Brasyl

JUNE 10-11, 2006

The book fitted the palm of the hand like a loved, kissed breviary; small, dense, bound in soft, mottled-gold leather that felt strangely warm and silky to Marcelina’s touch, as if it were still alive. Hand-sewn header tapes, a bookmark made from that same brass-and-gold leather, edged with new bright gold leaf; this was a volume that had been bound and rebound any times. The hand-painted endpapers were original watercolor sketches of a river journey, both banks represented, right at the top, left at the bottom, landmark trees, missions, churches all marked. Indios adorned with fantastical feathered headdresses and capes stood in canoes or on bamboo rafts; pink river dolphins leaped from the water. In the top of a dead tree red howler monkeys had been depicted in the oversize but minute detail of a dedicated chronicler. All was annotated with legends Marcelina could not decipher.

Mestre Ginga signaled for her to set the little book down. The cover bore only the outline of a frog, embossed in gold leaf. With gloved hands he moved it reverently to the end of the folding camp table before setting the coffee in front of Marcelina. She too wore gloves, and had been instructed under no circumstances to get the book wet. She sipped her coffee. Good, smoky, from a Flamengo mug. The walls of the little kitchen at the back of the fundação were painted yellow, the handmade cupboards and work surrfaces blue and green. A patriotic kitchen. A lizard sprang from stone motionnlessness to skim up the wall between the framed photographs of the great mestres and capoeiristas of the forties and fifties, before the joga became legal, let alone fashionable; men playing in Panama hats down in rodas down by the dock, stripped down to the singlets, pleat-top pants rolled up to the knees. The classic kicks and movement but with cigarettes in their mouths. That was true malandragem.

“So,” Mestre Ginga said. “What did you notice about the book?”

The car had taken off like a jet from the side of the street, and in the daze and confusion and the shock but above all the single, searing icon of her face, her face, her own face behind the knife, all Marcelina could think to say was, “I didn’t know you owned a car.”

“I don’t,” said Mestre Ginga, crashing gears. “I stole it.” It soon became clear that he didn’t drive either, blazing a course of grace and havoc between the taxis on Rua Barata Ribeiro, scraping paint-thin to the walls of the Tunel Novo, leaping out in a blare of horns into the lilac twilight of Botafogo. “I mean, how hard can driving be if taxi drivers do it?”

Marcelina saw the glowing blue free-form sculpture that crowned Canal Quatro appear above the build-line. It was a reassurance and a sorrowing psalm, a promised land from which she was exiled. She breathed deep, hard, the calming, powering intake of air that gave her such burning strength in the roda or the pitching room.

“I need a few things explained to me.”

Into Laranjeiras now, under the knees of the mountain.

“Yes, you do,” said Mestre Ginga, leaning back in his seat and steering one-handed. “It’s knowing where to start. We’d hoped that you wouldn’t get involved, that we could handle the admonitory before you learned anything, but when the bença was murdered, we couldn’t hold off.”

“That was you at the terreiro.”

“You always were too clever to be really smart,” Mestre Ginga said.

Familiar streets around Marcelina, they were heading up to the fundação. And you still have a Yoda complex. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since that clown Raimundo Soares sent you to Feijão. If he’d kept his mouth shut … But after the split with the bença he felt aggrieved. It should have been him got cut up; then we wouldn’t have been in this mess.”

“Wait wait, what is this mess anyway?”

Onto the corkscrew road, scraping the ochre and yellow-painted walls of the compounds.

“You want to be down a gear,” Marcelina said, troubled by the knocking, laboring engine. “You’re taking it too low.”

“And since when have you been Rubens Barrichello?”

“I watch my taxi drivers. So; that woman with the knife, who was she?”

“Who did it look like she was?”

“Me.”

“Then that’s who she was. There’s a way to explaining this that makes sense. Otherwise, trust me, in this game nothing is coincidence.”

Then the stolen Ford drew up before the graffitied walls of the fundação with its brightly colored, rumbling, happy capoeiristas; and Mestre Ginga, with a haste and tension Marcelina had never seen in him before, unlocked the gates and showed her round the back into the patriotic kitchen.

“The book’s some kind of expedition journal by an eighteenth-century French explorer on the Amazon. I didn’t read very much of it; I find that old stuff kind of hard to read.”

“I didn’t ask what it was. I asked you, what did you notice?”

