Chapter 12. The Ship 'FANTASII'
When Aster was 15, and had been living in the Maestro's palace as his slave and an sometime sex-toy for some of his favored guards (the latter of which never stopped causing her pain due to her internal scarring), something rather unusual happened one day, when the Maestro was holding one of his monthly 'court' sessions.
Or perhaps not unusual, but at least different enough from the norm that Aster remembered the incident for the rest of her life. The Maestro had just finished collecting taxes and tribute from several people, and had snapped the neck of an unfortunate man who failed to provide him with a sufficient number of barrels of apple beer, because the trees had not produced well. The man gave an explanation that Aster found fairly interesting, about how there was a shortage of honey bees, and he had been unable to obtain a sufficient number of hives of bees to pollinate the blossoms on the trees that spring. The Maestro did not seem to even bother to listen to what the man had to say, and grew visibly irritated when the man began complaining that much of the reason that there was a bee shortage had to do with the Maestro's gluttonous demands for large amounts of honey, leaving the beekeepers with insufficient honey to keep all of their bees from starving over the winter. When the unfortunate orchard owner began reciting from a piece of paper where he had written down a long list of facts and figures regarding how many bees it took to pollinate an acre of apple trees, and how many pints of honey said number of bees required to survive over the winter, boredom joined the irritation on the Maestro's face.
The orchard owner might have known a lot about apples and bees, but Aster saw that when it came to the Maestro, he was a great fool. It was foolish to try to reason with the monster. It was foolish to even show off to too great a degree that you were capable of reason. The Maestro wanted obedience, and results. Not intelligence. If the man had been wise, he wouldn't have even tried to give any reasons for his failure to produce sufficient apple beer, and merely begged for mercy and promised twice as much apple beer the following year. As it was, after listening to the facts and figures regarding bees and apples for barely fifteen seconds, the Maestro reached out one terrible, muscled hand, and with a swift motion, twisted the man's head quickly, snapping his neck. Aster was horrified, but not shocked. There was always at least one death at every court session. If not of someone who failed to pay sufficient taxes and tribute, then of someone who was found guilty of 'crimes' against the Maestro or his officials.
The main thing Aster wondered about, looking at the limp body of the orchard owner on the ground, was exactly how the Maestro thought he was going to get any apple beer at all, now that the man was dead. Aster recalled a book she had coverless book she had found in a trash can in the Maestro's palace a few months back. There had been a phrase in it, that she felt described the Maestro quite well.
All he wants is production. Without people who are able to produce. What makes him think it's possible?
It was interesting, reading the book, and gave Aster an idea about how intricate, and interconnect, the industrial base and economy of the pre-War world had been. You needed steel and coal to run railroads, but you also needed railroads to ship the steel and coal. And you needed farmers to grow food for all the miners and railroad people, but the farmers needed metal for their tools and railroads to ship the food they grew. It was hard to tell where it started and ended. How did such a complex system even get made in the first place. Probably from the bottom up, with a lot of hand labor and horse carts, before you could have enough steel and coal for the first trains. It was almost like what she knew about ecology and evolution and the food chain. You had to have bacteria at the bottom, and they got eaten by tiny fish and insects, or nourished plants, which fed larger animals, and other larger animals after that. Then when the animals died, their bodies rotted, the worm had it's due, as her father would have put it, and it went back to bacteria again. Break either the system of economics or the system of ecology too badly, and it would be very hard to put it back together again.
Come to think of it, the words were similar, they started with 'eco'. Maybe that meant something. And both systems were badly broken in Dystopia. The old industries were nearly gone, except for a few still-working machines in the Maestro's palace, and most people simply scavenged what they could, but didn't really make much. The same thing with the plants and animals. They were gradually dying, year by year. What the war hadn't killed, the Maestro was busy finishing off with his gluttonous appetites and mindless, dysgenic policies.
How did you fix an ecology or an economy? Aster didn't know. The book suggested that once an economy was broken, everything went back to horse farming for a long time. Which was much what was going on in the Outside of Dystopia. And what happened to an ecology? Maybe nothing survived but bacteria and bugs for a long time.
