Capitol

SKIPPING STONES

Unreal friendship may turn to real. But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.

-- T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

Bergen Bishop wanted to be an artist.

Because he said so when he was seven, he was promptly given pencils, paper, charcoal, watercolors, oils, canvas, a palette, an exquisite assortment of brushes, and an instructor who came and taught him once a week. In short, he was given all the paraphernalia money can buy.

The instructor was smart enough to know that when one hopes to make a living teaching the children of the rich, one learns when to be honest and when to lie. Thus, the words "the child has talent" had often passed his lips before. But this time he meant them, and it was difficult to find a way to make the lying words now express the truth.

"The boy has talent!" he declared. "The boy has talent!"

"No one supposed that he hadn't," the boy's mother said, a bit surprised at how effusive the teacher was. The father said nothing, just wondered if the instructor thought he'd get a bonus for declaring it with such fervor.

"That boy has talent. Potential. Great potential," the teacher said (again), and mother, finally grown weary of the effusion of praise, said, "My dear fellow, we don't mind a bit if he has talent. He may keep it. Now come again next Tuesday. Thank you."

Yet despite his parents' unconcern, Bergen applied himself to learning to paint with some vigor. In a short time he had acquired technique well beyond his years.

He was a good-tempered boy with a strong sense of justice. Many young men of his class on the planet Crove used their serving-men as whipping boys. After all, since brothers were out of fashion one had to have someone to pick on. And the serving-men (who were boys the same age as their masters) learned very early that if they defended themselves, they would soon face far worse than their youthful master could mete out.

Bergen, however, was not unfair. Because he was unquarrelsome, he and his serving-man, Dal Vouls, never had harsh words or blows. And because he was fair, when Dal shyly mentioned that he, too, would like to learn to paint, Bergen immediately shared his equipment and his instructor.

The instructor didn't mind teaching the two boys at once-- Dal was obedient and quiet and didn't ask questions. But he was too aware of the possibilities for added income not to mention to Bergen's father that it was customary to give an added stipend when there were two pupils instead of one.

"Dal, have you been wasting the instructor's time?" Locken Bishop asked his son's serving-man.

Dal remained silent, too afraid to speak quickly. Bergen answered. "It was my idea. To have him taught. It doesn't take the teacher any longer."

"The teacher's dunning me for more. You've got to learn the value of money, Bergen. Either you take the lessons alone, or you take them not at all."

Even so, Bergen forced the teacher ("I'll see you're fired and blackballed throughout the city. Throughout the world!") to let Dal sit quietly to one side, just watching. Dal didn't set pencil to paper in the sessions, however.

When he was nine, Bergen tired of painting and dismissed the teacher. He took up riding this time, years before most children did, but this time he insisted and his father purchased two horses; and so Dal rode with Bergen.

It's too easy to depict childhood as an idyll. Certainly there were some frustrations, some times when Dal and Bergen didn't see eye-to-eye. But those times were buried in an avalanche of other memories, so that they were soon forgotten. The rides took them far from Bergen's father's house, but there was no direction in which they could ride and leave his father's land and return home the same day.

And because Bergen was able to forget for hours at a time that he was heir and Dal was only a contracted serving-man, they became friends.

Together they poured hot wax on the stairway, which nearly killed Bergen's sister when she slipped on it-- and Bergen stoically took the full blame, since he would be confined to his room and Dal, if caught, would be beaten and dismissed. Together they hid in the bushes and watched as a couple who had ridden nude on horseback copulated in the gravel on the edge of a cliff-- they marveled for days at the thought that this was what Bergen's parents did behind closed doors. Together they swam in every untrustworthy waterhole on the estate and started fires in every likely corner, saving each other's lives so often they lost track of who was ahead.

And then, when Bergen was fourteen, he remembered that he had painted as a boy. An uncle visited and said, "And this is Bergen, the boy who paints."

"His painting was just a childish whim," Bergen's mother said. "He outgrew it."

