The Lord of Opium

by Nancy Farmer

  They went on with occasional stops to watch a technician study graphs or adjust a number on a dial. The Mushroom Master opened every door they passed—carefully, so Dr. Angel wouldn’t notice—and discovered a lunchroom with tables. “Excellent! Let’s have tea,” he said.

  Two technicians were sitting at a table, but they left when the visitors arrived. The old man was intrigued by a coffee machine and, by punching a button, managed to scald himself. “Here, I’ll do it,” said Cienfuegos, blowing on the old man’s hand to cool his skin. “Coffee or hot chocolate? I don’t think you’d like the tea.”

  “Hot chocolate,” the Mushroom Master said eagerly. They found a box full of donuts and helped themselves. “This is extremely unhealthy,” the old man said happily. “The dieticians at home are fanatical about me not eating sugar.”

  “By the way, sir, you do a fine imitation of a Tundran,” said the jefe. “Dr. Rivas and Dr. Angel couldn’t wait to get rid of you.” The Mushroom Master smiled and stuffed another donut into his mouth.

  Afterward they explored the solar telescope. A technician carrying a clipboard hurried over and offered to show them around. The man took them to the top of the tower, where the telescope followed the movement of the sun, and then down to the opening of a giant shaft that plunged at an angle into the earth.

  “Look at that,” cried Matt. A huge tube filled the inner part of the shaft, and elevators enclosed in a chicken-wire wall spiraled slowly down the outer part.

  “The elevators are for the maintenance crew. The tube is like a giant thermos bottle, and it needs to be checked constantly for weaknesses,” said the technician. “The image of the sun is projected inside the tube from lenses in the tower and filtered to remove most of the heat. Even so, the temperature can be lethal. The final image is relayed to computers in the main observatory to study the weather on the surface.”

  “The sun has weather?”

  “Yes, indeed. The surface is always boiling, and sometimes streams of hot gas are ejected into space. We’re concerned with the ones aimed at the Scorpion Star.”

  Lights illuminated the sides of the shaft, but it was so deep that Matt couldn’t make out the bottom. Air conditioners whirred in alcoves at various levels, and a hot breeze rose out of the depths and was sucked through vents.

  “Amazing,” said the Mushroom Master. “Even with all those safeguards, it’s still hot.”

  “The air-conditioning isn’t perfect,” admitted the technician. “Every now and then we lose a few eejits.”

  “What an evil place to work,” said Matt, watching the pasty faces of the maintenance crew in their wire cage. They were dressed in the usual tan jumpsuits, and their skin was bleached from lack of sun. They looked like mushrooms. Matt shone Tam Lin’s flashlight, and powerful though it was, the beam was lost.

  He thanked the technician for his help, and the man went back to his work. Matt continued to look into the hot shaft. More elevators slowly rose and fell along the sides, and some had stopped at alcoves to tend to machinery.

  “Triple dare you to go down to the bottom,” Cienfuegos said.

  “Me? Oh, no! It would be like being buried alive. I hate going underground.” Matt remembered finding part of El Patrón’s dragon hoard at the oasis. A dark shaft had opened up, and he’d glimpsed strange Egyptian gods and a floor covered with gold coins. It was the first of many chambers the old man had created. The earth around Ajo was riddled with them, all interconnected, with the last one leading to El Patrón’s funeral chamber and the bodies of those he had chosen to serve him in the afterlife.

  Matt had to hold on to the railing. Looking over the edge made him light-headed.

  “And you call yourself a drug lord,” the jefe said scornfully. “The Mushroom Master overcame his fear and threw away his umbrella.”

  “Not completely,” reminded the Mushroom Master.

  “It’s a work in progress. A real man doesn’t run and hide, Don Sombra. He would be ashamed.”

  Matt was shocked. Never had Cienfuegos dared to lecture him like this. It was like having Tam Lin back, scolding him for being afraid to get onto a horse. For a second he was angry, but then he realized that what the jefe said was true. He could not afford to give in to fear. He was the Lord of Opium. You couldn’t be weak and have power at the same time.

  “I could have you cockroached for that,” he said in an effort to save face, “but this time I’ll overlook your insolence. Let’s all go down to the bottom.”

