Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Well, if your evil twin is barefaced enough to get deliberately caught on camera at Canal Quatro, why did she disguise herself at terreiro?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe there’s another player. I’ll find out.’ Marcelina fiddled with her coffee cup. ‘Do you think I have an evil twin? Do you think my mother . . . ? She had her glittering career - she was Queen of Beija-Flor - and I always felt I was inconvenient. Could she have . . . no. Not even her at her most fucked up . . .’

  But it seduced, a great archetype: the twins separated at birth, one spun into the neon and sequins of the Copacabana; the other to obscurity hungry, and now she had returned to claim her birthright. Had she seen this in a telenovela once?

  ‘Ask her,’ Heitor said.

  Perhaps the coffee, perhaps the psychotherapeutic arrangement of the sofas, perhaps just the bell-like clarity of a friend listening and asking the one question that made it fall apart into brilliant facets. Suddenly the face in the freeze-frame, the papers scattered across the floor, were clear and simple. Of course there was no spirit-Marcelina woven out of stress and wisps of axé blowing between the morros. There was no magic in the hills or in the city: Heitor’s bleak philosophy allowed no magic into the world at all. No ghosts no Saci Pererés no doppelgangers no parallel universes. Just an old family secret come to take her due. But you don’t know Marcelina Hoffman. She is the capoeirista; she takes down the smart boys with jeito and malicia: she is the malandra.

  She had dried her clothes at midnight in Heitor’s tumble dryer - his cleaner believed in laundry on a Monday and it was no use asking Heitor; white goods hated him. He could not even properly operate his microwave and certainly his oven had never been used. Her jeans were tight and stiff as she forced her way into them, the top shrunken to overclinginess and her shoes still damp, the insoles stained. She swung her bag over her shoulder.

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere. Not home.’

  ‘How will you let me know when you’ve done whatever it is you need to do?’

  ‘You’ll know, newsboy.’ She stood up on tiptoes to kiss Heitor, old big growly bear-man. So easy to stay among the books and the minimalist leather, the picture glass and the slinky little playsuits, so easy to drop everything onto him and burrow down into his mass and depth. So dangerous. No one was safe until she had the mystery under her foot in the roda. ‘How exactly do you go about asking your mother, “Mum, do I have a secret twin sister you gave away at birth?” ’

  Heitor’s Blackberry chirruped. It was not the first time sex had been interrupted by his RSS headline feed. She felt him tighten against her, muscle armoring.

  ‘What is it, big bear?’

  ‘That guy you went to see at the terreiro.’

  ‘Bença Bento?’

  ‘He’s been found dead. Murdered. Cut to pieces in the night.’ Heitor hugged her to him, that strong-gentle crush-fearful delicacy of big men. ‘You be careful, oh so careful.’

  The hat was shaped like an enormous upturned shoe, the sole brimming low over the kiss-curl, the heel - solid, chunky, Cubano even - a brave crest. Marcelina lifted it with the reverence of the host.

  ‘Go on, try it,’ Vitor urged, his face silver-screen brilliant.

  Marcelina almost laughed at her reflection in the long mirror, put her hands on her hips and struck vampish, Carmen Mirandaesque poses, pout pout. Mwah. Then the light shifted, as it did dramatically in this old dream-theater, and in the sudden chiaroscuro she saw the Marcelina Hoffman her mother had dreamed: a silvery, powdered night-moth, the toast of the Copacabana stepping out of the deep dark of the mirror. Marcelina shivered and snatched off the hat, but the sun grew strong again through the glass roof and she saw in the flaking silvering a pair of silver wings, and silver muscle-armor - pecced and abbed and burnished - and there a bloated, chinoiserie horror-baby mask.

  ‘It’s . . .’ she said, wondering.

  ‘The wrong Brazil,’ Vitor said. ‘They were striking set after the shoot, and it was all a dreadful kerfuffle and someone thought it was the shipping destination.’

