Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Very well, senhor, with your permission I am going to break into the military police vehicle pound at Guapirá and steal four quantum computers.’

  OCTOBER 29, 1732

  Some Notes on the Hydrography of the Rio Negro

  and Rio Branco

  By

  Dr Robert Francois St Honore Falcon:

  Fellow of the Royal Academy of France

  The Rio Negro, or ‘Black’ River is one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon, joining with the Rio Solimões some two hundred and fifty leagues from the Amazon’s mouth, three leagues beneath the settlement of São José Tarumás, named after the now-extinct tribal Tarumá, or São José do Rio Negro. The most striking characteristic of the Rio Negro is that from which it derives its name - its black waters. And this is no imaginative or fanciful appellation; forasmuch as the waters of the ocean are blue, those of this river are jet black. The Rio Branco, a tributary of the greater Negro, is, as its name suggests, a ‘white’ river. Rivers in greater Amazonia are of these types, ‘black water’ and ‘white water.’ Beneath the Rio Branco all the northern tributaries of the Rio Negro are black water - those to the south are cross-channels connecting with the Solimões.

  From the Arquipelaga Anavilhanas I proceeded to this more promising camp at the confluence of Black and White Rivers where I have undertaken a series of tests of the waters and substrata of the two rivers. Both rivers are exceptionally deep and show a distinct stratification in the species of fish that live there. However lead-line soundings from the Rio Negro show a dark sediment, rich in vegetable matter, in its bed while the Rio Branco’s is soft, inorganic silt. An immediate speculation is that both rivers rise over differing terrains: the Rio Branco being hydrologically similar to the Rio Solimões which rises in the Andes cordillera, it seems a reasonable conclusion to draw that it too rises in a highland region, as yet uncharted but in all likelihood situate in the vast extent of land between the Guianas and the viceroyalty of Venezuela . . . .

  Dr Robert Falcon set down his quill. The voice of the forest deceived; many times in river camps he had thought he heard his name called or a distant hallo, only, on closer listening that verged on a hunter’s concentration, to perceive it as a phrase of birdsong or the rattle of some minute amphibian, its voice vastly greater than its bulk. Again: and this was no bird flute or frog chirp. A human voice calling in the lingua geral that his porters and paddlers, from many different tribes, used among themselves. A canoe in the stream. What should be so strange about that in these waters to set his men a-crying?

  Falcon carefully sanded and blew dry his book. His gauze canopy, only partially successful against the plaguing insects, was set up just within the tree line. A dozen steps took him down onto the cracked, oozing shore, the river still falling despite the recent violent thunder squalls. Never had he known rain like it, but it was still a drop in the immense volume of the Amazon rivers.

  His men were arrayed on the shore. The object of their attention was a solitary canoe, a big dugout for war or trade, drifting on the flow. Falcon slid on his green glasses for better discrimination, but the range was too great. He turned his pocket-glass on it; a moment to focus, then the canoe leaped clear. An immensely powerful black man sat in the stern, steering a course to shore. Falcon knew that form, that set of determination: Zemba, the freed slave Luis Quinn had taken into his mission up the Rio Branco.

  ‘The camp!’ Zemba cried in a huge voice. ‘Is this the camp of the Frenchman Falcon?’

  ‘I am he,’ Falcon shouted.

  ‘I require assistance; I have a sick man aboard.’

  Look for me by the mouth of the Rio Branco.

  Falcon plunged into the river as Zemba steered the canoe in to shore. Luis Quinn lay supine in the bottom. His exposed skin was cracked and blistered by the sun; the seeps and sores already flyblown and crawling. But he was alive, alive barely; his eyelids flickered; rags of loose skin trembled on his lips to inhalations so shallow it did not seem possible they could sustain life.

  ‘Help me, help me with him, get him up to the shelter,’ Falcon commanded as the canoe was run up on to the shore. ‘Careful with him now, careful you donkeys. Water; get me clean water to drink. Lint and soft cotton. Careful now. Yes, Luis Quinn, you have found me.’

  ‘What world is this?’

