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 would 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?”

  “To you I was a friend, Bergen,” Dal said, forgetting to say sir, “but to them I was a servant.”

  “You never told me.”

  “What could you have done?”

  And when Dal left at the end of the hour he had the agreement in writing.

  When Bergen woke from his first time under somec, he learned from a kindly man in the Sleeproom that his father had died only a few days after Bergen had left home, and his mother had been murdered by a lover two years later. The largest estate on Crove, besides the emperor’s, was now Bergen’s.

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Along with it, you should know,” said the kindly man, “comes a five years under and one year up somec privilege.”

  “I’d only have to live one year in every six?”

  “It’s the Empire’s way of expressing the value of certain large forces in the economy.”

  “But I want to paint.”

  “Paint then. But unless you want to visit your parents’ graves, the managers of your businesses are doing a remarkably good job, according to the government auditors, and you can go back under to complete your two years of entitlement.”

  “I have someone I want to see first.”

  “As you wish. We can put you back under any time within the next three days. After that, you have to complete your year up, and you will have lost two years of sleep.”

  Bergen spent the first two days trying to find Dal Vouls. He finally succeeded when he remembered that Dal would still be bound by the contract with his father, the executors of the estate were able to locate him because he was sending in occasional draughts to complete the seventy-five-percent clause.

  Dal opened the door and his lice lit up with immediate recognition.

  “Bergen,” he said. “Come in. It’s been three years, then, hasn’t it?”

  “I guess so. Dal, it feels like yesterday to me. It was yesterday. How have you been doing?”

  Dal pointed to the walls of the flat. Forty or fifty paintings and drawings hung there. For twenty minutes there was little conversation except “This; I like this” and “How did you manage that?” And then Bergen, thoroughly awed, sat on the floor (there was no furniture) and they talked.

  “How is it going?”

  “Sales are fairly slow. I don’t have a name yet. But people do buy. And the best of it is, the emperor has decreed that all government offices are to be moved to Crove. Even the name of the planet is changing. To Capitol. It seems that if all goes well, every damn planet’s going to orbit politically around Crove. And that means customers. It means people who know art instead of the military and commercial bastards who’ve had a stranglehold on money on this planet since time began.”

  “You’ve learned how to talk in long sentences since I last saw you.”

  Dal laughed. “I’ve felt freer.”

  “I brought you a present.” Bergen handed him the release from the contract.

  Dal read it, laughed, read it again, and then wept.

  “Bergen,” he said, “you don’t know. You don’t know how hard it’s been.”

  “I can guess.”

  “I haven’t been able to take the examination. Heaven knows, I’ve hardly been able to live. But now—”

  “More than that,” Bergen said. “The examination costs three thousand. I brought it.” He handed the money to his friend.

  Dal held the money for a few seconds, then handed it back. “Your father’s dead, then.”

  “Yes,” Bergen said.

  “I’m sorry. It must have been a shock to you.”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I don’t read papers. I don’t have a radio. And my draughts were never returned.”

  “Contracts are contracts, the executors figured. Trust my father not to free his contract servants in his will.”

  They chuckled wryly in memory of the man, whom Dal had last seen three years ago, whom Bergen had last seen yesterday.

  “Your mother?”

  “The bitch died in heat,” Bergen answered, and this time there was emotion.

  Dal touched his hand. “I’m sorry.” And it was Bergen’s turn to weep.

  “Thank God you’re my friend,” Bergen said at last.

  “And you mine,” Dal answered.

  And then the door opened and a woman walked in carrying a child that couldn’t have been a year old. She was startled to see Bergen there.

  “Company,” she said. “Hello. I’m Anda.”

  “I’m Bergen,” Bergen said.

  “My friend Bergen,” Dal introduced them. “My wife Anda. My son Bergen.”

  Anda smiled. “He told me you were bright and beautiful, and so our son had to be named after you. He was right.”

  “You’re too kind.”

  The conversation was good after that, but it was not what Bergen had expected. There couldn’t be the banter, the in-jokes, the delightful gutter talk, the insults that Bergen and Dal bad known for years, not with Anda there.

  And so they parted with friendship in the air, but a hollow feeling in Bergen’s stomach. Dal had refused his gift of the examination fee, and accepted only his freedom. He would share that freedom with Anda. Bergen went back to the sleeproom and used the rest of his new entitlement.

  When he awoke the next time, things had changed. With Crove now called Capitol, there was an incredible building boom. And Bergen’s companies were deeply involved.

  The building was haphazard, and Bergen began to realize that it wasn’t enough just to throw buildings into the air. Capitql would be the center of trade and government for hundreds of planets. Billions of people. He could conceive of it eventually becoming one vast city. And so be began to plan accordingly.

  He set his architects to planning a structure that would cover a hundred square miles and house fifty million people, heavy industry, light industry, transportation, distribution, and communication. The roof of the building had to be strong enough not only to handle the takeoffs and landings of landing craft, but also to cope with the weight of the huge starships themselves. It would take years to design, he gave them the obvious deadline of his next waking after five years of sleep.

  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.

  “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—”