  Vitor was of a generation whose duties and obligations went beyond those of alt dot families and honored still the carioca tradition of providing a bed and a beer for a night or a year and asking no questions. He had flung open his little shop of kitscheries to Marcelina, blown up the air mattress for her in the box room cluttered with boxes of old movie magazines and soccer programs, and when she had asked if there was a place where she could see her apartment without being seen, had without a word unlocked the door at the end of the kitchen and ushered her through into the only true magic that Rio still knew. Marcelina had always wondered where Vitor had found the art deco treasures that had so perfectly topped off the interiors in Kitsch and Bitch. His apartment, odd-proportioned, impractical rooms, strange staircases and interior balconies, was the converted foyer of a lost cinema, a jewel box of the 1940s smothered in cheap, shoving blocks like a forest tree within a strangler fig. Beneath the vaulted ceiling all the old movies had come to die. Props, sets, flats, lighting rigs and costumes, entire World war Two fighter aircraft, pieces of ocean liner, cafés, and casas were jammed and piled together.

  ‘They put everything in here, just in case they ever needed it again,’ Vitor said as he led Marcelina up to the top gallery. ‘And then someone locked the door and walked away and everyone forgot about it until I did a bit of digging into the Jornal records. Mind your step there, the damp’s got in.’

  There’s a program idea in here somewhere, Marcelina had thought; and it was grounding, it was sanity, it was the ineluctable truth of the trivial. There was a sun still in the sky and Jesus on a mountain. Now, even as she laid down the surreal shoe-hat, she gave a little cry: perched on a polystyrene head, all waxen pineapples and bananas be-dusted, was the original tutti-frutti hat.

  ‘Here’s a good place.’ Heitor opened a door into blinking, blinding light; a small room one side of which was a great circular window, leaded as if with vines. He patted a wicker chair. ‘You can see everything from up here, and no one will see you because no one ever looks up. I’ll bring you tea by and by.’

  It was a fine belvedere, part of a former bar, Marcelina theorized, commanding a sweep of street life: the convenience store, the two bars, the kilometric restaurant and the dry cleaners, the video store and the Chinese restaurant and the lobbies of thirty apartment blocks, her own among them. So near, so secret. How many times, she wondered, might Vitor have watched her comings and goings? A freeze of fear: might her enemy have watched from this very seat and noted down her routines? Vitor would not have known; Vitor had met her already, when she snubbed him on the street, and had not known the difference. Paranoia. Paranoia was understandable.

  Once, twice, three times Marcelina jerked herself awake, nodding into a doze in the comfortable, dusty warmth of the cupola. Investigative work, surveillance, had never been her thing. Running around with cameras and sound booms, PDAs and release forms; that was the game. Vitor brought tea, twice. He never asked what she was doing there, watching the silver door of her apartment, never once mentioned her brief notoriety in the Sundays - a proper World Cup scandal had swept her into the center pages on all but the Globo papers. The old men and women came back from the beach. The street vendors worked the intersection. The bars put out tables and lit up televisions, a steady line of home-shifting workers went into the 7-11 and came out with bottled water and beer and beans. She learned the timetables of the metro trains arriving at Copacabana Station by the pulses of pedestrians down the streets. She saw Vitor take his accustomed seat by the street, order his tea, and open his paper. Friends and acquaintances stopped to chat for a moment, a minute, an hour. That looks a good life, Marcelina thought. Uncomplicated, investing in relations, humane and civilized. Then she thought, You’d be bored bored bored within half an hour. Give me Supermodel Sex Secrets and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.

  She could procrastina
te no longer. Marcelina called her mother.

  ‘Hi. It’s me. Don’t hang up. Are you all right? Are you okay? Have you been, you know? Don’t hang up.’

  ‘Iracema’s very hurt. I can’t even begin to say how hurt she is; Gloria too, and me, well I’m more disappointed than anything. Disappointed and surprised; it’s not like you, why did you do a thing like that?’ An edge of rasp in the voice, a three-day vodka hangover simmering off.

