by Ian McDonald
The door is quantum coded. Amen. What quantum seals, quantum shall undo. He draws the Q-blade and with one economic gesture cuts the door free from its frames. The two halves hang a moment, then fall backward onto the woven grass carpet of the reception area. As Yanzon’s boot soles crush the faces of carved baroque angels and demons, silent alarms detonate across his expanded vision.
Edson hammers on the elevator call button. Every street-sense, every gene of malandragem says never trust the elevator when your soul and love depends on it. But he’s seen what’s down the stairs. It’s here: bing. Stupid stupid stupid elevator AI: I don’t care about safety instruction. My girlfriend’s down there with an admonitory of the Order and a Q-bow. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos, Alcides Teixeira had said. No you can’t. They don’t care for your money, they don’t care for your empire, they don’t care for your political patronage and your power. They are beyond mere economics.
The elevator bids Edson a good night. The door opens on chaos. The great baroque doors of the EMBRAÇA headquarters, appropriated from a church in Olinda, lie on the ground. Twenty alarm lights flash; a panicked sprinkler system douses the hardwood front desk. No one on that desk. Does he spy fingertips on the carpet? Running feet, voices cracking over com channels. Teixeira’s seguranças will shoot whatever they see. Move out, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. But he takes a grain of reassurance from his eyeblink reconnaissance. The admonitory is working through the corporate levels first. He has still time to make the apartment.
Yanzon sees the running guards through two corridors. He will take one and the other will run away. His weapons are expensive, even for the Order, and should be reserved for the mandatory targets. His mission on this level is complete, all targets accounted for. His I-shades track the two figures through the wall: in one breathtaking, killing move he draws an arrow from the magnetic quiver, nocks, pulls. The bow’s complex pulleys and levers slide with molecular precision. Fires. The Q-blade-tipped arrow cuts through wall, room, wall, running guard, out through the closed-down spaces of EMBRAÇA’s corporate headquarters, out through the glass wall of Oceanus. A flash of blue light and a man is down, dead, pooling blood across the pimpled black rubber. Yanzon steps around the corner, a new arrow strung. The terrified survivor throws his hands up, his gun down and, as predicted, flees. Yanzon mouths a brief consignatory prayer for the dead man. The Lord will receive his own. If he does not know the Lord Jesus then he must prepare for the Lake of Fire. Yanzon has yet to visit a universe that does not know the saving power of Christ. He has seen the true, the unimaginably true, extent of God’s might. The glowing icons of Teixeira security move erratically: panicked, afraid. Slipping through their indecision, Yanzon takes the emergency stairs two at a time down to the residential levels.
Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.
‘Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a computer everything can be a computer. Ah!’
Edson shakes her again.
‘Get up!’
Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, ‘What is go away let me sleep.’
‘The Order is here.’
She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.
‘What?’
Edson claps his hand over Fia’s mouth. The sound the smell the state of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia’s mouth two flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most attenuated fringes to pick out nano-shifts of pressure, rustles on the edge of audibility, a quantum’s difference in the slit of light under the door.
‘He’s gone. Now, with me. Don’t say a word.’
Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid stupid rich man’s apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.
‘That way.’ High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. ‘Piece of piss. Just don’t look down.’
Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the crossing.
‘Hey! Look at me!’
Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The great ship swarms like an ants’ nest spiked with battery acid. The hunter is still in there.
Yanzon, admonitory of the Order, moves unopposed through the residential boulevards of the Teixeira corporacão, destroying the enemies of the Order. The alarms are irritating him now, and he has had to eliminate a few of the more bold seguranças; but he has established dread and awe across the EMBRAÇA headquarters. They showed him once the order the Order enforces. When he crosses and becomes superposed with all his alters, that is the truth. There is a universal mind, and all are notions of it. The prelates and the presidents, the pontiffs and prime ministers call it the Parousia, the end-time, but the eye of a simple man’s faith can better know it as the kingdom of God. The Enemy says that is a lie, an endlessly repeated dream grinding ever slower as the multiverse wheels down, and they seek to break it, to wake the dreamers. They call this freedom and hope. To Yanzon it is pride, and annihilation, an endless drop into the final, eternal cold. A dream is not necessarily a lie.
He glances up. Through three floors he sees Alcides Teixeira trying to escape within a cadre of his bodyguards. They are heavily armed and equipped little sensor ghosts. Small avail against a hunter who can shoot through solid bulkheads. Yanzon sets arrow to his Q-bow, aims up through the ceiling. He whirls. Multiple contacts, closing fast. Oceanus’ marines have found him. Yanzon lowers his bow and breaks into a loping run. His mission now is to destroy the Q-cores and reach the extraction point. Or kill himself. The Order has always understood that its agents die with their secrets. One fast, easy pass with the Q-blade; almost accidental in its casualness. Yanzon has often imagined what it would feel like. He imagines his flesh parting down to the quantum at something silver and so subtle, so painless you would only suspect when the blood began to rush. No pain. No pain at all. And no sin, no sin at all.
