“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 did 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. Ina 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 look 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 whip trees 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 whip trees would be gone. And it was too late to do anything about it. Bergen grieved for the whip trees. He was sorry. The cities were already filling up with people. The starships were already coming in to land at the only space port 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 time-streams, 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 this 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 cappas-flower.
“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 got 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 your 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 hundreds 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 his 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 learned. 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 whip trees 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.
14. Second Chance
By the age of seven Batta was thoroughly trapped, though she scarcely recognized it until she was twenty-two. The bars were so fragile that to most other people they would not have existed at all:
A father, crippled in a freak tube accident and pensioned off by the government months before Batta was born.
A mother, whose heart was gold but whose mind was unable to concentrate meaningfully for more than three minutes at a time.
And brothers and sisters who, in the chaos and depression of the mindless, witless home, might have come unstuck from the fabric of adjusted society had not Batta decided (without deciding) that she would be mother and father to her siblings, her parents, and herself.
Many another person would have rebelled at having to come home directly after school, with never an opportunity to meet with friends and do the mad things through the endless corridors of Capitol that occupied the time of most adolescents of the middle class. Batta merely returned from school and did homework, fixed dinner, talked to Mother (or rather, listened), helped the other children with their problems, and braved the den where Father hid from the world, pretending that he had legs or that, lacking them, he had not diminished in worth. (“I fathered five damned children, didn't I?” he insisted from time to time.)
But all was not bleak. Batta loved studying, was, in fact, not far from being a genius—and she indulged herself enough to go to college, largely because she got a scholarship and her mother believed in taking advantage of every free thing that came.
And in college there was this one young man.
He was not far from being a genius too—from the other side. Batta had never known anyone like him (she didn't realize that she had hardly known anyone at all) but a crazy friendship grew up that ranged from gift-wrapped presents of dissected thwands from Basic Zoology to hours of silence together, studying for examinations.
No held hands. No attempted kisses. No fumbling experimentation in the dark.
Batta was unsure of what it was like and whether she would Want it (she always imagined her mother making love to a legless man), while she wondered if Abner Doon ever thought of sex at all.
And then college ended, degrees were granted—hers in physics, his in government service—and they stopped seeing each other and the months went by and she was twenty-two and it suddenly occurred to her that she was trapped.
“Where are you going? You're through with college, you don't have to go to class anymore, do you?” her mother asked plaintively.
“I thought I'd take a walk,” Batta answered.
“But Batta, your father needs you. You know he's only happy when you're here.”
Which was true. And Batta spent more and more hours inside the three-room flat until one day, almost a year after graduation, a buzzer.
“Abner,” she said, more in surprise than in delight. She had almost forgotten him. Indeed, she had almost forgotten that she had a college education.
“Batta. I haven't seen you. I wanted to.”
“Well,” she said, turning around for him to see her but knowing she looked terrible even as she did it, “here I am.”
“You look like hell.”
“And you,” she said, “look like a specimen that they forgot to dissect.”
They laughed. Old times, old magic. He asked her out. She refused. He asked her to go for a walk. She was too busy. And when her father called her out of the room for the fifth time since he had arrived, he decided the conversation was over and had left the apartment before she returned.
And she felt more trapped than ever.
Days passed, and in every day something different happened as the other children grew older (and married or didn't marry but left home anyway), but looking back, Batta felt that t
he days were all the same, after all, and the illusion of variety was just her mind's own away of keeping itself sane. And at last, when Batta was twenty-seven and a virgin and lonely as hell, all her brothers and sisters were gone and she was alone with her parents.
That was when Abner Doon came again.
He had not been on somec either, she noticed to her surprise as she showed him into the living room (same battered furniture, only older; same color walls, only dirtier; same Batta Heddis, only deader) and he sat, looking her over carefully.
“I thought you'd be on somec by now,” she said.
“So did everyone. But there are some things that can't be done while one sleeps the years away. I can't go on somec until I'm ready.”
“And when will that be?”
“When I rule the world.”
She laughed, thinking it was a joke. “And when they find out I'm Mother's long-lost daughter kidnapped by gypsies and kept by space-pirates, they'll make me Empress after her.”
“I'm going on somec within the year.”
And she didn't laugh. Only looked at him carefully and saw the way worry and work and, perhaps, cruelty had worn certain lines in certain places and given him an expression that made his eyes seem deep and hard to plumb. “You look like you're drowning,” she said.
“And you look like you're drowned.”
He reached out and took her hand. She was surprised—he had never done that. But the hand was warm, dry, smooth, firm just as she had thought a man's hand ought to feel (not like Father's claw) and she didn't take her hand away.
“I saw how it was when I came before,” he said. “I've been waiting till you were free. The last of your loving siblings left a week ago. Your affairs should be in order. Will you marry me now?”
Three hours later, they were halfway across the sector in a modest-seeming apartment (only seeming—computers and furniture came, literally, out of the walls) and she was shaking her head.
“Ab,” she said, “I can't. You don't understand.”
He looked concerned. “I thought you'd prefer the contract. It's so much safer for everyone. But if you'd rather we kept it informal—”
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