Chapter 14. Multiplication
The same night Aster had put together several puzzle pieces from things she had seen and heard, Betty 31 did indeed confirm that the picture of Morbius the Living Vampire was, in fact, the same vampire that had been terrorizing the survivors in the city of Milwaukee, where she had come from. Except, Betty 31 said, he was a lot thinner. Not surprising. From what the woman had to say about Morbius, that he screamed all the time, it sounded like he was completely out of his mind. The insane generally suffered from poor health, unless they were taken care of by others. In Dystopia, only the very wealthy could afford to care for mentally dysfunctional relatives, and the people in Milwaukee were hardly going to try to preserve the health of a monster that they wanted dead.
The latter goal, Aster decided after several weeks of reading the files on Morbius a few pages at a time, was probably a very grave error. One thing she found puzzling about Betty 31's story, is that she claimed that neither she nor any of her relatives had suffered from radiation poisoning (Aster described the usual symptoms to her) on, or immediately after, their trip from Milwaukee to Dystopia. However, some of them, when venturing too far away into the Outside to scavenge metal, had come down with mild cases of it since then. Unlike Aster, they didn't know what an electroscope was, so had no way of avoiding areas of high radiation levels.
But the level of radiation was even higher, beyond the Outside where the unfortunate dirt farmers lived. Betty 31 and her family should have gotten very sick, even from a few day trip. Yet she said they were fine. Or at least as 'fine' as you could describe a family that was living under the tyranny of the Maestro and had been forced to give up one of their daughter's as a sex toy to him. How could that be? Aster dismissed the notion that maybe the radiation levels had gone down to normal levels in the century following the War. People were still getting sick and dying of radiation poisoning all the time.
Probably there was little or no radiation in Milwaukee, if what Betty31 had said about all the plant life there was accurate. Most likely it was, Aster finally decided, regardless of how improbable a miracle it seemed in the Post War world. Top niche predators like the vampire needed a fairly large and complex food chain to support their presence. Morbius was still alive, and had to feed on human blood. That meant, a fairly large human population was needed to supply that blood. Which, in turn meant that a lot of smaller animals and plants were needed to keep the humans alive.
Aster considered the possibility that perhaps, out of sheer luck, Milwaukee and the nearby areas had never been hit by nuclear bombs during the War. However, when she questioned Betty 31 about it, the woman described destroyed buildings and the remains of fallen and burned trees. The city had been nuked. It had somehow recovered since to something resembling the Pre-War world. And whatever had made it recover had apparently done so fairly quickly, as Betty 31 said that according to her grandfather, there had been just as many plants and trees when he had been a boy (back when the vampire, Morbius, still retained sufficient sanity to talk sometimes) as there were now.
After getting through most of the file about Morbius during several months of carefully stolen moments, and learning about the things that had happened to him, and perhaps more importantly, the things he had done, the abilities he had displayed at different times after his transformation from a human biochemist into a vampire, Aster finally had a theory of sorts which explained the facts regarding the abundance of life (according to Betty 31) in and around the old city of Milwaukee, and the strange (albeit temporary) immunity of the woman and her fellow refugees to the high levels of radiation they were undoubtedly exposed to during their panicked (and ill advised in Aster's opinion) trip through dead, radioactive lands.
The vampire is killing some of the people over there in Wisconsin, certainly. Aster thought to herself after running one scenario after another through her head, and being left with only one theory that fit the facts. But their attempts to kill him are a very bad mistake on their part, and they are lucky they have not succeeded. Because if what I think is true, and I don't see any other explanation, then the vampire is also keeping them and everything else in Milwaukee alive.
Of course, what Betty 31 had told Aster, about the vampire being far thinner than he had been in the picture of him that Aster had stolen (and subsequently returned) from the files about him in the Hall of Fallen Heroes was extremely worrisome for several reasons. The picture in the file showed a vampire that was already fairly lean. If Morbius were a 'lot thinner' than that, he was probably literally starving. A starving animal, despite what some fools thought, was not a good hunter. A starving animal was a weak animal, and a weak animal was not good at hunting. Nor was it good at escaping anything that might hunt it. Aster recalled what Betty 31 had said about the people in Milwaukee trying to kill Morbius. Very likely, if he grew weak enough, they might succeed.
Bad, very bad. Aster thought. She was certain the vampire was keeping the humans, and everything else, in Milwaukee alive. But the people there didn't know that. All they knew is that he was attacking them, drinking their blood, and sometimes killing them. Very likely, since it sounded like Morbius was out of his mind, the vampire didn't realize it himself. The first clue anyone over there would probably have of what was going on would be if they succeeded in killing Morbius (which was probably inevitable in the near future, if he remained insane and kept getting weaker), and found out that everything around them started to die afterwards.
