The House of the Scorpion (33 page)

He waited expectantly, and after a while someone put up his hand and said, “We’d go in circles.”

“Very good!” said Raúl, beaming at his audience. “We all have to paddle together to reach the shore.”

“What if we don’t want to reach the shore?” Chacho said.

“A very good question,” said the Keeper. “Can anyone tell us what would happen if we stayed out in the boat for days and days?” He waited.

“We’d starve to death,” a boy said.

“There’s your answer, Chacho,” said Raúl. “We’d all starve to death. That brings me to the problem of the five-legged horse. A horse runs very well on four legs. It’s what he’s made for. But suppose he grew a fifth leg that only wanted to please itself. The other four legs would be running and running, but the fifth leg—which we’ll call individualism—would want to walk slowly to enjoy a beautiful meadow, or it might want to take a nap. Then the poor animal would fall over! That’s why we take that unhappy horse to a vet and have the fifth leg cut off. It may seem harsh, but we’ve all got to pull together in the new Aztlán, or we’ll all wind up lying in the dirt. Does anyone have a question?”

Raúl waited a long time. Finally, Matt put up his hand and said, “Why don’t you put a computer chip in the horse’s brain? Then it wouldn’t matter how many legs it had.” A gasp went around the room.

“Are you saying—?” the Keeper stopped, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you suggesting we turn the horse
into a zombie?”

“I don’t see much difference between that and sawing off the extra leg,” said Matt. “What you’re after is a horse that works hard and doesn’t waste time looking at flowers.”

“This is great!” Chacho said.

“But you—don’t you see the difference?” Raúl was so outraged, he could hardly speak.

“We recite the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness every time we want to eat,” explained Matt. “You keep telling us the orderly production of resources is vital to the general good of the people. It’s obvious we’re supposed to follow the rules and not walk slowly through meadows. But horses aren’t as smart as people. It makes sense to program them with computer chips.” Matt thought this was a brilliant argument, and he couldn’t see why the Keeper was so upset. El Patrón would have seen the logic of it in an instant.

“I can see we have our work cut out with you,” Raúl said in a tight voice. “I can see we have a nasty little aristocrat who needs to be educated about the will of the people!” Matt was amazed at the man’s reaction. The Keeper had asked for questions. In fact, he’d almost demanded them.

“Well!” said Raúl, brushing off his uniform as though he’d touched something dirty. “The sooner this nasty little aristocrat goes to the plankton factory the better. That’s all I can say.” And he flounced out of the room.

Instantly, all the boys crowded around Matt. “Wow! You showed him!” they cried.

“You mooned him even better than I did,” said Fidelito, bouncing up and down on a bed.

“He didn’t even make us recite the Five Principles of Good Citizenship and the Four Attitudes Leading to Right-Mindfulness,” exulted a boy.

“Heck, I had you down as a wuss,” said Chacho “You’ve got more nerve than a herd of bulls.”

“What? What did I do?” said Matt, completely bewildered.

“You only told him the Keepers were trying to turn us into a bunch of crots!”

Late that night Matt lay on a top bunk and went over the events of the day. He didn’t know how much trouble he was in or what kind of revenge to expect. He didn’t dislike Raúl. He only thought the man was an idiot. Matt realized he’d better walk carefully around people who took offense at mere words. What harm could words do? Tam Lin loved a good argument, the more spirited the better. He said it was like doing push-ups in your brain.

Matt felt his right foot under the scratchy wool blanket. This was his one weakness, and he despaired of keeping it hidden. Tam Lin might have said there was no difference between humans and clones, but everything in Matt’s experience argued against it. Humans hated clones. It was the natural order of things, and Raúl could use it to destroy him. No one must ever see the tattoo that tied Matt to Dreamland and to the vampire who lived in its castle.
Vampire!
thought Matt. El Patrón would have enjoyed that description. He loved to inspire fear.

