Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘And Canal Quatro finds itself in the news with the allegations by journalist Raimundo Soares to be published in the Jornal de Copacabana tomorrow that it is to make a television program about the Maracanaço. He alleges that he received a confidential e-mail from a Canal Quatro producer that the entertainment program will track down the eighty-five-year-old Moaçir Barbosa, seen by many as being chiefly responsible for the Maracanaço, and publicly humiliate him in a mock trial reality show.’

  VT insert of Raimundo Soares in surf shirt and shorts on rain-swept Flamengo Beach, his brotherhood nodding over their lines behind him. Cynicism. Lied to. Pillorying an old man. Then Marcelina could not hear anymore because the sound in her eyes in her head in her ears squeezed out into the world.

  It was all ended. Our Lady of Production Values had abandoned her.

  She pointed the remote and sent Heitor into the dark. Her heartbeat was the loudest sound in the room.

  ‘Who are you?’ Marcelina shouted. ‘Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?’

  She fled into the bedroom, emptied her bag onto the bed. There, there, the translucent plastic clamshell. She slid the DVD into the side of Heitor’s plasma screen.

  Her finger hesitated over the play button.

  She had to know. She had to see.

  Marcelina wound through Canal Quatro staff slipping out home, a nod and a silent word to Lampião. There went Leandro. Several fast-scans minutes of Lampião dully gaping at a flickering television. How little he moved. Then Marcelina saw the edge of the door revolve across the shot. A figure in a dark suit entered. Marcelina’s fingers stumbled over the buttons as she tried to find slo-mo. Back. Back. The drive whined. Again the figure entered. A woman. A woman jogging forward frame by frame in a good suit - dark gray. A woman, short, with a lot of naturally curled bouncing blond hair. A loira woman. Lampião looked up from his TV and smiled.

  Frame by frame, the woman turned to check the location of the camera.

  Marcelina hit pause. The only snow that Rio knew blew across the top of the screen.

  Her face. She was looking into her own face.

  JANUARY 28-29, 2033

  After midnight the axé flows strongest through the Igreja of the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte. Taxis and minibuses bring supplicants from all across the northern suburbs: when the saints are tired the walls between the worlds are weak and the most powerful workings may be dared. Edson tosses a coin to St Martin, the Christian aspect of Exu, Lord of the Crossroads, Trickster and Rent-boy of the orixás, patron of all malandros.

  The Sisters of the Good Death have orbited Edson’s life like fairy godmothers. His grandmother from the northeast had given the Sisterhood her two daughters, Hortense and Marizete, in exchange for the success of her sons in hard, clutching Sampa. But Dona Hortense had loved pirate radio and dancing and boys with fast cars and the madre had released her from her vows (truly, no God regards the vow of a fourteen-year-old as binding). Tia Marizete found peace and purpose in the discipline of a post-Catholic nun and remained and for twenty-five years had brought the Dignified Burial and unofficial social services to the bairros and favelas of north São Paulo. Unlike their mother church in Bahia, the Paulistana daughters did not practice seclusion: their Baiana crinolines and turbans were familiar and welcome sights on the streets as they gave healings, told fortunes, and collected reis in their baskets. Twice a year, at the Lady Days, Tia Marizete would call on her sister and nephews and the entire bairro would land on Dona Hortense’s verandah with a variety of small but niggling maladies.

  ‘Does your mother know where you are?’ Tia Marizete asks, clearing the guest room of gay abiás (‘we’ve become icons again, Mother help us’). She sets wards of palm and holy cake on the windowsills and door lintels.

  ‘She knows. She’s not to come looking for me. Don’t let her. I need money. And I may have to stay a while.’

  ‘You are welcome as long as you need. But I have a service to conduct. And Edson, remember, this is God’s house.’ Then the drums start so loud he can feel them in his bowels, but they are a comfort; he feels himself slipping down into their rhythm. By the time the tetchy initiate slips a tray of beans and rice and two Cokes through the door he’s nodding, exhausted.