It was a good book, and Aster had hidden it below the bottom drawer of her dresser in the women's quarters. Or partly a good book, anyways. It had a lot of good ideas for dealing with deliberately obstructive and hateful people, including a man, who had designed horrible weapons, much like the Maestro once had, and ended up by being killed by his own weapon. However, the book did not seem to make many accommodations for people who were genuinely weak or sick, or for much human kindness. Well, no book was perfect. At least she could understand the book, which was called Atlas Shrugged, as it was written in at least somewhat comprehensible language, rather than inscrutable acadamese like the wretched Fundamentals of Biochemistry. And it was interesting reading about the trains and steel mills and other things that people before the War had had. Too bad she didn't have a train to run the Maestro down with. Or a sound ray weapon like the one in the book that had killed it's own wretched inventor to blow him up with. Or maybe the sound rays had disintegrated things. It wasn't quite clear to Aster from the way the book described the sound ray weapon exactly how it had worked, but one was probably as bad as the other. Or as good as the other, if it were the Maestro getting blown up or disintegrated.
Despite the fact that the death of the orchard owner, and his fruitless explanation of his problems had reminded Aster very much of what was written in her secret book, it was not the Maestro's casual execution of him that caught Aster's attention during that particular court session. Rather, it was something that happened later, right at the very end of the court session, after the criminal trials and the settling of 'disputes between civilians'.Generally, after all that was settled, the Maestro would ask if anyone had any 'requests' of him, or 'concerns they wished to speak about. In the time Aster had been in the palace, a little over a year, nobody had ever dared approach the Maestro with any 'requests' or 'concerns'. Aster did not think that anybody ever would. It would take an unusually foolish, or unusually brave man to dare do so.
But today, much to Aster's astonishment, there was such a brave, or foolish man. When the Maestro asked if anyone had any requests or concerns they wished to speak to him about, a deep, gravelly voice said: "I have one request, my Lord."
If Aster was astonished that anyone would dare make a request of the Maestro, she was even more astonished by who made the request. It was one of the people she hated most in the world, and had thought a pig and a coward. The stablemaster, Daniel Wolfkiller.
Now, what in the fuck does HE want? Aster wondered as the Maestro waved one large green hand to indicate that the unkempt man should approach him. A private room in his stables to keep a couple of women in? Or a bigger liquor ration?
Those seemed the sorts of selfish, piggish things that Aster thought, based on her opinion of the man, that Wolfkiller would ask for. But if Aster had been surprised that anyone dare make a request of the Maestro, and amazed that Daniel Wolfkiller, of all people, had the balls to do so, she was completely dumbfounded by what he asked for, which was not for women, drink, or money, or any of the self-indulgent things she would have thought he would want to get.
Rather, Wolfkiller began telling the Maestro that the remaining tiger, which had been neglected in it's cage for over a year now, was in poor condition due to starvation and disease, had become feral, and given those facts, and the absence of the other tiger, was really of no further use to anyone, and was merely eating up meat to no good purpose. Wolfkiller asked the Maestro for permission to 'dispose' of the animal, and to relocate it's cage to a better area, where it could be used for his Wardogs.
The Maestro looked slightly surprised at the request, as if he hadn't really thought about the remaining tiger in a long time. To her guilt, Aster realized it had been a long time, over a year, since she had thought about the tiger, as well. She remembered how dirty, and sick, and weak it had been in it's cage. It's poor eyes all miserable and lonely and full of pain. And the poor thing was still alive. How could that be? Surely it would have starved by now, with no-one taking care of it…
Wolfkiller was taking care of it. She realized. Not well, probably the Maestro wasn't giving him any more food for the tiger once he got tired of using it as a toy, and there probably wasn't much he could do about it being sick, and lonely, and cramped in that little cage, but he must have been feeding it, somehow, all this time.
The Maestro, after his initial slight surprise at being reminded of the existence of the tiger he had nearly forgotten about, nodded his head, giving Wolfkiller permission to 'dispose' of it. Aster felt small and bad, and slumped down on the step of the dais where she was sitting. She had thought Daniel Wolfkiller to be a horrible, hateful, pig of a man, given to nothing but drinking and sex and making hateful comments to her, but he had been taking care of the tiger all this time when it's sufferings had completely slipped Aster's mind, and she had been selfishly concerned only with her own miseries. She was no better than the Maestro himself, maybe, to forget and not even care about the poor tiger for over a year. It was the last thing left in the palace, other than herself and the stuffed toy tiger, Tony, that had come from her home, from the Bronx Zoo. And she had forgotten all about it.
Having been given the Maestro's permission to get rid of the nearly forgotten tiger, Wolfkiller left the throne room, unslinging the rifle he wore over his shoulder as he did so.
The usual chatter in the throne room had actually been silenced by shock, at the audacity of someone daring to ask any sort of request of the Maestro, but it restarted hesitantly, as if to cover up the discomfort of the people present. Aster barely heard the chatter, she tuned it out, listening hard for something else. Something that came, in less than ten minutes.
