The Lord of Opium (33 page)

“I won’t,” she cried, clinging to the little boy. “Mbongeni needs me.”

“He’ll forget you the minute you’re out of the room.” Matt roughly pulled her arms away from the boy and dragged her out of the crib. She scratched and kicked him. “Stop that! Mirasol is dead, and we’re taking her body to Ajo.”

Listen stopped struggling. “Did I kill her?” she wailed. “I didn’t mean to.”

Mbongeni began wailing too. “Lissen . . . Lissen . . .
muh muh muh muh muh
.”

“He’s learned to say my name! He won’t forget me! Please, please, please let me stay!”

Matt didn’t bother to argue. He dragged Listen after him, and the cries of “Lissen . . . Lissen . . .
muh muh muh muh muh
” died away in the distance. Cienfuegos had the hovercraft at the hospital door. Mirasol’s body, wrapped in a white sheet, lay on the floor.
Sor
Artemesia had put more flowers on the shroud, and she sat by a window saying her beads.

Listen shrank away from the body. “She’s not dead. I don’t believe it. She’s not a rabbit.”

“Don’t be afraid of death, child,”
Sor
Artemesia said, beckoning to her. “It is when the soul is released to find its true
home. Mirasol is not here. She is in heaven and far happier than she ever was on earth. She’s with her father now.” The nun put aside her rosary and took the child into her arms. “Here. We’ll look at trees as we fly.”

The hovercraft took off. Cienfuegos went around the Chiricahua Mountains by a southerly route, passing the ruins of a town called Douglas. A great battle must have been fought there, because the ground was scorched black and hardly a trace of buildings was left. Matt saw an ancient road going west, with the remains of cars scattered at the side.

They passed over the ruins of Nogales and crossed a valley filled with deserted farms. “This would be a good place to plant new crops,” said Cienfuegos. “The water table has risen and the soil is good.”

Matt listened without interest.

“That’s Kitt Peak,” the
jefe
said, skirting the highest mountain. At the top were two observatories, smaller versions of the ones in the Sky Village. “This is one of the first places El Patrón captured, and it gave him the idea for the Scorpion Star.” But nothing could rouse Matt. He was numb. Colors, sounds, and voices withdrew to a gray background in his mind. He couldn’t even think of Mirasol.

They landed at Ajo, and eejits carried Mirasol’s body, completely shrouded, to the large veranda in front of the hacienda. They laid her on a couch. Matt sat down next to her. A peacock wandered onto the veranda and gave a harsh cry.

Celia, Daft Donald, Mr. Ortega, and the boys came out, and
Sor
Artemesia cautioned them to keep their distance. She herself went up to Matt and said, “
Mi patrón
, please let me help. I think you have never arranged a funeral before.”

Matt looked up. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, dazed. “I
don’t want her to be disposed of as though she were an animal.” He looked through the wide portico of the veranda to the distant fields. There were thousands and thousands of bodies out there. Cienfuegos had told him once that he had flown over the sand dunes of Yuma on a full moon night. By day you couldn’t see it, but by night the bones of Illegals showed up like a ghostly army sleeping on the earth.

“We need a coffin,”
Sor
Artemesia said. “A beautiful one. Perhaps one of the eejit carpenters could make it. The children’s choir could sing, and I will say the appropriate words. A priest would be better, but unfortunately we don’t have one.”

“El Patrón had a collection of Egyptian mummy cases,” said Matt. “Some of them are very beautiful.”

That very evening a procession of eejits dressed in white robes and adorned with flowers carried the coffin of an Egyptian queen. It had been buried thousands of years before in the hot sands of the North African desert. The queen’s likeness was carved on the lid. She wore a crown of gold and lapis lazuli. Her body was sheathed in white linen, and her arms were covered with carnelian bracelets. In her hand was a sacred blue lotus.

They came to the Alacrán mausoleum, a building as large as a house and covered with so many plaster cherubs it looked like a flock of chickens. Behind them came bodyguards carrying torches. Celia and the other servants, the boys, and Listen came next. Last of all walked the eejit children. They hummed the theme from
Pavane for a Dead Princess
, and the old choirmaster walked at their side to be sure they did it right.