Edson counts windows. Eleven, twelve.
‘I feel sick,’ Fia says.
‘Here.’
Lights burn behind drapery. If he had a Q-blade Edson could cut his way in neat as neat, a big circle of glass just falling away in front of him onto the bedroom pile. He doesn’t, but he can trust that Oceanus’ builders did it as cheap and shoddy and minimum wage as every other piece of work done for rich people. He grabs the stanchion, swings up, and punch-kicks forward. The whole doorframe comes away from its track and swings inward.
‘Ruuuunnnnn!’ yells Edson at the naked twentyish man standing startled in the middle of the floor. Tech-boy gives a little scream and flees into the bathroom. By Edson’s calculation they should be opposite a stairwell. Not even an admonitory could be fast enough to catch both of them on the short dash from door to stair. Surely. He flings the door open. The corridor is swarming with Oceanus’ marine security. Targeting lasers sweep walls, floors, ceiling. They catch Edson’s heel as he pushes Fia up the stairs.
‘This is the quantum computer level,’ Fia says.
‘I know,’ says Edson grimly. ‘There’s only one way off this ship. Can you work it? You have to work it.’
They exit the stairwell the same instant as Yanzon comes around the corner. Only the fact that they should be dead sav
es them. In that instant of astonishment, Fia hits the security scanner, Edson pushes her through the door, and they both dive to the floor. The blue bolts sear through the air where their heads would have been, stab through the floor like lightning.
‘Come on, he can cut his way through here like butter,’ says Edson.
The inner lock opens to Fia’s blink. Inside, the four stolen Q-cores and more mess than tidy and precise Edson has ever seen in his life. Girlie mags make-up drinks cans food wrappers balled-up tissues pairs of socks pairs of shoes pens and coffee cups with crusts of mold in their bottoms.
‘This is it?’ Edson asks. The gateway to the multiverse. But Fia has pulled off her top, an action Edson always finds deeply deeply sexy, and coronas of gray light flicker around the cogs on her belly as the wheels begin to turn. The Q-cores answer with the ghost-light of other universes. It is a terreiro, Edson thinks. Junk magic. A loud crash tells Edson the hunter is now in the outer lab. Of course. They may be invisible to him, but he wants the cores, the Q-cores. The Order is Jesuitical in its thoroughness. And there is only one door to this windowless room. No, there are a million doors, a billion doors. And in that thought they open. Edson reels, blinking in the silver light. Figures in the light; he is lost in a mirror-maze; a thousand Edsons stretch away from him on every side, an infinite regress. Those closest are mirror images, but as they recede into the light differences of dress, style, stature appear until, tear-blind in the glare of the multiverse, they might be angels, radiant as orixás. And he feels them, he knows them, every detail of their lives is available to him, just by looking. Entangled. As he knows them, they know him and one by one turn toward him. Ghost-wind streams Fia’s red hair back from her head: she is the Mae do Santo, and all her sisters attending her. Some of the doors are empty, Edson notices. And Edson also notices a squeal of plastic paneling coming apart at the quantum scale. He whirls as the Q-blade completes the circle. The wall panel crashes forward. The assassin’s amber I-shades crawl with data and trajectories and killing curves, none of which he needs because he has them there, right here right now, at arrow point.
‘Now Fia, now anywhere!’ Edson yells as the hunter draws, fires. Then time gels, time goes solid as the arrow drifts from the bow, cutting a line of Cerenkov radiation through the air. Edson sees it bore toward his heart, and then there is a jump, a quantum jump, and the arrow is in another place, another doorway, flickering from universe to universe as the probability of it killing this Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas dwindles to zero, as he becomes superposed with everywhere at once. The hunter gives an incoherent, rageful cry, drops his astonishing bow, and pulls the Q-blade. And a fourth figure is in the place above universes with them; the blond short loira woman, the miraculous capoeirista: a thousand, a million alters of her, charging across the multiverse. In one instant she is a universe away; the next she arrives, panting, beside Edson.
‘Hello again,’ she says, and slaps half a handcuff around Edson’s wrist. She ducks under the assassin’s Q-blade strike; delivers a crunching kick to the solar plexus that sends him reeling, agonized, out of the sanctorum; and slaps the other half of the handcuffs around the astonished Fia’s arm. ‘You’d just end up in two hundred kilometers of Atlantic,’ she says. ‘And you’re no use to us there.’ She hauls on the chain linking Edson and Fia. The doors swing wide; they fall through every door at once into the silver light. A billion lives, a billion deaths flash through Edson. He needs to cry piss vomit laugh pray ejaculate praise roar in ecstasy. Then he is standing in light, sunlight, on rain-damp concrete, by a low curb surrounding a statue of a man in soccer kit holding boldly aloft the kind of torch that only appears in statuary and political party logos. The man is bronze, and on the sides of the plinth are plaques in the same ritual metal bearing names. Legendary names, galactic names. Jairzinho and Ronaldo Fenómeno. Socrates, and that other Edson: Arantes do Nascimento. Before him is a curved triumphal gateway in mold-stained white-and-blue-painted concrete and the words Stadio Mario Filho.
