The Lord of Opium

  The little girl’s arms were scratched, and her eyes were wide with fear. Her skin had turned an ashen color. “Carry her to a bed, and don’t let anyone near her,” Matt told Cienfuegos. A hand raked out from under the bed and Matt jumped back before he got his ankle clawed. The boy’s fingernails were long and dirty. Matt dumped a couple of pillows out of their cases and used the cloth to protect his arms. He put his foot temptingly close, and when the hand raked out again, he grabbed it.

  A small boy, perhaps seven, came out clawing and spitting like a wildcat. He fastened his teeth onto the cloth hard enough to rip it open. “Cienfuegos!” cried Matt in alarm. In an instant the jefe was there, expertly twining a blanket around the boy’s body and tying him up with a jump rope until the child looked like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Still the boy thrashed and struggled. Cienfuegos found another jump rope and doubled the bonds.

  “Crap eater! Poo-poo brain!” raved the little boy. “I’ll have you killed! I’ll cockroach you!” He was practically foaming at the mouth, but eventually he stopped fighting. His face was red with exertion, and his black hair was plastered down with sweat. “How dare you touch me! I’m El Patrón!” he screamed.

  Matt took a closer look at the child. It was hard to see his features, for the boy was not only in a rage, he was also extremely dirty. But the resemblance was unmistakable. “He’s—he’s—” Matt couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “A clone,” said Cienfuegos. “He thinks he’s El Patrón’s heir. Those bodyguards at the door thought he was too, and they would have defended him to the death. That’s why I had to shoot them.”

  Matt sat on the floor, far enough away to avoid being spat on by the boy. “Why did Dr. Rivas hide this from me?” he asked. He could hardly take in the reality of the child, his brother—no, not his brother, any more than El Patrón was his father.

  “Well may you ask,” said Cienfuegos. He went over to take care of Listen, who was beginning to stir. The jefe found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and set about disinfecting her scratches, an activity that woke her up quickly.

  “Ow! Stop it!” she yelled.

  “It’s good for you,” Cienfuegos said, relentlessly swabbing the wounds. All the while a dozen eejits sat around the walls, oblivious to the battle going on. Presently a bell rang, and they rose to perform their chores. Two of them opened Mbongeni’s cage and hauled him off to a bathtub. Others swept the floor and tidied up the room. Still others poured lemonade into cups and brought them to Listen and the boy. They didn’t notice that the boy was trussed up in a blanket and couldn’t drink properly. The eejit simply poured the liquid over his face.

  “Go away! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill all of you,” the boy screamed. Matt thought about helping him, remembered the torn pillowcase, and decided against it.

  Listen sat up and dangled her legs over the edge of the bed. “Oh, crot! Now there’s two of them,” she said.

  “Don’t use language like that,” Cienfuegos scolded her.

  “You’re not my boss,” she said, and let fly with a string of curse words Matt had only recently learned from the boys at the plankton factory.

  “You’d better learn manners fast,” the jefe warned her. “That’s the new patrón. The other is only a clone.”

  “They’re both bugs,” the girl said rebelliously. “Everyone calls the little one El Bicho. The other one is El Bicho Grande.” She stuck out her tongue.

  Matt knew he ought to be angry, but Listen’s performance was so outrageous he laughed. She was fluffed up like a bantam rooster. He also understood her initial fear of him. The Bug had clearly terrorized her. “Why does Dr. Rivas allow El Bicho to hurt her? I thought she was being protected,” he asked Cienfuegos.

  “Another lie,” said the jefe. “Glass Eye didn’t ask for her to be spared. The doctor wanted her as a playmate for the others. You’ll notice that Mbongeni is kept out of harm’s way. He’s the important one.”

  “I am so important,” Listen insisted. “I’m going to grow up to be a beautiful woman and marry a drug lord.”

  “You can do better than that,” said Matt, feeling sorry for the unwanted girl. What was he to do with these new additions to his “family”? The playroom was no better than a zoo, and the three inhabitants were practically feral. Nothing could be done for Mbongeni, but Listen could be saved. As for the Bug . . .

  “I owe you an explanation,” said Dr. Rivas. He had arrived with another pair of bodyguards, who were checking their unconscious fellows for vital signs. Listen ran to the doctor and hugged him.

