The Lord of Opium

The jefe settled the stirabout down onto a patch of sand. “We should walk some distance away for security reasons. I hope your moccasins are up to it, sir.” The Mushroom Master put his umbrella up, for here were no trees. The sun blazed out of an empty blue sky. They walked along a trail until they got to a collection of boulders. Cienfuegos poked around them with a stick to check for snakes before they sat down.

“Is this place really that riddled with listening devices?” asked the Mushroom Master, wiping sweat from his face with a sleeve.

“El Patrón had them everywhere. He had bodyguards whose only job was to listen, and he liked to eavesdrop himself.”

“What a dreadful man,” said the Mushroom Master. “And now Dr. Rivas is doing it.”

“Probably.” Cienfuegos took out a bottle of water and passed it around.

“Whose clone is Dr. Rivas growing in that cow?” asked Matt, unable to hold back the question any longer.

“I think it’s his son,” said Cienfuegos.

“The one who’s an eejit?”

“Yes. Eduardo.”

Matt remembered the young man who had been picking leaves out of a pool, one by one. “Is—” The boy stopped to gather his thoughts. “Is the doctor going to do a brain transplant?”

“It’s been tried, but transplanting a brain is far different from doing a kidney or a liver,” said the jefe. “I remember that from lectures at Chapultepec University. The brain is shaped by the experiences of the body, and the body is shaped by the brain. When you learn to walk or swim or fly a hovercraft, both are involved. Changing one part results in lethal confusion for the other. I think Eduardo has been dead for a while, and Dr. Rivas is growing a replacement.”

“What terrible things have happened since the biosphere was enclosed,” said the Mushroom Master.

They sat, each with his own thoughts, gazing out at the low landscape of mesquite trees. The air shimmered over dull green leaves, and in the distance the domes of deserted observatories poked up in the heat haze like Shaggy Mane mushrooms. To the right, completely dwarfing all other structures, was the Alacrán observatory, whose great glass eye was trained on the Scorpion Star. Matt couldn’t see it now, but it was there. Always.

“Dr. Rivas has been getting stranger these past few months,” said Cienfuegos, “not that he was ever sane. I think the death of his son has pushed him over the edge.”

“I’m worried about that collection of germs he has in his freezer,” said the Mushroom Master. “Some of those diseases are legends. They aren’t supposed to exist.”

“Listen told me about them,” the jefe said. “Someday I’m going to take a blowtorch in there.”

“Make it soon,” said the old man.

“Excuse me, sir, but why did you come to Paradise?” Matt asked the Mushroom Master. “I mean, since you don’t like hovercrafts much.” He treated the man with the same courtesy as Cienfuegos did. The Mushroom Master might be odd, but there was no mistaking his quality. He was someone even a drug lord could respect.

“I was talking to Ton-Ton about microchips,” said the old man. “He’s a very clever lad. His methods are slow, but he has one outstanding quality. He overlooks nothing. He has come to the conclusion that the microchips are controlled by an outside energy source. I agree.”

All three of them turned to look at the Alacrán observatory. “El Patrón built that with a quarter of the fortune he had at the time,” said Cienfuegos. “I don’t know what he spent on the Scorpion Star, but possibly twice as much.”

“Controlling the eejits would be a compelling reason,” the Mushroom Master said.

“Could the Scorpion Star really affect people from so far away?” asked Matt.

“Sunlight reaches Earth from nine million miles away. Without it, life wouldn’t exist. Once there was something called a Global Positioning System. It controlled airplanes, ships, and cars from satellites.”

Matt’s thoughts whirled with this staggering revelation. All they would have to do was shut down the Scorpion Star. He could order that. He had absolute power. And then he thought, Order who?

“I wonder why Dr. Rivas hasn’t shut down the space station,” said Cienfuegos, echoing Matt’s thoughts.

“Perhaps he can’t,” said Matt.

Cienfuegos stood up and startled a lizard that had been sitting on an adjacent boulder. It threw itself off and disappeared into a clump of dry grass. “Let’s poke around the observatory and see what we can find out.”

41

THE SOLAR TELESCOPE