Brasyl

JUNE 9-10, 2006

O Dia had it on the front page. It was relegated to page two in Jornal do Brasil , pushed off the cover by a photograph of the wife of the head of CBF in just a pair of soccer socks and a strategically held ball. O Correio Brasilense likewise carried the scoop on page two, with a recap in the entertainment pages and a three-page analysis in the sports section, concluding that maybe it was time to look objectively at the Maracanaço and that it had swept away a swaggering complacency and so led to the mighty Seleçãos of 1958 and 1970 and that Carlos Alberto Parreira might well heed the lesson of 1950. Even Folha de São Paulo , which deigned anything carioca as beneath serious regard, carried the story in the bottom of the front page: RIO REALITY SHOW TO PUBLICLY TORTURE MARACANAÇO VICTIM. Jornal Copacabana’s Sunday Special splashed a full front page of “Professional Carioca” Raimundo Soares, arms folded, a look of righteous disgust on his face with the Sugar Loaf behind him and the lead-line SHE MADE ME BETRAY A FRIEND. O Globo opted for the full nuclear. Its cross-media network was ten times the size of Canal Quatro, yet it saw the upstart, adolescent independent channel as a grave threat to its key demographic and never wasted an opportunity to shit on it. A sixty-point screaming banner headline declared WELCOME BACK TO HELL. Beneath it was the lead photo of Barbosa, kneeling as if in prayer in the mouth of the Brazil goal, the ball sweetly in the back of the net. In the bottom left column was a picture of Adriano in surf shorts taken at the Intersul Television Conference in Florianopolis. Adriano Russo, responsible for bad-taste youth-oriented shows as Gay Jungle, Jailbait Superstar, and Filthy Pigs, said that the show was in the early stages of development among a raft of World Cup Season programming and that it had not yet been green-lit. When asked if the program intended to drag the eighty-five-year-old disgraced former goalkeeper out of retirement and subject him to “trial by television” and public humiliation, Canal Quatro’s director of programming said that the channel would maintain its position as the leading producers of edgy, noisy, and controversial popular television but that it was not, nor ever had been, its policy to hold older or weaker members of society up to shame.

They had called Adriano at dinner with his wife and guests in Satyricon, made him talk in front of the diners and all the waiting staff.

Page two ran a picture of the headquarters on Rua Muniz Barreto under the headline THRONE OF LIES. Beneath, the LIST OF SHAME ran down a chart of Canal Quatro’s sleaziest shows, from Nude Big Brother to Queen for a Day: I’m Coming Out!’ And there she was on page three, a grainy cellular snap of her at the commissioning party in Café Barbosa (a sign, a sign it had been, but against all she had assumed it to be) up on the table shaking it with her liter of Skol in its plastic cool jacket in her hand and Celso rolling his eyes as he pretended to lick her ass.

Queen of Sleaze

This is the Canal Quatro producer responsible for the Barbosa outrage, snapped during a drink- , drug- , and sex-fueled media party. Marcelina Hoffman is one of Canal Quatro’s most controversial program makers: her Jailbait Superstar, a talent show for inmates of a women’s prison, created a record number of complaints when it was revealed that the winner would be released, no matter what she had done. Ironically, it was Senhora Hoffman herself who gave the game away by accidentally sending an e-mail revealing the true purpose of the program to crusading journalist Raimundo Soares, after she lied to the King of the Cariocas in return for his help in finding Barbosa. Senhora Hoffman is a well-known Zona Sui party girl, infamous for her drinking and consumption of cocaine, and is described by work colleagues as a “borderline plastic surgery addict.” Her name has recently been linked with Heitor Serra, Canal Quatro’s respected newsreader…

The paper fell from Marcelina’s fingers. With a keening, animal cry she lay back among the tabloids and broadsheets scattered across Heitor’s floor, haloed in shouting headlines. HELP UU FIND BARBOSA FIRST! Rs 50,000 REWARD! SAVE BARBOSA. FIFTY YEARS IS ENOUGH.

Footsteps. Marcelina opened her eyes. Heitor stood over her like a Colossus, like the anticipation of water-sport sex, bizarrely foreshortened.

“I’m dead.”

Heitor kicked the papers across the room. “How long have you been here?”

“Forever. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could I dreamed I was awake. Do you have to get all the papers delivered?”

“It’s my job.”

Heitor had dropped back from the studio after the eleven thirty news update expecting Furaçao Marcelina to have blown through his apartment, strewing books, upturning tables, shattering glasses and fine china, shredding suits slashing paintings smashing the religious statues and images he had so adoringly collected over two decades of spiritual seeking. He had found something much more frightening: Marcelina seated in the middle of the floor, naked but for tanga, one knee pulled up to her breasts, the other folded around its ankle. She clutched her shin with both arms. Television cast the only light. When she looked up, Heitor saw a face so ghost-eaten, so alien that he had almost cried out, home invaded.

“Look.”

Marcelina had uncurled a fist holding the DVD remote, beeped it at the screen.

“What is it?”

“Don’t you see?” Marcelina had howled, and in her voice the hurricane broke. “It’s me.”

Heitor prised the remote out of her fingers, vanished the apparition paused in the act of looking up into the camera.

“In the morning.”

“No, not in the morning.”

“Get that down you.”

He had filled a glass from the refrigerator.

“What is it?”

“Just water.” Plus a capsule from his kitchen pharmacopoeia. “You need to rehydrate.”

“She wants rid of me,” Marcelina had said, sipping the water. “Who?”

“The me.”

The pill kicked in before she had finished the glass. Heitor lifted her into his bed. She was as small and light as a street dog. Heitor felt ashamed of all the times he had pinned her under his broad body; her thin, angular bones bending, her wiry thighs wrapped around his wide hairy back.

Ninety percent of Heitor’s cabinet of cures was out of date. Marcelina had come up out of the sleeping pill like a sea-launched missile. He snored; she padded into the living room to look again at the thing she could not commprehend. Again and again she watched the figure in the sweet black suit enter through the revolving door, go up to Lampião, and finally turn to look up into the camera for some clue, some truth. She had slowed the DVD down to a click through the individual frames. That was how she had found the tiny hint of a smile on her face, as if she-her-had intended that Marcelina see her grand imposture. Again and again and again, until the engine drone and brake-creak of the delivery boy’s LiteAce, the sound of feet on steps, and the thud of bundled papers against the back door.

Across the room Marcelina’s cellular sang “Don’cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me,” Brasiliero remix.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” A bone-deep media-ista, Heitor could be driven to high anxiety by an unanswered telephone.

