by Ian McDonald
From her nightdress Tia Marizete finds a fist of reis - such is the axé of aunts and Sisterhood attorney generals - and presses them into Edson’s hand. There’s another object in there.
‘Take care, be clever, be safe. This man will protect you.’
More by touch than sight Edson identifies the object in his hand, a little cheap bronze statue cast from recycled wire, a malandro in a suit and pork-pie hat: Exu, Lord of the Crossings.
The last place the light fills is the hollow where the water drops over the ledge into the shallow pool. The cold cold water strikes away the daze and dreams of the night. Edson gasps, paralyzed by the chill. An edge of light shines between the skinny boles of the trees, growing brighter with every moment, its dazzle burning away the silhouettes of the trunks until they dissolve into sun. Edson climbs up into the light. Fia sits as he left her, knees pulled to chest for warmth. Bronze sky, brass city. The sun pours into the bowl of São Paulo, touching first the flat roofs and sat-dishes of the favelas just beneath their feet where the people have been up for hours, on their long journeys to work in the endless city. It flows from the hilltops down the roads like spilled honey, catching on the mirrors and the chrome, turning the rodovias that curl along the hillsides to arcs of gold. Now it lights the smoke spires: the plumes from the industry and powerplant stacks, the more diffuse auras from the scattered bairros; then caught the tops of the high towers rising above the dawn smog, towers marching farther and farther than Edson can imagine, city without end and expanding every moment as the swift-climbing sun draws lesser towers up out of the shadow. He watches an aircraft catch the light and kindle like a star, like some fantastic starship, as it banks on approach. A big plane, from another country, perhaps even another continent. It has flown farther and yet never as far as this woman beside me, Edson thinks.
‘We lost the sun,’ Fia says, face filled with light. ‘We gave it away, we killed it. It’s gray all the time; we had to fix the sky to beat the warming. Constant clouds, constant overcast. It’s gray all the time. It’s a gray world. I think everyone should be made to come up here and watch it so no one can take it for granted.’ She gives a small, choked laugh. ‘I’m sitting here looking at the light, but I’m thinking, Sunburn Fia, sunburn. I used to be in this university bike club, and there was this crazy thing we used to do every year: the nude bike run. Everyone would cycle this loop from Liberdade through the Praça de Sé and back wearing nothing but body paint. We used to paint each other in the wildest designs. But I’d never have burned.’ She bows her head to her bent knees. ‘I’ve just thought; they’ll be wondering what happened to me. I just disappeared. Gone. Walked away and never came back. Oh yeah, that Fia Kishida, I wonder what happened to her? I couldn’t even say good-bye to any of them. That’s a cruel thing for me to do. That’s one of the cruelest things anyone can do, walk away and never look back. But I could go to their houses, knock on their doors - I know where they live - and they wouldn’t know me.’
Edson says, ‘The way you’re talking, it’s like you’ll never see them again.’
Fia looks up into the holy sun.
‘The crossing only works one way, there to here.’
Edson thinks, There is a smart brilliant creative Edson answer to this problem. But there is nothing but morning out there. Everyone hits that wall at the end of his competence. Impresarios cannot solve problems in quantum computing. But a good impresario, like any man of business, knows someone who can.
‘Come on.’ He offers a hand. ‘Let’s go. We’re going to see someone.’
Five hillsides over the sound of voices drives Edson down into the undergrowth, creeping forward under cover. From behind a fallen log he and Fia watch a gang of eight favela boys camp around an old dam from the coffee age. Empty Antarctica cans and roach ends are scattered around a stone-ringed fire burned down to white ash. Three of the teenagers splash ass-naked in the pool; the others loll around on the bubble-mats, stripped down to the Jams, talking futebol and fucking. They’re good-looking, beautiful-bodied, laughing boys; sex gods caught at play. Like gods, they are creatures of pure caprice.
‘They’re cute,’ Fia whispers. ‘Why are we hiding?’
‘Look.’ One of the men rolls onto his side. No one could miss the skeleton gun butt in his waistband. ‘Malandros come up here all the time to lie low from the police. The cops have no chance of catching them; they all learn jungle skills on national service.’
‘Even you?’
‘A businessman can’t afford to give two years to the army. I worked myself a medical discharge after two months. But they would rob us, and they would have no reason not to kill us too. We’re going, but move very slowly and don’t make any noise.’
