The Lord of Opium

by Nancy Farmer

  Listen wavered a little, but she stood her ground. “That was dee-diddly-dumb. You remind me of the Bug. He’s always breaking things, and then he doesn’t have them anymore.”

  “The Bug?” said Dabengwa.

  “Another clone of El Patrón,” Dr. Rivas explained quickly. “She used to play with him.”

  “Dead, I suppose,” said the drug lord.

  The doctor nodded, but Listen said, “He’s not dead. He’s running around, opening doors and all sorts of secret places.”

  “That’s a lie!” the doctor cried.

  “Nope. Dr. Rivas had him open the holoport. Then he took him to other places full of jewels and gold and everything. Ask him to show you.”

  “She’s raving, mi patrón. She makes up stories.”

  Glass Eye signaled, and a couple of the soldiers restrained the doctor. “This is very interesting, child. Tell me more.”

  The little girl took a deep breath. “See, the big people don’t pay attention to me. They don’t think I can understand, but I’m not called Listen for nothing. I heard Dr. Rivas and his son and daughter talk about a room at the bottom of the solar telescope. It’s where El Patrón kept his money. Boy, did they get excited! Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos loaded a hovercraft and took off for the Scorpion Star, but they didn’t get more than a tiny bit of the stuff.” She smiled winningly, an adorable child trying to please.

  Dr. Rivas struggled with the soldiers, but they only tightened their grip. “You can’t believe a seven-year-old! Children that age have no understanding of reality. And you need me, Glass Eye. You aren’t out of the woods yet. You need a heart monitor and another clone—”

  Glass Eye swung at the doctor and struck him such a blow that Matt heard the man’s neck crack. Dr. Rivas slid to the floor with a look of immense surprise. He lay there, his eyes open, his body trembling for a moment before it became still.

  That’s why I always got the better of Dabengwa, commented El Patrón. Poor impulse control.

  Matt was too frozen to respond. It had been so quick! The doctor, who had maintained El Patrón’s zombie army for twenty years, who had created his clones, who had created Matt himself, was dead!

  Happy Man Hikwa came to the door, supported by a shambling field eejit in a jumpsuit and floppy hat. His black general’s uniform was torn and smeared with blood. “Oh no.” He moaned. “You shouldn’t have done that, Glass Eye. Oh, no, no, no.”

  Dabengwa looked like a man waking up from a trance. He seemed to have trouble focusing. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “A few of us went to that abandoned church in the forest,” said Happy Man. “But the damn stirabout ran out of energy. We stalled. And this—this monster came out of the church—seven feet tall, I swear! His neck was covered in scars.”

  Daft Donald, thought Matt.

  “Where are my men?” thundered the drug lord.

  “Please don’t blame me, Glass Eye! There were enemies everywhere. We didn’t stand a chance. I was the only one who got away. I ran until I fell over a tree root and sprained my ankle. I saw this eejit and ordered him to help me.” Happy Man slumped and the eejit slumped too. Like most zombies, he tended to copy his master.

  “We’ve got to go,” Happy Man bleated. “Please, Glass Eye. We can’t survive here. There aren’t enough of us. Make the Baby Patrón open the border.”

  “Why am I plagued with such stupidity?” shouted Dabengwa. “Who told you to go joyriding when we’re in the middle of a war? I should have you skinned and nailed up on a wall as a warning to others.”

  “I meant no harm,” babbled Happy Man. “I’ve always been your most loyal follower.”

  “Drop him,” said Glass Eye. The eejit obediently opened his arms, and Hikwa fell to the floor with a loud shriek.

  “Ai! It hurts! I need a doctor!”

  “This is the treatment you get,” said Dabengwa, kicking Happy Man’s ankle. “Now you will open the holoport, boy, and end the lockdown.”

  Matt gathered up his courage. “I’ll never do that,” he said, and braced himself for a blow. But it didn’t come. Instead, Glass Eye turned to Listen and grabbed her by the throat. She tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip and she struggled for breath.

  “You have seen what I can do. Think carefully.” Glass Eye loosened his grip slightly, and Listen gasped.

