The Lord of Opium (28 page)

He walked to the hospital with an asthma inhaler in his pocket in case he was affected by the air. But this time he found it clean and fresh-smelling. Obviously, Fiona hadn’t kept up the place when she was in charge. Even the bullhead vines had been uprooted and gravel laid down. It wasn’t attractive, but at least you didn’t wind up with thorns embedded in your shoes.

A nurse immediately ushered Matt to an office and brought him iced tea. “Dr. Kim will be with you as soon as he’s out of the operating room,” she told him. Matt was surprised, but pleased. It seemed that the doctor was already working on a cure.

He looked through books on a shelf while he waited and discovered they were in an alphabet he didn’t even recognize. On the desk was a silver vase with a spray of purple orchids. That reminded him of the greenhouses between the hacienda and the deserted church. He hadn’t visited them for a long time. Herbs and vegetables for the kitchen were grown there, but the main attraction for him, as a small child, had been the flowers.

Perhaps Chacho would like to see the flowers. Someday. Matt shrank from a meeting so soon after last night’s disaster.

“What a pleasure to see you again,
mi patrón
,” said Dr. Kim, coming into the office. He was the man who had treated Listen when she had her night terrors. He moved with the grace of an athlete, and when he shook Matt’s hand, the boy felt a restrained power in his grip.

“The pleasure is mine as well,” Matt said formally. “The nurse said you were in the operating room. Have you found a way to remove microchips?”

“Only some,” the doctor said. “It’s early days, I’m afraid.”

“But you’ve had success,” Matt insisted.

“Not much,” Dr. Kim said. “I used a magnetic probe to take out perhaps two hundred chips from a subject, and yet the remaining number was so great it made no difference. The behavior of the subject before he was sacrificed was unchanged.”

“Sacrificed?” asked Matt, thinking,
What are we talking about here? A pok-a-tok game?

“It’s a term scientists use when they terminate lab animals. After the operation, I removed the eejit’s brain and homogenized it to estimate the number of microchips.” The doctor might have been sharing a recipe for clam chowder.

“You’re talking about a human being.”

“We could use that term,” said Dr. Kim. “But let’s face it, he
had the intellect of a lab rat.” The doctor rang a bell, and an eejit appeared with a tea tray and rice crackers. “I see you have a drink,
mi patrón
, but you might like to try my green tea. It’s imported from Korea and has an exquisite background flavor of ripe cherries.”

“No, thank you,” Matt said. “Why didn’t you send the eejit back to work when he’d recovered? Why did you have to kill him?”

Dr. Kim smiled in the same smooth way that Dr. Rivas did when he explained science to a layman. “We have to collect data,
mi patrón
. Other scientists would find our studies useless without verification of the results. In an ordinary experiment, no less than forty lab animals are necessary before a paper can be published.”

“I won’t let you kill forty eejits!” exploded Matt. “The whole point of the experiment is to save them.
¡Por Dios!
How many have you slaughtered already?”

“Only five,” the doctor said, and then he seemed to realize he was arguing with the Lord of Opium, not just a teenage boy. “I thought you had given your approval. Dr. Rivas said—”

“Dr. Rivas is in serious danger of becoming a lab rat himself!” shouted Matt. “Where did you get the eejits? How were they selected?”

Dr. Kim wiped his face. “Believe me, they were close to their expiry dates. Nurse Fiona checked.”

“She’s not a damned nurse! She’s a fraud!” Matt promised to get Cienfuegos after her and lock her up, if there was such a thing as a jail in Opium. “I want this clearly understood, Dr. Kim. You are to sacrifice no more eejits. You will study them and you will cure them. I want results as soon as possible.”

Matt’s voice had changed. There was a power in it and an
inflexible will that made Dr. Kim turn pale. It was El Patrón’s voice, full of the potential for extreme violence. “I’ll do anything you say,” bleated the doctor. “I’ll tell the other medical staff.”

The boy strode out of the office.
You certainly showed him,
said the old voice in Matt’s mind.
Put a burr up his tail, didn’t you? I haven’t had so much fun in years.

“Go back to where you belong,” said Matt. “You’ve got a tomb full of servants and treasure to play with.”

