"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?"