by Ian McDonald
His mind spinning with plans and potentialities, Edson saw the dawn through the cabin window, spilling light across the shadowed land so that it kindled and lit. He felt the breath catch in his throat. Roads were silver wires. Rivers were gold. Every instant the pattern of shadows across the land changed. Then Edson saw the blue curve of the ocean. He pressed his face to his window. Big sea, getting bigger. Whitecaps, white boats. Land gone now, nothing but open ocean, and the plane settling toward it. The wing was changing shape, unfolding its cruise sweepback. Edson felt the wheels slide out and lock. The whitecaps were growing closer; Edson gripped the armrests. There was nothing out there. How did that landing on water go again? Lower. Engines roared, the pilot put the nose up, and the Teixeira bizjet dropped sweet neat onto a pure white runway scuffed with grubby tire marks. There were Embraers at stands, a control tower, even a dinky terminal. Suit was out of her seat while the plane was still rolling. She stood in the aisle, arms braced on seatbacks.
‘Welcome to Oceanus.’
The daughters of Alcides Teixeira were goddesses. They had been built that way. Krekamey and Olinda: tall and pale from surgery, languid hands and thighs of gold. Creatures like Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas were beneath their regard, but their elongated, almond eyes opened as far as surgery would permit at the sight of the cyber-wheels turning slowly on Fia’s belly.
One thing you can’t buy, putas.
Alcides Teixeira led the tour personally, pointing out the offices and company apartments. Heroes are usually shorter than you imagine; but Edson hadn’t expected the bad skin. The sertão had engrained itself in acne pocks and sun-creased lines. Perhaps the thing about Alcides Teixeira’s level of wealth was the power to say, World, live with it.
‘And this is where you’ll be working.’
Cute muscly boys in EMBRAÇA high-visibility coveralls were already installing the Q-cores in the huge glass-walled room high above the sea: blue, blue glass. Fia berated them: Not there; when the sun gets round this side of the ship I won’t be able to see a damn thing.
‘We had a hell of a job catching you,’ Alcides Teixeira said. ‘You just kept running.’
‘We thought you were the . . . Order,’ Edson said. Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira of EMBRAÇA was standing beside him, close enough to smell his aftershave, talking to him. The glorious daughters moved before him like visions. But he could not deny it was embarrassing, the realization that the pistoleiros at Liberdade from whom Edson had rescued Fia were in fact Teixeira private seguranças. They had been successfully running away from salvation.
‘Son, if we know about Fia here, we know about the Order. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos.’
Edson ventured, ‘Mr Teixeira, if I could just say, you’ve always been a hero to me. I’m a businessman myself.’ Never be without a card. First rule of business. He pressed it on Alcides Teixeira.
‘Talent and light entertainment. Good on you, son.’ He nodded at his glorious daughters. ‘See those two? Bloody spoiled bitches, the pair of them. Spend all their money on their tits and asses.’ Krekamey - taller, blonder, weirder - scowled. ‘There’s a job for you here if you want it. We’ll find you something to exercise your talents, son.’
‘Mr Teixeira, if you don’t mind, I’d rather exercise my talents for myself.’ In thirty minutes down from the landing strip Edson had seen enough of Oceanus to know it was a ship of death. Death to Edson, to all he hoped to be. A kept boy, he would grow lazy and fat and doped and boozed and sun-soaked and dissolve into nothing. Dead.
Alcides Teixeira balked momentarily, not a man accustomed to refusal; then he grinned hugely and slapped Edson on his bird-frail back.
‘Of course of course, I’d say that myself. Paulistanos always had a great work ethic.’
Edson rides the moveway along the central spine of the great ship. The perspectives of the central strip awe: they’re designed to. A straight kay and half; fifty meters vertical. The walls are lined with baroque balcony walks and cupolas, restaurants hang like weaver bird nests from the roof. Airbridges, elevator shafts, escalator runs crisscross the airspace. Kinetic fabric sculptures flex and bow in the air-conditioning. The air is fresh with ozone and saltiness. Main Street opens up into the central atrium of Jungle!Jungle! the forested heart of Oceanus; the vast cathedral-windows of Dawn and Sunset on opposite sides of the ship flood the chirping, chittering, dripping, reeking mass of verdure with true photosynthesizable light. Macaws whoop, toucans swoop, and birds of paradise flutter. Stores are tiny jeweled nests set among the foliage. Behind the storefronts are labels Edson and Efrim alike would kill for, but his back would blister at the touch of unearned silk. But Efrim lately is a stranger, a woman with whom he once had a fine, elegant affair. Even Edson is numb among the retail opportunities.
It’s a hell of a walk home from the beach, through the twilight ecologies of Oceanus, but Edson knows this world is killing Fia. He doesn’t pretend to understand what she’s doing up in the R&D levels - not even Mr Peach could explain it, he suspects - but he knows what he sees dragging back from the office, piling into the sofa to sit curled up against the armrest silently sullenly flickering her eyes over A World Somewhere on her I-shades, fridge-feeding, putting on weight. And sex is completely out the window.
So Edson has this thing he does, because a man has to.
