Chapter 23. The Man Behind the Curtain
Of course, Aster could not enter the 'Consolidated Iron Mines' immediately. Horses and wagons were far less convenient than Pre-War cars. You simply couldn't park them where they sat at the end of the day. The horses had to be unhitched or de-saddled, and brought into stables to be brushed down, inspected, fed, and watered. The 'stables' in this case were located in tunnels dug into the side of the mountain. Well, hills, actually. Always curious about anything new, Aster studied them as she helped with the horses. It didn't take long for her to realize that the "Catskill Mountains" were actually very large hills, covered with dirt and trees, not real mountains made of bare rock such as she had seen in pictures. And not as tall as her first impression of them. Still, they were tall enough, and perhaps there was rock underneath. Probably there was. The iron had to come from somewhere.
She and the others had to put the horses into small paddocks inside the tunnel 'stables' that were dug into the side of the hills. The paddocks had the names of horses painted on wooden boards that hung from pegs above them, but nobody but Daniel Wolfkiller knew which horse was which, and he had to direct Aster and the people from Milwaukee as they put the horses away, then got food and water for them.
Once the horses were cared for, they had to deal with the wagons. Some of the ones with supplies, mostly the food, were driven into other tunnels. The tunnels were crude, and in some places supported with barely shaped logs rather than wooden beams. Probably they had been dug after the War. It was muddy work. The horses for the most part were too claustrophobic to cooperate with the maneuvering necessary to get the wagons into the cramped tunnels, and often they resorted to simply getting a dozen or so strong men to pull the wagons with ropes, while another 6 or so men pushed from behind. The half frozen mud was soon rutted, and covered with slushy puddles, and the tang of rust, almost like the taste of blood, was in Aster's mouth and nose as she worked.
She quickly grew frustrated that she was too weak to push the wagon as hard as a man could, and too large to effectively push from below like most of the other women were able to. A woman as abnormally tall as she was (especially for these times) could do little but get in the way. The sanguinous taste in her mouth from the rusty mud did little to improve her mood. Probably some percentage of the stuff was a slightly poisonous residue from the mines, that would take a year or ten off the lives of anyone exposed to it too often. Or would have, if the people who lived and worked after the War did not for the most part die too early from other causes to worry about the long term effects of exposure to toxins and pollutants.
Aster's boots, made from leather crudely stitched to a sole cut from an old tire, and lined with cloth, were not made for continual trudging through wetness. Water seeped through the stitches and soaked the lining. Her feet were painful with cold, and blisters rubbed by the gritty mud. She ignored it, and kept working anyways. At least as best as she could, given her combination of awkward size and lack of strength compared to a man.
They didn't both to put all the wagons in tunnels, but arranged them alongside the numerous Pre-War vehicles and pieces of construction equipment that were parked in the flat, muddy area that fronted the mines. Wolfkiller warned them not to park any wagons on the train track, though when Aster asked him why not, he merely shot her an angry look and refused to explain why. She shrugged. She was curious about what the tracks might currently be used for and annoyed that the older man wouldn't tell her. But it didn't really matter, there were plenty of other places to park the wagons. Once the wagons were arranged to his satisfaction, Wolfkiller directed them to a pile of ancient, cracked, plastic tarps that were heaped in one tunnel, and they covered the other wagons with them, to protect them and their contents from rain. Not that rain was likely. It seldom rained in Dystopia. But sometimes it did.
A few of the plastic tarps were so cracked and brittle with age, that they simply fell to shreds as they covered the wagons with them. Daniel Wolfkiller grew irate at this and told them angrily to all be 'more careful', but Aster didn't really see what could be done about it. The stuff was simply old. There hadn't been any plastic made since the War. Except, perhaps, in the Maestro's palace, and Aster was starting to wonder about that. Her mind, though definitely peculiar, was very good at solving certain types of problems very quickly, and she had had time, during the long wagon ride from Dystopia, to re-consider what she had been told, and believed, all her life, about high-tech goods being manufactured in the Maestro's palace. Probably some of it actually was, but there were so many things that were supposedly made there, that Aster simply couldn't see where the necessary raw materials or people to make them had come from. Or how it would all fit into the Maestro's palace, even as large as it was. She had seen a few places where things were made, she had once seen a small room with tanks and glassware, where the antibiotics and drugs that Dr. Llewellyn had used in his small hospital had been made.
