"Disrobe, Char"

– The Maestro – "Future Imperfect."

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"In the old tongue which had once been his world's lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however—char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one. Char meant death."

– Stephen King – "The Wastelands"

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V: What was done to me created me. It's a basic principle of the Universe that every action will create an equal and opposing reaction.

Evey Hammond: Is that how you see it? Like an equation?

V: What was done to me was monstrous.

Evey Hammond: And they created a monster.

– V for Vendetta

o

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Chapter 1. The Last Zookeeper

By the time Aster was 8 years old, she had learned most of the rules her father had taught her.

There were many rules, of course, and they were hard to keep track of. This animal had to have this food, for instance. It was safe to get into the large cage with most birds to feed or clean them, but anything with sharp teeth, or bigger than she was had to be in the smaller cage that was in back (and locked in very carefully!) before she could go into the bigger cage. Taking care of the cages was hard, dirty work. The shovel Aster used had been made before the War, and was meant for an adult. She had to wrap both hands tight around the handle and push it with her shoulder, which hurt. But all the dirty straw full of poop had to be gotten out. The animal poop smelled bad, too, and got all over her clothes and hands no matter how careful she was. Then, once the cage was clean, she had to get a bucket of water from one of the ponds, pour it on the floor and mop it, then bring clean straw and throw it down. That was messy, too, and between the poop, and the water, and the bits of straw, she always had to take a bath at the end of the day.

There was far too much work for just Aster and her father, of course. Aster's sister was just a baby and couldn't help, so her father had other men that came every day to help. They were a lot bigger than Aster and she asked her father why they couldn't do all the work, but he said that she would someday be Zookeeper after him, and had to learn responsibility. Aster wasn't quite sure what that meant, she guessed it meant doing things that need to be done like helping with the animals and her sister. The other men did not live in the zoo like Aster and her father and sister, so maybe they did not have responsibility. Whatever that meant.

A lot of cages were empty, of course. Her father had tried to explain to her about that, that something called 'refrigerants', and parts for machines he showed her called 'aeraters' had run out after the war. So there were no penguins or polar bears in the Bronx Zoo (even though their pictures were still by the empty cages and tanks), and the only fish were fat catfish in ponds outside that they sometimes had for supper, and sometimes her father traded for things that he needed.

Winter was harder. For the past few years she had helped her father and the other men who worked at the Zoo pile up huge mounds of leaves and straw in the cages of a building that said 'World of Reptiles' on it once fall started coming, and in the winter her father put several barrels inside where he kept small fires burning. The building was still very cold, and Aster asked her father why it had to be so cold, but didn't understand his answer. What did cold have to do with sleeping? When she got too cold in bed, she always woke up and had to get more blankets. There were special rules for the World of Reptiles building, of course. Some of the snakes had a large red sign in front of their cages that said 'venomous' and Aster's father had told her that she was never-ever to open those cages. Their teeth were too dangerous, he had told her. They could kill her with one bite. Aster didn't understand that, because most of them had teeth that looked very small. Much smaller than the teeth on the lynx, which he sometimes let her feed (but only if he was close by). If the teeth on the lynx were not that dangerous, how could the smaller teeth on the Venomous snakes be? Aster asked her father about that, and finally he had caught a rat and thrown it still alive into the cage of the "Diamondback Rattlesnake". The snake stuck out it's tongue a few times, smelling the rat Aster knew, then suddenly, so fast she could barely see it happen, it lunged out at the rat and bit it, leaving only two small holes. Aster had been bitten worse than that by a dog once, it hurt for a while, but certainly didn't kill her. But the rat staggered off, looking sick, it kept falling down, and soon couldn't get up at all, and the snake came over and started eating it.

"Poison." Her father explained. "The snakes that say 'Venomous' on their cages have poison in their teeth. It killed the rat, and it can kill you. Sometimes what you can't see is more dangerous than what you can. So you keep out of those cages, you hear?"

Aster did not want to be dead like the rat. She always carefully read the cages in the reptile building to see if they said 'venomous' before she cleaned them or put food in.

There were a lot of Reptiles that were gone, of course. Aster's father said there was no room in the World of Reptiles building for alligators and crocodiles. He was sad when he said it. He said there might still be alligators and crocodiles somewhere in the world, far away down south. Then again, they might be extinct. The war had killed most of the world. Her father told her that. He was sad when he said it. Most of the animals that used to exist were probably extinct, he said.