Bergen was not accustomed to getting angry with his mother. But at fourteen, few boys are able to accept the word childish without wrath. Bergen immediately said, "Did I, Mother? Then why is it that I still paint?"

"Where?" she said, disbelieving.

"In my room."

"Show me some of your work then, little artist." The word little was infuriating.

"I burn them. They aren't yet representative of my best work."

At that his mother and the uncle laughed uproariously, and Bergen stomped off to his room, Dal a shadow behind him.

"Where the hell is it!" he said angrily, hunting through the cupboard where the art supplies had been.

Dal coughed. "Bergen, Sir," he said (at twelve Bergen had halfway come of age, and it was the law that he had to be called sir by anyone under contract to him or his father), "I thought you weren't using your painting stuff anymore. I've got it."

Bergen turned in amazement. "I wasn't using it. But I didn't know you were."

"I'm sorry, sir. But I didn't get much chance to try while the instructor was coming. I've been using the materials ever since."

"Did you use them up?"

"There was a good supply. There's no more paper, but there's plenty of canvas. I'll get it."

He went and got it, brought it into the big house in two trips, being careful to use the back stairways so Bergen's parents wouldn't see. "I didn't think you'd mind," Dal said, when it was all brought back.

Bergen looked puzzled. "Of course I don't mind. It's just the old biddy's taken it into her head that I'm still a child. I'm going to paint again. I don't know why I ever quit. I've always wanted to be an artist."

And he set up the easel at the window, so he could see the yard below, dotted with the graceful whiptrees; of Crove that rose fifty meters straight up into the air-- and then, in a storm, lay over completely on the ground, so that no farmer of the Plains could ever be free of the worry of having a whiptree crash against his house in the wind. He began with an undercoat of green and blue, and Dal watched. Bergen hesitated now and then, but it came back quickly, and, in fact, the long separation from art had done him no harm. His eye was truer. His colors were deeper. But still an amateur.

"Perhaps if there were more magenta in the sky under the clouds," Dal offered.

Bergen turned to him coldly. "I'm not through with the sky."

"Sorry."

And Bergen painted on. Everything went well enough, except that he couldn't seem to get the whiptrees right. They kept looking so brown and solid, which wasn't right at all. And when he tried to draw them bent, they were awkward, not true to life. Finally he swore and threw the brush out the window, leaped to his feet and stormed away.

Dal walked to the painting and said, "Bergen, sir, it isn't bad. Not at all. It's good. Just the whiptrees."

"I know about the damned whiptrees," Bergen snarled, furious at his failure to be perfect in his first attempt in years. And he turned to see Dal taking swipes at the canvas, quick strokes with a slender brush. And then Dal turned around, and said, "Perhaps like that, sir."

Bergen walked up to the canvas. The whiptrees were there, by far the most lifelike, most dynamic, most beautiful thing in the painting. Bergen looked at them-- how effortless they seemed, how effortlessly Dal had stroked them into the painting. This was not how it should be. It was Bergen who was going to be the artist, not Dal. It was not just or right or fair that Dal should be able to paint whiptrees.

And in anger Bergen shouted something unintelligible and struck out at Dal, catching him a blow at the side of his head. Dal was stunned. Not from the force of the blow, but from the fact of it.

"You've never hit me before," he said, wonderingly.

"I'm sorry," Bergen said immediately.

"All I did was paint the whiptrees."

"I know. I'm sorry. Hitting servants isn't the kind of thing I do."

And now Dal's surprise turned to fury. "Servants?" he asked. "For a moment I forgot that I'm a servant. I saw us try our hands at the same task and I was better at it than you. I forgot I was a servant."

Bergen was frightened at this turn of events. He hadn't meant anything by his statement-- he just prided himself on not being an uncontrolled master.

"But Dal," he said innocently. "You are a servant."

"That I am. I must remember that in the future. Not to win at any games. To laugh at your jokes even when they're stupid. To let your horse always be a little faster. To always agree that you're right even when you're being a fool."

"I've never wanted anyone to treat me like that!" Bergen said, angry at the unfairness of it.

