The Lord of Opium

Matt saw a train consisting of at least two hundred cars waiting in Aztlán. As he watched, it slowly gathered speed and rolled across the border into Opium. The workmen were lined up about a hundred yards away from the tracks.

The crossing took less than fifteen minutes, for which Matt was grateful. He could see a mass of soldiers in green uniforms watching the procedure from Aztlán. Among them were UN peacekeepers in black. They were all heavily armed, and behind the men were ominous vehicles and hovercrafts.

“A whole maldito army!” swore Cienfuegos. “Crot Esperanza!” Matt flinched at the filthy word. “Close the border now, mi patrón. I don’t trust them to keep their distance.”

Matt did so. He had learned from the jefe that anyone could activate the lockdown in case of an emergency, but only El Patrón’s hand could remove it. It was another example of the extreme control the old man kept over everything. Opening and closing a small portion of the border should have been a simple task, but when Matt was finished, he was utterly exhausted.

“Takes it out of you, doesn’t it?” said Cienfuegos. “I’ve watched the old man fine-tune the border, and he always had to lie down afterward. It has something to do with the scanner.”

“It felt like ants were swarming over my skin,” said Matt.

“You’re lucky that’s all that happened. I was worried the first time you used the holoscope. If the machine doesn’t recognize you—well, it isn’t good.”

“How did you find out?” said Matt, remembering how nervous the jefe had been when he contacted Esperanza.

“I tried to use an eejit to access the controls,” said Cienfuegos. “Don’t worry. He was close to his expiry date, so no great loss.”

“You sacrificed a human being?”

“An eejit, mi patrón. No one knew you were coming back, and our goose was rapidly being cooked.”

It made sense, Matt realized. One of the Five Principles of Good Citizenship they had to parrot at the plankton factory was that an individual had no value apart from the group. It was the duty of a citizen to sacrifice himself for the good of all. And yet . . .

“What happened to him?” asked Matt.

“The scanner makes you fall apart,” the jefe said reluctantly. “I don’t quite understand how it works, but it removes the glue that holds your cells together. You melt.”

Matt felt sick, imagining what it looked like.

“If it’s any help, I don’t think the eejit minded,” said Cienfuegos. “He looked a little surprised, and then he was only a puddle on the floor. It was a mess to clean up.”

“I think I want to be alone for a while,” said Matt.

“There’s one more thing you should see,” said the jefe. He refocused the screen on the train, which was now halted on the tracks. Another alarm sounded, and the workmen moved even farther away. Presently, a sheet of light passed over the cars. Even in the fierce desert sunlight it burned bright enough to hurt your eyes. When it was done, it vanished and the alarm rang again. The men swarmed aboard and began unloading crates.

“You see, you can’t allow just anything to cross the border,” Cienfuegos explained. “You might have weevils or grain beetles on board. The beam kills them.”

“What about people?” said Matt, who saw where this was going.

“It eliminates them, too,” said Cienfuegos. “I wouldn’t put it past Esperanza to hide an army of peacekeepers. We’re in luck, though.” He pointed at the screen, where one of the workmen was waving a green flag. “No one was on the train. There’s nothing there but good cheese, milk, and vegetables.”

“And eejit pellets,” said Matt.

“Of course eejit pellets, in the last fifty cars,” said Cienfuegos.

*  *  *

Matt rested in his room for a while. He drew the curtains and lay down, enjoying the semidarkness and solitude. He listened to the gardeners clipping a hedge outside. El Patrón had wanted to keep his world the way it had been when he was young, and that meant almost no contact with the outside world. The old man had unbent enough to accept a few amenities—refrigerators, for example—but for the most part Opium remained in the past.

What an incredible joke! El Patrón had enslaved thousands of people and grown his crops with polluted water. He no doubt passed this pollution on to drug addicts around the world. Foul pits of chemicals spread death near the eejit pens, but most of the country was untouched. Deer and javelinas still roamed the forests. Wildflowers covered the desert after rain. Every cranny of the wilderness was full of life.