“Hopelessly ill people who can never be productively awakened. By any man’s definition they’re dead.”

  “Not by mine!” George insisted.

  The Russian laughed. “Angry, aren’t you? If you Americans had shown half so much spirit on the battlefield, we might not be here today.” And he left.

  George went to the files and reread the dialogues. Now he saw easily the real person behind the facade of phony memories. Now he loved them all, and mourned for their deaths. Now he understood why Aggie had left him, because in the long run all his work could be so easily undone, and at the last only the people remain, the only achievements that matter are the people he knew, and he realized he knew the dead sleepers better than he knew his wife, his daughters, or himself.

  It was not in his nature to kill himself.

  So he went to the braintaping room and erased his braintape. Then he went to the somec lab and injected the somec into his veins. They would cremate him, when they realized they had no hope of reviving him. But he would be asleep, and wouldn’t notice.

  And in the meantime, his memories were gone, because he knew who he really was, and he couldn’t, after all, live with himself. Who you are may be fixed by the genes, he said to himself as the somec swept through him. But it doesn’t mean you have to like it.

  Skipping Stones

  Unreal friendship may turn to real. But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended.

  —T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

  Bergen Bishop wanted to be an artist.

  Because he said so when he was seven, he was promptly given pencils, paper, charcoal, watercolors, oils, canvas, a palette, an exquisite assortment of brushes, and an instructor who came and taught him once a week. In short, he was given all the paraphernalia money can buy.

  The instructor was smart enough to know that when one hopes to make a living teaching the children of the rich, one learns when to be honest and when to lie. Thus, the words “the child has talent” had often passed his lips before. But this time he meant them, and it was difficult to find a way to make the lying words now express the truth.

  “The boy has talent!” he declared. “The boy has talent!”

  “No one supposed that he hadn’t,” the boy’s mother said, a bit surprised at how effusive the teacher was. The father said nothing, just wondered if the instructor thought he’d get a bonus for declaring it with such fervor.

  “That boy has talent. Potential. Great potential,” the teacher said (again), and mother, finally grown weary of the effusion of praise, said, “My dear fellow, we don’t mind a bit if he has talent. He may keep it. Now come again next Tuesday. Thank you.”

  Yet despite his parents’ unconcern, Bergen applied himself to learning to paint with some vigor. In a short time he had acquired technique well beyond his years.

  He was a good-tempered boy with a strong sense of justice. Many young men of his class on the planet Crove used their serving-men as whipping boys.

  After all, since brothers were out of fashion one had to have someone to pick on. And the serving-men (who were boys the same age as their masters) learned very early that if they defended themselves, they would soon face far worse than their youthful master could mete out.

  Bergen, however, was not unfair. Because he was unquarrelsome, he and his serving-man, Dal Vouls, never had harsh words or blows. And because he was fair, when Dal shyly mentioned that he, too, would like to learn to paint, Bergen immediately shared his equipment and his instructor.

  The instructor didn’t mind teaching the two boys at once, Dal was obedient and quiet and didn’t ask questions. But he was too aware of the possibilities for added income not to mention to Bergen’s father that it was customary to give an added stipend when there were two pupils instead of one.

  “Dal, have you been wasting the instructor’s time?” Locken Bishop asked his son’s serving-man.

  Dal remained silent, too afraid to speak quickly. Bergen answered. “It was my idea. To have him taught. It doesn’t take the teacher any longer.”

  “The teacher’s dunning me for more. You’ve got to learn the value of money, Bergen. Either you take the lessons alone, or you take them not at all.”

  Even so, Bergen forced the teacher (“I’ll see you’re fired and blackballed throughout the city. Throughout the world!”) to let Dal sit quietly to one side, just watching. Dal didn’t set pencil to paper in the sessions, however.

  When he was nine, Bergen tired of painting and dismissed the teacher. He took up riding this time, years before most children did, but this time he insisted and his father purchased two horses; and so Dal rode with Bergen.

  It’s too easy to depict childhood as an idyll. Certainly there were some frustrations, some times when Dal and Bergen didn’t see eye-to-eye. But those times were buried in an avalanche of other memories, so that they were soon forgotten. The rides took them far from Bergen’s father’s house, but there was no direction in which they could ride and leave his father’s land and return home the same day.

  And because Bergen was able to forget for hours at a time that he was heir and Dal was only a contracted serving-man, they became friends.

  Together they poured hot wax on the stairway, which nearly killed Bergen’s sister when she slipped on it, and Bergen stoically took the full blame, since he would be confined to his room and Dal, if caught, would be beaten and dismissed. Together they hid in the bushes and watched as a couple who had ridden nude on horseback copulated in the gravel on the edge of a cliff, they marveled for days at the thought that this was what Bergen’s parents did behind closed doors. Together they swam in every untrustworthy waterhole on the estate and started fires in every likely corner, saving each other’s lives so often they lost track of who was ahead.

  And then, when Bergen was fourteen, he remembered that he had painted as a boy. An uncle visited and said, “And this is Bergen, the boy who paints.”