The security jockey on the desk at the residential level is a Maceio boy watching Bang!Bang on his transparent desktop. He despises Edson but must respect the Teixeira authority on his I-shades. Most of Oceanus’ labor has been shipped in from the northeast. Is this what we aspire to? Edson thinks. Cheap offshore meat exports. Brasil, the nation of the future, and always will be.
The apartment has luxuries Edson could never dream even for his fantasy Ilhabela beach house: an I-wall, a spa bath, massage chairs, a free-flow bed that learns its occupants’ sleep patterns and molds itself to them. Edson has taken to the fold-down in the living room. She’s the worker, she needs the quality sleep, he tells himself. The sun beaming through the glass wall wakes him every morning. He brings Fia morning coffee and takes his out onto the balcony to watch the light out of the sea. Not even a kiss. This is it, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, he tells himself as he sits at the deck table and feels the warmth on his face. The one thing you wanted.
‘Hey.’
The apartment is in darkness, but there is a moon and light from the sea: Oceanus is pushing through a huge current of phosphorescence. Edson lifts his hand to the lights.
A sigh.
‘Leave it.’
Fia is on the balcony, curled up on the decking against the partition wall in panties and vest-top. By ocean-light Edson can see she’s been crying again. He knows her enduring fear: she’s a postdoc researcher into quantum economic modeling who stumbled from one universe to another by luck and desperation, and she is expected to direct the sharpest theoreticians Teixeira money can hire. She fears they know that, that one day one of them will casually ask, Who told you you could do this? Edson has spent his life staying one answer ahead of that question.
‘Are you all right?’
‘No. Do you want to know, Ed?’ She has taken to this nickname. Edson doesn’t like it. It’s not a self he’s made. But he kicks off his shoes, slides out of his jacket. The air is soft and skin-warm, tanged with salt. He never imagined the sea would smell so strange: like it hates the land and all who come from it.
‘Want to know what?’
‘Do you want to know what the Order is keeping secret? We’ve found it. It’s a doozy, Edson. Tell me this, why are we alone? Why are humans the only intelligence in the universe?’
‘I know this argument. Mr Peach used to talk about this; he had a name for it. Something’s paradox.’
‘Fermi’s Paradox, that’s what you’re looking for. Keep that in your head while I ask you question two: why is mathematics so good at explaining physical reality? What is it about numbers and logic?’
&nbs
p; ‘Well, that’s the universal quantum computing thing . . .’
‘And Mr Peach told you that too.’
‘Don’t laugh at him. I told you before. Don’t laugh at him.’
Fia starts at the sure ferocity in Edson’s voice.
‘I’m sorry. Okay, let’s just leave that as something I will never get. But why should computation be the root of reality? Why should reality be one huge system of rendering - no different from a very big, very complicated computer game? Why should it all look like a fake? Unless it is a fake. Or a repeat. Maybe there are no alien intelligences out there because what we think of as our universe is a massive quantum computation simulation. A rerun. All of them, reruns.’
Edson slips his arm behind her back.
‘Come on. You need to get to bed, you’re tired.’
‘No Edson, listen. Before we killed the Amazon, in my world, there was a legend. In it the jaguar made the world, but not very well; and it ended on the third day and we - the world, everything we think is real - are just the dreams of the third night. It’s true Edson, it’s true. We’re the dreams. We’re all ghosts. Think about it: if a universal quantum computer could simulate reality exactly, any numbers of times, what are the odds of us being in the very first, original one, as opposed to any other? Do you want those numbers? I can give you those numbers. We’ve worked them out. They are so so so so small . . . . The real universe died long ago, and we’re just ghosts, at the end of time, in the cold, the final cold. It’s running slower and slower and slower, but it will never stop, over and over again, and we can’t get off. None of us can ever get off. And that’s what the Order is keeping from us. We are not humans. We’re ghosts of humans running on a huge quantum simulation. All of us. All the worlds, all the universes.’
‘Fia, come on, you’re not well, come on, I’ll help you.’ He doesn’t want her talking about the Order, their Sesmarias and killers. Edson fetches water from the kitchen zone. The water on this boat tastes sick; like sea that has been through too many bladders. He’s added a couple of additions from the farmacia to it. She’s been working too hard. Rantings, mad stuff. ‘Come on, sleep.’
She’s a solid girl, growing more massy on junk food, no exercise, and homesickness. Edson helps her to the bed.
‘Ed, I’m scared.’
‘Ssh, sleep, you’ll be all right.’ Her eyes close. She is out. Edson arranges the pillow under her head. He looks long at Fia swashing down into sleep like a coin through water. Then Edson pulls on his polished shoes and straightens his hip ruffled shirt and goes out to meet his coconut boy. Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.
Coco-boy meets Edson at the back of the double-deck driving range stand. The nets are floodlit; stray light glints from the steel sea far below. A whistle.
‘Oi.’
‘Oi.’
‘It’s been delayed. There’s something else coming in ahead of it.’