“Well, it’s been rebound several times, and the contents are handwritten but they’re not original, I suspect; the illustrations inside the cover had coded wtiting on them, and knowing the way Brazil was in the eighteenth century, I reckon it’s a good guess that it was originally written in code as well.”

“Good guess. Anything else.”

“Like I said, I didn’t read much of it. Now, I’m sure this old eighteenth-century book has something to do with my evil double trying to kill me, but it might be a whole lot simpler if you just got to the point.”

“Anything else.”

Marcelina shrugged; then a realization of strange, a sense of cold wonder, shivered through her. In the blossom-perfumed heat of Mestre Ginga’s kitchen, she saw the gooseflesh lift the fine, blonde hairs on her forearm.

“There was a plague, a plague of horses.” She knew the look on Mestre Ginga’s face; so many times she had seen it in the roda as he squatted in the ring, leaning on his stick. Go on, my daughter, go on. “All the horses, the donnkeys, even the oxen, they were wiped out by the plague. That never happpened. It’s fiction, it’s a story.”

“No, it’s true. It’s a history. It’s just not our history.”

“This is insane.”

“Lick the book,” Mestre Ginga ordered. “Pick it up and just touch the tip of your tongue to it.”

Sense of cold wonder became vertiginous fear. Favors and privileges had flowed around the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor, one of them free and unlimmited access to the private pool and beach of the Ilha Grande Hotel at Arpoador, the rocky point between the golden curves of Copacabana and Ipanema. Dalliances and liaisons blew through the airy corridors and cloisters, but the children who splashed round the rocks were as oblivious to this as they were to satellites. The big thrill was the Leaping Point, a five-meter rock that overhung a Yemanja-blue plunge pool: a hold of the nose, a quick cross, and down like a harpoon into the clear cold water. Marcelina — age eight — had always envied the bigger girls who filled their swimsuits and the gawky boys who could make the leap. For hot holiday weeks she had tried to call up the courage to go up on to the Leaping Point, and then at the last day of summer before school resumed she had worked up sufficient force of soul to climb up the rock. Her mother and sisters, racked out on the wooden sun loungers, waved and cheered, Go on go on go on! She crossed herself. She looked down. The deep blue water looked back up into her soul. And she couldn’t do it. There was swallowing madness down there. The climb back down the rock-cut steps, backward, feeling her way one hand, one foot at a time, was the longest walk of her life.

Marcelina looked into the book. The golden eye of the frog held her.

Where would the walk back down from this painted sanctuary take her? Not back to any life she could recognize. The old capoeiristas, the great mestres and corda vermelhas, taunted her with their jeito. Our Lady of Production Values, who is our Lady of Jeito, aid me.

Marcelina lifted the book to her face and touched the eye of the golden frog with the tip of her tongue. And the book opened the room opened the city opened the world opened.

Marcelina lifted a hand. A thousand hands bled off that, like the feedback echo of visual dub. The table was a Church of All Tables, the green and blue cabinets a Picasso of unfolding cubes. And Mestre Ginga was a host of ghosts, an Indian god of moving limbs and heads. The book in her hand unfolded into pages upon pages within pages, endless origami. Voices, a choir of voices, a million voices, a million cities roaring and singing and jabbering at once. Marcelina reached for the table — which table, which hands — and rose to her feet through a blur of images. Then Mestre Ginga was at her side, prising open her mouth, pouring strong, hot, startling black coffee down her throat. Marcelina coughed, retched up bile black cafezinho and was herself again, lone, isolate, entire. She dropped into the aluminum kitchen chair.

“What did you do to me?”

Mestre Ginga ducked his head apologetically.

“I showed you the order of the universe.”

Marcelina slung the book across the table. Mestre Ginga caught it, squared it neat to the end of the galvanised tin top.

“You drugged me!” She accused him with a finger.

“Yes. No. You know my methods. Your body teaches.” Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair and laughed. “And you accuse me?”

“There’s a difference. That was a spiked book.”

“The book is bound in the skin of the curupairá, the sacred golden frog.” Marcelina had been to the Amazon to research Twenty Secret Ways to Kill Someone and had seen the murderous power of brightly colored forest frogs.

“You could have killed me.”

