Chapter 19. Anima

The next day, Aster got up in the morning, and despite being nervous about the raw pond water she had drunk, felt fine. It seemed good, like the proper thing to do, to be doing at least some of the chores that needed to be done for winter, and cleaning up at least one building of the zoo. She gathered up more nuts that day, and the day after, and eventually had to get more wood to seal off more of the habitats in the Mouse House from the marauding squirrels. Or maybe it wasn't a Mouse House any more, but an Aster House. She didn't live in a regular people house any more, but in one of the Zoo cages. So maybe she was a Zoo animal. The only Zoo animal. The last Zoo animal in the world, without even a Zookeeper to help take care of her.

Sometimes she would stop doing her chores, and go to look at the grave where she had buried her father (and made markers both for him and for Thumb). Once, after a rare, fairly heavy rain, the markers were a little tilted, so she went and got the hammer and pounded them in deeper. There wasn't much else she could do. She got sad when she went to the grave, but thought she was supposed to. Besides, she needed to check it every now and then to make sure it hadn't done something weird in a supernatural like way, because it wasn't a proper six feet deep.

Over a few weeks, Aster became aware that there were, in fact, still animals in the Zoo. The overgrown, abandoned place, held a suprising number of wild creatures. Probably attracted by the trees and other brush, and the absence of man. She went into her old house just long enough to get her old bow, a bright pink thing made before the War of something called 'fiber-glass'. Aster wasn't quite sure what fiber-glass was. It didn't look much like the glass that was used in windows, or that had once been in front of the habitats in the Mouse House. And real glass didn't bend like the fiber-glass bow, either. But it seemed to be practically indestructible, which was good. She would shoot a rabbit or a squirrel with it every couple of days. She had a couple of places to cook, now. She had made a sort of square in the middle of the Mouse House out of bricks, and sometimes made a fire in it, that she cooked with, or roasted some of the nuts over. It made smoke, and there was no chimney, but if she kept the doors to the Mouse House open, it didn't get too bad. She also used her hammer to chip out a little hollow, in the back wall of the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she slept, and sometimes made a tiny fire in there, behind a little door made of a flattened can with lots of big holes punched in it. Just big enough to warm it up before she slept.

She had to put the little fire in the little cubbyhole out before she slept, though. It was only one of several improvements that she had made to her sleeping place. She had gotten some more blankets, pinned them together, and stuffed them with a bunch of grass to make a sort of thin mattress. It was because she was worried about the dried grass catching on fire while she slept that she had to put the little fire out with a pitcher of water, before she went to sleep. She had also made a wooden cover to the large, gravestone shaped opening of the place, the way she had with the habitats where she stored her nuts, except with the little door in the bottom, rather than the top. Once the door was closed, it kept the heat in, and more importantly, kept animals out. Aster had seen what looked like some sort of dog or wolf tracks, in some mud near the pond, and was worried about being attacked in her sleep. They were actually coyote tracks, from the very same coyote that had sniffed her in her sleep the very first night of her return to the Zoo, but she had no way of knowing that, much less that the coyote was far more scared of her than she was of it.

She used some of the wood to make shelves. A small shelf that she actually had to disassemble, as it wouldn't fit through the tiny door of the 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat and reassemble inside, on which she put a few knives, and some odds and ends she collected, such as different seeds, pine cones, small colorful pebbles, bones, and some especially symmetrical looking nuts. Sometimes when she didn't feel like working (or had finished her work and was tired) she would sit by her little shelf, and spend what sometimes seemed like hours, re-arranging these different objects, as if, by finding the right pattern or balance between them, she could somehow restore balance to her life, or to the entire world. But it never worked, though. Something always seemed to be missing.

Eventually, she knocked the tiny shelf apart and threw the boards out of her little 'Common Vampire Bat' habitat where she slept. It was completely inadequate, and making her frustrated. She got some more boards, and made a new shelf. Or rather, two shelves, each about 5 feet long and high, and crossing each other in the center. She put all her existing 'treasures' onto it, and frequently added to the collection, as different items she encountered while looking for food caught her eye.