  The Sisters have always saved him. When he was twelve he had been given a hooky antibiotic that kicked off a massive allergic reaction that left mouth, tongue, lips covered in white-tipped ulcers and drove him fever-mad, hallucinating that a ball at once chokingly small and jaw-wrenchingly huge was being forced endlessly into his mouth. The doctor had rolled his eyes and shaken his head. Biology would take its course. His brothers had carried him on the back of a HiLux to the Sisters, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets. Tia Marizete had laid him in one of the acolytes’ rooms, bathed him with scented and herbal waters, anointed him with sweet oils, scattered prayers and consecrated farofa over him. Three days he had raged along the borderlands between life and death. The ulcers advanced down his throat. If they reached his tonsils, he would die. They halted at the base of his uvula. Axé. Through it all, the memory the drums and the clapping hands, the stamp and bell-jingle of the Sisters as they whirled in their ecstasy dances; the cheers and tears and praises to Our Lady, Our Wonderful Lady. Down, into the drums.

  Crying. Soft and faltering, at the very end of tears, more gasp than sob. Edson slips from the thin foam mattress. The sound comes from the camarinha, the innermost, holiest sanctuary, the heart of axé. Fia sits in the middle of the floor, legs curled, fingers twined. Around her the statues of the saints on their poles lean against the walls, each draped in his or her sacramental color.

  ‘Hey. It’s only me. You know, we shouldn’t really be in here. It’s for the Sisters and the high initiates only.’

  It takes a long time for Fia’s gasps to form words. Edson’s cold and shivering after his sleep; the energy of the night has left him. He could hold Fia; his comfort, her warmth. But it’s not her.

  ‘Did you ever have a dream where you’re at home and you know everyone and everything, but they don’t know you, they’ve never known you, and no matter how much you try and tell them, they never will know you?’

  ‘Everyone has that dream.’

  ‘But you know me, and I’ve never seen you before in my life. You say you are Edson Jesus . . .’

  ‘Oliveira de Freitas.’

  ‘I think I need to know this now. Who was I?’

  So among the shrouded saints Edson tells her about her father with his New Age columns and stable of accountancy bots and her mother with her urban farm and her brother away across the big planet on his gap-year chasing surf and surf-bunnies . . . .

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Yoshi, your brother. You have a brother, where you come from?’

  ‘Of course I do, but he’s in his first year at the São Paulo Seminary.’

  Edson blinks in astonishment.

  Fia asks, ‘Edson, what was I like?’

  ‘You. Not you. She liked bags, clothes, girlie things. Shoes. The last day I saw her, she went to a shop to get these shoes printed.’

  He sees the soles, the logos bobbing before him as the crash team slides the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

  ‘Shoes, printed?’

  Edson explains the technology as he understands it. When Fia concentrates she tilts her head to one side. Edson never saw the real Fia do that. It makes this Fia look even less true, like a dead doll.

  ‘She never got on the back of my bike. She always took taxis. She hated getting dirty, even when we were up in Todos os Santos she was immaculate, always immaculate. She had quite a lot of girlfriends.’ How little I know, Edson realizes. A few details, a scoop of observations. ‘She was very direct. I don’t think she was comfortable being too near to things. All those friends, but she was never really close to them. She liked being an outsider. She liked being the rebel, the quantumeira.’

  ‘I’m nowhere near as wild and romantic as that,’ Fia says. ‘Just a plain
quantum-computing postgrad specializing in multiversal economic modeling. My world; it’s less paranoid. We don’t watch each other all the time. But it’s more . . . broken. I’m broken, everyone’s broken. We leave bits of ourselves all over the place: memories, diaries, names, experiences, knowledge, friends, personalities even, I suppose. I loaded everything I could, but there are still important parts of me back there: pictures, childhood memories, school friends. And the world is broken. It’s not like this. This is . . . like heaven.’

  Edson tries to imagine the point at which Fia’s world branched off from his. But that is a trap, Mr Peach had taught. There is no heart reality from which everything else diverges. Every part of the multiverse exists, has existed, will exist, independently of every other. Edson shivers. How can you live with that sort of knowledge? But Fia notices him shiver.