  Matt dropped his hands to show compliance. He knew the man could snap the little girl’s neck. And he knew that nothing he tried would make the slightest difference. If he attacked, the soldiers would be on him. If he agreed to open the border, it would only postpone the inevitable. Ultimately, Glass Eye would not let either of them live.

  Death then, he decided. It would trap the invaders, and Daft Donald and Cienfuegos could finish them off. Opium would remain sealed. Once, he had believed that the country would die without supplies, but that was before he had learned about the biosphere. When the rest of them were dead, the Mushroom Master would free his people and Opium would become the new biosphere.

  Matt looked at Listen and hesitated. His hand brushed against a lump in his pocket, and suddenly he remembered El Patrón’s advice: Just because they took your weapons doesn’t mean you aren’t armed. He grabbed Tam Lin’s flashlight and turned it to maximum. A beam ten times the brightness of the sun shot out and struck Dabengwa’s eyes. The drug lord screamed and dropped Listen. He clawed at his face, making mindless groans. His whole body seemed to convulse, as though the various parts of it were at war with one another.

  Matt turned off the flashlight. Even the reflection of it dazzled him, and he couldn’t see where to go. But a hand reached through the brilliance and dragged him away. “Good thing I had the sense to close my eyes,” a man said.

  They ran until they got outside, and Matt’s vision began to recover. He saw the eejit with Listen slung over his shoulder. “Put me down. I can’t breathe,” she cried. She swayed and held on to him. “Crap! What happened back there?”

  “Something I’m sure Sor Artemesia would call a miracle,” said the eejit. “It’s a good thing you still had Tam Lin’s flashlight, mi patrón, because I didn’t know how I was going to take on so many.”

  Matt’s heart skipped a beat. “Cienfuegos?”

  “At your service,” said the jefe, bowing.

  “How did you—”

  Cienfuegos smiled. “Nobody notices eejits. I had a devil of a time locating you, Don Sombra. Couldn’t you have dropped a few bread crumbs on the trail?”

  “I was out of bread crumbs,” said Matt. He felt like collapsing, the relief was so great.

  “I tossed tranquilizer beads around as we left, but we’d better make ourselves scarce.” They walked through the gardens at a normal pace so as not to draw attention. Cienfuegos went in front, with the hangdog posture of an eejit.

  49

  THE ABANDONED OBSERVATORY

  They passed the soldiers throwing water on the lab.

  “I couldn’t believe how easy that was,” said the jefe. “I simply walked inside with a flamethrower, and no one questioned it. People ignore eejits at their peril.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Matt.

  “We can’t stay here, and it’s too dangerous to cross the hospital grounds and head for the chapel. Our friends are fine, by the way. Daft Donald has set up a command post nearby. No, I think we’ll head for the observatory.”

  Matt fell silent. Sunlight shone through the trees and cast patterns on the ground. Here and there a beam caught the flash of mica on a stone. Birds swooped out of trees and flew close to the ground until they reached the safety of a yucca. Matt felt the wonder of being alive, of staying alive. Listen, too, was uncharacteristically quiet.

  They went to the hovercraft port, but the energy signal on all the stirabouts was flat. Happy Man hadn’t bothered to recharge them. Matt, Listen, and Cienfuegos would have to walk, and the way was long, treeless, and hot. It quickly became clear that Listen would need frequent rest stops. Cienfuegos himself w
as uneasy about traveling without cover in daylight. “I wish I’d thought to bring water,” he said.

  He broke into one of the small, abandoned observatories on the way. A mesquite tree had grown up in front of the door, and his hands got gouged by thorns when he cleared its branches. “Sometimes I forget that everything in this desert is out to get you,” he said, sucking blood from his fingers. “The cactuses, the trees, the bullhead vines. If you lift a board, you find a rattlesnake. If you take a nap, the conenose beetles crawl into bed and suck your blood. Dark corners are the happy homes of black widows and brown recluse spiders and these suckers—!” He squashed a bark scorpion running for cover.

  “Still, it’s all part of the ecosystem,” he said, patting the single bed inside and releasing clouds of dust. “Just as I am part of the ecosystem, along with my venomous brothers and sisters.” Once he was satisfied that the bed was safe, he told Listen to lie down.