Matt had added a few more crumbs to the stash of information he was accumulating about this new world in which he found himself. An aristocrat was the lowest form of life, a parasite who expected honest peasants to be his slaves. A crot—the deadliest insult anyone could utter—was a simple, harmless eejit, like the thousands who had cut grass, washed floors, and tended poppies as far back as Matt could remember. The clean word for them was
zombies
. Whatever they were called, Matt thought they deserved pity, not hatred.

He couldn’t bring himself to think about Celia and Tam Lin. Sorrow threatened to overwhelm him, and he didn’t want to be caught sobbing like a baby. Instead, he thought about going to San Luis. He’d look for the Convent of Santa Clara right away and find María. The thought of María cheered him up immensely.

Matt basked in the approval of his newfound friends. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. The boys accepted him as though he were a real human. He felt like he’d been walking across a desert all his life and now he’d arrived at the biggest and best oasis in the world.

28
THE PLANKTON FACTORY

R
aúl gave the boys an inspirational talk in the morning. It was all about aristocrats and how attractive they might seem on the surface but how vile they really were inside. No mention was made of Matt. A few of the younger boys seemed uneasy, but Chacho and Fidelito proclaimed Matt a national hero after the Keeper left.

Matt was put to work the instant the talk was over. He was told to measure pills with the younger children, and his quota was twice theirs, “to teach him the value of labor.” Matt wasn’t worried. When they reached San Luis, he’d be off to the convent faster than Fidelito could say,
It’s hard but it’s fair
.

For breakfast he was given only half a bowl of beans and three tortillas instead of six. Chacho told each of the bigger boys to give him a spoonful of theirs, so he wound up with a full bowl anyway.

At mid-morning Raúl called out the names of the three who were to go to San Luis and marched them to the hovercraft. “You’ve had it easy here,” he told them. “This is a holiday camp compared to where you’re going; but if you work hard and keep your record clean, you can move up to full citizenship when you reach eighteen.”

“Crot that,” muttered Chacho.

“That’s not a good beginning. That’s not a good beginning at all,” said Raúl.

Matt had been inside a hovercraft only once—the disastrous night when he’d been betrayed by Steven and Emilia. This ship wasn’t nearly as nice. It was full of hard plastic seats, and it smelled of sweat and mold. Raúl sat them in the middle, as far from the windows as possible. He gave them a bag of plastic strips to weave into sandals.

“Told you we’d have to work,” said Chacho under his breath.

The Keeper strapped them in and left without a word. The rest of the hovercraft was filled with bales of plastic sandals piled so high, the boys couldn’t see out the windows. They couldn’t move around, either, because the straps were locked into place.
What
is
it with these people?
thought Matt. They couldn’t seem to relax unless they had total control.

The hovercraft lifted, and Fidelito announced that he always got sick on airships. “You barf on me, you’ve had it,” snarled Chacho.

Matt solved the problem by transferring the bag of plastic strips to the little boy’s lap.

“You’re a genius,” said Chacho. “Go ahead, Fidelito. Knock yourself out.”

What were Steven and Emilia doing now? Matt wondered as they flew on. Steven was the crown prince of Opium now. He’d be celebrating. His friends from school would come over, and tables would be set in the garden where El Patrón used to have his birthday parties. Emilia would have her eejit flower girls to wait on her, or perhaps she’d sent them away to the fields. They weren’t capable of much else.

Those girls must have tried to run with their parents
, Matt thought with a thrill of horror. They weren’t any older than Fidelito, who had lost his battle with airsickness and was coating the plastic strips in secondhand beans and tortillas.

“They should have starved you at breakfast time,” said Chacho.

“I can’t help it,” said Fidelito in a muffled voice.

The rest of the trip—mercifully short—was spent in a cloud of sour vomit. Matt leaned one way and Chacho leaned the other in a vain attempt to escape the smell. Fortunately, the hovercraft landed soon. When the pilot saw what had happened, he unlocked the seat belts and shoved the boys out the door.