But many of the other things, such as the computers and cybernetic parts used to make the Wardogs? She had never seen anything that looked like a factory to make silicon chips or other electronics. Not that she knew much about how they were made, other than what she had read in old, pre-war books, but the little she had read had given her the impression that many different factories, each refining or assembling products from one or more of the previous ones, had been needed before you got a complete computer. Starting with those that mined and refined different elements from the ground. None of that existed in the Maestro's palace, that she had ever seen. Nor had she ever seen large groups of people whose jobs she didn't know. It was possible that most of the manufacturing was a huge secret, but she didn't know why, say, such things as smelting copper or weaving cloth would have been kept a secret even by someone as insane as the Maestro. And although there were some areas of the palace that had been off limits to her, she had spent enough time in the palace and become familiar enough with it to realize that these areas could not have been large enough to accommodate several different types of factories.
She had considered, and quickly rejected, the possibility that the Maestro was making all the manufactured goods himself. True, he was probably strong enough to power several factories, but creating goods took time and detailed effort. The Maestro, however strong he might have been, simply was not fast enough to create all the goods himself. Nor did he seem the type to actually do boring labor, rather than using his strength to intimidate others into doing so, and spending his own time amusing himself with whatever forms of sadism and degradation he could come up with.
Most likely, the goods she had thought were manufactured were, in fact, scavenged. Recycled, and repurposed. There had been a lot of computers before the War, and unused, and kept out of the weather, their innards probably were still in fairly decent condition. It didn't take too much of a stretch on Aster's part to imagine their chips being disassembled, and used in such things as the control modules of the Wardogs.
It had all been a big lie, Aster decided, as yet another plastic tarp shredded in her hands. Something made up by the Maestro to make himself seem more impressive to the people of Dystopia. As if his sheer strength itself was not impressive enough. But he craved respect, and pure strength simply couldn't get that for him. Especially when used the way he did. It could only get fear. But if he could represent himself as a creator, as well as a destroyer, a genius who was the last source of high tech goods, well, that impressed people and would make them feel dependent on him, since none of them were smart enough to make a computer chip themselves, under current conditions.
None of them were smart enough to make a computer chip under current conditions, because it simply wasn't possible under current conditions, Aster decided. Nobody was smart enough to do it, including the Maestro. He was a fraud. A scavenger, like the rest of them. He simply had a better supply line, and a pre-war education that let him re-use scavenged objects like computer chips for purposes different enough from their original ones that it seemed new.
Aster walked absently back into the tunnel to go get another tarp. She barely looked where she was going, and hardly noticed as she tripped over a board. Pieces were clicking into place in her mind, assorted bits of information were assembling into a complete picture.
"Aw, hell no." She mumbled, drawing a look from a few of the people working with her. It was all a big fake. Worse than a fake. A fraud. The Maestro had convinced everyone they needed him. That he was the only one smart enough to still create complex manufactured goods in the post war world. When it had been scavenged all along. She or anyone else could have done the same thing. It had been ordinary people like them who had made all the stuff from before the War. But they'd all been too afraid of the Maestro to think too hard about it. To afraid to look at the man behind the curtain.
The man she had seen, once, a long time ago. When a much smaller Aster had squeezed into a crack that no adult could have gotten into, and seen a tiny, old looking man who had eventually transformed before her amazed eyes from a weak looking human being into a ten foot tall green monstrosity. But the man… the man behind the curtain. Living in a green city. Like a book Aster had once read, a long time ago.
"The Wizard of Oz." She let the corner of the tarp drop, as she realized it aloud.
"Pick that up!" someone, she didn't know who, snapped at her.
