The Lord of Opium

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?”

“He flew the Mushroom Master back to the biosphere. When he returned and found the doctor growing more erratic, he radioed to Ajo for Daft Donald and the bodyguards. Oh! María’s eyes are open!”

The girl was blinking, as though she didn’t know where she was. Matt immediately went to her side. “You’re safe, mi vida.”

Suddenly she was wide awake. “Matt?”

“I’m here. You should have asked me to come to you. I would have done it no matter how angry Esperanza was.”

“But you have come,” she insisted. “I had such a fight with Mother! You wouldn’t believe how inflexible she can be when she wants something. She kept pushing me to get engaged to that creepy friend of hers. Honestly! He reminded me of a plucked turkey.”

The excited flow of words told Matt that María had come back in full force. He was so grateful that he promised himself to apologize to Dr. Rivas as soon as possible. But then . . . perhaps recovery hadn’t been the doctor’s real intention. Matt remembered him tapping the syringe and claiming it was a stimulant. Why wait so long to give her a stimulant? Why wait until María was almost well?

He remembered Nurse Fiona’s words: They put a drip into the patient’s arm and then they inject the chips with the liquid. The chips are smaller than blood cells and go right through the heart. The process takes less than fifteen minutes.

“I’ll kill him,” he said.

“Don’t bother,” María said brightly. “I put him in his place. He tried to kiss me, and I gave him a slap he won’t soon forget. Sor Artemesia, how wonderful to see you! Did Mother let you come back?” She sat up, and the intravenous needle popped out of her arm. “Ow! What’s going on here?”

“It’s all right, mija. You’re in the hospital.” The nun gently forced her to lie back down. She swabbed the blood from María’s arm with a cotton ball.

“Hospital? I’m not sick. It’s probably one of Mother’s schemes to keep me under lock and key.” She had no memory of going through the portal, and when she learned that she was actually in Opium, she was all for getting up to explore. “I’ve only been to Paradise as a small child. I remember wonderful gardens and deer that would eat out of my hand. The hummingbirds were everywhere.”

“You haven’t eaten real food for a week. You must take things slowly,” said Sor Artemesia. She and Matt jumped when they heard the rattle of a machine gun.

Matt ran to the window and signaled for the others to stay back. He saw the shadow of several hovercrafts pass overhead. He heard the clap of stun guns, more machine-gun fire, then silence. They waited. “It came from the direction of the observatory,” said Matt.

“Closer than that.” Sor Artemesia shivered. They waited for a long time, and no more sounds came. Matt ventured into the hallway and found it deserted.

“I took Fidelito to a place of safety,” said Sor Artemesia. “I tried to bring Listen, but she wouldn’t leave Mbongeni. Chacho and Ton-Ton are okay as long as they stay in Ajo.”

“You seem to have expected trouble,” said Matt.

“Let’s just say I know Dr. Rivas. We should take María away. I don’t trust him.”

They unpinned the altar cloth and eased María out of bed. Her legs gave out when she tried to stand, and they had to support her. “I wish we could get one of those little stirabouts,” she said. “I remember floating around the gardens in one.”

“We’re less noticeable on foot,” said Matt, remembering the shadows of large hovercrafts overhead.

Half-filled coffee cups sat on the nurses’ desks, and half-eaten sandwiches had been knocked to the floor. The station had been abandoned in a hurry. They collected a full thermos of coffee and unopened packages of cookies.

“Why don’t we go to the holoport room and call Mother?” suggested María.

“Later,” said Matt. The sooner they got under cover, the better. Sor Artemesia led them along a stream in a direction Matt hadn’t been before. For a while María had to lean on the others, but she recovered swiftly. She looked around eagerly and chattered about how happy she was to be here. Matt didn’t tell her about Dr. Rivas. Sycamores twisted white branches over the path, and cottonwoods whispered among themselves. The shadows of birds followed them as they traveled.

The Paradise hospital and observatory were the most advanced of their kind in the world. Yet a short walk took you into a world that looked as though it hadn’t been disturbed since the beginning of time. Pronghorn antelope and white-tailed deer swiveled their ears toward the travelers. A coyote slipped into tall grass, and Matt saw his yellow eyes peering at them through the leaves. He reminded the boy of Cienfuegos.

A fork-tailed hawk crested the trees in search of prey, and a family of quail sat as still as a painting in the dappled shade of a bush. Nothing was unduly alarmed by the people moving through their domain. The animals were cautious, as they would have been with one another, but not frightened. They had not been hunted for a century.

Matt saw a white building with stained-glass windows beyond a woven fence of reeds. “Is that a church?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” said Sor Artemesia with a crooked smile. “It’s the chapel of Jesús Malverde.”