They make no noise; they move slowly; the boys’ voices recede into the forest buzz. The sun climbs high, pouring heat and dazzle through the leaf canopy. Minutes’ walk on either side of this ridge trail are rodovias, lanchonetes, coffee, and gossip; the morning news is a touch away on the I-shades, but Edson feels like an old, bold Paulista bandeirante, pushing into strange new worlds.
‘If I am going to help you, there’s stuff I need to know,’ Edson says. ‘Like priests, and the Order, and that guy with the Q-blade, and who was that capoeirista?’
‘How do I say this without it sounding like the most insane thing you’ve ever heard? There’s an organization - more a society really - that controls quantum communication between universes.’
‘Like a police, government?’
‘No, it’s much bigger than that. It covers many universes. Governments can’t touch it. It works on two levels. There’s the local level - each universe has its agents - they’re known as Sesmarias. Sesmarias tend to run in families: the same people occupy the same roles in other universes.’
‘How can it run in families?’
‘I told you it would sound crazy. Some of them are very old and respectable families. But the Sesmarias are just part of a bigger thing, and that’s the Order.’
‘I’ve heard that word twice in one day. You, then that capoeirista woman. So the man who attacked us at the Igreja, he was from the Order, right?’
‘No, he would have been just a Sesmaria. They aren’t terribly good, really. Sesmarias are allowed to contact each other but not cross. I’d hoped the Sesmaria back where I come from hadn’t been able to track where I was going. Wrong there. But the Order can go wherever it wants across the multiverse. They have agents: admonitories. When they send one through, they have to tell everyone from the president of the United States to the pope.’
Edson presses his hands to either side of his skull, as if he might squeeze madness out or reality in. ‘So capoeira woman, who is she?’
‘I’ve never seen or heard of her before in my life. But I do know one thing.’
‘What?’
‘I think she’s on our side.’
We could do with that, Edson thinks, but then a sound, a rushing sound, makes him look up, the dread back in his heart. But it is not police drones moving carefully between the branches. Edson smiles and grins: high above the treetops wind turbines are turning.
‘Stay as long as you need.’
‘You don’t understand . . .’
‘I do understand. Stay as long as you need.’
The moment Mr Peach saw Edson on his security camera, and the girl behind him, he knew nothing would ever be simple again. Beneath the cherubic ceiling of the baroque living room Sextinho and the girl are sprawled unconscious on the Chesterfield, innocently draped around each other like sibling cats. Sextinho - no, he can’t call him that now. The young woman on his sofa is a refugee from another part of the polyverse. Swallow that intellectual wad and everything else follows. Of course they are caught between the ritual assassins of a transdimensional conspiracy and mysterious saviors. Of course refuge must be offered, though it marks him irrevocably as a player.
Something has fallen from Edson’s fist. Mr Peach lifts it. An ugly, mass-manufactured icon of Ex
u. Crossings, gateways. He smiles as he balances it on the arm of the sofa. Watch him well, small lord. The girl sleeps on her back, arms flung back, crop top ridden up. Mr Peach bends close to study the tattoo. Liquid protein polymer circuitry. Infinitely malleable and morphable. There must be self-organizing nano-structures. Quasi-life. Extraordinary technology. Direct neural interface; no need for the clumsy, plasticy tech of I-shades and smart-fabrics. What was the sum of the histories of her part of the polyverse that gave rise to so similar a society, so radically different a technology? But they’re all out there. There is a universe for every possible quantum state in the Big Bang; some as similar as this girl’s, some so different that life is physically impossible.
Edson is awake, one eye open, watching.
‘Hey.’
‘Hey. I’ve made you breakfast.’
OCTOBER 1-2, 1732
‘Such fine design and so ingenious; yes yes, I can immediately see applications for this device in my own work.’ Father Diego Gonçalves turned the crank on the Governing Engine and watched the click and flop of the card chain through the mill and the rise and fall of the harnesses. ‘Drudgery abolished, mere mechanical labor transformed. Men liberated from the wheel.’