“It’ll be the Black Plumed Bird.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“No!” Then, gently, “I don’t want her to know you’re here. The papers … ”

“I can see the papers. You have to talk to her sometime.”

The SMS alert jabbered, a recording of a very high travesti raving at the Copa carnaval party about his upcoming surgery.

“Give me a sweatshirt or something, then.”

On the balcony Marcelina strode up and down in panties and a holey old hoodie. Across the lagoon the apartment blocks were a holy city of silver and gold; the last rags of early mist burned off the green hills, and fit girls were running on the lakeside loop. Heitor tried to read Marcelina’s hands.

“So?”

Marcelina dropped onto the leather sofa.

“Bad enough. She told me to take some unofficial leave; basically, I’m suspended on full pay.”

“They could have fired you on the spot.”

“She talked Adriano down from that. She’s giving me the benefit of the doubt that I didn’t send the e-mail, that it was some kind of industrial espionage or someone hacked my computer. I think I may have got it wrong about the Black Plumed Bird.”

“And the show?”

“Adriano thinks it may have done us some good. APRIGPR.”

“We don’t get his text speak down in News and Current Affairs.”

“All PR Is Good PR. He’ll wait until he sees if there’s a ratings backlash against Rede Gobo. I may get it yet.”

“There’s another call you need to make.” Heitor’s espresso machine filled the kitchen zone with shriekings and roarings.

“I know. Oh, I know.” Her mother would be drunk, would have been drinking slowly, steadily all night, one slow little vodka at a time, watching the mesh of headlights along the rainy avenues of Leblon. Frank Sinatra had turned away. It had always been nothing more than reflections from a glitterball. Your self shattered into a thousand spangles and mirrored back to you. “And I will make it. But I can’t stay here, Heitor.”

“Oswaldo has hinted that it might not be the best thing for my professsional objectivity. Stay as long as you need. I’m not Jesus.”

“It’s not about you. Can you understand that? It’s not about you. It’s just that, while she’s still out there, I need you to be able to trust me, and that can only happen if you know that if I call or e-mail or drop round, it won’t be me. It’ll be her and whatever she says will be a lie.”

“I’d know her. I interviewed a policeman once who worked with forged banknotes. I asked him how he learned to spot the fakes and he said, by looking at the originals. I’d know you anywhere.”

“Did Raimundo Soares know? Did any of the people she sambaed past at Canal Quatro know? Did my sisters and my own mother know? No, it’s safer this way.”

“And how will I know when it’s over?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet!” Marcelina snapped. “Why are you making this harder for me? I don’t know how any of this is going to work, but I do know that I am a very, very good researcher and it’s time for me to stop being the hunted and turn it all around and become the hunter. What am I hunting? Myself. That’s all I can say about it. Something that looks like me, sounds like me, thinks like me, knows what I’m going to do before I do it, and is absolutely dedicated to destroying me. Why, I don’t know. I’ll find that out. But I do know that if it looks like me and thinks like me and talks like me, then it is me. How, I don’t know either. You tell me — you’ve shelffuls of books out there on everything under the sun. You’ve got a theory for everything: give me one, anyone that makes any sense.”

“Nothing does make any sense.” Heitor sat heavily on the opposing creaking leather minimalist sofa-cube across the glass coffee table.

“That doesn’t matter. Do you want to see the DVD again and tell me that isn’t rea!?”

“Some error of timing?”

“Ask my entire development team. They were smoking my blow at the time.”

“Well, if your evil twin is barefaced enough to get deliberately caught on camera at Canal Quatro, why did she disguise herself at terreiro?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe there’s another player. I’ll find out.” Marcelina fiddled with her coffee cup. “Do you think I have an evil twin? Do you think my mother… ? She had her glittering career — she was Queen of Beija-Flor — and I always felt I was inconvenient. Could she have … no. Not even her at her most fucked up.…”

But it seduced, a great archetype: the twins separated at birth, one spun into the neon and sequins of the Copacabana; the other to obscurity hungry, and now she had returned to claim her birthright. Had she seen this in a telenovela once?

“Ask her,” Heitor said.

Perhaps the coffee, perhaps the psychotherapeutic arrangement of the sofas, perhaps just the bell-like clarity of a friend listening and asking the one quesstion that made it fall apart into brilliant facets. Suddenly the face in the freezeeframe, the papers scattered across the floor, were clear and simple. Of course there was no spirit-Marcelina woven out of stress and wisps of axé blowing between the morros. There was no magic in the hills or in the city: Heitor’s bleak philosophy allowed no magic into the world at all. No ghosts no Saci Pererés no doppelgangers no parallel universes. Just an old family secret come to take her due. But you don’t know Marcelina Hoffman. She is the capoeirista; she takes down the smart boys with jeito and malicia: she is the malandra.

She had dried her clothes at midnight in Heitor’s tumble dryer-his cleaner believed in laundry on a Monday and it was no use asking Heitor; white goods hated him. He could not even properly operate his microwave and certainly his oven had never been used. Her jeans were tight and stiff as she forced her way into them, the top shrunken to overclinginess and her shoes still damp, the insoles stained. She swung her bag over her shoulder.

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll find somewhere. Not home.”

“How will you let me know when you’ve done whatever it is you need to do?”

“You’ll know, newsboy.” She stood up on tiptoes to kiss Heitor, old big growly bear-man. So easy to stay among the books and the minimalist leather, the picture glass and the slinky little playsuits, so easy to drop everyything onto him and burrow down into his mass and depth. So dangerous. No one was safe until she had the mystery under her foot in the roda. “How exactly do you go about asking you mother, ‘Mum, do I have a secret twin sister you gave away at birth?’”

Heitor’s Blackberry chirruped. It was not the first time sex had been interrupted by his RSS headline feed. She felt him tighten against her, muscle armoring.

“What is it, big bear?”

“That guy you went to see at the terreiro.”

“Bença Bento?”

“He’s been found dead. Murdered. Cut to pieces in the night.” Heitor hugged her to him, that strong-gentle crush-fearful delicacy of big men. “You be careful, oh so careful.”

The hat was shaped like an enormous upturned shoe, the sole brimming low over the kiss-curl, the heel — solid, chunky, Cubano even — a brave crest. Marcelina lifted it with the reverence of the host.

“Go on, try it,” Vitor urged, his face silver-screen brilliant.

