Capitol

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 gri

"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.