by Nancy Farmer
“I’ve got so much to tell you,” he said.
“Me too,” said María. “I was outside when the first meteor fell. It was the brightest I’ve ever seen, and then I saw another one. Not long after, the men began to show up. They were so lost, mi vida. They didn’t know what had happened, and they were calling for their families. Sor Artemesia said that Malverde was the only shred of religion they’d had and that we must honor it.”
“I’m really interested,” said Matt, yawning broadly, “but I’ve been through so much I can’t even think straight.”
“That’s all right,” she said in the understanding way he loved. “We have the rest of our lives to talk.”
He kissed her sleepily, staggered to the front of the chapel, and passed out on one of the pews. In the middle of the night he awoke when a bright light passed over the forest. It was the last of the meteors, perhaps Tundra.
The Scorpion Star had uncoupled, each building separating from the others, and the carefully maintained orbit had failed. One by one they had fallen. Matt tried not to think of the terrified people inside. He’d been no better than El Patrón shooting down a passenger plane.
52
THE GHOST ARMY
It seemed unfair that Matt could remember everything awful that had happened, but few of the good times. The months after the Scorpion Star fell were some of the good times. They were a golden blur. Many of the paisanos left, with money to get established in their new lives. Nothing, of course, could make up for what they had lost. Some remained who had little to return to.
One of the most difficult problems was getting Aztlán and the United States to take back their citizens. These people had no passports, the governments argued. They were unpersons and therefore Opium’s responsibility. Matt understood that paisanos had little value in lands where machines did most of the work, and for this problem he called on Esperanza.
She looked like a small black thundercloud ready to spit lightning when he accessed the Convent of Santa Clara. “What have you done with my daughter?” she shouted.
“I didn’t do anything. María came here of her own accord,” protested Matt.
“Then she is with you,” said Esperanza, and Matt realized he’d been tricked. María’s mother hadn’t known where she was.
“She’s happy,” he said.
“She probably is, the little fool. What I can’t figure out is how you got your hands on her. The last anyone saw of her, she was in this room. Then the sisters discovered that the door lock had been melted with a laser. By the time they broke it open, she was gone. What did you do? Send a commando unit and then fuse the lock to provide a distraction?” Esperanza was practically incandescent with rage.
“I didn’t do anything. She came through the portal,” Matt said.
Her eyes widened. “That’s impossible! It’s a wormhole. It’s the temperature of outer space.” The intensity of her rage reached through the portal, and Matt, in spite of knowing he was safe, took a step backward.
“You’re lying. You lured her through, and now she’s dead,” said Esperanza.
“No!” Matt cried. “She dressed herself in a UN peacekeeper’s hazard gear. She almost died from lack of air, but she recovered and has no permanent damage. I’ll bring her. You’ll see.”
He turned to call a paisano, but Esperanza impatiently waved the man away. “This is extremely interesting. A person went through a wormhole and survived. Don’t you see the military importance of such a discovery?”
It wasn’t just a person, Matt thought. It was your daughter. As before, he was amazed at how coolly she received bad news. Her husband and older daughter had died at El Patrón’s funeral, and Esperanza’s only reaction had been, That certainly makes things awkward.
“With the right gear and a supply of oxygen, I could transport a soldier anywhere in the world,” said Esperanza. “I’ll have to find out how long it takes to cross a wormhole.”
“If you’re thinking of sending peacekeepers here, think again. Armies can go both ways,” Matt said, with what he hoped was El Patrón’s menace.
“It won’t be necessary,” said Esperanza, brushing off his threat. “Some very unusual things have been happening. The Scorpion Star, that monstrosity El Patrón planted in the southern sky, fell out of orbit and burned. And the eejits under Glass Eye Dabengwa’s control went rogue and wiped out his army. Reports are that he’s missing.”
“He’s dead,” Matt said. He filled her in on all that had happened. “Those eejits aren’t rogue, they’re awake, and so are the ones in Opium. The Scorpion Star was controlling their brains, and I destroyed it.” He waited to see whether she would congratulate him. She didn’t. “Most of the ex-eejits want to go home, but the countries they came from won’t take them back.”