Marcelina almost laughed at her reflection in the long mirror, put her hands on her hips and struck vampish, Carmen Mirandaesque poses, pout pout. Mwah. Then the light shifted, as it did dramatically in this old dream-theater, and in the sudden chiaroscuro she saw the Marcelina Hoffman her mother had dreamed: a silvery, powered night-moth, the toast of the Copacabana stepping out of the deep dark of the mirror. Marcelina shivered and snatched off the hat, but the sun grew strong again through the glass roof and she saw in the flaking silvering a pair of silver wings, and silver muscle-armor — pecced and abbed and burnished — and there a bloated, chinoiserie horror-baby mask.

“It’s … ,” she said, wondering.

“The wrong Brazil,” Vitor said. “They were striking set after the shoot, and it was all a dreadful kerfuffle and someone thought it was the shipping destination. ”

Vitor was of a generation whose duties and obligations went beyond those of alt dot families and honored still the carioca tradition of providing a bed and a beer for a night or a year and asking no questions. He had flung open his little shop of kitscheries to Marcelina, blown up the air mattress for her in the box room cluttered with boxes of old movie magazines and soccer programs, and when she had asked if there was a place where she could see her apartment without being seen, had without a word unlocked the door at the end of kitchen and ushered her through into the only true magic that Rio still knew. Marcelina had always wondered where Vitor had found the art deco treasures that had so perfectly topped off the interiors in Kitsch and Bitch. His apartment, odd-proportioned, impractical rooms, strange staircases, and inteerior balconies, was the converted foyer of a lost cinema, a jewel box of the 1940s smothered in cheap, shoving blocks like a forest tree within a strangler fig. Beneath the vaulted ceiling all the old movies had come to die. Props, sets, flats, lighting rigs, and costumes, entire World War Two fighter aircraft, pieces of ocean liner, cafes, and casas were jammed and piled together.

“They put everything in here, just in case they ever needed it again,” Vitor said as he led Marcelina up to the top gallery. “And then someone locked the door and walked away and everyone forgot about it until I did a bit of digging into the Jornal records. Mind your step there, the damp’s got in.”

There’s a program idea in here somewhere, Marcelina had thought; and it was grounding, it was sanity, it was the ineluctable truth of the trivial. There was a sun still in the sky and Jesus on a mountain. Now, even as she laid down the surreal shoe-hat, she gave a little cry: perched on a polystyrene head, all waxén pineapples and bananas be-dusted, was the original tutti-frutti hat.

“Here’s a good place.” Vitor opened a door into blinking, blinding light; a small room one side of which was a great circular window, leaded as if with vines. He patted a wicker chair. “You can see everything from up here, and no one will see you because no ever looks up. I’ll bring you tea by and by.”

It was a fine belvedere, part of a former bar, Marcelina theorized, commanding a sweep of street life: the convenience store, the two bars, the kilometric restaurant and the dry cleaners, the video store and the Chinese restaurant, and the lobbies of thirty apartment blocks, her own among them. So near, so secret. How many times, she wondered, might Vitor have watched her comings and goings? A freeze of fear: might her enemy have watched from this very seat and noted down her routines? Vitor would not have known; Vitor had met her already, when she snubbed him on the street, and had not known the difference. Paranoia. Paranoia was understandable.

Once, twice, three times Marcelina jerked herself awake, nodding into a doze in the comfortable, dusty warmth of the cupola. Investigative work, surrveillance, had never been her thing. Running around with cameras and sound booms, PDAs and release forms; that was the game. Vitor brought tea, twice. He never asked what she was doing there, watching the silver door of her apartment, never once mentioned her brief notoriety in the Sundays — a proper World Cup scandal had swept her into the center pages on all but the Globo papers. The old men and women came back from the beach. The street vendors worked the intersection. The bars put out tables and lit up televisions, a steady line of home-shifting workers went into the 7-Eleven and came out with bottled water and beer and beans. She learned the timetables of the metro trains arriving at Copacabana Station by the pulses of pedestrians down the streets. She saw Vitor take his accustomed seat by the street, order his tea, and open his paper. Friends and acquaintances stopped to chat for a moment, a minute, an hour. That looks a good life , Marcelina thought. Uncomplicated, investing in relations, humane and civilized. Then she thought, You’d be bored bored bored within half an hour. Give me Supermodel Sex Secrets and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.

She could procrastinate no longer. Marcelina called her mother.

“Hi. It’s me. Don’t hang up. Are you all right? Are you okay? Have you been, you know? Don’t hang up.”

“Iracema’s very hurt. I can’t even begin to say how hurt she is; Gloria too, and me, well I’m more disappointed than anything. Disappointed and surrprised; it’s not like you, why did you do a thing like that?” An edge of rasp in the voice, a three-day vodka hangover simmering off.

Ask her, ask her now; you have your opening. All the shadow-lengthening afternoon she had toyed with tactics, openings and moves, feints and concesssions, the edged tools from her box of professional instruments but ultimately hinging around the one strategic problem: to apologize and call later with the Hard Question, or to say it once and for all.

Marcelina decided.

“I know you won’t believe me if I say it wasn’t me — and I know I should just have apologized there and then. I don’t know why I started that arguument, bur I did and I’m sorry.” This much is true. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Another sharp little tool of the information trade. “You’ve probably seen the stuff in the paper by now.”

“Are you all right? Is everything okay?”

Are you a liar and a hypocrite? Marcelina asked herself. So long and so old and so tired it’s become truth?

“Mum, this is going to sound strange — maybe even the strangest thing I’ve ever said — but, am I the only one?”

Dead air.

“What, love? I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“I mean, is there…” The sentence hung unfinished. Marcelina heard her mother’s voice squawking, “What what what?” Standing in the open doorway of the apartment block applying lippy, closing a little Coco bag, the door swinging softly, heavily shut behind her. Her. The one. The evil twin. “Got to go Mum bye I love you.”

Marcelina dashed through the dark loom of the gallery knocking over dummies, sending costumes rocking on their rails. She jumped over the rotten woodwork, took the stairs two at a time. Lilac evening had poured into the streets; lights burned; people stared as she ran past them. Where where where? There. Marcelina ran the intersection; cars jolted to a halt, aggresssively sounded horns.

“Darling… ,” Vitor called after her.