"That's the way servants treat their masters."

"I don't want you to be a servant. I want you to be my friend!"

"And I thought I was."

"You're a servant and a friend."

Dal laughed. "Bergen, sir, a man is either a servant or a friend. They're opposite directions on the same road. Either you're paid for service, or you do it for love."

"But you're paid for service, and I thought you did it for love!"

Dal shook his head. "I served for love, and I thought you fed and clothed me for love. I felt free with you."

"You are free."

"I have a contract."

"If you ever ask me to break it, I will!"

"Is that a promise?"

"On my life. You aren't a servant, Dal!"

And then the door opened, and Bergen's mother and uncle came in. "We heard shouting," his mother said. "We thought there was a quarrel."

"We were having a pillow fight," Bergen said.

"Then why is the pillow neatly on the bed?"

"We finished and put it back."

The uncle laughed. "What a regular little housemaid you're raising, Selly."

"My Lord, Nooel, he wasn't joking. He still paints." They walked up to the painting and looked at it carefully.

Finally Nooel turned to Bergen and smiled, and put out his hand. "I thought it was just bluster and blow. Just a teenager spouting off. But you've got talent, boy. The sky's a bit rough, and you need some work on detail. But whoever can paint whiptrees like that has a future."

Bergen could not take credit unfairly.

"Dal painted the whiptrees."

Selly Bishop looked furious, but smiled sweetly at Dal nonetheless. "How nice, Dal, that Bergen lets you play with his paintings." Dal said nothing. But Nooel stared at him.

"Contract?" Nooel asked.

Dal nodded.

"I'll buy it," Nooel offered.

"Not for sale," Bergen said quickly.

"Actually," Selly said sweetly, "it's not a bad idea. Think you might want to develop the talent?"

"It's worth developing."

"The contract," Bergen said firmly, "is not for sale."

Selly looked coldly at her son. "Everything that was bought can be sold."

"But what a man loves enough, mother, he'll keep regardless of the price he's offered."

"Loves?"

"Your mind is disgusting, Selly," Nooel said. "Obviously they're friends. Sometimes you can be the worst bitch on the planet."

"You're too kind, Nooel. On this planet it's an achievement. After all, there's the empress."

They both laughed and left the room.

"I'm sorry, Dal," Bergen said.

"I'm used to it," Dal answered. "Your mother and I haven't ever gotten along too well. And I don't care-- there's only one person here I care about."

They looked at each other closely for a short time. Smiled. Then dropped the subject, because at fourteen there are few gentle emotions that can be openly borne for very long.

When Bergen turned twenty, somec came to their level of society.

"A brilliant stroke," Locken Bishop said. "Do you know what it means? If we qualify, we can sleep for five years at a time and wake up for five years at a time. We'll live for another century beyond what we would have otherwise."

"But will we qualify?" Bergen asked.

His parents laughed uproariously. "It's pure merit, and the boy asks if his family will qualify! Of course we'll qualify, Bergen!"

Bergen was quietly angry, as he usually was with his parents these days. "Why?" he asked.

Locken caught the edge in his son's tone. He turned authoritarian, and pointed at Bergen's chest. "Because your father provides jobs for fifty thousand men and women. Because if I went out of business half this planet would reel under the impact. And because I pay more taxes than all but fifty other men in the Empire."

"Because you're rich, in other words," Bergen said.

"Because I'm rich!" Locken answered angrily.

"Then, it, you don't mind, I'll wait to go on somec until I qualify by my merit, and not by my father's."

Selly laughed. "If I waited until I qualified on my own, I'd never get on somec!"

Bergen looked at her with loathing. "And if there were any justice in the world, you never would."

It surprised Bergen, but neither his mother nor his father said anything at all. It was Dal who spoke to him, later that night, as the two of them sat together putting finishing touches on art pieces-- Dal, a miniature, in oils; Bergen, a massive, almost mural-sized portrait of the houseson the estate as he thought they ought to be, with the house much smaller and the barns large enough to be of some use. And his whiptrees were beautiful.

