House Of The Scorpion

by Nancy Farmer

  They rushed down the front steps and along a winding path, going through darkened gardens until they reached the edge of the desert. Behind them Matt saw the great mansion with its white pillars and orange trees decorated with lights. His bare foot crunched down on a bullhead thorn.

  “Ow!” Matt crouched down to remove the thorn.

  The bodyguards whisked him off the ground before he could reach his foot. Then Matt realized where they were heading.

  “The hospital!” he gasped.

  “It’s all right, mi vida,” said Celia, but it didn’t sound all right. Her voice was choked.

  “I’m not sick!” Matt cried. He hadn’t been to the hospital since he’d seen the thing on the bed.

  “You’re not sick. El Patrón is,” said one of the guards.

  Matt stopped struggling then. It was perfectly natural for them to bring him to El Patrón. He loved El Patrón, and the old man would want to see him if he was very sick.

  “What happened?” Matt said.

  “Heart attack,” grunted the guard.

  “He’s not … dead?”

  “Not yet.”

  Matt suddenly felt faint with shock. His vision blurred and his heart pounded. He twisted his head away from the bodyguard’s arm and vomited.

  “What the—?” The man gave a startled shout followed by a string of curses. “Crikey! Look at what he did to my suit!”

  Matt no longer bothered about the thorn in his foot. Far worse problems overwhelmed him. His stomach felt like he’d swallowed a barrel cactus. Something was wrong with his eyes, too. The hospital walls swarmed with weird colors.

  Orderlies lifted him onto a stretcher, quickly wheeled him down a hall, and transferred him to a bed. Someone shouted, “His heartbeat’s all over the place!” and someone else ran a needle into his arm. Matt was no longer sure of what was real and what was a nightmare. He seemed to be in the trough at the eejit pens, floating in yellow sludge. He vomited again and again until only a thin, bile-flavored liquid dribbled out. He saw Furball sitting at the foot of his bed, looking reproachful. Was this how Furball suffered after he’d ingested the laudanum?

  Then it was Saint Francis who sat at the foot of the bed. Brother Wolf you have done much evil so that all folk are your enemy. Yet I would be your friend, he said.

  Sure. Okay, thought Matt.

  The figure of Saint Francis shifted to that of Tarn Lin. The bodyguard looked gray and haggard. He bowed his head as though in prayer, although praying was very far from the activities Matt associated with the man.

  A faint, blue light illuminated the window. Dawn was approaching, and the horrors of the night were ebbing away. Matt swallowed. His throat was so raw, he wasn’t sure he could speak.

  “Tam Lin,” he croaked. The bodyguard’s head snapped up. He looked—Matt couldn’t quite put a name to it—both relieved and miserable.

  “Don’t talk unless you have to, laddie.”

  “El Patrón,” whispered Matt.

  “He’s stable,” said Tam Lin. “They had to do a piggyback transplant on him.” Matt raised his eyebrows. “That’s where they put a donor heart next to his, to regulate the beat. The donor was—the heart was—too small to do the job by itself.”

  Matt understood something of the process from his science classes. When someone died in an accident, his organs were used to save the lives of sick people. If the heart El Patrón got was small, it must have come from a child. Maybe that was what had depressed Tam Lin.

  “I was at… eejit pens,” Matt said, and paused to let the pain in his throat subside. “Got sick. Farm Patrol … found me.”

  “You were in the wastelands?” Tam Lin exploded. “Good God! No wonder your heart went wonky! There’s a witch’s brew of chemicals in that soil. I want you to promise me never, never to go there again.”

  Matt was overwhelmed by the bodyguard’s anger. How was he to know where the dangers were when no one told him? His eyes began to leak tears in spite of his efforts not to appear cowardly.

  “Heck, I’m sorry,” said Tam Lin. “I shouldn’t yell at you when you’re down. Look, you did a daft thing, nosing around the eejit pens, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad mistake. They do say guardian angels guide the steps of idiots.” The man looked speculatively at Matt, as though he wanted to say more.

  “Sorry,” whispered Matt.

  “And so you should be. Celia’s been wearing a groove in the floor outside for hours. Do you feel up to a little weeping and wailing?”