Good suit. Good heels, confident heels — she can see them snapping at the sidewalk twenty, nineteen, eighteen people ahead of her. She walks like me. She is me. Left turn. Where are you going? Do you live within a spit of my home; have you lived here for years without my knowing, our paths and lives always that step out of synchronization; the two Marcelinas? Fifteen, fourteen people. Marcelina shouldered through the evening strollers, the dog-walkers, the power walkers. She could see her now. A little heavier? Hands a little broader, nails unsophisticated. Ten, nine, eight people. I’m behind you now, right behind you, if you looked around right now you would see me. Me. And Marcelina found that she wasn’t afraid. No fear at all. It was the game, the burn, the car lifted on the Rua Sacopa, the pictures coming together in the edit, the pitch when they get it, see it, when it all opens up in front of them; the moment when idea becomes incarnate as program.

I am behind you now.

Marcelina reached out to touch her twin’s shoulder. “Excuse me.”

The woman turned. Marcelina reeled back. This was no twin. A twin she would have known for its differences, its imperfections, the subtle variations spun out of the DNA. This was herself, precise to the moles, to the hair, to the slight scar on the upper lip, to the lines around the eyes.

“Ah,” Marcelina said. “Oh.”

She heard the blade before she saw it, a shriek of energy, an arc of blue.

And the malicia kicked: before sense, long before conscious thought, Marcelina dropped back to the ground in a negativa angola. The blade whistled over her face. Screams, shouts. People fled. Cars stopped, horns blared. Marcelina rolled out of the defensive drop with a kick. The blade cut down again. Marcelina flipped into a dobrado, then wheeled for a crippling kick. Two hands seized her pants and ankles and pulled her away. The knife slashed again, seeming to cut the air itself; the A-frame sign for the Teresina payweight restaurant fell into two ringing halves. The woman turned and ran. Marcelina struggled, but the hands held her.

“Leave it,” a man’s voice ordered. “This is beyond you. Leave it.”

Now she was quite quite mad, for the voice, the hands, the face belonged to Mestre Ginga.

FEBRUARY 2-10, 2033

Mr. Peach adores her.

“First halfway-stimulating conversation I’ve had in months,” he says to Edson in the privacy of breakfast moments while Fia is in the shower. She is a bathroom girl; the sound of her happy splashing carries far up and down the fazenda’s cool tiled corridors.

“Never mind that,” says Edson. “Is all the gear stowed away?”

Mr. Peach holds up a big old iron key. Fia comes in patting the ends of her hair dry with a towel. She knows Mr. Peach as Carlinhos; a kind of uncle in Edson’s far-flung family, scattered like stars linked in a constellation. They’re going to talk science again.

Edson hates it when they do that. He bangs aluminum things in the kitchen while they argue quantum information theory.

The best Edson understands it is this: Fia had been part of a research team using her University of São Paulo quantum mainframe to explore multiversal economic modeling, entangling so many qubits — that, Edson underrstands, is the word — across so many universes that it has the same number of pieces as a real economy. And, Mr. Peach says, if the model is as complex as the things it models, is there any meaningful difference? In Fia’s São Paulo — in Fia’s world — it seems to Edson that tech-stuff took a different turn sometime in the late teens, early twenties. Where Edson’s world solved the problem of processors and circuit boards so small that quantum effects became key elements, Fia’s world learned to use proteins and viruses as processors. Semi living computers you can tattoo on your ass as opposed to cool I-shades and the need to reel out ever-more-complex security codes to satisfy a paranoid, omniscient city. But Fia’s people killed their world. They couldn’t break the oil addiction, and it burned their forests and turned their sky hot sunless gray.

They were on about superpositions again. That’s where a single atom is in two contradictory states at the same time. But a physical object cannot be two things at once. What you measure is that atom and its exact corresponding atom in another universe. And the most likely way for both to be in a state of superposition is for them each to be in quantum computers in their own universes. So in a sense (big brain itch here, right at the back of Edson’s head where he can’t reach it) there are not many many quantum computers across millions of universes. There is just one, spread across all of them. That’s what Fia’s economic model proved; what they’re calling the multiversal quantum computer. Then she created a quantum model of herself and found that it was more than a dumb image. It was Mr. Peach’s storm blowing between worlds. It was a window to all those other Fia Kishidas with whom it was entangled. The ghost Fias Edson had glimpsed in the workshop in Cook/Chill Meal Solutions were counterparts in other worlds spellbound by entanglement.

Edson bangs down the pot and cups.

“Carlinhos. I need to borrow your car.” Edson’s going shopping. Out on the streets of his big dirty city with his hands on the wheel and one of the many backup identities he’s stashed all across northwest Sampa, I-shades feeding him police maps, Edson feels his mojo returning. Careful. Overconfidence would be easy and dangerous. For this kind of operation he would normally have picked up an alibi, but that’s not safe after that poor bastard Petty Cash. The Sesmarias may be out of the game, but there are those other bastards: the Order, who ever they are; and then the cops, always the cops. No, a malandro can’t be too careful. He takes camera-free local roads and backstreets to the mall. Among the racks and hangers is bliss. It is good to buy, but he dare not use his debit account. If the stores don’t give him a disscount for cash — and many will not even accept notes — he moves on to another one.

“Hey, got you something to make you look less like a freak.” From the glee with which she throws herself on the bright bags, Edson concludes there are other things than physics that light up Fia Kishida.

“Did you choose for me or for you?” she asks, holding up little scraps of stretchy sequined fabric.

“You want to look Paulistana?” Edson says.

“I want not to look like a hooker,” Fia says, hooking down at the bottom of her cheek-clinging shorts. “But I love these boots.” They are mock-jacaré, elasticated with good heels, and Edson knew she would coo and purr at first try-on. The crop top shows off the minute detail of her tattoo-computer; in the low light slanting across the fields of oil-soy it burns like gold. Edson imagines the wheels and spirals turning, a number mill.

“Where I come from, it’s rude to stare.”

“Where I come from, people don’t have things like that tattooed on them.”

“Do you ever actually apologize for anything?”

“Why should I do that? Come and eat. Carlinhos is making his moqueça. You need to eat more.”

In the cool of the evening, Edson finds Mr. Peach leaning against his balcony rail with a big spliff in his hand. The burbs glow like sand beneath him; the stars cannot match them. Even the light-dance of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, like attenuated bioluminous Amazon insects, up on the edge of space, is muted and astrological. The night air brings with it the slur of wind turbines up on the old coffee plantations, a sound Edson has always found comforting and stimulating. Endless energy.

“Hey, Sextinho.” Mr. Peach offers Edson the big sweet spliff.

“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Edson says, but takes a good toke anyway and lets it swirl up into the dome of his skull. Mr. Peach leans toward him. He takes another toke from Edson, slips an arm comfortably around his back. He holds the spliff up, contemplates it like holy sinsemilla.

