The Lord of Opium

“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.”