Chapter 13. Lusus Naturae
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead -
There were no birds to fly. – Lewis Carroll
The work on repairing and refurbishing the cruise ship was done shortly before Aster turned 16, and she and all the other women were invited by the Maestro to travel on the ship with him, up and down several miles of coastline, so he could survey from sea, all that he owned on the land. All of his female slaves were forced to go with him, to act as decorations and toys. Aster was actually a bit excited, she had never been on a boat before (unless you counted a toy raft made out of boards she had once made as a child to float around on in a small pond at the zoo). Once the ship, The Green Fantasy, had gotten several hundred yards away from the land, Aster scampered up and down the deck excitedly, amazed at how far you could see to the horizon. The Maestro and his followers were all on the left side of the boat, near the spot where they had first boarded, so she went around the front, to the left side, putting the large cabin between herself and everyone else, so she could look at the ocean in peace. There was so much water! Miles of it! And who knew how deep! Miles deep too, probably! The waves were also interesting, she liked looking at their shapes, and the foam on them. Her old fairy tale books had said that mermaids turned into foam when they died.
Except there were no mermaids, of course. Aster looked down into the water, which was amazingly clear, trying to see if she could see any fish, since they looked something like mermaids. But there weren't any fish, either. After looking at the lifeless water for over an hour, listening to one wave after another splashing against the side of the huge boat, she started to get bored. There weren't any other ocean noises, just the thrum of the Green Fantasy's engine, and the chatter of people talking in a crowd at one end of the boat. Aster decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to stand out, by being off by herself, and decided to go back to the front of the boat where everyone else was. Besides, she was getting hot and sunburned as well. The sun seemed brighter and hotter on the ocean, than on land. Maybe because there were no trees for shade. There weren't even any clouds up in the sky that day. And after having been confined to the Maestro's palace for nearly two years, where the only sunlight was the occasional patch through a window, her skin had gotten pretty pale.
She was thirsty, too. Aster didn't know you could get so thirsty, when surrounded by so much water. But you couldn't drink ocean water, it was too salty. Maybe it was the temptation of the sight of water that you couldn't drink, along with the heat and salt in the air that made her so thirsty. It was a craving that actually seemed more intense than any she had ever felt for codeine, even when she had first stopped taking it. But then, unlike codeine, water was something you actually needed to survive, so it probably made sense that people would crave it so badly when they got thirsty enough.
As Aster made her was around the rest of the deck, to rejoin the crowd and find something to drink, she saw to her surprise that the Maestro brought his green blimp, the Fantasii, along as well, tethered to the rear of the cruise ship by a steel cable. The enormous ocean vessel, which seemed nearly as big as the Maestro's palace, pulled along the relatively trivial weight of the airship with no difficulty whatsoever. Aster wondered exactly why the Maestro had brought the blimp along, but soon had her question answered. When they were well out at sea, the Maestro took the steel cable that tethered the blimp to the rear of the boat, and using his incredible strength, pulled it in as easily as if it had been a child's toy balloon, such as in pictures Aster had seen in old books.
He waved invitingly to the female slaves he had brought. "Any of you want to take a ride on the blimp?" He offered, as he got the huge airship lowered to within a few inches of the deck of the ocean cruiser.
The Bettys begain chattering excited. They had never been allowed onto the Fantasii before. Only the Maestro and the blimp crew had ever been on it. Being able to actually fly was a rare treat, capping off the unusual holiday that they had just by being allowed to go with the Maestro on the ocean cruise. Aster held back and let the others get on. She was afraid of heights. And she didn't trust the Maestro. Or the blimp. Living as a slave in the Maestro's palace had made her wary of being trapped. It was why she always kept in mind which was the nearest unlocked door through which she could hide from Paul Rasse and his rapist buddies whenever she ventured out of the women's quarters. It was important to always have an escape route in mind. But what was the escape route from that blimp? Straight down a few hundred feet into the ocean? She was a good swimmer, but didn't know much about diving and doubted she could survive a fall like that.
The Maestro didn't seem to notice her not boarding the blimp. It could only hold a certain number of people, anyways, because of it's low weight capacity, and there were far more women on the cruise ship than would fit into the blimp. Fools, Aster thought, as she saw them giggling and laughing inside the blimp. Don't they know enough by now to never trust anything he does?