‘Or a subtler slavery.’ Through the delicately worked wooden grille Luis Quinn looked out at the river. Father Gonçalves’ private apartment was at the rear of the basilica-ship, high to catch what few cooling breaths the river granted. None this day- only a heat of oppression and distant growls of thunder. Quinn pressed his head to the screen. ‘Someone must put his back to that wheel, someone must press the holes in the cards, and someone there must be who writes the sequence of those holes.’ Quinn watched a small boy squatting in the stern steering his leaf-light craft in and out of the larger canoes in Father Diego Gonçalves’ entourage. The boy’s younger sister, a tiny round-faced thing with her hand in her mouth, sat dumpily in the waist. For three days Quinn had watched the boy paddle from the black of the Rio Negro into the white of the Rio Branco, feeding the infant manioc cakes that he carefully unwrapped from parcels of broad forest leaves. Again, the soft rattle of Falcon’s infernal machine.
‘Oh, that is simplicity itself, Father Quinn: an industrial engine would be harnessed to a water sluice, or even a windmill. And the very first engine you build is the one that copies the pattern of holes for all its successors. But your third point raises an intriguing philosophical question: is it possible to construct an engine that writes the sequence for any other, and therefore logically itself?’
Thunder boomed, closer now, as if summoned by the clack of the Governing Engine. A universe ruled by number, running like punched cards through the loom of God. Luis Quinn had thought to destroy it privately, cast it into the huge waters: he had delivered it into the hands of his enemy.
Nossa Senhora da Varzea, Our Lady of the Floodplain: that was the name of the green saint on the banner and of this construct of which she was patron, a saint alien to Luis Quinn’s hagiography. It had not been until he saw the short, thin figure in black descend the basilica steps that Luis Quinn realized that with every oar-sweep and paddle-stroke upstream he had been mentally drawing a picture of Father Diego Gonçalves, one sketched, like Dr Falcon’s intelligence maps, from the crude charcoal of supposition. Now as they shared the fraternal kiss of Christ he had found those lines erased completely, beyond even his phenomenal recall, save that the Diego Gonçalves he had envisioned bore no resemblance to this bounding, energetic, almost boyish man. This is the brother I must return to the discipline of the Order, Luis Quinn had thought. Open your eyes, your ears, all your senses as you did in Salvador, see what is to be seen.
‘You know what I am?’
Father Diego Gonçalves had smiled. ‘You are the admonitory of provincial de Magalhães of the Colégio of Salvador in Bahia.’
So it was to be a duel, then.
‘Would that news traveled as swiftly downriver as it travels up. Kindly have your men stop that immediately.’
Índio sailors, naked but for geometrical patterns of black genipapo juice on their faces, torsos and thighs, with feather bands plaited around upper arms and calves, were unloading Quinn’s bales and sacks from the pirogue. Zemba watched suspiciously, paddle gripped two-handed, an attitude of defense.
‘Forgive me, I presumed you would accept my hospitality, Brother.’ Father Diego’s Portuguese was flawless, but Quinn heard old Vascongadas in the long vowels.
‘If you are aware of my task, then you must surely be aware that I cannot compromise myself. I shall sleep in the pirogue with my people.’
‘As you wish.’ Father Diego gave orders. Quinn identified a handful of Tupi loan words. ‘But may we at least share the Sacrament?’
‘I should at the least be interested to see if the interior of your . . . mission . . . matches its exterior.’
‘You will find Nossa Senhora da Varzea a complete testimony to the glory of God in every aspect.’ Gonçalves hesitated an instant on the steps. ‘Father Quinn, I trust it would not offend you if I said that word has also preceded you that you enjoy a reputation with the sword.’
‘I trained under Jésus y Portugal of Léon.’ Quinn was in no humor for false humility.
‘Montoya of Toledo was my master,’ Father Diego said with the smallest smile, the shallowest dip of the head. ‘Now that would be fine exercise.’
