Chapter 6. Broken Toys

Children in Dystopia were expected to know a trade by the time they were 14. It didn't matter what the trade *was*. If they were lucky, and born to a family of privilege (said privilege likely to be revoked at any time, for any reason… or no reason), then their trade consisted of knowing how to maintain wealth and privilege. Relatively easy work, for most. Human beings, other than those bordering somewhere on the autistic side of the psychological spectrum like Aster, were naturally social creatures, and the desire and ability to climb the social ladder came easily to most. The ruthlessness needed to do so in Dystopia also came easily to most. If the choice was between hurting other relatively feeble human beings, and offending the Maestro, very few would even consider the latter.

Those slightly less lucky might be chosen by the Maestro to learn to operate and repair what was left of the old technology. And there seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to how the Maestro chose those who were given the privilege of such education. He certainly didn't go to any effort to determine whether they had the intelligence for such work. Those able to learn it were required to compensate as best as they could for those who were unable to learn it. The wrath of the Maestro on hearing that someone was unable to do the job he wanted them to do as often as not extended unfairly to anyone who happened to be nearby at the time.

The less lucky were made to do a variety of manual jobs, ranging from the relatively easy (driving one of the old trucks to bring food and materials to Dystopia) to the backbreaking (pulling a hand plow)

If you were really unlucky, or displeased the Maestro, you got to pull a hand plow on a farm in the Outside (or the Wastelands as some called them). Given that most of those thus condemned did not know how to build an electroscope like Aster had, the radiation generally killed them in late middle age. Long enough to have children, generally doomed to the same backbreaking work and early death as themselves, to reflect on whatever errors they may have committed in life that consigned them and their offspring to such a fate, and to see the pick of everything they produced seized every year by the Maestro, regardless of what it was. The best meat animals, the biggest fruits and vegetables, and their very children, whether they be boys or girls were taken to feed or serve the tyrant of Dystopia.

Of course, the quality of 'the best' declined slightly every year. Those who lived in the wastelands blamed the radiation, perpetual conditions of heat and drought, and bad luck in general. The Maestro, in turn, blamed those who lived in the wastelands for causing the situation with their laziness and incompetence.

Either Joshua Aversa or his twelve year old daughter could have told them that they were both wrong. Eating your best animals and seed crops had a dysgenic effect. As did taking the best boys and girls out of the human breeding pool. There were a few others in Dystopia, such as Daniel Wolfkiller, who knew it, but they did not mention it to the Maestro. To the extent that the Maestro's head stable master thought about the matter at all, he assumed that given that the Maestro was a scientist, he already knew about the genetic effects of what he was doing, and either did not care, or was doing it deliberately. At any rate, Wolfkiller was not going to risk disturbing the Maestro's rather precarious mental equilibrium by bringing up the subject.

Wolfkiller was wrong, however. The Maestro did NOT know about the effects of his practices on the genetics of crops, livestock, or human beings. Although he was right to the extent that the Maestro would not have cared, if he had known. But the man the Maestro had one been had been a physicist who spent his entire life creating weapons of mass destruction for the purposes of murdering millions of innocent people. The entirety of his scientific endeavors was to destroy life of all sorts, not to preserve and maintain it. That being the case, biology and genetics were subjects he had had no use for, and knew very little about.

It was such a weapon, in fact, the Gamma bomb, that had transformed him from a human scientist into the superhuman monstrosity devoted to destruction that he was now. Though his survival and transformation were, perhaps, surprising in that he had beaten the odds of simply being incinerated by his own gamma bomb, what he had become should not have surprised anyone. When he had been caught in the blast of his own gamma bomb, consummating, as it were, the relationship between the creation and the creator, he simply became a mirror of the creation.

A weapon of mass destruction.

That anyone had ever thought otherwise, or thought that he could somehow be redeemed from what he had become was the folly of fools, blinded by friendship and the absurd thought that patriotism somehow excused endeavors of mass murder. They had eventually all paid for their folly with their lives.