  Cienfuegos went into a defense posture. “Tell them to dump their weapons now. I mean it,” he said.

  “I’m sure you do,” said the doctor, gently patting Listen’s head. He gave the order and two stun guns, four knives, a knuckle duster, and a garrote wire dropped to the floor.

  “Kick them toward me,” said the jefe.

  “Please don’t think I was being disloyal, mi patrón,” Dr. Rivas said. He seemed utterly relaxed, as though no one could possibly suspect him of wrongdoing. “I wasn’t sure how to tell you about El Bicho.”

  “You could begin by telling the patrón why he’s still alive,” snarled Cienfuegos.

  “So bloodthirsty,” murmured the doctor. “Why don’t you ask Matt whether he wants the boy destroyed?”

  Matt hadn’t sorted out his feelings about the Bug, but he definitely didn’t want to order a murder. “I think there’s been enough death in this place,” he said.

  “I quite agree,” said Dr. Rivas, smiling serenely. He sat down on a bed, and Listen curled up on the floor by his feet. She held on to his pant leg and sucked her thumb like a much younger child. “Round up some eejits and take the injured men to the hospital,” the doctor told the bodyguards. “You know, Cienfuegos, it isn’t good for El Bicho to be wrapped up so tightly. He gets into terrible sweats.”

  “Tough toenails. I’m not letting that little viper loose,” said Cienfuegos.

  By now the eejits had returned Mbongeni, powdered and sweet-smelling, to his cage. The little boy was massacring a peanut butter sandwich and getting most of it on his face. “Can I help him?” pleaded Listen. The doctor nodded, and she ran to the cage. On the way she kicked the Bug’s blanket, and the Bug snapped at her.

  “Let me explain how it all happened,” began Dr. Rivas. “Would you care for some refreshments, mi patrón? I can have coffee and snacks sent from the kitchen. No? Very well. To begin with, El Patrón ordered El Bicho as a backup for you. You had that distressing asthma and strange bouts of illness we couldn’t understand.”

  Matt knew he was referring to the arsenic Celia had fed him. “Go on,” he said.

  “When El Patrón died, the order came for all of us to attend the funeral. You can’t imagine what a momentous event that was. The old man had ruled this country for more than a hundred years, and no one could imagine what was coming. I knew the law—the others didn’t—that when the original of a clone dies, the clone takes his place. More important, he inherits. We were told you were dead, and I thought, ‘El Bicho is now the heir. If I destroy him, I’ll be committing murder.’ ”

  Dr. Rivas spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He smiled, and Matt was almost convinced of his innocence, but there was the bite on Listen’s arm and her use as a rag doll for the two boys that argued against it.

  “So you stayed behind with a few bodyguards and a stockpile of weapons,” said Matt. Cienfuegos let out a bark of laughter.

  “I couldn’t neglect the heir.” The doctor seemed affronted.

  “I’m the heir, not El Bicho,” Matt pointed out.

  “No you aren’t, poo-poo face!” said the Bug, entering the conversation for the first time.

  “Be quiet,” said Dr. Rivas with an edge to his voice. To Matt’s surprise, the Bug obeyed. “The situation is easily remedied,” the doctor said. “I bring the bodyguards together, explain that you are the true ruler of Opium, and they’ll switch their allegiance to you.”

/>   “Will that work, Cienfuegos?” asked Matt.

  “Probably, but I’m staying armed,” the jefe said.

  An ammonia stench reached Matt’s nose, and he realized that the Bug had fouled his blanket. “We can’t keep him tied up forever,” he said.

  “I sometimes put him on a leash,” the doctor admitted. He called for a group of four eejits, and in a moment Matt could see why. As soon as they unwrapped the Bug, he began kicking, screaming, and biting. The eejits held his arms and legs, reminding Matt of ants holding down a grasshopper, and hauled him off for a bath.

  “Is something wrong with his brain?” Matt asked.

  “All of El Patrón’s clones differ from the original in some way,” said Dr. Rivas. “You were the most perfect. El Bicho is almost as good. He’s very intelligent and his health is good, but he has no impulse control. If he wants something, he goes straight for it, no matter who or what is in the way.”

