Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,27

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 a genius-- and she indulged herself enough to go to college, largely because she got a scholarship and her mother believed in taking advantage of every free thing that came.

Aqd