They’re boring,
complained El Patrón.
There’s nothing like the living for entertainment.

“I refuse to listen to you.” The boy went to the hacienda and played the piano until a shimmering curtain of music stood between him and the voice. Then he went in search of Cienfuegos.

*  *  *

The
jefe
sent bodyguards to drag Fiona from the hospital. There were no jails in Opium, none being needed in a society where everyone was controlled. Doors had locks, but since theft did not occur, most of the keys had gone missing. “I could unperson her,” suggested Cienfuegos, jerking his hands as though snapping a twig.

“No!” said Matt.

“How about giving her another job, something so isolated that she can’t muck things up?”

“What sort of job?” Matt asked suspiciously.

“Nothing drastic. Something she can easily do.” Cienfuegos held out his hands as if to show he had no weapon concealed in them.

“I don’t want her tortured or killed, just neutralized.”

The
jefe
gave his promise, and although Matt was fairly certain
a secret was being kept from him, he agreed. “Another thing, Dr. Kim said he was only using eejits close to their expiry dates,” said the boy. “You used that term once too. What does it mean?”

“It’s an estimate,” Cienfuegos said. “Now that you’re feeding the eejits better and letting them rest longer, the life expectancy has increased. In the old days, when we could count on a steady supply, we didn’t worry about maintenance. An eejit with the maximum dose of microchips lasted about six months.”

“That little,” murmured Matt.

“Otherwise they tended to pile up,” the
jefe
explained. “No use feeding more than we could use, and neither the United States or Aztlán wanted the overflow. The original treaty between them and the drug lords stated that only a certain number could be allowed to cross the Dope Confederacy.”

“So some people
were
successful.”

“That was part of the plan.” Cienfuegos and Matt were sitting in the kitchen, and in the background the French ex-chef fussed over a hollandaise sauce. An eejit boy was taking the strings off green beans. A dull-eyed woman scrubbed the floor. Her skirt was soaked with soapy water as she dragged a bucket behind her. A man followed with a giant sponge that he rinsed in a second bucket.

“If no one had succeeded, the flood of Illegals would have dried up,” said Cienfuegos. “We needed a few success stories to whet the appetites of the others. Both of the governments of Aztlán and the United States agreed to this.”

“It’s so . . . ”

“Corrupt,” finished the
jefe
. “Now you know how big governments work. Not so different from El Patrón after all.”

Celia entered with a basket of vegetables she had personally
selected from the greenhouses. She laid out lettuces, tomatoes, celery, and spring onions on the table. “Would you like a salad for dinner,
mi patrón
?” she asked. “Or roasted eggplant with tomatoes?”

“You choose. Everything you cook is wonderful,” responded Matt, wishing she wouldn’t be so formal. Turning to Cienfuegos, he said, “How do you look up an expiry date?”

“It’s tattooed on the bottom of the foot,” said the
jefe
.

Matt caught his breath. He had writing on the bottom of his foot:
PROPERTY OF THE ALACRÁN ESTATE.
He’d meant to have it removed, but with one thing and another he’d forgotten.

“I see,” he said.

“A worker with fewer microchips lasts longer and some, like Eusebio, can count on a normal life span. Personally,
mi caramelito
,” Cienfuegos said to Celia, “I’d like a big beefsteak for dinner and to hell with the vegetables.”

“You’ll get what I cook,” said Celia.

The
jefe
and Matt went out for a riding lesson. Matt had taken to this with enthusiasm and unmistakable talent, which was to be expected, since El Patrón had been a legendary horseman. They rode to the armory, where Cienfuegos discovered he had work to do. “You can return to the hacienda on your own,
mi patrón
,” he said. “You don’t need a babysitter anymore. Of course you can stay and watch. We’re disposing of a couple of expired eejits in one of the fields.”

Matt hastily left. He wondered how many bodies were buried out there. If it took one thousand eejits to run an opium farm, and each one lived for six months, and the ranch had existed for a hundred years . . . It was like one of the problems he’d been given when he studied math. The answer was two hundred thousand bodies. That was if only one thousand eejits were needed. The real number was much higher.