The poison snakes scared Aster but even more scary was the Mouse House. It was dark in there, so Aster had to bring a lantern with her whenever she cleaned the cages, and the tunnels seemed like scary caves, especially water often dripped down the walls, and there were strange echoes, and the glass windows of the cages were shaped like huge, wide gravestones with writing on top telling what animal was inside. Or used to be insde, before the War. There were tiny creatures in there like bats that usually hid, but sometimes ran or flew around when Aster wasn't expecting it, or looked at her with tiny black eyes that seemed like they could see her no matter how dark it was. But her father said they were lucky to have the Mouse House. He said it had made a pretty good fallout shelter, when the war had happened. That had been a long time ago, when Aster's grandfather had been the Zookeeper.

Aster always wrote down the rules her father had taught her about the Bronx Zoo in a notebook. She had known how to read since she was 4. Her father had taught her. She liked to read. Sometimes she went a few blocks away to several buildings that her father called a 'Library'. It was a bit scary going to the Library, sometimes. The Maestro had brought books from several old libraries into some new buildings in the city where they lived, Dystopia. That had been a long time ago. The Maestro no longer cared about books, her father said one night. Aster thought maybe he was drunk when he said it. He had traded some catfish from the pond for some bottles of wine earlier that day. Then he told her to never-ever say that to the Maestro. He got more drunk after that, started crying, and fell over on the floor, crying about Aster's mother, who had died three years ago when Aster's sister was born. Aster tried to pull her father into bed, but he was too heavy.

Her father slept most of the next day, so Aster was naughty and didn't help the men clean the cages and feed the animals, and instead she went to the Library when she was done and read some of her favorite books. 'Fairy Tales', her father called them. They were about the world a long time ago, the world even before the world that had been destroyed in the War. There was a lot of magic in them, but her father said there was no such thing as magic. At least not any more. They were just stories. And there was no happy endings in the real world, like in the stories. That made Aster sad. Why couldn't things be happy? The zoo made her happy. Usually the library made her happy, too, even though it was a little scary leaving the Zoo to go there. The air was drier outside the Zoo and smelled bad, and there were crowds of people. Some of them looked mean at Aster, in a way that reminded her of the tigers in the Zoo, but if they tried to bother her, she told them that she was the daughter of the Zookeeper and showed them a shiny card her father had given her called an 'I.D.' and after that they left her alone, even though they still gave her mean looks. She didn't care about the mean looks, any more than she did from the tigers, provided they were inside the cage, so that was alright, and she would just keep going to the library to find new books to read.

The Maestro sometimes came to the Zoo, of course. Her father explained the rules to Aster, that she was never to talk to the Maestro. Only he was to talk to him. Her father seemed very afraid of the Maestro, which Aster didn't understand. The Maestro had always been there, like the zoo, and the library, and the animals like the venomous snakes or tigers. The Maestro was much bigger than her father, of course, but so were the buffalo, and her father was not afraid of them. And Aster was short for her age, pretty much all grownups were much taller than her, and she really didn't think much about whether they were taller than each other or not. He was also green, but she didn't think about that much, either. Some of the men who sometimes came to help with the zoo were so dark brown they were nearly black, so Aster supposed there were a lot of different colored people in the world, just like the stray cats that ran around the zoo to eat mice came in a lot of colors.

Usually the Maestro came to ask for a deer or a buffalo. To eat, her father said. Or to make leather boots from. He would look at the numbered brands on the animals, then read in a large book he sometimes wrote in late in the evening, and point to the ones he wanted the Maestro to take. The older males, her father said, though he didn't say why, and they all looked mostly the same to Aster anyways. Sometimes the Maestro would take different ones anyways, and her father wouldn't say anything. Aster wanted to make a face at the Maestro for not following the Rules of the Zoo, but her father had said she must never, ever do that in front of the Maestro, so she always looked at the ground and stuck out her tongue later, after the Maestro was gone.

Other times the Maestro would come to the zoo, just to look at the animals. "He's like a boy." Her father said once. That's why he came to the zoo, but didn't care about reading anymore. Once the Maestro got angry that there weren't very many birds in the zoo. Her father did something very strange then, that Aster didn't understand. He bowed down in front of the Maestro, and begged the Maestro to forgive him. Birds were very sensitive to the weather and something called 'radiation'. Most of them had died before the Maestro had built Dystopia, her father said. The Maestro started laughing the moment her father said the word 'radiation', though Aster had no idea what was so funny about 'radiation', whatever that was. Then he told her father to make sure he bred more deer and buffalo, and went away.

Once the Maestro was gone, and it wasn't against the Rules for Aster to talk, she asked her father: "What's radiation?"