  “If you take … thorn out of foot,” croaked Matt.

  The bodyguard yanked back the covers and found the problem at once. “Bloody idiots,” he growled under his breath. “Can’t find anything unless it has a bull’s-eye painted around it.” He pulled out the thorn and swabbed Matt’s foot with rubbing alcohol.

  Matt wanted badly to ask him questions. Do you feel sorry about killing twenty children? for instance, and Why were you angry about Furball when you did something far worse? But it took more confidence than Matt had to confront Tam Lin.

  Weeping and wailing was exactly what Celia had in mind. She lamented over Matt until he felt hysterical. Still, it was nice to be loved. Even better, she stood up to the hospital orderlies like a tigress. “He’s not needed here anymore!” she cried in both English and Spanish.

  Matt was loaded onto a stretcher and carried back through the fresh, cool dawn air to Celia’s apartment. She tucked him into bed and stood guard over him for the rest of the day.

  El Patrón’s piggyback heart performed valiantly, but it was clear the old man had passed a kind of milestone. He no longer purred around restlessly in his motor-driven wheelchair. Physical therapists worked his arms and legs to keep the muscles from wasting away, but something vital had gone.

  Once El Patrón would have roared with laughter when Tam Lin described how his enemies in the U.S. and Aztlán governments had been disgraced or met with strange accidents. Now he merely nodded. Such pleasures were beyond El Patrón now, and he had few enough left at the age of 148.

  Tam Lin had treasures brought from the vast hoard of gifts the old man had amassed. El Patron ran his gnarled fingers through a box of diamonds and sighed. “In the end they’re only rocks.”

  Matt, who spent much time by El Patrón’s bed these days, said, “They’re very beautiful.”

  “I no longer see the life in them. The fire that made men go to war for them is gone.”

  And Matt understood that what El Patrón missed was not the beauty of the stones, but the joy he once took in owning fine things. He felt very sorry for the old man and didn’t know how to comfort him.

  “Saint Francis says it’s good to give stuff away to the poor,” Matt suggested.

  The change that came over El Patron then was extraordinary. He drew himself up in the bed. His eyes flashed, and energy bubbled up from some unknown reservoir. “Give … things … away?” he cried in the voice of a man one hundred years younger. “Give things away? I can’t believe I heard that! What have they been teaching you!”

  “It was only a suggestion,” Matt said, aghast at the reaction he’d provoked. “Saint Francis lived a long time ago.”

  “Give things away?” mused the old man. “Was that why I fought my way out of Durango? Was that why I built an empire greater than El Dorado’s? El Dorado bathed in gold dust every day. Did you know that?”

  Matt did. El Patrón had told him at least a dozen times.

  “He stood on the porch of his golden house,” said El Patrón, his black eyes shining, “and his servants dusted him with metal until he shone like the sun. His people worshipped him like a god.”

  The old man was lost in the fantasy now, and his eyes looked far away to the jungles where the fabled king had lived.

  Later Tam Lin complimented Matt on his cleverness. “Brought the roses back to his cheeks, suggesting he give away his dragon hoard. I’ve been too soft on him. What he really needed was a boot up the rear end.”

  “What’s
a dragon hoard?” asked Matt. He and Tam Lin were sitting in Celia’s garden sharing a pitcher of lemonade. The bodyguard rarely had time to visit since El Patron’s heart operation. Now, though, because of Matt’s incautious remark, the old man was roaming around the house by himself. Tam Lin said he was counting the spoons.

  “Ah, now,” said Tam Lin. “That’s what a dragon amasses from pillaging castles. He keeps his wealth in a deep, dark cave in the mountains, and at night he sleeps on it. It’s probably uncomfortable with all those jewel-encrusted daggers and so forth. But the dragon is so covered with scales, he can’t feel it.”

  Matt loved it when Tam Lin spoke of things he must have heard as a child. A soft, musical lilt came into his voice. Matt could imagine him as a boy, long before the events that had blunted his nose and reamed him with scars from head to toe.

  “Does it make the dragon happy?” Matt asked.