  Cienfuegos grinned. “Very good, mi patrón. You’re learning.”

  Of the three of them, only the Mushroom Master was at ease. He was used to dark, enclosed places like the elevator cage. The heat was unbearable. Their clothes quickly became drenched with sweat as the cage crawled into the depths. Matt found himself panting, whether from fear or heat he didn’t know. Cienfuegos, for all his bravado, looked nervous in the occasional lights that flashed by. Now and then they passed a platform where there was an alcove gouged into the side of the shaft.

  “What does ‘cockroached’ mean?” said the Mushroom Master. It was a question Matt had wanted to ask. “We have cockroaches in the biosphere, several kinds, in fact. Our founders tried to preserve as many life-forms as possible, although they drew the line at smallpox.”

  “Cockroached?” Cienfuegos seemed half-asleep. He was panting just like Matt. “It’s a punishment El Patrón dreamed up. He got it from some Indian raja. You tie a person down in a room full of roaches, the bigger the better, and pry his mouth open so he can’t close it. The roaches wander around and eventually one of them discovers the open mouth and decides to explore. More follow. There’s only so long you can spit them out. It’s a way of strangling someone slowly, and for some reason it caught the attention of the Farm Patrolmen. There’s nothing they fear more.”

  Matt felt like throwing up. The more he learned about El Patrón, the more he wished he weren’t a copy of him.

  “The punishment was never carried out,” the jefe said.

  “Thank Gaia for that!” said the Mushroom Master.

  “The old man liked to dream up lurid punishments to scare the crap out of people, but if he wanted to kill someone, he did it quickly and efficiently.”

  The elevator bumped at the bottom. Here the tube ended in a ring of cement, and Cienfuegos locked the door open before they stepped out. They didn’t want to be trapped down here.

  They walked around the edge, noting the lights, the air conditioners, and the pipes snaking around the wall. Matt didn’t know what they were looking for, but he was glad he hadn’t acted like a coward. He walked quickly so they could leave quickly.

  On the far side of the tube, a red light illuminated part of the wall. “What’s that? Some kind of warning?” said the Mushroom Master. Beneath the light glimmered the red figure of a scorpion.

  “Stop!” shouted Cienfuegos as the old man reached out. “I’ve seen those before. It guards something that only El Patrón was allowed to see. It recognizes his handprint and kills anyone else who touches it. You could open it, Don Sombra.”

  Both men turned to Matt. He stared at the symbol. There was no telling what it led to, but he was suddenly unwilling to reveal the secret. El Patrón had considered it important enough to hide in this dangerous place. Matt wanted to be alone when he opened up whatever it was.

  “I’ll come back another time,” he said in a tone that allowed no room for argument. “Let’s return to the hospital.”

  42

  THE SUICIDE BOMBER

  They had lunch under a grape arbor. Fidelito and Listen had quarreled, and Sor Artemesia sat between them to keep the peace. “He wouldn’t play with Mbongeni,” Listen complained.

  “Who wants to sit in a baby crib and glue chicken feathers to your fingers?” retorted Fidelito.

  “You’re jealous ’cause Mbongeni likes me and not you.”

  “He bit me,” cried the little boy.

  “So? You had molasses on your hand. He likes swee
ts.”

  “Both of you keep quiet,” said Sor Artemesia. She was out of sorts and was distant with Dr. Rivas. He, too, spoke little and appeared agitated. An uneasy atmosphere brooded over the gathering.

  Only the Mushroom Master seemed relaxed. He rambled on about how mycelia wrap the roots of young fir trees and draw food to them when the soil is poor. “I think of them as babysitters,” he said. “ ‘Time for your three o’clock feeding,’ they say, and the little trees sit up and pay attention.”

  “Shut up!” exclaimed Dr. Rivas. “I can’t take much more of your drivel. What in hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “He’s helping us clean up the pollution near the eejit pens,” Cienfuegos said.

  “Why bother? The eejits don’t care.” The doctor glanced toward the lab, where the cow was walking slowly through flower-filled meadows in her mind. “I’m sick of eejits. Nothing fixes them. Nothing works.”

