Chapter 11. Prosecution

Aster learned to avoid being noticed. She tried as much as possible to stay with the other women, whenever coming from or going to one of the Maestro's feast-like meals. Sometimes she would explore the palace by herself, but learned to keep alert for anyone approaching her, and wherever she was, she always kept in mind the three nearest hiding places. Whenever she did meet someone, she offered them whatever particular rituals of respects that the other women did, no more, no less. The bowing was meaningless to her, nothing more than something done to avoid trouble, like not trying to stare down one of the animals in the zoo. If the bows meant something to those she bowed to… well no doubt animals felt smug when she or her father avoided eye contact with them.

Occassionally, she considered exploring the palace at night, thinking that perhaps she would learn something as extraordinary as she had the one night she had gone wandering due to insomnia caused by her withdrawal from codeine. Learning that the Maestro could, at times, turn back into an ordinary human being, presumably as easily killed as anyone else, was beyond a doubt the most interesting thing she had learned in her short life. But where there was one interesting thing to learn, there might be others. And most likely WOULD be others, far more interesting. It was as if you were to kick a haystack, and have a diamond fall out at your feet. Chances were, the haystack was full of diamonds, and odds were against the particular diamond that first fell out being the largest of the lot.

But exploring the palace at night would draw attention to herself. The other women, the Bettys, all got up shortly before breakfast and went to bed shortly after dinner. They did not go wandering around at midnight or 3:00 am. And drawing attention was dangerous. Still, there were ways to use the night time hours WITHOUT drawing attention to herself. She had gotten off the codeine (though often after being raped by Paul Rasse and his sadistic gang of guards she was sorely tempted to take it again) but that did not mean that she could not give the impression to others of still taking it. There were reasons for that, one being that if everyone thought she was perpetually stoned it would put them off their guard, the other being that it gave her an excuse to go periodically to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital.

Thus, every few weeks, Aster would go up the few stories in the palace to the level where Doctor Llewellyn's hospital was, carrying a small silk purse with her empty glass bottle inside, along with the sorts of cosmetics the other Bettys liked to have with them, and ask him to refill it. Occassionally his nurse would raise an eyebrow, but never offered a comment. As soon as Doctor Llewellyn (or his nurse if he wasn't there) went in the back with the bottle to get the codeine, Aster would quickly scan the large bookshelf in the front room where Doctor Llewellyn kept his medical texts. She would seize one that looked interesting, put it in her silk purse, and rearrange the other books to conceal the gap. The next time she came back, a few weeks later, on the pretext of obtaining more codeine, she would return the book, and get another.

Unbeknownst to Aster, Doctor Llewellyn was well aware of her 'borrowing' of his medical texts. He said nothing to her about the matter. Apparently Wolfkiller had someone persuaded her to stop taking codeine, and her 'refills' were merely a pretense to allow her access to his books, without raising suspicion. Well, he wasn't going to TELL her she could read his books whenever she wanted. It would make her careless. Of course, there was always the possibility that she was somehow trading or selling the codeine to someone else, but that was hardly his concern.

Probably it would have been more clever of Aster to get goods or favors in return for the narcotics she wasn't using herself, but the idea of doing so didn't even occur to her. Being on the autistic side of the human psychological spectrum, there were a great many things she saw that others did not, but the opposite was also true. There were things that others could easily see and think, such as the possibility of selling or trading drugs, which Aster had a large blind spot regarding. Especially at her young age. Despite what she had been through in the past several months, she was still not quite 15 years old.

Since she did not want to take any more codeine herself, and it never occurred to her to sell or trade it to others, Aster would always pour it down the sink or toilet as soon as she got back to the women's quarters. However, despite having a large blind spot about the possibility of dealing drugs, she was aware that an empty bottle, after supposedly being just refilled, might arouse suspicion. She would refill the bottle with water and color and scent it with a combination of juices, cooking sherry, spices, or whatever else she could steal from the kitchen when she served meals. Her thefts were occasionally noticed, but not commented on. All the women stole food and alcohol. So long as their thefts did not become too great, they were tolerated. Periodically, she would make sure that one or more of the Bettys saw her drinking the liquid from the bottle. It tasted horrible. She drank it anyways.

