The Nursery

Bertha Fifty Two carefully groomed the small hairs on the head of the infant in her arms. “I hear they found a new food patch over by the concrete field the other day. It promises to be a repeatedly plentiful supply.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Gertrude Seventeen cooed to the baby she was feeding. “I heard that it was plentiful this once, but probably not ever again. We don’t live close enough to the endless cliff for any food supply to be plentiful forever.”

“No, it’s true,” Bertha explained. “I heard it in the lower nursery from Bertha One Hundred Ninety Five. She passes the soldiers and food gatherers all the time.”

“She lies all the time,” Gertrude sighed. “That nursery just lost seven of its children the other day.”

“Workers?” Bertha squeezed the infant too tight, until it wailed and waved, and she returned to soothing it.

“Oh no, soldiers!” Gertrude commented. “They were off fighting with the colony from near the giant trees, and seven from their nursery never made it back.”

“Oh well,” Bertha shrugged unconcerned. “Soldiers must fight and die in wars.”

Gertrude clicked in agreement. “There was a rumor going around that they were crushed as if something heavy fell on them and then was lifted away. I believed it until George Three told us they were killed in battle. George Three would never tell a lie.”

Bertha trembled. “Such things don’t happen anyway. Those creatures don’t exist.”

“That’s a lie,” Gertrude shook her head. “Someone from my home nursery was found burned in the sun one day. The other workers took the food he was carrying and brought it back and told me so.”

“You’re lying,” Bertha insisted. “George Three told us once that such creatures don’t exist. If they did we would know where they existed and where they burned and where they crushed and we could avoid them.”

“Carlin Eighty told me once that they were not reliable,” Gertrude took the infant in her arms and set it down and then picked up another to groom. “They’d appear and make earth rumblings and then they were gone. They didn’t always appear, only sometimes.”

“Can something only happen sometimes?” Bertha asked.

“Carlin Eighty said that once they moved the giant trees to another part of the world,” Gertrude spoke with widening eyes and a hushed tone.

Bertha did not believe her setting the infant down and skittering to the other end of the nursery to pick up another. “Such things are too big to exist.”