"No." The person gave her a rude push that she barely noticed. There had been other Oz books. She had read all of them, at least all of them that had been in the Library, when she had been a child. Not just 'The Wizard of Oz', which most citizens of Dystopia were familiar with, as it was often shown in the single operating movie theater, but another one came to mind now. One with a faded picture on the cover of a rather regal figure, standing arrogantly in a chariot that was pulled by a lion and a tiger.
The Cowardly Lion, and the Hungry Tiger. She remembered. And an army stretched out behind the chariot. It all seemed so obvious now, but as a child, when the Maestro had first demanded that her father train two tigers from the zoo to pull him in a chariot, she hadn't made the obvious connection. It had been too ludicrous.
How could she have been expected to connect as frightening a creature as the Maestro with one as harmless as Ozma of Oz?
"Aw, hell, no." This was bad. Worse than she thought. Aster knew that her own mind was often lost in the books she had read so long ago. She didn't know if it had to be that way, if the odd child she had been would have turned out that way no matter what, or if it was her way of dealing with what she had seen and endured during her short life. But for one ordinary human woman to spend much of her life disconnected from actual reality and losing herself in books was one thing, and not much cause for alarm.
For a ten foot tall Maestro, capable of leveling buildings with few punches to be lost in old books, and no doubt experiencing the inevitable frustration when reality failed to live up to fantasy was quite another. The tigers were a good example. The cover on the book 'Ozma of Oz' had made riding in a chariot pulled by large, ferocious animals look fun, safe, and easy. It failed to show the reality of how hard it was to train and control such creatures, or the constant care they would require. Aster couldn't remember if her father had tried to warn the Maestro about what the reality of using tigers in such a manner was like. Probably he had been too frightened to warn him, and the Maestro probably would not have listened even if her father had warned him. But deliberate blindness of reality could not erase that reality, and inevitably confronted with the reality of living tigers, the Maestro had neglected them, and in the end killed one simply for following it's instincts, and left the other to starve in a cage.
She looked around for Daniel Wolfkiller, but he was nowhere to be seen. The night seemed to come earlier in the shadows cast by the Catskill Mountains, and she asked a few people where he had gone. One of them mumbled something about a 'meeting', and pointed towards the main entrance to the mines. There was a heavy wooden door with rusted iron straps, currently partly open. The door looked solid, at least six inches thick, despite the rust. The wood was covered with tar, and not rotted, and there were three sets of slots for bars on the inside. Not that that would stop the Maestro for more than a fraction of a second, but it might slow down his guards. If they hadn't brought any heavy ordinance. Which probably wasn't likely. This place survived because it was far enough away and inconveniently enough located that it hadn't been found.
The mine was in many ways, the opposite of the Maestro's palace. The hallways there had been wide and tall, built to easily accommodate someone the size of the Maestro, and lit by electricity. The rooms had been large, too. The mine on the other hand, consisted of narrow tunnels, poorly lit by a few torches and lanterns, and the ceiling was so low that Aster imagined that the Maestro would have to practically crawl to get through. Hell, Daniel Wolfkiller probably had to stoop to get through, and her own head sometimes brushed the support beams. The 'rooms', such as they were, looked to be little more than slightly wider than usual tunnels, branching out to one side or the other.
Large as it was, though, the Maestro's palace had been a prison. It was an odd thought. Aster had always thought of prison cells as being small and cramped, and freedom as existing in spacious places. But clearly, space did not make for freedom, nor did cramped quarters necessarily make a prison. She didn't have time to reflect on it further, as she heard raised voices from one small 'room' ahead of her. Aster hurried to look in, and saw Daniel Wolfkiller arguing with several other people.
Not wanting to risk the large man's bad temper, Aster wedged herself in behind the crowd and listening to what was being said. After a few minutes, she derived the gist of the argument, which was apparently that plans had been made for a few years to steal the Maestro's cruise ship 'The Green Fantasy', and sail it to Iceland, which from what the people in the room had to say, was a cross between Pre-War New York City, and Heaven itself.