Weeks later, Bergen slipped off and paid the examination fee and tested high enough in basic intelligence, creativity, and ambition that he was given the right to go on somec for three years and off for five years. He would be a sleeper. And he did it without money.

"Congratulations, son," his father said, more than a little proud at his son's independence.

"I notice you've scheduled it so you wake up two years before us. Time to play around, I imagine," Selly said, looking and sounding more bitter than ever.

Dal said only one thing when he heard Bergen was going on somec. "Free me first."

Bergen looked startled.

"You promised," Dal reminded him.

"But I'm not of age. I can't for a year."

"And do you think your father will? Or that your mother would let him? My contract lets them forbid me to paint, or lets them own anything I produce. They could make me clean the stables. They could make me cut trees with my bare hands. And you won't be back for three years."

Bergen was genuinely distressed. "What can I do?"

"Persuade your father to give me my freedom. Or stay awake until you come of age and can give me my freedom yourself."

"I can't forfeit the somec. You have to use it when you get it. They only have so many openings a year."

"Then persuade your father."

It took a month of constant badgering before Locken Bishop finally agreed to release Dal from his contract. And the contract had a stipulation. "Seventy-five percent of your income above room and board comes to us for five years or until you have paid us eighty thousand."

"Father," Bergen protested, "that's gouging. I would have freed him eleven months from now anyway. And eighty thousand is ten times what you paid for his contract in the first place-- and you didn't pay it to him."

"I've also fed him for twenty years."

"And he worked for it."

"Worked?" Selly interrupted. "He just played. With you."

Dal spoke, softly enough that they quieted down to hear him. "If I give you that, I won't be able to get enough money to take the somec merit examination."

Locken set his jaw. "That makes no difference. It's that or you stay under contract."

Bergen put his face in his hands. Selly smiled. And Dal nodded. "But I want it in writing."

The words were soft, but the effect was electric. Locken rose to his feet, towering over Dal, who was seated. "What did you say, boy? Were you saying you expected a Bishop to make a written contract with a bastard contract worker?"

"I want it in writing," Dal said softly, meeting Locken's fury with equanimity.

"You have my spoken word, and that's enough!"

"And who are the witnesses? Your son, who'll be asleep for three years, and your wife, who can't be trusted alone with a fifteen-year-old servant boy."

Selly gasped. Locken turned red, but stepped back from Dal. And Bergen was horrified. "What?" he asked.

"I want it in writing," Dal said.

"I want you out of this house," Locken answered, but his voice had a new emotion in it-- hurt and betrayal. Of course, Bergen thought: if Dal really meant that, and Mother certainly isn't denying it, of course Father is hurt.

But Dal looked up at Locken with a smile and said, "Did you think that territory where you trod wbuld always belong to you?"

Now Bergen refused to understand. "What does he mean, father? What is Dal saying?"

"Nothing," Locken insisted, too quickly.

Dal refused to be stopped. "Your father," he said to Bergen, "plays the strangest games with five-year-old boys. I always urged him to invite you to join in, but he never would."

The uproar didn't die down for an hour. Locken kept uselessly pounding his left fist against his thigh, as Selly gleefully attacked him to take the opprobrium for her own dalliances from her shoulders. Only Bergen could honestly grieve. "All those years, Dal. This was happening all those years?"

"To you I was a friend, Bergen," Dal said, forgetting to say sir, "but to them I was a servant."

"You never told me."

"What could you have done?"

And when Dal left at the end of the hour he had the agreement in writing.

When Bergen woke from his first time under somec, he learned from a kindly man in the Sleeproom that his father had died only a few days after Bergen had left home, and his mother had been murdered by a lover two years later. The largest estate on Crove, besides the emperor's, was now Bergen's.

"I don't want it."

"Along with it, you should know," said the kindly man, "comes a five years under and one year up somec privilege."

"I'd only have to live one year in every six?"

"It's the Empire's way of expressing the value of certain large forces in the economy."

"But I want to paint."