Often, in order to make use of the night, Aster would sleep during the day, when she didn't have any duties. Sometimes she would pretend that the 'codeine' was making her sleepy. Other times, she would complain of headaches. If she got enough nap time in during the day, she was able to stay up much of the night, reading the medical books she 'borrowed' from Doctor Llewellyn's office while sitting up in bed with a small light. Afterwards, she would always hide them under her mattress. She kept a few of the Pre-War romance books on her dresser, so that if anyone noticed the light, they would think she was reading those. Some, she actually read. Just in case anyone asked her about the plot. But for the most part, she found them boring. She was vastly more interested in the medical books. She had determined to show up the sneering stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller, by finding out ever last weakness the Maestro had. Not that she would ever dare tell him. But she would still prove to herself that she was smarter than him. She would show him up. But to find out any weaknesses that the ten foot tall monster might have, she needed to know as much as she possibly could about how the human body worked. After all, the Maestro had been human once. And, as she had seen, apparently still was sometimes.

Not all of the books she snuck out of Doctor Llewellyn's office were useful to Aster in understanding human anatomy and physiology. She did not have time to look through them during the few brief moments when she was left alone while her bottle of codeine was being refilled. Some of them were about Pre-War drugs that were no longer made today, even in the Maestro's palace. Some were about diseases, which she was pretty sure that the Maestro didn't have. Unless whatever made him ten feet tall and inhumanly strong was a disease of some sort, but she'd never heard a disease that made people stronger rather than weaker. Except maybe rabies, which made dogs and other animals go crazy and bite, and sometimes they seemed stronger because they were so crazed by the disease.

And, of course, some of the books were simply too far above her level of education for Aster to understand. The worst example of the latter was a book with a glossy grey cover that read 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry'. Aster wasn't quite clear on exactly what 'biochemistry' was, but had thought by the use of the word 'fundamentals', that the book would be fairly simple. However, the author of the book, someone by the name of Dr. Michael Morbius apparently had a rather different notion of what constituted 'fundamentals' than Aster did. Said notion being about 3 miles or so above her head. About the only thing she understood at all in the book was the occasional mention of some of the different types of alcohol such as ethanol and methanol. After struggling through several incomprehensible paragraphs, Aster slammed the book shut and stuck out her tongue at the picture of the author, a dark haired, rather sour-expressioned man in a turtleneck sweater, that was printed on the back cover of the book. Whoever Doctor Michael Morbius was, he was obviously so much smarter and better educated than her, that at this point she had about as much hope of successfully comprehending his 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' as she had of successfully armwrestling the Maestro. She felt very tempted to draw a moustache on the picture's face to express her displeasure with the pre-War biochemist's apparent inability to explain anything simply, but decided against it. She still naively thought that Doctor Llewellyn was unaware of her 'borrowing' of his books, and if she made any sort of graffiti on the books, he might notice it and become suspicious.

Aster squinted at the picture of Dr. Michael Morbius (Ph. D. and Nobel Prize Winner according to a rather boastful short biography below his name). It seemed to her that she had heard that name somewhere before. But where? She couldn't remember. Well, it didn't matter. Probably she had just seen the book a few months before, back when she was still recovering from her injuries in the hospital and had tried reading some of Doctor Llewellyn's books out of boredom, and didn't remember it that well because she had still been on the codeine back then. She dismissed the nagging memory, and the next time she went back to get her pretended refill of codeine, she brought the book back, and while Doctor Llewellyn was in back, put it back on his shelf and instead got a book about the human eye, that was much more enjoyable to her because it was written more simply (at the freshman college level rather than the post-doctorate level like the 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' and had a lot of pictures.