Passing beneath the watchword of his order into the basilica Luis Quinn was at once brought up by profound darkness. Shafts fell from the high clerestory, broken into leaf-dapple by the intricate grille-work, revealing glimpses of extravagant painted bas-reliefs. An altar light glowed in the indeterminate distance; ruddy Mars to the scattered constellations of the votives. This was the dimension of a more intimate organ than the fickle eye. Luis Quinn breathed deep and extended his sense of smell. Sun-warmed wood, the rancid reek of smoking palm oil, incenses familiar and alien; green scents, herbs and foliages. Quinn started, caught by a sudden overpowering scent of verdure: green rot and dark growing. Now his sense of space and geometry came into focus; he felt great masses of heavy wood above him, decorated buttresses and bosses, a web of vaulting like the tendrils of the strangling fig, galleries and lofts. Figures looked down upon him. Last of all his eyes followed his other senses into comprehension. The exuberance the craftsmen had displayed on the basilica’s exterior had within been let run into religious ecstasy. The nave was a vast depiction of the Last Judgment. Christ the Judge formed the entire rood screen; a starveling, crucified Messiah, his bones the ribs of the screen, his head thrown back in an agony of thorns each the length of Quinn’s arm. His outflung arms judged the quick and the dead, his fingertips breaking into coils and twines of flowering vines that ran the length of the side panels. On his right, the rejoicing redeemed, innocent and naked índios. Hands pressed together in thanks-giving, they sported and rolled in the petals that blossomed from Christ’s fingers. On the left hand of Jesus, the damned writhed within coils of thorned liana, faces upturned, begging impossible surcease. Demons herded the lost along the vines: Quinn recognized forest monsters; the deceiving curupira; the boar-riding Tupi lord of the hunt; a one-legged black homunculus in a red Phrygian cap who seemed to be smoking a pipe. Father Gonçalves waited at Quinn’s side, awaiting response. When none came, he said mildly, ‘What does Salvador believe of me?’
‘That you have transgressed the bounds of your vows and faith and brought the Society into perilous disrepute.’
‘You are not the first to have come here bearing that charge.’
‘I know that, but I believe I am the first with the authority to intervene.’
Gonçalves bowed his head meekly.
‘I regret that Salvador considers intervention necessary.’
‘My predecessors, none of them returned; what befell them?’
‘I would ask you to believe me when I tell you that they departed from me hale in will and wind and convinced of the value of my mission. We are far from Salvador here
; there are many perils to body and soul. Fierce forest tigers, terrible snakes, bats that feed on man’s blood, toothed fish that can strip the flesh from his bones in instants, let alone any number of diseases and sicknesses.’ Father Gonçalves gestured for Quinn to precede him to the choir. The screen gate was in the shape of the heart of Christ; Gonçalves pushed it open and bade Quinn enter.
The altar was the conventional wooden table, worked in the fever-dream fashion of Gonçalves’ craftmasters to resemble twined branches, the crucifix its only adornment, an índio Christ, exquisitely worked, sufferings incomprehensible to the Old World borne on his face and scourged, pierced body. But the crucifix had not taken Father Quinn’s breath, powerful and alien though it was; it was so monumentally overshadowed by the altarpiece behind it that it seemed an apostrophe. The east end of the church, where lights and lady-chapel would have been in a basilica of stone and glass, was fashioned into one towering reredos. A woman, the green woman, the Saint of the Flood, wreathed in life and glory. Nude she was, Eve-innocent, but never naked. The saint was clothed in the forest: jewel-bright parrots and toucans, some decorated with real plumage, were her diadem; from her full breasts and milk-proud nipples burst flowers, fruit, and tobacco; while from her navel, the divine omphalos, sprouted vines and lianas that clothed her torso and thighs. The beasts of the varzea dropped from her womb to crouch in adoration at the one foot that touched the ground and struck roots across the floor into the rear of the altar: capybara, paca, peccary and tapir, the green sloth and the crouching jaguar. Her other leg was bent, sole pressed to thigh, a dancer’s pose; an anaconda circled it, its head pressed to her pubis. Her right hand held the manioc bush, her left the recurved hunting bow of the flood forest; and fish attended her, a star-swarm like the milky band of the galaxy reflected in black water, swimming through the woven tracery of tree boles and vines against which Nossa Senhora danced. But true stars also attended her, the Lady twinkled with glowing points of soft radiance: glowworms pinned to the altarpiece with thorns. Again Luis Quinn caught the noble rot of vegetation; as his eyes grew accustomed to the deeper gloom around the altar and the monstrous scale of the work revealed itself to him, he saw that where rays of light struck down through the tracery of the clerestory, precious orchids and bromeliads had been planted in niches in the screen of trees: a living forest. Our Lady of the Floods was beautiful and terrible, commanding awe and reverence. Luis Quinn could feel her forcing him to his knees and by that same token knew that to genuflect before her would be true blasphemy.