  ‘Here, you’re freezing.’ She peels off her ripped hoodie. Beneath she wears a tight sleeveless T, dragged up to her breasts by the cling of the hoodie. Edson stares. Beneath the crop top is a tattoo like none he has ever seen before. Wheels, cogs, meshing; arcs, spirals, paisleys, fractal sprays, and mathematical blossoms. A silvery machine of slate-gray ink covers her torso from breastbone to the waistband of her leggings. Edson’s hand stays Fia’s as she moves to pull her top down.

  ‘Oh my God, what is that?’

  Fia stands up, pulls up her top again and coyly wiggles her leggings down to the sweet tiny pink bow on the hip-band of her panties where the tattoo coils in to nestle like a snake against her pubis. Not taking her eyes off Edson, she hooks her red hair back behind her left ear. There is a cursive of gray ink over the top of ear and along her hairline, like one of Zezão’s sinuous abstract pichaçãos that now have preservation orders smacked all over them.

  ‘You wear your computers,’ Fia says as she restores her clothing. ‘We’re more . . . intimate . . . with ours.’

  Edson lifts a finger, whirls into a crouch.

  ‘I hear something.’ He slides Mr Peach’s gun out of the waistband of his Jams and pushes it across the foot-polished wooden floor of the camarinha to Fia. She knows what to do with it. Edson moves cat-careful between the shrouded saints. The layout of the terreiro is as inviolable as its obrigacões. Beyond the sacred camarinha is the great public room of the barracão, then the hall with the ilê where the saints stand when they are awake. He checks the front door. The manioc-paste seals are intact, the coffins of the Good Dead laid out on the floor, dusted with white farofa. Nothing to be scared of there. Probably one of the abiás getting up for a piss. The quarters run around the back of the terreiro and open onto the barracão and the backyard where the chickens and Vietnamese pot-belly pigs are kept and the holy herbs are grown in fake-terracotta planters. The Sisters maintain private room upstairs. Edson opens the door from the corridor to the big kitchen, where the food for the gods, hungry as babies, is prepared.

  A foot smashes into his breastbone, sends him sprawling, windless, across the barracão, scattering offerings. He sees a figure wheel out of the darkness in a capoeira meia lua de compasso into a poised ginga. A white woman, in sports top, Adidas baggies, and bare feet. She wears odd metal bracers on her forearms. Edson fights for words breath sanity power.

  A shot. From the holy camarinha.

  ‘Shit. He’s already here,’ the woman hisses and flicks her right hand into a fist. A blade flashes from the bracer over her balled knuckles. Blue light flickers around its Planck-keen edges. She whirls through the door to the barracão in a one-handed dobrado cartwheel. Gasping for breath, Edson limps after her.

  The camarinha is a martyrdom of slashed saints. Fia holds off a man armed with a Q-blade using a statue of Senhor de Bonfim on his pole, gold-tasseled shroud flapping. Faint hope in the saint: the Q-blade cuts through it like smoke. Mr Peach’s beautiful silver gun is already in two pieces, cut through the firing chamber. The assassin’s blur of blue light drives Fia back to the wall. By tradition this sacred room has only one door. The killer knows this tradition. The woman wheels into the camarinha and drops into the negativa fighting crouch. The assassin spins to face her. He is a young man, pale skinned, with floppy hair and a goatee. Blades blur past each other; the capoeira woman’s foot wheels up to deliver a stun-blow to the side of the Q-blade man’s head. But the killer ducks under it and rolls across the camarinha to put space between him and the woman. Fia hunts for a gap, feinting with her mutilated orixá, but the assassin is between her and the door. Frantic with fear, Edson looks for an opportunity. Voices, behind him. The terreiro is awake. Abiás in their underwear, shorts, jog pants, Sisters in their nightgowns. Their hands are raised in horror at the violation of the sanctuary.