Aster doubted that assessment of Iceland was anywhere near the truth. She half-listened to the crowd alternating between completely unrealistic praises of a place they knew little about, other than what they had heard in a few radio broadcasts, and screaming at Daniel Wolfkiller first for wanting to change the plans, secondly for bringing a few dozen complete strangers from The Land of The Cannibal Vampire into their oh-so-sacred mining tunnels, and thirdly, for wanting to take THEM to the Land of the Cannibal Vampire, rather than God's Own Paradise On Earth Also Known as Iceland.
Wolfkiller even had a time frame for his plan. They had to do it when the Maestro was on one of his trips to collect taxes, women, and anything else he wanted from the people who lived in and around Dystopia. The Maestro did this four times a year, in January, April, July, and October, to correspond with the four seasons. If they were going to do as he proposed, it had to be in April. April gave them over three months to train an 'army'. Daniel Wolfkiller seemed to like the word 'army' a lot, and kept using it. There were other reasons it had to be April, as well. Most of the snow would be melted on what was left of the roads between Dystopia and Milwaukee by that time, meaning they would have one less obstruction to worry about. And it would give them time to find land in Wisconsin and put in crops of some sort.
Despite the fact that Daniel Wolfkiller seemed to have everything planned well, those listening to him kept grumbling in disappointment that they could not go to Iceland. Aster thought they sounded rather like children who had not gotten the present they wanted for Christmas. In between listening to the praises and complaints of the crowd, Aster thought about the plan that Daniel Wolfkiller was trying to talk them out of, the one they had their hearts set on, that of taking the Maestro's own cruise ship to Iceland. She half-closed her eyes, envisioning a map of the world in her head, a tiny cruise ship sailing from Dystopia to a distant island nation. Tiny people dotted the map she held in her head, and she considered their most like actions. Including a tiny, infuriated Maestro. Human behavior, as a subset of animal behavior. None of the possibilities she contemplated turned out well. She shook her head, and finally spoke.
"You'll never make it to Iceland." She finally said in a clear tone, that cut through the grumbles of the crowd.
The people turned and looked at her.
"Who the hell are you?" One of them finally asked.
"Aster Aversa."
"The Zookeeping Bitch." She was apparently known, even here. At least by the snotty sounding owner of the voice. "How the hell can you know that we wouldn't make it to Iceland. You've been talking to Wolfkiller, haven't you? He told you that? Right?"
"He told me no such thing." Aster shook her head. "And I wouldn't believe it, just because he told it to me, anyways. I worked it out for myself, while you were all busy talking, just now."
"Bull shit." said a bald man with a grey moustache, wearing a patched, quilted coat that looked like it had once had a bright plaid, but now was mostly mud brown and faded grey. "How can you know all that? Or work it out in a few minutes?"
People. They thought so damned slowly, and took forever to realize the obvious. Or maybe they just didn't want to realize it. Aster explained her reasoning to them.
"The Maestro has weapons. I've seen them. Things from before the War. Missiles and stuff. He'd find the ship and blow it out of the water. Even if he doesn't have… homing beacons… or something on the ship, he had other ships with radar. The ocean is simply too empty. There's nowhere to hide between here and Iceland. And even if he didn't find us… the Icelanders would never let us land. They have radar and weapons, too. I've heard people talk about how them mention them sometimes in radio their broadcasts. They'd blow us out of the water before we got within 50 miles of the place."
"But…" the bald man seemed unplussed. "Why would they do that? They're not monsters, like the Maestro."
"If you lived in Iceland, would YOU let a boat from Dystopia land there? Knowing that the Maestro could very well be aboard?"
"But… we're not bringing the Maestro there!"
"And they're supposed to know that how, exactly? Or that we're not bringing nukes to blow them up?"
"We could talk to them on the radio. Tell them to send a small boat, inspect our ship."
"We could do that. I doubt they'd listen."
"They have to listen to reason. Surely they have to be reasonable people. Or they'd never have a civilization there."