Aster's fears about the blimp proved well founded. Once the women had gotten in and sat down in the seats, the Maestro let the steel cable feed back out of his hands, so the blimp rose in the air, with the women inside. Then, once the blimp had risen as far as the length of the cable would allow, the Maestro waited a few moments, until the female passengers had gotten comfortable enough with being in the airship to venture out of their seats, and look out the windows. A few of them waved through the glass, at the Maestro and the other people on the boat.
Then the Maestro gave the steel cable a sudden, hard jerk! The women, who had been standing up in the blimp, were all thrown partly across the cabin, landing on the seats or against the wall on the opposite side. Aster thought she saw a gout of blood splash against the glass.
I never thought I'd be glad to be afraid of anything, Aster thought, But I'm bloody well glad just now that I'm afraid of heights, and afraid of him. If I weren't afraid of them, it would be ME up there with them.
The Maestro pulled and yanked on the steel cable of the blimp several more times, once jerking it down nearly to the surface of the ocean. It reminded Aster of how she had once played with a kite her father had made for her and Thumb. Jerking and yanking on the string and making the kite weave and dive in the air. Except the blimp was no kite. Or maybe it was, to someone as large and strong as the Maestro. A big, giant kite with his human dolls on it for him to terrify with the ride. It reminded her of some of the snotty boys who sometimes visited the zoo, and tried to scare the small animals, such as the bats, in the Mouse House, by banging on their cages. Aster would punch them in the nose when she saw them doing that. But nobody could punch the Maestro. He was too strong, and had no weaknesses, just like Wolfkiller had said.
Eventually, most of the Bettys seemed to give up trying to stand while the Maestro yanked the airship around, and from the little Aster could see, were either laying on the floor, or clinging desperately to the seats in the cabin. The Maestro yanked on the cable a few more times, then grew bored, and began pulling the blimp back down. As it got closer to the deck, Aster could hear moaning and sobbing from the unfortunate women who had been inside, and when the door was opened, she saw not only blood, but vomit as well. The terrified women staggered and crawled out, some of them cringing in terror at the Maestro's feet, others wandering in a daze, or simply lying limp in shock. One of the Betty's that had been on the blimp had a broken leg, and the Maestro ordered two of his guards to carry her off the blimp after the rest of the women had gotten off.
Once the first load of victims had finally all left (or been carried) off the airship Fantasii, Aster got worried that the Maestro might try to make some other people – such as herself – go up in the blimp so that he could play the same game with them. She was already standing in the shadows, due to her sunburn, and stealthily backed away, ducking into a convenient door that led to a dining area. It was mostly empty, just one chair was occupied by one of the Bettys. Betty 31, Aster thought. She had bright red hair in a coiled braid that was fastened to the back of her head with jeweled clips set with white gems. Aster winced at the clips. She had been made to wear them during that horrible mockery of a wedding feast with the Maestro, nearly two years earlier. She never did find out what had happened to them, sometime after her nearly lethal rape by the Maestro, and her awakening in Doctor Llewellyn's hospital, they had gone missing. She didn't really care. She hated them and hoped she would never see them again. The Maestro had forced her to grown her hair longer, and she had to wear jeweled clips in it like the other women, to keep from standing out and attracting attention, but at least they weren't those particular clips. She generally picked the red ones, not the white ones. And definitely not the green ones. She hated the color green and everything that was that color. If she could have gotten a different colored dress and worn it safely, she would have.
Betty 31 noticed her. "What's he doing with the airship?" she asked in a tremulous voice.
So this woman, at least, had been smart as Aster had, in not getting onto the blimp.
"I don't know." Aster glanced out the smeared window of the empty dining room, but couldn't see either the Maestro or the blimp from the angle she was at. "I'm not going out there to find out. And I'm not staying here, either, waiting for the door to open."
She heard more sobbing and a few shrieks from outside. Probably the women who had been on the blimp, being further terrorized by the Maestro. Or possibly other people being forced into it, so the Maestro could play the same sick game with them. Aster pointed towards a door on the far side of the dining area. "We should go through there, and find someplace to keep out of the way for a while. At least until he gets tired of what he's doing."