  “Does it make the dragon happy?” echoed Tam Lin. “Why, I never thought of that. I suppose it does. What other pleasure can a creature have whose life consists of making everyone else miserable? To go on, though: The most amazing thing about dragons is that they know when anything, no matter how small, has been taken from their hoard. They can be in a deep slumber. But if some foolish lad creeps up in the middle of the night and takes only one coin, the dragon wakes up. You wouldn’t want to be that lad then. The dragon burns him right down to a lump of coal. And tosses him onto a heap with the other lumps of coal who made the mistake of trying to steal from a dragon hoard.”

  Bees hovered over banks of flowers in the warm afternoon sun. Normally, Celia preferred growing vegetables, but she’d recently taken an interest in flowers. Black-eyed Susans climbed one of the walls, and a passionflower vine decorated another. Foxgloves and larkspurs formed a tidy bed framed by other plants Matt didn’t recognize. Some were sensitive to sunlight, so Tam Lin had constructed a latticework arbor. Matt thought it made the garden much nicer.

  “Does El Patron know how much stuff he has in his storeroom?” Matt knew, of course, who was being referred to with the dragon story.

  “Probably not. But you don’t want to take a chance on it,” said Tam Lin.

  19

  COMING-OF-AGE

  El Patrón’s burst of energy didn’t last long. Soon he was as pale and weak as ever. He rambled on about his childhood and his seven brothers and sisters who had all died young. He listened to Matt play the guitar, although the boy’s fingers weren’t long enough yet to play really complicated pieces.

  Matt’s voice was high and sweet—an angel’s voice, Celia said. El Patrón went into a quiet daze when he listened to it. Matt loved to see the old man then, with his eyes half closed and his mouth curved up in a gentle smile. It was better than any compliment.

  One day, as Matt was singing a Spanish ballad, his voice cracked. It dropped more than an octave to produce a sound more like a braying donkey than a boy. Embarrassed, he cleared his throat and tried again. At first the song went smoothly, but after a few moments the same thing happened again. Matt stood up in confusion.

  “So it has happened,” murmured El Patórn from his bed.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll ask Celia for cough drops,” said Matt.

  “You don’t know what’s wrong, do you? You’re so cut off from the rest of the world, you don’t know.”

  “I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

  The old man laughed: a dry, dusty sound. “Ask Celia or Tam Lin to explain. Just play for me without singing. That’s good enough.”

  But when Matt asked Celia later, she threw her apron over her face and burst into tears. “What is it? What’s wrong?” cried Matt, thoroughly alarmed.

  “You’ve grown up!” wailed Celia from behind the apron.

  “Isn’t that okay?” Matt’s voice, to his horror, boomed out like a bass drum.

  “Of course it is, mi vida,” said Celia, wiping her eyes with the cloth and putting on an unconvincing smile. “It’s always a shock when a little lamb sprouts horns and turns into a big, handsome ram. But it’s a good thing, darling, really it is. We must have a party to celebrate.”

  Matt sat in his room with the guitar as he listened to Celia bang pots in the kitchen. He didn’t believe it was a good thing to grow up. He could read Celia’s moods no matter how many smiles she produced. He knew that underneath she was upset, and he wanted to know why.

  He’d become a man. No, that was wrong. Since he wasn’t a boy to begin with, he couldn’t turn into a man. He was an adult clone. An old memory surfaced of the doctor telling Rosa that clones went to pieces when they got older. Matt no longer feared he would actually fall apart. But what did happen?

  Matt felt his face for the first hint of whiskers. There was nothing except a couple of bumps left over from his last bout of acne. Maybe it’s a mistake, he thought. He attempted the ballad again and made it through only the first line before his throat betrayed him. It was extremely disappointing. His new voice wasn’t nearly as good as the old one.

  I wonder if María’s voice will change too, he thought.

  The party that night was subdued. Celia and Tam Lin sat in the courtyard with glasses of champagne to celebrate Matt’s new status. As a special treat Matt was allowed one too, although Celia insisted on watering it down with lemonade. Fireflies Matt had ordered from a catalog pulsed across the warm, humid garden. A heavy odor filled the walled-in space from Celia’s new and somewhat creepy plants. She said she had ordered them from a curandera in Aztlán.