In her efforts to get the appearance of her collection just the way she wanted it to be, Aster sometimes got some pieces of chalky rock, and drew on the floor and walls of the Mouse House, in geometrical patterns. Always in shapes. Squares, triangles, hexagons, and circles. She wished the could make hexagon shaped shelves, but she lacked the woodworking skills and the tools to do so. At times, she would put some of her objects into the shapes on the floor, and study them, then shook her head, put them back on the shelf, and erased the chalky geometrical drawings with a damp rag, only to start over again, differently, in a day or two.

It got colder, and sometimes Aster would wake up shivering, and have to go stand by the fire she kept banked in the big square of bricks she had made. Most of the things growing in what had once been the Zoo had some sort of use. She could weave together long pieces of straw, or cat-tails to make a sort of mat that she could eat from and pretend it was a plate. She tried to make a basket, but the straw and cattails weren't sturdy enough for it. She had better luck with some thin branches from a weeping willow tree, though the baskets she made were rather ugly and couldn't fit more than a pint or so of nuts. Even the disgusting little hickory weevils (which she would always find when she went to get some nuts out of her cache) had uses. She could bait a fish-hook with them, or put them in a battered pan over the fire, where they would sizzle and melt into mostly fat, that she could use to fry things. It didn't taste too bad, and she got tired of eating boiled meat after a while.

Sometimes she tried to dry some of the tiny apples and grapes in the sun, with mostly poor results. Although it seldom rained in Dystopia, since the War, it seemed like it always drizzled whenever she laid down cut up apples on flat rocks to dry. When she tried drying them in her pan, over the fire, they turned into slices of baked apples, which tasted good, but really couldn't be stored. Always, before, her father had bought dried fruit for the winter from merchants in Dystopia, and Aster wasn't quite sure how they did it. Possibly there were books in the Library that might explain how, but she was too frightened of leaving the Zoo to go there any more. Besides, for all she knew, the Library books had long since been burned on the Maestro's overly-large, inferno-like fireplace. It seemed fairly likely. Likely enough, at any rate, that she could use it as a justification to herself for not going out to read up on the subject of fruit-drying, when she knew deep down that the real reason was that she was afraid.

But there was always plenty to do. As the amount of nuts began to dwindle, Aster invented other ways to distract herself, to keep from having to think too much (though her distractions actually involved thinking - just not about her family or the Maestro). She forced herself to eat the internal organs (well cleaned) of the squirrels, rabbits, and other animals she hunted. She had heard once that the internal organs had a lot of the same vitamins that fruits and vegetables did. Since her attempts at drying the little fruit she could find were mostly a failure, she needed to get her proper vitamins somehow. But it tasted awful. It took a long time to force herself to choke it down. Sometimes she would mix a small bite of liver or kidney with a mouthful of nuts, to try and dilute the taste. There were also some plants to eat. Not fruit, but daylily leaves and burdock and sunflower roots. She tried to store most of the roots for the winter, but made a sort of a 'stew' sometimes by boiling the daylily leaves with meat. There were also a few vegetables, in a garden her father had apparently started earlier in the year. It was late in the season for most of them, but she did get some potatoes, onions, and beets by digging around with the shovel.

There were quite a few insects during the warmer days, and Aster got some old, dusty jars, punched small holes in the lids, and would put the insects inside them. She would line them up, on the floor of the Mouse House, and pretend she had her own little insect zoo. She didn't know the names of all the insects, though, so it wasn't that much fun, and would let them go in the grass before the end of the day so they could find their way home.