“Why should I do that? Marcelina, I know what you think of me — you don’t have anywhere near as much malicia as you think, but believe me when I say, what you do have, you are going to need. Every last drop of it. So stop thinking stupid and start acting like a malandro, because stupid is going to get not just you killed but everyone else around you.”

The room shivered around Marcelina, spraying off multiple realities like a dog shaking water from its coat.

“So it’s some kind of hallucinogen, like ayahuasca.”

“No, nothing like ayahuasca. The iâos of the bença believe that the Daime stimulates those parts of the brain that generate the sensations of spirituality. Cutupairá shows the literal truth. The eye of the frog is so sensitive that it can perceive a single photon of light, a single quantum event. The frog sees the fundamental quantum nature of reality.”

The snap was on Marcelina’s lip: And what does a capoeira Mestre know about quantum theory? In surliness was security; she was in a place as familiar and comfortable as home, yet the step from the yard where she played the great game into the green, blue, and yellow kitchen was the step from one world to another. Rio had always been a city of shifting realities, hill and sea, the apartment buildings that grew out of the sheer rock of the morros, the jarring abutments of million-real houses with favela newlywed blocks, piled one on top of another. And where the realities overlap, violence spills through. Heitor, whose private life you entered through books, had so many times tried to explain quantum theory to Marcelina, usually when she just wanted him to tell her how hot her ass looked in the latest little mesh number. All she understood of it was that her career depended on it and that there were three interpretations (as she tried to get him to take a line from the glass-top table), only one of which could be true; but whichever one was, it meant that reality was completely different from what common sense told us. So shut up the mouth and listen to Mestre Yoda.

“Whatever’s in the frog skin allows our minds to perceive on the quantum level.”

“What did you see?”

“Like everything had a halo, had other selves … ” She hesitated over the two words that would turn her world upside down, shatter it into glittering dust. “Many worlds.”

There are three main interpretations of quantum theory , Heitor had said. It had been three days after carnaval, when all the marvelous city still had huge stashes of recreational drugs to use up before the feathers and the sequins and the skin glitter were put away and the world of work reaffirmed its dull authority. Marcelina had been reeling around the apartment blessed on 1guaçu white, practicing her booty shake before it was put away until the New Year Yemanja festival. The Copenhagen interpretation is considered a purely probabilistic interpretaation in that in physical terms it gives undue prominence to observation, information, and mind. The Bohm carrier-wave theory is essentially nonlocal, in that every particle in the universe is connected across space and time to every other, which has been seized on by various New Age charlatans as supporting mysticism. The Everett many-world theorem reconciles the paradoxes in quantum theory by positing a huge, maybe even infinite, number of parallel universes that contain every possible quantum state.

Why are you telling me this why is this important what does it mean come and have some coke , Marcelina had jabbered. She had never forgotten Heitor’s answer.

What it means is, any way you cut it, it’s a mad world.

Again the room, the fundação, Jesus on his mountain spasmed around Marcelina. I am seeing across multiple universes, parallel Rios, other Marcelinas. What of the ones I can’t see, the ones who were that hair too slow on Rua Rabata Ribeiro and were cut open under that knife? She took a sip of her strong, now-cold coffee.

“I think you’re going to have to explain this to me.”

Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair.

“Very well then. You won’t believe it, but every word is true.”

“There is not one world. There are many worlds. There is not one you; there are many yous. There is no universe; there is the multiverse, and all possible quantum states are contained within it. Write down ninety-nine point nine and as many nines after that until you get bored with it. That many universes are empty, sterile, exercises in abstract geometry and topology; two-dimen-sional, gravityless, impossible. Out of that chain-of-zeroes point one that remain, the greater part are universes where the constants of physics vary by a tiny degree, a decimal here or there, but even that minuscule variation means that the universe immediately collapses after the big bang into a black hole that expands infinitely in a fraction of a second so that every particle ends up so far from its neighbor that it is effectively in a universe of its own, where stars do not form, or burn out in a three-score and ten. And in the same fraction of those universes as they are to the multiverse, the fine-tuning of constants allows the ultimate unlikelihood of life to exist, to exist intelligently, to found empires and build beautiful Rios, to learn martial arts and make television programs and quest into the nature of the universe in which it finds itself so improbably. We have penetrated to ten to the three hundred thousand universes and still we are not a thumbnail’s thickness into the rind of the multiverse, let alone begun to exhaust the universes where we exist in some form recognizable to ourselves.