It got worse. The story told in the files was both extraordinary, and tragic. After becoming a vampire, Morbius had done both incredible and dreadful things. The latter was particularly tragic, given that it seemed to Aster that most of the terrible things he had done were probably unnecessary, and caused by both the former biochemist, and various other people who had lived before the war operating off the same basic mistaken premise. An understandable premise, but a dreadfully mistaken one nonetheless.
Reading the files also showed her what it was about Morbius that was potentially dangerous to the Maestro. But the word, potentially, of course, reminded her of an old joke, that she had heard the men who worked at the zoo sometimes tell each other. The joke had different variations, but always the same punch line, with someone concluding: Potentially, we could have three million new-dollars. But in actuality what we really have on our hands are two sluts and a queer.
Which was much what Aster had on her hands.
Potentially she had a vampire who was keeping a whole ecosystem alive without even knowing (at least consciously) that he was doing so, and could probably spread the area of life if he did know what he was doing, and also had just the right combination of abilities that could, potentially, under exactly the right circumstances, prove lethal to the Maestro.
In actuality what she had on her hands was being locked up as a sex toy in the Maestro's palace with no way to escape, and a starving, deranged vampire about 1000 miles away (across land with very high radiation levels) who was surrounded by numerous people who wanted to kill him, and she had no way of reaching the place to tell the people to stop trying to kill him, or of attempting to return the vampire to sanity, or whether such an attempt would even work.
Besides which, Aster thought with a sigh one night, as she re-read a few particular pages that she had read several times before. Even if I get to him, getting him to do what I want may cost far more than I or anyone else is able or willing to do.
She looked at the two pictures of Michael Morbius, the one of him as a human, and the one of him as a vampire. Had she thought before that he should have become what the Maestro had? That he would have been better off that way?
No, she concluded looking at the picture. As someone else in the files, deranged, but brilliant, had concluded, he was actually just perfect the way he was. After all, he was a Living vampire. Perhaps her wish to use him as the perfect weapon, to kill the Maestro, was selfishness. Far more important was probably keeping him alive. So he could keep everything in Milwaukee alive. It was, after all, the last little island of life in the entire continent. One of the last few in the world, probably. Though she had no idea what the rest of the world was like.
And what if the Maestro finds that place? Which he most likely will, sooner or later. When he eats his way through the last of what's left here, he's going to be looking for someplace else. And though Morbius has the potential to kill him, a weakened, insane vampire is hardly going to last more than a second against that bloody green brute.
Several scenarios went through Aster's mind in a few seconds, and she sighed. She needed to get to Wisconsin to protect Morbius. And it was not just herself she had to somehow get there. She would need help. There was no way for her to do what needed to be done on her own. And, being on the autistic side of the human psychological spectrum, Aster was not very adept at being socially persuasive. And even if she were, there was still that little nagging problem. That what ultimately needed to be done would very likely would cost far more than she or anyone else was able or willing to do. And very possibly, more than Morbius would be able or willing to do, as well. The vampire was the perfect weapon, but a fragile and dangerous one. Using him as a weapon would be rather like using one of those Japanese swords, while it was heated to a few thousand degrees. It would cut through almost anything, but simply picking it up would badly burn you, and if you didn't use it in just the right way, the sword itself would shatter.
Still, that particular problem was far in the future. It would be a while, yet, before Dystopia was so dead that the Maestro needed to find a new place to live. Best to concentrate on the first problem at hand. How to get out of the palace. Because she had no clue as to how she would do that.
Aster spent other stolen moments in the next several months re-reading bits and pieces of Morbius's file, and trying to find a way to escape the palace. The former was interesting, and she wished there were a way she could steal the whole file en-mass and study it at her leisure. But that was impossible, as was escape from the palace. The doors were always guarded, and even if she had found a way out, the Maestro would track her down with his Wardogs and probably have them rip her to pieces. Or rape her first, then (assuming she survived that) have the Wardogs rip her to pieces afterwards.
She grew taller, and although when she had first come to the palace she had been the shortest female slave that the Maestro had, by the time she was nearly 17, she was taller than most of them. And likely to get taller, still. Aster was by no means, physically an adult. Her breasts, although larger than the nubs they had been at 14, were still fairly small. Nor had she started menstruating yet.
