by Nancy Farmer
“No one can do that,” said Esperanza.
“I intend to try,” Matt said. “I want you to find me some expert brain surgeons.”
“That’s going to take time,” she protested.
“Do what you can. And I want María and the boys I knew in the plankton factory to visit me.”
“Not possible,” said Esperanza. “Think! You have Glass Eye Dabengwa leaning on your eastern border. He’s not stupid. He’s going over and over your lockdown system, trying to find a way to break it open. Do you really want your friends in his path if he invades?”
Matt was deeply disappointed, but he knew she was right. “We’ll talk about it later,” he conceded. “Right now I want you to find me doctors. I’m going to open the border for brief periods, but be warned—”
Esperanza rubbed her forehead vigorously, and her lips were compressed into a thin line.
“—if your peacekeepers try to get in, I swear that I will fry every gopher, bighorn sheep, and bunny rabbit from here to the Salton Sea. Do you understand?”
From Esperanza’s furious expression, he knew she did.
“Fine. I’ll call you in a few days to see what progress has been made. How do I turn this thing off, Cienfuegos?” But the jefe didn’t need to do anything. Esperanza had already broken the connection.
9
THE GUITAR FACTORY
You should have seen him, Celia!” exclaimed Cienfuegos over lunch. They were in the kitchen, feasting on her excellent chiles rellenos. “It was like having the old man back again.”
“I don’t like the idea of having the old man back again,” said Celia, casting a troubled look at Matt.
The boy ate silently, trying to ignore the conversation. He wasn’t sure what had happened, and he was certain he didn’t like it. Two times a voice had whispered in his ear and made him do things. It was good, of course, to stand up to Esperanza. But where had that courage come from?
“I think we should call him El Relámpago, the Lightning Bolt,” Cienfuegos said. “He let Esperanza have it right between the eyes—Pum!—‘Do what I say or I’ll fry the whole country.’ Brilliant!”
“That’s a terrible thing to threaten,” said Celia.
The jefe shrugged. “Fear is the beginning of wisdom, mi caramelito.”
“Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” corrected Celia. “And I’m not your sweetie pie.”
Cienfuegos reached for a tortilla and expertly loaded it with lettuce, beans, and salsa. “What do you say, El Relámpago? Shall we open the border today?”
“Stop giving me nicknames,” Matt said. “How fast can we get supplies in? I don’t want us vulnerable for more than a few minutes.”
“No problemo. The train has been sitting in San Luis for weeks,” said Cienfuegos.
After lunch they returned to the control room, and Matt found he could pause the lockdown in as large or small an area as he liked, while keeping the rest of the border secure. Cienfuegos focused a screen to show him the border post. Following the jefe’s instructions, Matt pressed a button. He heard an alarm ring in the distance and saw a mob of workmen running from a warehouse.
“See? They’ve been waiting for your signal,” said the jefe. “It won’t take them long to unload the train.”
Matt saw a train consisting of at least two hundred cars waiting in Aztlán. As he watched, it slowly gathered speed and rolled across the border into Opium. The workmen were lined up about a hundred yards away from the tracks.
The crossing took less than fifteen minutes, for which Matt was grateful. He could see a mass of soldiers in green uniforms watching the procedure from Aztlán. Among them were UN peacekeepers in black. They were all heavily armed, and behind the men were ominous vehicles and hovercrafts.
“A whole maldito army!” swore Cienfuegos. “Crot Esperanza!” Matt flinched at the filthy word. “Close the border now, mi patrón. I don’t trust them to keep their distance.”
Matt did so. He had learned from the jefe that anyone could activate the lockdown in case of an emergency, but only El Patrón’s hand could remove it. It was another example of the extreme control the old man kept over everything. Opening and closing a small portion of the border should have been a simple task, but when Matt was finished, he was utterly exhausted.
“Takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” said Cienfuegos. “I’ve watched the old man fine-tune the border, and he always had to lie down afterward. It has something to do with the scanner.”
“It felt like ants were swarming over my skin,” said Matt.
“You’re lucky that’s all that happened. I was worried the first time you used the holoscope. If the machine doesn’t recognize you—well, it isn’t good.”