“Everyone’s got a theory. Ask any Rio taxi driver and he’ll give you his free. Taxi drivers know how to make a better country and a perfect Seleçao as well as all the best places to eat. What matters is, how useful is your theory? Does it explain the everyday as well as the weird and spooky? Physics is no different. We’ve had Newton and we’ve had Einstein and we’ve had Bohr and Heisenberg, and each time the theory gets a little better at explaining what’s real; but we’re still a long long way from a final Theory of Everything, the ultimate taxi driver theory that you plug a value in and it gives you everything from the reason there is something rather than nothing to the soccer results. Physics is now a roda: all the malandros standing round clapping and singing while two theories go in and try to out-jeito each other. There are two big strong boys who think they have the malandragem to be the theory of everything. One of them is String theory, or M-theory as it’s also called. Facing it in the ring is Loop Quantum Gravity. They’re calling names at each other, taking each other’s measure, trying to trick the other into a simple mistake they can use to make him look stupid, like you made Jair look stupid with that boca de calça. The LQG boys, they’re shouting at the String theorists that it’s not even wrong. The Stringeiros, they shout back that it’s just dreadlocks in space. Which is right? I’m just a guy who runs a capoeira school and who needs some theory to explain what a little book with a frog on the cover has shown him, and that’s a hell of a lot of parallel universes.

“Me, I go for dreadlocks in space. Loop Quantum Gravity’s main theory is that everything is made from space and time woven into itself. Everything can be made from loops of space and time pulled through themselves. Yeah, it’s not dreadlocks, it’s knitting. But I was reading on online forums — I read the physics forums, why shouldn’t I? — and there’s a guy in the terreiro at Rio U who says that maybe what we think of as space is just connections between pieces of information. Everything is connected information in time, and we have a word for that: it’s computer. The universe is one huge quantum computer; all matter, all energy, everything we are, are programs running on this computer. Now, stick with me here. What I know about quantum computers, they can exist in two contradictory states at the same time, and this allows them to do things no other computer could. But I know, because I’ve seen them, that reality is a multiverse, so those computations are being done in many universes at once, so in fact all the multiverse is one vast quantum computer. Everything is information. Everything is … thought. Out minds are part of it. Out minds run across many universes — maybe all of them. That’s what the curupairá does, reduces our perceptions to the level where we become aware that we are part of the multiverse quantum computer. And listen, listen well, if it’s all information, if it’s all thought and computation, then that information can be rewritten and edited. You can write yourself into any part of the multiverse, any place, any time. And another you has written herself into this universe, and will run you down and kill you. Think of her as a kind of policeman. A militar. She is part of an organization that polices the multiverse, that seeks to keep the true nature of reality secret, controlled only by a small, elite group. She will take your place, and then she hoped to use that to infiltrate us, and eliminate us all.

“I told you you wouldn’t believe it. But it’s the truest thing there is.”

Marcelina rocked back in her chair.

“Have you got, could you get me, I really need something to drink.”

Mestre Ginga went to the refrigerator. Full dark had fallen; the blue light from the cool cabinet was painful as he hunted for a Skol. Marcelina started at the sound of car tires squealing on the greasy road. Every twitch, every fidget and rustle was an enemy. Marcelina drank the beer. It was stupidly cold and gloriously real and it slid through her like rain through a ghost, touching nothing. The Mestre’s cellular rang; a slow ladainha for solo voice and betimbau. As he talked — low, short phrases — realization passed through Marcelina in the shadow of the beer.

“I’m a fucking cop out there. Somewhere.”

Mestre Ginga clammed shut his phone. Dew ran down the sides of the cans. “In a sense, yes. The term we use is an admonitory; it’s an old religious expression. There is an organization; call it an order. It’s old — it’s a lot older than you think, it all goes back to that book I gave you. The Order’s purpose is to suppress knowledge about the multiverse; that it is possible to cross it, that it exists at all. I can understand why: all our beliefs about who and what we are challenged; the great religions just comfortable stories. Humankind cannot stand too much reality. The Order suffered a partial defeat when quantum theory itself developed the many-worlds interpretation, but they still have a firm grip on their central mission, to control communication and travel across the multiverse; and deep down, that is the ability to rewrite the programs of the universal quantum computer. They are the reality cops. Locally the Order is hereditary; it runs in certain old families who have access to the highest level of government, business, and the military. When Lula got elected, the first thing they did was shake his hand and say ‘Congratulations, Mr. President.’ The second thing they did was take him into a back room and introduce him to our Brazilian Sesmaria. The Sesmarias move slowly; the last thing they want is to attract attention. They have to live here; they’re not allowed to cross between worlds. But sometimes the opportunity arrives to strike a blow, and that’s when they call in an admonitory.”