"Paint then. But unless you want to visit your parents' graves, the managers of your businesses are doing a remarkably good job, according to the government auditors, and you can go back under to complete your two years of entitlement."

"I have someone I want to see first."

"As you wish. We can put you back under any time within the next three days. After that, you have to complete your year up, and you will have lost two years of sleep."

Bergen spent the first two days trying to find Dal Vouls. He finally succeeded when he remembered that Dal would still be bound by the contract with his father-- the executors of the estate were able to locate him because he was sending in occasional draughts to complete the seventy-five-percent clause.

Dal opened the door and his lice lit up with immediate recognition. "Bergen," he said. "Come in. It's been three years, then, hasn't it?"

"I guess so. Dal, it feels like yesterday to me. It was yesterday. How have you been doing?"

Dal pointed to the walls of the flat. Forty or fifty paintings and drawings hung there. For twenty minutes there was little conversation except "This; I like this" and "How did you manage that?" And then Bergen, thoroughly awed, sat on the floor (there was no furniture) and they talked.

"How is it going?"

"Sales are fairly slow. I don't have a name yet. But people do buy. And the best of it is, the emperor has decreed that all government offices are to be moved to Crove. Even the name of the planet is changing. To Capitol. It seems that if all goes well, every damn planet's going to orbit politically around Crove. And that means customers. It means people who know art instead of the military and commercial bastards who've had a stranglehold on money on this planet since time began."

"You've learned how to talk in long sentences since I last saw you."

Dal laughed. "I've felt freer."

"I brought you a present." Bergen handed him the release from the contract.

Dal read it, laughed, read it again, and then wept.

"Bergen," he said, "you don't know. You don't know how hard it's been."

"I can guess."

"I haven't been able to take the examination. Heaven knows, I've hardly been able to live. But now--"

"More than that," Bergen said. "The examination costs three thousand. I brought it." He handed the money to his friend.

Dal held the money for a few seconds, then handed it back. "Your father's dead, then."

"Yes," Bergen said.

"I'm sorry. It must have been a shock to you."

"You didn't know?"

"I don't read papers. I don't have a radio. And my draughts were never returned."

"Contracts are contracts, the executors figured. Trust my father not to free his contract servants in his will."

They chuckled wryly in memory of the man, whom Dal had last seen three years ago, whom Bergen had last seen yesterday.

"Your mother?"

"The bitch died in heat," Bergen answered, and this time there was emotion. Dal touched his hand. "I'm sorry." And it was Bergen's turn to weep.

"Thank God you're my friend," Bergen said at last.

"And you mine," Dal answered.

And then the door opened and a woman walked in carrying a child that couldn't have been a year old. She was startled to see Bergen there. "Company," she said. "Hello. I'm Anda."

"I'm Bergen," Bergen said.

"My friend Bergen," Dal introduced them. "My wife Anda. My son Bergen."

Anda smiled. "He told me you were bright and beautiful, and so our son had to be named after you. He was right."

"You're too kind."

The conversation was good after that, but it was not what Bergen had expected. There couldn't be the banter, the in-jokes, the delightful gutter talk, the insults that Bergen and Dal bad known for years, not with Anda there. And so they parted with friendship in the air-- but a hollow feeling in Bergen's stomach. Dal had refused his gift of the examination fee, and accepted only his freedom. He would share that freedom with Anda. Bergen went back to the sleeproom and used the rest of his new entitlement.

When he awoke the next time, things had changed. With Crove now called Capitol, there was an incredible building boom. And Bergen's companies were deeply involved.

The building was haphazard, and Bergen began to realize that it wasn't enough just to throw buildings into the air. Capitql would be the center of trade and government for hundreds of planets. Billions of people. He could conceive of it eventually becoming one vast city. And so be began to plan accordingly.

He set his architects to planning a structure that would cover a hundred square miles and house fifty million people, heavy industry, light industry, transportation, distribution, and communication. The roof of the building had to be strong enough not only to handle the takeoffs and landings of landing craft, but also to cope with the weight of the huge starships themselves. It would take years to design-- he gave them the obvious deadline of his next waking after five years of sleep.

