by Ian McDonald
Death Metal raises the ramp and pulls the shutter down with a clatter. Recessed mood-lights flood on. Edson feels his eyes widen behind his wraparound I-shades. The rear of the container is docking space; the forward two-thirds is split-level business accommodation. The lower floor - reception - is Karma Café kitsch, all shag rugs, leather beanbags, inflatable chairs, and zebra-skin sofas on spindly legs. There is a battery of rollscreens tuned to sports and news channels, a complex coffee engine with attendant barista and low-laid bossa nova. Upstairs is the office, a transparent cube of plastic, harshly neon-lit to the downbeat downlighting of the club below. The cube is stacked ceiling-high with server farms, wiring alleys, and tanks conspicuously marked liquid nitrogen. Edson makes out a figure moving among the racked boxes, a glimpse of swinging red hair. Heaven and clubland are connected by a spiral staircase of glowing blue plastic.
A floppy-haired queen in a good suit and shiny shirt unfolds from a sofa. He has pointy pirate shoes, immaculately polished.
‘So this is the handbag?’ The bicha turns it over in his hands. ‘I suppose it was going to happen sooner or later as quantum technology gets cheaper. It would have been a lot simpler just to have thrown it away.’
‘My brother can make money out of this.’
The truck accelerates; the seguranças have a fix on the arfid and are running them out of road.
‘We can certainly blank this for you. It’s not the most up-to-date model. Fia.’
You can fall in love with someone for their shoes. These are gold jacaré-skin wedge heels, strappy at the ankle. They descend the top turn of the spiral staircase. Above them, slim ankles, good calves not too full, Capri-cut tapered pant-bottoms with a little dart in the side and white piping running up to a matching jacaré belt. The pants belong to a black jumpsuit, confrontationally retro in its cut, shoulder pads, trim and kitschy tit-zips. All this detail gleams in Edson’s edged perception. Then the head descends from the suite upstairs. Third-generation Japonesa cheekbones and nose - she’s had the eyes done, round anime doe-eyes. Hair that super-silky straightness that all aspire to but only the Japanese have the DNA to achieve. Bobbed so severely it might have been measured with a spirit level. Red is the color again, this year. She wears top-marque Blu Mann I-shades pushed up on it.
‘Good bag,’ she comments.
Edson opens his mouth and nothing comes out. It’s not love. It’s not even lust. The closest emotion to it he can recognize is glamour. If he had a religious cell in his body, he might know it as worship, in that word’s oldest, truest sense: worth-ship. She fascinates him. She is all the things he hopes to be. He wants to orbit in her gravity, circle her thrilling world and thrilling clothes and thrilling friends and thrilling places to go and do and be and see. She takes the jeito he thinks he has earned and spreads it all over the road behind her like a mashed cat. She makes him feel like favela scum. That’s all right. Compared to her he is, he is.
‘They’re about two minutes out,’ chides the bicha.
‘You want to give me that bag?’
‘Um, can I watch?’
‘There’s nothing to see. You’ll be disappointed.’
‘I don’t think I will. I’d like to see.’
‘You will. Everybody is.’
‘About a minute and a half,’ says bicha-boy. Gerson is having a cafezinho.
She lets him carry the bag upstairs.
‘Fia? Fia what?’
There’s barely space for the two swivel chairs among the technology. The cubicle is swagged with enough cable to rig a suspension bridge.
‘Kishida.’ She says it fast, with Japanese emphases though her accent is pure Paulistana. Fia sets the Giorelli on an illuminated white plastic tray under a set of micromanipulator arms. She sweeps her Blu Manns down over her face. Her hands dance in air; the robot arms gavotte over the handbag, seeking the arfid chip. Edson sees ghosts and circuitry in increasing magnifications flicker across Fia’s shades.
‘I know this tune, I really like it. Do you like baile?’ Edson says, twitching his muscles to the house beat. ‘There’s a gafieira on Friday; I’ve a client doing a set.’
‘Could you just shut up for thirty seconds while I try and do some work?’