  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” the Mushroom Master said brightly. Dr. Rivas threw down his napkin and stalked off.

  “I think all of us have been put into his freezer,” said Listen.

  “He certainly seems nervous,” the jefe said. “Did you see the Bug when you visited the nursery?”

  “Nope. I hope somebody got him with a flyswatter,” said the little girl.

  They finished lunch, and Sor Artemesia took Fidelito and Listen off for a nap. The Mushroom Master said he wanted a nap too.

  That left Matt and Cienfuegos. “I’m going to call María, and I want to be alone,” Matt said.

  “Bad idea,” said the jefe.

  “What? Calling María?”

  “Being alone.” Cienfuegos looked pointedly at the grape arbor and cupped his ear. Matt understood. Someone was listening. There was an undercurrent of danger in Paradise, and the jefe had picked it up. He was practically sniffing the air like a coyote.

  Matt felt the strange tension too. Something was building up, and he wished he could count one-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two to see how close it was. Along with Cienfuegos, he went to the holoport room and opened the wormhole to the Convent of Santa Clara. A UN peacekeeper in full battle dress was standing in front of the portal. He was covered from head to toe with riot gear, and his helmet was darkened so no one could see his expression. The soldier hurled himself into the wormhole.

  “Close the portal!” screamed the jefe.

  Matt was frozen.

  “Close it! That’s a suicide bomber!”

  The figure drew closer with agonizing slowness, and Cienfuegos tried to reach the controls. Matt shoved him away. “We don’t know what he is. Stay back! That’s a direct order!”

  The jefe collapsed to his knees. “I can’t disobey, but please, please, please close the portal! Esperanza wants to kill you!”

  What would El Patrón do? thought Matt as the lethal mists swirled about the figure. The answer came at once. I’d wait and see, said the old, old voice in his mind. I didn’t become a drug lord by wetting my pants every time something went wrong.

  Cienfuegos was doubled up with pain, the two directives at war in his mind: to protect the patrón and to obey a direct order. It was killing him. Matt laid his hand on the man’s head and said, “I forgive you.”

  The peacekeeper’s body shot out of the wormhole and fell with a clatter. The portal closed with a thunderclap that shook the room. Matt kicked away ice, wrapped his hands in a towel, and undid the helmet. The cold still penetrated to his fingers. He blew on a face that was heartbreakingly still and white.

  “¡Por Dios!” cried Cienfuegos. He raced from the room and returned with a hair dryer. “Quick! Quick! Get the uniform off!” He ran the hair dryer over María’s face while Matt undid buckles and snaps. She wasn’t breathing, and Matt blew air into her lungs. She shuddered and gasped.

  “She’s in shock,” said Cienfuegos. He called for help. Servants came running and carried her to a hospital room. By that time a doctor and nurse had arrived and began working to keep her warm and to feed oxygen into her lungs. A blood pressure cuff and heart rate monitor recorded life signs. Matt watched in a daze, not knowing what they meant but only that there was still something to measure.

  Time passed. She began to breathe regularly. The color had come back into her skin, and the doctor said that she wouldn’t lose her fingers or toes. The biggest problem was that she’d gone without air for an unknown time. No one knew how time was measured inside a wormhole.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” the doctor said. “Astronauts undergo the temperature of outer space, but they have the right protection. This uniform was meant for Earth conditions. I didn’t know it could keep out cold.”

  María had come up with the only way she could escape her mother and used the only kind of uniform she could lay her hands on. “She didn’t know either,” Matt said.

  * * *

  He briefly went to his room to fetch the altar cloth María had sent to him through the holoport, and this he pinned to the wall in front of her bed. It would be the first thing she saw. All other concerns went out of his head. He sat for hours in her room, refusing food and turning away visitors. Lack of oxygen had harmed Chacho, though he had recovered eventually. He had never lost consciousness like this. Finally, Sor Artemesia came and refused to go. “You must rest, Don Sombra. You must eat.”

  “I’ll do it here,” said Matt. He had a cot brought in, but when he tried to eat, his stomach revolted and he couldn’t keep anything down. This was too much like Mirasol’s last hours. He dreaded seeing the doctor come, afraid that the man would tell him the situation was hopeless. Nurses arrived regularly to change the girl’s position in bed and to administer intravenous feeding.