Matt tumbled to his knees on hot sand. He sucked in air and immediately regretted it. The smell outside was even worse. It was like thousands of fish rotting and oozing in the hot sun. Matt gave in to the inevitable and emptied his stomach. Not far away Chacho was doing the same. “I was in purgatory. Now I’m in hell,” he groaned.

“Make it stop,” sobbed Fidelito.

Matt pulled himself to his feet and dragged the little boy toward a building shimmering in the heat. All around, Matt saw blinding white hills and crusted pools stained with crimson. Chacho stumbled after them.

Matt pulled Fidelito through a doorway and slumped against a wall to recover. The air inside was cooler and slightly fresher. The room was full of bubbling tanks tended by boys who morosely fished the water with nets and who paid no attention to the newcomers.

After a few moments Matt felt strong enough to get up. His legs were rubbery and his stomach was in knots. “Who’s in charge?” he asked. A boy pointed at a door.

Matt knocked and went in. He saw a group of men dressed in the same black uniform as Raúl, with the emblem of a bee-hive on their sleeves. “There’s one of
los bichos—
the vermin—who stank up my hovercraft,” said the pilot.

“What’s your name?” said a Keeper.

“Matt Ortega,” Matt replied.

“Ah. The aristocrat.”

Uh oh
, thought Matt.
Raúl must have spread the word
.

“Well, you won’t get away with your swanky ways here,” the man said. “We’ve got something called the boneyard, and any troublemaker who goes through it comes out as harmless as a little lamb.”

“The first thing he’s going to do is clean my ship,” said the pilot. And so Matt, along with Chacho, soon found himself scrubbing the floors and walls of the aircraft. Lastly—and most horribly—they had to wash each slimy strip of plastic in a bucket of hot, soapy water.

The air didn’t smell as evil as before. “It’s just as bad,” the pilot assured them from his seat under a plastic shade. “The longer you’re here, the less you notice it. There’s something in it that paralyzes your sense of smell.”

“We should make Fidelito drink this,” said Chacho, idly sloshing the contents of the bucket.

“He can’t help it,” Matt said. Poor Fidelito had curled up on the ground in a fit of misery. Neither boy had the heart to make him work.

After they finished, the head Keeper, who was called Carlos, gave them a tour of the factory. “These are the brine tanks,” he said. “You take the stink bugs out of the tanks with this”—he held up a net—“and when the plankton’s ripe, you harvest it.”

“What’s plankton?” Matt ventured to ask.

“Plankton!” exclaimed Carlos, as though he’d been waiting eagerly for that question. “It’s what a whale filters out of the sea to make a meal. It’s the microscopic plants and animals that drift in the top layer of the water. You wouldn’t think an enormous creature could live on something so tiny, but that’s the astonishing truth. Plankton is the eighth wonder of the world. It’s full of protein, vitamins, and roughage. It’s got everything a whale needs to be happy and everything people need too. The plankton we manufacture here is made into hamburgers, hotdogs, and burritos. Ground up fine, it takes the place of mother’s milk.”

Carlos went on and on. It appeared his life’s work was to make people love and appreciate plankton. He seemed blind to the bleak desert that surrounded them, now that they had gone outside.

Matt saw high security fences in the distance, and his heart sank. The air was foul, the temperature broiling, and the humidity so high that his jumpsuit clung to his body like a second skin. This was the place he was supposed to inhabit until he turned eighteen.

“Where’s San Luis?” he asked.

“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” said Carlos. “When we feel you need the information, that’s when you get to know it. Don’t get any ideas about going over the fence, either. The top wire has enough power to spit you back like a melon seed. Here are the salt mountains.” He indicated the white dunes Matt had noticed before. “After we harvest the plankton, the brine is evaporated and the salt is processed for sale. These are the highest salt mountains in the world. People come from all over to admire them.”