One duty that Aster had to do for the Maestro that she actually found to be somewhat interesting, was to (along with several other women) act as a 'decoration', sitting either on or near the Maestro when he held court. This was something that he did on the first day of every month, regardless of what day of the week it was. The Maestro did not, so far as Aster could tell, subscribe to any sort of religion, and had no concern for the religious practices of other. If others wanted (or, as was more often the case, were required) to attend his court on a day when they normally went to church, they would simply have to give up church for the day. The Maestro discouraged church going, anyways, though he did not outright forbid it. The few churches that existed in Dystopia were required to pay a large tax for the privilege of being allowed to exist and meet, and not having their building smashed to rubble in a few punches by the Maestro.

The 'court' sessions generally had the same format. They started out with various people paying tribute or taxes to the Maestro, which was either money, or a certain amount of goods. Occassionally, someone would not have whatever amount the Maestro had decided (exactly how he 'decided' other than by his own fickle whims, Aster wasn't sure) he owed, which never turned out well for them. The lucky ones were required to pay a greater amount, within a short period of time. The unlucky ones, which were actually in the majority, were sold as slaves, or had their children sold as slaves, or both. Sometimes their children were simply taken by the Maestro to serve him, rather than being sold. Often, from what Aster heard, parents who did not have sufficient goods or money to pay whatever amount the Maestro demanded sold their children to someone ELSE first, in order to get enough to pay off the Maestro, rather than have their children serving a monster. Probably they were the smart ones.

Very rarely, the Maestro would kill someone who did not have sufficient taxes or tributes, merely reaching out with one hand to snap their neck. Aster always cringed when that happened, but said nothing. She never learned what the tax defaulters who were killed had done worse or differently than the other ones. Probably it simply depended on the Maestro's whims at the time. The bodies generally lay where they were until after the 'court' session was over, as nobody was brave enough to ask the Maestro for permission to remove them.

After the first part of the 'court' session, in which taxes and tribute were paid, the Maestro then heard criminal cases, if there were any. Usually, there was not. 'Crime' in Dystopia was defined specifically as offenses against the Maestro, or his officials. Very few people were brave or stupid enough to do such a thing. Those who were, were more often than not executed on the spot, so 'criminal cases' were rare. So far as Aster could tell, all 'criminal cases' were found guilty, regardless of how much or how little evidence there was. After the inevitable guilty verdict, regardless of how trivial the offense was, the criminal was then executed on the spot (his body joining those of the less fortunate of those unable to pay their taxes and tribute).
It was not the tax paying or the criminal parts of the Maestro's court sessions that Aster found interesting, but rather, the third part, in which the Maestro deigned to here 'disputes between citizens'. These were disagreements – sometimes criminal in nature, sometimes not – between people in Dystopia other than the Maestro and his officials. They varied in nature, and listening to them taught Aster a great deal about how people sometimes came into social conflict. There were so many things people could disagree about, ranging from who might own an unmarked cow, to where a fence should be located, to criminal things like theft and murder.

There were not that many 'disputes between citizens' which Aster found odd. It had been her experience that disagreements were frequent among people. She often disagreed with Thumb, the men who had worked for her father often disagreed about any number of things, as did the guards in the palace, and the various women who served the Maestro. Eventually, however, it became clear to Aster as to why not very many private disputes were brought before the Maestro to settle. His 'justice' was not justice in any rational sense, but, rather, was either bought, or a popularity contest. If two women were in a dispute over who owned a grape vine on the border of their yards, the Maestro would inevitably find in favor of the prettier one. If two men were in dispute, the Maestro would always find in favor of whoever bribed him the most, or had the greater social status. Which generally were one and the same, anyways. From what Aster heard in rumors, most people, who felt they would not get justice from the Maestro, tried to settle their disputes amongst themselves in various ways, ranging from choosing someone else other than the Maestro to arbitrate for them, to fighting a duel in the streets. The Maestro did not seem to care about this, as he felt that settling disputes for 'the rabble' was a waste of his time anyways, and did not seem to understand that when people sought justice from sources other than himself, it cost him the respect that he craved.