"Poison." He said.

"Like in the snakes?"

Her father nodded. "Yes, but worse. At least you can see a snake. And there used to be shots you could get to cure snake venom. You can't see radiation at all. It's in the ground, and the air, and the food. The bombs used in the war made a lot of radiation all over the whole world. It kills everything. And there's no cure."

"How come we're still alive, then?"

"Sorry, my mistake." her father said. "It kills almost everything. A very few things, it makes stronger. Like the Maestro. Radiation is like food, for him. He got stronger after the war, and built Dystopia to keep radiation out, so we can live here."

"He saved us, then?"

Her father shook his head. "He didn't do it for us."

"Who did he do it for?"

"Himself." The word sounded like a curse, and Aster could tell her father was getting angry, so she didn't ask any more questions, even though she didn't understand what her father had said.

When Aster was ten years old, she knew a lot more than she had at eight. She was sometimes allowed to feed the small rattlesnakes, but not the coral snakes or cobras yet. There was a list of the ones she was allowed to feed. Her father had taught her a lot of things she had to know to run the zoo. He didn't have any other children, so she would have to be Zookeeper someday, he said. The animals had to be saved. He taught her how to make squares to understand 'genetics' of an animal, and how to select which male and female animal to breed together. It was bad to breed together animals that were closely related. He showed her why, on the squares. A lot of the animals would not breed, even though her father put them together in the spring, and sometimes even did a funny dance in front of them. It was because they were 'imprinted' on people. They wanted to have sex with people, rather than animals. Astrid thought that was terribly funny and laughed for nearly a minute until her father scowled angrily at her.

"It's not funny. It's a damned nuisance."

"Why?"

"If they won't mate with each other, they have to be artificially inseminated. Only way to keep the species alive."

"What's artificially inseminated?"

"Something like sex. But not as fun. It's a damned nuisance, like I said. Nothing but a trick on nature."

"Will you show me? If it's for keeping the animals alive, then I need to know it to be zookeeper, don't I?"

For some reason her father looked like he didn't want to show her. Then he sighed. "I suppose you have to learn sometime. I won't live forever. I'll show you on a deer."

Most of the deer were tame, and her father easily caught a buck with large antlers, which he brought into a building where Aster had never been before. It was very clean there, and full of shiny metal things. He put it on a metal platform and buckled several straps around it. Then he did something surprising, reaching down and grasping it underneath from where it peed.

"This is embarrassing, but necessary." He told Aster, though she didn't understand what was embarrassing about it. "But living where we do… with the… well, we really can't afford squeamishness. Think of this as a job. Not a fun job, any more than cleaning the cages is fun. But it needs to be done, to keep the animals alive."

Her father moved both his hands under the animal for a few minutes, causing the deer to thrash around in the restraints and bellow loudly. Eventually, he took one hand away, reached for a large glass test tube, and held it under the deer's penis, where it filled with a liquid that looked to Aster to be something like runny boogers. He took a syringe and sucked the liquid up.

"It's important to do this quickly", he told Aster. "The sperm doesn't live very long outside the animal."

They went back out to the deer, and her father went up to a doe and put the syringe into the hole between her legs and squirted the liquid into her.

"That hole is the female deer's vagina." Her father explained. "If it were spring, and I did this, the sperm would make her pregnant with baby deer. I have to do this with a lot of animals that are imprinted on humans, because they won't have sex."

"Is sex with people, like that?"

"Oh, brother. Now's a fine time to discuss the birds and the bees." Her father rolled his eyes. "What I just did was a job. Not a fun job, but a necessary job. Something to get over with as quickly as possible. Sex with people is more fun. Usually they like to take their time, to make the fun last longer. You'll understand in a few more years, when you get interested in boys."

Aster pulled a face at that. Boys were annoying. They teased the animals and threw stones when they came to the Zoo. She supposed her father had once been a boy, but he was, well, her father. Not a boy. Her father laughed at Aster's face and ruffled her hair.

She thought for a moment about what they had done. "What's a trick on nature?" she asked her father.

"Well, nature works in a certain way, most of the time. But sometimes you can play tricks on it, to get things done the way they normally wouldn't work in nature. For instance, normally animals have babies by having sex. But if they won't, you can do what I just did, to get them to have babies anyways. There's a lot of ways to play tricks on nature. Not all of them good. Technology and machines are nothing but one big trick on nature, and that's what made the War. Human wisdom, unfortunately, often doesn't keep up with human intelligence. It hardly ever does, in fact."

"I don't understand. I thought the machines saved work."