  ‘Get everyone out of here!’ Edson shouts. The boys understand and herd the Sisters back to the kitchen and the safety of the garden, but Tia Marizete is paralyzed at the vision of her saints, her murdered saints, their desecration. Arms out, she rushes to comfort them. Edson grabs her by the waist, drags her away. The assassin’s attention flickers to him. The capoeirista uses the moment to spin up into a great flying leap, blade-arm drawn back. With a roar, the assassin leaps to meet her. They clash, they pass in a flash of ionization in the middle of the air above the heart of the camarinha. Then they are both crouched like cats, glaring, panting. Their shattered blades spin on the wooden floor, flat sides, safe sides down.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the woman. ‘But I’ve got another one. Have you?’ She snaps her left hand into a fist, and a fresh Q-blade flicks out from the magnetic sheathing on her wrist-guard. The killer scores the possibilities in an eye-flash. He dives flat, arm outstretched, and with the tips of his fingers catches the flat side of the Q-blade and flicks it at the capoeirista. At any speed the quantum-sharp cutting edge is a sure kill. Then Edson’s vision goes into martial arts-movie slow motion. The woman bends back from the hips, trying to roll away from the blade cutting toward her throat through a wake of burned blue air. Fia brings the Senhor do Bonfim sweeping up under the flying blade. An orixá-blessed hit. She catches the harmless flat of the shard. The fragment spins up into the air, but the flick is too feeble to carry it to safety. The Q-blade shard loops down and cuts sweetly, cleanly through the man’s shoulder and upper right thigh before vanishing into the floor of the camarinha. He stares a moment at his arm, his severed leg, and then explodes in blood.

  The capoeirista seizes Fia while she is still frozen and drags her out into the barracão.

  ‘Shit shit shit shit shit,’ the woman swears. ‘That went wrong. I needed to know if he was Sesmaria or Order.’ She’s in one place long enough now for Edson to see her properly. She’s short, thin as a cat, loira skin and bubble-blond hair. ‘They know where you are. Get out of here.’ The little Asian pigs are spooked, turning in their tiny pens, snorting in alarm. Sirens, Sisters, frantic initiates, and in a moment Fia is going to lose it. The entire bairro is awake. Alarm fireworks explode all across the sky. Police and drug lords alike have been blessed by the hands of the Sisters of the Good Death and will come to their aid.

  Edson turns to call to the woman to help him with Fia, but she is gone. Vanished as she appeared. Tia Marizete is there, her arm now around Fia’s shoulder. She stares at Fia’s torso tattoo.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Edson whispers to his aunt. The gay boys are inconsolable, some weeping, most looking petty, vengeful. He cannot begin to imagine the desecration he has worked on the camarinha.

  ‘Edson, what have gotten yourself into? These Take Out the Trash people, we have no argument with them, they have no argument with us. Why have they come here, why have they come for you?’

  ‘It’s not Take Out the Trash,’ Edson says. ‘It’s . . .’ What indeed, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas? Quantum blades and quantum computers. Priests and orders. A gazillion universes next to each other. Capoeiristas and killers. And this Fia, this refugee with bad clothes and a computer tattooed on her belly. ‘I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.’

  But it won’t be the Yam that takes him
to safety. It lies bisected headlight to exhaust in a pool of alco and engine fluids. The insane energy, the stubborn refusal to believe what is happening to him that has kept Edson running for what feels like lifetimes gushes out of him. He feels old and scared and more tired than any human can be and there is still farther to run. He stares dumbly at the two fillets of his lovely, lovely motorbike.

  ‘Come on, son,’ commands Tia Marizete, taking his hand now and drawing him after her with divine strength. ‘There’s a ladeiro up here.’ Past the hysterical pigs, above the herb terraces, is a gate in a wall that leads to a steep, narrow staircase lurching between houses into a greater dank dark that smells of wet green growing. Edson stumbles after Tia Marizete, feet slipping on the slippery concrete steps. He glances back at Fia. Behind her upturned, dazed pale face, beyond the roof tiles of the Igreja, the street pulses blue and red from police beacons. Then they are out into cool and mold, above the build-line, on the hilltop in the forest. The old austral forests of north São Paulo have always been a refuge and highway for the hunted; índios to runaway slaves to drug runners. Now quantumeiros.