The Lord of Opium

15

DR. RIVAS

The stars gleamed through the transparent ceiling of the hovercraft. Matt was too dazed to recognize any of them except for the Scorpion Star. It was in the south, as always, and glittered with a red brilliance. He was lying on a stretcher behind the two seats. In the right chair was Mirasol. In the left was Cienfuegos, piloting the craft.

“There’s a water bottle in front of you, Waitress,” said the jefe. “Take it to the patrón and drip it into his mouth until he tells you to stop. Move carefully so you don’t tip the craft.” Matt was surprised to see that Mirasol understood such a complicated order. She knelt beside the stretcher with barely a whisper of disturbance in their flight and carefully gave him the water.

“Enough.” He stayed her hand. “Thank you.”

Cienfuegos laughed. “I keep telling you courtesy is wasted on her.”

“Isn’t,” said Matt. He wanted to say more, that she’d saved his life, that she cared, otherwise she wouldn’t have fetched Celia. But he was too weak. Meanwhile, he found it soothing to have her near.

The hovercraft was moving at three hundred miles an hour, according to Cienfuegos, yet there was no turbulence. A field of energy repelled all but the fiercest winds. The jefe said they could go through a thunderstorm, but at this time of year there were none to worry about.

“Where . . . are we going?” Matt asked.

“To Paradise,” said Cienfuegos.

Paradise, thought the boy. That sounded nice. Now that he had a soul, the angels wouldn’t turn him away. Or Mirasol either. He would argue for her.

“It’s the heart of El Patrón’s empire,” explained the jefe. “It has the best hospital in the world, although right now there’s only one doctor. The rest died at the old man’s funeral.”

El Patrón killed them because he wanted the best possible care in the afterlife, Matt thought. I wonder if you can get sick in heaven. Mirasol wiped his forehead with a damp cloth, and he realized that no order had been given for her to do this. She was doing it on her own initiative.

The sky began to soften as dawn approached. The stars went out one by one, with the Scorpion Star lasting the longest.

“We’re circling to go up a valley,” said Cienfuegos. The hovercraft dipped, and Matt saw white domes here and there among the mesquite trees. They passed over a huge dome that dwarfed all the others. It had a slit in the top like the piggy bank Celia had once given him as a child. She’d handed him shiny new centavos to insert, but Matt hadn’t seen the point of that.

I’m trying to show you how to save money, Celia had explained. That’s how people get rich. But money wasn’t used in Opium, and Matt had preferred to roll the coins around until they were lost down cracks in the floor.

“What you see is the Sky Village,” said Cienfuegos. “Long ago astronomers lived here, and each of them had his own observatory. When El Patrón took over, he built his own observatory, larger and more powerful than anyone else’s. He bought a giant telescope that he said could see all the way around the universe and look at the back of your neck.”

“Don’t . . . understand,” Matt said. It was hard enough to think without puzzles like that.

“El Patrón didn’t either,” said the jefe. “He was repeating what some scientist told him. He must have had a good reason to build the observatory, because it cost him a quarter of his fortune.”

“Maybe . . . ” Matt swallowed. His fever must be going up again, because when he blinked he saw lights flashing. “Maybe . . . he was looking for heaven.”

Cienfuegos chuckled. “If he found heaven, you can bet the angels were out building fences to keep him away. I’ll tip slightly so you can see the trees as we go into the mountains.”

Scrubby mesquite and cholla gave way to juniper and oak, and then to pine. Cliffs rose on either side, with folded rocks and caves in which anything might hide. A flock of brightly colored parrots went by. The hovercraft was getting lower as they followed a road with a stream at its side. A mule deer looked up from drinking.

“There it is,” said the jefe. In the middle of the wilderness was a fabulous mansion, with many outbuildings extending under trees on either side. It was so cleverly built of native rock that at first it looked like part of the mountain. Only up close could you see verandas and reflecting pools and gardens. “El Patrón loved this place. He sometimes said, ‘If there is Paradise on Earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.’ That’s a quote from an ancient Indian emperor. The old man could surprise you with what he knew, but then he had a hundred and forty-six years to learn. Anyhow, that’s why this place is called Paradise.”

