The Lord of Opium (18 page)

Matt shied away from the idea. “Not really. The statues were
copied from Illegal children. There weren’t any pictures of the originals. People like us have to make our families.”

“So that means
you’re
my brother,” said El Bicho.

“I suppose,” Matt said unwillingly. He considered for a moment. “I think that people have an instinct for a family. You look until you find a mother, a father, a sister, a brother. They don’t have to be blood relatives. They just have to love you. And when you find them, you don’t have to look anymore.”

They ate in silence for a while. Matt had no appetite and passed much of his food on to Mirasol. He thought about Celia and Tam Lin, and about Fidelito, who had called him
brother
. Was María his sister? No, she was something more. He kept looking at the Bug’s hobbles and wondering whether he dared to remove them. “If I took off your leg restraints,” Matt said carefully, “do you promise not to throw a fit?”

“Sure,” said El Bicho.

“We could go for a walk.”

“I can show you the way to the observatory,” said the boy, showing genuine interest for the first time. “It’s great! There’re all kinds of machines and computers. The smaller telescope looks at the sun, and the big one looks at the rest of the sky.”

The Bug’s enthusiasm transformed his face, and Matt thought,
What kind of childhood has he had, shut up in a nursery with eejits for company? No wonder he isn’t normal.
But that could be changed. He ordered the eejits to unlock the hobbles.

“Remember. No tantrums,” Matt warned as they went into the gardens, but he needn’t have worried. El Bicho danced around from the joy of being outside before settling down to a steady pace. The eejits followed solemnly, holding their leashes.

To Matt’s surprise they went to a hovercraft port concealed behind a hedge. There were a dozen or so small craft parked on
magnetic strips, and the Bug went up to one and opened the hatch. “It’s a long way to the observatory,” he explained.

“I’ll get Cienfuegos to pilot,” said Matt.

The Bug laughed. “Anybody can fly these,” he said, climbing inside. The eejits followed him, pressing themselves against the back wall. “You need a pilot to take up a real hovercraft. This is a stirabout for short hops.” He patted the seat next to him.

Matt climbed in, hoping that he wasn’t making a mistake. The change in El Bicho had been so gratifying, he didn’t want to spoil the boy’s mood.

“First, you uncouple the magnets,” explained the Bug. He pushed a green button. The stirabout lurched up, and Matt caught his breath. “It’s okay. We can’t go more than ten feet off the ground,” said the Bug. “Now you press the go button and steer with this wheel. I’ll let you try it on the way back.”

The stirabout obediently followed the road, and Matt’s heart settled down to a regular rhythm. For one thing, he was astounded that a seven-year-old could fly anything. El Bicho was clearly intelligent—he spoke of telescopes and computers with easy familiarity just as Listen spoke of rabbit anatomy. They had both copied Dr. Rivas. Matt thought uncomfortably of his own upbringing. At age seven he’d been interested in picnics and Celia’s cooking. Nothing much to exercise a brain there.

It occurred to him that El Bicho had become much friendlier when he was in charge.
Power
was what the boy craved, even as El Patrón had craved it all his life.

The valley widened out to a broad plain dotted with mesquite, yucca, and cactus. Here and there were the small observatories once owned by astronomers before El Patrón drove them out. Mesquite trees had grown up around the buildings until their walls were almost invisible. Their round roofs were caked
with dirt and bird droppings. Looming beyond them was an enormous white dome, the biggest observatory in the world, Matt remembered, with a telescope that could look around the universe until you could see the back of your neck.

By its side, no less impressive, was a building shaped like the number seven tipped over on its side. The shorter section rose at least a hundred feet into the air. At the top was a solar telescope. The longer section sloped at an angle to the earth and, El Bicho said, extended a thousand feet underground. “Dr. Rivas let me look into it once, but it’s nasty. Dark and hot. Only eejits work there.”

The boy positioned the stirabout over a strip in the parking lot, and Matt felt the magnetism pull them down.

“What you must always do, when you’ve gone for a hop,” said the Bug in the same serious way as Dr. Rivas giving a lecture, “is recharge the antigravity pods. You pull this lever”—Matt heard a
whump
as a tube with a sucker at the end clamped onto the front of the craft—“and you’re set. It takes fifteen minutes to recharge for the distance we’ve gone.”