"Never mind." Her father sighed. "It isn't important. Most of the machines are gone, except from here, and they aren't making them any more anyways. Someday they'll all be gone. Learning to run the Zoo is more important. We need to keep the animals alive. I'm going to give you some books to read about this. Also some books to start you out learning veterinary medicine. Make sure you study them hard. I'm going to buy some small goats for you to practice things like artificial insemination, giving intravenous fluids, and setting bones on. You can start out on them, even if they get out of the restraints, they can't hurt you."

Something occurred to Aster. "How do you do that to a tiger… if you have to, I mean. If the deer escapes from the straps it'll probably just run away and kick stuff. The tiger would kill you. Wouldn't it be dangerous?"

"A good question. Shows you're thinking." Aster beamed under the approval. "I haven't had to, very often. When I do, I generally buy some opium in the market, and sedate them. I'll get you a book about how to do that, you'll probably have to sedate animals sooner or later for medical treatment or even surgery, and it's important to know how to do that. You need to know the right amount to give them. If you give a goat the same amount of opium you would give a tiger, you'll kill it, and if you give a tiger the same amount you give a goat, you won't even make it drowsy and it'll rip your head off."

Opium was, of course, the only drug they had for surgery. It came from poppies grown in greenhouses. The Maestro ordered it grown. Her father said that the Maestro like to use 'opium derivatives' such as something called 'heroin' to control people, and warned her never to take it if it were offered.

"I won't" Aster promised. It was a promise she would eventually break, but she meant it at the time.

A lot of the books her father gave her were yellowing, with brittle pages. He said the books were very old, and people had used more modern drugs for surgery before the War. But now, opium was all they had. Aster had to learn a lot of things, like how to make the opium from the flower, and how to administer it. The latter was pretty disgusting. You had to put little pieces of opium up an animal's butt. You couldn't feed it to them, or they would likely throw up. Aster told her father that putting things up a butt hole was disgusting, and her father told her to forget about it. It was just another job you needed to do for the zoo, like cleaning up the cages. Astrid made a face and read some of her old fairy tale books, she liked the stories about the handsome prince who saved the princess from evil queens and fairies. Maybe when she got interested in boys, the way her father said she would in a few years, she would find a handsome prince to come marry her and live at the zoo with her. After all, her father had once been married. Before Aster's mother had died, giving birth to her younger sister.

Aster's sister was 5 years younger than her. She loved her sister, but felt bad for her. Whatever had killed their mother had left her sister weak her whole life. Or maybe it was because she didn't get mother's milk but only cow milk. Her father said that goat milk would have been better, but there hadn't been very many goats in Dystopia at the time. Her real name was Tina, but Aster always called her 'Thumbelina' or 'Thumb', because she was so tiny like Thumbelina was in the books about Fairy Tales that Aster liked to read. After a while, Aster's father got into the habit of calling her that, too. He told Aster that she would probably eventually grow much bigger, but her sister would always be small.

"The runt of the litter." He said sadly. He made Aster promise always to take care of her sister.

"I will." Aster tried to teach her sister to read, and eventually she learned, but was never as fast at reading as Aster. She liked the fairy tale books, though, so one day Aster gathered up all that she owned and gave them to Thumb. Her father said that if Aster was going to be Zookeeper someday, she needed to learn a lot of things. Real things, not stories. She had to memorize what the different animals ate, and what to do with them in the winter, and much harder things, such as what to do if they had trouble giving birth, how to set their bones, what their bones and teeth looked like, and even really gross things like what their poop should look like looking at their poop to see if they were sick or had parasites.

Her father would often quiz Aster, he would bring in a bone or a tooth or a stick with bite marks or a piece of poop and make her tell him what animal it had come from. Sometimes he brought in dead animals and made her cut them up and tell him what all the different parts were inside. Astrid cried once when he brought in a dead kitty. She liked kitties. Her father told her that if she learned well, she might be able to save the lives of other kitties, someday. That made Aster stop crying. She supposed the dead kitty would stay dead whether she cut it up or not, so it was more important to learn so she could save the live kitties, and the other animals at the Zoo.

Sometimes Aster would walk with her sister, Thumb, around the Zoo. Thumb liked being with her, and Aster would pick tulips (or other flowers if the tulips were not blooming) and put them behind Thumb's ear. Thumb asked why she did that, and Aster said: "Well, because Thumbelina always sat inside a tulip in the story."

Then she would tell Thumb to hush. She practiced reciting what she knew about animals as she walked around the zoo.