A single shot.
Somewhere in Aster's head, warm metal gears, turned to ice.
Why'd he do it? Aster wondered, still wanting to believe that the filthy man was all bad. She would have done it herself, to end the tiger's obvious misery, if only she had remembered how it was suffering, and if only she had been allowed to leave the palace, or to own a rifle. But she was just a stupid helpless girl who was stuck here and couldn't even help herself. Of course, it could be, that Wolfkiller hated the tiger, because he was afraid of it, and it had clawed his arm once. That he hated it and liked it's suffering, but then why feed it at all, or put it out of it's misery. Just for the cage? There were plenty of cages to be had around the Maestro's palace. Aster had been brought there in one. She felt cold and miserable at the same time. She felt like she wasn't a real person. Real people were happy, and didn't have horrible things done to them, and didn't forget for over a whole year about poor animals who couldn't even help themselves suffering and dying in cages.
Wondering about Wolfkiller's motivation in killing the tiger joined many of the other mysteries that Aster had to think about, during her free time. She actually had more of it than most of the other women, the 'Betty's' who, for God only knew what reason, seemed to be concerned with 'Pleasing the Maestro' and would volunteer for extra duties when they didn't have to. Occassionally, worried that not volunteering for extra duties might somehow attract attention to herself, Aster would do so as well, but was somewhat particular in the sort of duties she volunteered for. She would never volunteer to participate in any of the frequent orgies that occurred, and could not help but wonder at the sanity of the women who did volunteer to attend them. Perhaps they thought they would be rewarded or freed if they 'pleased the Maestro' enough, but from what Aster could see, that was a fool's hope. The Maestro only let women go when he tired of them, usually after they lost their looks. Often, they died from his 'attentions' long before that happened. Sometimes they simply vanished, and Aster didn't dare to ask what had happened to them.
The problem with participating in the orgies was not merely the risk of being used by the Maestro, and subsequently ending up in the hospital (or dead), but the fact that the events were, quite frankly, obscene. Sometimes Aster wondered about that concept. People thought of things that were 'obscene' as being 'dirty', but it seemed to Aster, that that was merely part of the truth. Dirt was dirty, as were sick people, or chamber pots (such as the Maestro's that she had to empty), but they weren't obscene. Neither was it simply all the sex that was the problem. Animals mating in the zoo, or collecting their sperm for artificial insemination had never really bothered her.
The whole concept of obscenity was, perhaps, a lesser form of sacrilege. An act of pointless vandals. Taking something that was, or normally ought to have been clean and healthy, and making it sick and dirty. Which is what the orgies were, as was, now that she thought about it, what had happened to the once magnificent tiger she and her father had trained, left to rot and starve and die alone in a cage, until Wolfkiller finally put a stop to it. It was the Maestro who had destroyed the tiger. He enjoyed destroying everything. Probably he thought the orgies were funny, watching people actually volunteer to do something obscene, to destroy themselves, in front of him.
Come to think of it, Aster had never actually seen Daniel Wolfkiller at any of the orgies. Which, once she realized it, actually surprised her. Participating in an orgy seemed like the sort of thing she would have expected the grubby stablemaster to do, so she had merely assumed for the past year or so that he was doing so. Yet she had never actually seen him at one, despite bringing in wine and grapes from the kitchen as refreshments for the participants. It was actually surprising to her that he would not be there. But then, it had been surprising to her that he had actually been brave enough to make a request of the Maestro, let alone the one that he had.
Aster counted herself lucky that the Maestro had never forced her to participate in one of the orgies she found so disgusting, and rather than attract attention by not volunteering for anything, generally would offer to help in the kitchen, serving food, or washing dishes. It gave her a chance to steal the spices, sherry, and other things she used to create a fake 'codeine' solution in her bottle, and she also got to eat a lot of table scraps, which weren't too bad if you cut off the part that had been chewed on.
And she needed the food. Lately, she had been ravenous most of the time. After a lifetime of being short for her age, she was actually starting to grow. Her breasts filled out, and the sheer green brassiere she wore under her dress no longer looked like a ludicrous empty sack. Aster's father had been tall, and she couldn't remember her mother very well, but some of her old dresses and other clothing that her father had kept had been large enough that her father likely could have worn them. So, if both her parents had been tall, perhaps she would someday be tall a well. If she lived that long. Not that there weren't advantages to being small. Aster sometimes still remembered that insomniac night, when she had first stopped taking the codeine, and had seen the Maestro in a human form, through a vent. The shelf stacked with crates that she had been hiding behind had actually been very close to the wall, and only someone as small as Aster had been back then could have squeezed behind it, to see what she saw.