There had been a small shrine in Ajo and near the nursery in Paradise, but this was a building as big as a church. A long room had pews on either side and an altar at the end. Storerooms and a kitchen were separate from the main chapel. This was a serious meeting place, and Matt wondered what sort of rituals were performed for a saint who answered the prayers of drug dealers. Stained-glass windows showed Malverde standing in a marijuana patch, giving money to the poor, casting blindness on a troop of narcotics agents, and warning a drug mule to flee.

The altar was covered with silver charms, candles, and gifts like the one in Ajo. On a dais behind it was the saint himself, sitting in a chair. A cactus wren had made a nest in the timbers over his head, and wisps of grass had fallen onto Jesús Malverde’s black hair.

This was a far better statue than the other ones Matt had seen. The saint’s hair was carefully combed, and his face was painted with care. He wore a white shirt and bandanna. His trousers were black and his shoes were polished and expensive-looking. In one hand he held a bag of money. In the other was a sheaf of dollar bills. At his feet was a carpet of gold coins.

“María!” squealed Fidelito, popping up from behind a pew. The little boy ran up and hugged her. “I was so worried about you. Are you all waked up? Did you see things when you flew through the wormhole?”

But María couldn’t tell him, because she had no memory of it.

“Be gentle with her, chico. She’s been ill,” said Sor Artemesia, untangling the little boy’s arms.

“Where’s Listen? I found dolls at the back of the altar. She’d like them.”

Sor Artemesia shuddered. “That’s brujería, mijo. Witchcraft. Those are voodoo dolls meant to curse someone, and it’s better if you don’t touch them. I couldn’t get Listen to leave Mbongeni.” The nun found the dolls and threw them away. She draped the altar cloth in the appropriate place and stood back to admire her work. “There!” she said. “That should take some of the curse off this place.”

Sor Artemesia had planned the refuge carefully. She had stashed bottles of drinking water along the walls, and crackers and beef jerky were stored in plastic boxes to keep them from the mice. She told Fidelito to fetch sleeping bags from a cupboard and lay them on the pews for beds.

“Won’t the saint be angry that we’re living in his house?” said the little boy.

“That saint,” said Sor Artemesia, “wouldn’t care if you turned the place into a nightclub.”

They made María lie down and propped her up with pillows. The nun insisted that she eat some jerky and drink a little coffee with lots of sugar. Matt also drank coffee, although he didn’t like it. He’d been fasting for days and felt light-headed.

“I don’t want to leave you,” he said.

“You have to, Don Sombra. You have duties,” said Sor Artemesia.

“I never asked for them,” he said wearily. “I’m tired of cleaning up El Patrón’s mess and watching the opium farms churn out drugs. I’m tired of watching eejits die. It’s like a giant machine with no off button. Why shouldn’t I stay here with people I love and forget the whole miserable thing?”

“You can’t, Brother Wolf.” María had been silent until now, but the food had brought life back into her eyes.

“The problem is too big, mi vida,” said Matt. Thousands of people and billions of dollars are involved. We need an army to deal with it, and I can’t trust anyone who has one.” He threw up his hands. “If I had such a force, who would I attack? What would I invade?”

“You must begin by freeing the eejits,” María said gently.

“Oh, sure! Like I haven’t been working on that.”

“I spoke with Cienfuegos before he went away,” Sor Artemesia said. “He says the Scorpion Star is the source of the power that controls the eejits. You have to destroy it.”

Matt looked at her in amazement. This was not the gentle, compassionate nun he was used to. “There are three hundred people on that space station.”

“And at least ten thousand times that number are buried under the fields.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Shoot it down? What would Saint Francis recommend?”

The nun was unmoved by Matt’s sarcasm. “He’d tell you to get off your butt and do the job God has given you.”

The boy had no answer for this. He was bone tired. He wanted to hand the problem to someone else. He wanted to move into the biosphere and herd frogs for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t allowed. He took María’s hand and felt its warmth. “I’ll return when I can,” he said.

“I can help you,” she said. “I don’t want to be left behind. I didn’t risk death to be tossed aside like a kitten that’s only good for chasing feathers.”

Sor Artemesia laughed. It was the first wholehearted laugh Matt had heard from her in days. “I remember the arguments we used to have at school when she wanted to care for lepers. ‘We’ll have to import them,’ I told her. ‘Leprosy has been extinct for fifty years.’ I remember her turtles with cracked shells, the birds with broken wings, and the three-legged cats. You have a drive to do good, María, but you’d slow Matt down in your present condition.”

“No te preocupas, mi vida. Don’t worry. Your turn will come when I’ve sorted out the Scorpion Star,” said Matt, holding her hands and gazing into her eyes. “There will be thousands of people who will need your help.”

“Well, then,” she said, gazing back. He kissed her and left before she could think of an objection.

“Don’t forget Listen,” called Fidelito as Matt left the clearing where the chapel of Jesús Malverde stood.