Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Yeah, we won,’ Edson says. ‘Against the United States.’

  ‘The United States?’ the old man says, then starts to laugh so painfully, so wheezily Edson thinks he is having a heart attack. ‘The ianques playing futebol? In the World Cup? What was the score?’

  ‘Two one.’

  ‘Hah!’ the old man says. ‘And Uruguay?’

  ‘They haven’t qualified since 2010.’

  The man punches fist into palm. ‘Heh heh. Son, you have made an old man so very, very happy. So so happy.’ Chuckles bubble up in him all the way along the curving corridor lined with photographs of the great and glorious. Edson stops; something in a photo of goalkeeper making a spectacular save has caught his eye. And the date. July 16, 1950.

  ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s not there in the original Maracanã. I mean the one where I come from. And it never was that photo.’

  Marcelina holds open the door to the presidential box. Edson steps into the blinding light. Two hundred thousand souls greet him. He reels, then draws himself upright and walks deliberately, gracefully down the red-carpeted steps to the rail where Fia stands, glowing in the attention. Senhors, Senhoras, I present to you, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas! Superstarrrrrrrrrr!

  ‘I told you it could be a bit overwhelming,’ Marcelina said. And in the moment after the tyranny of the eyes tells him, Two hundred thousand fans, the ears tell him different, and more strange. This thronged stadium is totally silent. Not a cheer, not an airhorn, not a thunder of a bateria or the chant of a supporters’ samba. Not a firework. Not an announcer screaming Goooooooooool do Brasil! A stadium of ghosts. As his eyes catch up with his ears, Edson sees something very much like weather blowing across the stands and the high, almost vertical arquibancadas, like the huge silk team banners passed hand to hand around the huge circle, a change-wave rippling between worlds, between realities, between Fluminense and Flamengo, between decades. The fans of a million universes flicker through this Maracanã beyond time and space.

  ‘I was finding I couldn’t get anything done with the noise,’ Marcelina says.

  Down in the sacred circle of green a match is in progress. Edson knows instinctively what game it is. No other game matters. But it is not one Fateful Final, it is thousands, flickering through each other, ghosts of players, crosses from other universes, goal kicks into the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Edson watches the cursed Barbosa ruefully pick the ball out of the back of the net; then reality shifts and he is rolling it out past the strikers coming in on the back of the save on a long throw to Juvenal.

  ‘I’m used to it,’ says Moaçir Barbosa. ‘On average, we win. But hey, the USA two one? Oh, I cannot get used to that.’

  Edson lifts his hands from the rail.

  ‘Okay, this is all very good and I’m prepared to believe I’m in some bubble outside space and time or some private little universe or whatever, but I have one question. What is it all about?’

  Marcelina applauds. The sound rings around the eerily silent Maracanã.

  ‘Correct question!’

  ‘And the answer?’

  ‘The universe - the original universe, the one in which we all lived our lives the first time - died long ago. Not died - it never dies, it just goes on expanding forever until every particle is so far from every other that it’s effectively in a universe of its own. We haven’t reached that stage yet; the universe is so old and cold there is no longer enough energy to sustain life, or any other process except quantum computation. But intelligence always tries to find a way out, a way not to die with the stars, and so it created a vast quantum simulation of its own history, and entered it. And we live it over and over and over again, ever more slowly as the universe cools toward absolute zero, until in the end-time it stops completely and we are frozen in the eternal present.’

  Edson, always thin, always undernourished, shivers in his sharp white malandro’s suit.

  ‘I’m alive,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. No. An accurate-enough simulation is virtually indistinguishable from reality. It’s only when you look up close that the cracks begin to appear.’

  ‘Quantum weirdness,’ Fia says.

  ‘No way around it. The quantum nature of the simulation would always betray its true nature. That’s what the Order was created to protect.’

  ‘Fia told me the Sesmarias are old fidalgo families. How long have we known about this?’