  Dr Robert Falcon set down his pen on his folding desk. The tent glowed with the light of clay oil lamps; fragrant bark smoldering in a burner repelled those insects that had infiltrated through flaps and vents. Those outside, drawn helpless to the light, beat mechanically, senselessly, against the stretched fabric, each impact a soft tick. On the long nights he had sat vigil by the hammock Falcon had imagined himself trapped inside a monstrous, moth-powered clock: a great Governing Engine.

  ‘Might I say, Father Quinn, that is a most singular question. What day is it, where am I - that would not be unexpected. Even, who are you? But “What world is this?” That I have never heard.’

  Luis Quinn laughed weakly, the laugh breaking into dry, heaving coughing. Falcon was at his side with the water sack. When he had half the bag down him, swigging immoderately, Quinn said, voice croaking, ‘You certainly sound like the learned Dr Falcon I recall. How long?’

  ‘You have been fever-racked for three days.’

  Quinn tried to sit up. Falcon’s hand on his chest lightly but irresistibly ordered him down.

  ‘They will be here, he is coming, he’s very near.’

  ‘You are safe. Zemba has told me all. We are beyond the reach of your Nossa Senhora da Varzea, though I admit I should be intrigued to see such a prodigy.’

  A flash, like lightning in the skull. A moment of lucidity, Zemba running the canoe out into the dark water and lying in the bottom as the current carried it away from Nossa Senhora da Varzea. ‘I have you, Pai, you will be safe.’ Staring up into the starry dome, past exhaustion, past sanity, the black filling with stars, and then constellations appearing behind those constellations and ones beyond that, and beyond that, black night filling up with alien constellations until it blazed, more and still more stars until the night was white and he was not staring up into forever but falling facedown toward the ever-brightening light, infinite light. Quinn cried out. Falcon took his hand. It was yet fever-dry, thin as parchment.

  Three days, working with Zemba to dress the burns with paste the Manaos prepared from forest leaves, removing blowflies one by one with botanical forceps, bathing sweating brows and shivering lips, forcing spastic jaws open to pour in thin, poor soup or herbal maté to see it moments later spewed up in a stream, hoping that some fragment of good had gone out from it. Water, always water, more water, he could not have enough water. Nights of fevered ravings, shrieking demons and hallucinations, prophecies and stammerings until Falcon thought he must stop his ears with wax like Odysseus or go mad.

  ‘It has always been so,’ Zemba said as they bound Quinn’s hands to the hammock ropes with strips of cotton to stop the priest putting out his own eyes. And then the roaring ceased, that silence the most terrifying, when Falcon crept to the hammock not knowing if sanity or death had claimed Quinn.

  ‘Zemba . . .’

  ‘Outside, waiting.’

  ‘He saved me. There are not thanks enough for him . . . . Listen Falcon, listen to me. I must tell you what I have seen.’

  ‘When you are rested and stronger.’ But Quinn’s grip as he seized Falcon’s arm was strong, insanely strong.

  ‘No. Now. No one ever survived; this may not be the end of it. I may yet succumb, God between us and evil. This may be only a moment of lucidity. Oh Christ, help me!’

  ‘Water, friend, have more water.’ Zemba entered with a fresh skin; together the two men helped Quinn drink deep and long. He lay back in the hammock, drained.

  ‘For a hundred leagues along the Rio Branco the emblem of the Green Lady is an object of dread, the Green Lady, and the Jesuit dress. My own black robe, Falcon. He has made a desert land, the villages empty, rotting; t
he plantations overgrown, the forest reclaiming all. All gone; dead, fled or taken to the City of God, or the block in São José Tarumás. The friars at São José said nothing; that is their price. Plague is his herald, fire his vanguard: whole nations have retreated into the igapó and the terra firme only to be annihilated to the last child by the diseases of the white men. But he sees the hand of God; the red man must be tried by the white, must grow strong or perish utterly from the world.

  ‘From the City of God to the Rio Catrimani is five days, and eight farther to the Iguapará. I had not thought there could be so much water in all the world. Endless, empty forest, with only the voices of the beasts for company. Manoel had passed into a silent, trancelike state of introspection; even the Guabirú guards were mute. I have heard that the índios may will themselves to stop living and very soon pass into a melancholic decline and die. Many have chosen to escape that way from slavery. I believe Manoel was on the edges of that state; such were the rumors of what the Iguapá would work upon us.