“How did you find out?” said Matt, remembering how nervous the jefe had been when he contacted Esperanza.
“I tried to use an eejit to access the controls,” said Cienfuegos. “Don’t worry. He was close to his expiry date, so no great loss.”
“You sacrificed a human being?”
“An eejit, mi patrón. No one knew you were coming back, and our goose was rapidly being cooked.”
It made sense, Matt realized. One of the Five Principles of Good Citizenship they had to parrot at the plankton factory was that an individual had no value apart from the group. It was the duty of a citizen to sacrifice himself for the good of all. And yet . . .
“What happened to him?” asked Matt.
“The scanner makes you fall apart,” the jefe said reluctantly. “I don’t quite understand how it works, but it removes the glue that holds your cells together. You melt.”
Matt felt sick, imagining what it looked like.
“If it’s any help, I don’t think the eejit minded,” said Cienfuegos. “He looked a little surprised, and then he was only a puddle on the floor. It was a mess to clean up.”
“I think I want to be alone for a while,” said Matt.
“There’s one more thing you should see,” said the jefe. He refocused the screen on the train, which was now halted on the tracks. Another alarm sounded, and the workmen moved even farther away. Presently, a sheet of light passed over the cars. Even in the fierce desert sunlight it burned bright enough to hurt your eyes. When it was done, it vanished and the alarm rang again. The men swarmed aboard and began unloading crates.
“You see, you can’t allow just anything to cross the border,” Cienfuegos explained. “You might have weevils or grain beetles on board. The beam kills them.”
“What about people?” said Matt, who saw where this was going.
“It eliminates them, too,” said Cienfuegos. “I wouldn’t put it past Esperanza to hide an army of peacekeepers. We’re in luck, though.” He pointed at the screen, where one of the workmen was waving a green flag. “No one was on the train. There’s nothing there but good cheese, milk, and vegetables.”
“And eejit pellets,” said Matt.
“Of course eejit pellets, in the last fifty cars,” said Cienfuegos.
* * *
Matt rested in his room for a while. He drew the curtains and lay down, enjoying the semidarkness and solitude. He listened to the gardeners clipping a hedge outside. El Patrón had wanted to keep his world the way it had been when he was young, and that meant almost no contact with the outside world. The old man had unbent enough to accept a few amenities—refrigerators, for example—but for the most part Opium remained in the past.
What an incredible joke! El Patrón had enslaved thousands of people and grown his crops with polluted water. He no doubt passed this pollution on to drug addicts around the world. Foul pits of chemicals spread death near the eejit pens, but most of the country was untouched. Deer and javelinas still roamed the forests. Wildflowers covered the desert after rain. Every cranny of the wilderness was full of life.
El Patrón craved land because he liked owning things, but he had chosen to neglect vast areas of it. For purely selfish reasons, the old man had preserved what the rest of the world had dest
royed.
Matt felt too restless to stay in bed. He went in search of Waitress, but she was nowhere to be found. With nothing better to do, he went to the garage and found Daft Donald playing chess with Mr. Ortega. “I want to get out. I don’t care where,” he said.
The two men had an odd relationship based on their disabilities. Daft Donald couldn’t talk and Mr. Ortega couldn’t hear, so they worked as a team, with Daft Donald scribbling notes on a yellow pad of paper he always carried with him. Mr. Ortega translated it into speech. The music teacher was also very good at reading lips, and you could carry on an almost normal conversation with him. Now he suggested visiting the guitar factory.
Matt had often been to the workshops, though not with Mr. Ortega. One building was reserved for making pottery. Long ago El Patrón’s mother had gathered clay from riverbeds to make pots in what was then Mexico. She had also woven rebozos on a homemade loom, and so there was a cloth-weaving shed too. Matt sometimes wondered about this shadowy person. In a way she was Matt’s mother too, and he tried to imagine the woman behind the smell of wet clay and the sound of shuttles.