It wasn't necessary to explain who he was. Betty 31 nodded, and followed after Aster like a lost puppy. The door led to a kitchen area, filled with mostly silver colored counters, stoves, and sinks, and on the far end of that was a staircase going down. The sight of the sinks brought back her thirst, and she turned on a faucet slightly, so as not to make much noise, then lowered her head down and sucked the water greedily directly from the metal plumbing. Once she had satisfied her thirst, Aster turned the faucet back off, gestured to Betty 31 to follow her, went down the stairs, and found herself in a large hallway. There were doors on either side. Opening the first one, Aster saw a room full of cans and boxes. Food stocked for the voyage, obviously
"We can hide here, for a while." She told Betty 31. "Lunch was only an hour ago, so it'll be a few hours, at least, before anyone comes in here to get food to start making supper. By that time, he'll have probably gotten tired of shaking people around in that blimp, and we'll be safe."
"No, we won't be." Betty 31 said, and Aster couldn't disagree with her. "Is he always like this? Doesn't he ever get better?"
"No. He's never any better. A lot of times, he's worse." Aster said. Lying wouldn't help. "You either need to keep on his good side, or do what I do, and try to just keep quiet and out of his way, most of the time."
"I wish I'd never come here." Betty 31 sniffed, and sat down against a crate that said 'Canned Cherries'. A red stain ran down one side of it, probably one of the cans was leaking. "But the place I came from was awful, too. When we heard that this place existed, we thought we would come here. That it would be better. That the monster wouldn't be here. But it's not better here. It's worse. There are hardly even any plants or animals or anything to eat here, and he's worse than the monster was. He does horrible tricks. I just knew the blimp had to be a trick, he never would do anything nice. Not for real. That's why I hid in the dining room."
"Wait a minute…" Aster shook her head. What Betty 31 was saying sounded like ravings that you could expect from a drunk. She knew that most of the Bettys were given to drink or drugs, to deal with their life as the sex toys of the Maestro and his favored guards. Aster held her head in her hands. "I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're saying. You're saying that you don't come 'from here'? Do you mean you come from the Outside? The Wastelands?"
She knew as she said it, that that didn't entirely make sense, either. While it was true that the Maestro took a lot of the better looking young women from the Outside (or the Wastelands, as some people called them), there were far fewer plants and animals in the Outside than there were within the city limits of Dystopia. Not more. The farther one got from the shield that the Maestro used to protect people from radiation, the worse the radiation got, and the fewer plants and animals there were. It was why the farmers on the Outside had such a difficult time growing sufficient crops to feed themselves, and a nearly impossible time growing enough to satisfy the Maestro's demands for tribute, as well.
"No, not the Wastelands. There's hardly any plants there at all, you're right. Even less than in your city, Dystopia. But I came from much farther than that. My family and some of our friends came, in some kind of big, old pre-War car. A 'camper' my father called it. We came a really long way, hundreds of miles, maybe. Or maybe even a thousand. It took us a couple days to get here. We thought maybe we could live in the city, and we asked the Maestro if we could live here. But he said that if my father and all our friends wanted to live in the city, then I had to come to live in his palace with him. My father didn't like it, but what could we do? The Maestro wrecked the car-camper thing we came in, so we couldn't go back. And the Maestro could at least talk, not like the monster back home, so we thought he wouldn't be as bad. Except he was. In fact, he's worse. I wish we'd never come here at all. I'd rather get killed by the monster. At least he kills you quick, and doesn't lock you up and do awful things to you. And there was a lot more to eat. Plants and animals, and berries… all sorts of stuff."
Aster had grown up in a place of ecological catastrophe, made far worse by the Maestros gluttonous actions of eating the best breeding stock of all the animals, crop plants, and starving honey bees to death to satisfy his desire for sweets. The only places with large amounts of plants that she knew of were in the Bronx Zoo, where she had grown up, and within the grounds of the Maestro's palace. Both were maintained by vast amounts of human labor. The idea that there could be a whole, large place filled with plants and animals, without their being constantly fed and irrigated was as fantastic as notion to her as if cakes were to start falling from the sky. But perhaps Betty was exaggerating. People told tales, and telling tales was one of the chief forms of entertainment of the Maestro's slaves. So many things about the story that Betty told her were completely contrary to reality.