All in all, although the 'court' sessions reminded her of something a King from one of her old fairytale books would do with his subjects, the fashion in which the Maestro chose to carry them out did not seem very 'Kingly'. It reminded her more of the way she had seen Thumb sometimes play with dolls, back when Thumb had been 4 or 5, spanking and throwing around the dolls that weren't quite as pretty, and putting the nicer looking ones in a toy cradle.

Aster knew that the Maestro had built Dystopia, right after the War, a long time ago. But it seemed as if he thought that once he had built the town, and let people move in and around it, that there was nothing further to do, and he could sit back and do nothing, or even wreck things, and the town and everything in it would go on just fine. But that didn't seem right to her at all. She knew that people long ago had built the Zoo, but once they built it and filled it with animals, they couldn't just sit back and do nothing. Even before the war, when there had been more machines, she knew that there had been many people who had to work-work-work all day long at the zoo, feeding and cleaning the animals, and making sure the visitors didn't cause trouble. They had to do it, to keep things at the Zoo running. If they had just sat around doing nothing, or having a party with the money the visitors paid, things would have fallen apart, everything would have gotten all dirty, and the animals would have died of illness or starvation.

It was the basic concept of entropy, but Aster was not familiar with that word. It simply seemed to her, that the Maestro wanted to rule Dystopia, but he didn't want to manage it. He merely wanted to boss it around. To play with it.

The times in which Aster was required to act as a decoration during the Maestro's 'court' sessions were interesting not only in that they gave her an opportunity to learn about the social interactions and disputes of most people (something Aster had difficulty understanding) but perhaps more importantly, gave her an opportunity to observe the Maestro himself. If you knew a lot about how the human body functioned, you could learn a lot about someone just by watching them. And after having been educated by her father for years, to take over the Bronx Zoo someday, Aster knew a lot about how animal bodies worked. Which was not very different from how human bodies worked. There were still gaps in her knowledge, but not many, and some of them were getting filled in by the books she 'borrowed' from Doctor Llewellyn's office.

It would not do, Aster knew, to let the Maestro suspect that she was watching him. So she never looked at him directly. It was a technique she had learned from hunting animals on the Outside, to supplement her family's food supply. Animals were not all that smart, and if you didn't look directly at them, would assume that you weren't interested in them at all. Stalking rabbits, Aster could get a lot closer to them by looking at them out of the side of her eyes, using her peripheral vision, and walking towards them diagonally, to the left or the right of the rabbit, rather than straight for it.

She now used the same technique of indirect observation with the Maestro, sitting on his lap, or on the dais in front of his throne, and directing a deliberately vacant gaze towards whoever was currently standing before him, or at one of the other women, or at one of the numerous lights or statues that decorated the room. Meanwhile, she would look at the green monster out of the corner of one eye, or in a brief direct gaze when she turned her head in a lethargic manner from one person or decoration to another.

There was a lot to see. For instance, the Maestro breathed regularly. That meant he probably required oxygen. It was impossible to tell how much, or how often. Some animals that breathed air, like turtles, could remain underwater for up to eight hours before drowning. Still, the fact that the Maestro did need to breath implied that he could potentially be suffocated, drowned, or affected by poison gas.

Equally informative was the fact that Aster could occasionally see a pulse in the blood vessels in the Maestro's wrist, as well as hear his heart beat in his chest on one horrid occasion when he made her straddle him right at his crotch and she was afraid that he would decide rape her again. The rape never happened, but when the Maestro finally tired of her and allowed her to leave, she leaned against the wall around one corner of the hallway, pressing her cheek to the cool marble, shaking with fear and relief for nearly an hour. It took all of her willpower then, not to immediately request a refill of her bottle of codeine from Doctor Llewellyn and actually take some of it for real this time.