He ought to return to the hacienda to work on the books and answer frantic calls from dealers who hadn’t received their shipments. But the weather was too good. He had a bottle of water attached to his saddle—Cienfuegos insisted that he go nowhere without it—and he had a packed lunch. Matt turned the horse toward the Ajo hills.

He skirted the eejit pens, knowing from experience how foul they were. That would be his next project, to construct better, cleaner housing. He could see ponds of fetid waste and a miasma of stinking haze near the water purification plant. An underground canal flowed from where the Colorado River emptied into the Gulf of California, and the water needed extensive cleaning. The river had become so polluted that nothing could live in it except mutated horrors. If you ate one of its fish, your lips blistered.

Long ago the gulf had extended farther north, and the water had been full of life. The great whales had used it as a nursery, but now the whales were gone and their bones filled a great pit near the plankton factory.

It was strange that Opium contained a running sore like the eejit pens. It was completely unnecessary, yet El Patrón had seen nothing wrong with housing his slaves there and feeding them plankton pellets. As Cienfuegos said, he was an accidental ecologist. If he’d paid more attention to the rest of the country, it would have deteriorated like the rest of the world.

The rest of the world had turned into God’s Ashtray. Forests had been cut down, animals hunted to extinction, land poisoned, and water polluted. God had finally grown tired of his unruly children and was in the process of stubbing them out.

Matt rode on until he reached the dry streambed that led into the hills. He dismounted, led the horse into the shade of a cliff, and
tethered it to a wooden trough. He filled the trough with water from an old, rusty pump, and the animal eagerly began drinking. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” the boy told it, scratching it under the chin at a sweet spot he’d discovered horses liked.

What a difference it made to have a creature that could respond to his voice! Unlike a Safe Horse, it could twitch its hide when flies landed on it and snort when it smelled something interesting. Matt had ordered that no more animals should be microchipped and that the ones already harmed should be cared for until the doctors discovered a cure. If Ton-Ton or Chacho got thrown off while learning to ride a Real Horse, that was their problem.

Thinking of his friends, he sighed and walked up the dry stream. When he got to the boulder blocking the trail, he looked back. Behind him was desert. Ahead—after he climbed through the donut hole—was another world. Matt hadn’t been there since the first night he returned to Opium.

Creosote bushes and paloverde trees framed a small, narrow valley, and in the center was the oasis. A ripple of little fish moved away as he approached. “I’m back,” Matt announced to no one in particular. He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one, yet he had the feeling that the place wasn’t deserted. He sat in the shade of the old grape arbor, after sweeping the ground for scorpions, and ate his lunch.

A small flock of sandhill cranes floated on the far side of the pool. More circled in the air, uttering high, sweet cries. Tam Lin said that in the old days they flew all the way from Siberia to spend the winter here. When spring came they flew back, but El Patrón had fixed them so that they no longer migrated.
That first summer must have been hell for them,
the bodyguard had said. But the birds had adjusted, as the lions had, to the new environment.

“I’m the new Lord of Opium,” Matt told Tam Lin. “I don’t think you ever expected that. I sure didn’t. Everyone treats me differently now. Celia calls me
patrón
and won’t eat with me anymore.” It felt good to talk, even if his friend couldn’t answer.

Matt told him about Dr. Rivas, the Bug, and Listen. “I like Listen even though she’s usually a pest. Cienfuegos likes her too. I guess you knew him.” Matt talked about losing Chacho’s friendship. He described how El Patrón sometimes seemed to be inside his head, telling him what to do.

Not here,
said a voice. Matt jumped. He wasn’t sure whether it had been an actual voice or an illusion. “What isn’t here?” he said cautiously.

Heed the high cliffs, lad. They keep things out.
Matt didn’t understand the meaning of this. He wondered whether he was remembering something Tam Lin had actually said on one of their visits. He sat quietly for a while. The voice didn’t come again.

33

MIRASOL DANCES

H
e had dinner alone with Mirasol, because everyone else was at the guitar factory. “It’s not my fault,” he told her. “I didn’t turn Eusebio into an eejit, but they blame me just the same. Why can’t they understand that I was just as much a prisoner as he was for many years?”