“I’ll organize a committee to study the situation,” said Esperanza.
“Oh, no you won’t. A committee would string things out for years. I want you to lean on those governments until they back down. Otherwise, I won’t send you any more bunny rabbits and squirrels.” The woman frowned, ready to do battle, but Matt added, “You’ll never believe what we discovered near Tucson. Lions and tigers from a zoo that went wild during the drug wars.”
Esperanza was so startled she forgot to scowl. She clasped her heavily ringed hands until they looked like a ball of silver and turquoise gems. “Lions? They survived in the desert?”
“Tucson isn’t quite a desert anymore,” said Matt. “It’s hot, but lions are used to heat. I also discovered a jungle with monkeys and toucans and crocodiles. And there’s a biosphere with ecosystems from every part of the Earth. Think about it, Esperanza. Opium holds the seeds of recovery for the entire planet. The scientists in the biosphere have also found a way to clean up polluted soil.”
She was stunned. She opened her mouth and no sound came out. As Cienfuegos had suggested, keeping the lions secret had been a good idea.
“I can’t believe it,” she murmured at last.
“Believe it. I’ll send you pictures.”
“We built a park near the ruins of Tijuana for the samples you sent,” she said. Her expression had changed completely. She was no longer harsh and uncompromising. She looked twenty years younger. “It’s a very small place, but we planned to expand it slowly. If there’s a way to recover polluted soil . . . ”
“There is. Do we have a basis for negotiation?” asked Matt.
“Oh, yes. Yes.” Esperanza’s face was radiant with joy. It almost made the commander of the UN forces likable. But when they had finished their conversation and Matt had shut down the portal, he remembered.
Esperanza had entirely forgotten about María.
* * *
Most of the Farm Patrolmen stayed because they had prices on their heads in other lands. Samson and Boris opted to stay as well. Cienfuegos recovered slowly. Once Matt found him weeping, and he turned away quickly to hide it. “I remember too much,” he explained. “But don’t worry, Don Sombra. People like me have an infinite ability to forgive themselves.”
Matt offered to help find his family in Aztlán, but he shook his head. “My daughter was ten when I left her, and now she’d be almost thirty. She’ll have married and forgotten about me. As for my wife, she’ll definitely have remarried. It would be amusing to walk in on her and her new husband, but I’ve lost my taste for blood sports.”
With Matt’s help, Cienfuegos sent samples of the fungi used by the Mushroom Master to his old university. “What I would most like is to grow something here that isn’t narcotics,” the jefe said. “It would be wonderful to produce life instead of taking it.” Matt promised that he could do whatever he liked. “Of course, if you need me to kick butt with the Farm Patrol, I’d be willing to help,” Cienfuegos said, with a flash of his old spirit.
Matt set about finding jobs for the remaining paisanos. Most of the opium was uprooted, and soon alfalfa, corn, tomatoes, wheat, and chilies took the place of the old fields. The population of Opium, minus
the men who had gone home, was very small compared to that of other countries. Most of the land would be left untouched.
María, of course, was in her element. She gathered the ex-eejit children into small houses and, with Sor Artemesia’s help, hired women from Aztlán and the United States to be surrogate mothers for them. None of the children, as far as they could tell, had any family left. Those who were musical were given lessons by Mr. Ortega and the newly freed choirmaster.
* * *
Eusebio wasn’t interested in giving lessons. Chacho said that his father awoke that memorable night when the Scorpion Star fell, turned on the light, and inspected the rows and rows of guitars propped against the walls. “Who left these here?” he demanded. “They should be in proper cases and not lying around where mice can get at them.”
Chacho sat up, utterly amazed. “You made them, Father.”
“Me? Pah! I don’t remember doing it. And who are you?”
For a moment Chacho was speechless. “I’m your son,” he managed to say.
