The Lord of Opium

49

THE ABANDONED OBSERVATORY

They passed the soldiers throwing water on the lab.

“I couldn’t believe how easy that was,” said the jefe. “I simply walked inside with a flamethrower, and no one questioned it. People ignore eejits at their peril.”

“Where are we going?” asked Matt.

“We can’t stay here, and it’s too dangerous to cross the hospital grounds and head for the chapel. Our friends are fine, by the way. Daft Donald has set up a command post nearby. No, I think we’ll head for the observatory.”

Matt fell silent. Sunlight shone through the trees and cast patterns on the ground. Here and there a beam caught the flash of mica on a stone. Birds swooped out of trees and flew close to the ground until they reached the safety of a yucca. Matt felt the wonder of being alive, of staying alive. Listen, too, was uncharacteristically quiet.

They went to the hovercraft port, but the energy signal on all the stirabouts was flat. Happy Man hadn’t bothered to recharge them. Matt, Listen, and Cienfuegos would have to walk, and the way was long, treeless, and hot. It quickly became clear that Listen would need frequent rest stops. Cienfuegos himself was uneasy about traveling without cover in daylight. “I wish I’d thought to bring water,” he said.

He broke into one of the small, abandoned observatories on the way. A mesquite tree had grown up in front of the door, and his hands got gouged by thorns when he cleared its branches. “Sometimes I forget that everything in this desert is out to get you,” he said, sucking blood from his fingers. “The cactuses, the trees, the bullhead vines. If you lift a board, you find a rattlesnake. If you take a nap, the conenose beetles crawl into bed and suck your blood. Dark corners are the happy homes of black widows and brown recluse spiders and these suckers—!” He squashed a bark scorpion running for cover.

“Still, it’s all part of the ecosystem,” he said, patting the single bed inside and releasing clouds of dust. “Just as I am part of the ecosystem, along with my venomous brothers and sisters.” Once he was satisfied that the bed was safe, he told Listen to lie down.

The air was cool and shadowed. Ancient photographs of star systems covered the walls, and a desk with a bookcase stood against a wall. A small kitchen with dishes and a sink was attached to the building, but of course nothing came out of the faucet except a centipede.

“Let me look outside,” said Cienfuegos. They heard him pulling away bushes and cursing. They heard banging and clanking, and the jefe eventually returned soaking wet. “Water,” he announced. He had discovered a hand pump and by pounding it with rocks had worked the rusty handle until he got a stream of reddish-brown liquid. Matt and he filled pans and bowls.

“At least it’s wet,” conceded Cienfuegos.

“Looks like mud,” said Listen.

“Give it a few minutes. The sediment will sink, and you can pour off the top.”

They rested, waiting for dusk, when it would be safer to travel. “Whoever owned the place walked out one day and never came back,” observed Matt. A leather-bound book lay open on the desk next to a pair of wire-rim glasses. He recognized these from old TV shows. No one wore glasses anymore.

“Be careful with the books,” said Cienfuegos. “I’ll take them to the Mushroom Master. He’ll know how to preserve them.”

Listen pointed at a photograph. “That’s an African,” she said. Matt blew gently to dislodge the dust and saw a man in an astronaut’s uniform. The symbol on his sleeve was of the old American empire, and he stood next to an antique escape pod.

“Who was he?” said Matt. But they found nothing about him in the papers scattered on the desk.

They exchanged news of what each had been doing during their separation. Cienfuegos revealed that he’d been responsible for the dead soldier outside the operating room. “Then I had to run,” he said. “There were too many of Glass Eye’s troops on the ground. I realized that the border was open and went to the holoport, but you’d already closed it. That’s when I found the Bug.”

“How was he?” asked Matt.

“Buggy,” the jefe said. “Half the time he screamed and the other half threatened. I was seriously tempted to leave him, but . . . ”

“You felt sorry for him.”

“Not really. He was making a racket, and I didn’t want Glass Eye’s troops to show up. I carried him to Malverde’s chapel. Sor Artemesia is looking after him, and good luck on that job. I’d rather take care of a rabid skunk.” Cienfuegos got up and poured clear upper water into another basin.