Aster was troubled by very little, of this. The Maestro was unpleasant, but he was simply something that was there, not much different from things like mudholes or mutated trees in the Outside that dripped smelly sap. She was vaguely aware from hearsay that the Maestro had once been a man, and transformed into what he was by a freak accident with a bomb. From the same hearsay, she knew that there had been a very few other such people. None of whom really mattered, because they either couldn't or wouldn't offer any aid to the people in Dystopia in general (or the Zoo, specifically). A doctor Samson something or the other who had been killed by the Maestro. A woman who was supposedly locked in an iron box somewhere in the Maestro's palace. There were rumors of an ugly green fishy creature everyone called 'Abominable' that lived in swamps somewhere in the Outside, and sulked in the mud most of the time. Though occasionally, so Aster had heard, he would come out and rob people, or raid farms for food. She had once met a farmer in the market in Dystopia who swore that the 'Abominable Creature' had once come to his farm, picked up a whole entire cart full of sacks of wheat, weighing no less than a full ton, mind you, and simply jumped off with it to somewhere or the other. Not that his story had impressed the Maestro. The Maestro told him that his full tribute of wheat was due that year, Abominable Creature or no Abominable Creature. The farmer had been forced to sell his youngest son as a slave, to get the money to buy more wheat.

At age 14, Aster was not precisely an exception to the rule of children being expected to know how a trade at that age. She knew most of what she needed to know to run the Bronx Zoo. Her father never missed an opportunity to give her knowledge and experience. Recently, for instance, some of the buffalo had been giving birth prematurely. Her father had stayed up nights studying notes he had taken of their ancestry and which males and females he had mated together, with the result that he sold a particular male that he said had genetic problems at the market in Dystopia. However, he also showed Aster what to do in the case of premature birth. Sometimes the tiny baby buffalo could be saved. If they were not too tiny. If they were born too young, her father said, their lungs were not developed. Even if they could breath on their own, there were other problems, such as not being able to keep themselves warm, being too weak to nurse, their mothers rejecting them (nature knows best her father said about that). Often, keeping them alive meant wrapping them in a wool blanket near the fire and letting Thumb nurse them with a bottle full of warmed up goat's milk. A few of the premature buffalo they were able to save, although her father sold them later that year. He didn't want to breed bad stock.

Still, there was so much to learn. Even her father confessed that he didn't know everything there was to know about the zoo, or all the animals. Probably no single person ever could, he had once told Aster. Before the war, the Zoo had been run by a lot of different people, each of them with a different area of knowledge. He knew enough to run the zoo, as did Aster by this time. But more importantly, he knew how to find out information that he didn't have, if he ever needed it. For instance, what to do when an animal got botflies, as several did in the summer after some of the buffalo had given birth prematurely.

Her father took Aster to the Library with him to watch how he picked out the right books and used their index to firstly find out just what was wrong with the animals and secondly, what to do about it. It required minor surgery. There were non-surgical treatments for botflies, but unfortunately those pretty much only worked for human beings, as they required a high degree of cooperation from the patient to work.

There were other things to learn as well. Although the notion of tiger testicles, or any other animal parts having any sort of medical benefit was absurd, there were things that did work. Mainly different sorts of plants, such as the opium poppies that provided their only anesthetic. A lot of them were extinct, but a surprising number of them had been kept alive and grown in gardens and greenhouses in Dystopia. Aster often went to the library and got books about medicinal herbs, and occasionally bought some of them that were for sale in the market in Dystopia. Willow bark was especially good for treating headaches. It tasted awful, though.

During the two years since the zookeeper, Joshua Aversa and the Maestro's stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller had trained the tigers to pull a chariot for the Maestro, Aster had often seen the Maestro going through the streets of Dystopia in his chariot, the two tigers often growling slightly as they pulled his weight. It looked to Aster as if they were badly underweight, and whenever she saw them, she generally went into the nearest open building, bearing in mind her father's warning that even a tame tiger was generally only three good meals away from becoming a maneater. The other people on the street would generally bow, and get out of the way to one side, but didn't seem concerned about the presence of the tigers. They seemed to think that since they would never contemplate disobeying anyone as strong as the Maestro, the tigers wouldn't either.