“Nonsense! Mi hijo is only so high, not a hulking teenager like you. Where’s Mr. Ortega?” By now the light had awakened the piano teacher, who stumbled out of bed and tried to explain the situation. It took a while for Eusebio to realize that his friend was deaf.
“What a pity! What a pity!” the guitar maker exclaimed. “And you such a great pianist. Are you ill, mi compadre? You look so old. It must be the dry desert air.”
“I advise you not to look into a mirror,” retorted Mr. Ortega. Gradually, he and Chacho told Eusebio what had happened. Chacho said he was worried about his father’s reaction, but Eusebio was far more interested to learn that he could write music here and not be concerned with finding work. He lived for music, just as it seemed Chacho would live for art.
He was hugely impressed with his son’s artistic ability. “Runs in the family,” he bragged. “All of us Orozcos are born with either a paintbrush or a guitar pick in our hands.”
* * *
Ton-Ton was a problem. He admired music and art from a distance, but he had little talent in those areas. Most of what sent Chacho into transports of joy passed over Ton-Ton’s head. María drafted him to teach the ex-eejit children. “They can learn so much from you,” she enthused. “You can show them gears and screwdrivers and those little round things you use to feed wires into boxes.”
“Grommets,” said Ton-Ton.
“Yes! Such a cute name!” But when she found him threatening to beat the stuffing out of a five-year-old who had rearranged Ton-Ton’s computer parts, she was outraged.
“It’s a j-joke,” he explained when she pulled the howling boy away. “Fidelito and Listen aren’t scared of me. Kids, uh, break stuff if you don’t w-watch them all the time.”
“You can’t threaten them,” she cried.
“W-why not, if it works?” he argued. And so the experiment with Ton-Ton as teacher was over.
Matt tried to involve him in farming, but years of toiling under the hot sun at the plankton factory had killed the interest. Medicine and astronomy, two other possibilities, were too “brainy,” according to Ton-Ton. Yet Matt knew that nothing was wrong with the older boy’s brain. He simply approached problems in a different way.
It was finally Daft Donald who came up with the solution. He thinks with his hands, wrote the bodyguard on his yellow pad of paper. And so he introduced Ton-Ton to the inner workings of Hitler’s car. The boy was enchanted. From there they went on to Celia’s freezer, to Dr. Kim’s electron microscope at the hospital, to the irrigation system at the mushroom house, and to many other delights.
“The secret of successful education,” the Mushroom Master said wisely as Ton-Ton moled around the fungus gardens with pipes, “is finding out how a particular person learns.”
* * *
Matt fulfilled his promise to take Listen to the oasis. He worried that she would destroy the quiet nature of the place, but she seemed awestruck by it. “We won’t tell the others,” she said. “They don’t need a secret world, but we do. Those sure are some funny-looking rocks.”
Matt looked up at the range he’d climbed to escape Opium. “That’s how I got to Aztlán. There’s a ridge of mountains where you can see all the opium farms at once.”
“I don’t mean those,” the little girl said impatiently. “I mean these.”
And Matt saw the rocks that surrounded the old miner’s cabin and collapsed grapevine. They were some distance away, on three sides with the fourth side opening onto the small lake. In the middle, next to the water, was the campsite where he and Tam Lin had toasted hot dogs.
Now he saw what Listen was talking about. The color and texture were strange. He walked to the nearest one and scratched it with his pocketknife. It was very hard, but a few brown flakes came loose. “This looks like some kind of metal ore,” he said.
“Dr. Rivas had a box that looked like that,” said Listen. “He put an eejit inside. He was trying to block out something, but he wouldn’t tell me what.”
Matt remembered asking Tam Lin why they could sleep so soundly at the oasis with mosquitoes whining in their ears and the hard earth underneath. ’Tis not bodily comfort we need, Tam Lin had replied, but the mind at ease. Something about the rocks holds back the cares of the world. This is the only place in Opium I’ve felt free.
Of course. The metal ore blocked the energy from the Scorpion Star. “What happened to the eejit?” he asked.
