Bishop slaps his chest. “What about me? What’s my first name?”
The monster’s spidery hand gives a dismissive wave. “It hardly matters. Everyone knows you as Bishop, and Bishop you are.”
Brewer’s voice lowers, softens, becomes sad and wistful.
“All of you can have what I can never possess. You could go to that planet.”
Gaston slides between me and Bishop. He moves close to the monster’s face, even closer than when I lost control and screamed horrible threats. Seeing little Gaston standing right in front of Brewer makes me wince, as if the monster might reach out, bite down and drag Gaston into nothingness.
“Is it safe?” Gaston asks Brewer. “The planet?”
Brewer laughs so hard his furrowed head tilts back and he starts to shake. As before, the bone-scraping sound grinds into a coughing fit. This one racks his body, makes his limp hands flop about like boneless birds. Fluid bubbles up from leathery folds covering where his mouth should be—grayish red glistens on black.
It takes a few minutes for the coughs to ease. We wait.
He finally gets it under control. “Who are you, little tooth-boy? I don’t recognize you.”
“My name is Gaston. Gaston, X.”
The monster rubs a skeletal black hand across his face, across the leathery folds of his mouth. He looks at his palm, seems sad to see wetness there.
“Not fair,” he says quietly. “Not fair-a-dair.”
He focuses on Gaston.
“Without the burns and scars, you aren’t nearly as dashing, Xander. Yes, the planet is safe. Well, the air won’t kill you, anyway. Hopefully you can break the mold. If you can’t, that was one very long trip for nothing.”
I wonder what it’s like down on that planet. I try to imagine a place with no walls. Sky instead of ceiling, sky that goes on forever and ever. A place where the dust of the dead doesn’t cover everything, doesn’t coat our tongues and invade our lungs.
Something about that planet calls to me.
I don’t even care if it’s safe: I would rather die down there than live up here.
A very long trip…the centuries have not been kind…
Brewer’s words push and pull at my muddy mind. A sliver of memory sneaks out: a planet, but not this planet. Something brown, ugly. The thought slithers around like a snake, feeding, growing, becomes almost clear. Another planet…a dying planet. A desperate need to flee.
And then, I understand.
The planet we’re looking at doesn’t just call to me, it calls to us.
It calls to the sleepers.
It calls to the birthday children.
“That’s what this ship was made for,” I say. “To bring us here.”
The monster nods. “Very good, Miss Matilda Savage. And the journey took a mere ten centuries.”
Bishop huffs. “No one lives that long.”
“Some do,” Brewer says. “Many more should have, but revolts can get in the way.”
A thousand years. If Brewer has been alive that long, maybe he is some kind of god.
I think of all the bodies we’ve seen. So many corpses on this ship. A trip of a thousand years. More things click into place.
“The Garden,” I say. “All that fruit…food for the trip. And the pigs. Were they meant to be food as well?”
“Filthy beasts,” Brewer says. “Did you know swine are smart enough to learn how to open basic husks? Simple buttons were a design flaw, I fear. Live and learn. Swine are always after that calcium. I warned against bringing them. The smarter a creature, the less likely it is to behave. Once they got out of their section, there was no getting them back in. You don’t see cows and chickens and sheep turning against their masters, do you?”
Gaston gives a doubtful look. “Livestock? You’d need a lot of space for cows, and we haven’t seen any cows at all. Or chickens. Or sheep.”
The image above the pedestal blurs and shifts. Brewer’s head disappears. In its place, a grassy field with dozens of animals. They have black fur, like the pigs, but are much bigger. Are those cows? In the distance, I think I can make out thicket walls.
So the Garden isn’t the only room with food after all.
The image shifts again. A tall metal rack filled with small cages, and in each cage, a black bird. These I recognize: chickens.
The image blinks, and we’re again looking at Brewer’s horrid head.
“Don’t base reality on what you have seen when you have seen very little,” the monster says. “The Xolotl is vast. Far larger than your young minds can comprehend. You might say that the journey of a thousand years begins with more than a single flightless bird.”
This ship came from another planet, a trip that seems desperate and impossibly long. People must have worked together to make that happen. And it seems like they had plenty of food. How many people were on this ship before the killing began?
“Brewer, what happened here?” I ask. “What made you do these things to each other?”