About a month after Daniel Wolfkiller granted a final mercy to the sick tiger he had helped train, the Maestro got, from someplace or the other, some new thought in his head about a new toy that he wanted. Apparently some scavengers who worked for him, bringing back gold and gems and still functional pieces of pre-War machinery, had located something called the 'Goodyear Blimp' in a warehouse some distance from Dystopia. The warehouse had been fairly intact, only the windows broken, and the 'Goodyear Blimp' was apparently in fairly good condition. After they described what they had found to the Maestro, he immediately ordered several truck drivers and operators of other machines that Aster had never seen before to go to the warehouse and bring the 'Goodyear Blimp' back to his palace.
The Maestro was very excited about the find, and wouldn't stop talking about it to anyone who would listen (which was pretty much everyone, as nobody would dare to not to him). He even spoke to Aster about it, one day while she was sitting below his throne.
"I'm going to have the blimp dyed green, Betty." He said to Aster. He no longer called her Aster or 'Little Zookeeper' and Aster often wondered if he even remembered why he had brought her here in the first place, for reading too many books. But then, if he had forgotten, he wouldn't have kept humiliating her by forcing her to be the only one required to empty his chamber pot every time he used it.
"What will you do with it? What does a blimp do, anyways?" Aster asked him, despite the fact that she had read all about blimps in old books. But pretending to be stupid was safer. And it was a safe question. The Maestro liked to hear himself talk, and brag.
"Like I said, first I'll dye it green. And have it mended and repaired. Then once it's working, I can fly around on it, above the city and the ocean. Perhaps even to Iceland, who knows. I'll have to rename it, though. 'The Goodyear Blimp' is a stupid name. There are no more Goodyear tires. I think I'll call it 'The Green Fantasy'."
The Maestro went on at some length, describing his plans to put a dock for 'The Green Fantasy' on the highest story of his palace, and perhaps to even fly it to Iceland and conquer the place, as their 'political radio broadcasts' annoyed him, and the 'rabble needed to learn their place'.
"Perhaps I'll even let you ride with me, little zookeeper" said the Maestro after his long monologue that Aster had mostly ignored, showing that he had not at all forgotten where she had come from. "You can ride above the city and look down at it. Maybe we'll even fly above your zoo, and you can wave down at your father. Would you like that?"
Aster nodded, forcing back tears. She had tried not to think about her father, and the zoo, and had mostly succeeded. She didn't know if her father even knew she was still alive, or thought about her at all. Maybe it would be better if her father thought that she was dead, like the tiger Wolfkiller had shot.
The Maestro then went on again about all the places he wanted to visit in the blimp. Aster forced herself to look impressed, and nodded at the right places. But privately, she thought that the Maestro was acting like a little boy, about to get a new toy. Just like the tigers. Thinking of how that had ended up, she wondered how long it would take the Maestro to tire of 'The Goodyear Blimp', once he got it. Or what would happen if he didn't get it, or were somehow disappointed with it. She sure as hell wouldn't want to be around if that happened.
The latter thought turned out, weeks later, to be downright prophetic. Getting the pre-War blimp out of the warehouse where it had been stored, and back to the Maestro's palace, took only a few days, and several trips with trucks, and cranes, and other such machines. Repairing it, once it was back at the palace, was a far more difficult and lengthy process. Dying it bright green, to please the Maestro, was easy enough. Green dye was manufactured in the palace, and there were countless barrels of the stuff. But dying it didn't fix the more serious problems of the inevitable decay to a century old airship. There were holes in the fabric of the blimp, and parts of it had to be patched or replaced. And it wasn't any old sort of fabric, either, it was some fantastic pre-war stuff with 'kevlar fibers' and who knew what else. Metal valves and other parts had to be replaced from smaller hot-air balloons, or custom made on metal lathes in the Maestro's palace.
Then there were more serious problems. Apparently the blimp had, in the past, been filled with helium, which in the post—War world was simply over the rainbow. There was no helium to be gotten. Not even when the Maestro, in the middle of an argument (or rather a once sided screaming fit on his part and apologetic groveling on the part of everyone else) with the men repairing the blimp, seized one of them and squeezed his head so hard that he gasped and began kicking. The Maestro released him, still alive, but with a fractured jaw, much to everyone's surprise and relief. The man staggered off to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital.