  “His painting was just a childish whim,” Bergen’s mother said. “He outgrew it.”

  Bergen was not accustomed to getting angry with his mother. But at fourteen, few boys are able to accept the word childish without wrath. Bergen immediately said, “Did I, Mother? Then why is it that I still paint?”

  “Where?” she said, disbelieving.

  “In my room.”

  “Show me some of your work then, little artist.” The word little was infuriating.

  “I burn them. They aren’t yet representative of my best work.”

  At that his mother and the uncle laughed uproariously, and Bergen stomped off to his room, Dal a shadow behind him.

  “Where the hell is it!” he said angrily, hunting through the cupboard where the art supplies had been.

  Dal coughed. “Bergen, Sir,” he said (at twelve Bergen had halfway come of age, and it was the law that he had to be called sir by anyone under contract to him or his father), “I thought you weren’t using your painting stuff anymore.

  I’ve got it.”

  Bergen turned in amazement. “I wasn’t using it. But I didn’t know you were.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. But I didn’t get much chance to try while the instructor was coming. I’ve been using the materials ever since.”

  “Did you use them up?”

  “There was a good supply. There’s no more paper, but there’s plenty of canvas. I’ll get it.”

  He went and got it, brought it into the big house in two trips, being careful to use the back stairways so Bergen’s parents wouldn’t see. “I didn’t think you’d mind,” Dal said, when it was all brought back.

  Bergen looked puzzled. “Of course I don’t mind. It’s just the old biddy’s taken it into her head that I’m still a child. I’m going to paint again. I don’t know why I ever quit. I’ve always wanted to be an artist.”

  And he set up the easel at the window, so he could see the yard below, dotted with the graceful whiptrees; of Crove that rose fifty meters straight up into the air, and then, in a storm, lay over completely on the ground, so that no farmer of the Plains could ever be free of the worry of having a whiptree crash against his house in the wind. He began with an undercoat of green and blue, and Dal watched. Bergen hesitated now and then, but it came back quickly, and, in fact, the long separation from art had done him no harm. His eye was truer. His colors were deeper. But still an amateur.

  “Perhaps if there were more magenta in the sky under the clouds,” Dal offered.

  Bergen turned to him coldly. “I’m not through with the sky.”

  “Sorry.”

  And Bergen painted on. Everything went well enough, except that he couldn’t seem to get the whiptrees right. They kept looking so brown and solid, which wasn’t right at all. And when he tried to draw them bent, they were awkward, not true to life. Finally he swore and threw the brush out the window, leaped to his feet and stormed away.

  Dal walked to the painting and said, “Bergen, sir, it isn’t bad. Not at all. It’s good. Just the whiptrees.”

  “I know about the damned whiptrees,” Bergen snarled, furious at his failure to be perfect in his first attempt in years. And he turned to see Dal taking swipes at the canvas, quick strokes with a slender brush. And then Dal turned around, and said, “Perhaps like that, sir.”

  Bergen walked up to the canvas. The whiptrees were there, by far the most lifelike, most dynamic, most beautiful thing in the painting. Bergen looked at them, how effortless they seemed, how effortlessly Dal had stroked them into the painting. This was not how it should be. It was Bergen who was going to be the artist, not Dal. It was not just or right or fair that Dal should be able to paint whiptrees.

  And in anger Bergen shouted something unintelligible and struck out at Dal, catching him a blow at the side of his head. Dal was stunned. Not from the force of the blow, but from the fact of it.

  “You’ve never hit me before,” he said, wonderingly.

  “I’m sorry,” Bergen said immediately.

  “All I did was paint the whiptrees.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Hitting servants isn’t the kind of thing I do.”

  And now Dal’s surprise turned to fury. “Servants?” he asked. “For a moment I forgot that I’m a servant. I saw us try our hands at the same task and I was better at it than you. I forgot I was a servant.”

  Bergen was frightened at this turn of events. He hadn’t meant anything by his statement, he just prided himself on not being an uncontrolled master.

  “But Dal,” he said innocently. “You are a servant.”

  “That I am. I must remember that in the future. Not to win at any games. To laugh at your jokes even when they’re stupid. To let your horse always be a little faster. To always agree that you’re right even when you’re being a fool.”

  “I’ve never wanted anyone to treat me like that!” Bergen said, angry at the unfairness of it.

  “That’s the way servants treat their masters.”

  “I don’t want you to be a servant. I want you to be my friend!”

  “And I thought I was.”

  “You’re a servant and a friend.”

  Dal laughed. “Bergen, sir, a man is either a servant or a friend. They’re opposite directions on the same road. Either you’re paid for service, or you do it for love.”

  “But you’re paid for service, and I thought you did it for love!”

  Dal shook his head. “I served for love, and I thought you fed and clothed me for love. I felt free with you.”

  “You are free.”

  “I have a contract.”

  “If you ever ask me to break it, I will!”

  “Is that a promise?”

  “On my life. You aren’t a servant, Dal!”

  And then the door opened, and Bergen’s mother and uncle came in. “We heard shouting,” his mother said. “We thought there was a quarrel.”

  “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 houses on 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.”