"Red Fox. Vulpes Vulpes. Mammal. Carnivore. "

"Buffalo. Bison bison. Mammal. Herbivore."

"Tiger. Panthera Tigris. Mammal. Obligate Carnivore."

"What's 'obligate' mean?" Thumb asked.

Aster thought for a minute. "It means it has to. It has to eat meat. Father says that things like dogs and foxes can live on vegetables for a while, if you know which vegetables to give them to give them the right nutrition, but that tigers have to eat meat. Otherwise they'll go blind, and then die."

"That's gross." Thumb complained.

"You don't have to feed them." Aster said. "You're lucky. Father says he's going to try and find me a bow pretty soon and teach me to hunt rabbits and stuff. Getting enough meat for the tigers and wolves is expensive. Sometimes the Maestro gives us meat, but it's never enough, and then Father has to go buy extra in the market. At least the Buffalo are cheap to feed. They eat grass, and people can't eat that. But people like to eat meat, too, like the tigers."

Thumb had no more questions, so Aster went on with practicing what she knew about the animals. Soon, she finished with the outdoor mammals and went into the World of Reptiles building.

"King Cobra. Ophiophagous Hannah. Reptile. Hibernates in the Winter. Obligate carnivore. Preferably Ophiophagous."

"What's 'Oh-fee-fage-us'?" Thumb asked.

"Ophiophagous." Aster corrected in a scolding voice. "It means it prefers to eat other snakes. But we don't have that many snakes. Father usually has to feed it by chopping meat really fine, and forcing it down the snake's throat. It's not easy, either. They're really poisonous and father has to pay a lot to get anyone to help him. Then if they puke, he has to do it again."

"Can't the Maestro help him?" Thumb asked? "I heard nothing could hurt him."

Aster had asked her father that very same question once, about a year ago, and hadn't gotten a clear answer, except that apparently the Maestro was very busy doing other things.

"The Maestro's the King." She explained to Thumb. "He has much more important things to do than feeding snakes. That's Father's job."

"Someday it'll be your job, won't it?"

"Yes. That's why I have to learn."

Aster liked the garter snakes (Thamnophis Sirtalis) best in the World of Reptiles building. They were tame, and would take worms and bits of fish right from her hands. They had a lot of babies, too. Father sometimes fed the garter snakes to the King Cobras. He said the King Cobras brought in more money than garter snakes. They needed the money, to take care of the animals. But it still made Aster sad.

After the World of Reptiles building, Aster went to the Mouse House. She lit one of the oil lanterns that were kept just inside the doorway with a match, and went in, carefully holding it away from both herself and Thumb. She was not afraid of being in the Mouse House as she had been when she was only eight. There had once been many more types of animals in the Mouse House, but father said that different species of mice just ate food without bringing up money. There were some mice, of course, but they were in cages in the other buildings, and mainly fed to things like the snakes. Otherwise, the building now had mainly animals the people in Dystopia (and more importantly, the Maestro) were more interested in, like small monkeys and different types of bats. That was okay with Aster, she had seen different types of mice in some of her father's books, and there were so many of them and they all looked so much alike to her that she wasn't sure she would have been able to tell the difference between them all.

The tiny black eyes on the bats didn't scare her anymore, either. Bats had a different way of seeing, with sound, not with their eyes. Sometimes Aster tried closing her eyes in the Mouse House and making different sounds, sometimes squeaking like the bats, sometimes just shouting, but all that happened was that she heard her own voice echoing. She couldn't see anything the way the bats could. She stuck out her tongue at one of the bats. Too bad she couldn't steal it's ears. It would be neat to see things in the dark by shouting. She could sneak up on one of the nasty boys who teased the animals that way and really scare him.

She recited all the facts about the different bats as she walked past them, until she came to the last cage in the building.

"Common Vampire Bat. Desmodus Rotundus. Mammal. Obligate haemovore."

Thumb wrinkled her nose at more long words. It didn't seem fair that Aster was not only bigger than her, but seemed three times smarter, and got smarter every day, while Thumb struggled with fairytale books and took all day to read a book that Aster said usually took her less than an hour to read when she had been five like Thumb. But maybe if she listened enough to Aster she could learn to be as smart as she was someday. "What's 'hee-mo-vore' mean?"

"Blood." Aster answered the question absently as she tapped on the smeared glass to make the vampire bats fly around a bit rather than just hanging there doing nothing. Eventually she did get a few to flutter from one branch to another, where they promptly went back to sleep. Stupid, lazy things, Aster decided. She turned back to Thumb. "The vampire bat feeds on blood."