  Ask her, ask her now; you have your opening. All the shadow-lengthening afternoon she had toyed with tactics, openings and moves, feints and concessions, the edged tools from her box of professional instruments but ultimately hinging around the one strategic problem: to apologize and call later with the Hard Question, or to say it once and for all.

  Marcelina decided.

  ‘I know you won’t believe me if I say it wasn’t me- and I know I should just have apologized there and then. I don’t know why I started that argument, but I did and I’m sorry.’ This much is true. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Another sharp little tool of the information trade. ‘You’ve probably seen the stuff in the paper by now.’

  ‘Are you all right? Is everything okay?’

  Are you a liar and a hypocrite? Marcelina asked herself. So long and so old and so tired it’s become truth?

  ‘Mum, this is going to sound strange- maybe even the strangest thing I’ve ever said - but, am I the only one?’

  Dead air.

  ‘What, love? I don’t understand. What are you talking about?’

  ‘I mean, is there . . .’ The sentence hung unfinished. Marcelina heard her mother’s voice squawking, ‘What what what?’ Standing in the open doorway of the apartment block applying lippy, closing a little Coco bag, the door swinging softly, heavily shut behind her. Her. The one. The evil twin. ‘Got to go Mum bye I love you.’

  Marcelina dashed through the dark loom of the gallery knocking over dummies, sending costumes rocking on their rails. She jumped over the rotten woodwork, took the stairs two at a time. Lilac evening had poured into the streets; lights burned; people stared as she ran past them. Where where where? There. Marcelina ran the intersection; cars jolted to a halt, aggressively sounded horns.

  ‘Darling . . .’ Vitor called after her.

  Good suit. Good heels, confident heels - she can see them snapping at the sidewalk twenty, nineteen, eighteen people ahead of her. She walks like me. She is me. Left turn. Where are you going? Do you live within a spit of my home; have you lived here for years without my knowing, our paths and lives always that step out of synchronization; the two Marcelinas? Fifteen, fourteen people. Marcelina shouldered through the evening strollers, the dog-walkers, the power walkers. She could see her now. A little heavier? Hands a little broader, nails unsophisticated. Ten, nine, eight people. I’m behind you now, right behind you, if you looked around right now you would see me. Me. And Marcelina found that she wasn’t afraid. No fear at all. It was the game, the burn, the car lifted on the Rua Sacopã, the pictures coming together in the edit, the pitch when they get it, see it, when it all opens up in front of them; the moment when idea becomes incarnate as program.

  I am behind you now.

  Marcelina reached out to touch her twin’s shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The woman turned. Marcelina reeled back. This was no twin. A twin she would have known for its differences, its imperfections, the subtle variations spun out of the DNA. This was herself, precise to the moles, to the hair, to the slight scar on the upper lip, to the lines around the eyes.

  ‘Ah,’ Marcelina said. ‘Oh.’

  She heard the blade before she saw it, a shriek of energy, an arc of blue. And the malicia kicked: before sense, long before conscious thought, Marcelina dropped back to the ground in a negativa angola. The blade whistled over her face. Screams, shouts. People fled. Cars stopped, horns blared. Marcelina rolled out of the defensive drop with a kick. The blade cut down again. Marcelina flipped into a dobrado, then wheeled for a crippling kick. Two hands seized her pants and ankles and pulled her away. The knife slashed again, seeming to cut the air itself; the A-frame sign for the Teresina pay-by-weight restaurant fell into two ringing halves. The woman turned and ran. Marcelina struggled, but the hands held her.

  ‘Leave it,’ a man’s voice ordered. ‘This is beyond you. Leave it.’

  Now she was quite quite mad, for the voice, the hands, the face belonged to Mestre Ginga.

  FEBRUARY 2-10, 2033

  Mr Peach adores her.

  ‘First halfway-stimulating conversation I’ve had in months,’ he says to Edson in the privacy of breakfast moments while Fia is in the shower. She is a bathroom girl; the sound of her happy splashing carries far up and down the fazenda’s cool tiled corridors.