“This the only thing keeping me from running right out that gate and getting on the first plane to Miami,” Mr. Peach says, looking at the coil of maconha smoke.

“Miami?”

“We’ve all got our boltholes. Our Shangri-las. When it’s abstract, when it’s more universes than there are stars in the sky, than there are atoms in the universe, I can handle it. Numbers, theories; comfortable intellecrual games. Like arithmetic with infinities: terrifying concepts, but ultimately abstract. Head games. She didn’t know me, Sextinho.”

Edson lets the name pass.

“She didn’t recognize me. She would have known me, same as … the other one. Jesus and Mary, the word games this makes us play. Quantum theory, quantum computing, quantum schmauntum; at that postgrad level you work across disciplines. But she didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t there. Maybe I was dead, maybe I was in jail, maybe I never was a physicist, maybe there never was a Carlinhos Farah Baroso de Alvaranga. But I know: I’m in Miami. I could have gone. Twenty years ago I could have gone. Open arms, they’d have had me. Lovely doe-eyed Cuban boys with nasty Mafia connecctions. But Dad would have had to go into a home, and I couldn’t do that. Leave him. Leave him with strangers. So I turned the offer down, and he lived three years and I think he was happy right up to the end. By then I was too old, too entangled. Too scared. But he went. He’s leading the life I could have led. I should have led.”

Mr. Peach quickly wipes any tears gone before they gather gravity. Edson says gently, “I remember you told me once that it was all fixed, from beginning to end; like the universe is one thing made out of space and time and we only dream we have free will.”

“You’re not reassuring me.”

’Tm just trying to say, there was nothing you could have done.”

The spliff has burned down to a sour roach. Edson grinds it flat under the sale of his Havaiana.

“Sextinho… Edson. I think I really need to be with you tonight.”

“I thought we’d agreed.”

“I know but, well, why should it matter if it’s not her?”

Edson loves the old bastard, and he could come for him, without games, without boots and costumes, without masks, pretend to be that nasty Cuban malandro, pretend to be whatever he needs to send him to Miami in his mind. But still, it does matter. And Mr. Peach can read that in Edson’s body, and he says, “Well, looks like it’s not fated in this universe either.”

In retro Hello Kitty panties, Fia backstrokes laps of the pool. From verandah shadow Edson watches sunlit water dapple her flat boy-breasts. He checks for stirrings, urgings, dick-swellings. Curiosity, getting a look, like any male. Nothing more.

“Hey.” She treads water, face shatter-lit by reflected sun-chop. “Give me a towel.”

Fia hauls herself out, drapes the towel over the mahogany sun lounger and herself on the towel. Nipples and little pink panty-bow.

“This is the first time I’ve felt clean in weeks,” Fia declares. “He’s not your uncle, is he? I found your stuff. I couldn’t sleep so I went poking around. I do that, poke around. I found these costumes and things. They’re very… sleek.”

“I told him to make sure they were locked up.”

“Why? If you guys have something going on, I’m cool with it. You don’t have to hide stuff from me. Did you think I would be bothered? Did she know? That’s it, isn’t it? She didn’t know.”

“You’re not her, I know. But are you bothered?”

“Me. No. Maybe. I don’t know. It bothers me you didn’t tell her.”

“But you said — ”

“I know, I know. Don’t expect me to be consistent about this. What did you do, anyway, with the gear and all that?”

“Superhero sex.”

Her eyes open wide at that.

“Like, Batman and Robin slashy stuff? Cool. I mean, what do you actually do?”

“What’s it to you?”

’’I’m a nosy cow. It’s got me into trouble already.”

“We dress up. We play. Sometimes we pretend to fight, you know, have battles.” Hearing it spoken, the secret spilled, Edson feels burningly embarrassed. “But a lot of the time we just talk.”

“I’m trying to picture Carlinhos in one of those full suits.…”

“Don’t laugh at him,” Edson says. “And I call him Mr. Peach. The first time we met, he gave me peaches for minding his car because he didn’t have any change. He watched me eat them. The juice ran down my chin. I was thirteen. You probably think that’s a terrible thing; you probably have some clever educated middle-class judgment abour that. Well, he was very shy and very good to me. He calls me Sextinho.” There is an edge in his voice that makes Fia feel self-conscious, tit-naked in an alien universe. It’s their first row. A motorbike passes the gate. Edson notes it, remembers fondly his murdered Yamaha scrambler. A few seconds later it passes the gate again in the opposite direction. Slow, very slow. Edson feels his eyes widen. He looks up. A surveillance drone completes it buzz over the shiny new gated estate, but does it linger that moment too long on the outward turn? He had been so careful in Mr. Peach’s car, but there were always cameras he could have missed, a new one put up, an eye on a truck or a bus or in a T-shirt or even a pair of passing I-shades that later got into a robbery or an I-mugging or something that would have had the police running through the memory. Paranoia within paranoia. But everyone is paranoid in great São Paulo.

He says, “How long have you been here now?”

“Three days,” Fia says. “Why are you asking?”

“You’ve been talking all that physics — ”

“Information theory … ”

“Whatever shit, but I want to ask, have you found a way back yet?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said it was a one-way trip, there was no going back.”

“Well, a quantum mainframe the size of São Paulo U’s would do. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I think they’re looking for us.” That gets her sitting upright. Hello Kitty. “In fact, I think they know where we are. We’re not safe here. I can get you safe, but there’s one problem. It’s going to take a lot of money.”

Bare-ass naked on the pseudo-Niemeyer wave mosaic by the green green pool Edson holds the towel in one hand and asks the soldados, “Where do I go?”

They grunt him to the landscaped sauna at the back of the spa. Both High and Low Cidades know The Man has a morbid fear of age and wreck and spends profanely on defeating it. No one in the two cities expects him to live so long, but he has resident Chinese medics and Zen hot springs for his hilltop pousada. Some sonic-electric field tech thing holds in the heat. The Man beckons Edson join him on the hardwood bench. Around him sit his soldados, as naked as he; stripped-down guns at easy reach on the hot wood: the Luz SurfTeam, they call themselves. They have surfers’ muscles and scrolls of proud dotted weals across their chests and bellies where they pierce themselves and carefully rub in the ashes of scarification ritual. Edson sits carefully, conscious of his shaved genitals, unsure of the etiquette of being caught staring at your drug lord’s dick.