And then he spent the rest of the year lobbying with the bureaucrats to get his plan, already taking shape, adopted as the master plan for the planet. Every city designed the same way, so that as the population boomed, the cities could link up floor to floor and pipe to pipe and form a continuous, unbroken city with a spaceport for a roof and its roots deep in the bedrock. When his time was up, he had won-- and the contracts almost all went to Bergen Bishop's companies.

He did not forget Dal, however. He found him by his paintings, which were now gaining some note. It was difficult to talk, however.

"Bergen. The rumors are flying."

"Good to see you, Dal."

"They say you're stripping the planet right down to the bedrock and putting steel on top."

"Here and there."

"They say it's all supposed to interlock."

Bergen shrugged it off. "There'll be huge parks. Huge tracts of land untouched."

"Until the population needs it. Right? Always that reservation."

Bergen was hurt. "I came to talk about your painting."

"Here, then," Dal said. "Have a look." And he handed Bergen a painting of a steel monster that was settling like pus onto the countryside.

"This is repulsive," Bergen said.

"It's your city. I took it from the architect's renderings."

"My city isn't this ugly."

"I know. It's an artist's job to make beauty more beautiful and ugliness uglier."

"The Empire has to have a capital somewhere."

"Does there have to be an empire?"

"What's made you so bitter?" Bergen asked, genuinely concerned. "People have been tearing up planets for years. What's getting to you?"

"Nothing's getting to me."

"Where's Anda? Where's your son?"

"Who knows? Who cares?" Dal walked to a painting of a sunset and shoved his fist through it.

"Dal!" Bergen shouted. "Don't do that!"

"I made it. I can destroy it."

"Why'd she leave?"

"I failed the merit test. She had an offer of marriage from a guy who could take her on somec. She accepted."

"How could you fail the merit test?"

"They can't measure my paintings. And when you're twenty-six years old, the requirements are higher. Much, much higher."

"Twenty-six-- but we're only--"

"You're only twenty-one. I'm twenty-six and aging fast." Dal walked to the door and opened it. "Get out of here, Bergen. I'm dying fast. In a couple of your years I'll be an old man who isn't worth a damn so don't bother looking me up anymore. Get on out there and wreck the planet while there's still a profit in it."

Bergen left, hurt and unable to understand why Dal should suddenly hate him. If Dal had only taken the money Bergen offered two years before, he could have taken the test when he could still have passed it. It was his own fault, not Bergen's. And blaming Bergen for it wasn't fair.

For three wakings, Bergen didn't took Dal up. The memory of Dal's bitterness was too harsh, too hurtful. Instead Bergen concentrated on building his cities. Half a million men were working on them, a dozen cities arising simultaneously on the plain. There was plenty of land left undisturbed, but the cities rose so high that the winds were broken and the whiptrees died. How could anyone have known that the seeds had to fall to the earth from no more than a meter off the ground, and that without wind strong enough to bend the trees all the way to the ground, the seeds would fall too far and break and die? In fifty years the last of the whiptrees would be gone. And it was too late to do anything about it. Bergen grieved for the whiptrees. He was sorry. The cities were already filling up with people. The starships were already coming in to land at the only spaceport in the galaxy large enough and strong enough to hold them. There was no going back.

On his fourth waking, however, Bergen learned that he had been promoted to a one year up, ten years down somec level, and he realized that if Dal still wasn't on somec, the man would be in his mid-forties, and in the next waking would be getting old. Bergen was only in his mid-twenties. And suddenly he regretted having stayed away from Dal for so long. It was a strange thing about somec. It cut you off from people. Put you in different timestreams, and Bergen realized that soon the only people he would know would be those who had exactly the same somec schedule as he.

Most of his old friends he wouldn't mind losing. After all, he had survived losing both his parents in his first sleep. But Dal was a different matter. He hadn't seen Dal for three waking years, and,he missed him. They had been so close up till then.