For all the authority El Bicho tried to project as he led the way into the observatory, he still looked like a little kid on a leash. The eejits followed him as though they were walking a dog, and Matt struggled not to smile. He sensed that any hint of humor would send the boy into one of his rages.

The building was dark, except for the lights on computers, and it was very warm. “You have to keep the telescopes at the same temperature as the outside,” said the Bug. “Otherwise, they won’t stay still. In winter the astronomers have to wear thick coats.”

A woman in a white lab coat hurried out of an office.
“¿Dónde está mi padre?”

“Dr. Rivas was busy, Dr. Angel,” the Bug said grandly.

“You’re never supposed to come here without him,” scolded Dr. Angel. “But who is this? Ah! Father told me at dinner. You must be the new
patrón
!” The woman bowed as though greeting royalty.

“And you must be Dr. Rivas’s daughter,” said Matt. “I hope we aren’t disturbing your work.”

“Not at all. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Dr. Angel graciously. “Would you like a tour?”

“
I’ll
show him around,” the Bug objected.

“
You
will follow me and keep your hands off the computers,” said the woman. “It took us weeks to recover from your last visit.”

Matt was afraid the boy would lose his temper, but he merely shrugged. Dr. Angel showed them the image from the solar telescope projected onto a screen. It looked like a pot of boiling fire with whirlpools and tendrils of darker flame writhing across the surface. They climbed stairs and walked along a causeway circling the larger telescope. A man in a white lab coat was lying on a recliner and looking up into the eyepiece. He didn’t react as they passed. “That’s Dr. Marcos, my brother,” said Dr. Angel. “We’re all called Rivas, so we use our first names to distinguish us from Father.”

Lab assistants stood before banks of machinery, adjusting the focus and movement of the telescope. Dr. Angel explained each activity, but Matt had trouble remembering what she said. It was all so new and unfamiliar that he only took in one word in five. She spoke of
azimuths
and
albedos
and other strange things. Mostly, he was impressed with the sheer size of the instruments. After a while Dr. Angel took pity on him and showed him pictures the large telescope had taken.

He saw Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, and a comet that
looked like a dirty snowball with water vapor streaming off it. “That’s baby stuff,” complained the Bug. “I want to see the Scorpion Star.”

“We’re not looking at it right now,” said Dr. Angel.

“I don’t care. I want to see it.”

“I’ll show you the latest picture,” she said. She flicked on a large screen to show . . . Matt wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He saw a collection of skyscrapers floating in black space. Light reflected off red walls, and the whole assembly was enclosed in a bubble of some clear substance. A hovercraft was frozen between two buildings.

“Is that a planet?” he asked.

“It’s our space station,” said the Bug. “Enlarge it, Dr. Angel. I want to see the people.”

She went to a computer, and the image grew larger. It felt like flying down toward a city. You got closer and closer to the buildings until you no longer noticed the bubble surrounding them. Windows and walkways appeared. Now Matt saw a man walking through a clear tube connected to another building. He saw a woman standing at a window next to a potted plant.

Dr. Angel moved the image from one part of the station to another.

Matt saw more hovercrafts. The Scorpion Star was so enormous that people had to fly from one end to the other. “There’s the best part,” said the Bug, pointing. The screen had moved into the heart of the buildings, where another, smaller bubble contained trees and gardens. “That’s how they get their oxygen,” said the boy. “They grow crops and raise chickens and everything. It’s like a whole world where everything is perfect. I wish I could go there!” The longing in the boy’s voice was so intense that Matt turned away from the screen to look at him.

“Earth is a good place too,” he said.

“No, it isn’t! Earth is crappy! Everybody hates me. Up there . . . ” The Bug reached out to touch the screen, and Dr. Angel jerked his hand back. “Stop it, you poo-poo brain!” he screamed. “Up there are
real
scientists, not fakes like you! They’ll want me. I know they will. Someday I’m going up there, and when I do, I’ll burn this place down and you with it! Let go of me!”

