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.