These craft eejits, Matt realized now, were implanted with a milder form of microchip that preserved their skills. They were well fed and housed, for they were not expendable like the workers in the fields. Some of them, Mr. Ortega said, had been there for many years. Daft Donald waited in the car with a comic book when they went inside.
The guitar factory was a beautiful building copied from something El Patrón had seen in an old English movie. It was meant to be one of those charming country homes where gentlemen drank tea while their ladies played the harpsichord. It was completely out of place here. The English garden suffered in the dry desert air and was overrun with flower-eating lizards and bugs.
Inside were racks of harps, oboes, zithers, sitars, drums, and every other kind of instrument that had taken the old man’s fancy. In one room was a piano. A group of eejit boys were singing German folk songs under the direction of an elderly choirmaster. They were no older than Fidelito, and their voices had the high, pure sweetness of children.
Matt’s favorite room, and El Patrón’s as well, was full of guitars. At a large table the master craftsman worked alone, for the task was too demanding for lesser hands. At the moment he was sanding a piece of African mahogany, making it as soft and smooth as skin. The man himself was not unlike a tree stump you might find in a forest. His body was thick, with a barrel chest and sturdy legs. The expression on his face, as he bent over the table, was as concentrated as a tree knot, and his large, sloping nose was pure Aztec.
At first glance the man’s fingers seemed too clumsy to produce such works of art, but the results of his labor stood against the walls. There was row upon row of the most beautiful guitars in the world. Musicians everywhere coveted them, and El Patrón sometimes gave them to his favorites.
“Vaya con Dios, Eusebio,” said Mr. Ortega. “May you go with God.” The guitar maker kept on sanding.
“You know him?” asked Matt. He had watched the guitar maker for years, but no one had ever given him a name. Like most eejits, he was referred to by his occupation.
“He was my compadre. We crossed the border together. Like an idiot, I wanted to be a big star in Hollywood and he . . . ” Mr. Ortega paused. “Eusebio has always been happy doing exactly what he is doing now. He came with me for friendship, and look where it got him.”
Wsssss went Eusebio’s sandpaper as he polished the wood.
“The Farm Patrol shot me with a stun gun. Here.” Mr. Ortega pointed to his ear. “In that instant the world vanished, the world for a musician, I mean. It made me stone deaf.”
“What happened next?” said Matt. He had never had such a long and personal conversation with his music teacher. In fact, the man hadn’t seemed to like him much.
“Eusebio, may God reward him, defended us with a guitar. He played as though we were in a concert hall, not surrounded by enemies. I couldn’t hear it, but I could see his fingers moving over the strings. No man was ever a better musician. It was such a unique defense that the Farm Patrol brought us to El Patrón. Later I learned that my friend described me as a famous pianist and himself as the world’s greatest guitar maker. Which he is, of course. Unfortunately, it didn’t save him from being microchipped. If you hadn’t needed a music teacher, I would have ended up here.”
Matt didn’t know what to say. He had assumed that Mr. Ortega had been hired as the bodyguards were. When El Patrón wanted something, his dealers in the outside world found it for him, whether it was a doctor, a dentist, a repairman, or a gardener. It seemed odd at the time that the only piano teacher the old man could find was deaf, but Matt had been very young and frightened. He didn’t dare ask questions.
“I want to show you something,” Mr. Ortega said. He took up one of the guitars leaning against a wall and tuned the strings. He laid his cheek against the wood, and Matt realized that he was listening to the music with his bones. It was the same thing he did when teaching piano. Satisfied, Mr. Ortega proceeded to play the most beautiful flamenco music Matt had ever heard. The notes flowed through the air like water into a desert pool, and it made anyone else’s guitar playing seem cheap and tinny.
Eusebio turned toward the sound. His mouth opened as though he were drinking in the music, and his eyes cleared. The sandpaper fell to the floor. On and on Mr. Ortega played until a Farm Patrolman, whose job it was to maintain the craft eejits, came in and ordered him to stop.
The music halted. Matt woke up. He, too, had his mouth open, and it was as though he’d been shaken out of a wonderful dream. “How dare you!” he shouted at the Patrolman in the best El Patrón manner. “Get out and don’t bother us again!” The Farm Patrolman did a double take and began apologizing. “Get out!” screamed Matt. The man fled.