  And still she did not awake. One of the new doctors measured her brain activity and pronounced himself satisfied with the results. “She seems normal in all respects except one. It isn’t like a coma, Don Sombra. It’s more like a deep sleep and that gives me hope that she will recover.”

  Matt said nothing. He remembered Mirasol collapsing after one of her dance sessions, only to be roused by a command. How long would she have slept if he hadn’t given that command?

  When the doctor had left, Matt said, “María, wake up!” but nothing happened. He talked to her as he’d spoken to Rosa after she’d been turned into an eejit. He told her about the disastrous party he’d thrown for the boys, about Chacho and his father, about the visit to the biosphere. But he left out any reference to the Mushroom Master in case Dr. Rivas was listening.

  Day turned into night. He dozed, sitting up each time the nurses came in. They flexed María’s arms and legs to stimulate her circulation. On the second day the doctor noted her eyelids fluttering. “She’s dreaming, Don Sombra. Her brain is active.” Matt wondered whether it was a nightmare or whether she was walking through flower-filled meadows like the cow. At this point he would have welcomed one of Listen’s night terrors, if only to prove that María was still there.

  Matt fell into a trancelike state. The sight of food revolted him, and he was no longer sure whether he was awake or dreaming. Nurses came and went. The sound of voices echoed distantly from the hall. The window lightened and darkened as the sun moved across the sky.

  Matt saw Dr. Rivas bent over María and wondered vaguely why the man hadn’t come before. The doctor held up a syringe, tapped it to dislodge air bubbles, and squirted a small amount of liquid from the tip.

  “What are you doing?” asked Matt.

  “Giving her a stimulant,” said Dr. Rivas.

  Something was wrong—the doctor’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, and behind that smile his teeth were clenched. Matt jumped up and smashed the syringe out of the doctor’s hand.

  Dr. Rivas backed away, hands in the air. “I meant no harm, Don Sombra. I exist to serve.”

  “Like you served El Patrón by carving up his clones.”

  “Good heavens! I’m your best hope for María’s survival. Look. She’s stirri
ng.”

  Matt turned to see her fingers fluttering on the sheet. “María, it’s me. I’m here. You made it. You’re safe.” The girl tossed her head from side to side. Her dark hair whipped across the pillow. “What’s wrong?” the boy cried.

  “She’s trying to wake up. This will pass,” said Dr. Rivas. And indeed, after a moment María calmed down and breathed easily again. Her lips opened slightly as though she wanted to speak. Matt watched, fascinated, willing her to come to life.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Dr. Rivas,” said Matt, holding her hands and feeling warmth return to them. He turned, but the room was empty.

  43

  THE CHAPEL OF JESÚS MALVERDE

  He rang for a nurse. No one came. He rang again and went out into the hall. The nurse’s station was deserted. There were no voices, no whirr of machines, only the sound of eejits going about their tasks. He went back to the room. María seemed to be all right. Her blood pressure and heartbeat, as far as he could tell, hadn’t changed.

  He was afraid to leave her. He sat there, watching for any change in her condition. He realized that he shouldn’t have struck out at Dr. Rivas. The man was understandably upset about his son’s death. Matt should have been more patient.

  “Don Sombra,” came a soft voice from the door. Matt looked up to see Sor Artemesia. “You must come, Don Sombra. I think Dr. Rivas has gone mad. He’s been fighting with the other doctors and destroying equipment.”

  Matt felt heavy with lack of sleep and food. His mind wasn’t functioning clearly. “I’ll deal with it later,” he said.

  “You must come now,” urged Sor Artemesia. “There was trouble at one of the labs. Something about a dead cow. Dr. Rivas killed an eejit.”

  Everyone kills eejits, Matt thought wearily. Dr. Kim, Esperanza, even Cienfuegos on occasion. Nothing abnormal about that. “I need coffee,” he said. The nun hurriedly fetched him a cup from the nurse’s station. Matt waited for the bitter brew to work its way into his consciousness. “I can’t leave María now. Especially if Dr. Rivas is going rogue. Where’s Cienfuegos?”