  ‘I think there have always been individuals who understood the multiverse. But the Order has only existed since the middle of the eighteenth century, when a French explorer brought back an Amazonian drug that allowed the mind to operate on a quantum level.’

  Edson’s head reels. Stop this stop this. Give me sun and beer; give me a Keepie-Uppie Queen and a hot deal.

  ‘We’re dead. We’re ghosts, so what? We all die in the end.’

  He feels Fia’s hand clutch his.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be that way,’ she says. ‘All available energy goes into running the multiversal quantum computer.’

  ‘The Order calls it the Parousia.’

  ‘But instead, all that energy could be put into something else. Something unpredictable. A random quantum event, like the one that inflated into this multiverse in the first place. A new creation. But you’d have to end the simulation first. You would have to turn off the Parousia.’

  ‘Wait wait wait wait,’ says Edson. ‘You turn it off, we all die.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Fia says, overbiting her bottom lip in that way she doesn’t know she does but Edson finds sweet-sexy. ‘“A black hole does have hair.” Information could be conserved through a singularity.’

  ‘I’m not a scientist, you know,’ Edson says.

  ‘Me neither,’ says Marcelina. ‘But I have made some science shows. Mostly about plastic surgery.’

  ‘That’s what you’re fighting for,’ Fia says, and her eyes are bright, seeing to the end of the universe and beyond, reflecting that new light. ‘Death in the cold and dark, or the hope of rebirth in the fire.’

  ‘You should write scripts,’ Marcelina says. ‘That’s very good. Very poetic. This is what the Order fears; that’s why we are fighting it all across the multiverse, for a chance at something different, something magical. Places like this, they’re a start, a tiny start. Edson, I need a word with your girlfriend, in private.’

  Edson turns again to the endless final. The bright watered green, the sky that only Rio makes so blue, the many colors of the crowd: ghosts, echoes. His own hand on the rail seems so thin and insubstantial he could see through it. He turns his face up to the sun and it is cold.

  ‘Scared the hell out of me too, son,’ Barbosa says. He leans on the rail, decorously spits over the edge of the presidential box. ‘But whatever it is, this is the world we live in. We’re men; we make our own way. Maybe it all begins anew; maybe we die and that’s the end of it, no heaven, no hell, nothing. But I know I can’t go on living what happened to me over and over and over, slower and slower until it all freezes. That’s death. This . . . this is nothing.’ He looks around. ‘That was quick. I’ll leave you young things’ He climbs the steps, passes Fia on the red carpet.

  ‘She offered you a job, didn’t she?’ Edson says.

  ‘It’s getting to be a habit.’

  ‘And did you take it?’

  ‘What’s the alternative? For someone like me, what’s the alternative?’

  ‘But nothing for Edson.’

  She can’t look at him. Below them, in a million universes, Augusto lifts high the Jules Rimet trophy to a silent Maracanã.

  ‘I can’t make that decision for you.’

  ‘Did you even try?’

  ‘It’s too dangerous. You’re not a player; I am, for better or worse. You can’t come with me. Go back; we can send you back, it’s easy. I can do it. The Order is looking for me now.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t see you again, would I? Not if the Order is hunting you.’

 
; She shakes her head, chews her lip. There will be tears soon. Good, Edson thinks. I deserve them.

  ‘Ed . . .’

  ‘Don’t call me that. I hate that. Call me my name. I’m Edson.’

  ‘Edson, you have a home to go to. You have all your family, and all those brothers and Dona Hortense and your Aunt Marizete and all those friends. You’ve got Carlinhos . . . Mr Peach. He loves you. I don’t know what he’ll do without you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Edson says, biting his lip because he can feel it coming and he does not want her to see it, not while he is hurt and full of rage, ‘maybe I love you.’

  She puts her hand up to her mouth, tries to push his words back into unspokenness.