  Matt could hear the Bug screaming in one of the other rooms. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the boy was being tortured. “What should I do with him?” he asked.

  “Put him to sleep like a rabid dog,” said Cienfuegos.

  Matt frowned. “I was half-mad from neglect when I was six years old, but Celia, Tam Lin, and María brought me back to life. Perhaps El Bicho can be saved.”

  The jefe snorted. The doctor gazed into the distance. Only Listen, who was tucking a sandwich into Mbongeni’s mouth, offered an opinion. “He’s a bug,” she said. “What you need is a big old shoe to squash him.”

  It’s like owning a cage full of pit bulls, thought Matt. He had no idea what to do.

  21

  THE SCORPION STAR

  Matt realized he would have to postpone his return to Ajo. Mbongeni was all right. He was a cheerful infant and his needs were simple, but Listen had to be taken away from El Bicho. Matt moved her next to his room and got one of the nurses to keep an eye on her. Listen didn’t like that one bit.

  Matt found her surprisingly informed about some things and completely ignorant about others. When he tried to read her Peter Rabbit, she sneered at him.

  “Rabbits don’t wear clothes,” she said scornfully. “They don’t eat currant buns. That’s a stupid book. I hate it.”

  “It isn’t supposed to be real,” Matt explained. “You have to pretend you’re a rabbit and imagine what it’s like being hunted by a farmer who wants to put you into a pie.”

  “Why would I do that?” asked Listen.

  “To grow your imagination. To give your brain a workout.”

  The little girl considered the possibility that brains needed workouts. “It’s still a lie,” she decided. “Dr. Rivas says that scientists always tell the truth.”

  Except when it involves you, thought Matt, but he didn’t say it aloud.

  Listen then told him about Dr. Rivas’s rabbits, which he kept for experiments. She didn’t seem upset that he killed them afterward, or that he let her watch dissections. She knew the names of organs and how the bones were put together. When you cut open the stomach, she said, all that was inside was lettuce, not currant buns. Matt realized that she had patterned herself after the doctor. It wasn’t surprising, since he was the only normal adult she saw, but she didn’t realize that she was just another rabbit to him.

  No one had ever sung her lullabies or tucked her into bed. No one had ever held her when she had nightmares, and she did have them. Matt heard her screaming in the middle of the night, but she wouldn’t tell him about the dream. She’d never played hide-and-seek, although she’d done plenty of hiding from the Bug. She was, in her way, as isolated as Matt had been at that age, except that she didn’t have Celia to tell her stories or Tam Lin to take her exploring. And she didn’t have María.

  Matt vowed to make it up to her.

  The Bug was a much more difficult problem. Once he was cleaned up and his fingernails cut, Matt visited him. Eejits stood on either side, restraining him with a pair of leashes, just as large, vicious dogs were sometimes controlled. The boy’s legs were hobbled so that he could walk, but not run. The eejits forced him into a chair facing Matt.

  Mirasol brought in a cart with cookies, cheese slices, strawberries, and glasses of milk. For a moment Matt was struck by the similarity between this meeting and when he had first met El Patrón.

  Matt had been so traumatized then that he couldn’t speak, but he had instinctively liked the old man. Everything was right about him, the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands, his voice. Matt went up to the drug lord without the slightest hesitation, and El Patrón had asked him gravely if he liked cookies.

  “Do you like cookies?” Matt said now to the scowling, simmering boy.

  “Crot you!” said the Bug.

  “Dr. Rivas says you’re intelligent. You don’t act like it.” Matt edged the plate of snacks closer.

  “I’m smarter than you are, roach face. I’m the boss of this place.”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” said Matt, pointing at the eejits holding leashes. “Let’s start over. If you’re as bright as Dr. Rivas says, you’ll want to get along with me.”

  “When you die, I’m going to take your place,” boasted the Bug.

  “That’s a really stupid thing to say. Only an idiot threatens a man holding a gun.”

  El Bicho sat very still. After a moment an amazing transformation came over him. His body relaxed, and he grinned like a normal kid who only wanted to make friends. “I guess I acted like a real turkey,” he apologized. “You’re right. Let’s start over.”

  “Okay,” Matt said warily. The shift of personality had caught him off guard. “Do you like cookies?”

