by Ian McDonald
‘The book’s some kind of expedition journal by an eighteenth-century French explorer on the Amazon. I didn’t read very much of it; I find that old stuff kind of hard to read.’
‘I didn’t ask what it was. I asked you, what did you notice?’
‘Well, it’s been rebound several times, and the contents are handwritten but they’re not original, I suspect; the illustrations inside the cover had coded writing on them, and knowing the way Brazil was in the eighteenth century, I reckon it’s a good guess that it was originally written in code as well.’
‘Good guess. Anything else.’
‘Like I said, I didn’t read much of it. Now, I’m sure this old eighteenth-century book has something to do with my evil double trying to kill me, but it might be a whole lot simpler if you just got to the point.’
‘Anything else.’
Marcelina shrugged; then a realization of strange, a sense of cold wonder, shivered through her. In the blossom-perfumed heat of Mestre Ginga’s kitchen, she saw the gooseflesh lift the fine, blond hairs on her forearm.
‘There was a plague, a plague of horses.’ She knew the look on Mestre Ginga’s face; so many times she had seen it in the roda as he squatted in the ring, leaning on his stick. Go on, my daughter, go on. ‘All the horses, the donkeys, even the oxen, they were wiped out by the plague. That never happened. It’s fiction, it’s a story.’
‘No, it’s true. It’s a history. It’s just not our history.’
‘This is insane.’
‘Lick the book,’ Mestre Ginga ordered. ‘Pick it up and just touch the tip of your tongue to it.’
Sense of cold wonder became vertiginous fear. Favors and privileges had flowed around the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor, one of them free and unlimited access to the private pool and beach of the Ilha Grande Hotel at Arpoador, the rocky point between the golden curves of Copacabana and Ipanema. Dalliances and liaisons blew through the airy corridors and cloisters, but the children who splashed round the rocks were as oblivious to this as they were to satellites. The big thrill was the Leaping Point, a five-meter rock that overhung a Yemanja-blue plunge pool: a hold of the nose, a quick cross, and down like a harpoon into the clear cold water. Marcelina - age eight- had always envied the bigger girls who filled their swimsuits and the gawky boys who could make the leap. For hot holiday weeks she had tried to call up the courage to go up on to the Leaping Point, and then at the last day of summer before school resumed she had worked up sufficient force of soul to climb up the rock. Her mother and sisters, racked out on the wooden sun loungers, waved and cheered, Go on go on go on! She crossed herself. She looked down. The deep blue water looked back up into her soul. And she couldn’t do it. There was swallowing madness down there. The climb back down the rock-cut steps, backward, feeling her way one hand, one foot at a time, was the longest walk of her life.
Marcelina looked into the book. The golden eye of the frog held her. Where would the walk back down from this painted sanctuary take her? Not back to any life she could recognize. The old capoeiristas, the great mestres and corda vermelhas, taunted her with their jeito. Our Lady of Production Values, who is our Lady of Jeito, aid me.
Marcelina lifted the book to her face and touched the eye of the golden frog with the tip of her tongue. And the book opened the room opened the city opened the world opened.
Marcelina lifted a hand. A thousand hands bled off that, like the feedback echo of visual dub. The table was a Church of All Tables, the green and blue cabinets a Picasso of unfolding cubes. And Mestre Ginga was a host of ghosts, an Indian god of moving limbs and heads. The book in her hand unfolded into pages upon pages within pages, endless origami. Voices, a choir of voices, a million voices, a million cities roaring and singing and jabbering at once. Marcelina reached for the table- which table, which hands - and rose to her feet through a blur of images. Then Mestre Ginga was at her side, prising open her mouth, pouring strong, hot, startling black coffee down her throat. Marcelina coughed, retched up bile black cafezinho and was herself again, lone, isolate, entire. She dropped into the aluminum kitchen chair.
‘What did you do to me?’
Mestre Ginga ducked his head apologetically.
‘I showed you the order of the universe.’
Marcelina slung the book across the table. Mestre Ginga caught it, squared it neat to the end of the galvanised tin top.
‘You drugged me!’ She accused him with a finger.
‘Yes. No. You know my methods. Your body teaches.’ Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair and laughed. ‘And you accuse me?’
‘There’s a difference. That was a spiked book.’
‘The book is bound in the skin of the curupairá, the sacred golden frog.’
Marcelina had been to the Amazon to research Twenty Secret Ways to Kill Someone and had seen the murderous power of brightly colored forest frogs.
‘You could have killed me.’
‘Why should I do that? Marcelina, I know what you think of me-you don’t have anywhere near as much malicia as you think, but believe me when I say, what you do have, you are going to need. Every last drop of it. So stop thinking stupid and start acting like a malandro, because stupid is going to get not just you killed but everyone else around you.’
The room shivered around Marcelina, spraying off multiple realities like a dog shaking water from its coat.
‘So it’s some kind of hallucinogen, like ayahuasca.’