"They are reasonable people. But they want to live. Oh, they might believe that we're innocent refugees. Probably they would believe it. But they would never let us land."
The bald man sneered. "Oh really? Why not?"
"The fact that we might be innocent, from our own point of view, doesn't mean that we aren't a threat to them." Aster explained. "If we get all the way to Iceland, they're going to assume that the Maestro probably let us get away. Meaning that he's using us without our knowledge, to attack them. Possibly they may think he has nukes hidden on the boat that we don't know about. Or that he's infected us -without our knowing it - with a highly contagious and deadly, but slow acting plague of some kind. Even if they don't think we're a direct threat… letting us land there would be regarded as an act of war by the Maestro. He'd probably attack them immediately."
Aster sighed. "They are reasonable people, I'm sure. They aren't evil. They aren't monsters. But they're human, like the rest of us. They are going to try and take care of themselves, and their own families and friends first, even if it means letting innocent strangers die. Or killing them to save themselves from the Maestro. For however long they can save themselves from the Maestro. I'm sure he'll get after them eventually. In ten years, or a hundred. But they want those years, for as long as they last."
The bald man looked annoyed and pulled angrily at his own grey moustache. From the looks of the hair growing there, yanking on it and actually pulling patches of it out was a frequent habit of his. Aster sighed. People generally did not react well to hard truths that took away whatever hope they had been counting on, and often blamed the person who informed them of the truths for their disappointment. Another enemy for her to deal with.
"What do we do, then? I don't like the sounds of this Vampire that Wolfkiller has been talking about."
"We have a better chance with him, than with the Maestro." Aster pointed out. "For one thing, he's nowhere near as strong. Enough of us can probably fight him off, if we need to. And the people from Wisconsin have managed to survive his presence fairly well for a hundred years." The latter statement was a slight lie. During the long wagon trip, one of the things Aster had had time to think through were the things she knew about Morbius, including his dietary requirements, and the guilty, angry looks the people from Wisconsin sometimes gave her, when she mentioned the Vampire. Aster had run various scenarios through her head of what may have happened to the humans and the Vampire living in and near Milwaukee since the war, and none of them made complete sense to her.
There was something missing… something that the people from Wisconsin probably knew, that they were not telling her. That pissed Aster off. She didn't like not knowing things that she wanted to know, and she especially didn't like people deliberately not telling her things that she wanted to know.
Well, if and when they ever got to Wisconsin, she would find out sooner or later, what the missing pieces of the puzzle were. Probably she wouldn't like it. People did not keep guilty secrets because the concealed information was rosy and fun. But whatever it was, she was fairly sure that she could not possibly dislike it more than she did the Maestro. At least she hoped not.
For now, Aster dismissed the missing information, and returned to strict truth.
"It's going to be a lot easier to hide, fleeing by land than by sea." She pointed out. "Mind you, stealing the Green Fantasy is a still a good idea. In fact, we're probably going to have to, if we're to get away with this."
The bald man pulled at his moustache, this time coming away with two or three hairs. "What for? We can't take the boat to Wisconsin. The Erie locks got blown apart in the War."
Aster was about to answer when Wolfkiller interrupted.
"Smart." he said bluntly. Obviously, much as he disliked her, he could follow Aster's reasoning.
"What's smart about stealing a boat we can't use and don't need? Sounds like pointless danger to me." The bald man complained.
"Misdirection." said Aster. "We're fleeing by land, but we don't want the Maestro to know that. We steal the boat so he thinks we're heading for Iceland. The boat is old… but it still works. Including the … what do you call it… autopilot, I think. And the Maestro likes to smash things. We give him something to smash, and a reason to smash it. Once he's wanked off his mad-on and thinks he's killed all of us, he'll be so pleased with himself that he probably won't bother thinking or worrying about us any more."
The bald man considered this. He reached inside his plaid quilted jacket, and fondled something Aster couldn't see. A weapon of some sort, most likely.