  ‘The Iguapá are a nation of seers and prophets; pagés and caraíbas. They are consulted only on matters of the gravest import and they are never wrong. Thus they have lived a thousand years unmolested by war, famine, or disease. Their legend is that by Amazonian forest drugs they are able to see every possible answer to the supplicant’s question and so select the true. But the price is terrible indeed. Very soon after the climax of the ritual trance the caraíba descends into confusion, then to full hallucination and a final collapse into insanity and death. They see too much. They try to understand, they overbalance, they fail, they fall . . . I outrun myself. At such a price, the Iguapá do not sacrifice their own. No, their prophets are prisoners of war, hostages, rivals, criminals, outcasts. And of course the black priests of an alien, ineffectual faith. What is our weak prayer, our unseen hope, our whimsical miracles, compared with their iron certainty of the truth, that there is an answer and they will always know it? We could ask them about the mysteries of our God and faith, and they would answer truly. Dare we ask that? Dare we let it darken our imaginations?

  ‘For five days we camped at the designated shore, leaving the signs and markers, invisible to me but as obvious to a native of these forests as a church cross to a European. When you have need of them, they will come to you. On the sixth day they came. They were wary; they have always been jealous with their secrets, but in this time of dying and vast migrations through the varzea they have grown more cautious. Like spirits out of the forest, so silent they were among us, their arrow-points at our hearts, before we knew it. I did not think they were of this world, so uncanny was their appearance: their faces shone gold; they habitually apply the oil of a forest nut they call urocum, and their foreheads, which they shave almost to the crown, slope sharply backward to resemble the shape of a boat. They bind the skulls of their infants with boards and leather while they are still soft and malleable. Manoel and I were bound and led by the hand; the Guabirú guides blindfolded. Their interpreter, a man named Waitacá, told me this was a recent courtesy: the eyes of all but the questioner would have formerly been put out with splinters of bamboo. We of course were never expected to return capable of speech.

  ‘I do not remember how long we stumbled through the forest- days, certainly. The Iguapá trap their forest trails with snares and pitfalls; they could hold at bay an entire colonial army. As we detoured around the strangling nooses, poison arrows, and beds of spines one question vexed me, what did Gonçalves wish with them? So simple a thing as conquest? The triumph of the tyrant is not his aim. He styles himself a political philosopher, a social experimenter. Were there questions - questions like those I dared posit on faith and the nature of the world - to which he required infallible answers? He believes himself a true man of God: did he seek that prophetic power to destroy it? Or is his overweening vanity so great that he seeks that power for himself, to know without faith, to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

  ‘For all their cunning defenses, their village was poor and mean, foul with the filth of peccaries and dogs, huts sagging, thatch rotted and sprouting. There was not a child there that did not bear sores and boils or sties of the eye and lip on their golden faces. A special maloca was reserved for the caraíbas, as we sacrificial victims were known - a title of great honor, I was informed by Waitacá, though I had by now picked up the gist of their own, quite singular language. The hut was the vilest in the village, the thatch raining insects and spouting rain in a dozen places.

  ‘In my wait I learned the basic tenets of Iguapá belief. They worship no God, have no story of creation or redemption, no sin nor heaven nor hell. Yet their belief system - it can never be a theology - is complex, thorough, and sophisticated. Their totemic creature is a frog - neither the loudest nor the most venomous nor the most colorful, though its skin has a beautiful golden sheen which they copy in their face-painting. This frog, which they call curupairá, was first of all creatures and saw the first light, the true light of the world - or should I say worlds, for they believe in a multiplicity of worlds that reflects every possible expression of human free will- whole and entire. It retains that memory of when reality was whole and undivided, like the pages in a book before they are cut. It still sees that true light, which is the light of all suns, and by the grace of the beings that inhabit those other worlds beside our own, can give that sight to humans. It is the extract of the curupairá, which is slowly boiled to death in a sealed clay pot with a spout, that induces the oracular vision.

