“Oh! I didn’t think of that,” said Fidelito.
“I just remembered,” Matt said. “Sor Artemesia said that God calls animals to heaven. I thought Catholics believed they didn’t have souls.”
“Sor Artemesia isn’t like most of the nuns. She’s awesome!” said Chacho. “She read to me for hours when I was in the hospital. She’s a follower of Saint Francis and thinks that animals are just as good as people.”
“So that’s where María got her ideas,” said Matt.
“She practically raised M-María,” said Ton-Ton. “When Esperanza dumped her kids, S-Senator Mendoza sent them to the Convent of Santa Clara. If I had a mother like, uh, Esperanza, I’d pray to get d-dumped. Not that she hasn’t been good to us, but I don’t think she likes kids.”
“You think zombies are scary, Fidelito, you should see Esperanza in a bad mood,” said Chacho. “Speaking of kids, how’s Emilia doing? María asked Sor Artemesia, but she didn’t know.”
Matt was dumbfounded. For some reason Esperanza wanted to hide the truth, and until he knew why, he couldn’t reveal it. “I haven’t seen her,” he said evasively.
“I guess Opium’s a big place. I mean, you have room for thousands of zombies,” said Chacho. To change the subject, Matt brought out the music box, and as he’d expected, they were all enchanted with it.
“It’s so clever!” exclaimed Ton-Ton. “I wonder if I could m-make something like that.”
“You’re good with machinery. I’m sure you could,” said Matt. He wound it up again, and they watched the gentleman and lady dance. Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Fidelito fiddling with the birdcage, and the next minute the little boy had the finch clinging to his finger by one claw. “Ton-Ton! Watch Fidelito!” he cried.
The older boy turned and shouted, “Put that back!” The little boy jumped. The bird fell off his hand and flew straight at the holoport. Ton-Ton tried to grab it out of the air, but he was too late. The finch hung in midflight as the opening began to swirl with fog. It had seemed to be only a few inches away, but it moved with painful slowness. Its wings were outspread and its beak was open in a silent cry. Then it fell out the other end and shattered on the floor.
Matt touched it. Ice dampened his finger. The bird had broken into three parts but was melting rapidly into pathetic little heaps. Matt looked up to see the portal trying to re-form. He closed it down before anything else could happen. After a while he wrapped the dead bird in a napkin.
13
THE OPIUM FACTORY
Matt returned the music box to El Patrón’s apartment and sat staring out the windows of the bedroom. Celia’s picnic basket was on the bed, and in a corner of it was the napkin containing the dead finch. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to make decisions.
How simple it had been at the plankton factory, though of course it had been terrible, too. There he hadn’t been responsible for anything. The Keepers could be blamed for problems. He hoped that Fidelito wouldn’t get into trouble for losing María’s bird. No one knew, after all, that it was dead. Matt could say that it was living happily in Opium, but no, he’d have to tell the truth. Otherwise Fidelito might throw something else into the portal.
He thought about contacting the convent again and was strangely reluctant. The boys were on one side of the portal, having a high old time raiding kitchens and destroying flower beds. He was trapped on the other, with a wall of death in between. It was like watching TV when he was very small and had never seen other children. It was worse than being alone.
After a while Matt went outside and buried the finch, still in its napkin, under an orange tree.
He drifted to the music room, where he’d spent so many happy hours, and played Mozart’s “Turkish March.” He went faster and louder until it sounded more like noise than music. He crashed both fists down on the keys and stopped. Once, he’d been satisfied by the music alone. Now he had learned about friendship, and it was no longer enough to play without an audience.
Finally, out of boredom, Matt asked Daft Donald and Mr. Ortega to take him to the opium factory. He’d been there many times in the days when he thought El Patrón was preparing him to run the country. He had watched how the dried poppy sap was rolled into black balls the size of coconuts and then pressed into a disk stamped with the scorpion emblem. An eejit assembly line wrapped the disks in waxed paper and stored them in metal cookie cans.
Another assembly line measured laudanum, or opium dissolved in alcohol, into bottles. This was marketed in orange, lemon, cinnamon, and clove flavors. A rose-petal variation was manufactured for the Middle East market. More intelligent eejits processed the raw poppy sap into morphine, codeine, and heroin.
All the storerooms and most of the halls were full of cookie cans and bottles, and the overflow was stacked outside under makeshift ramadas. Matt remembered the lights blinking at various addresses on the holoport. The dealers wanted their shipments, and very soon he would have to deal with the situation.
A fume of dust filled the building. The foreman quickly found respirators to protect the visitors from being overcome, but Mr. Ortega waved his aside. “You know me,” he told the foreman. “I’m here to smell the roses.” He breathed in deeply with an ecstatic look on his face. “Aaahhh,” he said with a sigh. “Don’t look so surprised, mi patrón. I’m a drug addict. Didn’t you ever wonder why my hands sometimes shake?”
Matt hadn’t really thought about it. He’d assumed the music teacher was ill.
Daft Donald put a finger to his temple, like a man pretending to shoot himself.
“No, I wouldn’t rather be dead,” said Mr. Ortega, understanding the gesture. “You’ve got nerve taking a high moral tone with me after all the murders you’ve committed.”
Daft Donald made a circular motion with his finger: You’re completely nuts.
“On the contrary, I’m extremely clever,” argued the music teacher. “Where else would a drug addict want to be except where there are piles and piles of lovely opium?”
Daft Donald shook with silent laughter.
Their conversation continued, with the bodyguard making gestures and the music teacher replying aloud.
Matt wandered off. The foreman was courteous to him, a change from the old days when the man had treated him like a roach. The boy told him that supplies had arrived from Aztlán. The eejits could go back to full rations. “Very good, mi patrón,” said the foreman. “We lost a couple of them yesterday and production is down, not”—the man gestured at the overflowing hallways—“that we don’t have more dope than we know what to do with.”
Matt felt depressed. The eejits—thousands of them—were programmed to plant poppies, slash pods, and make laudanum, and they didn’t know how to do anything else. If they were prevented from working, they jittered. Cienfuegos said that after a while these eejits simply keeled over and died. The tension was too great for them. Thus, they had to go on working day after day, while the opium had to keep piling up. It was like a well-oiled machine without an off button.
Matt’s choices were to supply the dealers and keep the machine going with fresh Illegals, or to stop exporting drugs and let the current eejits work themselves to death. It was his decision.