It’s a sweet little business arrangement. Coconut and guest workers come in on the night flights and with them Pernambuco’s finest mood-shifters. It’s not illegal - very little is illegal on extraterritorial Oceanus, where the corporacãos rule like colonial donatories. Neither is it particularly legal. Oceanus is a nuclear-powered gray economy, and Edson moves through the informal economy like a cat in a favela. Personality adjuncts are marketable: Edson has sent roots down into the club level, and his business plan predicts doubling the number of personalities on Oceanus in six months. God and his Mother; those blandroids need all the character they can get. And tonight tonight tonight eight kilos are coming in from the farma shops of Recife, and everyone knows the people of the nordeste are the best cooks in all Brasil.
Lights in the dark sky, fast approaching. Now engine noise. Growing up in a flight-path, Edson has noticed how aircraft engines are never on a sliding scale of audibility, from whisper to rush to roar, but go from silence instantly to audible. Quantum noise. The kind of thing you would find in Fia’s fake universe.
‘That’s the other flight,’ Coco-boy says. He has the jeitinho with the airport staff.
‘That doesn’t sound like a plane,’ Edson says. A jet-black helicopter, visible only by the gleams of moonlight on its sleek, jaguar flanks, slides in over Oceanus. Edson and Coco-boy both see the green and yellow Brasilian Air Force stars morph up on its fuselage. It settles but does not land, hovering a meter and half above the strip. A door opens. A figure drops out, landing lightly on the runway. In an instant he is up and away. In the same instant the helicopter climbs and peels away from Oceanus. It shivers against the sky and then fades into the night, stealth systems engaged.
‘Fuck,’ says Coco-boy.
‘Back,’ says Edson. ‘Hide.’ His balls are cold and tight. Wrong here. His balls have never lied to him. Even as Efrim. Lights come on in the control tower; seguranças run around not quite knowing what has happened or what they should do. The running figure pauses not five meters from Coco-boy and Edson’s hiding place behind a plastic welcome banner. He turns. Backscatter from the driving range floodlights catches on an object slung across his back; at first Edson thinks it’s bone, a spine, something bizarre. Then he sees it is a bow, cast and shaped to an individual hand. And, as the man runs soft, swift, silent as light to the emergency stairwell, Edson sees another thing: an unforgettable blue glow, seemingly from the arrowheads in their quiver. Quantum-blades.
At age twelve Yanzon could shoot the eye from a monkey among the forks and leaves of the tallest, densest tree in the forest canopy. In those plague days monkeys were not good eating; Yanzon did this merely to display his supreme skill. After the fifth pandemic reduced the Iguapá nation to twenty souls, Yanzon made the long descent of the white and black waters to Manaus. His shooting eye earned money among the people who bet on the street-archery contests. When no one would bet on him anymore he was taken up by a patron who groomed him to represent his nation in the Olympic games. In Luzon in 2028 he won gold in all his shooting disciplines. The Robin Hood of Rio do Ouro, the papers said, the last Iguapá. But Manaus’ memory flows away like the river, and Yanzon would have slipped down through low-paid jobs into casual alcohol but for the aristocratic alva who arrived at his door one morning and offered him a job with travel prospects beyond his imagination. His old soul was unsurprised; the Iguapá had always known of the labyrinth of worlds and the caraibas who walked between them.
Now he runs lightly down the service stairs from Oceanus’ airport into the heart of the great ship. Yanzon touches the frame of his I-shades: a sunset-colored schematic is projected onto his retina. He can see through bulkheads, into sealed rooms, beyond walls and ceilings. Extraordinary technology; a world where everyone and everything may be located with a thought. A world with no room in which sin may hide. And music too; TV, movies everything. Not for the first time he wonders what his Brazyl might have achieved, but for the seven plagues.
His right hand holds the bow. It is an appallingly beautiful piece of killing gear. The compound limb is printed molecule by molecule from carbon nano-fiber and molds to his grip like a prayer to a pain; the tip pivots are spun diamond. Pure titanium wheels give a hundred kilos of pull for an effortless, whip-fast draw. Gyros in the airspaces of the limb ensure exceptional stability and freedom from vibration; Yanzon can sight, aim, and have three arrows in the air and one on the nock before the first has punched home. Seeing it, you would say, That is one beautiful evil bow, but the words would not even leave your lips before Yanzon put an arrow clean through you. The real evil is not the bow, but the arrows.
Yanzon, last archer of the Iguapá, first hunter of the Order, arrives on Avenida Corporacão. The main business thoroughfare is cool, air-conditioned cypress scented. A touch to the frame of Yanzon’s I-shades blinds the security eyes, but the baroque double doors of EMBRAÇA resist his code. This is what comes from leaving things to a hereditary aristocracy. Amateurs. The Buenos Aires Sesmarias coul
d have handled this, but they are scared the Zemba will appear again as she did at the church when she destroyed the São Paulo family. Let her come. Yanzon has long anticipated matching her fighting art against his Q-bow. Kill the researchers, destroy the Q-cores, and the helicopter will return him to the DOI quantum computer and the crossing back to his Florianopolis beach-front apartment. He should try and pick up something in Brasilia for Rosemeri’s sixth birthday. A pair of these shades would be good, but they’re probably incompatible. It is never clean eliminating someone as prominent as this man of business, but Yanzon has seen every great man as a beggar elsewhere.