“Son, do we find you well?” The Man is nested in as many names as his corporate structure. The lower city, where his writ runs partial, knows him as Senhor Amaral; in the upper city he is Euclides. Only the priest who baptized him knows his full name. Layers, pyramids: he is fleshy, rolls of fat tapering toward his hairless head, shaved as close as Edson’s balls. “And the dona, how is she this weather?” When Anderson died, Euclides the Man sent flowers and condolences with a picture of Our Lady of Consolation. He claims to be as omniscient as the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, but he does not know that Dona Hortense shredded the card and, by dark of moon, threw the flowers into the fetid, Gurana-bottle-and-dead-piglet-choked sewer that is Cidade de Luz’s storm drain. “I hear you’ve been causing that good lady grief, Edson.”

“Senhor, I would not pur my own mother in any kind of danger, believe that.” Edson hears the shake in his voice. “Could I show you something? I think you’ll be impressed.” Edson lifts his hand. The SurfTeam stirred toward their guns. The Man nods. Edson completes the gesture and out of the changing room bounds Milena in her monogrammed top and patriotic thong and socks, soccer ball skittering like a puppy before her, blithely chewing her gum before her audience of naked male meat. Remember what I taught you , Edson wills at her as she keeps the ball up up up. Smiling smiling always smiling.

“So, senhor, what do you think?” After this , Edson thinks, one hundred thousand fans at Morumbi are easy.

“I am impressed; the girl has a talent. Now, she will need some surgery up top, and I am sure you have that already planned, but her ass is good. She has a Brasilian ass. How long can she keep it up for?” The Man slaps the soldado beside him hard on the thigh. “Hey, you like that white ass? That getting you stiff, eh?” Slap slap. I would remember that, ifl were him, Edson thinks. “Jigga jigga eh?” Slap slap slap. “Who’s got boners, eh? Come on, show me, who’s hard?” Everyone but The Man, Edson notices. And Edson. “So, son, I am rightly entertained, but you didn’t come up here just to show me your Keepie-Uppie Queen.”

“That’s correct,” Edson says. “I’m here because I’m planning an operaation, and I need your permission.”

Pena Pena Penal! The word up and down the ladeiros, running down the serpentine main street of Cidade de Luz like sheet-water, rumored through the diners and supermarkets, the ball courts and the lamp standards where carpimpers hard-wired their arc-welders and spray-guns. Black cock tail-feathers stuck into the verge mud, poked through the wire mesh of a front gate, tucked under windscreen wipers. Stencil-cut roosters sprayed onto shop shutters, curbstones, into the corners of bigger, bolder swaths of street art; the cheeky, ballsy little black cock. His crow sounded across the hillside from the rodovia to the bus station, from the Assembly of God to the Man high over all: call the boys, the good old boys, the gang is back.

They met in the back office of Emerson’s gym among the broken exercise machines: Emerson himself; Big Steak — could do with patronizing his own gym; Turkey-Feet with his Q-blade; that fool Treats because if he had been left out he would have blown the whole thing; then the car boys Edimilson and Jack Chocolate from the garage; Waguinho and Furação the drivers; and, honorary Penas, Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles for stealth and security, looking simultaneously superior and scared.

“And me,” Fia had said. “You used my money, I want to see what you’re spending it on.”

“It wasn’t your money. Someone had to know how to place the bet. And some of the guys, they knew you from before.”

Edson had to admit, it was a brilliant little scam. Fia had come banging on his door in the wee wee hours, a look of wide-eyed astonishment on her face. Edson had been out of his bed in an instant, bare-ass naked, reaching for Mr. Peach’s gun thinking, Killers Sesmarias pistoleiros.

“I can’t believe it, you’ve got A World Somewhere!”

O Globo 12 ran twenty-four-hour telenovelas, and In the insomniac hours Fia had channel surfed onto a quantum marvel. (“Everything happens somewhere in the multiverse,” Mr. Peach had said at breakfast the next morning where they cracked the plan over the eggs and sausage.) Not just that Edson’s universe too had A World Somewhere , but that it was identical to the one to which Fia had been secretly addicted: cast, characters, and plot. With one significant, big-money-making difference: the telenovela in Edson’s universe was a week behind. Edson even remembered the cause:

Fia — the other Fia — had explained that it was a strike by the technicians. It had gone to the wire, but they had walked out all the same. It had seemed important to her at the time. In Fia’s universe, they had made the deal.

“The same, word for word?”

She nodded, dumbfounded. “Are you sure?”

Big big eyes.

“Information is power,” he had declared over breakfast eggs and sausage.

“How can we make money out of this?”

“That’s easy,” Fia said. “Boy-love.” Mr. Peach scrambled eggs, unperturbed. For two months now A World Somewhere had been working up to a culminating moment of passion and oral between Raimundo and Ronaldão. If Edson ever bothered to watch the television read mags follow the chat channels, he would have known that the most important question in Brasil was will they/won’t they? The bookies’ odds were dropping day by day as the Notorious Episode approached: it surely must happen: boy-love on prime time. As part of the buildup the writers had been holed up in a hotel under armed guard. Expectation was sky-high, advertising prices cosmological.

But Fia had already watched that ep.

It was a complicated bet; small amounts liquidated from antiques donated by Mr. Peach spread around backstreet bookies all over northern São Paulo, never enough to shift the odds, sufficiently far apart to break up a pattern. Edson, Fia, and Mr. Peach cruised the boulevards, swinging coolly into the back-alley rooms and slapping the reis down on the Formica table.

Edson was so engrossed sending the black feathers and the pichaçeiros with the cockerel stencils out into Cidade de Luz to summon the old team that he completely missed the Notorious Episode.

Old Gear summoned his safe out of the floor and fetched sufficient reis to bathe in.

“How did you know they’d chicken out at the last moment? Were you holding a scriptwriter’s mother hostage or something?”

“Or something,” Edson said.

And standing up in front of the old Penas in Emerson’s gym, sports-bags full of reis under the desk, Edson had watched the years scatter like startled birds. He was twelve again, and with the rolling back of hope and achievement came the bitter realization that for all his ambition he had never been able to fly fast enough to escape Cidade de Luz’s gravity. You end as just another malandro with a gun and a gang.

“Thank you all for coming. I have a plan, an operation. I can’t achieve it myself; I need your help. It’s not legal” — laughs here: As if, Edson — “and it’s not safe. That’s why I wouldn’t ask you as friends, even as old Penas. Don’t think I’m insulting anyone’s honor when I offer to pay you, and I’ll pay well. I had a bit of a windfall. A couple of bets came in. You know me; I will always be professional.” He takes a breath and the room holds its breath with him. “It’s a big ask, but this is what I want to do … ”

“I see no political objections to you planning an operation,” says The Man, leaning into the heat so that the sweat drips from his nipples. “Edson, I respect your businesslike attitude, so I’m offering you fifteen percent off the standard license fee.”