But there was still no helium to be gotten. There was talk of somehow converting the blimp to use hot air to levitate, but when the cold facts were presented, that hot air would simply not provide enough lift to support the Maestro's weight, that notion was dropped. The blimp was filled with hydrogen, gotten by electrolysis of water. Smoking, lanterns, candles, or open flames or sparks of any sort were forbidden within 500 feet of the blimp on penalty of immediate execution. When serving the men who were fixing the blimp at meals, Aster heard them occasionally whispering about something called a 'Hindenberg'. They never whispered it when the Maestro was anywhere near them, however, and Aster was afraid to ask what the 'Hindenberg' was. It must have been something truly terrible, if the men were afraid to talk about it in front of the Maestro.
Even the hydrogen, though apparently it actually provided more lift than helium would have, was simply not sufficient to deal with certain realities. The blimp had been designed to carry ordinary human beings, who even if very overweight, seldom weighed more than 300 lbs. And a heavy person on one side of the blimp's cabin could be balanced by other people, on the opposite side. However, the Maestro was 10 feet tall, and weighed over 1000 lbs. The entire cabin of the blimp had to be rebuilt, to accommodate his height. It was far more difficult to accommodate his weight. The Goodyear blimp had been built for no more than 6 passengers, plus the crew. The Maestro weighed as much as 6 ordinary people, and the few crew members who could get on with him, and still not go above the airship's weight capacity, could not counterbalance 1000 lbs of green tyrant. If he moved to the front, back, or sides of the blimp, the airship would tilt dangerously. There was thought of eliminating the water used as ballast, to gain more lift, but that was far too dangerous as well. All the Maestro could do was sit in the exact center of the cabin, the few times he went up in new floating toy, and look at the skyline, as approaching any window to look down at his palace or the city of Dystopia caused the ship to tilt downwards towards wherever he stood.
The Maestro grew frustrated with this problem caused by his weight, and blamed the obviously terrified men who had used old books they found to train themselves to pilot it.
All you have to do is change back, to human. Aster thought, when she saw a particularly sour expression on the Maestro's face one day, while he was gazing out a window, upwards at the bright green blimp. Change back, and you can ride on the blimp with no problems. And I can kill you with no problems.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that almost every one of the humans he terrorized, would kill him in an instant, if he ever once turned back into his weak, human form in front of him, and that they would stop at nothing to find a way to force him to change back, if they knew the possibility existed, that prevented the Maestro from doing so. Probably mobs of them would be working night and day to try and decipher 'Fundamentals of Biochemistry' and every other book that might tell them what sort of hormone or chemical or whatever could be used to force the Maestro to return to a human form. No, Aster thought, thinking that the Maestro would not even take off his clothes when he had sex, the tyrant would never display an hint of vulnerability in front of anyone else. Ever. Even though it cost him the ability to ride on his latest toy. And though neither Aster nor the Maestro knew it, it would eventually cost him a great deal more than a mere ride on a rebuilt Pre-War novelty airship.
Riding around in the exact center of the blimp grew boring for the Maestro after five or six times. He then decided on a new project. Dystopia had been built partly on the remains of the old city of New York, which was on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. The ocean in the area was polluted and radioactive of course, and the few fish that existed, dangerous to eat, but that was irrelevant to the Maestro's latest thought. Having found that he could not ride one sort of ship, he determined to ride another. He got together the mechanics and engineers who had rebuilt the Goodyear Blimp for him, and set them to work repairing an old cruise ship, and restructuring it to accommodate his height. His weight was not a problem. Large ocean going cruise ships were built to carry tens of thousands of tons.
The ship was repainted bright green, and renamed 'The Green Fantasy', just like the blimp had been. The green airship, that had so disappointed the Maestro was renamed, it was now just called 'FANTASII' in capital letters. Aster wasn't sure if that was meant to be a plural of the word 'Fantasy' or if the last two letters 'II' were meant to be the Roman numeral '2'. Either way, it didn't really make much sense to her, as the blimp had come first, so it should have been the ocean liner that was given the plural or numerically higher designation. But in the Maestro's universe, the things most important to him always came first, regardless of the logic of doing so. Certainly neither Aster nor anyone else was going to risk starting an argument with him about a rather minor grammatical point. Hell, nobody would even risk starting an argument with him about rape and murder.
Work on the ocean going 'Green Fantasy' proceeded apace. The mechanics and engineers who worked for the Maestro seemed determined to redeem themselves from his disappointment in the blimp, despite the fact that it was hardly their fault that the Ship Fantasii could not be made to accommodate his half-ton weight.
Aster still watched the Maestro, but learned little that was new. Yet she did not give up. Hunting required patience.