He found him by simply asking a man with exceptionally good taste if he had ever heard of Dal Vouls.

"Has a Christian ever heard of Jesus?" asked the man, laughing.

Bergen hadn't heard of Jesus or Christians either, but he got the point. And he found Dal in a large studio in a tract of open country where trees hid the view of the eight cities growing here and there in the distance.

"Bergen," Dal said in surprise. "I never thought I'd see you again!"

And Bergen only looked in awe at the man who had been, his boyhood friend. What had been only four years for Bergen had been twenty for Dal, and the difference was staggering. Dal had a belly, was now an impressively stout man with a full beard and a ready grin (this is not Dal! something shouted inside Bergen). Dal was prospering, was friendly, was, it seemed, happy, but Bergen couldn't stop thinking of this stranger as an older man to whom he should show respect.

"Bergen, you haven't changed."

"You have," Bergen answered, trying to smile as if he meant it.

"Come in. Look at my paintings. I promise to stand aside. My wife says I could hide a mural, I'm getting so fat. I tell her I have to be large enough to hold all my money on a single belt." Dal's laugh boomed out, and a middle-aged woman appeared on a balcony inside the studio.

"You make my cakes fall, you break glasses, and now you have to shout loud enough that the birds' nests are falling from the eaves!" she shouted, and Dal lumbered over to her like an amorous bear and kissed her and dragged her back.

"Bergen, meet my wife. Treve, meet Bergen, my friend who returns like a bright shadow out of my past to tie up the last of my loose ends."

"Until we buy you new clothes," Treve complained, "You have no loose ends."

"I married her," Dal said, "because I needed someone to tell me what a bad artist I am."

"He's terrible. Best in the world. But still Rembrandt returns to haunt us!" And Treve punched Dal in the arm, lightly.

I can't stand this, Bergen thought. This isn't Dal. He's too damn cheerful. And who's this woman who takes such liberties with my dignified friend? Who's this fat man with the grin who pretends to be an artist?

"My work," Dal said, suddenly. "Come see my work."

It was then, walking quietly along the walls where the paintings hung, that Bergen knew for sure that it was Dal. True, the voice at his shoulder was still cheerful and middle-aged. But the paintings, the strokes and sweeps and washes of them, they were all Dal. They were born in the pain of slavery on the Bishop estate; but now they were overlaid with a serenity that Dal's paintings had never had before. Yet, looking at them, Bergen realized that that serenity had also been there all the time, waiting for something to bring it out into the open.

And the something was obviously Treve.

At lunch, Bergen shyly admitted to Treve that yes, he was the man who built the cities.

"Very efficient," she said, making short work of a cappasflower.

"My wife hates the cities," Dal said.

"As I remember, you don't love them either."

Dal grinned, and then remembered to swallow what he had been chewing. "Bergen, my friend, I am above such concerns."

"Then," his wife interjected, "those concerns had better be strong enough to support a great amount of weight."

Dal laughed and hugged her and said, "Keep your mouth shut about my weight when I'm eating, Thin Woman, it ruins the lunch."

"The cities don't bother you?"

"The cities are ugly," Dal said. "But I think of them as vast sewage disposal plants. When you have fifteen billion people on a planet that should only have fifteen million, the sewage has go to be put somewhere. So you built huge metal blocks and they kill the trees that grow in the shadows. Can I reach out and stop the tide?"

"Of course you can," Treve said.

"She believes in me. No, Bergen, I don't fight the cities. People in the cities buy my paintings and let me live in luxury like this, making brilliant paintings and sleeping with my beautiful wife."

"If I'm so beautiful, why never a portrait of me?"

"I am incapable of doing justice," Dal said. "I paint Crove. I paint it as it was before they killed it and named the corpse Capitol. These paintings will last hundreds of years. People who see them will maybe say, 'This is what a world looks like. Not corridors of steel and plastic and artificial wood."

"We don't use artificial wood," Bergen protested

"You will," Dal answered. "The trees are nearly gone. And wood is awfully expensive to ship between the stars."