Fools. Was Aster's thought, when people who had little children with them would merely get a few feet out of the way when the Maestro went past in his chariot. All predators attacked the weak. Which meant the young, the old, and the sick. Thinking that the tigers would know in the same way they did that attacking the Maestro was another word for suicide was a mistake. It was a mistake her father had taught her about, though she forgot exactly when. Anthropomorphism. It meant thinking (erroneously) that animals saw or thought about the world anything like in the same way human beings did. No, the tigers would not have the sense, as people did, to NOT attack the Maestro, or someone else, if they became sufficiently enraged or hungry. It was the possibility of attacking someone else that worried Aster the most. The Maestro was strong enough to protect himself from the tigers. Other people were not, and Aster had serious doubts as to whether or not even the Maestro would be fast enough to prevent a tiger from ripping someone's throat out. Or if he would even try. From what Aster knew of his character, it was entirely likely that the Maestro would find the spectacle of some helpless person being ripped apart by tigers to be funny.

Over the course of the two years since the tigers had been trained, Aster noticed that the Maestro gradually rode in the chariot pulled by them less and less. Which pretty much fit in with her assessment of how he thought of the tigers. As toys, not living creatures, and like most toys, especially those owned by immature children, the Maestro eventually started to get bored with it. Once, when the Maestro's chariot went by only a few inches away from the window of a building where Aster had taken shelter when she saw the Maestro and his tigers approaching, she saw that not only were the tigers underfed, and infested with botflies, but the bright green paint on the chariot was faded and peeling, the iron rims of the wheels rusting, and some of the gold metalwork broken off.

The chariot was…worn out. Dying. Like the tigers. Like everything in Dystopia. Aster recalled the broken green window panes she had seen in the Maestro's palace, which nobody had cared to fix. The entire city and everything in it (especially the Maestro) was like a maggot. Feeding on the remains of the dead. But even maggots were part of life, and helped create soil. Dystopia created nothing. It only took. From the past. From the people. More like a fire, than a worm. It turned everything to ashes.

What happens when it all wears out? Aster wondered as the chariot clattered on down the street. What happens to the zoo? What happens to ME? I don't think the Maestro is going to do without whatever he wants, for the sake of anyone else. He'll kill this place. And everyone in it. Then go on to somewhere else. If there is anywhere else. Iceland, maybe. I've heard there's people there and hardly any radiation.

It was a cold thought. Another one, even colder, followed it.

What happens when he's killed the whole world?

After nearly two years of owning his tigers, the Maestro hardly ever took them out at all. He seemed to have a new toy, some giant dogs (Aster had no idea that dogs could GET that big) that had robotic parts somehow made a part of them. Some sort of surgery, she guessed, apparently done at the Maestro's palace, because neither she nor her father could have begun to approach anything of that complexity at the zoo. He would often walk, the dogs in front of him. Aster listened to people talk about the dogs. They'd been not only bred to be big, but injected with steroids and growth hormones since birth. Their very brains had been partly removed, and the missing parts replaced with pre-War computers. Unlike the tigers, the dogs would never think of attacking the Maestro. Or anyone else, unless the Maestro commanded. They couldn't think of such disobedience, any more than a clock could think of not going 'tick tock tick tock' all day long.

Looking at the giant dogs made Aster cold. Their eyes had no more life than the headlights of the trucks that brought food and other goods from the Outside to Dystopia. They were not animals. Not even alive, really. They just had living meat stuck onto a machine. Toys, literally. Maybe it was kinder. They probably couldn't suffer, the way the tigers could.

Still, the Maestro took his tigers out once a month or so. Aster thought of sending a letter to the Maestro, to ask him to either care for the tigers better, or give them back to the zoo. She decided against it. Attracting any attention from the Maestro, if you didn't absolutely have to, was a dangerous idea. Then she thought of sending a letter to his stable master, Daniel Wolfkiller, asking him to care for the tigers better. She decided against it. She didn't like the man or want his attention any more than the Maestro's, and either he didn't care that the tigers were slowly starving, or was unable to do anything about it. The latter was probably more likely, she was forced to admit grudgingly to herself. Much as she disliked the rather dirty and nasty man, it seemed that he would not have gotten into the business of caring for horses if he didn't at least care a little for animals.