No codeine. She could imagine the taste of it in her mouth, and the warm muzzy feeling and happy dreams she would have, even while still awake. But she had to think. The heartbeat along with the fact that he breathed meant that the Maestro's body was not that different from anyone else's, on the basic metabolic level. His cells needed oxygen. And fuel, as evidenced by the fact that the Maestro ate. In fact, he ate more than about 20 other people put together. The Maestro might have gained his incredible strength from radiation, perhaps was even partly fueled by radiation (there was no way for Aster to tell if that was the case or not) but at least some aspects of his metabolism required the same combustion of food calories as almost every other organism on the planet. Potentially, he could be starved to death. Or poisoned.

The problem was, of course, summed up in the word 'Potentially'. Potentially, the Maestro could (maybe) be killed by suffocation, starvation, or poison. But the problem was the same as in a story Aster had read about mice who proposed belling a cat. In theory, the cat could have a bell put on it, and it would be very useful (to the mice) if it did have a bell on it. But in practice, the cat was so dangerous to the mice, that no mouse could ever get a bell onto it. Likewise, there was nobody alive who could suffocate or starve the Maestro. Poison was, perhaps, a better possibility, but there was no way for Aster to know which poisons, if any, would be effective, and at what dosage.

There were a few other weaknesses that Aster noticed. Or perhaps, they would be better termed as limitations, areas where his abilities were no greater than an ordinary human beings. Mainly these were in the areas of senses. The Maestro couldn't see in the dark, the few times Aster saw him enter a dark area he either turned on a light before entering, or carried one. His hearing was, perhaps, only slightly better than normal. He was as sensitive to loud noises as other people, as Aster noticed him wince and cup his ears a few times when a loud note was played by one of the musicians who often played in the palace. He also couldn't fly, though being able to jump what seemed like a mile through the air was a pretty good substitute. Though not a perfect one. Birds could change direction in midflight. The Maestro could not. But since there was nobody around who could fly, all the old heroes having been either killed in the war, or by the Maestro, that fact was of little use, either.

There was a final possibility, perhaps about equal to the idea of poisoning the Maestro, that Aster came up with. The Maestro had long seen fit to humiliate her by forcing her to empty his chamber pot, and after reading a book about the human digestive system, it occurred to her that the fact that the Maestro's wastes smelled pretty much the same as everyone else meant that he had the same symbiotic bacteria living in his intestines, and helping to digest his food. It was believed that the Maestro could not get sick, and that his immune system was so powerful that it killed any microbe that dared invade him, but that couldn't be completely true. The bacteria in his guts obviously survived just fine. Where one sort of bacteria could survive, perhaps others could. Perhaps the Maestro could be infected with diseases, but his body just healed any damage caused by the disease so quickly, that neither he nor anyone else realized that he ever even had a sickness. Was there some sort of really bad disease, somewhere, that could hurt his body faster than it could heal? Aster didn't know.

Utterly frustrating to her, of course, was the knowledge that the Maestro could, when he wanted, change back into an ordinary human being. Which Aster was certain he never did where anyone could see him and take advantage of the fact to kill him. She had no idea HOW he changed back. Probably some sort of hormone or other chemical in the body, but she had no idea what. She had no idea how to even begin to find out, and even if she had been able to find out, lacked both the knowledge and the means to be able to synthesize whatever substance was responsible in hopes of somehow getting the Maestro to breath it in or drink it. Maybe Michael Morbius, the author of that tremendously complicated book 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' could have somehow found out and duplicated whatever hormone or chemical or whatever it was in the Maestro's body that turned him back to an ordinary person. But Aster, despite brilliant intelligence and one of the best educations to be had in the Post-War world, was nowhere near the post-doctorate and prize winning level of a brilliant pre-war scientist. She was just a scared, small for her age teenage girl, trying to find out by herself what all of the scientists who lived before the war had not been able to find out.

