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"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 got 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 all:
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.)
But all was not bleak. Batta loved studying, was, in fact, not far from being [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]