  ‘The ceremony seemed designed to lull both petitioners and victims alike into a near-ecstasy. Drumming, the piping of clay ocarinas, circle dancing, figures passing repeatedly in front of the light from the fire: all the old tricks. We were dragged from the hut, stripped, anointed with the golden oil - I bear traces of it still - and lashed to St Andrew’s crosses. I remember it raining, a punishing downpour, but the women and children danced on, shuffling around that smoking fire. Their pagé entered at the tail of the dance, the flask in his hand. He came to Manoel, then to me, forced our mouths open with a wooden screw, and poured a jet of the liquid into our gullets. I tried to spit it out but he kept pouring, like the old water ordeal.’

  Again Quinn seized Falcon’s hand.

  ‘It came so fast, brother, so fast. I had not time, no word of prayer, no moment even of recollection to prepare. One moment I was a golden idol crucified, the next I was swept away, across worlds, Robert, across worlds. My vision expanded and I saw myself, bound to the cross, as if I stood outside my own body. Yet this was not me, for in every direction I looked, I saw myself, bound to that cross, other Luis Quinns sharing my plight and my vision. A hundred mes, a thousand mes, receding like reflections of reflections in every direction, and the farther I looked, the less like me they were. Not physically, nor even I believe in will or intellect, but in the circumstances of their lives. Here were Luis Quinns who had failed in their mission, who had declined the burden of Father James in Coimbra, who had never joined the Society of Jesus. Here were Luis Quinns who had killed the slave in Porto without a backward look. Here were Luis Quinns who had never killed that slave at all. Luis Quinns leading lives of commerce and success, married, fathering children, captaining great ships or houses of trade. Here were Luis Quinns alive and dead a thousand different ways, a myriad different ways. All the lives I might have led. And Falcon, Falcon, this you must understand if nothing else: they were all as true as each other. My life was not the trunk from which all others branch at each juncture or decision. They were independent, complete, not other lives, but other worlds, separate from the very creating word of God to the final judgment. Worlds without end, Falcon. Naked I was sent out across them, my expanded mind racing down those lines of other Luis Quinns’ other worlds, and I could see no end to them, no end at all. And the voices, Falcon, a million, a thousand million, a thousand times that, voices all speaking at once, all combining into a terrible wordless howl like the roaring of the damned in hell.

&
nbsp; ‘Then I heard a word speak through the cacophony, one voice that was a thousand voices, the pagé saying over and over “Ask! Ask! Ask!” He too was surrounded by a bright blinding halo of his other selves; everyone, everything, the whole mean shambles of the village, my brother in suffering Manoel; I saw them all across countless worlds.

  ‘“Ask”? What could this mean? And then I heard Paguana the leader of the Guabirú speak in a voice like a whirlwind: “When will the Guabirú achieve victory and rule over their enemies?” And they heard, Falcon, all those uncountable voices; they heard and asked it of themselves, and each spoke his answer. I knew that somewhere among them, in that vast array of possible answers, was the truth; simple, complete, incontestable. Beside me, Manoel, endless Manoels, more than blossoms on an apple tree, asked that same question of his other selves and would, I knew certainly, receive the same infallible answer.

  ‘Once more I was spun forth among my other selves, across the worlds, faster, ever faster, outracing light and thought, even prayer. Godspeeded, I traversed a million worlds until an echo brought me up, to a room, a plain whitewashed room, furniture simply fashioned from heavy, valuable woods, a room in Ireland I knew from the taste of the air and the small square of green I could spy through the narrow window. There I saw myself, Luis Quinn, with a hound beneath my hand and an infant rolling at my feet. I looked myself in the eye and said, “The Guabirú will never rule over their enemies, for their enemy rules them already and water will run red with their blood and then they will become nothing but a memory of a name.” And I knew this was true prophecy, because, Falcon, Falcon- it has happened. You wondered if the universe might be modeled by a simple machine: here is your answer. There is a world for every possible deed and act, but they are all written, preordained. The stack of cards runs through the machine. Free will is an illusion. We imagine we have choice, but the outcome is already decided, was written the moment the world was made, complete in time.’