She also rejected the notion of asking the Maestro to return the tigers to the zoo, if he was no longer interested in them. That would have also attracted the Maestro's attention to her, and given that he behaved pretty much like a spoiled, angry three year old, he would probably not take kindly to the suggestion that he give up any of his toys. Even toys that he didn't care about or want any more. No, he'd see the tigers dead, before giving them up. Besides which, the Zoo always seemed to be short of food, especially meat. It would be foolish to waste meat on tigers that couldn't breed because they were castrated, when they were having a hard enough time feeding those that could breed, to try and maintain the species. Though for what, Aster was rapidly becoming nearly as cynical as her father about. There was no place for the animals, other than in the Zoo. Almost all of the world was dead, and seemed to be getting worse. Except maybe Iceland, and faraway places like that, but she was under no delusions. She had no more chance of getting the zoo animals to Iceland than she had of getting them to the moon.

It was only a few days after Aster had considered (and rejected) sending a letter to the Maestro or Daniel Wolfkiller that she was very surprised by Wolfkiller actually showing up at the Zoo. He had been obviously not happy to ever to have been there in the first place, and more than happy to leave, and Aster would have thought that if he had his way, he wouldn't want to ever set foot in the zoo again.

Aster did not like the man any better than she did two years ago, and if anything, upon seeing him, her previous estimation of his personal hygiene habits had gone downwards. But although not socially inclined, she was capable of learning, and had learned to be more polite in the past two years. Besides, for all she knew, the Maestro had forbidden the man to wash. She had heard of the tyrant of Dystopia inflicting such bizarre punishments on people for minor offenses (real or imagined) before.

"Mister Wolfkiller." She greeted him politely when he came into the zoo. "Or Stablemaster, if you will. What can I do for you?"

She saw that he had new clothes, and a rifle slung over his back. Apparently either his efforts with the tigers, or with the Maestro's horses, or both, had paid off with money, or a promotion. Or both. Though his new clothes did not seem much cleaner than his old ones, which always had seemed grubby even right after Aster had washed them in the big tub, with the best lye soap.

Wolfkiller peered at her from under his greasy bangs with black eyes that seemed not a bit more pleasant than they had been two years ago. Well, so much for gratitude for her attempted politeness. "The Maestro's killed one of the tigers. I need to speak to your father."

"One of the tigers!" Bloody hell. Now Aster felt like a coward for not writing that letter to the Maestro. Maybe he would have started taking better care of them if she had explained well enough how bad they felt, how much it must have hurt them when they were starving. "What happened?"

"It attacked him. This morning at the market. He killed it, of course."

Aster sighed. She had been expecting something of the sort for over a year, now. There was no controlling tigers, not when they were hungry. She was actually surprised it had taken one of them this long to attack it's 'owner'. Though you never really owned an animal, unless maybe it was just a machine toy like the Maestro's giant robot dogs. You could befriend them, tame them, even imprison them. But never really owned them the way you did a clock or a bottle. Always was the possibility of their having their own thoughts that were contrary to yours.

"And the other?"

"In it's cage. I don't think the Maestro means to let it out again." Wolfkiller seemed about to say something else. His cold black eyes actually had a touch of pity. For the tiger, Aster guessed. "I need to talk to your father about it."

"He's with the wolves. I'll go fetch him for you."

"I know where it is. You stay here. I want to talk to him alone." He glanced at her once more, still looking a little sad. He shook his head. "You're still small."

Then Wolfkiller turned and left. So much the better. Aster still didn't like the man. Though at least he seemed to feel a little bad about what had happened to the tigers. Although she had no idea what her being small, now or in the past had to do with anything. She was growing taller. Assuming that really mattered one way or the other, which she couldn't see that it did.

She went about taking care of the animals near her. One of the deer needed a hoof filed, and wouldn't stand still for it, running away ever time it felt the rasp of the file, so Aster finally had to tie it to a tree. Then she was able to file the hoof, despite the deer trying to kick and run away. But without free motion it couldn't get any leverage and she managed the job.