Matt and
Sor
Artemesia met them at the mausoleum. On either side of the glass doors were what looked like chests of drawers. The name of a departed Alacrán was inscribed on each long drawer, but there were several that hadn’t been used yet.
One was pulled out, and here the eejits deposited Mirasol’s body in the Egyptian queen’s coffin.
Sor
Artemesia performed the funeral ceremony, and two burly bodyguards slid the drawer closed.

They went outside. The sky was clear after rain, and the stars shone brilliantly. One of them fell, a bright streak across the blackness, and Celia turned to Listen and said, “Look,
chiquita
. That’s a prayer being answered by God. One of the angels is flying down to carry out His orders.”

38

THE MUSHROOM MASTER VS. THE SKY

M
att moved his office to another part of the hacienda. He couldn’t bear to be in the place where Mirasol had danced. He closed up the room and ordered the door to be nailed shut. Ton-Ton hid all the music boxes after Matt smashed one of them.

There was plenty of work to occupy Matt’s mind. What with sending samples to Esperanza, keeping the opium dealers at bay, and laying out plans for new fields, there was barely time to relax. He moved like a robot from one task to the next. Ton-Ton, Chacho, and Fidelito left him alone, and Listen had been rebuffed so many times that she hid when Matt came into a room.

He didn’t care. At one point—it was hard to keep track of the days—Cienfuegos told him that the light for the Convent of Santa Clara was blinking on the holoport. Matt was in the kitchen, dining alone as he preferred now. “I don’t want to talk to Esperanza,” he said.

“It could be María,” suggested the
jefe
.

“She’s always with her mother.”

“It’s better than nothing,” said Cienfuegos.

“It
is
nothing.” Matt took another bite of a sandwich that tasted like sawdust to him.

“That’s no way to treat a friend,” said the
jefe
, drawing up a chair. “You liked María before Mirasol came into the picture.”

“I loved her,” Matt said.

“And still do,
mi patrón
. Please do not speak of her in the past tense.
Es muy antipático
. Disagreeable.”

“You don’t have to call me
patrón
anymore. I’ve chosen a new name,” said Matt.

Cienfuegos looked surprised and then pleased. “I hope it’s frightening. I always thought El Picador—the Meat Grinder—had a certain nasty charm.”

“I want to be called Don Sombra, Lord Shadow.”

The
jefe
thought for a moment. “It isn’t as scary as I’d hoped, but then it depends on what you mean by shadow. A lurking danger, an unseen threat. Yes, it could do.”

“It’s what I want. You can tell the others. Now leave me alone. I want to think.” Cienfuegos withdrew and Matt thought,
Mirasol means “look at the sun.” She thought I was the sun, and now that she’s gone, there’s nothing left but shadow.
He didn’t answer the holoport call on that day or on the next five occasions.

The monsoon departed, drifting back now and then to drench the soil and cause flash floods in the hills. The days were hot. Matt wore a hat like the Farm Patrolmen and, when he had time, rode out to inspect the opium fields. Eejits worked to remove stones from new tracts of land where Matt intended to plant with corn.

Field eejits were trained to prepare soil, but they understood
only one type of crop. Cienfuegos had tried them out on a small stand of corn, and predictably, they slashed the growing cobs with razors and waited patiently for the resin to ooze out. “I’ve tried every command I can think of, but they won’t change,” the
jefe
had said. “It’s possible to retrain them, but think of the time wasted, not to mention the high mortality.”

“Are they living longer now?” Matt had asked.

“Much longer,” Cienfuegos had said. “Of course there are the usual accidents. One of them turned the wrong way and marched out into the desert instead of returning to the pens. No one noticed until the following day. We found him at the bottom of a wash. Two or three go rogue every month.”

Matt had turned away. He was preparing fields no one would use unless the Farm Patrol and bodyguards could be persuaded to do it. They wouldn’t like it. It was beneath their dignity.

Now Matt walked alone toward the mushroom house. The experiment had worked better than anyone’s wildest dreams. Polluted soil now sprouted with grass. Waste from the water treatment plant no longer drained into fetid pits but spread into enclosures, where it was set upon by hordes of ravenous Shaggy Manes. Matt could understand why the Mushroom Master was so proud of his pets.