"How many plants, and animals?" Aster asked… she thought for a moment, then took a clipboard off the door that was used to record whenever food was put into or taken out of the storage room. A pen dangled from it, and Aster took a sheet of paper from the bottom of the clipboard and handed it to Betty 31. "Here. Forget the animals. Just draw me what all the plants look like, how many there are usually around."
Betty took the pen and began sketching. Her skills as an artist were fairly good, however the picture was flat and two dimensional. The concept of perspective in drawing had been forgotten by most people, in the years since the war. She drew stick figures of trees, closer together than any Aster had ever seen, even in the Zoo, and between them, bushes and grass, and small things with leaves and flowers.
It was the drawing of a madwoman, Aster thought. Even though Betty 31 did not seem mad. Aster had no context whatsoever for the picture of what she drew. It was rather as if every single plant in the zoo, or one of the many greenhouses where fruits and vegetables grew in Dystopia, had all been gathered together and planted in one tiny area, no bigger than her house. That was how crowded, the plants were. And the area in the picture, judging by the size of the trees in it, was obviously far bigger than her house. It was madness. Even if you did, for God knows what reason, put so many plants that close together, they couldn't possibly survive for very long after that. Ever since the War, the ground had too much radiation and not enough nutrients. Plus it seldom rained. Plants needed to be kept apart, so that each one would have enough ground to get sufficient nutrition and water.
"That… can't be right." Aster said to Betty 31. "You can't have that many… living… things… so many plants… so close to each other. They'll crowd each other out and starve."
"That's the way things look, back where I came from." Betty insisted.
Madness. It had to be madness. Nothing looked that way. Not since the war. Aster had seen pictures of forests and meadows in Pre-War books, that looked like this, but nothing looked that way now. The world was dead, or dying, everywhere. Even in Dystopia. Wasn't it?
"You came from a place like this, and came here." Aster said, trying to understand exactly what sort of madness had infected Betty 31, and apparently her whole family and friends, as well. What if it were some new form of rabies? Best to learn all she could, so she could be prepared. "Why? Are you fucking nuts? Why would you leave a place like that, and come here?"
"I told you. It was the monster. He kills people, sometimes. We were afraid, and wanted to get away. We thought maybe we'd be safe from him, here. Except the Maestro is worse. There is nowhere safe."
Theres Iceland, maybe. Aster thought, but there was no point in raising Betty 31's hopes, or confusing her with talk of a place neither of them had any way of getting to.
"Didn't anyone ever try to kill the monster? Or is he as big and strong as the Maestro?" A crazed, radiation created monster, like the Maestro or the Abominable Creature, except worse, as unimaginable as that might be, would explain the desperation of Betty 31's family to escape to somewhere, anywhere else.
Betty 31 bit her lip, obviously not liking to remember the monster she and her family had fled what sounded like a paradise to escape from. "No, he's not much like the Maestro. He's not big and green. He's not a Gamma like the Maestro. He's white. My father said he was a vampire."
"No such thing." Aster said automatically. Vampire books were all in the fiction section, at the Library.
"He's a vampire." Betty insisted. "I've seen him. I saw him close once, he knocked me down, when I was outside my house. He's all white, and has red eyes and fangs. My father chased him away with a torch, and that was when we decided to come here, and get away from him. He didn't seem that much bigger than my father, not ten feet tall like the Maestro. Then once, another time, a couple of years ago, I saw him running away, after he bit a woman on her neck. Some men chased him away, and we had to put some moss on her neck to stop the bleeding. But I don't think he was as big as the Maestro then, either. In fact, a couple of the men chasing him were as big as he was. I'm pretty sure. It was hard to tell, it was night time, both times."
"If he's not big like the Maestro, then why haven't the people back there, where you live, killed him?"