Her father came back with Wolfkiller, going towards the house. Aster could tell he was very upset about what happened. His face was distraught and he waved his arms as he always did when very angry about something. She caught a little of the conversation between him and Wolfkiller as they went past.

"But why?!" Her father seemed not to understand some point or the other about what Wolfkiller had told him. Which was odd. One tiger was dead, the other locked up forever, or until it died of starvation, which probably wouldn't be all that long. What else was there to understand?

"He feels you cheated him. That you didn't train the tigers properly, or maybe even somehow trained them to attack him. So he wants compensation."

"For the love of God. Can't he see sense? No animal can be trained not to go for food if you're going to starve it like that, no matter what you do. Hell, you can't even train most people not to do that. No, never mind. He is what he is. I'm glad you told me. Still, why… that? It's hardly…"

He noticed Aster by the deer, and seemed angry. "Get in the house! Right now!"

Aster hastily untied the deer, and scurried into the house. She had no idea what was going on. Apparently the Maestro was blaming her father for the tiger attacking him, something that anyone sane could see was caused by the Maestro's own stupidity in not feeding the tigers decently, and now wanted her father to pay some huge compensation in money or zoo animals that he didn't want to pay.

Probably they'd have to pay him. Regardless of how much it was. They'd get by, somehow. They always did.

She peered out the window of the house. Her father kept on talking to the Maestro's stable master for several more minutes. Then the stable master left, shaking his head again about something, and her father headed towards another part of the zoo. Probably to take care of the animals. So maybe things were back to normal.

But they were not normal. Her father didn't come back for supper. Aster heated up some stew from the previous day for herself and Thumb, making a face at the taste. The meat was a little bit tainted. She didn't know if her father would want any when he came back to the house, but she'd have to throw the rest away. You couldn't eat meat when it got too bad, you'd get sick. Aster over-salted the stew, and that hid the taste a little.

"Where's father?" Thumb asked, taking an apple out of a basket to get the taste of the tainted stew out of her mouth.

"I don't know." It was not like their father not to be there for supper, and not to have told Aster and Thumb where he was going and that he would be late.

It got dark, and eventually Aster told Thumb to go to bed. She wanted to stay up and wait for their father, so threw a few more logs of wood into the iron stove and lit a candle inside a lantern, but eventually fell asleep, despite her best efforts.

She was awoken sometime late at night, or maybe it was early morning, before dawn, by her father shaking her shoulder. It was dark, the fire in the stove had died down to bare embers and the candle had gone out. She started for a moment, before recognizing him in the light of the oil lantern he carried.

"Aster…" his voice trembled. "Come here. Sit down at the table."

Aster got up from the chair by the iron stove and sat down at the table. Her father had his leather satchel that he used for carrying medical tools. He opened it up and took out a large syringe, the sort used for the bigger animals like tigers. It was full of a murky brown liquid. He set it down at the table, a horrible look on his face as he regarded it. Then he looked up at Aster.

"Aster…" he shook his head. "What do you think of the Maestro? Tell me the truth."

When Aster had been only eight, she had thought of the Maestro as a fierce, but mainly inscrutable king, not to be questioned, like the kings in the fairytale books she had liked to read at that age. The real truth had become glaring obvious to her in the 6 years and some odd months since then.

"He's a monster. I hate him. He takes the best animals from the zoo, and from all the farmers. Daniel Wolfkiller said he killed one of the tigers and locked up the other one in a tiny cage. He cuts out the brains from puppies and puts machines in their heads. He kills people who disappoint him even when they have tried their best."

"Yes." Her father said nothing for a minute. "And I disappointed him."

"Because the tiger attacked him? That's not your fault. Anyone can see that. Even the Maestro has to see that."

"I'm sure he does see it." He laughed ruefully. "But he doesn't care. Like I've told you many times before, he's like a little boy, in some ways. He never puts any responsibility on himself. The tiger attacking him has to be someone's fault, and of course it can't be his. So why not blame me? I'm convenient. So I'm the one who has to be punished. And give him a new toy to play with, to replace the one that I supposedly broke."

"What does he want? More tigers?" Aster frowned. The zoo didn't have that many to spare.