And then Bergen asked the question he had meant to ask since he arrived. "Is it true that you've been offered somec?"

"They practically forced the needle into my arm right here. I had to beat them off with a canvas."

"Then it's true that you turned it down?" Bergen was incredulous.

"Three times. They keep saying, we'll let you sleep ten years, we'll let you sleep fifteen years. But who wants to sleep? I can't paint in my sleep."

"But Dal," Bergen protested. "Somec is like immortality. I'm going on the ten-down-one-up schedule, and that means that when I'm fifty, three hundred years will have passed! Three centuries! And I'll live another five hundred years beyond that. I'll see the Empire rise and fall, I'll see the work of a thousand artists living hundreds of years apart, I'll have broken out of the ties of time--"

"Ties of time. A good phrase. You are ecstatic about progress. I congratulate you. I wish you well. Sleep and sleep and sleep, may you profit from it."

"The prayer of the capitalist," Treve added, smiling and putting more salad on Bergen's plate.

"But Bergen. While you fly, like stones skipping across the water, touching down here and there and barely getting wet, while you are busy doing that, I shall swim. I like to swim. It gets me wet. It wears me out. And when I die, which will happen before you turn thirty, I'm sure, I'll have my paintings to leave behind me."

"Vicarious immortality is rather second rate, isn't it?"

"Is there anything second rate about my work?"

"No," Bergen answered.

"Then eat my food, and look at my paintings again, and go back to building huge cities until there's a roof over all the world and the planet shines in space like a star. There's a kind of beauty in that, too, and your work will live after you. Live however you like. But tell me, Bergen, do you have time to swim naked in a lake?"

Bergen laughed. "I haven't done that in years."

"I did it this morning."

"At your age?" Bergen asked, and then regretted the words. Not because Dal resented them-- he didn't seem to notice them. Bergen regretted the words because they were the end of even the hope of a friendship. Dal, who had painted beautiful whiptrees into his painting, was an older man now, and would get even older in the next few years, and their lives would never cross meaningfully again. It was Treve who bantered with him like a friend.

While I, Bergen realized, I build cities.

When they parted at evening, still cheerful, still friends, Dal asked (and his voice was serious): "Bergen. Do you ever paint?"

Bergen shook his head. "I haven't the time. But I admit-- if I had your talent, Dal, I'd find the time. I haven't that talent, though. Never did."

"That's not true, Bergen. You had more talent than I."

Bergen looked Dal in the eye and realized the man meant it. "Don't say that," Bergen said fervently. "If I believed that, Dal, do you think I could spend my life the way I have to spend it?"

"Oh, my friend," Dal said, smiling. "You have made me sad, sad, sad. Hug me for the boys we were together."

They embraced, and then Bergen left. They never met again.

Bergen lived to see Capitol covered in steel from pole to pole, with even the oceans encroached upon until they were mere ponds. He once went out in a pleasure cruiser and saw the planet from space. It gleamed. It was beautiful. It was like a star.

Bergen lived long enough to see something else: He visited a store one day that sold rare and old paintings. And there he saw a painting that he recognized immediately. The paint was chipping away; the colors had faded. But it was Dal Vouls's work, and there were whiptrees in the painting, and Bergen demanded of the storekeeper, "Who's let this painting get in such a condition?"

"Such a condition? Sir, don't you know how old this is? Seven hundred years old, sir! It's remarkably well preserved. By a great artist, the greatest of our millennium, but nobody makes paint or canvas that stays unmarred for more than a few centuries. What do you want, miracles?"

And Bergen realized that in his pursuit of immortality, he had got more than he hoped for. For not only did friends drop away and die behind him, but also their works, and all the works of men, had crumbled in his lifetime. Some had crumbled into dust; some were just showing the first cracks. But Bergen had lived long enough to see the one sight the universe usually hides from mankind: entropy.

The universe is winding down, Bergen said as he looked at Dal's painting. Was it worth the cost just to find that out?

He bought the painting. It fell to pieces before he died.