The arms locate and lock. Icons appear on Fia’s glasses: her pupils dance across the display, issuing commands. Edson finds his attention hooked by a glowing object beneath the glass surface of the desk. He cups his hands around his face and presses it to the desktop. The glass is cool enough for his breath to dew. Far below, seemingly farther than the architecture of the trailer allows - below the floor of the lab, below the club lounge, below the truck chassis and the surface of the road - is a shifting, morphing glow.
‘What’s that?’ He lowers his brow until it touches the cool glass.
‘Reality,’ says Fia. ‘Quantum dots in superposition. The light is vacuum fluctuation photons leaking through from some of the parallel states in which the computation is being made.’
‘Ah, you’re the physicist,’ Edson says, and bites his tongue: is it the pill that is making this muscle that has never let him down before speak only stupid? She looks at him as if he has shit on her glass desktop. She reaches across Edson to hit a key. The robot probes move in a fraction of a hair, then withdraw to their standby position.
‘Okay, that’s it. Safe and anonymous.’
‘What, you mean, that quick?’
‘I told you you would be disappointed.’
‘But nothing happened.’
‘I ran through possible combinations in ten to the eight hundred universes. That’s not exactly nothing.’
‘Of course,’ says Edson unconvincingly.
‘There’s always an answer out there somewhere.’
Edson has heard a little about this - he makes it his business to know something about everything that occupies adjacent niches to him in the twilight economy - and he has seen with his own eyes now what it can achieve, but it still feels like witchcraft to him. Quantum dots in superwhateverpositions. Ten to the eight hundred universes. That is not reality. Reality is Brooklin Bandeiras running back to the office, out of funding and out of quarry. Reality is people stupid enough to pay three thousand reis for a handbag, and people stupid enough to steal one. Reality is the necessity of getting with this magnetic, strict creature.
‘If you say,’ says Edson. If she thinks he is ignorant, he might as well put it to work. ‘But you could explain it to me over lunch.’
‘I’d rather you just paid me now.’
Down in the lounge, he throws the bag to Gerson while the bicha in the suit prints out an invoice. A movement distracts Edson, someone/thing among the quantum computers above. Impossible. No one could get past them on the neon staircase. Weird shit happens around them, Mr Smiles had warned.
‘We’d prefer cash,’ the bicha says. Whatever preferred payment option, it’s impossible.
‘Don’t be owing us,’ advises the Black Metalista. Edson’s money-sense cues him that he is the wealth behind the operation.
‘I’ll take the bag,’ says Fia. Edson snatches it away from his brother.
‘So, gafieira?’ he chances as the truck pulls into a safe stop and the shutter clatters up. ‘José’s Garage, Cidade de Luz.’
‘Don’t push it,’ says Fia quantumeira, but Edson can see deep down, at the quantum level, she’s a baile queen.
JUNE 19, 1732
The mule went mad on the cobbled pier of the Cidade Baixa. The insanity fell on it in an instant, one moment doggedly hauling the laden wagon with the tenacity of its breed, the next shying in its traces, ears back, teeth bared, braying. It tore free from the barefoot slave who had been steering it half-asleep, such was the stolid placidity of the mule, from the engenho to the dock where the low, slow carracks rolled on the swell of the Bahia de Todos os Santos, fat with sugar and Vila Rica gold. The slave snatched for the bridle; the mule shied away from the hand, eyes rolling. The mule reared, kicked. The wagon rocked, spillin
g white pillows of sugar that split on the cobbles. The dockside whores, come down for the arrival of Cristo Redentor in Salvador harbor - a ship from Portugal, a navy ship - flew with cries and oaths. Soldiers in the buff and crimson of the imperial infantry under the command of a sword-carrying Teniente ran from the Custom House. The mule leaped and plunged; the slave danced around before it, trying to seize the lead rope, but the cry had already gone out across the harbor: The rage the rage.
