The Lord of Opium (42 page)

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

W
hen 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 blew 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.

The heat was unbearable, even at night. Soon they were all panting, and Matt opened one of the apple juice boxes and handed it to Listen. They passed a platform in an alcove and saw
eejits mending a pipe with an oxyacetylene torch. Sparks showered into the elevator cage. More heat.

The elevator bumped at the bottom. They moved quickly, but before they got to the door, they heard the sizzle of more sparks. Cienfuegos signaled for them to stop. Matt saw an eejit trying to cut through the wall to the forbidden room.

Listen grabbed Matt’s arm. “I can see Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos,” she whispered.

Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a lightning bolt snaked out of the wall and incinerated the eejit. The odor of burnt flesh drifted through the hall. “Next!” shouted a voice Matt recognized. Another eejit took up the torch. There was a line of them waiting in the space between the telescope and the wall.

“This won’t work,” said Dr. Angel. “We’ve tried it before.”

“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it,” said Happy Man Hikwa. “Each time the wall will degrade a little more. Eventually, we’ll break through.”

“It isn’t just the substance the door’s made of, it’s the force field running through it. There’s a plasma current that reacts to energy,” said Dr. Marcos. “The more you pour in, the more powerfully it pushes back. We’ve tried this before.”

Happy Man barked a command, and a soldier struck Dr. Marcos on the head with the butt of a gun. The doctor fell to his knees. The next eejit blasted the wall until another tongue of fire erupted from it. The remaining eejits watched passively.

“Can we do anything?” whispered Matt.

Cienfuegos watched as the next man moved into position. He drew his stun gun and fired at Happy Man twice in rapid succession, a lethal shot. The
jefe
jumped back, pulling Matt and Listen with him. “Run,” he said, but when they got to the
elevator, it was gone. They had forgotten to prop open the door, and someone had called for it. They could see it slowly spiraling upward. “Climb!” the
jefe
said desperately.

There was a chicken-wire barrier enclosing the elevator shaft, and Matt tried to haul himself up, but the openings were too small. His feet didn’t fit, and he could only cling with his fingers. Cienfuegos tried to boost Listen into a position to climb, but the structure of the barrier was against them. She wasn’t strong enough to hold on. The
jefe
turned, thrusting Matt and the little girl behind him, and took aim at the soldiers.

He brought two down, but a third one shot him. It was an old-fashioned gun with metal bullets, and the impact threw Cienfuegos against the barrier. He raised his weapon and was struck by several more bullets. He crumpled to the floor. Listen screamed. The soldier took aim at Matt and a voice shouted, “Stop!”

It was Dr. Angel. “Stop! He’s the only one who can open the door! That’s El Patrón’s clone!”

The soldiers halted. They looked back. “We only take orders from our
patrón
,” one said.

“You don’t have a
patrón
anymore,” Dr. Angel said. “If you want to survive, join us. If not”—she looked upward—“the Farm Patrol will take care of you.”

Dr. Marcos came up behind her. His head was bleeding, but he seemed to have recovered. “Take the boy,” he ordered. “Leave the girl and the eejit.”

“Stay with him,” Matt whispered, hoping that Listen would, for once, follow orders. She did. She fell over Cienfuegos’s body and clung to his shirt, which was beginning to ooze blood. Matt forced himself to look away. He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t fall apart.

“I thought you were on your way to the Scorpion Star,” he said as soldiers shoved him down the hallway.

“We had to turn back at the border,” said Dr. Angel. “Someone reactivated the lockdown, but no matter. There are worse things than becoming the Lady of Opium.”