“He was okay as long as he was inside, but he went rogue the minute he got out. Dr. Rivas tried it about a hundred times.” Listen yawned and lay down on the sand next to the water.
* * *
That left only the Bug to deal with. If El Bicho had learned anything from being treated kindly—gratitude, for example—no one saw evidence of it. He was as vicious and demanding as ever. Finally, after consulting everyone, Matt asked permission to install the child in the Brat Enclosure. “My opinion, which you won’t listen to, is that we put him to sleep like the rabid coyote he is,” said Cienfuegos.
“I thought you didn’t have homicidal impulses anymore,” said Matt.
“A few may have been overlooked,” admitted the jefe.
“We’ve had bichos like him before,” said the Mushroom Master. “We treat them with love, and if that doesn’t work, we give them an extra-long Dormancy to be sure they don’t do harm when they wake up.”
As for El Bicho, he approached the Brat Enclosure with suspicion. He found the peaceful groups of children threatening, and he immediately destroyed a sand castle they had built. The children only looked at him and began building another. “Do you remember the Scorpion Star?” Matt asked him. “This is its original. When you grow up, you’ll join the scientists. You’ll be one of them and never be lonely again.”
The Bug looked at Matt as though he were a rat dropping. But he went willingly into the enclosure, and the last they saw of him, he was squatting by a pool with other children, feeding giant carp with rice balls. “Do you know,” said Matt, “his hand has started to grow back. It’s like he’s a frog or something.”
“Then he’ll fit right in here,” the Mushroom Master said tranquilly. “We admire frogs.”
* * *
One moonlit night Matt flew María over the sand dunes west of Yuma. They passed the ruins of the old city, a sketchwork of deserted houses and dry fields. To the south was the glow of San Luis on the border of Aztlán, and when they went close to the ground, María gasped. “Those are bones! There are skeletons down there!”
“Cienfuegos told me about this,” said Matt. “They’re only visible under the full moon, and sometimes they’re hidden by shifting sand. Those are the bones of Illegals who tried to cross over.”
“So many,” said María.
“They’ve had a hundred years to accumulate. It’s extremely hot and dry here. El Patrón didn’t bother to send out the Farm Patrol.”
“But why didn’t their own governments stop them?”
Matt looked
out over the thousands and thousands of skeletons strewn like a ghost army over the earth. “These were surplus people. They had few skills that Aztlán and the United States wanted. The governments were glad to get rid of them.”
“This must never happen again,” said María, with a firmness that reminded Matt of her mother.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “I have to fix the border so that other people can open it in an emergency. Power has been in the hands of one man for too long. But there are problems with giving people freedom. Some of them will abuse it. Both Cienfuegos and Sor Artemesia say it’s inevitable. Cienfuegos says he can organize the Farm Patrol into a decent police force, and Sor Artemesia will try to look after people’s souls. Our old, predictable lives are going to change.” He idled the hovercraft over the dunes, and it bobbed gently on a cushion of antigravity.
“I’m thinking of not opening the border until people adjust to the new system. We’ll soon be self-sufficient, especially if we can persuade women to join us. I’m thinking of turning Opium into a larger biosphere, or as close to it as we can get.”
“The drug dealers won’t like it,” María pointed out.
“Crot the drug dealers,” said Matt. “It will be an adventure, and it may not work, but it’s worth trying. And one thing more, mi vida.”
She turned toward him.
“I want to marry you.”
She smiled mischievously, so like the lady in the Goya painting. “I’m only fifteen, you know. It’s illegal.”
“I’m fifteen too, and I’m the Lord of Opium. I say it’s legal.”
“Mother will be furious.”
“That’s one of the side benefits,” said Matt. They said nothing for a while.
María gazed out at the field of bones, and the moonlight painted the world with a pale blue light. “You sure picked a weird place to propose,” she said.
“I think it’s peaceful.”
“You’ll have to bring in a real priest. I’m not going to be a drug lord’s floozy.”