It was around this time that Betty 31, the woman who had told Aster about Morbius's survival, suddenly changed from being depressed and fearful the way Aster had seen her on the cruise ship The Green Fantasy, to being strangely buoyant and excited. This worried Aster. Such a drastic change in personality could , in fact, very likely did, mean that the older woman had lost her sanity. That was not a good thing. Aster had managed to frighten Betty 31 into keeping silent about the existence of the vampire and all the plant life where she had come from, by telling her that the Maestro would be infuriated by the mere mention of such things. But an insane person often didn't have enough good sense to be frightened or to keep silent when they should. Aster knew all about that. She certainly hadn't had enough sense years ago to know enough to conceal her intelligence from the Maestro.
Not sure what to do about the sudden change in Betty 31's mood, Aster finally decided to confront her with it directly. She stole a couple cookies from the kitchen one day, and brought them over to Betty 31's bed that evening.
"Look what I brought you!" Aster said, setting the treats next to the pillow.
"Oh! Thank you! I've been starving lately!" Betty began munching on the treats, and Aster regarded the way she looked. She seemed to have gained weight, in the months since Aster had spoken with her in the food storage room on The Green Fantasy. Perhaps that explained her cheerfulness. Perhaps she had found a guard who was slipping her extra food in return for occasional sexual favors. Extra food didn't seem like a very good reason to Aster to be as happy and bouncing as Betty 31 was, when she was a slave and sex toy to a monster, but perhaps it was a good enough reason by the other woman's way of thinking.
Still, she needed to be sure it was the food, and not insanity.
Please, please let it not be insanity. Aster prayed to whatever gods there were that listened to prayers from people in such wretched circumstances as hers. She wasn't sure what she would do if it were insanity. She couldn't, she simply couldn't let Betty 31 run around insane, and possibly blabbering about the vampire and all the plants and animals where she had come from, but Aster wasn't sure she was coldblooded enough to kill the woman to keep her quiet. In fact, she was actually fairly sure that she probably couldn't do anything that horrible. She didn't know what she would do. Perhaps if Betty 31 blabbed because she was insane, Aster could somehow convince the Maestro that everything she said was merely the ravings of a madwoman and had no basis in reality.
She waited while Betty 31 munched a few bites of cookie.
"You seem happier lately." Aster said cautiously. "Have things gotten better for you, here?"
"Oh, yes!" Betty 31 said brightly, worrying Aster. Things never got better in the Maestro's palace for his slaves. They only got worse. He only got worse. It was insanity, it had to be, to think otherwise. Still, she had to be sure.
"How have they gotten better?" Aster asked. "You look like you've gained a little weight. Is one of the guards getting you more food."
"Yes, I have gained weight, haven't I?" Betty 31 looked down at her slightly plump stomach and smiled. "I'm going to be queen! I'm going to have his baby, and afterwards, my family will come here and live with me in the palace, and I'll be queen."
It was insanity, but it was not the sort Aster had feared. It was worse.
"You're telling me that you're pregnant? With the Maestro's baby? How did that happen?" It was difficult for the monster to get any of his slaves pregnant, which was perhaps a small mercy. He ripped them up inside too much by the mere sex act.
"The Maestro asked me. He said I looked a lot like the first Betty, the one who was his wife, and wanted me to have his son for him. He said if I did it, I would be queen, and my family could all come live with me here at the palace. So I said yes. He got Doctor Llewellyn to do it."
For a moment the involvement of the Doctor didn't make sense to Aster. If Betty 31 was pregnant with the Maestro's child, then what was she doing having sex with the physician. Then things clicked into place. Since the injuries he caused women made it almost impossible for them to get pregnant, the Maestro had resorted to other means, the same means often used at the zoo, to try to produce an heir for himself. Or rather, to try and produce a new sort of toy for himself.
"Artificial insemination?" She said to Betty 31.
"Yes!" The older woman nodded enthusiastically. "That's what the doctor called it. It was a month ago, and it worked. I've been so hungry, though. I guess the little baby inside me needs a lot of food. Like him."
Aster backed away, horror on her face.
"What's wrong?" said Betty 31. "Are you alright."
"I… I feel sick. I think I need some of my codeine." She hadn't taken the codeine in years, but everyone else thought she still was. "I'm really happy for you, though."
It was a lie, but there would have been no point in telling the woman the truth. Aster made her way to her bed. Perhaps it was only partly a lie. She did feel sick. She wasn't looking at an insane woman, but a dead one. The poor stupid fool, the Maestro had taken advantage of the fact that she had come from another place, far away from Dystopia, and didn't know enough about the Maestro, not about his body and not about his mind, to know not to agree to what she had.