"People have tried!" Protested Betty 31. "He's not as strong as the Maestro, but he's still pretty strong. And fast. And he hides during the day, someplace we can't find him, and only comes out at night, when it's hard to see to fight him. There's nothing we can do. Even the priest tried, he blessed some water and got some crosses, like some old books said would keep vampires away. We put crosses and blessed water all over our village, but it didn't even help. He kept coming back anyways. Kept attacking people and killing them. We don't know what to do. My grandfather said that the monster sometimes used to talk, back when he was a boy, and the chief or the priest could sometimes get him to go away, but I think my grandfather is just senile. He never talks, all he does is scream, sometimes."
It was insane. A paradise full of plants that couldn't possibly exist, and inhabited by a monster, that also couldn't exist.
Of course, Aster had lived in just such a place for nearly two years now. But that was different. The Maestro was a Gamma. Gammas were real, there were others besides the Maestro, such as the Abominable Creature, or a woman spoken about in whispers who was supposedly locked away by the Maestro, still alive, in a coffin no-one had ever seen. Or the skeleton of someone called Leonard Samson, in the Hall of Fallen Heroes.
The Hall of Fallen Heroes. … something clicked in Aster's mind, like the first gear in a combination safe falling into place.
There had been something she had seen, back when she had been made to visit that place, as a child. Something she had thought at the time had not made sense, and when she had gone home and read her story, The Emporer's New Clothes, in her old fairytale book, she had been sure it had been a lie. The guard who had told them a terrible story of all the heroes being killed either in the War, or afterwards by the Maestro, had been lying. Aster had thought so, then, and she was nearly certain of it, now. The Hall of Fallen Heroes had been full of skeletons, and other body parts, with one exception. There had been a suit of clothes, tacked to a large board, a suit of clothes that supposedly belonged to a vampire. So there must have actually been such things, at least before the War. What had been his name… she couldn't remember… Perhaps Betty 31 knew. She had supposedly seen this vampire fairly recently.
"This monster… this vampire…" Aster said to Betty. "You said your grandfather said he used to talk, a long time ago. Did he ever have a name, back then?"
Betty frowned, trying to think. "Something… when we first got here, and heard of him, of the Maestro, I remember thinking that his name sounded like the name my gramps said the vampire had. But not quite the same. It was a 'M' name, though.
Another gear clicked into place, in Aster's brain.
The first letter was enough. She remembered the name that had been on the sign, above the peculiar blue and red suit of shredded, bloodstained clothing.
"Morbius." She said the name aloud.
"Yes, that's it!" Betty 31 seemed surprised. "How did you know? Have you met someone from Milwaukee before?"
Milwaukee. The name was familiar. She'd seen it on old Pre-War maps, in some state nearly halfway across the continent. "Is that where you and your family come from? Milwaukee?"
The other woman nodded, but Aster's mind was already racing ahead of her.
A third gear clicked into place in her head.
She'd seen that name, Morbius, somewhere else, other than the Hall of Fallen Heroes, far more recently. On the spine and back of an annoyingly incomprehensible book, Fundamentals of Biochemistry. It was an unusual name. Were the author of the book and the vampire who was terrorizing the people in Milwaukee, and whose clothes hung on a board in the Maestro's palace somehow related?
A fourth gear clicked into place. Or perhaps, not even two related men. Maybe, just maybe, the same man. After all, the Maestro had once been a man, and had been turned into the huge green thing he was now. Maybe the author of the book had been turned into a vampire. It was actually more likely than being turned into a Gamma, the way Aster saw it. After all, according to the books about vampires, which maybe were not all fiction after all, if you got bitten by a vampire (or killed by one, the books disagreed on that point), you turned into one.
Whatever it was, whoever it was, it was interesting. Brilliant, almost. But the Maestro either thought that Morbius was dead, in which case Aster didn't really care for him to know anything he was unaware of, or else knew he was alive, in which case he wanted other people to believe that the vampire was dead, and Aster didn't really care to put herself in danger by letting the green monster know that she knew things that he didn't want her (or anyone else) to know. She had to remain silent about what she knew. And keep Betty 31 silent, as well.
"Listen to me." She said to the other woman. "You can't ever tell the Maestro about the vampire. He'd be absolutely furious, if he knew."
Betty 31 looked puzzled. "Why? The vampire's back in Wisconsin. It's so far away. Why should the Maestro get angry?"
"Does he need a reason to get angry?"