  ‘Don’t say that, no, have you any idea how hard it is to hear you say that? How can I say this? This sounds the most callous thing. Edson, I died to you once already. I’m not her. I never was.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Edson, ‘it’s you I love.’

  ‘No!’ Fia cries. ‘Stop saying this. I’m going, I have to go now, I have to do this quickly. You can’t come with me. Don’t look for me, don’t try and get in touch with me. I won’t look for you. Let me go back to being dead.’

  She turns and walks up the red carpet. Marcelina opens the door. Edson knows what lies beyond that door: all the worlds in the multiverse. Once she steps through, she will disappear between the worlds and he will never be able to find her again. He will go back to his office at the back of Dona Hortense’s house in respectable hardworking Cidade de Luz. The fuss over the Q-cores will disappear as the police find easier meat to pick over. There will be other Keepie-Uppie Queens, other fut-volley teams, and there is the whole Habibi lanchonete business for De Freitas Global Talent. And on those rare clear nights in autumn and early spring he will look up beyond the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance to the stars themselves and the faint glow of the Milky Way, and see her out there, farther than any star, yet only a weave of the world away. The door is closing; Fia is already stepping through. One more step and he will lose her forever. And Edson finds he is running up those stairs, up that red carpet, toward that closing door. ‘No!’ he shouts. ‘No!’

  AUGUST 18-SEPTEMBER 3, 1733

  In the waxing light the quilombistas on Hope of the Saints Hill stood as one, silent, staring at the angels of God walking over the treetops toward them, haloed by the rising sun. Then Zemba beat his spear against his shield, ran up and down between the ranks, his iâos behind him, roaring and leaping, proud and furious.

  ‘What pacas are you, that stand in awe of wooden puppets? For bauds and gauds you would put your wrists into the manacles? Fight, you pacas! This is the City of God. This!’ The iâos in their bridal dresses joined their throats with his: a voice here, a voice there sounded; then of a sudden the whole hill shouted as one. Falcon felt the cry in his throat, the good cry of pride and defiance and laughter; then he too was roaring with the people: Hope of the Saints Hill red with bodies all shouting at the sun.

  The hill was still resounding to the great cheer as Falcon took his Manaos down the slope into the flooded forest. There was treachery beneath the opaque, muddied surface: the old trench lines and pit traps remained; one step could leave an unwary warrior floundering in deep water, helpless under the enemy’s blades. Falcon looked back but once, when he saw the angels come to halt. Through the trees he glimpsed Caixa in her forward trench, passing out serrated wooden knives to the women and children of her command. Moments later the varzea shook to the crash of artillery and the whistle of mortar shells. The hilltop where Zemba had stationed his viable artillery exploded in smoke and red earth. Clods fell like rain, but from the clearing cloud of smoke Falcon heard the cheer of defiance renewed. Zemba’s hasty earthworks had endured; the ballisteiros and trebuchistas danced on the parapet, waved their urocum-dyed manhoods at the hovering angels.

  A bird-whistle; Tucuru held his left hand out at his side, fluttered it. Enemy within sight. Falcon peered into the gloom, but all he could see was a waterlogged sloth, lanky and lugubrious, rowing its way across the floodwaters like a debauched spider. Then in an epiphany of vision, the same as suddenly draws constellations upon scattered stars, he discerned the curved prows of war canoes pressing through the leaf-and-water dazzle. He held out his sword. His archers concealed themselves in the lush cover. They would fire twice, then withdraw to harry the enemy again. Close. Let them close. And closer yet.

  ‘For the Marvelous City!’ Falcon cried. Fifty archers fired, their second arrows in the air before the first had found their marks. All was silent. Then the forest exploded in a wall of cannon fire and the air turned to a shrieking, killing cloud of ball and splint. In that opening salvo half of Falcon’s command was blown to red wreck.

