“He’s dead,” Matt said. He filled her in on all that had happened. “Those eejits aren’t rogue, they’re awake, and so are the ones in Opium. The Scorpion Star was controlling their brains, and I destroyed it.” He waited to see whether she would congratulate him. She didn’t. “Most of the ex-eejits want to go home, but the countries they came from won’t take them back.”
“I’ll organize a committee to study the situation,” said Esperanza.
“Oh, no you won’t. A committee would string things out for years. I want you to lean on those governments until they back down. Otherwise, I won’t send you any more bunny rabbits and squirrels.” The woman frowned, ready to do battle, but Matt added, “You’ll never believe what we discovered near Tucson. Lions and tigers from a zoo that went wild during the drug wars.”
Esperanza was so startled she forgot to scowl. She clasped her heavily ringed hands until they looked like a ball of silver and turquoise gems. “Lions? They survived in the desert?”
“Tucson isn’t quite a desert anymore,” said Matt. “It’s hot, but lions are used to heat. I also discovered a jungle with monkeys and toucans and crocodiles. And there’s a biosphere with ecosystems from every part of the Earth. Think about it, Esperanza. Opium holds the seeds of recovery for the entire planet. The scientists in the biosphere have also found a way to clean up polluted soil.”
She was stunned. She opened her mouth and no sound came out. As Cienfuegos had suggested, keeping the lions secret had been a good idea.
“I can’t believe it,” she murmured at last.
“Believe it. I’ll send you pictures.”
“We built a park near the ruins of Tijuana for the samples you sent,” she said. Her expression had changed completely. She was no longer harsh and uncompromising. She looked twenty years younger. “It’s a very small place, but we planned to expand it slowly. If there’s a way to recover polluted soil . . . ”
“There is. Do we have a basis for negotiation?” asked Matt.
“Oh, yes. Yes.” Esperanza’s face was radiant with joy. It almost made the commander of the UN forces likable. But when they had finished their conversation and Matt had shut down the portal, he remembered.
Esperanza had entirely forgotten about María.
* * *
Most of the Farm Patrolmen stayed because they had prices on their heads in other lands. Samson and Boris opted to stay as well. Cienfuegos recovered slowly. Once Matt found him weeping, and he turned away quickly to hide it. “I remember too much,” he explained. “But don’t worry, Don Sombra. People like me have an infinite ability to forgive themselves.”
Matt offered to help find his family in Aztlán, but he shook his head. “My daughter was ten when I left her, and now she’d be almost thirty. She’ll have married and forgotten about me. As for my wife, she’ll definitely have remarried. It would be amusing to walk in on her and her new husband, but I’ve lost my taste for blood sports.”
With Matt’s help, Cienfuegos sent samples of the fungi used by the Mushroom Master to his old university. “What I would most like is to grow something here that isn’t narcotics,” the jefe said. “It would be wonderful to produce life instead of taking it.” Matt promised that he could do whatever he liked. “Of course, if you need me to kick butt with the Farm Patrol, I’d be willing to help,” Cienfuegos said, with a flash of his old spirit.
Matt set about finding jobs for the remaining paisanos. Most of the opium was uprooted, and soon alfalfa, corn, tomatoes, wheat, and chilies took the place of the old fields. The population of Opium, minus the men who had gone home, was very small compared to that of other countries. Most of the land would be left untouched.
María, of course, was in her element. She gathered the ex-eejit children into small houses and, with Sor Artemesia’s help, hired women from Aztlán and the United States to be surrogate mothers for them. None of the children, as far as they could tell, had any family left. Those who were musical were given lessons by Mr. Ortega and the newly freed choirmaster.
* * *
Eusebio wasn’t interested in giving lessons. Chacho said that his father awoke that memorable night when the Scorpion Star fell, turned on the light, and inspected the rows and rows of guitars propped against the walls. “Who left these here?” he demanded. “They should be in proper cases and not lying around where mice can get at them.”
Chacho sat up, utterly amazed. “You made them, Father.”
“Me? Pah! I don’t remember doing it. And who are you?”
For a moment Chacho was speechless. “I’m your son,” he managed to say.
“Nonsense! Mi hijo is only so high, not a hulking teenager like you. Where’s Mr. Ortega?” By now the light had awakened the piano teacher, who stumbled out of bed and tried to explain the situation. It took a while for Eusebio to realize that his friend was deaf.
“What a pity! What a pity!” the guitar maker exclaimed. “And you such a great pianist. Are you ill, mi compadre? You look so old. It must be the dry desert air.”
“I advise you not to look into a mirror,” retorted Mr. Ortega. Gradually, he and Chacho told Eusebio what had happened. Chacho said he was worried about his father’s reaction, but Eusebio was far more interested to learn that he could write music here and not be concerned with finding work. He lived for music, just as it seemed Chacho would live for art.
He was hugely impressed with his son’s artistic ability. “Runs in the family,” he bragged. “All of us Orozcos are born with either a paintbrush or a guitar pick in our hands.”
* * *
Ton-Ton was a problem. He admired music and art from a distance, but he had little talent in those areas. Most of what sent Chacho into transports of joy passed over Ton-Ton’s head. María drafted him to teach the ex-eejit children. “They can learn so much from you,” she enthused. “You can show them gears and screwdrivers and those little round things you use to feed wires into boxes.”
“Grommets,” said Ton-Ton.
“Yes! Such a cute name!” But when she found him threatening to beat the stuffing out of a five-year-old who had rearranged Ton-Ton’s computer parts, she was outraged.
“It’s a j-joke,” he explained when she pulled the howling boy away. “Fidelito and Listen aren’t scared of me. Kids, uh, break stuff if you don’t w-watch them all the time.”
“You can’t threaten them,” she cried.
“W-why not, if it works?” he argued. And so the experiment with Ton-Ton as teacher was over.
Matt tried to involve him in farming, but years of toiling under the hot sun at the plankton factory had killed the interest. Medicine and astronomy, two other possibilities, were too “brainy,” according to Ton-Ton. Yet Matt knew that nothing was wrong with the older boy’s brain. He simply approached problems in a different way.
It was finally Daft Donald who came up with the solution. He thinks with his hands, wrote the bodyguard on his yellow pad of paper. And so he introduced Ton-Ton to the inner workings of Hitler’s car. The boy was enchanted. From there they went on to Celia’s freezer, to Dr. Kim’s electron microscope at the hospital, to the irrigation system at the mushroom house, and to many other delights.