Oh, Betty, you poor, stupid fool. Aster thought. Why did you believe his promises? Do you really think he means to make you a queen? Why didn't you ask me, before you agreed? I would have told you to say 'No'. Though likely he would have forced it on you anyways. Maybe you're better off this way, being happy for a few months, believing you're going to be a queen and see your family again. But oh, poor Betty. There is simply no way for us poor, frail, merely human women to carry a child of his to term. There is no way for us to even survive such a thing.
Aster did not sleep well that night. As things stood, Betty 31 was going to die within a few months. Aster wasn't sure how long, she had read about the development of human embryos and fetuses in some of the books she had borrowed over the past few years from Doctor Llewellyn's shelves, but the development of an essentially human baby did not necessarily have anything to do with the development of a gamma baby. It could take 9 months, or more time or less time. Aster had no way of knowing. The longer it took to develop, the longer Betty 31 would have to live. But it wasn't going to be very much longer. Not unless Aster did something.
And that was the maddening part. At this early point, there were things that Aster could do, to save Betty 31's life. She knew of herbs sold in the market in Dystopia that would induce a miscarriage. She could tell the pregnant woman to have the guard she was 'friendly' with to get some of them. It was not too late. Betty 31 had done Aster a great favor by telling her what was happening in Wisconsin, by letting her know that life still survived. That Morbius the Living Vampire still survived. Now Aster could return the favor. She could use her knowledge to save the other woman's life.
She could… but after several hours of thought, sitting in the dark and cold in a chair near one of the barred windows, Aster made a cold blooded decision not to. She felt guilty and ashamed, as she made a deliberate decision to let the other woman die. She had been raised to be a zookeeper, a steward of life, and surely that meant human life as well as that of the zoo animals. But….
There was her own life to think of. Perhaps if Betty 31 had been just a little bit smarter… a little bit stronger… a little bit less foolish, Aster might decided to do something. Or she might not have. She wasn't sure. Perhaps she was simply trying to justify things to herself. But Betty 31 simply did too many foolish things. Her affair with the guard was foolish, done as it was without the knowledge and consent of the Maestro. Her agreement to carry the child of the Maestro, who anyone with eyes could see was five times the size, and God only knew how much stronger than a normal man, was foolish. In fact, her decision to leave a paradise of plants and animals because it contained one single vampire who was not nearly as bad as the Maestro, was foolish. And Betty 31's foolishness made her weak, and her weakness made her dangerous.
No, it was far safer and more convenient to Aster to let her die. If she were dead, she would not talk (whether out of foolishness or out of fear) to the Maestro about such things as an island of life around the old city of Milwaukee, or the vampire that lived there. And saving her life would be dangerous for Aster. If the Maestro were to find out that Aster had given the woman herbs to miscarry his unborn child, he would simply kill Aster out of hand, in some painful and humiliating way. And Betty 31's foolishness made it all too likely that the Maestro would somehow find out.
Besides which, for all Aster knew, if did save Betty 31's life with abortifacient herbs, for all she knew, it would only be temporary. Very likely it would be temporary, Aster told herself, knowing as she did so that she was simply looking for justifications for her coldblooded decision to assuage her guilt. But if the woman miscarried the child she was pregnant with now, the Maestro would likely just try again.
Or so Aster told herself. But she was far too intellectually honest to completely avoid the real truth, or the guilt that it gave her, that she was choosing her own survival at the cost of the other woman's death. Probably a death of extreme pain.
Aster lived with the guilt over the next few months, trying without success to salve her conscience by giving Betty 31 all the best treats that she was able to steal from the kitchen, and listening patiently, disguising her sadness, when the woman told her about how happy she was going to be when she was Queen, and her family came to the palace to live with her.
The fantasies Betty 31 had about how wonderful things would be as the Maestro's Queen made Aster sad, as well as guilty. It reminded Aster of the books about fairytales she had read so long ago. Or perhaps it had not been so long ago, she had been 14 years old when the Maestro had taken her away from her home, and right now she was not quite 17 years old yet. She'd only been a slave for a little under three years, and even at 14 years old, she had still liked borrowing the fairy tale books from Thumb and reading them every now and then. But back at the zoo had been another life. She was older now, and after enduring that horrible night with the Maestro, and the several rapes by Paul Rasse and his gang of sadistic guards since then, she was older in other, different ways, than she would have been if she had still been living with her father at the zoo.