That made Betty 31 shudder. She thought about what the Maestro had done with the blimp, torturing the Betty's foolish enough to get onto it for no reason at all. "No… I guess not. You're right."
"The people you came with can't ever tell him, either. Or anyone. He'd probably kill them, if they talked about it." Aster warned her. "Do you have a way to get some sort of message to them?"
"Maybe." Said Betty. "The priest back home taught me and the other children to read and write. I've been able to send and get a few letters from my family since I was brought to the Maestro's palace. There's a guard who likes me, and sometimes does me favors like delivering them."
Aster didn't ask why the guard, whoever he was, liked Betty 31, or was willing to do such favors. She could guess well enough, and didn't need to hear the details.
"Is there a way you can tell them in a letter not to ever talk to anyone else about where they came from, that only they will understand? Not to talk about the vampire? Or how so many plants grew, back where you came from."
"I think so." Said Betty, hesitantly. "Maybe talking about some things that happened in our family a while back. They'd be the only ones to understand it.
Aster nodded in relief. If the vampire was not a good thing to let the Maestro know about, then letting him know about the plants was even worse. If Betty was actually right, about what she had said regarding how so many plants and animals existed in and around Milwaukee (and HOW they survived and thrived in the Post-War world was something Aster had no clue as of yet), then the last thing Aster wanted to do was to let the Maestro know that such a place existed. The green monster had been destroying the plant and animal life in and around Dystopia for decades, due to his unwise, appetite ruled decisions. The island of life Betty 31 claimed to have come from might be the last such place left in all of what used to be North America. Maybe the last such place in the world. Except for maybe Iceland. But regardless of what might be going on in some small island halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, there was no way Aster was going to let the Maestro know about some tiny, miraculous island of life on the same continent he was on, so that once he finished destroying Dystopia, he could go there and destroy it as well.
And he would destroy it, if he knew about it. Aster was certain of that. The Maestro destroyed everything he touched. He had spent his entire life, even as a human, devoted to destruction. And she doubted that either the people who still lived in Milwaukee, or even the vampire Morbius (or whoever the hell he was) would stop the Maestro from taking and destroying whatever he wanted, when he wanted it. From eating his way through the place, the way he was eating his way through Dystopia. She'd been raised to be a zookeeper, to be a steward of life. If this miraculous little island of life that Betty 31 said she came from had somehow really survived the War, or somehow appeared afterwards, Aster could never betray it to the Maestro. Not even if she had to die to keep the secret.
Not even, she thought with cold pragmatism, if Betty 31 had to die as well, to keep it. But it most likely wouldn't come to that. The thought that the Maestro would be furious if he heard any mention of a vampire or anything else that existed back where the other woman had come from would ensure her silence.
"We need to go back," Aster said to Betty. "Someone might wonder, if we're gone too long, and we'll be punished. We'll wait in that dining area and listen at the door until the Maestro's done playing with that stupid blimp, before we go out. Try to act normal. But when we get back, I might have some more questions for you. Go to your bed as soon as you can when you get back. I'll meet you there later in the night."
Betty 31 nodded, and they went back up to the deck of the ship. As it turned out, it seemed that the Maestro had been satisfied with playing with just the first group of women he had tricked into getting onto the blimp. The rest of the trip went by in a blur, Aster eager for the very first time in her life to get to the Maestro's palace.
The cruise ship, The Green Fantasy, did not return to land until nearly midnight. Things were chaotic, of course. Some of the women and crew had had supper on the ship, and wanted to go to bed. Some hadn't eaten due to seasickness or the excitement of the trip, and now were hungry and demanded that supper be served despite the late hour. Still others wanted to extend the revelry of the sea voyage onto land, and dashed about excitedly here and there in the palace, enjoying drink, drugs, and sex.
Aster took advantage of the convenient chaos to make her way, unnoticed, to the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Or nearly unnoticed. Daniel Wolfkiller had not been on the ocean cruise, but knew that Aster had. He made it a point to watch the girl, without her noticing him watching, just as she made it a point to watch the Maestro, without him noticing it, either. Aster would probably have been hysterically amused by the mathematical recursion of the situation, if she had been aware of it, but the stablemaster's sense of humor, what little of it there was, tended towards the more blunt and obvious.