‘No, nothing like ayahuasca. The iâos of the bença believe that the Daime stimulates those parts of the brain that generate the sensations of spirituality. Curupairá shows the literal truth. The eye of the frog is so sensitive that it can perceive a single photon of light, a single quantum event. The frog sees the fundamental quantum nature of reality.’
The snap was on Marcelina’s lip: And what does a capoeira Mestre know about quantum theory? In surliness was security; she was in a place as familiar and comfortable as home, yet the step from the yard where she played the great game into the green, blue, and yellow kitchen was the step from one world to another. Rio had always been a city of shifting realities, hill and sea, the apartment buildings that grew out of the sheer rock of the morros, the jarring abutments of million-real houses with favela newlywed blocks, piled one on top of another. And where the realities overlap, violence spills through. Heitor, whose private life you entered through books, had so many times tried to explain quantum theory to Marcelina, usually when she just wanted him to tell her how hot her ass looked in the latest little mesh number. All she understood of it was that her career depended on it and that there were three interpretations (as she tried to get him to take a line from the glass-top table), only one of which could be true; but whichever one was, it meant that reality was completely different from what common sense told us. So shut up the mouth and listen to Mestre Yoda.
‘Whatever’s in the frog skin allows our minds to perceive on the quantum level.’
‘What did you see?’
‘Like everything had a halo, had other selves . . .’ She hesitated over the two words that would turn her world upside down, shatter it into glittering dust. ‘Many worlds.’
There are three main interpretations of quantum theory, Heitor had said. It had been three days after carnaval, when all the marvelous city still had huge stashes of recreational drugs to use up before the feathers and the sequins and the skin glitter were put away and the world of work reaffirmed its dull authority. Marcelina had been reeling around the apartment blessed on Iguaçu white, practicing her booty shake before it was put away until the New Year Yemanja festival. The Copenhagen interpretation is considered a purely probabilistic interpretation in that in physical terms it gives undue prominence to observation, information, and mind. The Bohm carrier-wave theory is essentially nonlocal, in that every particle in the universe is connected across space and time to every other, which has been seized on by various New Age charlatans as supporting mysticism. The Everett many-worlds theorem reconciles the pa
radoxes in quantum theory by positing a huge, maybe even infinite, number of parallel universes that contain every possible quantum state.
Why are you telling me this why is this important what does it mean come and have some coke, Marcelina had jabbered. She had never forgotten Heitor’s answer.
What it means is, any way you cut it, it’s a mad world.
Again the room, the fundação, Jesus on his mountain spasmed around Marcelina. I am seeing across multiple universes, parallel Rios, other Marcelinas. What of the ones I can’t see, the ones who were that hair too slow on Rua Rabata Ribeiro and were cut open under that knife? She took a sip of her strong, now-cold coffee.
‘I think you’re going to have to explain this to me.’
Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair.
‘Very well then. You won’t believe it, but every word is true.’
‘There is not one world. There are many worlds. There is not one you; there are many yous. There is no universe; there is the multiverse, and all possible quantum states are contained within it. Write down ninety-nine point nine and as many nines after that until you get bored with it. That many universes are empty, sterile, exercises in abstract geometry and topology; two-dimensional, gravityless, impossible. Out of that chain-of-zeroes point one that remain, the greater part are universes where the constants of physics vary by a tiny degree, a decimal here or there, but even that minuscule variation means that the universe immediately collapses after the Big Bang into a black hole, or expands infinitely in a fraction of a second so that every particle ends up so far from its neighbor that it is effectively in a universe of its own, where stars do not form, or burn out in a three-score and ten. And in the same fraction of those universes as they are to the multiverse, the fine-tuning of constants allows the ultimate unlikelihood of life to exist, to exist intelligently, to found empires and build beautiful Rios, to learn martial arts and make television programs and quest into the nature of the universe in which it finds itself so improbably. We have penetrated to ten to the three hundred thousand universes and still we are not a thumbnail’s thickness into the rind of the multiverse, let alone begun to exhaust the universes where we exist in some form recognizable to ourselves.
‘Everyone’s got a theory. Ask any Rio taxi driver and he’ll give you his free. Taxi drivers know how to make a better country and a perfect Seleção as well as all the best places to eat. What matters is, how useful is your theory? Does it explain the everyday as well as the weird and spooky? Physics is no different. We’ve had Newton and we’ve had Einstein and we’ve had Bohr and Heisenberg, and each time the theory gets a little better at explaining what’s real; but we’re still a long long way from a final Theory of Everything, the ultimate taxi driver theory that you plug a value in and it gives you everything from the reason there is something rather than nothing to the football results. Physics is now a roda: all the malandros standing round clapping and singing while two theories go in and try to out-jeito each other. There are two big strong boys think they have the malandragem to be the theory of everything. One of them is String theory, or M-theory as it’s also called. Facing it in the ring is Loop Quantum Gravity. They’re calling names at each other, taking each other’s measure, trying to trick the other into a simple mistake they can use to make him look stupid, like you made Jair look stupid with that boca de calça. The LQG boys, they’re shouting at the String theorists that it’s not even wrong. The Stringeiros, they shout back that it’s just dreadlocks in space. Which is right? I’m just a guy runs a capoeira school who needs some theory to explain what a little book with a frog on the cover has shown him, and that’s a hell of a lot of parallel universes.
