"I'm running from the court. Winslow wants to kill me. I have to find Daveen."
The tall youngster chuckled raucously. "Daveen hasn't been here in years. You'll never find him!"
An atonal blast of the weird music blended oddly with the harsh laughter that suddenly surrounded him. Defeated, confused, Kesley looked at the alien faces of the men and women in the room. It was as if they wore masks of desperate gaiety, hiding a deep inward brooding.
He realized it had been a mistake to come here. In the middle of the room, a lithe girl of about nineteen was taking off her clothes to the accompaniment of an ecstatic chant from a ring of onlookers; a spindly man of about forty was intoning what was probably poetry, and the blond boy had gone into a frenzied solo dance.
Distortion upon distortion, darkness within darkness. Kesley felt cold and alone. At his side, Lisa clung tightly to him, sliding her hands playfully over the flat, hard muscles of his chest, giggling and whispering. The party was reaching a peak of wild license now.
This was what happened when walls closed around people, he thought. The mutants in their city; the poets in theirs. The Dukes in their Empires. And somewhere, far to the frozen south, the Antarcticans behind their blockade. They all interlocked, meshed in a tightly-geared procession to nowhere. Grimly, Kesley watched the blond boy dance himself into exhaustion, watched the girl in the middle of the room whip off her one remaining garment and stand totally naked.
Lisa was chanting, "This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends." It was probably a line from some poem. But it was more than poetry, thought Kesley. It was truth.
Truth.
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