Foundation

hesitantly. He set down the plate in front of Mags. On it was a sliced apple, whole and sound, not a wormhole or rotten spot to be seen, and a piece of creamy cheese, without a touch of mold to it. “Me gran would say he should have this, too, Herald Jakyr,” the young man said, and Mags got it, unbidden from the young man’s mind, that he had a little brother about Mags’ age, and that Mags himself was wearing this fellow’s outgrown shirt, as he was wearing discarded trews, boots, stockings, smallclothes, from four other young Guardsmen. Oddly enough ... that felt ... warming. Like they had given him a bit of themselves with the clothing.

“I expect your gran is right,” Jakyr agreed, and nodded to Mags to start in on the good things. “Have that, lad, if you can find a corner to tuck it in.”

Again, he ate slowly, the cheese first, savoring the richness of it, soft, creamy, a bit of a bite, and the unexpected crunch of tiny salt crystals, marveling that this was how cheese was supposed to taste. The only cheese he had ever gotten was cheese so covered with mold it was green, and as dried out and hard as a board to boot. Then the apple, so sweet it tasted like the nectar the kiddies used to suck out of the bases of flowers when they got a chance. But by that point, a full belly and being warm and the drone of voices as Jakyr talked to the Guardsmen was making him drowsy ... then sleepy ... and he felt himself nodding off with a slice of apple still in his hand. He woke up a bit when Jakyr shook him, and obediently let himself be led off by one of the Guardsmen, the same one that had brought him the cheese, to a room, where there was a bed, the first bed he had ever slept in. The Guardsman helped him off with his boots, and that was the last thing he remembered before falling into a dream of riding Dallen through apple-flavored clouds to the biggest Big House he had ever seen.

Chapter 4

Mags’ dreams were soothing, for the first time in his memory, and full of something else, too; Dallen explaining things to him. Never in all his life had he encountered anyone with Dallen’s patience. He felt like such a dolt, but all those things in his head, they all were so strange, so completely divorced from anything he knew. He kept asking questions and often only got more confused. Finally Dallen stopped where he was in the imaginary landscape; the clouds billowed up about them and whited everything out, so that there was only himself and Dallen.

Over and over, Dallen explained what it was that he was, what it was that Dallen was, and why it was important. “I may be a dolt,” Mags said once, hanging his head. “But it don’t seem real nor possible. How can I do all them grand things? How can you be talking like a human person?”

And Dallen would begin all over again, explaining it a different way. Always, he was wrapped in that calm, which was a good thing, because it let him listen and try to understand without panicking.

Slowly he began, if not to understand, at least to accept, though none of it made any sense by his lights. Nobody was getting anything out of this so far as he could see. Everything was about what a body got out of something. But the Companions got nothing out of this, and the Heralds, well, all right, they got to live better than Master Cole, but they had to work three times as hard for it. And all the sorting out of things that Heralds did, well, who got anything out of that? It was bewildering. And that was just looking at things the simple way .... When you went at it in a more complicated way, when you started wondering what Companions were, and how they could be as smart as a person, and where they came from and why they were doing all of this, well, it was just plain crazy. And if he had not been enveloped in that calm, he would have been sure he had actually gone mad, and none of this was happening.

Finally Dallen went silent for a long time. :Chosen, when you gave Burd that piece of bread, why did you do it? You got nothing out of it except his gratitude.:

That brought all Mags’ questions to a tumbling halt, because even he didn’t know why he’d done it. It wasn’t like the snitched food that might be bad, with everyone sharing it so nobody got too sick. That half slice of bread wasn’t going to make Burd strong enough to do his work and Mags’. And the lack of it wasn’t going to keep him from doing his own work All right, maybe some time in the future, Burd might recall and do him a turn, but he might not. So why had he done it? It wasn’t the first time he’d shared with one of the others either ... generally the littlest or weakest. Then, of course, he’d had to go all hard on them so that they wouldn’t think they could depend on him —but he’d felt bad when he did that, too.

“’Cause ...” he began, struggling with his own thoughts “Because ... it weren’t fair. They put him in a played-out seam, how’d they expect him t’ find sparklies there? Then they take away his bread ’cause he don’t. They knowed he weren’t shirking. They knowed he weren’t hiding sparklies. It weren’t fair. They was takin’ away what he shoulda had outa pure meanness. An’ there weren’t nothin’ he could do about it neither.”

:That is why we do all of it, Chosen,: Dallen said with immense pride. :We try to make things fair.:

Such a strange thought. Such a very strange thought. But it made a kind of equally strange sense.

Slowly he pieced together what Dallen was trying to tell him. That he had been picked out by Dallen to do this thing, because there was something in him that made him right for a task that was going to last a lifetime. That the something was partly what made him give Burd that bread—and many other kindnesses he had done for the other kiddies. That was the complex matter on which all the rest of it rested. It seemed that what he was trying to do—if he understood correctly—was to make things fair.

Which made no sense.

“But life ain’t fair—” he protested, having heard that over and over again, with varying degrees of smugness on the part of the Pieters’ boys.

:Why not?: Dallen asked, stopping him in his tracks.

“Because—because it ain’t!” was all he could come up with. It was true. Everyone knew it. Why try and go against what was true?

:And the more people that say that, the more people there are who use that as their excuse to be cruel, mean, and ugly,: Dallen said implacably. :’Life isn’t fair’ is nothing but an excuse people make to justify bad things they do. But why shouldn’t life be fair? What’s keeping it from being fair? Those same cruel, mean, and evil people. I think you understand that, Mags—maybe not in your head, but in your heart, which is more important. And the more people there are who who to make life fair, the more likely it is that it will become fair. Don’t you want that?:

He had to admit that he did. And he had to admit that the idea of making life fair had a kind of thrill to it. Even if all he did was share a piece of bread ...

But all that was really too much to think about for very long. Even in his dreams, his attention came back to the basics, the simple things. And Dallen was perfectly willing, in his dream, to talk about those, too.