The Lord of Opium

35

THE EXPIRY DATE

Chacho did not take his father to the greenhouse. Mr. Ortega explained that removing an eejit (or “a man in your father’s condition” as he put it) from his job caused jittering. It was a sign of extreme stress and might actually kill him. This threw Chacho into an even deeper depression. He refused to leave the guitar factory and barely spoke to anyone.

Several days later, after prolonged nagging, Matt let Listen watch Mirasol dance. He turned on the music, and the girl twirled and clapped. She bowed to an invisible partner before moving to the next.

“That’s spooky,” said Listen. “She’s really seeing something.”

“It’s a memory,” Matt said sadly. “Somewhere, the real Mirasol exists where we can’t find her.”

“What if you played the music over and over?” suggested the little girl.

“I’m afraid to. I don’t know how strong she is. She’s past her expiry date.” Too late Matt realized he’d opened the door to something he didn’t want to talk about.

“What’s an expiry date?” asked Listen.

“It means . . . the day something is finished,” Matt said, thinking rapidly. “It means Mirasol has to be repaired, like putting a new battery into a flashlight.”

“So why don’t you fix her?”

Matt wished, not for the first time, that the little girl weren’t so quick to pick up on things. “The doctors are trying to figure out how. It’s part of the microchip problem.”

Listen nodded and fortunately didn’t ask what would happen if Mirasol wasn’t fixed. “How do you know when her expiry date is?”

“It’s printed on the bottom of her foot.”

By now the music had ended. Matt caught Mirasol and eased her to the carpet. Listen got a magnifying glass and inspected the date. She pulled off her shoes and checked her own feet. “Nothing,” she said. “What about you?”

“I have writing,” said Matt. “It got me into a lot of trouble when I was at the plankton factory in Aztlán.” He’d gotten into the habit of talking to the little girl, always being careful not to give her more information than was good for her. Sometimes he forgot she was only seven years old, she was so intelligent, but he knew she wasn’t able to handle many things.

“The Keepers and other boys found out I was a clone. They thought I was lower than the lowest beast . . . except for Chacho, Ton-Ton, and Fidelito. They stood by me.”

“You were like Mbongeni,” said Listen. For a moment she looked sad, and he realized that she missed her playmate. He would have to figure a way to bring them together, minus the Bug. “I saw writing on Mbongeni’s foot,” the little girl said. “I didn’t know what it meant. Can I see yours?”

For a moment Matt was revolted by the idea. It was a shameful memory, but she had no concept of the beastliness of it. She’d grown up with the idea. It meant no more to her than a freckle or a mole. He took off his shoe, and she got a flashlight to see.

“I don’t know all the words. I recognize ‘of’ and ‘the,’ ” she said.

“It says ‘Property of the Alacrán Estate.’ ”

“That means you belong here, huh? It’s like a cattle brand.”

“I suppose so,” Matt said unwillingly.

“Wait. There’s more.” She fetched the magnifying glass.

More? thought Matt.

“It’s a little squinched-up line below the words.” She applied both the magnifying glass and flashlight. “It’s numbers.” She repeated them, and Matt turned cold. It was a date, a number related to the only birthday he would ever have, the day he was harvested from a cow.

His thirteenth birthday.

He was more than fifteen now. Who could tell him what it meant? It couldn’t possibly be an expiry date, because he wasn’t microchipped. Or was he? How could he know?

“Are you okay?” asked Listen.

“It’s stuffy in here. Let’s wake up Mirasol and go horseback riding.” Matt clapped his hands and sent the girl to the kitchen to help Celia. He took Listen to the stables and ordered a horse to be saddled. All the while his mind was churning over the number on his foot. He’d seen the mark before. He’d thought it was a scar from when he fell onto broken window glass as a small child.

They rode past the pottery and weaving factories. The craftsmen and -women were outside, producing their goods in the way people had done for thousands of years. The women patted wet clay onto a potter’s wheel turned by pedals they worked with their feet. Others spun wool shorn from a sizable herd of merino sheep. The wool was colored with natural dyes obtained from saffron and indigo plants, and from mushrooms.

Mushrooms. Rose, lavender, yellow, and blue. He remembered seeing them in a barn near the stables as a child. He hadn’t been interested enough then to ask about them.

They came to the guitar factory. “Can we go in?” Listen asked.

Matt woke up. He’d forgotten her existence, although she was clinging to his back like a burr. “I don’t want to. You go. Ask Mr. Ortega to take you home.” She looked at him oddly as he swung her to the ground.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

“I’m as good as I ever was,” he said, and rode off.

The world had changed for him. He barely heard the gardeners shouting, “¡Viva El Patrón!” as he passed. He registered that a team of eejits was being moved from one field to the next, and that the Farm Patrolman tipped his hat. Was he one of them on some level? Did something in his brain control him? Was this where El Patrón’s voice came from?

A trapped feeling like that he’d experienced as a young child in a room full of sawdust came over him. He had trouble breathing and felt for his asthma inhaler.

There was no noxious air or suffocating dust to account for it this time. The reaction was purely in his mind. He was part of the machine El Patrón had created.

He came to the new eejit pens, now built some distance from the evil-smelling pits. They had beds inside and large communal showers. Dining halls with tables and chairs were at the end of each building. The eejits ate a balanced diet of meat, vegetables, and bread, although the Farm Patrolmen were still using eejit pellets for lunch in the fields. Did it matter? Did the workers notice how their lives had improved?