‘Me, I go for dreadlocks in space. Loop Quantum Gravity’s main theory is that everything is made from space and time woven into itself. Everything can be made from loops of space and time pulled through themselves. Yeah, it’s not dreadlocks, it’s knitting. But I was reading on online forums - I read the physics forums, why shouldn’t I? - and there’s a guy in the terreiro at Rio U who says that maybe what we think of as space is just connections between pieces of information. Everything is connected information in time, and we have a word for that: it’s computer. The universe is one huge quantum computer; all matter, all energy, everything we are, are programs running on this computer. Now, stick with me here. What I know about quantum computers, they can exist in two contradictory states at the same time, and this allows them to do things no other computer could. But I know, because I’ve seen them, that reality is a multiverse, so those computations are being done in many universes at once, so in fact all the multiverse is one vast quantum computer. Everything is information. Everything is . . . thought. Our minds are part of it. Our minds run across many universes - maybe all of them. That’s what the curupairá does, reduces our perceptions to the level where we become aware that we are part of the multiverse quantum computer. And listen, listen well, if it’s all information, if it’s all thought and computation, then that information can be rewritten and edited. You can write yourself into any part of the multiverse, any place, any time. And another you has written herself into this universe, and will run you down and kill you. Think of her as a kind of policeman. A militar. She is part of an organization that polices the multiverse, that seeks to keep the true nature of reality secret, controlled only by a small, elite group. She will take your place, and then she hoped to use that to infiltrate us, and eliminate us all.
‘I told you you wouldn’t believe it. But it’s the truest thing there is.’
Marcelina rocked back in her chair.
‘Have you got, could you get me, I really need something to drink.’
Mestre Ginga went to the refrigerator. Full dark had fallen; the blue light from the cool cabinet was painful as he hunted for a Skol. Marcelina started at the sound of car tires squealing on the greasy road. Every twitch, every fidget and rustle was an enemy. Marcelina drank the beer. It was stupidly cold and gloriously real and it slid through her like rain through a ghost, touching nothing. The Mestre’s celular rang; a slow ladainha for solo voice and berimbau. As he talked - low, short phrases - realization passed through Marcelina in the shadow of the beer.
‘I’m a fucking cop out there. Somewhere.’
Mestre Ginga clammed shut his phone. Dew ran down the sides of the can.
‘In a sense, yes. The term we use is an admonitory; it’s an old religious expression. There is an organization; call it an order. It’s old - it’s a lot older than you think, it all goes back to that book I gave you. The Order’s purpose is to suppress knowledge about the multiverse; that it is possible to cross it, that it exists at all. I can understand why: all our beliefs about who and what we are challenged; the great religions just comfortable stories. Humankind cannot stand too much reality. The Order suffered a partial defeat when quantum theory itself developed the many-worlds interpretation, but they still have a firm grip on their central mission, to control communication and travel across the multiverse; and deep down, that is the ability to rewrite the programs of the universal quantum computer. They are the reality cops. Locally the Order is hereditary; it runs in certain old families who have access to the highest level of government, business, and the military. When Lula got elected the first thing they did was shake his hand and say “Congratulations, Mr President.” The second thing they did was take him into a back room and introduce him to our Brazilian Sesmaria. The Sesmarias move slowly; the last thing they want is to attract attention. They have to live here; they’re not allowed to cross between worlds. But sometimes the opportunity arrives to strike a blow, and that’s when they call in an admonitory.’
‘Me, when I started looking for Barbosa, that was their opportunity.’
‘You were doing all their work for them. First they discredit you; then they replace you. And when they’re finished, they walk away into the multiverse again.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me, is it? I’m just convenient, a way for the Order to get t
o you.’
‘In the multiverse, you are everything you can be. Villain, mother, assassin, saint. Maybe even hero.’
A crunch of tires. A horn blew twice. Mestre Ginga looked up. He left the small kitchen with its lingering tang of dende. Doors opening, doors closing; voices on the edge of audibility. Marcelina felt Mestre Ginga’s bright kitchen expand around her until it became a universe, her trapped in it, alone, isolate. Heitor used to say that when God is dead all we have left is conspiracy. This cold illusion, this book of ghosts would have satisfied his hard, gloomy worldview: the whirling noise and color and life of the city a dance of dolls knitted from time and words. Mestre Ginga’s celular lay on the table. Celular, beer, a coffee mug for a futebol team, a book from another universe. A Brazilian Last Supper. She could pick up that phone. She could call Heitor. He alone remained. Career, friends, family had been stripped away from her like a skin peel, deeper and deeper, rawer and rawer. She should call Heitor, warn him. Pick up the phone. Press out the number. But she had said that the next voice he heard would not be hers. He would not believe her. But she might have gotten to him already. Her: the other Marcelina. She knows you; she knows everything about you because she is you. Your thoughts are her thoughts, your strengths her strengths. You are your own worst enemy.