There were a number of stray cats living around the Zoo, some of which were descendents of the tame cats that Aster and her family had once kept, others feral for generations, and attracted by the vermin, the overgrowth, and the absence of any human beings except for a single one who sometimes made strange cries, other times made a terrible banging or rasping with metal things, but didn't seem to actually bother them. They were also attracted to the few bits of the animals that Aster hunted, but didn't eat (sometimes she couldn't force herself to eat the more disgusting parts of the animals like their intestines, even though she worried she needed the vitamins). Aster noticed them lurking around on occasion, and remembered the pet cats she used to have. She wished that she could find a little kitten, and maybe tame it for her very own. She could name it Tony Tiger. But it was the wrong time of the year for kittens. Sometimes, Aster would put a few bits of meat where she thought some of the cats were hiding, and eventually some of them would come within a few feet of her when she called them, and eat meat if she tossed it to them, but they would never let her touch or stroke them the way the pet cats she used to have as a child would.

Meanwhile, it was getting colder. Aster was getting less sleep, and waking up shivering more often. She decided she would have to get some more boards and wall off a small area of the Mouse House, near the 'Common Vampire Bat' enclosure where she slept, then move her brick firepit in there, so she could keep the smaller area warm at night without risking setting her dried-grass mattress on fire. She measured the floor and walls with a yardstick, to figure out how much wood she would need for two walls, about 10 feet apart. This was all improper construction, of course. Not insulated or anything so proper as that. But it would work.

It was slow going, getting the necessary amount of lumber. It was far more than was needed to simply board off one of the former animal habitats in the Mouse House in order to protect her cached nuts from squirrels. Aster didn't feel like going to get one of the hand wagons, on which she could have carried several boards at once. She liked better to look at the plants (or at least their bare stalks), and the cats, and carry the boards one at a time, alternating between holding onto it with her hands, and placing it on her shoulders. Then sometimes she would stop fetching boards, and do something else instead, like try to call the cats to her, or re-arrange all her pebbles, pine cones, and other 'treasures' on her shelf, never quite satisfied with how she had them lined up. She tried putting some of them in jars that were laid on their sides, and in the spaces between the jars. Maybe she needed a bigger shelf,yet. Or more things to put on it. Like a blue bottle. She had had a blue bottle, once. She remembered that. She had stolen it from Daniel Wolfkiller, though he said he didn't really care. Where was it now? In her house? That's where she had left it, but it could be her father had thrown it away after the Maestro had enslaved her. She didn't really want to go in the house to look. She wasn't sure if she would be more sad if the bottle were still there, or if it was gone.

Eventually, Aster had about half the lumber she was going to need, or enough for one wall, piled in the Mouse House (Which was starting to resemble a combination between an animal's den, a pantry, a supply shed, and a museum). She began sawing the boards to the proper measurements, making a framework of thicker boards to mount, and eventually nail the thinner boards to. She had been at this work for nearly an hour, when she was interrupted by a shadow falling over her.

Aster looked up. There was a man, dressed in ragged clothing and wearing a hooded vest made of several opossum pelts standing there. She didn't much like opossum fur, but at least it wasn't one of the uniforms that the Maestro's guards wore, and she supposed it was probably warmer than her own Zookeeper's uniform. She'd been shivering a lot, lately. Maybe she should get another uniform, and wear two of them, to keep warm.

"I'm sorry." Aster said. "I didn't hear you come in. I was busy working. I need to get this wall done before winter."

She waved her hammer vaguely at the pile of lumber, then set it down. "We haven't had any visitors to the zoo for a long time… I'm afraid the Zoo is actually closed. The animals are gone. I think the Maestro ate them. I haven't been able to catch any more."

The man folded his arms and said nothing. Aster got worried. It wouldn't do for him to have a bad impression of the Zoo. "I did have some interesting insects that I caught. But I let them go again, and they haven't been around for a while. Probably there will be more insects, and perhaps some animals in the spring. If you like, I can write you a voucher for a free admission."

The man finally spoke. "Aster!"

"Yes… that's me. Aster…" Aster frowned. "Or is it Betty?… I guess it's whatever you want it to be. I get confused, sometimes. There's really nobody to talk to here, except some stray cats, and I can't get them to come over by me."