“Me, when I started looking for Barbosa, that was their opportunity.”

“You were doing all their work for them. First they discredit you; then they replace you. And when they’re finished, they walk away into the multiiverse again.”

“It’s nothing to do with me, is it? I’m just convenient, a way for the Order to get to you.”

“In the multiverse, you are everything you can be. Villain, mother, assassin, saint. Maybe even hero.”

A crunch of tires. A horn blew twice. Mestre Ginga looked up. He left the small kitchen with its lingering tang of dende. Doors opening, doors closing; voices on the edge of audibility. Marcelina felt Mestre Ginga’s bright kitchen expand around her until it became a universe, her trapped in it, alone, isolate. Heitor used to say that when God is dead all we have left is conspiracy. This cold illusion, this book of ghosts would have satisfied his hard, gloomy worldview: the whirling noise and color and life of the city a dance of dolls knitted from time and words. Mestre Ginga’s cellular lay on the table. Cellular, beer, a coffee mug for a futebol team, a book from another universe. A Brazilian Last Supper. She could pick up that phone. She could call Heitor. He alone remained. Career, friends, family had been stripped away from her like a skin peel, deeper and deeper, rawer and rawer. She should call Heitor, warn him. Pick up the phone. Press out the number. But she had said that the next voice he heard would not be hers. He would not believe her. But she might have gotten to him already. Her: the other Marcelina. She knows you; she knows everything about you because she is you. Your thoughts are her thoughts, your strengths her strengths. You are your own worst enemy.

Your weaknesses her weaknesses.

The creak of the wrought-iron gate, footsteps on the floor tiles. The kitchen door opened. An old man, hair gone grizzle-gray bur his skin still bright and black and his bearing upright and glowing with energy, entered. He wore a light linen suit, pants taper-cuffed, high-waisted, and an open-necked silk shirt. Mestre Ginga followed. It was evident in every motion and muscle that he held the visitor in the greatest reverence. Marcelina felt compelled to rise. The old man shook her hand and settled himself heavily on a kitchen chair. “Good evening to you, Senhora Hoffman. I am very pleased to see you well. I am the man who made all Brazil cry.”

FEBRUARY 12, 2033

Two by cab. Two on the Metro Linea 4, on separate trains. Two in the van, the biggest risk; two already out and running in the rig. Edson by moto-taxi. Last of all, Fia. In one hour she will take a minibus cab to the rendezvous at the dead mall. No different from a show , Edson thinks. It’s all choreography. Each player is equipped with a one-shot cloned identity and has been rigorously de-arfided. Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles’s bill had taken the jaguar’s share of the A World Somewhere prize money; even so, Edson, clinging to the moto boy as he accelerates between two lines of traffic, imagines the talons of the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance reaching for his kidneys.

Efrim checked the restaurant thirty-six hours before go-day. Long tables, clean tiled floors, good food, and no one put their thumbs on the scales. Now in his Edson persona, he picks the big table by the window. The car pound runs from front to back on the block opposite; they’ll make their entrance from the rear.

Emerson and Big Steak first. Shake hands, a little high-carb, low-protein dinner. Then Edimilson and Jack Chocolate, that’s the garage team on-site. First real risk here: their gear is in a false-registration van parked out on the street. No one should get curious, but Edson taps his long, tapered fingers together in anxiety.

“Here, eat something.” Edson passes a roll of reis to the mechanics. He’s not eating, himself; he took a little corajoso when he paid the moto-boy, and it kicks in with an accompanying swooping nausea. His stomach lurches as he watches the mechanics load up on meat from the churrascaria. Keep it down, Edson. Waguinho and Furaçãio in the rig will arrive on target at the designated time. Where are Turkey-Feet and Treats? He flicks the time up in the corner of his I-shades. Fia will already have set off from the fazenda. Mr. Peach will drop her by the rodoviaria in Itaparaca; there is something headed into town every two minutes. He picked the old mall because it is enclosed and free from the eyes of cameras, but it’s big and out of the way and full of weirds and he doesn’t love the idea of her hanging around among them too long.