By now the eejits had been alerted, and they moved in to hold on to the raving boy. They wrapped the leashes around him and carried him down the stairs and out into the parking lot. Matt followed, with Dr. Angel. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I thought he would be all right.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” the woman said. “Come back by yourself whenever you like.” She left, and the eejits loaded the boy into the back and sat on either side of him. Matt realized that he would have to fly the stirabout, but fortunately, he had paid close attention to the boy’s directions.

He pulled the lever, and the recharging hose dropped away. He pushed the green button to uncouple the magnets and the go button to start moving. The stirabout almost collided with a tree on the way up, but soon Matt was effortlessly following the road back to the hospital. All the while El Bicho screamed and spat on him until the back of his shirt was wet.

The Bug had screamed himself hoarse by the time they arrived at the little hovercraft port behind the hedge. “When you’ve recovered, we can start over again,” said Matt, struggling to stay calm.
Not right away, though,
he thought.

“I’ll kill you,” the little boy rasped as the eejits unloaded him.

“I’ll bring you pictures of the space station, and we can talk about what it’s like to live there,” said Matt. He was shaking
with nerves. Never had he seen anyone lose control so completely.

“Kill you . . .,” whispered El Bicho as he was hauled off to the nursery. Matt went to his room and put on a recording of Hovhaness’s
And God Created Great Whales
. The swelling music soothed him with its power, although the great whales themselves were gone and only the echo of their voices remained in the music. He wanted more than anything to lose himself, to disappear into an ideal world where all was orderly and beautiful.

Not unlike the Scorpion Star that El Bicho longed for.

22

THE ALTAR CLOTH

I
want to go back to Ajo immediately,” Matt told Cienfuegos.

“¿El Bicho se encabronó, verdad?”
said the
jefe
. “The little pest got your goat, didn’t he?”

“You find out about everything.”

“It’s my job.” Cienfuegos grinned. “I won’t be sorry to leave this place. Dr. Rivas has too many secrets for my liking, and I can’t make up my mind whether he’s a villain or not. But then Opium is full of villains.” They were sitting under the trees next to a warehouse the
jefe
had used to store the plants and animals he’d collected for Esperanza. Matt could see cages of squirrels, rattlesnakes, and roadrunners.

“Why would anyone want rattlesnakes?” asked Matt.

“They’re part of the ecosystem,
mi patrón
. No matter how nasty something is, it has some purpose.” Cienfuegos gazed fondly at the animals he’d rounded up. “This is the kind of work I was made for, not hunting Illegals.” For a moment he looked
sad. It was the first time Matt had seen any sign of regret.

“You can spend all the time you like on it,” the boy said, “when you don’t have duties with the Farm Patrol.”

Cienfuegos grimaced. “I always have duties with the Farm Patrol. It’s what I’m
programmed
to do.”

Matt paused, understanding what the word
programmed
meant. He tried to think of a way to ask about it without offending the
jefe
. “This programming,” he began, “there seem to be several levels. You, for example, show no evidence of control. Mr. Ortega doesn’t either, but Eusebio, the guitar master, works like a machine. Music can awaken him briefly, and Mirasol responds to food. The field eejits don’t respond to anything. How is this possible?” Cienfuegos stiffened, and Matt braced himself for an attack.

“If you weren’t the
patrón
, I would have killed you by now,” the man said. “That is the one topic I can’t bear to think about. I wake up at night remembering what I’ve lost and that there’s nothing I can ever do about it. I can’t kill myself. That’s part of the programming too. All I can do is get up, inspect my troops, and send them out on their missions. Now, of course, with the border sealed, there’s no one to hunt. Long may it stay that way.”

For the first time the
jefe
had let his guard slip. He was a relentless hunter and showed no compassion for his prey, but how much was part of the man and how much was induced by the microchips?

A breeze brought the smell of pinewoods from farther up the mountain and blew dust along the road. Sometimes the winds were so fierce they made the walls of the mansion shudder. It was a place both wild and ultracivilized, Matt thought. Some parts were beyond anything else in the world, like the
hospital, but hawks nested in the crags above its roof, and black bears prowled the grounds after dark.