"Aster…" The man looked around in confusion. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm building two walls." Was the man stupid? Wasn't it obvious what she was doing? "It's getting colder, and I need to keep the heat in where I sleep."

"Aster…" The man sounded upset. "You can't stay here."

"Why not?" Aster waved at the interior of the Mouse House. "I got plenty of food stored. And once I get the walls done, I'll have a warm area where I sleep."

The man slapped her then. Not hard, but the blow was as shocking as a pitcher full of ice water to the face. "Stupid girl! You're leaving spoor! There's tracks everywhere around here. Not to mention your smoke, and the pit you dug for a toilet."

The 'stupid girl' comment finally let Aster recognize the man. She shook her head, clearing away some of her confusion. "Wolfkiller?"

"You're lucky I'm not the Maestro." He said. "Right now I assume he's interested in things other than you, because if he came here, he'd find you almost immediately. Especially with those wardogs of his. But you can't assume that he's not going to track you down at some point."

"Bloody hell." Aster stood, thinking for a moment, then balled her fist, as if she wanted to return Wolfkiller's slap. "What happened? Your note said you'd come back. And you never did. You left me alone."

"I'm sorry." It was inadequate, but he tried to explain. "When I went back to the stables, all the horses had been killed, and my room had been tossed. I don't know why, or what they suspected me of, or if there was even any reason for it at all, but it was too dangerous for me to stay. I left the city that night, with my family. I had to stay in hiding with them for a month. I eventually did come back here, but wasn't able to get into the palace or get a message to you. That place was locked down tight."

"Not anymore" Aster informed him. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.

Wolfkiller nodded. "I know. The last time I was in the city… things were pretty bad. I could have gotten into the palace then, but didn't give much for my chances of getting out, again. And I thought you were dead. So many were. Then three days ago I heard that the maestro had 'let go of the only b… one he ever kneeled to'. I couldn't picture him kneeling to anyone, and letting them live, mind you. But it seemed odd enough that I thought it might be you."

"Why me?"

"Hope?" The man shrugged. "I've been hoping to find you and talk to you for so long now. And because he kneeled to you. There's nobody strong enough to make him do that. Nobody stronger than him. That leaves someone smarter than him."

"Oh, so now you think I'm smart." Aster wrinkled up her nose. "After you keep calling me 'stupid girl' all the time."

"You're incredibly smart." Daniel Wolfkiller admitted. "The smartest person I know. Also, probably the most foolish, in many ways."

"Because I didn't keep it under my hat." Aster thought about that, and what it had cost her. "You said you wanted to talk to me. About what? Why would you want to talk to me if you think I'm foolish."

"Because I saw you watching the Maestro. For years. I need to know what you saw. If he has any weaknesses. Any way to be killed."

Memories from years ago, Wolfkiller taunting her and telling her that the Maestro didn't have any weaknesses, and that she wasn't smart enough to find any, surfaced at different points in her mind and connected.

"You ugly son of a bitch." Aster swore. "You sicced me on him!"

She began screaming: "You used me! Do you have any idea what sort of hell I went through! Do you! Nearly torn apart by that cock of his! Raped by his guards! Made to watch while he burned people to death? While he ate a little boy! Raped my sister to death! For years! Came back and my own father was dead! God Damn you to hell! Couldn't you have done something! At least told my father I was still alive? Done something besides use me?"

"Yes, I used you." Wolfkiller hissed. "But I didn't put you in that situation. I tried to keep you out of it, and if there had been a way to get you out of there, believe me I would have done so. But since you were there, NOT using you wasn't going to make your situation any better. You wouldn't have been hurt any less, raped any fewer times. I couldn't help you. But I could use you, to help others."

"You think you have it bad?" He pointed at her. "Think about the woman you killed, Betty something or the other. Slit her throat. Not that I blame you, there wasn't anything you could have done. But she's dead, and you're alive. Think about that."

He lowered his accusing finger. "He did the same thing to my wife, you know. She wasn't lucky enough to have someone slit her throat for her. The - thing - he put inside her ripped her apart from the inside out."