But regardless of his lack of a finely developed sense of humor, Wolfkiller had a finely developed sense of observation. He was far older than Aster and far more experienced at hunting. So he recognized the quick, excited motions with which Aster moved, as soon as she thought she was away from the crowd that had come off the boat with her. It was the body language of a predator, that had gotten wind of some strong scent of blood, or something else of extreme interest, and was determined to track it down.
Something's got her wind up. Wolfkiller thought. She found out something very interesting on that boat. Or thought she did. I don't know what it was, but I do know that her main interest for years has been finding a way to kill that bastard. I've made damn sure of that.
He did not dare take Aster off whatever scent she was following, by trying to see where she was going. If she found out something interesting, he would find a way to learn it later. For now, he let her follow her own head, and went back into the small cottage by the stables where he lived.
Aster, for her part, had not noticed Daniel Wolfkiller in the midst of the rest of the crowd. So far as she knew, once she slipped out of the crowd, she was alone and unsuspected. When she got to the Hall of Fallen Heroes, it was empty, without even a guard. The Maestro considered the artifacts of no value, except to terrify the human citizens of Dystopia. Nor did he consider the files of information about the dead heroes to have any value, either, except as a further means of creating terror. It was, perhaps, a reasonable assumption on his part.
To most people, strength was power. And all the strength of the Heroes, all their power, had not saved them from either the War, or the Maestro.
To the Maestro, strength was power. And he was the strongest one there was.
To Aster, knowledge was power.
After entering the Hall of Fallen Heroes, Aster did nothing for several seconds. She cocked her head and listened carefully, making sure that she didn't hear the footsteps of anyone else coming down the corridor towards her.
Then she made her way to the file cabinet below the suit of red and blue clothes that said 'Morbius The Living Vampire' above them. She wasn't sure how the files were organized, she had never actually read them before. It was a failure on her part which she now could have kicked herself for. But dwelling on past mistakes wouldn't help her. From her experience at the library that she had frequented so often, back before she had become the Maestro's slave, it seemed reasonable that the files would be organized either in order of the relevance of the information, or in chronological order. She slid the drawer open slightly, and breathing heavily in excitement, took a sheaf of papers about half an inch thick out from the very front, and then sat down behind a large platform with a skeleton on it, well hidden from the hallway, and began to read.
Her face was flushed, and her heart beat so loudly that she was sure that the Maestro could hear it from anywhere in the palace. She read anyways. Reading was an addiction with her, far more ingrained and intense than codeine had ever been. And other than the medical books she only very occasionally dared 'borrow' from Doctor Llewellyn's shelves, it had been a very long time before she had gotten a pure, mainlined fix of print.
The story she read on the first few pages made Aster, despite all the horrors she had been through, nearly sob with pity. Her intuition on the boat had actually been correct. The biochemist, Michael Morbius, who had written the inscrutable book, Fundamentals of Biochemistry, had, in fact, actually been turned, into a vampire. Or perhaps vampire was not the right word for whatever it was he had become. He hadn't been bitten or killed by a vampire such as occurred in the books about such creatures, but instead had been transformed into a vampire (or whatever the hell it was that he was) by some sort of poorly thought out cure for a blood disease that he had, which involved injecting himself with blood from a vampire bat and giving himself electric shocks.
The procedure didn't sound like a very good idea to Aster, it actually sounded about as ludicrous as the notion that some of the oriental people in Dystopia had regarding the magical curative properties of tiger testicles and other assorted animal body parts. But she was hardly a Nobel Prize Winning biochemist, so what did she know? Maybe it was actually a brilliant idea, to those with Michael Morbius's education, but the results were not so brilliant. His disease had not been cured. Instead, his results had been more like something Aster's father would have described as a 'dirty trick on nature'. Rather than curing his blood disease, whatever Michael Morbius had done, had done an end-run around the problem, and enabled him to live, despite his blood problem, by giving him the ability to replace his own failed blood supply with that of others. By drinking it.