  ‘Never mind that,’ says Edson. ‘Is all the gear stowed away?’

  Mr Peach holds up a big old iron key. Fia comes in patting the ends of her hair dry with a towel. She knows Mr Peach as Carlinhos; a kind of uncle in Edson’s far-flung family, scattered like stars linked in a constellation. They’re going to talk science again.

  Edson hates it when they do that. He bangs aluminum things in the kitchen while they argue quantum information theory.

  The best Edson understands it is this: Fia had been part of a research team using her University of São Paulo quantum mainframe to explore multiversal economic modeling, entangling so many qubits - that, Edson understands, is the word- across so many universes that it has the same number of pieces as a real economy. And, Mr Peach says, if the model is as complex as the things it models, is there any meaningful difference? In Fia’s São Paulo - in Fia’s world - it seems to Edson that tech-stuff took a different turn sometime in the late teens, early twenties. Where Edson’s world solved the problem of processors and circuit boards so small that quantum effects became key elements, Fia’s world learned to use proteins and viruses as processors. Semiliving computers you can tattoo on your ass as opposed to cool I-shades and the need to reel out ever-more-complex security codes to satisfy a paranoid, omniscient city. But Fia’s people killed their world. They couldn’t break the oil addiction, and it burned their forests and turned their sky hot sunless gray.

  They were on about superpositions again. That’s where a single atom is in two contradictory states at the same time. But a physical object cannot be two things at once. What you measure is that atom and its exact corresponding atom in another universe. And the most likely way for both to be in a state of superposition is for them each to be in quantum computers in their own universes. So in a sense (big brain itch here, right at the back of Edson’s head where he can’t reach it) there are not many many quantum computers in millions of universes. There is just one, spread across all of them. That’s what Fia’s economic model proved; what they’re calling the multiversal quantum computer. Then she created a quantum model of herself and found that it was more than a dumb image. It was Mr Peach’s storm blowing between worlds. It was a window to all those other Fia Kishidas with whom it was entangled. The ghost Fias Edson had glimpsed in the workshop in Cook/Chill Meal Solutions were counterparts in other worlds spellbound by entanglement.

  Edson bangs down the pot and cups.

  ‘Carlinhos. I need to borrow your car.’ Edson’s going shopping. Out on the streets of his big dirty city with his hands on the wheel and one of the many backup identities he’s stashed all across northwest Sampa, I-shades feeding him police maps, Edson feels his mojo returning. Careful. Overconfidence would be easy and dangerous. For this kind of operation he would normally have picked up an alibi, but that’s not safe after that poor bastard Petty Cash. The Sesmarias may be out of the game, but there are those other bastards: the Order, whoever they are; and then the cops, always the cops. No, a malandro can’t be too careful. He takes camera-free local roads and backstreets to the mall. Among the racks and hangers is bliss. It is good to buy, but he dare not use his debit account. If the stores don’t give him a discount for cash - and many will not
even accept notes- he moves on to another one.

  ‘Hey, got you something to make you look less like a freak.’ From the glee with which she throws herself on the bright bags, Edson concludes there are other things than physics that light up Fia Kishida.

  ‘Did you choose for me or for you?’ she asks, holding up little scraps of stretchy sequined fabric.

  ‘You want to look Paulistana?’ Edson says.

  ‘I want not to look like a hooker,’ Fia says, hooking down the bottom of her cheek-clinging shorts. ‘But I love these boots.’ They are mock-jacaré, elasticated with good heels, and Edson knew she would coo and purr at first try-on. The crop top shows off the minute detail of her tattoo-computer; in the low light slanting across the fields of oil-soy it burns like gold. Edson imagines the wheels and spirals turning, a number mill.

  ‘Where I come from, it’s rude to stare.’

  ‘Where I come from, people don’t have things like that tattooed on them.’

  ‘Do you ever actually apologize for anything?’

  ‘Why should I do that? Come and eat. Carlinhos is making his moqueça. You need to eat more.’