The Lord of Opium

“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.

“The microchips form a kind of constellation,” Cienfuegos said after a while. “Depending on their makeup, they attach to different parts of the brain. Dr. Rivas knows far more about it than I do. The eejits get a dose like the blast of a shotgun. Everything is shorted out. The lab technicians get enough to control their will, but not enough to dampen their intelligence. Almost everyone in this place is controlled to one degree or another. Celia was spared because she was a woman and not considered important enough to be a threat. Dr. Rivas and his son and daughter at the observatory were left untouched as well.”

“Why them?” asked Matt.

Cienfuegos gazed up at the trees, white sycamores that were just coming into leaf. The scanty shade sent speckles of sunlight onto the man’s face and illuminated his yellow-brown eyes. “Dr. Rivas was El Patrón’s guarantee of immortality,” he said. “I don’t know why the two astronomers were spared, but you can bet it was for a good reason. Well”—the jefe stood up—“I’d better see about packing. We’ll need a large hovercraft, though most of the plant and animal samples can go by road.”