  The air was cool and shadowed. Ancient photographs of star systems covered the walls, and a desk with a bookcase stood against a wall. A small kitchen with dishes and a sink was attached to the building, but of course nothing came out of the faucet except a centipede.

  “Let me look outside,” said Cienfuegos. They heard him pulling away bushes and cursing. They heard banging and clanking, and the jefe eventually returned soaking wet. “Water,” he announced. He had discovered a hand pump and by pounding it with rocks had worked the rusty handle until he got a stream of reddish-brown liquid. Matt and he filled pans and bowls.

  “At least it’s wet,” conceded Cienfuegos.

  “Looks like mud,” said Listen.

  “Give it a few minutes. The sediment will sink, and you can pour off the top.”

  They rested, waiting for dusk, when it would be safer to travel. “Whoever owned the place walked out one day and never came back,” observed Matt. A leather-bound book lay open on the desk next to a pair of wire-rim glasses. He recognized these from old TV shows. No one wore glasses anymore.

  “Be careful with the books,” said Cienfuegos. “I’ll take them to the Mushroom Master. He’ll know how to preserve them.”

  Listen pointed at a photograph. “That’s an African,” she said. Matt blew gently to dislodge the dust and saw a man in an astronaut’s uniform. The symbol on his sleeve was of the old American empire, and he stood next to an antique escape pod.

  “Who was he?” said Matt. But they found nothing about him in the papers scattered on the desk.

  They exchanged news of what each had been doing during their separation. Cienfuegos revealed that he’d been responsible for the dead soldier outside the operating room. “Then I had to run,” he said. “There were too many of Glass Eye’s troops on the ground. I realized that the border was open and went to the holoport, but you’d already closed it. That’s when I found the Bug.”

  “How was he?” asked Matt.

  “Buggy,” the jefe said. “Half the time he screamed and the other half threatened. I was seriously tempted to leave him, but . . . ”

  “You felt sorry for him.”

  “Not really. He was making a racket, and I didn’t want Glass Eye’s troops to show up. I carried him to Malverde’s chapel. Sor Artemesia is looking after him, and good luck on that job. I’d rather take care of a rabid skunk.” Cienfuegos got up and poured clear upper water into another basin.

  “There’s a dead mosquito in it,” complained Listen.

  “Yum,” said Cienfuegos, picking it out and eating it. It was difficult to gross out the jefe.

  Matt revealed what had happened just before Cienfuegos arrived in Glass Eye’s hospital room, and the man was impressed. “You killed Dr. Rivas?” he asked Listen.

  “I guess I did. I made Glass Eye mad,” the little girl said uncomfortably. “But Dr. Rivas killed my best buddy. He promised not to, but he did it. He did.” The energy went out of her and she bent over, grieving silently.

  “Well, I think you’re crotting marvelous. If I’m ever elected head of the UN, I’ll issue you a Hero Medal.”

  “You said a curse word,” she said.

  “It’s okay when I do it. Did you really hear Dr. Rivas and his son and daughter talk about the room at the bottom of the solar telescope?”

  “They said it had a big secret inside and they wanted the Bug to open it, but he couldn’t. Dr. Rivas thought I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Big people ignore little kids, and they shouldn’t.”

  “I’d never ignore you, chiquita. You’re too dangerous,” said the jefe. “So Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos escaped.”

  “I think so,” the little girl said. “They didn’t get any loot, though. I made that part up. I’m hungry.”

  They found rusty cans of food in the pantry, which Cienfuegos said were too old to be safe. The loaves of bread crumbled into dust when Listen touched them.

  “It’s like an Egyptian tomb with all the things the owner needed for the afterlife,” said Matt, thinking of El Patrón and also of Mirasol. The flowers that had been heaped around her must have withered by now. Or perhaps they didn’t in the world of the dead. Perhaps they still bloomed, and she was dancing with the people she had loved. He had left the music box in her tomb.

  “There are clothes in the closet and a toothbrush on the sink, except that the bristles have fallen out,” said Matt. “All we need is a sarcophagus with a pharaoh painted on the lid.” And servants, he thought. Real pharaohs needed servants to get through the afterlife.

