"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.
SECOND CHANCE
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
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 alclass="underline"
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, will-less 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.)