And Kesley felt light flash numbingly through him.
He huddled in his chair while the frozen brain-cells at last discharged
the information they had stored for nearly five years. The words went
rumbling over his synapses, repeating themselves endlessly.
Finally it stopped. Hesitantly, he looked up at the calmly smiling
Daveen.
Then he looked down at his hands--his own hands, the hands he had
farmed with and killed with.
The hands of an Immortal.
"Me?"
It was almost impossible. But he knew it was true.
"You will never die," Daveen said.
"I will never die."
"_Two!_" said Daveen suddenly.
Kesley was thrown back in his seat by the unexpected, second
data-release. When it was over, he looked up again, smiling.
"An Immortal and the son of an Immortal. Small wonder Miguel and
Winslow wanted to kill me!"
The words of Winslow's sentence came drifting back now: "_... you
represent as great a threat to the Twelve Empires as has ever been
born, my young friend._"
Of course! Twelve sterile Dukes, blessed with eternal life but cursed
with the inability to reproduce--what would they do, how would they
react when they knew that one line of Immortals, somewhere in Earth,
bred true? That they were faced with the prospect of a gathering race
of Immortals threatening their powers as the years rolled on?
"You see?" Daveen asked.
"I understand now," Kesley said. "They _had_ to try to kill me. I was a
menace--an Immortal who wasn't a Duke, and whose children could breed
true!"
He stared at his hands as if they were covered with suddenly alien
flesh. "I wasn't a Duke, was I?" He asked cautiously. Anything was
possible now.
"No," Daveen told him. "You were never a Duke."
Kesley smiled, thinking now of the centuries stretching endlessly
ahead. "A king without a kingdom, then. Well, there's plenty of time
for me to find one. But you still haven't told me who I am, Daveen."