"What if he swims after us?" The bald man pointed out, a smug look on his face. "That bastard can hold his breath like a whale. What if he goes after us to see where we went down and look for the bodies? Wants to bring them back to stick on pikes in front of his palace. Or worse yet, wants to kill us himself, instead of letting a missile do the work. Don't think he'll be too happy with an empty boat, do you?"
Aster thought about this. "If he looks to see where the ship went down…" she bit on the inside of her lip. "The ocean is a pretty good hiding place. We can put things on the boat, to make it look like we were on it. Some food and other stuff. And bodies. We can get those from the Maestro's charnel pit. Dress them up like us. After being burned when the boat is blown up, and eaten by fish, they won't be identifiable. And I think the Maestro isn't going to be surprised by not finding every last thing we steal, he'll figure it got covered by mud or drifted away in currents."
"Hmm." The balding man did not seem convinced. "And if he comes to kill us himself? Swims after us? Or takes another boat? The Green Fantasy isn't the only ship he owns. How about that, miss smartypants?"
Aster's intellect was undoubtedly more than adequate to solve this problem. But her emotional makeup was not. She could not find, could not let herself see, the obvious answer to this particular problem. Despite what she had been through in her life, what she had done, she lacked the ruthlessness needed for it.
The bald man's face puffed up so widely with smugness that Aster thought it might pop like a balloon.
"Didn't think so." He said, his face puffing up even more. "You didn't even think of that, did you? Not so smart, are you?"
Aster's mouth opened, then shut again. She felt like swearing at the rude, smug man, but that would have just made things worse. Instead, she gaped like a hooked fish.
She was rescued from her quandary by Wolfkiller.
"She didn't think of it, but I did." The man said harshly. "What you're talking about is not a problem. There's ways to deal with it."
"How?" The bald man sneered.
"How do you think?" Wolfkiller sneered back, straightening to his full height. "We put a bomb on the boat. And ask for a volunteer. Hopefully someone fairly old, or with a terminal illness."
That shut the bald man up, but Daniel Wolfkiller kept tonguelashing him. "And you're expecting a woman - a WOMAN! - who is barely more than a hurt, frightened child to think like a military commander. Just because she has the ability, doesn't mean she has the desire. Or that the rumors and graffiti about her mean that's she's some sort of hero like the dead ones on display in the Maestro's palace. And before that smug look on your face gets any bigger, you'd best consider that she managed to survive living with the Maestro for five years. Think you could do that well?"
The expression on the bald man's face turned from smugness to sourness, like a ripe apple shriveling and fermenting in the late autumn sun. He muttered something about the Maestro not being into buggery, but otherwise said nothing. His face was flushed in the torches and lanterns that illuminated the small room. Aster thought he looked like an embarrassed pig, and enjoyed a mental picture of him on a spit in front of the Maestro's fireplace, an apple stuffed in his mouth. Then she thought about the six year old boy that the Maestro had eaten, that last, terrible night, she had been there, and felt bad. How much better was she, really, than the Maestro himself, to think about such things, or wish them on someone just for being a little mean to her?
Of course, Aster didn't much like the comment that Daniel Wolfkiller had made, disparaging her because she was a 'woman'. It didn't seem fair to her, and she cursed whatever god had decided she should be born a girl. If she hadn't been a girl, the Maestro would never have been so angry at her knowing so many things. Would never have taken her away from her father to rape her. None of this would ever have happened. She would be Zookeeper now.
The Maestro still would have gone mad, when his son died. A mocking voice in her head pointed out. He still would have destroyed the Zoo. You'd be NOTHING. Same as you are, now.
Even if the Maestro hadn't destroyed the Zoo, there were other problems. She had read some books about genetics in Dr. Llewellyn's office, back at the Maestro's palace, and the unpleasant nagging thought often entered her head that everything her family had done, saving the zoo animals for as long as they had, had been an exercise in futility. In fact, the lives of the human survivors in and around Dystopia, were very likely an exercise in futility.
They were all doomed. There was one way out. Maybe. But most people wouldn't like it. More likely, her thought of the intelligent descendents of bats digging up human ruins, tens of millions of years from now, was what they had to look forward to.
