Nocturnal

The Kingdom

So many babies.

The nursery was the final stop on Rex’s tour of his new realm. Hillary had been so eager to show him everything. Sly and Pierre came with, of course.

Realm. That was a cool word; he’d read about realms in his many fantasy stories, played in them on video games. It was just a cooler word than kingdom. And this really wasn’t a kingdom, anyway. The tour showed him that.

A kingdom was a huge thing, sprawling as far as the eye could see. Home wasn’t that big, just a collection of the two large caverns, two smaller caverns, thirteen isolated clusters of caves, and — of course — tunnels, tunnels and more tunnels. He’d seen the library (it had dehumidifiers to keep the books dry), the kitchen (complete with what was left of Alex, who tasted delicious), the theater (they had an old, giant-sized TV and a copy of just about every movie Rex had ever heard of) and the armory that held all the guns. Lots of guns. Hillary and Sly told him that there were other tunnel clusters elsewhere in the city, but those would have to wait. He had seen the main areas of Home, then finished up at the nursery.

Dozens of old bassinets, beat-up cribs and even metal tubs with blankets lined the edges of the small room. Babies of different shapes and colors lay in most of these things. Women — both strange-looking and normal — tended to the babies, cuddled them, took care of them when they cried. So much love. Secondhand toys littered the floor.

Giggling little kids also scurried through the room. When they saw Rex, they ran to him. He recognized Vanilla Gorilla, Crabapple Bob and the other children who had chased Alex down and torn him to pieces. Hands reached to Rex, tugged at his clothes — these children wanted to be picked up and held. Some were too big for that, and at any rate, that probably wasn’t kingly behavior.

“Sly,” he said, and that was all he had to say. Sly made fake roaring noises and picked the children up, tossing them lightly away. The children squealed and laughed, but they gave Rex space.

Such a happy place, at least on the surface. The more Rex looked around, the more he noticed the bad things — many of the babies just lay there. Some were coughing lightly, some cried and whimpered. Most of them looked sick.

“Hillary, what’s wrong with them?”

Hillary reached into a metal tub and gently lifted a yellow-skinned child who had just one big, blue eye in the middle of its face. The eyelid drooped half shut, and the eye seemed to stare out into nothing. She cradled the child in her arms.

“Mommy is old,” Hillary said. “Old even for us.”

“How old is she?”

Hillary shrugged. “I was born in 1864. Mommy was at least fifty when she had me.”

Hillary was a hundred and fifty years old? Holy shit! Would Rex live that long? Maybe even longer than that, because Mommy was already two hundred years old.

Hillary lifted the child and kissed its forehead. “Mommy has as many babies as she used to, but the older she gets, the more of them that are born dead. Those who live are often sickly. Most of the children do not make it past their first birthday.”

Rex again looked around the room, taking in the numbers. These babies were his brothers and sisters — how many of them would just die? It was terrible and heartbreaking; it hurt to even think about it. “What about doctors? Can’t we take them to a hospital?”

Hillary shrugged as she gently rocked the one-eyed baby. “Could we take this one to the hospital? I think not. We do all we can, but even if we had medicine, we wouldn’t know which kind to give. This is why I worked so hard to bring in a new king, so that the people could spread. If our kind is to survive, we have to spread.”

Many of these babies would die, and yet Firstborn killed baby kings? Why would anyone kill children? Rex wondered if he had made a mistake by sparing Firstborn’s life. Maybe, but there was something about that tall man, something great.

There had to be a reason why Firstborn killed babies.

“Sly, where does Firstborn live?”

“In a room on the Alamandralina, the ship you saw when you first got here,” Sly said. “Firstborn has it good — his room is the nicest place in all of Home.”

“Take me there,” Rex said. “If he’s not there already, you take Pierre and Fort and whoever else you need and bring him. He doesn’t have a choice.”