The hovercraft set down as delicately as a feather, and at once men in green scrubs ran out. They unloaded Matt and carried him to one of the outbuildings. In an instant he was moved from a cool, pine-smelling forest to a bed in a place filled with the odors of medicine and antiseptics. He tensed up. He couldn’t help it. Hospitals had never been good to him.

An older man in a lab coat appeared and felt Matt’s head. “Por Dios, Cienfuegos! Why hasn’t anyone treated this boy?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Rivas,” said the jefe. “We don’t have anyone left at the Ajo hospital except a nurse called Fiona.”

Dr. Rivas gave a barking laugh. “Fiona! She’s no nurse. She was in charge of sterilizing equipment. She must have taken advantage of the situation and put on a uniform.”

“You don’t say! She stitched up my arm.”

“You’re lucky not to have gangrene,” said the doctor. “Well, let’s look at you, chico. Where does it hurt?”

“Uh, Dr. Rivas. This is the new patrón.”

The doctor flinched as though he’d been shot. “This child? How is it possible? Nobody told me.”

“He was, uh, he was . . . ” Cienfuegos trailed off.

“A clone,” Matt finished for him.

A look of wonder crossed the doctor’s face. “This is the one I remember. I thought he’d been harvested.” He touched Matt’s head again very gently. “Let’s get you better before I go off on a tangent.” He opened Matt’s shirt and pressed his fingers on the boy’s chest. “Look, Cienfuegos. That’s classic. The skin is red as though scalded, and when I take my fingers away, you can see a white imprint for a few seconds. His lymph nodes are swollen. I’ll bet your throat’s sore, mi patrón. God, it feels strange to call a child patrón.”

Matt smiled weakly. He wasn’t upset that the doctor had called him a child.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Cienfuegos.

“Scarlet fever. I haven’t seen a case for years and certainly never expected it in”—he paused—“someone so heavily immunized.”

“The patrón accessed the holoport twice and fine-tuned the border once in little more than a day,” said the jefe. “I thought that the scanner might have weakened his immune system.”

“Interesting,” said Dr. Rivas. “You know, clones aren’t exactly like the original. The physical differences are small, but they’re there. The scanner might have thought he was an outsider for an instant. Well, I’d better stop nattering and do something.” He filled a fearsomely large hypodermic needle from a sealed bottle and swabbed Matt’s arm with alcohol. “This isn’t going to be pleasant, but the old ways are best with infections of this kind.”

Dr. Rivas was correct. It was the most painful injection Matt had ever had, and he gritted his teeth to keep from groaning. “Very good,” the doctor said. “Now you try to rest. I’ll send someone with fruit juice and water. You’re to drink as often as you can stand it, and I’ll have the nurse pack you in ice bags until the penicillin takes effect.”

Matt caught the doctor’s arm before he could leave. “Mirasol,” he said. Dr. Rivas looked at Cienfuegos.

“It’s a long story,” said the jefe. “He has a pet Mirasol. Don’t worry. I know what to do.”

“Mirasol,” said the doctor as the two men went out the door. “Is that some kind of bird or what?”

* * *

Matt recovered slowly and was allowed out of bed for short periods. “We can’t let our new patrón take chances,” Dr. Rivas said. He spent much time with the boy, and Matt enjoyed his company. The doctor didn’t treat him as some kind of ogre, and when he played chess he didn’t make stupid blunders to let Matt win. Mr. Ortega and Daft Donald always did. He didn’t make jokes about Mirasol, either.

“You say she wakes up when you feed her baked custard. That’s interesting,” the doctor said one afternoon when they were drinking iced tea on a veranda. In the distance Matt could see the main part of the mansion, where an eejit was removing fallen leaves from a pond. Like most eejits, he wore a faded tan jumpsuit and floppy hat. Without the hat, the man might work in the sun until he died of heatstroke.

Matt raised a pair of binoculars Dr. Rivas had given him for amusement and saw that the man was collecting the leaves one by one. He waded to the side with a single leaf at a time and deposited it in a basket. It was going to take a while to clear the pond.

“Taste and smell endure longer than most memories. You can recall a whole scene from one such clue,” said the doctor.