‘Help me!’ the slave cried. A hoof caught the carter a glancing blow; he reeled across the quay, blood starting from his smashed jaw. The mule bucked and plunged, trying to twist off the heavy cart. Yellow foam burst from its mouth. Its chest heaved, sweat stained its hide. Cries, shrieks from the ladies in their headscarves and petticoats. Slaves left their rail carts, their master and mistresses, encircled the insane mule, arms outstretched. The soldiers unshouldered their muskets. Eyes wide, the mule reared again and launched into a full gallop along the pier. Slaves and soldiers fled.
‘The priest! For the love of God, Father!’ the Teniente shouted.
Father Luis Quinn looked up from where he had been supervising the unshipping of his small trunk of possessions from Cristo Redentor. The mule and leaping cart bore down upon him like a blazing war chariot from the Fianna legends. Luis Quinn threw his arms up. He was a big man, larger and more imposing yet in the simple black robe of his order, a piece of night fallen into day. The mule leaped straight up into the air in its traces, came down foursquare, and stopped dead, head bowed.
Every sailor, every officer, every soldier, every slave, every whore in her bright jollyboat, stopped to stare at Luis Quinn. Slowly he lowered his arms and stepped toward the twitching, foaming beast, clicking and shushing under his breath all the words for horses he knew in both his natal tongues, Portuguese and Irish.
‘I advise you not to approach the creature, Father,’ the Teniente called, a pale, European face among the caboclo faces of the Salvador Auxiliaries. ‘We will shoot the beast and burn its body; that way the rage will not spread.’
‘Hush, hush there,’ Luis Quinn said as reached out for the rope halter. He could see the infantry forming a line, taking aim. His fingers closed around the rope. With a cry more like a human scream than any right sound of a beast the mule reared, flashing out with its steel-shod hooves. Quinn twisted out of the path of the killing hoof; then the mule leaped. For a moment it seemed suspended; then mule and wagon plunged into the green water of the bay. Whore-boats scattered. Luis Quinn saw the mule’s head fight out of the chop, eyes wild with the knowledge of its certain destruction, the cream foam at its mouth now blood-stained. The weight of the cart pulled it under. Luis Quinn saw its knees kicking against the dragging green water; then it was lost. Empty sugar sacks rose to the surface one by one as their contents dissolved like white, night-blooming water flowers.
‘Ah, the creature the creature.’ It had been but an animal, but Luis Quinn nevertheless murmured a prayer. The Teniente, now at Quinn’s side, crossed himself.
‘You are all right, Father.’
‘I am unharmed.’ Quinn noticed all across the dock the soldiers, the slaves, even the strumpets, make the same blessing. He did not doubt it was as much for his habit as the sudden fatal madness of the mule. Thus had it been on the slow, calm-bound, scurvy-racked voyage of Cristo Redentor from the bar of the Tagus: mutterings, scratchings, charms, and prayers. A priest, a black Jesuit, aboard. No luck upon this ship. ‘I heard mention of a rage.’
‘A madness of horses first, latterly of all beasts of burden, God between us and evil.’ The Teniente signaled for one of his troopers to bear the father’s trunk. As the young officer escorted him toward the Custom House Quinn opened his senses to this place in which he had so freshly landed. He noted with a start that there was not one horse. No animal at all on this great stone apron beneath the sheer bluff of the Cidade Alta. No beast on the steep ladeira that wound up the steep cliff between low and high Salvador. Human muscle alone powered this city. The cobbled paths and quays teemed with slaves pushing laden barrows and gurneys on iron rails, bent under sacks slung from brow straps, carefully negotiating sedan chairs through the thronging black and red bodies and fat white sacks of king sugar. ‘As with all afflictions, rumors run wild,’ the Teniente continued. The soldier, a ragged mameluco in half uniform of frock coat and loose duck breeches, unshod like a slave, followed six paces behind. ‘The rage is a thing of the índios from out of the deep forest; it is the work of the Dutch or the Spanish; it is a punishment from God. Not last week angels were seen in Pelourinho, battling with knives of light, three nights in succession. It is attested to by some of the best in Salvador.’