  “You bet,” said the Bug. “I like milk, too. And strawberries and cheese. It was nice of you to invite me to lunch.”

  “Help yourself,” said Matt, and was surprised by the boy’s elegant table manners. He’d expected Mbongeni’s type of chaos, but of course the Bug had normal intelligence. Better than normal. “What do you do all day?” he asked.

  “What do I do?” El Bicho’s gaze was far away as he tried to remember. “Sometimes Dr. Rivas teaches me things, and sometimes we go for walks. I watch TV a lot.”

  “Where do you walk?”

  “Here and there,” the boy said vaguely. “I like going to the observatory. Dr. Rivas’s children are astronomers—well, two of them are. The oldest son is a crot—sorry—an eejit. Sometimes they let me look through the telescope.”

  It sounded like a normal outing except for the leashes and hobbles. Did the boy wear them most of the time? “Do you like Dr. Rivas?”

  “Of course. He’s like a father. Or what I think a father is. Like you, I don’t know much about families.”

  For some reason Matt felt like there was a pane of glass between himself and the Bug. What the boy said was reasonable, but it was just words, with no connection to the person behind them. The Bug was saying what he thought Matt wanted to hear.

  “El Patrón’s father lived a hundred fifty years ago,” said Matt. “In a way he was our father too. We had a family back then, but they died long before we existed. It’s so strange. Sometimes I feel like an old photograph hidden away at the back of a drawer. Did you ever meet El Patrón?”

  El Bicho shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  “I knew him well. He talked a lot about his brothers and sisters, and it bothered him that they’d never had a chance. That fountain outside the lab is supposed to be statues of them.”

  “Are they our brothers and sisters?” said the Bug.

  Matt shied away from the idea. “Not really. The statues were copied from Illegal children. There weren’t any pictures of the originals. People like us have to make our families.”

  “So that means you’re my brother,” said El Bicho.

  “I suppose,” Matt said unwillingly. He considered for a moment. “I think that people have an instinct for a family. You look until you find a mother, a father, a sister, a brother. They don’t hav
e to be blood relatives. They just have to love you. And when you find them, you don’t have to look anymore.”

  They ate in silence for a while. Matt had no appetite and passed much of his food on to Mirasol. He thought about Celia and Tam Lin, and about Fidelito, who had called him brother. Was María his sister? No, she was something more. He kept looking at the Bug’s hobbles and wondering whether he dared to remove them. “If I took off your leg restraints,” Matt said carefully, “do you promise not to throw a fit?”

  “Sure,” said El Bicho.

  “We could go for a walk.”

  “I can show you the way to the observatory,” said the boy, showing genuine interest for the first time. “It’s great! There’re all kinds of machines and computers. The smaller telescope looks at the sun, and the big one looks at the rest of the sky.”

  The Bug’s enthusiasm transformed his face, and Matt thought, What kind of childhood has he had, shut up in a nursery with eejits for company? No wonder he isn’t normal. But that could be changed. He ordered the eejits to unlock the hobbles.

  “Remember. No tantrums,” Matt warned as they went into the gardens, but he needn’t have worried. El Bicho danced around from the joy of being outside before settling down to a steady pace. The eejits followed solemnly, holding their leashes.

  To Matt’s surprise they went to a hovercraft port concealed behind a hedge. There were a dozen or so small craft parked on magnetic strips, and the Bug went up to one and opened the hatch. “It’s a long way to the observatory,” he explained.

  “I’ll get Cienfuegos to pilot,” said Matt.

  The Bug laughed. “Anybody can fly these,” he said, climbing inside. The eejits followed him, pressing themselves against the back wall. “You need a pilot to take up a real hovercraft. This is a stirabout for short hops.” He patted the seat next to him.

  Matt climbed in, hoping that he wasn’t making a mistake. The change in El Bicho had been so gratifying, he didn’t want to spoil the boy’s mood.

  “First, you uncouple the magnets,” explained the Bug. He pushed a green button. The stirabout lurched up, and Matt caught his breath. “It’s okay. We can’t go more than ten feet off the ground,” said the Bug. “Now you press the go button and steer with this wheel. I’ll let you try it on the way back.”