Edson is in a place he’s never been before. The Maracanã Stadium.
‘Rio?’ Fia asks wearily, as if one more wonder or horror and she would lie down in the damp gutter and pull the trash over her.
‘What’s going on here?’ Edson demands, frowning at the verdigrised plaques. ‘Where’s the 2030 Seleção that won right here, and 2018 in Russia? When are we?’
‘That’s a slightly tricky question,’ the blond woman says. ‘You see, we’re not really any time at all. We’re sort of outside time; it just happens to look like the Maracanã from my era. When I come from, we haven’t won yet. We lost. That’s the point. And it’s not really Rio either. All you have to do is go as far as the edge of the dropoff zone and you’ll see.’
Edson almost hauls Fia off her feet. The cuffs the cuffs - he’s forgotten they are chained together. Fia is still looking around her dazed, spun out on the chemical tail of two Teixeira corporação sleeping pills.
‘Oh shit sorry about that,’ the woman says. She fiddles in a pants pockets for a key. ‘I didn’t want you wandering off; if you’d got separated we’d never have found you again.’ Two oiled clicks, then the woman stows the shiny chrome handcuffs in her belt. Edson rubs his wrist. He never ever wants to get any closer to things police than that.
‘What you, some kind of cop?’ he throws back over his shoulder as he crosses the cobbles.
‘Hey. I am not a cop,’ the woman snaps. But Edson’s discovered a weird thing: as he stands between the flagpoles that line the curb and moves his head from side to side, the trees and office buildings across the road move with him.
‘What is going on here?’
At the same time Fia says, ‘Where are all the people?’
‘Coffee,’ the woman says. ‘This needs explaining over coffee.’ She places an order for three cafezinhos from an old black man with gray gray hair at a little tin stall in front of the colonnade Edson cannot remember seeing before. The coffee is dark and sweet and finger-searingly hot in the little translucent plastic cup, but these cariocas cannot make coffee. Paulistanos, now: they grow it, they know it.
‘Think of it as a kind of movie set, only it’s solid and real all the way through,’ the woman says. The old man leans his elbows on the counter of his little stand. ‘As real as anything really is. It’s a safe haven. We have hundreds of them, probably billions of them. This one just happens to be the size and shape of the Maracanã Stadium circa 2006. I’m not actually much of a futebol fan, but the location has a kind of special significance to us. I’ve got places all over the place, but this is sort of our office. Corporate headquarters, so to speak. Fortress of Solitude.’
Fia has been turning slowly around, manga-eyes wide.
‘It’s a pocket universe,’ she says. ‘That’s so clever. You found a way into the multiversal quantum computer and hacked it out.’
‘It’s a very small universe, like I said - just big enough to fit the stadium into. I’d’ve loved a beach, maybe the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, the Copa, but we daren’t get overambitious. The Order knows we’re there somewhere; they just haven’t been able to find us yet.’
Edson crumples his plastic cup and flings it away from him. A gust of wind rattles it across the cracked concrete.
‘But that was real, and the coffee was hot and pretty bad. How can you make something out of nothing? I can feel it, I can touch it.’
‘It’s not nothing,’ the old man on the coffee stand says. ‘It’s time and information, the most real things there are.’
‘You can reprogram the multiversal quantum computer,’ Fia says with a light of revelation dawning in her eyes. The woman and the old man look at each other,
‘You’ve got it,’ the woman says with a cheeky grin. ‘I knew we hadn’t made a mistake with you. Okay, well I think you’re about ready to go inside. It can be a bit . . . disorienting at first, but you do get used to it.’
‘Just one moment,’ Edson demands. Fia, capoeira woman, an
d bad coffee man are already at the blue-and-white colonnade. ‘Before I go anywhere, just who are you?’
The woman throws up her hands, shakes her head in self-exasperation.
‘You know, I completely forgot. I just have so much on, I am completely ditzy.’ She offers a hand to Edson. ‘My name is Marcelina Hoffman, and I am what is known as a Zemba. I’m kind of like a superheroine; I turn up in the nick of time and rescue people. Now, come on, there’s a lot more to show you.’ Edson briefly shakes the offered hand. Glancing back from the tiled lobby, he can no longer see the coffee stall, but the plaza flickers with more-guessed than glimpsed figures: ghosts of an old black man, a short white woman, a dekasegui and a cor-de-canela boy in a sharp white suit.
‘So did Brasil really win in 2030?’ The old man falls in beside Edson as he ascends the sloping entry tunnel. Edson drops his pace to match him. He whispers, ‘She really doesn’t know anything about futebol. Television, that’s her thing. Was her thing.’