‘We have not heard of this in Coimbra.’
‘There is much in Brazil never reaches the ears of Portugal.’ The Teniente halted short of the bustling portico of the Custom House. ‘Ah. As I feared. It is always so when a ship’s arrival corresponds with the sailing of the sugar fleet. The Custom House is the most hopeless jam; I cannot see you getting clear for hours. As a crown officer, I am empowered to authorize your permissions of entry to the colony.’
‘For a small consideration,’ said Luis Quinn.
‘A trifling impost, that’s all.’
‘I am under the direct authority of the Provincial of Brazil.’ Luis Quinn retained the tones of his birth-accent; a linguist, a speaker in tongues, he was well aware of the advantage its air of the uncanny lent him. A big man, hands like spades, softly spoken as big men so often are.
‘Indeed, Father, but Brazil is not like other places. You will find that little happens here without inducement.’
Brazil is not like other places. So many had said that to him, from Father James his spiritual director, even as he ordered him on the task most difficult, to this cocky puppy of a soldiereen in his wig and three-cornered hat gay with feathers.
‘I do not think it would suit my cloth to be seen enjoying preferment over others. No, I shall wait my turn in the Custom House, Teniente. Sure when God made time He made plenty of it.’ The officer bowed, but his mouth was sour. He took his bearer with him.
I ask only that I might be given a task most difficult. In the studies and libraries of the College at Coimbra, Luis Quinn’s request, made every year on the day of the patron of his native Ireland to his spiritual director, had sounded rich in zeal and honesty. Candlelight, cloisters work such deceptions. Every year for five years the same reply: When the need and the man meet. This year, Father James, the mathematics instructor to the missionaries to China where that art commanded special admiration, had said, My room, after compline.
‘Brazil.’
‘Brazil, yes. Where all the sin in the world has washed up. A request from the provincial of the College at Salvador for an admonitory.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘Our own provincial says only that he requires an admonitory from outside the colony.’ Then, with a wry smile: ‘That seems to me to imply a task most difficult.’
Luis Quinn drew again in his memory Father James, a short laconic Ulsterman with his province’s flinty accent and humor. A fellow refugee from the penal laws swept down the sea-lanes to Portugal.
Luis Quinn hefted his small sea chest and joined the noisy crowd at the arcade. The ship had seemed like a prison, yet the world felt too expansive, the horizon too close, the sky too distant, the colors too bright and people too brash and clamorous. The sailors and the captains, the feitores and the senhores de engenhos moved away from him, touching their miraculous medals, bowing a nod: Go through there, Father; after you, Father.
Beyond the interminable questions and inspections and opening and resealings of the Custom House were the carriers, squatting around their feitor, a fat caboclo with ripped stockings and high-heeled shoes.
‘Father Father, a carry a carry.’ The slave was an índio, bow back and bow legs, yet his muscles were like bands of iron. He wore a brow strap that hung to beneath his shoulder blades. A pair of r
ope stirrups dangled around his neck. He knelt on the cobbles before a worn wooden mounting block.
‘Get up get up,’ Quinn cried in Tupi lingua geral. ‘This is the harness of a horse.’
‘Yes yes a horse, your horse,’ the slave answered in Portuguese, eyeing warily his foreman. ‘The only horse not mad or dead, mad or dead. I am strong, Your Holiness.’
‘Up up,’ Luis Quinn commanded in Tupi. ‘I will not have any man for my beast of burden.’ He turned on the feitor; the man’s face paled at the righteous rage in Quinn’s gaunt face. ‘What manner of vile, luxurious creature are you? Here, what’s your price for your man to guide me to the Jesuit Colégio?’ The caboclo named a sum that even with the smell of the sea still on his cheeks, Luis Quinn knew for usury. He imagined his big fist striking into the middle of the greasy man’s round face. Breath shuddering in his lungs, Quinn fought the anger down. He threw a handful of small coppers. The caboclo dived to snatch them up. The slave made to lift Luis Quinn’s chest. ‘Leave it. All I require from you is guidance.’