Where are Turkey-Feet and Treats?

Then Edson’s corajoso flickers and is snuffed out. Six cops have just come in, sat down at a table, big guns at their thighs, and are studying the menu.

Two good-byes.

“Hey, my mama.”

The custom in Cidade de Luz is that every sunset the women come out of their houses to walk. Singly or in pairs, by three or fours, feet encased in sports shoes worn only for this social occasion, elbows pumping to maintain aerobic capacity, they pace a time-hallowed route: the winding main road, the old High Road that runs parallel to the rodovia, the long slow ascent of Rua Paulo Manendes where by some economic gravitation only car-part factors and veterinarian supply stores have taken root. Men too walk the walk. They set out half an hour after the women and always walk widdershins, to meet the women face-to-face. They are invariably younger men, or fresh divorcees.

In the fast German car, Edson caught up with Dona Hortense and her walking friends outside the Happy Cats Veterinarian Supply Company and cruised in to the curb beside her. Dona Hottense peered under the brim of the white pimp’s hat.

“Edson? That you? Kind of you to come over and see me rather than sending that uneducated Treats round to my door to collect your laundry.”

“Come on, Mama, you know the trouble I’m in.”

“I don’t know, that’s the thing.” The girlfriends are looking at him as they might a cop or a debt collector.

“Mama, this is not the place.” Edson opened the door; Dona Hortense slid into the car, ran her hand over the leather upholstery.

“This is nice. Is it yours? Where did you get it?”

“A man. Mama, I have to go away.”

“I thought you might.”

“A long way, a very long way. I don’t know how long I’ll be away, but it will be a long time.”

“Oh Edson, oh my love. But call me, pick up the phone, let me know you’re all right.”

“I can’t do that, Mama.” The light was fast fading, and in the dark of the car, behind polarized windows by Cidade’s de Luz’s happenstance street lighting, Edson thought his mother might be crying silently.

“What, they’ve no phones this place you’re going? A letter, something.”

“Mama … ”

“Edson what is this? You’re scaring me.”

“I’ll be all right, and I’ll be back. I promise you, I’ll find a way back. Don’t put me in the Book just yet.”

“Is there anything I can say?”

“No. Not a thing. Now, kiss me and I’ll drop you back at the house, or do you want me to leave you back with the girls?”

“Oh, in a big flash car like this, drop me back at the house,” said Dona Hortense.

And again, good-bye.

“This is probably the most romantic notion I have heard in my entire life,” said Mr. Peach. Geography is not always a subject of the vast and slow, of eons and crustal plates. It can spring up in a night; the new green space opened one afternoon by the next morning is crisscrossed by footpaths, always mystically following the shortest routes to the shops or the bus stop. In the days that Fia has been a refugee at Fazenda Alvaranga, the old drying shed where the sun loungers are stored in winter has been Sextinho and Mr. Peach’s Place.

“It’s the last place they would think we’d go; back to where she came from.”

“And you, Sextinho? It sounds like a hard world, hers. Gray skies, pollution, wrecked climates.”

Fia’s world was strange and challenging, but in those differences lie opportunities a man of business and wit can exploit to make money. As long as there was still an Ilhabela, and an ocean to wash the feet of the house, he would make it there. His dreams had moved sideways.

“But no Angels of Perpetual Surveillance.”

“No angels. You going to get one of those computers tattooed on your belly?” It was a joke. Mr. Peach knows well Edson’s abhorrence of anything violating the sanctity of his skin. “But one thing: you will be there.”

“Of course I’ll be there.”

“No, I mean, there will be an Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas somewhere in that city.”

It was one of the first things that Edson had thought when he made the decision to flee with Fia back to her São Paulo. He never could resist a mirror: how would it reflect him? Richer, more successful, a man of big business, marrried, dead? Worst, just some dust-poor favelado? He could not bear that. It could not be any kind of good luck to meet your ghost-self, but how could he fail to intervene in a life like that? Closer than any twin or freaky clone-thing but further than the farthest star. Him, in every atom. He owed it to himself.

“It won’t be the first time I’ve had to get a new identity,” Edson said flipppantly, but he was spooked, iced in the vein. “Maybe I’ll even become Sextinho.”