"No." His fingers barely caressed the syringe, and then he hastily withdrew them, as if they had been burned. "He wants… you… Aster."

"Me?" She would have been less surprised if told that the Maestro wanted a flock of extinct birds like flamingoes. "What does he want with me? He doesn't have any zoo animals other than that tiger in the cage, and Daniel Wolfkiller takes care of his horses and dogs for him. Even if he did have zoo animals, you'd know more about them than I do."

"No… your education has nothing to do with what he wants with you. Or maybe it does. You're probably smarter than he is. Maybe not as well educated in all the old pre-War technology. But smarter. And he hates that."

"Is…" now Aster's voice trembled. She had tried her entire life not to offend the Maestro. Now apparently she had, anyways, through no fault of her own. "Is he going to kill me?"

"No… he wants to ruin you. Very likely he may kill you, either in the process, or afterwards. But first he wants to ruin you. Likely he'll keep you alive for long enough to see that happen. He wants…" Her father had a hard time getting the words out directly. "He wants you for the same thing men want the women who work in brothels for."

"He wants to have sex with me?" Vomit rose in her throat. "But he said I was ugly. And I haven't even started bleeding yet."

"Oh, you poor child." Her father got up and hugged her around the head. "This isn't sex. This isn't anything like it, except in the strict mechanical sense. And he doesn't care about your looks. Or late development. You're nothing to him but a toy that's offended him, and he wants to break you before throwing you out with yesterday's trash."

He released his embrace and taking a deep breath, slid the syringe towards her. "I brought you this. Opium. Enough to kill you. It'll be like going to sleep."

Aster shoved her chair backwards violently, jumped up and retreated.

"I don't want to die!" she screamed.

"You're probably going to die anyways. And suffer for it first. I know you deserve better than this but… sometimes a painless death is better."

"You said probably… so there's a chance I might not die."

"A small chance. Very small. Even if you don't die, you're probably going to be crippled. It isn't worth whatever small chance you might have, to go through all that."

"But I was to be zookeeper!" Aster protested. "If I die, what happens to the animals? To Thumb?"

"The Maestro won't ever let you be zookeeper." Her father shook his head. "Not anymore. I'll be lucky if he lets me train someone else. And I'm not sure I even want to. I might just let the animals go. Take their chances Outside."

"No. They wouldn't have a chance." Not between the lack of food and the radiation. Aster sniffed back some tears. "Keep them. Find someone else to take care of them. There's still time. Maybe Daniel Wolfkiller knows someone who would be interested."

"I'm useless." Her father slumped. "I can't save you. I can't even help you. If I had Wolfkiller's guts, I'd kill you."

"Stop that! Wolfkiller is a jerk. You don't want to be like him. And you got more guts than him. You were less afraid of the tigers when you were training them. Its not your fault. Save what you can. Take care of Thumb and the animals."

"For what? There's nowhere else for them to live. All that's here in the Zoo are living fossils of species that should be dead."

"There's Iceland." Aster pointed out and her father laughed slightly. He knew as well as Aster that Iceland might as well be the moon, for all the chance they had of ever getting the animals there. "If Iceland survived the War, maybe someplace else did. Maybe we just don't know about it. Or the weather and radiation might get better. The old books say that radiation fades with time. We don't know when it'll be gone. How would you feel if you killed all the zoo animals, and year after that, the radiation was gone."

Joshua nodded. That was a point. But what a cost. The one thing the Maestro was best at was knowing how to hurt people. "If only it were me the Maestro wanted. I would have gone, and gladly left you in charge of the Zoo."

"But it isn't. And I have to die sometime, I guess. I don't want it to be now, but it is. It's like you said. The worm will have it's due. Don't..don't let it be for nothing. Keep the animals. I thought I would live for a lot longer than this... but if all my life and death do is to keep them alive, at least it will have meant something. If you wreck the zoo, or if the Maestro wrecks it, because he didn't get what he wanted, I'll still be dead, and it will all have been for nothing." She picked up the syringe. "I'll need a jar for this. Something I can put in my pocket."

"A jar…" Her father was nonplussed. "What for."

Aster held up the syringe, trembling and gazing at death in a vial. "I might change my mind."