Edson realizes he’s been holding his breath. He lets it out so slowly, so imperceptibly, that the sweat-beads on his thin chest do not even shiver.

“It’s a generous offer, senhor, but at the moment, any monetary fee hits my cash flow hard.”

The Man laughs. Every part of him jigs in sympathy. “Let’s hear your payment plan, then.”

Edson nods at Milena, still keeping it up, still smiling at every bounce.

“You said she was impressive.”

“I said she needed surgery.”

“I’ve got her a try-out with Atletico Sorocaba.” It’s not quite a lie. He knows the first name of the man there; he’s left an appointment with the secretary.

“Not exactly São Paulo.”

“It’s building a following. I’ve a career development plan.”

“No one could ever accuse you of not being thorough,” The Man says. “But…”

“I’ll throw in my fut-volley crew.”

The Man scowls. The SurfTeam copies his expression, amplified by hard. “They’re girls.”

The Man rolls his head on his sloping, corrugated neck.

“They do it topless.”

“Deal,” says The Man, suddenly quivering with laughter, rocking back and forth, creasing his big hairy belly, slapping his thigh. “You kill me, you fucking cheeky ape. You have your license. Now, tell me, what do you want it for?”

“Very well, senhor, with your permission I am going to break into the military police vehicle pound at Guapira 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 Solimoes some two hundred and fifty leagues from the Amazon’s mouth, three leagues beneath the settlement of São José Tarumás, named after the nowextinct 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 sift. 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 disstant 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 coutse 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 blisstered 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? Bur ‘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 Várzea, 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 Várzea. “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 mate 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; the 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 Iguapára. 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 commpany. Manoel had passed into a silent, trancelike state of introspection; even the Guabirú guards were mute. I have heard that the indios may will themmselves 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 caraibas. 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 posssible 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 caraiba descends into confusion, then to full hallucination and a final collapse into insanity and death. They see too much. They try to understand, they overballance, 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 várzea 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, bur 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 chilldren, 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, commplete, 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.

“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 quesstion 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 wonndered if the universe might be modeled by a simple machine: here is your answer. There is a world for every possible deed and act, bur 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.”

“I cannot believe that,” Falcon said, the first words he had spoken since Quinn began his testimony. “I must believe that the world is shaped by our wills and actions.”

“The Rio Branco will run with the blood of the Guabirú and they will vanish utterly from this world: it will happen, it has already happened. Manoel spoke it first, and Paguana in a fit of rage seized a spear and ran him through, again and again. He would have done the same to me had he not been restrained by the Iguapá, and in truth, what good would it have done? The words spoken cannot be taken back. The Guabirú will be destroyed whether the oracle is spoken or not. This is the true horror of the Iguapá gift: the foreknowledge of that which you are powerless to change.

“For that instant only the truth spoke clear out of all the possible answers; then the roar of voices resumed, doubled, redoubled in volume; a million million voices and I could hear each one of them, Robert. I was driven down and apart so that I forgot who I was, where I was. I fled between worlds, a ghost, a demon. I know now I was cut down from the cross and that the Guabirú, with little grace, bound me to a litter to take me back to the City of God. I believe the Iguapá only let me go because they knew I would certainly die. There are moments of sanity and surcease when I became aware of this world: lurching through the trees, carried by blindfolded bearers, and again, at the river, when the Iguapá seized Paguana and poured poison into his eyes, for he had committed sacrilege against the caraíba.

“I recall Nossa Senhora da Várzea at night, a thousand lights upon her, and Diego Gonçalves’s face looking down upon me: I recall seeing my own face flecked with Iguapá gold in a mirror and my own breath misting my image. And all the while the one sane thought in my head was that he must not have it, that I must exert myself, discipline myself not to give voice to the truth I had learned in my madness and visions of other worlds. Deny him it, deny him it; I believe now it was that simple, potent need that drew me back from destruction. But I had no strength, my body was a traitor. Then among the worlds I heard my name spoken and it called me back, and there was Zemba, good Zemba. He it was who slipped me from my hammock and took a canoe and pushed us out into the stream, and then all the stars of all the universes opened upon me and I was lost in light.

“Water, Falcon, I beg you.”

Hands trembling, Robert Falcon held the water skin up to Luis Quinn’s lips. Again Quinn drank deeply, desperately. The tent fabric glowed with the promise of day: a night had been talked away, and all the birds of the forest joined in one whooping, shrilling, clattering chorus.

“My friend, my friend, I cannot believe what you are saying. If it is true … Rest, restore your strength. You are still very weak, and it is clear that some residue of the curupairá still affects your reason.”

Marie-Jeanne had given Falcon the flask — a precious, pretty little thing, chased silver, easily slipped into the place next to the heart — at the reception in the Hotel Faurichard the night before his embarkation to Brest. For when you are far from home, and wish to remember it, and me. How he wished for a sip of its fine old Cognac. This monstrous river, this dreadful land, this terrifying endless silent forest that hid horrors at its heart but spoke never a word, gave never a sign. One sip of France, of Marie-Jeanne and her bright, birdlike laughter; but he had stowed it, restowed it, stowed it yet again, it was lost. Not one world but many worlds. A drug that enabled the human mind to see reality and to communicate with its counterparts, the implication being — given that the universe ran to explicable, physical laws and not a quixotic divine will or thaumaturgy — that all minds must therefore be aspects of the one, immense mind. Quinn’s image returned to him, a stack of loom cards unfolding one at a time through the toothed mill of a Governing Engine.

Quinn had forced himself upright, gaunt face tight with energy and mania. “Even now I see it, Falcon, though the vision fades — no mind can look on such things and survive. Gonçalveswas correct in his supposition that my particular cast of mind — something in my facility for language, some innate ability to see pattern and meaning — allowed me to survive where those before me that he sent to seek out the oracle perished. But I am ridden by a terrible fear, that in my delirium I betrayed the Iguapá and even now that monstrous blasphemy of a basilica is casting off into the stream to enslave them. Falcon, I must go back. I have betrayed my order and my vows. I have left undone that which I ought to have done. There is no help in me. Doctor, I may have need again of your sword.”