It wasn't fair. One day after being particularly frustrated, Aster went to the Hall of Fallen Heroes to glare at the remains. They had all had every advantage there was. They had been smart, had super-powers, had colleges where they learned all sorts of brilliant things, had computers and X-rays and who knew what else, and been able to work without having to worry about being raped or killed. And none of them had been able to find a way to kill the Maestro. So what hope did she have? She wasn't a Hero. She was just a stupid little girl, just like that horrible Daniel Wolfkiller said. A stupid girl who had gotten herself trapped in a horrible place. Wolfkiller was right. There was no way to kill the Maestro. He had no weaknesses. Or at least not any that could be used by regular people against him. Maybe if any of the heroes had still been alive, they could have somehow used the few tiny weaknesses Aster had seen. But they were all dead, despite all their smartness and super powers and computers and stuff.

It was depressing. It made her want the codeine again. To just go away and live in a dream until she died. Except she didn't want that, either. If she went to get the codeine, the way she felt, she'd probably drink the whole bottle, and then she would die.

It would have been little comfort to Aster to know that her breaking of her addiction to codeine, and subsequent observations of the Maestro had not gone entirely un-noticed, and had, in fact, been admired. The stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller, who had used hatred and pride to goad her into her current course of action, at first thought that he had failed, when he saw Aster going up to the hospital a few days later, to get her bottle of narcotics refilled. He had a violent argument with Doctor Llewellyn on the evening of the same day, about his refusing to provide the girl with any more codeine, but with no better results than his first attempt to get the physician to cut her off. And he did have a point. An addict wouldn't and couldn't stop their addiction unless they wanted to stop. There were plenty of drugs to be had in the Maestro's palace. If Aster wanted them, she would find a way to get them.

Some time later, however, when the stablemaster was required by the Maestro to attend his 'court' in order to act as an 'expert witness' in a case involving a man who claimed to have been kicked in the shoulder by a peddler's horse, he realized that he had not failed, after all. Aster, along with several other women in scanty outfits, was sitting on the floor near the Maestro's feet, staring out a window with a blank expression on her face. Or, so it seemed. Only someone who had hunted, like Wolfkiller often did, would have noticed that Aster always pointed her vacant, apparently drugged gaze, in a direction just so, at just the right angle that the Maestro was about 45 degrees from the center of her gaze, where seeing things with the peripheral vision was not too difficult. And that every so often, her eyes would flick straight towards the huge, green monstrosity, getting a good look at him straight on, before she turned her head to look at a chandelier, or the lace on someone's sleeve.

Stoned, my ass. Wolfkiller thought. That girl is not stoned, on codeine, or anything like it. I don't know what she's doing with the stuff Llewellyn is giving her, using it as a hair rinse or feeding it to her stuffed toy tiger, but she sure as hell isn't drinking it any more. Because what she's doing isn't being stoned. It's hunting.

The stablemaster found a pretext to attend the Maestro's farcical, and often lethal, court sessions a few more times. He pretended interest in the criminal cases and disputes between civilians, but his real interest was Aster. And her behavior was always the same. Always watching her prey without letting the prey know it was being watched. Always hunting. Only someone else who had hunted, like Wolfkiller, would have known another hunter. It was lucky for Aster, he reflected, that the Maestro didn't hunt. Probably couldn't hunt, large as he was, and most likely didn't need to. The green brute was strong and fast enough to smash anything or anyone he wanted to, without needing to sneak up on them.

Unless, of course, he couldn't find them, or see them. That needed hunting skills. Obviously, he couldn't see Aster. He couldn't see her real value before, and he couldn't see what Aster was doing now, watching him from the edge of her slack face.

But what could Aster see? That was the real question. He had manipulated her into watching the Maestro, and trying to find a weakness. But were there any to find? That was the question.

Well, no, actually, the stablemaster was forced to admit to himself. It was actually only part of the question. Even if the Maestro did have weaknesses, it was by no means certain that Aster could find them, especially with the limited means of observation at her disposal. And then there was the last question, the one that kept bothering Wolfkiller.

Even if he does have a weakness, and even if the girl by some miracle finds it, just what makes you think she'll tell you? Wolfkiller was forced to ask himself. Why should she tell you, when she hates you?

Like many of the questions that Aster had asked herself, it was something to which Wolfkiller had no answer.