The Lord of Opium

“They said it had a big secret inside and they wanted the Bug to open it, but he couldn’t. Dr. Rivas thought I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Big people ignore little kids, and they shouldn’t.”

“I’d never ignore you, chiquita. You’re too dangerous,” said the jefe. “So Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos escaped.”

“I think so,” the little girl said. “They didn’t get any loot, though. I made that part up. I’m hungry.”

They found rusty cans of food in the pantry, which Cienfuegos said were too old to be safe. The loaves of bread crumbled into dust when Listen touched them.

“It’s like an Egyptian tomb with all the things the owner needed for the afterlife,” said Matt, thinking of El Patrón and also of Mirasol. The flowers that had been heaped around her must have withered by now. Or perhaps they didn’t in the world of the dead. Perhaps they still bloomed, and she was dancing with the people she had loved. He had left the music box in her tomb.

“There are clothes in the closet and a toothbrush on the sink, except that the bristles have fallen out,” said Matt. “All we need is a sarcophagus with a pharaoh painted on the lid.” And servants, he thought. Real pharaohs needed servants to get through the afterlife.

“There’s a lunchroom at the observatory,” Listen said. “You can get hot chocolate and donuts and sometimes turkey burritos. We should go there now.”

“Patience,” said Cienfuegos, leaning back in a chair and half-closing his eyes. “Your ancestors didn’t whine about turkey burritos when they were on a hunt. They waited like lions for the game to get careless.”

“So we’re lions,” the little girl said, interested.

“Oh, yes. We’re hunting the biggest game of all.”

“The Scorpion Star,” said Matt.

The jefe smiled gently at the dark ceiling draped with ancient cobwebs and dust. “The Mushroom Master thinks the eejits’ brains are controlled by an energy source on the Scorpion Star. And that the observatory controls the Star. We’ll begin our hunt by looking into that room at the bottom of the solar telescope.”

Matt didn’t like the plan, but he couldn’t think of a better one. He helped Listen search through the desk while they waited. Dried-up fountain pens of a sort only seen in museums filled one drawer. In another were colored scraps of paper that Cienfuegos said were used for sending letters, a concept he had to explain. These were in an envelope labeled FOREVER STAMPS.

The little girl unfolded a large diagram on the floor. The folds cracked, and each section separated from the others.

“That looks familiar.” Cienfuegos got up and weighted the pages with stones to be sure they didn’t get mixed up. “It looks a lot like the biosphere. There’s Northern Europe and Africa. And at the far end is Tundra. It’s even got the name printed on it.”

Matt knelt by it. “It could also be the space station.” The longer they studied it, the more likely this seemed. The diagram was covered with strange symbols and mathematical formulas. Between each ecosystem was a series of zigzag lines and notes like gauss here and outgauss there. In the margin was written 500 teslas. Excessive? No! At the bottom were two words: Couple on the left, and Uncouple on the right.

Cienfuegos carefully gathered up the sheets, keeping them in order. “This is gibberish to me. I’ll take it to the Mushroom Master later. It’s strange. He knows more about science than we do, and he’s a hundred years in the past. He says we depend too much on machines. All we know how to do is press buttons, but he knows how the buttons work.”

50

THE SECRET ROOM

When the sun slipped behind the Chiricahua Mountains, they left the abandoned observatory. Heat still radiated from the ground, and a wind had whipped up a dust storm. It blew into their eyes and dried their lips, but it also made them less easy to spot on the treeless road.

The white dome of El Patrón’s observatory loomed against the shadow of night rising in the east. To the south appeared the Scorpion Star, always the first to be seen at evening and the last to disappear at dawn. They slipped into a side door and tiptoed along the dark, curved wall to the door of the lunchroom. No one noticed them. The technicians were busy with screens and computers.