In the distance lay the water purification plant and the polluted pits. Matt headed the horse that way. It was a perverse thing to do. It was guaranteed to bring on a full-scale asthma attack, but he didn’t care. Now he understood Cienfuegos’s desperation. The head of the Farm Patrol was trapped in an endless round of violence that he wasn’t allowed to escape.

Am I allowed? I’ll find out, Matt thought savagely.

When he drew near to the pits, the horse began to snort and act up. The stench wasn’t too bad, but the animal was clearly alarmed by it. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Matt said. He rode back to where the air was cleaner and tethered the horse to a fence post. “Someone will find you if I don’t come back,” he said.

He didn’t really want to die. The closer he got to the pits, the more foolish the trip seemed, yet he kept on. He wanted to know how far he could push this death wish. At a certain point he sat on the ground and thought, I’m not really like Cienfuegos. I left the country, and he can’t do that. I can love. I love María. This made him feel better. He didn’t have to kill himself to prove he was free.

One worrisome thing remained, though: the voice in his head. Celia thought he was possessed. Cienfuegos believed that he really was El Patrón come back from the dead. So did Sor Artemesia, but she said that he had a chance to be different.

“And I do,” Matt said aloud. He stood up and shaded his eyes as he gazed at the polluted pits not far away. The ground was covered in sheets of the same light-sensitive plastic he’d seen at the mushroom greenhouse. A person was tending them, lifting sheets to examine what lay beneath and spraying water from a large hose. The smell wasn’t nearly as bad as Matt remembered. He went closer.

It was a woman. She wore a white hazmat suit that must have been hot. Her face was flushed and angry. Her heavy boots came halfway up to her knees. The purposeful way she moved told Matt that she wasn’t an eejit. Every now and then she stopped, kicked a stone, and swore a blue streak.

“Fiona?” he said.

She looked up and cursed again. “You did this to me, you pile of eejit droppings! Is this the kind of job for someone who got an A in her A-levels? Who kept the hospital going when all the doctors and nurses buggered off to that party? Served them right to get poisoned. Self-centered duckwits! And didn’t I save your life when you got sick? Oh, but nobody cares for Fiona. She’s expendable.”

“Fiona,” said Matt again. “What are you doing?”

“As if you don’t know! Cienfuegos said he would cockroach me if I didn’t work here. He means it too, the bludger. He’s got evil, cold eyes like a snake.”

Matt barely noticed the smell of the pits, he was so surprised by Fiona’s behavior. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.

The woman stopped and scowled at him. “It’s perfectly clear, isn’t it? I’m tending these ghastly mycelia. They eat filth and they are filth, just strings of rot as far as I can see. The whole place smells like toilet.”

Well, it was a job, Matt decided. Cienfuegos had kept his word. Fiona was alive and where she couldn’t do mischief. “Are you getting fed?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Prison rations, not that I can stomach it after eight hours of this. I get a bloody cot in one of those new eejit pens. If I want a shower, it’s all in together with the zombies, watching them soap themselves in unison.”

Matt, in spite of her crimes, felt sorry for her. “I’ll see that you get your own cottage,” he said, and then, rashly, he said, “Fiona, are you microchipped?”

She appeared to swell up with rage. “You’ve got a lot of cheek saying I’m an eejit. I don’t stumble around like a drunk on Saturday night, thank you very much. You need an eye exam.”

“There are other kinds of control, things so subtle you can’t see them. Like wanting to do something and discovering you can’t.”

Fiona turned pale. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you have any injections when you arrived?”

“We all had immunizations, didn’t we? For the exotic diseases.” She seemed to deflate before his eyes.

“Of course. That’s all it was,” said Matt, unwilling to push the issue. “I’ll tell Cienfuegos to find you a cottage.” He left her standing by the pits. She didn’t move until he was a long way off.

He got the horse and rode on toward the oasis. A few sandhill cranes were huddled in the shady part of the water, panting in the heat. Once there had been thousands of them, but only a few hundred had survived the summers. They moved from pool to pool, seeking coolness.

Matt sat under the collapsing grape arbor and drank some of the water he carried with him. He pulled off his left shoe and looked at the bottom of his foot. The dark line Listen had discovered had always been there, but Matt had never looked at it closely.

Yet he wasn’t as worried here as he’d been outside. Something about the place made him feel safe. He looked around at the rocks enclosing the old campsite on three sides. The fourth side was the lake.

Heed the high cliffs, lad. They keep things out. Now Matt remembered that Tam Lin had actually said this once when they camped overnight. The boy had wondered why they could sleep so soundly with mosquitoes whining in their ears and the hard earth under the sleeping bags.

’Tis not bodily comfort we need, the man had said, 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.

That was the time Tam Lin had told him the sad story of the sandhill cranes. The later Alacráns didn’t know about the oasis, but the old man did. It was the first place he’d come to in the United States, before he established his empire. He’d built the old miner’s cabin and planted the grapevine. Through the years he’d forgotten the oasis and anyhow was too old to climb through the rocks. But in the beginning he’d noticed the sandhill cranes arrive with cold weather and depart in spring.

El Patrón hated to give up anything he thought he owned.

He had his son Felipe net the birds and pull out the lead feathers on one wing. Birds cannot fly unbalanced, said Tam Lin. They tip to one side and fall to earth. The cranes were trapped. Half of them died that first summer, and more the next.

A few had survived, the ancestors of this flock. Matt watched them now, guiltily enjoying their presence. After a while, his mind at ease, he went back to the horse and rode toward the hacienda.