  “There’s a lunchroom at the observatory,” Listen said. “You can get hot chocolate and donuts and sometimes turkey burritos. We should go there now.”

  “Patience,” said Cienfuegos, leaning back in a chair and half-closing his eyes. “Your ancestors didn’t whine about turkey burritos when they were on a hunt. They waited like lions for the game to get careless.”

  “So we’re lions,” the little girl said, interested.

  “Oh, yes. We’re hunting the biggest game of all.”

  “The Scorpion Star,” said Matt.

  The jefe smiled gently at the dark ceiling draped with ancient cobwebs and dust. “The Mushroom Master thinks the eejits’ brains are controlled by an energy source on the Scorpion Star. And that the observatory controls the Star. We’ll begin our hunt by looking into that room at the bottom of the solar telescope.”

  Matt didn’t like the plan, but he couldn’t think of a better one. He helped Listen search through the desk while they waited. Dried-up fountain pens of a sort only seen in museums filled one drawer. In another were colored scraps of paper that Cienfuegos said were used for sending letters, a concept he had to explain. These were in an envelope labeled FOREVER STAMPS.

  The little girl unfolded a large diagram on the floor. The folds cracked, and each section separated from the others.

  “That looks familiar.” Cienfuegos got up and weighted the pages with stones to be sure they didn’t get mixed up. “It looks a lot like the biosphere. There’s Northern Europe and Africa. And at the far end is Tundra. It’s even got the name printed on it.”

  Matt knelt by it. “It could also be the space station.” The longer they studied it, the more likely this seemed. The diagram was covered with strange symbols and mathematical formulas. Between each ecosystem was a series of zigzag lines and notes like gauss here and outgauss there. In the margin was written 500 teslas. Excessive? No! At the bottom were two words: Couple on the left, and Uncouple on the right.

  Cienfuegos carefully gathered up the sheets, keeping them in order. “This is gibberish to me. I’ll take it to the Mushroom Master later. It’s strange. He knows more about science than we do, and he’s a hundred years in the past. He says we depend too much on machines. All we know how to do is press buttons, but he knows how the buttons work.”

  50

  THE SECRET ROOM

  When the sun slipped behind the Chiricahua Mountains, they left the abandoned observatory. Heat still radiated from the ground, and a wind had whipped up a dust storm. It bl
ew into their eyes and dried their lips, but it also made them less easy to spot on the treeless road.

  The white dome of El Patrón’s observatory loomed against the shadow of night rising in the east. To the south appeared the Scorpion Star, always the first to be seen at evening and the last to disappear at dawn. They slipped into a side door and tiptoed along the dark, curved wall to the door of the lunchroom. No one noticed them. The technicians were busy with screens and computers.

  The room was deserted, and they helped themselves to hot chocolate and donuts. Only the greasy wrappers that had been around the turkey burritos were left. “We’re taking a huge chance, but I think Listen is right. We need a pick-me-up before tackling the solar telescope,” said Cienfuegos. Matt found a machine that served boxes of apple juice, and he pocketed a few of these before they went to the other building.

  He dreaded the giant shaft plunging beneath the solar telescope in a way that wasn’t quite rational. After all, they had survived it before. Yet something about the enclosed space, the hot air gusting up, the darkness and awareness of tons of earth over his head made him break out in a sweat before they even got to the elevator.

  “I wish we could leave Listen up here,” Matt whispered when they had reached the shaft door.

  “She’s safer with us,” said Cienfuegos.

  “Don’t worry, Listen. We did it before and we can do it again,” said Matt, more to reassure himself than her. He held on to the elevator door, wishing he could back out.

  “I’m not scared of heights,” the little girl said.

  “You can’t be sure of that. You’ve never seen a drop like this.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said the jefe, pulling the door closed. And then they were sinking at a forty-five-degree angle. Round and round they spiraled the huge tube of the telescope. Dim lights gleamed on its dark-green surface. “It’s hot down here,” said Listen, pulling her blouse loose. She was already drenched in sweat.

  Air conditioners whirred at various levels, and a warm breeze rose out of the depths. They passed another elevator slowly rising and saw the sickly faces of the eejits moving up.