But the dream had been shattered. There was nothing—nothing!—Matt hated more than having music interrupted. He wanted revenge! He wanted the Patrolman flogged or, better still, cockroached—
“Are you all right?” asked Mr. Ortega.
Matt blinked. No, he wasn’t all right. For a moment he had simply vanished into rage. He had no memory of what he’d said to the Patrolman.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” said Mr. Ortega. Eusebio went back to polishing. “Celia told me that you were having problems. Cienfuegos thinks it’s great when you sound like the old man, but she says it’s dangerous. She’s a curandera, you know, a traditional healer. She thinks you might be suffering from spirit possession.”
Matt choked on the water. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Probably,” said Mr. Ortega. “No doubt there’s a psychological explanation, but I always find it useful to listen to Celia. Or read her lips,” he amended with a sad smile. “That music you just heard was written by Eusebio. I discovered that he wakes up a little when I play it. I thought you might be interested, since you like talking to Waitress.”
Matt was overcome with embarrassment. Was it possible to do anything in this place without being found out? Cienfuegos must have spread the story. “I was curious about her, that’s all,” he said. “I’d like to go now.”
“Would you mind if I stayed?” The music teacher picked up the guitar.
“Not at all.”
“You should visit the drug factory,” said Mr. Ortega, “keep up with the family business. It’s bursting at the seams now because they can’t export the opium. The dust alone in that place would knock you on your nachas.”
“That can’t be good for the workers,” said Matt.
“They’re eejits,” the music teacher said. “They don’t know when they’re stoned.”
10
NURSE FIONA
Matt didn’t go to the opium factory. Eusebio’s reaction to the music bothered him too much, and he told Daft Donald to drive to the hospital. He had no good memories of the place and didn’t want to go there now, but he had to learn more about the microchipping process.
The hospi
tal was set apart from other buildings. It was a gray, windowless place surrounded by a wasteland of sand and thorny vines. Dust had drifted over its front steps as though no one had gone inside for a long time. But the door wasn’t locked. The smell in the waiting room was sickly sweet and medicinal at the same time, and it stirred terrible images from Matt’s past. For the first time in weeks he felt his lungs close up. Bad air! his mind screamed as he reached for his asthma inhaler. He staggered outside and collapsed on the dusty steps.
Daft Donald, who had been waiting in the car, rushed over. “Find help,” Matt managed to gasp. The bodyguard nodded and ran inside.
It took Daft Donald a few minutes to return, and by that time Matt felt slightly better. A woman in a nurse’s uniform knelt beside him. “Dear me, young master. You want to be lying down.” She had the same lilting accent as Tam Lin.
“Not in the hospital,” said Matt.
“No indeed! It’s like a bloody crypt in there,” the nurse said. She and Daft Donald carried the boy to the car, although Matt said he felt well enough to walk. “I’ll see you back to your own good bed, laddie. It’ll be a fair treat getting out of that hospital, I can tell you,” the nurse confided. “All the doctors gone, only the odd gardener coming in with a cut, the halls deserted except for those bloody zombies. Scrub, scrub, scrub, that’s all they ever do. It’s a wonder the floor hasn’t eroded.”
By the time they arrived back at the hacienda, Matt had learned a lot about the nurse, whose name was Fiona. He knew where she’d gone to school, her first and second husbands’ names, her father’s occupation (punter, whatever that was), her mother’s problems with varicose veins. On and on the one-sided conversation flowed until Matt was quite bewildered.
“You’re the first Real Person I’ve seen in donkey’s years,” Fiona warbled, tucking Matt into bed. “ ‘Look after the hospital,’ they said, going off to that party they threw for the old man’s funeral. The doctors, the head nurses, the lab technicians left me behind because I’m at the bottom of the heap. No vacations for Fiona. She’s only a dishwasher. ‘We’ll be right back,’ they said. And didn’t they drink poisoned wine at that party! It just shows that good luck has a way of turning on you. Foo! There’s a fair pong in this room. Would you mind if I opened a window?”