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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--"

"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