“That you shall not have,” Falcon said, preparing manioc mush. “For I shall have need of it myself, at your side.”

The signs are set, the markers laid down; yet the Iguapá do not come. This is our fourth night upon this strand, and the fear haunts me that they have already been knocked down at the block in São José Tarumás. On the third night of our journey up the Catrimani and the Rio Iguapará we stole past Nossa Senhora de Várzea, the monstrous carbuncle, but was it ascending, or descending with its holds full of red gold? Falcon paused to swipe at a troubling insect, then bent to his journal again. Diliigently I log this journey, leagues traveled, rivers mapped, though the purpose of my expedition is utterly lost. I record villages and missions, navigation hazards and defensible positions; but increasingly I ask myself, to what end? Too readily I convince myself no one will ever read these reports and dispatches. Quinn would tell me that dessperation is a sin, but I dread that I shall never leave this green hell, that my bones will lie down in the heat and the rot and the pestilence and be covered over with veggetation and every trace of me will be lost. And yet, I write …

A twitch at the tent flap. Zemba entered the scriptorium. “The Mair wishes me to inform you, they are here.”

Mair: the hero, the supernatural leader, the extraordinary man. The legend was beginning. Falcon’s own Manaos now used it among themselves; he soon expected to hear it addressed to Quinn directly in place of the commonplace Pai. Zemba had appointed himself Quinn’s lieutenant, but what else besides? Falcon realized that his opinions of Zemba were prejudices drawn from his physical size and the color of his skin. Here was a man rich in skills and insight, taken from his home and people in the sure knowledge that he would never see any of them again, that to him they were the dead, that any life he must make would be here, rootless, reduced to an insect, a speck in the vastnesses of Brazil.

“I am coming.”

Falcon stepped from the tent into a ring of blowpipes. The unworldly golden faces, the elongated, sloping foreheads of the Iguapá reminded Falcon strikingly, terrifyingly, of an altar screen by some maniacal Flemish painter, judgments and dark deliverers and strange, sharp instruments of inquiry. Twenty weapons drew on Falcon. Quinn sat at his ease propped on a barrel of salt pork, merry almost, though one of the Iguapá, a speaker of the lingua geral, stood before him in clear accusation. It was like a dance between them: the Iguapá striding forward to stab with his blowpipe, bark a question, then step back into the company. Quinn would answer in the same tongue, slowly, patiently, at his ease.

“The indio asks if the Mair is man or spirit. The Mair answers, ‘Touch my hands, my face,’ ” Zemba translated for Falcon.

Quinn held out his arms, a black crucifix. Waitacá composed himself before his hunting brothers, then stepped boldly forward and pressed the fingers of his hands into Quinn’s palms.

“The indio begs forgiveness, but it has never happened in the memory of the Iguapá that a caraíba’s soul has returned to his body from the worlds of the curupairá,” Zemba whispered. Quinn spoke, and the circle of hunters gave a low rumble of astonishment and anger. Falcon noted that some of the golden-faced warriors were still uncircumcised boys. Oh for my sketchbook! he thought. Such singular crania; they must be achieved in infancy by binding the head, as was the custom of many of the extinct peoples of the Andes.

“What did the father say there?”

“The Mair said, ‘Ask me a question, any question.’’’

The Iguapá called to each other in their own language. The Manaos waited at the edge of the firelight, suspicious, ready for fight. Falcon caught the eye of Juripari, his Manao translator. One word and the Manaos would strike. One word and it would be more bloody anonymous death on the river sand, unseen, unheard, unmourned.

Waitacá jabbed his blowpipe at Quinn with a simultaneously stabbing question.

“He says, ‘And where was your God, O priest?’”

For too many heartbeats Falcon felt every poison dart trained on him.

Then Quinn snatched the blowpipe from Wairaea’s and smartly, impertinently, rapped him on his sloping forehead. Waitacá’s hand flew to the serrated wooden dagger slung across his chest, eyes bulging in rage. Quinn held his gaze; then his face gently creased and folded into a smile, into helpless laughter. The infection of the ridiculous: Waitacá’s wounded pride evaporated like a morning mist; shaking with barely contained mirth, he took the blowpipe back from Quinn and, with deadly pomp, tapped the Jesuit on the crown of the head. Quinn exploded into guffaws; released, every Iguapá let free their repressed laughter. Wairaea managed to bellow out a choking senntence before he doubled up. Against will, reason, and sanity, Falcon felt the clench of laughter beneath his ribs.

“What did he, what did the indio say?”

“He said, ‘Of course, where else?’”

The laughter was slow spent, the madness of fear transfigured.

“Bur my friends, my friends,” Quinn said, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his filthy black robe, “I must warn you, the other father, the Black Pai, is coming. His great church is less than a day from you, and all his thought is turned upon you.” In a breath all laughter ceased. “He intends the reduction of the Iguapá, and all your concealments and traps will not avail you, for he has as many warriors as there are stars in the sky and he would sell everyone of their lives to assimilate you into his City of God. Your gods and ancestors will wander lost; your name will be forgotten.”

A warrior called out a question. Waitacá translated. “How does the Black Pai know this?”

“Because in my madness I told him,” Quinn said.

A susurrus of dismay passed from warrior to warrior. A youth, a still-fat boy, asked, “Will the Black Pai take us?”

Quinn sat back on his barrel, turned his gaze upward to the band of stars. You know the answer to that , Falcon thought. You see them still; I think you see them always, those stars of the other skies. All the worlds you told me are open to you.

“Bring your women and your children,” Quinn said. “Your beasts and your weapons, your tools and your cooking pots. Sling your hammocks upon your backs and gather up your urocum and the bones of your ancestors. Make cages for your curupaira, as many as you can carry, male and female both. When you have done all this, burn your village to the earth and follow me. There is a place for you. I have seen it, a hidden place, a safe place, not just for the Iguapá but also for everyone who flees the slave coffle and the block. There will be no slaves. This place will be rich in fish and hunting, manioc and fruits; it will be strong and defended.” Quinn inclined his head to Zemba. “No one will be able to take this place, not the bandeirantes, not the Black Pai and his Guabirú fighters. The name of it will be Cidade Maravillhosa, the Marvelous City. Falcon, gather your supplies and what equipment you deem necessary. Burn your canoes and whatever you do not require on the journey. We leave this instant. I shall lead you.”

“Quinn, Quinn, this is insanity, what madness … ?” Falcon cried, but Luis Quinn had already disappeared into the dark of the forest. One by one the golden bodies of the Iguapá followed him and vanished.