  A sudden thought struck Matt. “How old am I?” he asked, holding out his glass for a refill. Celia, ignoring a frown from Tam Lin, poured him lemonade instead of champagne. “I know I don’t have a birthday like humans,” Matt said, “but I was born. Or something like it.”

  “You were harvested,” said Tam Lin. His speech was slurred. He had polished off a bottle by himself, and Matt realized he’d never seen the bodyguard drink alcohol before.

  “I grew inside a cow. Did she give birth to me like a calf?” Matt saw nothing wrong with being born in a stable. Jesus had found it perfectly acceptable.

  “You were harvested,” repeated Tam Lin.

  “He doesn’t need the details,” Celia said.

  “And I say he does!” roared the man, slamming his fist on the picnic table. Both Celia and Matt flinched. “There’s been enough damn secrecy around this place! There’s been enough damn lies!”

  “Please,” Celia said urgently, placing her hand on Tam Lin’s arm. “The cameras—”

  “The cameras can go to blazes for all I care! Take a look, you lying, spying wretches! Here’s what I think of you!” The man made an extremely rude hand gesture at the black-eyed Susan vines covering one wall. Matt had copied that gesture once and had been yelled at by Celia.

  “Please. If you won’t think of yourself, think of us.” Celia had gone on her knees by the bodyguard’s bench. She clasped her hands the way she did in prayer.

  Tam Lin shook himself like a dog. “Ach! It’s the drink talking!” He grabbed the remaining champagne bottle and hurled it against the wall. Matt heard the fragments shower over the black-eyed Susans. “I’ll tell you this much, lad.” He hauled Matt up by the front of his shirt. Celia watched with a pale, frightened face. “You were grown in that poor cow for nine months, and then you were cut out of her. You were harvested. She was sacrificed. That’s the term they use when they kill a poor lab animal. Your stepmother was turned into ruddy T-bone steaks.”

  He dropped Matt, and Matt backed away out of reach.

  “It’s all right, Tam Lin,” Celia said gently. She eased onto the seat beside him.

  “It’s not all right.” The man buried his head in his arms on the table. “We’re bloody lab animals to this lot. We’re only well treated until we outlive our usefulness.”

  “They won’t get their way forever,” Celia whispered, putting her arms around him.

  Tam Lin twisted his head until he could peer at her from the shelter of his arms. “I know
what you’ve got in mind, and it’s too dangerous,” he said.

  Celia leaned against him and rubbed his back with her large, gentle hands. “This Farm has been here for a hundred years. How many eejits do you think are buried under the poppies?”

  “Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.” Tam Lin’s voice was almost a groan.

  “Don’t you think that’s enough?” Celia smiled at Matt as she rubbed the bodyguard’s back. It was a real smile this time, and it made her beautiful in the shadowy garden light. “Go to bed, mi vida.” she said. “I’ll look in on you later.”

  Matt was annoyed that the two seemed to have forgotten it was his party, his coming-of-age. He sulked in his bedroom. He twanged the guitar, hoping the noise would disturb the pair huddled in the garden. But after a while his anger faded away.

  It was replaced by a feeling that he had overlooked something important. Hints had been as thick as fireflies in the courtyard garden. They brightened with promise. They stayed alight almost long enough to show Matt what they were. But then, like the fireflies, they vanished. Tam Lin and Celia were far too careful.

  It had been like that for years. Matt knew there was vital information he was missing. It had to do with clones. He wasn’t supposed to know how they were made. He wasn’t supposed to know that all of them—except for him—were brain dead.

  Now, for the hundredth time, Matt thought about why anyone would create a monster. It couldn’t be to replace a beloved child. Children were loved and clones were hated. It couldn’t be to have a pet. No pet resembled the horrible, terrified thing Matt had seen in the hospital.

  Matt remembered Mr. MacGregor and El Patrón sitting in adjoining wheelchairs after their operations. Got me a new liver, MacGregor had said, patting his stomach, and went in for a set of kidneys while I was at it. He’d looked at Matt with those bright blue eyes that were so much like Tom’s, and Matt had been revolted.

  No! It couldn’t be!

  Matt remembered the birthday party where El Patrón had so suddenly recovered his mental abilities. Fetal brain implants—I must try that sometime, MacGregor had said. It’s done wonders for you.