Matt nodded. He knew that the smell of wax from the holy candles Celia burned before the Virgin of Guadalupe was enough to bring back the little house he’d grown up in. “Have you ever heard of an eejit waking up completely?”

“Never,” said the doctor, dashing his hopes.

Mirasol sat nearby, her hands in her lap. Matt had given her a glass of iced tea, and she’d bolted it down so quickly he was afraid to give her more. “What if I found more of these clues?” the boy said.

“The reaction disappears too quickly. You could keep feeding Mirasol until she weighed five hundred pounds, but that’s all you’d accomplish.”

“I’ve asked Esperanza to find brain surgeons.”

Dr. Rivas frowned. “It’s going to be difficult to convince anyone to come here.”

“I could pay them well,” said Matt.

“El Patrón paid them well too, before he poisoned them.” Dr. Rivas sent Mirasol for more iced tea, and Matt trained his binoculars on the eejit clearing the pool. Beyond them was an arbor covered with vines. Someone had hung up a hummingbird feeder, and the tiny birds swarmed around it like wasps. Below, half-hidden in leaves, was a child—or perhaps it was a statue. It was hard to see into the shadows.

“Occasionally El Patrón spared educated Illegals. I was one.”

“You?” said Matt, looking away from the arbor.

“I crossed the border with my father, wife, and three small children, on the way to a glorious career at Stanford University. Or so I hoped. I had a degree in molecular biology with a minor in cloning. Yes, I said cloning. What a fool I was to think a whole family could elude capture! I had to barter my services for their lives.”

Mirasol returned with a fresh pitcher and a plate of sandwiches. Matt wondered whether the sandwiches had been the cook’s idea or hers.

“I started out as a lab technician, growing cells from various drug lords into clones. When I had proved my skill, I was given skin samples from El Patrón. The previous technician had been killed because he could no longer produce results, and I was no luckier. El Patrón’s samples were a hundred years old and no longer responded to treatment. Those that grew were deformed. One of my sons was turned into an eejit as punishment, and so I tried harder, invented new techniques, and finally, after repeated failures, I produced you.”

Matt turned cold with shock. He had guessed where Dr. Rivas was going when he learned the man was an expert in cloning, but to hear it said so bluntly! To know that this man had selected a cell from skin so old and corrupt that it was little more than carrion was beyond disturbing. The priest had once called Matt unnatural, a soulless creature from the grave. Here was the proof!

“You were a beautiful embryo,” said Dr. Rivas. “I watched you through a monitor. I talked to you, and almost as though you could hear, you turned and smiled. Embryos can smile, you know. Who knows what thoughts are passing through their heads? When you were harvested—”

“Don’t!” Matt raised his hand to fend off the words.

“I forget that we scientists are used to such things. It wasn’t so terrible—bad luck for the cow, of course, but she’d had a happy nine months drifting through a dreamworld of flowery meadows.”

“She had a microchip in her brain,” said Matt. Somehow it made it worse to call the animal she. It made her seem more real.

“When I held you in my hands it was as though you were my own child, the boy I had lost.” Dr. Rivas shaded his eyes and fell silent for a moment. “Strange. The grief never goes away. My son was called Eduardo after me.”

“What happened to him?” Matt forced himself to ask the question.

“He works in the gardens. El Patrón made certain I knew where he was in case I had any thoughts of rebelling. That’s why I know the eejit operation can’t be reversed. I have spent years trying to do it with absolutely no success.”

Mirasol was gazing pointedly at the sandwiches, and Matt responded by giving her two. That was surely communication, he thought. He’d become better and better at reading her body language. He winced at the messy speed with which she devoured them and leaned forward to wipe her mouth with a napkin.

“She’s got you trained,” observed Dr. Rivas. “You were the best of the lot, the most intelligent, the most perfect.”

“The best of what lot?” Matt said, although he knew.

“The others were used for liver transplants and blood transfusions,” said the doctor, ignoring the question. “One, an infant, supplied a heart. It was too small, and the operation failed.”

Matt tried to see Dr. Rivas as he’d been a few moments before—a kind, friendly man who had saved his life—and failed. “How could you do it?”

“I had a family to protect. The others, except for you, were merely collections of cells.” Dr. Rivas shrugged. “You get used to being evil.”