Aster's thoughts were interrupted by the bald man, still as red and puffed up as a pig. He pointed angrily at her. "YOU - come with me."
Aster looked at him as if he had said something utterly insane, such as proposing that castrated animals could still sire offspring. "I don't have to go with you. You're not the boss of me."
The bald man's face puffed up even larger. "The hell I'm not. I'm in charge of everything here!"
Aster glanced over at Daniel Wolfkiller. This made the bald man angry, for some reason. "What? You thought the Wolfkiller was in charge? Didn't he tell you anything?"
"I didn't have time." Daniel said. "There were other things to be done." He turned to Aster, a slightly sour look on his face. "Aster, meet General Eric Monroe. He IS in charge here. He owns the mines."
Aster thought about this. "Is he a… descendent… of the people who used to mine iron here."
The bald man curled his lip slightly.
"He found them empty. Took them over." Wolfkiller explained.
"Ah." Right of salvage was something that Aster understood. A lot of stuff from before the War was lying around, and belonged to whoever could find and hold it. "What… army… is he a General of?"
General Monroe interrupted before Wolfkiller could answer. "I'll explain that in private. Now, you come with me. NOW."
A warning flashed in Daniel's eyes, and Aster decided not to argue any more. She didn't much like this fat General, who didn't seem to be the General of any real army at all. But she wasn't sure how dangerous he was, or what sort of power he had around here. When dealing with an unknown dangerous animal, it was always safest to watch and wait. She followed the self-styled 'General' Monroe out of the small room of the mine, down a tunnel, and into an even smaller room that was too dark to see in until Wolfkiller entered with a lantern. Even with the lantern, the room was still dim. There was crude furniture in it, several round chunks of logs that were meant as stools, part of an old pre-war pallet that had been torn apart and put back together as a table, and several chests with rusty padlocks that weren't even locked.
"Thing one." General Monroe pointed at Wolfkiller. "Don't ever bring anyone here, ever again, without telling them who is in charge." He turned and pointed at Aster. "Thing two. Don't ever question or deliberately disobey me in public again."
He lowered his finger. "Feel free to question me in private all you want. From what Daniel's been saying, any question you have is likely to be a good one. And what you had to say about not getting to Iceland made good sense."
"Then why did you argue with it?"
"I'm in charge here, that's why. I won't tolerate insubordination."
Aster thought it was a pretty shaky sort of 'being in charge' that couldn't stand up to being questioned at all, but said nothing. She needed this 'General Monroe' to help her, and if that meant stroking his shaky ego, so be it.
"Now… what questions do you have?"
Aster thought about this. "What army are you a general of?"
"The one I'm in the process of building. The one everyone here is going to be part of."
Aster was not at all sure if she wanted to be part of any army, let alone one headed by this very unpleasant man, but let that pass. If his 'army' would help her, then she would be a part of it, if that made him happy. For now.
"If you are just making your army, right now, then how can you be a 'general'. You have to have military experience to be a 'general'? Don't you?"
"He has military experience." Daniel Wolfkiller said in a slightly sour tone. "He used to be a bandit."
"That's military experience?"
"I was a successful bandit." The self-styled 'general' pointed out. "Unlike the ones that the Wolfkiller here said that you met on the way here."
A thief and a murderer then, Aster decided. Who apparently was smart enough to realize he was getting too old for the thief and murder business. But pretty much all governments throughout history were self-legalized thieves and murderers.
General Monroe noticed Aster thinking, remained silent for a few moments, then went on. "Here's a little test for you. Unlike the bandits that you and Wolfkiller saw on the way here, I was never caught and hung. In fact, you would never have even seen me or my men, unless I decided to rob you. Which I would never have tried against a group as large as yours. So you tell me… what would you have seen?"
Aster's eyes closed slightly, envisioning different sized caravans of travellers, and a group of bandits led by a younger General Erick Monroe.