“There’s a dead mosquito in it,” complained Listen.

“Yum,” said Cienfuegos, picking it out and eating it. It was difficult to gross out the jefe.

Matt revealed what had happened just before Cienfuegos arrived in Glass Eye’s hospital room, and the man was impressed. “You killed Dr. Rivas?” he asked Listen.

“I guess I did. I made Glass Eye mad,” the little girl said uncomfortably. “But Dr. Rivas killed my best buddy. He promised not to, but he did it. He did.” The energy went out of her and she bent over, grieving silently.

“Well, I think you’re crotting marvelous. If I’m ever elected head of the UN, I’ll issue you a Hero Medal.”

“You said a curse word,” she said.

“It’s okay when I do it. Did you really hear Dr. Rivas and his son and daughter talk about the room at the bottom of the solar telescope?”

“They said it had a big secret inside and they wanted the Bug to open it, but he couldn’t. Dr. Rivas thought I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Big people ignore little kids, and they shouldn’t.”

“I’d never ignore you, chiquita. You’re too dangerous,” said the jefe. “So Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos escaped.”

“I think so,” the little girl said. “They didn’t get any loot, though. I made that part up. I’m hungry.”

They found rusty cans of food in the pantry, which Cienfuegos said were too old to be safe. The loaves of bread crumbled into dust when Listen touched them.

“It’s like an Egyptian tomb with all the things the owner needed for the afterlife,” said Matt, thinking of El Patrón and also of Mirasol. The flowers that had been heaped around her must have withered by now. Or perhaps they didn’t in the world of the dead. Perhaps they still bloomed, and she was dancing with the people she had loved. He had left the music box in her tomb.

“There are clothes in the closet and a toothbrush on the sink, except that the bristles have fallen out,” said Matt. “All we need is a sarcophagus with a pharaoh painted on the lid.” And servants, he thought. Real pharaohs needed servants to get through the afterlife.

“There’s a lunchroom at the observatory,” Listen said. “You can get hot chocolate and donuts and sometimes turkey burritos. We should go there now.”

“Patience,” said Cienfuegos, leaning back in a chair and half-closing his eyes. “Your ancestors didn’t whine about turkey burritos when they were on a hunt. They waited like lions for the game to get careless.”

“So we’re lions,” the little girl said, interested.

“Oh, yes. We’re hunting the biggest game of all.”

“The Scorpion Star,” said Matt.

The jefe smiled gently at the dark ceiling draped with ancient cobwebs and dust. “The Mushroom Master thinks the eejits’ brains are controlled by an energy source on the Scorpion Star. And that the observatory controls the Star. We’ll begin our hunt by looking into that room at the bottom of the solar telescope.”

Matt didn’t like the plan, but he couldn’t think of a better one. He helped Listen search through the desk while they waited. Dried-up fountain pens of a sort only seen in museums filled one drawer. In another were colored scraps of paper that Cienfuegos said were used for sending letters, a concept he had to explain. These were in an envelope labeled FOREVER STAMPS.

The little girl unfolded a large diagram on the floor. The folds cracked, and each section separated from the others.

“That looks familiar.” Cienfuegos got up and weighted the pages with stones to be sure they didn’t get mixed up. “It looks a lot like the biosphere. There’s Northern Europe and Africa. And at the far end is Tundra. It’s even got the name printed on it.”

Matt knelt by it. “It could also be the space station.” The longer they studied it, the more likely this seemed. The diagram was covered with strange symbols and mathematical formulas. Between each ecosystem was a series of zigzag lines and notes like gauss here and outgauss there. In the margin was written 500 teslas. Excessive? No! At the bottom were two words: Couple on the left, and Uncouple on the right.

Cienfuegos carefully gathered up the sheets, keeping them in order. “This is gibberish to me. I’ll take it to the Mushroom Master later. It’s strange. He knows more about science than we do, and he’s a hundred years in the past. He says we depend too much on machines. All we know how to do is press buttons, but he knows how the buttons work.”