  ‘Second positions!’ he shouted. Beyond the gunboats the waters were solid with canoes, more canoes than he had ever imagined. Crown and church had joined their forces not on a mission of enslavement but of annihilation. ‘Christ have mercy,’ he muttered. Against such odds all he could do, must do, was buy some little time. ‘Cover and fire!’ he commanded. The line of gunboats fired again as it advanced through the trees. Trunks branches twigs flew to splinters and leaves, a deadly storm of splinters, ripped apart by canister shot. Sword beating at his side, Falcon splashed through the thigh-deep water. He glanced up at the whistle and crash of a salvo of iron-hard wooden balls stabbing through the canopy. The boy slingers on Hope of the Saints Hill were firing blind on ballistic trajectories. Cries in Portuguese; the paddlers raised their wooden shields over their heads. The Manao beside Falcon took the unguarded moment to turn and loose an arrow at a cannoneer. A musket spoke, the man spun on his heel, the arrow skied, he fell back into the leaf-covered water, chest shattered red. As the gunners reloaded their murderous pieces Zemba’s treetop snipers opened fire. Warm work they performed with their repeating crossbows, but each story ended the same: blasts of blunderbuss, clouds of smoke, bodies falling from the trees like red fruit. And still the boats came on. Falcon looked around him at the bodies hunched in the water, already prey to piranha. Less than a quarter of his archers remained. This was bloody slaughter.

  ‘Retreat!’ Falcon yelled. ‘To the trenches! Sauve qui peut!’

  The canoes moved between the treetops. A biblical scene, Quinn thought: animals clinging desperately to the very tips of the submerged trees, each tree an island unto itself, the waters stinking with the bloated bodies of the drowned. A veritable city must have stood here to house and feed the workers, their huts the first to go under the rising water, all trace of the builders erased. Quinn tried to imagine the hundreds of great forest trees felled to form the pilings, the thousands of tons of earth moved by wooden tools and human muscles. A task beyond biblical; of Egyptian proportions.

  In the deep under-dawn they had stolen away from the Cidade Maravilhosa into the tangle of the flood-canopy. Sensed before seen, like the wind from many worlds stirring the varzea, Quinn had become aware of a vast dark mass moving beyond the screening branches; oars rising and falling like the legs of a monstrous forest millipede. Nossa Senhora de Varzea, forthright in attack, confident in strategy. Satanic arrogance was yet Father Diego Gonçalves’ abiding sin. Hunting shadows ran with Our Lady of the Flood Forest, dark as jaguars in the morning gloaming; a vast train of canoes, the City of God militant. Quinn pressed his finger to his lips; his lieutenants understood in a glance. Shipping noisy, betraying paddles they hauled themselves cautiously along boughs and lianas until the host of heaven was gone from sight.

  Open water before their prow; the dam a dark line between the blue sky and the green-dotted deeper blue of the flood. The simplicity of the geometry deceived the senses: whatever the distance the dam seemed the same size to the canoes so that Quinn was unable to estimate its distance. The patrol maintained its position a quarter league to the south. Quinn had glassed the canoes at range as they darted out from the green tangle of the southern side of the lake, light three-man pirogues admirably suited to interception work,
crewed by boys of no more than twelve years of age, painted and patterned like grown warriors; those grown warriors now assaulting the Cidade Maravilhosa. They signaled with bright metal. Flashes of light replied, and the world fell into perspective around Quinn: the dam was virtually within arrow-shot, the water very much higher than he had anticipated, almost to the top of the great log pilings. Figures ran from the palm-leaf shelters set up along the earthen walls; the first few arrows stabbed into the water around the canoes. Quinn turned the glass on them: old men, their hunting days past. He opened his sight to the other worlds, dam upon dam upon dam, all the water in the worlds mounted up behind them. Show me, what is best, what is right, show me the cardinal flaw. And then he saw it as clearly as if an angel stood upon the dome of the temple: a point slightly to the north of the center of the great, gentle bow of earth and wood where there was a slightly greater gap between the wooden pilings, the right answer plucked from the universe of all possible answers.