He saw the Mushroom Master now. The man was carrying a large, brown umbrella that came down past his shoulders and made him look not unlike a mushroom himself. “Hello there!” he called. The man tipped up the umbrella and lowered it again.

“Please forgive me for not stopping, Don Sombra. I was checking a leak in the sprinkler system and must go back inside at once. You are welcome to visit, of course. I have some excellent pu-erh tea.” The Mushroom Master scurried through the door as though a rattlesnake was lunging at his heels.

“Is there an emergency?” Matt asked.

“With me, yes.” The Mushroom Master furled the umbrella and placed it by the door. “Thank Gaia for this umbrella,” he said. “Cienfuegos got it for me. The first time I left the biosphere, I panicked like a newly awakened Dormant at his first mating season. He had to drag me out.”

“Is the outside world that frightening?” Matt followed the man through the growing chambers to a small office in the middle of the building. Here the air was pleasantly cool and fresh. A small teapot simmered on a hot plate.

“It’s the sky.” The Mushroom Master leaned forward as though imparting a secret. “You have no idea how terrifying it is to someone who’s always had a roof over his head. It’s so big! It goes up and up forever. I feel like I could be sucked into it.”

Matt was surprised to find that he understood this feeling. “Once, long ago, I camped out under the open sky at night. I, too, was afraid of falling upward into the stars.”

“Stars! I haven’t dared to look at them yet.” The teapot began to rattle, and the Mushroom Master sprinkled the water with dried leaves. After a few minutes he poured out two cups of fragrant liquid. “This is tea. Have you ever had it, Don Sombra?”

Matt said he had and didn’t think much of it. It was brown like old dishwater and tasted much the same.

“Ah! But this is different,” said the man. “Tea isn’t a plant you can boil like spinach. It must be ripened like a fine cheese. Here. Enjoy the aroma first and then sip carefully.”

The boy took the cup with some amusement. The people in the biosphere were peculiar, from the frogherd with his skinny white legs to the people slurping grasshopper stew. But the aroma
was
pleasant. It wasn’t like flowers exactly. It reminded
him of cedar or sandalwood, of something old but not decayed.

He sipped it. “This really is good.”

“You see!” crowed the Mushroom Master. “Even people who have never ventured outside a building can surprise you. Pu-erh is fermented by yeast. Do you know what a yeast is? A fungus! Is there nothing fungi can’t do?” The old man warbled on about spores and mycelia, lost in the wonder of Gaia’s creations.

Matt liked him and on an impulse said, “Why don’t you come to dinner at the hacienda? We can sit outside and stargaze.” The Mushroom Master tensed up. “We’ll stay close to the door so you can escape if it gets too frightening.”

The Mushroom Master considered. “Cienfuegos is always telling me about how beautiful the outside world is, but I’m afraid the farthest he’s got me is one trip to the pollution pits. Can I bring my umbrella?”

“Of course,” Matt said. “You can sit under it the whole time if it makes you comfortable.”

A weight seemed to have lifted from Matt as he made his way back to the hacienda. For weeks he had lived under a cloud, and none of his friends could help him. Everything and everyone reminded him of Mirasol. More than anything, he felt devastated that he hadn’t saved her. He should have found other doctors. He should have stopped trying to wake her up.

The Mushroom Master was different, because nothing about him raised unhappy memories. Being with him was like closing a door and looking ahead.

Matt went by the mausoleum, which wasn’t far from the hospital. He did this often, though both Celia and
Sor
Artemesia told him it was a bad idea.
I don’t even have a picture of Mirasol,
he thought, gazing at the dusty glass doors. How could he have
been so careless? He remembered her now, but what about later?

Long ago he’d had a teacher, a woman who was one of the higher-grade eejits. He remembered her as very tall, but then he’d been a little kid. Everyone looked tall. She had brown hair and wore a green dress, and her face . . . was missing. It had vanished from his mind as the woman herself had vanished into the opium fields.

I’ll ask Chacho to draw a picture,
Matt thought. He went by the guitar factory and invited his friend to dinner.

*  *  *

Eejits moved a picnic table near the veranda and placed lamps at either end. They were powered by solar cells that gathered energy during the day and refunded it as a pearly glow after dark. Matt thought it would appeal to the Mushroom Master. The table was close to a door where the man could dive for shelter.