"I don't think I would have seen you and your whole group of bandits." Aster said thoughtfully. "You wouldn't have had supply wagons with you, not to rob people, they'd slow you down. You'd take their wagons if you needed them. Without wagons, and with a whole group of men, it would have been obvious that you were bandits, and people would have reported you to the Maestro. So you must have had scouts. Maybe a few people disguised as travellers or beggars. Maybe even a small, weak looking group of bandits, that people wouldn't bother worrying about or reporting. Or you might have paid people who lived near the road to tell you about small groups of travellers that were safe to rob."
And kill. Aster didn't add that, but it was fairly obvious to her by the fact that General Monroe had said he was a successful bandit. Successful bandits did not leave witnesses. She resolved to be very, very careful around this bandit chieftan. He was a killer, and while not stronger than the Maestro, was still stronger than her.
"Hmm." General Monroe nodded. "You figured out most of my methods. Not all, but most. And a lot faster than it took me."
He strode over to the chests, and took out a wooden board, and a box of chess and checker pieces. "I want to try something with you. Play a couple games of this with me. Let's see how you are at strategy."
Aster loved both chess and checkers. Her eyes lit up as she regarded the nicely carved wooden pieces. The black and white checkers had ornate geometrical carvings on top, and the chess set looked like tiny little people. There were tiny carved, cute, child-like faces on the pawns and regal faces on the other pieces. General Monroe set up the checker game first, and Aster beat him three times in a row. She could simply see too many moves ahead in the game, compared to what the older man could. After the third game, the 'General' grew visibly annoyed, and set up some chess pieces instead. At this game, Aster lost. Badly. And fairly quickly.
After he second game, General Monroe stood up, apparently having proven something to himself. He looked down at Aster. "Do you know why you will never be a military leader?"
The question had little meaning for Aster. She had no more desire or ability to be a 'military leader' than she had to dig a hole in the ground like a mole. She shook her head.
"Neither do I." General Monroe put the two games away. "In the sense that I don't know what sort of joke which god might have had in mind, when he made you, then broke you. But you'll never be a military leader. Oh, you've the mind for strategy. Better than mine. But you're a woman. And you've too much compassion. Especially for a world like this one. You're afraid to sacrifice pieces. At least the ones that seem like people to you. As for sacrificing actual people… soldiers in a war… you'd kill to defend yourself… you'd even sacrifice yourself for others… but you'd never give the orders to send others to their death, would you?"
"I don't like killing people." Aster didn't know why she felt guilty. "I was supposed to be a Zookeeper. Keep animals alive. Not go around killing."
"In war" General Monroe said in a cold voice. "Sometimes you have to sacrifice some people to keep the rest alive. But that's not your job. You've in the army now. You've a brilliant mind for strategy. I intend to use it. You'll train. You'll answer my questions, to the best of your ability. You'll ask questions… in private. You might even give orders. But not about people. That's my job."
Aster thought about this. She really didn't care if she 'gave orders' or not. She had no desire to be a tyrant like the Maestro, or this General Monroe. Truth be told, she really wasn't interested enough in most people to care what they did, unless they worked for her, in which case the only thing she cared about was whether they did their jobs. "Why are you building an army, to escape from here? It seems hard. Why not just live off what you stole as a bandit?"
"Ah. A good question." General Monroe smiled slightly for the first time. "It's about a woman. Or several. It always is." He glanced over at Daniel Wolfkiller, for some reason. "For a long time I didn't think I cared about them. Or the 'presents' I gave some of them. But as I've gotten older… I've started to care a little. I don't have a 'God'. Or much longer to live. All the money I've stolen won't buy me five more years of life. So if I can use what I've gotten, and what I've learned to get them to a better place than this, away from that Green bastard, maybe things won't have been a complete waste."
He's dying. Aster realized. Probably cancer. The mines were free of radiation, but the life of a bandit, cutting through the wastelands repeatedly, had caught up with the former bandit in the end. This was his particular way of putting his affairs in order.
"So… will you help me? Follow my orders?" General Monroe asked. "So we can get the hell out of this Hell?"
Aster nodded and held out her hand. She was in the army now.