Wolfkiller began pacing, his eyes half closed. "He gave me a 'choice', you know. Said I was 'lucky'. I got to 'choose' whether to hand over my wife or my daughter to him. And to work for him, in exchange for his not taking both. Then, after my wife died, he kept asking about my daughter. Never came for her. But kept asking about her. Then let me know that he knew that she had had children of her own."

"As for your father… he asked me not to tell him if you were alive or dead. If I'd been here and known that the Maestro had told him he had killed you, though, before he took your sister, I would have told him it was a lie. But I wasn't here, and I didn't know."

"So, you tell me, Zookeeper's daughter. If it had been the other way around, if you thought you could use me somehow, to find a way to kill him and save your father and sister, to save all the people he's going to rape and kill in the future, would you have hesitated? Or would you do the 'noble' thing? The stupid and useless thing?"

"No. Damn you." She was no hero.

"I didn't think so." Survival was often an ugly thing, and as odd as she was, Aster was a survivor. The fact that she'd gotten out of the Maestro's palace alive was proof of that. "So tell me. Did you learn anything, watching him all those years. Does he have any weaknesses… some way to kill him?"

Aster thought about all the bits of information, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, that she had learned in her four years at the palace.

"He has some weaknesses. Most of them will just hurt him a little and piss him off." She sorted out mentally, everything she had learned, into categories. "There's some things that might kill him, in theory, but it would be like belling the cat, in practice. He'd kill you long before what you were doing could kill him."

"Then.. There's no hope." Aster had never seen Wolfkiller look dejected before.

"I'm not sure…" There was one last category in Aster's mental list that she hadn't mentioned. "There's nothing you or I, or any normal person can do to kill the Maestro. But there's somebody, maybe, who could."

"Somebody?" That definitely got Wolfkiller's attention. "Who! Tell me!"

Aster shook her head. She wasn't sure if she should tell, or not. There was something she had to know about Daniel Wolfkiller first.

"You tell me something, first." she said. "Why did you shoot the tiger, back at the Maestro's palace. Was it because you hated it? Was it to get even because you were scared of it, and one of them scratched you?"

The scarred man didn't see what the tiger had to do with the subject at hand, but decided to humor Aster. If she knew of a way to kill the Maestro, the last thing he needed was her clamming up because he pissed her off. Of course, giving the wrong answer to her question probably would piss her off, but giving no answer at all definitely would piss her off.

"I didn't hate the tiger." He told her. "I was very frightened of, it yes, and didn't much like it when it clawed up my arm. It made me angry. But hate it? No. It's pointless to hate or try to get even with an animal that doesn't know any better and can't help itself. And as it was, it was locked up in a cage and hardly a threat to anyone."

"Then why shoot it?"

"Same reason you killed that woman, I imagine." Wolfkiller said. "It was suffering and dying, and there was nothing I could do to help. It was the kindest thing to do, to put it out of it's misery."

"I see." Aster went over and looked at her shelf of various objects. She began moving them around them as she thought.

Wolfkiller said nothing, and after a few minutes went over to the shelf, looking at the geometrical patterns, and noticed for the first time, the chalk shapes drawn all over the floor of the Mouse House. He turned his head back and forth, trying to make sense of it. It was hard. The compulsive caching of food and the crude place where Aster slept clashed with this… elegant… arrangement of objects. It was hard to decide if this were the den of an animal… or of an angel. Or something that partook of the natures of both.

Now Aster was putting some of the objects, some shiny brown seeds, into some of the shapes on the floor. The former stable master shook his head. The arrangement almost seemed to make sense, to have meaning but he had enough wisdom to know that he was never, ever going to understand what that meaning was. Possibly, if he had had a mind like Aster's, who saw reality from some point slightly off what constituted 'center' for most people, and probably had more thoughts and smarter thoughts in an hour than a dozen ordinary people had in a month, he might be able to grasp it. As it was, he had about as much hope of understanding it as an opossum had of learning to read.