His 'cure' had turned him into something very much resembling a vampire in terms of appearance, strength, abilities, and diet, but Aster was hardly fooled. Creatures with different origins might look and act superficially similar, but if you looked at them closely, would have all sorts of fundamental differences. The shark and the dolphin were good examples. One had evolved as a primitive fish. The other had evolved from mammals. Regular vampires were made by being bitten by another vampire. Morbius had become whatever he was due to some kind of mad scientist experiment he had done on himself. Vampire maybe was the only convenient word in the English language by which to call him, but to think he was more than superficially similar to ordinary vampires was bullshit.
She read on a few more pages. It got worse. Morbius's vampiric (for lack of a better word) necessity to drink the blood of others would, if not satisfied, cause a craving and an agony that gradually increased in intensity, until he lost complete control of his rational faculties, and would attack the nearest person to drink their blood. Often, someone who had been his friend. Often, they died.
The man, or the vampire, was a killer. Like the Maestro.
No, not like the Maestro. More like a rabid dog. He had little control or choice over the matter. Especially since, despite the man's brilliance, his reaction to his condition seemed to be perversely the opposite of what it ought to have been. It was rather like the difference between intelligence and wisdom her father had told her about. Like the Maestro, he had plenty of the former, but perhaps not so much of the latter. Morbius, like the Maestro was brilliant enough to figure out how to do what he wanted to do (except apparently curing his disease in a proper fashion), but also like the Maestro, not quite so good at knowing what he should be doing. Or maybe not. The Maestro had spent his life building weapons to kill people with. Morbius had been a doctor, and spent his life helping people. His perverse foolishness seemed to focus entirely on the ass-backwards way in which he dealt with his vampiric condition.
"Poor damned bastard." Aster muttered to herself. The whole situation seemed like some sort of a cosmic farce to her. The fucking Maestro had spent his whole life finding ways to kill people, and had ended up pretty much winning the lottery when it came to transformations. He had the strongest body in the world, when he wanted, and could turn back into a normal person when he wanted. He could have been anything. Done anything. And what did he do with such fantastic luck? Raped and killed people and destroyed everything around him. Meanwhile the poor bastard she was reading about devoted his life to saving lives, and what happened to him? He ended up what had to be some sort of cosmic sick joke of a booby prize, a body with a vampiric condition that forced him to attack and kill people.
She touched a photograph on one of the pages, of Morbius back when he had been human. It was the same picture that was on the back of Fundamentals of Biochemistry.
"Poor damned bastard." She said again. "It's sick, and unfair what happened to you. You should be what he is."
There were several more photographs. Aster took one, of Morbius, after his transformation into a vampire, and folded it carefully. She was going to show it to Betty 31 just to confirm if this was the vampire that she had seen, back in Milwaukee, but Aster was almost certain that it was. Everything fit what the other woman had told her, including the fact that crosses and blessed water had no effect on him.
Carefully, she put the rest of the papers in her hand back into the drawer, in the proper order. There was far more to read, and it would probably take her several weeks of sneaking around to get through it all. But she was fairly sure that there had to be something of extreme interest in the files. Someone had gone to fairy great lengths to give everyone the impression that Morbius was dead. People didn't do something like that for no reason. There had to be a reason. She didn't know if it was the Maestro deliberately lying, because he didn't want anyone else to know that Morbius was alive, or if it was the old man from the rebellion several years ago, Rick Jones, not wanting the Maestro to know that Morbius was alive.
But either way, whether the Maestro didn't want others to know, or Rick Jones didn't want the Maestro to know, the conclusion was the same. Except for children playing games, people didn't lie and keep secrets for no reason, or silly reasons. They kept them out of fear.
Gears that had been clicking in Aster's brain all the time she read the few pages on Morbius settled into their final positions, and the door to a riddle opened wide. Revealing answers, but also far more questions. Her eyes gleamed fiercely. The eyes of a predator, and the eyes of an addict, mainlining cognition, hatred, and revenge.
There has to be something about Morbius for the Maestro to be afraid of. Something that's dangerous to the Maestro. Aster thought. I don't know what, but I'm going to find out. There's hundreds of pages in his files. It has to be in there, somewhere. I'm going to find out what it is about Morbius that's dangerous. Then I'm going to find him.I'll get to Wisconsin, somehow, and find him. Because he's still alive. I'm sure of it.
Morbius the Living Vampire is still ALIVE!