In a way, it seemed like she was older than Betty 31, even though the other woman was actually 25, or 9 years older than Aster. But what the other woman said about being Queen reminded Aster of a naïve child. There were no fairy tales, or queens. And Aster would have far rather slept in a cage full of dirty straw with a bunch of zoo animals than to sleep in a velvet and silk bed with the Maestro, or sit next to him on a throne and be his 'Queen'. Not that Betty would even live to be 'Queen' anyways.
The maddening part, that made Aster feel even worse than her guilt already did, was that Betty 31's death was probably utterly pointless. Probably pointless, because if it was impossible for a frail, merely human woman to survive carrying a child of a monstrous creature like the Maestro's, it was for the same reason highly improbable that she would live long enough that the child inside her would develop to the point of viability. Even the Maestro had certain weaknesses. One of them which Aster had noticed almost immediately, after she began specifically looking for them, was that he had to breath. He needed oxygen. And a fetus that was too young, even a gamma fetus, would not have lungs developed well enough to breath on it's own. If the pregnancy killed Betty 31 too quickly, the child inside her was doomed as well. Aster recalled the time, long ago, when she had seen the Maestro transformed into a normal, human form. She didn't know if a child of his would or could develop in a normal human form. Probably not. The only way it would do so would be if it didn't inherit the abilities of the Maestro at all, in which case the Maestro would probably simply reject it and try again. If it did have the Maestro's abilities, it would kill the mother. That was inevitable.
Of course, maybe the child could inherit the Maestro's abilities but not manifest them until it gets older. Or at least until after it's born. That would be nice. Aster thought once, when she was in a particular sour mood. Having pastries fall from the sky would be nice, too. Or having the New Icelandic Army show up in the harbor tomorrow, with weapons full of some sort of toxic gas that's lethal to the Maestro and nobody else. All those things would be nice. But I'm not going to count on them happening.
Around this time, Aster stopped borrowing books from Dr. Llewellyn's shelf. She had read most of them, or at least most of them that she could understand. A few of them, like the wretched Fundamentals of Biochemistry remained far beyond her present level of understanding, and maddeningly absent from the Doctor's medical library were the intermediate books that probably must have been available to pre-War medical students in the past, that would allow her to fill in the huge gaps in her knowledge sufficiently that the advanced books would become understandable to her.
She still went to his hospital periodically to fill her bottle of codeine (which she still promptly threw out while trying hard not to think of the happy dreams it could give her), but Betty 31's pregnancy with the Maestro's child had caused Aster to become very wary of the physician. The pregnancy was due to artificial insemination. The Maestro apparently was smart enough to grasp that ripping a woman up inside by having sex with her would probably damage her so badly that she would not be able to get pregnant, though not smart enough to grasp that a merely human woman probably couldn't carry a child of his long enough that it would survive. And it occurred to Aster, one day, that the only person in the palace that she knew of who had the equipment and skills to carry out the artificial insemination procedure was Doctor Llewellyn.
Probably the Doctor had very little choice in the matter. Certainly he must have known that he was signing Betty 31's death warrant, but if he had refused, the Maestro simply would have killed him, and found another doctor who would carry out the procedure. But Aster still didn't like it, and it helped to alleviate some of her guilt at her deliberate decision to let Betty 31 die to place the blame for it on Doctor Llewellyn instead of herself. Perhaps Doctor Llewellyn even knew why Aster now left his hospital in much more of a hurry than she had previously, because he seemed to have a drawn, sad look about his face. Or perhaps that was just age catching up with him. Aster did not trust the sad look. If he were so sad as all that, then he could have refused to perform the procedure on Betty 31 that was going to result in her death. He would have been killed himself, but then he wouldn't have been so sad.
During the few months when Aster tried to assuage her conscience regarding her decision to let Betty 31 die, it seemed to her that the woman's stomach grew larger, faster, than it would have with an ordinary pregnancy. Aster didn't know what to conclude from that. It could mean that the fetus, being a gamma, was simply larger at any given stage of development than an ordinary human fetus would have been. It could mean that the fetus was developing faster. Or both, or neither. There was no information in any of Doctor Llewellyn's books that Aster had seen about gamma pregnancies. The Maestro actually seemed rather concerned about Betty 31 during this time and let the woman rest in bed whenever she wanted, and frequently brought her up to Doctor Llewellyn's hospital for checkups. Aster wasn't entirely sure what the doctor would know, if anything, about Gamma pregnancies, either, but despite her anger at his performing the procedure that had doomed Betty 31, she wasn't going to endanger him (or more importantly, herself) by bringing up the question.