Or of a blind man learning to read. Wolfkiller thought wryly. I've managed to elude the Maestro for over a year now, so let's not be too down your own intelligence, Daniel.

"Are you going to tell me who it is you think can kill the Maestro?" He asked again.

"I will." said Aster. The words had the tone of a promise. "I just wish I could get this right."

She moved some more objects around on the shelf. "It needs something else. I wish I had that blue glass bottle. Do you remember it?"

"I remember it well." It was the one she had stolen from him, her crude theft leaving all sorts of obvious clues.

"It used to be in my house. I kept it on my window, where the sun could shine through it. But I don't want to go in there. I don't live in that house any more. And I buried my father in front of it. So it's like a marker." She frowned at the objects and moved an acorn up by one shelf. "Do you think maybe you could look, and see if it's there? I'm not sure if it will be, my father might have thrown it away."

"I'll go look." He owed her that much. The bottle might have originally been stolen, but since that time, Aster had far more than earned it. Nobody should have had to suffer and see the things that she had. Nobody deserved that.

Daniel Wolfkiller left the Mouse House and was back in several minutes with the bottle. Aster was sitting on the floor, drawing a hexagon with an ornate arrangement of triangles on each side, diminishing in size. It reminded him of a snowflake. He set the bottle down next to her, wordlessly. Aster continued drawing for a few more minutes, then took the bottle, stood up, and turned it over in her hands, inspecting it.

"So it was there." She said, sounding a little surprised. "It's exactly the same one. Where did you find it?"

"It was on your window, in your old room. Where you said you kept it."

"So… he kept it there." Her father had kept her things. Maybe he had hoped she would someday come home. And she had. But it had been just a few, heartbreaking days too later. She sniffed. "Kept my bottle, and things, for me. That's good, I guess."

She took the cobalt blue bottle, and put it in the center of the very top shelf, where the two crossing shelves intersected. Then she regarded her other objects, and next to it, in a sort of an off-center triangular arrangement, no object really pointed directly towards the front or the back, put a white, fanged cat skull with a high, domed brain pan, and a pointed, jet black quartz crystal. Aster took a few steps back to regard it.

"That's better… I think." She looked some more. "As good as I can get it, I guess. I wish I could put it in the sun, but then the weather would wreck it."

"It's very nice." Wolfkiller said, although he didn't understand it at all. Then curiosity made him add: "What does it mean?"

"I don't know… the world, maybe." It was a new answer for Aster, one she had not thought of before. "If I could get it right, maybe I could understand the world. But it might have to be as big as the whole world, for that to happen."

"Well, it can't be that big. It's only one small shelf." He pointed out.

"Not here. But in my head, maybe." Aster said, and Wolfkiller wondered about what was going on in that head, that she thought she could fit the whole world into it. Or maybe she could fit the whole world into it. How was he to know for sure? The Post-War world that he lived in was a world of dark miracles, and strange things could and did happen. Like a man being transformed into a ten foot tall green monster.

"We should close the doors, and lock them." Aster said. "To keep the weather and animals out. It'll protect my things for a while, after I'm gone."

She looked at all the objects, occupying all the dimensions, vertical and horizontal space. If only she could make it perfect. If only she could make the world perfect, instead of the Hell that it was. But maybe close to perfect was as good as even she could do. She turned back to Wolfkiller. "You're right. I can't stay here. It's too close to the Maestro. And I've been leaving tracks and making a mess everywhere. I guess I wasn't thinking. So I'll go with you. If the Maestro hasn't found you in a year, you must know somewhere safe. And I'll tell you about him on the way."

Him. "The man who you think can kill the Maestro."

"Not a man." Aster corrected Wolfkiller, and for a moment he thought she meant a woman, perhaps the Shulk, but then why had she used the male pronoun him. Besides which, the Shulk was securely locked up and there was no way to free her. Aster's next statement, however, shocked him far more than if it had been the Shulk she was thinking of.

"Not a man." Aster repeated. "A Vampire."