“Do you know what’s so silly, and so impossible? I want to go too. All my life I’ve been teaching the multiverse. I know the theory, I know the math; they prove it more accurately and beautifully than any gross human sense, bur I want to see it with my eyes. I want to experience it, and then I’ll truly know. If I taught you one thing about physics, Sextinho, it’s passion. Physics is love. Why would anyone do this thing, beat their lives against truths we can barely understand, if not for love? Fia says that when you enter superposition, you experience all the other universes at once. So many questions answered. But you, you little bastard, you won’t even appreciate what you’re seeing. Go on, hero, do well.”

Among the moldering showerheads and aluminum nets and scoops for fishing leaves out of the pool, by the cleaning robot’s little hutch, Mr. Peach hugged Edson to him. The kid was so small, so thin and frail-looking, but strong beneath, all sinews and wires. Hard to embrace.

“Just one question,” Edson said. “When you cross over, do you think it hurts?”

Treats and Turkey-Feet bowl in eighteen minutes late, laughing and swaggering and acting cool cool cool. Edson is ice with them; they make to laugh at his anger but then see that none of the others are smiling.

“Why are you late?”

“We were starving, so we got something to eat and a couple of Chopps.”

“You’ve been drinking?”

“Oh, come on Edson … ”

“You’re drawing attention to yourselves and to me. We are friends meeting up for a meal after work. Now, whether you’ve eaten or not, go up and get something from the buffet. No beer. This is an alcohol-free operation.”

All the while he watches the policemen go up to the counter for seconds.

They’re fat, ordinary cops, civils; they’re just out like Edson and his team for a bite with friends after work. Edimilson and Jack Chocolate the mechanics tell track-side tales from Interlagos. Edson hardly hears them; every second that ticks away on the countdown in the corner of his I-shades is slower than the one before until they freeze like drips in an icebox.

I can’t do it. I can’t do it. It’s all just something I made up.

Then he sees himself pushing his plate away from him, standing up, straightening his cuffs, spiking up his hair, and hears his voice say, “Are we all done? Then let’s go.”

Tremendous scuff, that corajoso.

The lift hits as he pulls the bandana up over his face. His heart kicks; his breath is shallow and fast and fills him with fire. It’s not the corajoso; it’s old hot liquid adrenaline, molten in his skull. It’s hitting the best deal; it’s that Number One Business plan clicking into place.

Turkey-Feet has the Q-blade out. Two searing passes and the rear gate is free from its hinges. Emerson and Big Steak lower it lightly to the ground. The guys are already moving as the lasers try to get retina lock. No luck there, militars: everyone’s I-shades are stacked with stolen eye-scans. As the alarms kick off woo woo woo, the drone goes in so low over Edson’s head he can feel its downdraft muss up his careful gel-spikes. It’s an old Radio Sampa traffic-report drone that Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles got in a jeitinho deal and recondiitioned to their own gray purposes. It circles like a little spook from a kids’ cartoon, pumping out enough variant DNA to bust the budget of any forensics company that tries to profile the crime scene. Lovely boys, clever boys.

It might only be graveyard shift at the car pound, but the militars are quick — nothing on Globo Futebol tonight, then — and tooled for general assault. Firing from cover, Big Steak and Emerson Taser the first two out of the trap. Unlike his kid-times-six brother, Emerson enjoyed his army service. Even as the cops hit the ground twitching, Treats and Turkey-Feet are on top of them. Turkey Feet has his Q-blade at the dazed, dazzled policeman’s throat. The guy can’t move, can’t speak, can only follow the dancing blade with his eyes. Blue on blue. Edson smells piss: the Tasers do that, he’s heard. So does fear. It’s a hostage situation now: the remaining four nightwatch throw down their weapons and up their hands. They can read the time and geography as well as Edson: twenty seconds, maybe thirty if they’ve had a big dinner, for the regional headquarters to assess the threat. Another thirty to establish level of response, another twenty to alert units. They won’t tender out to seguranças. The military police enjoy a good fire fight too much. Surveillance drones will be over the target within two minutes of the general alert. Surface units will converge within five minutes. But Edson has it timed to the tick, and the garage van is bowling in over the felled gate, pulling up beside the maimed Cook/Chill Meal Solutions trailer. Edimilson has already run the hydraulic jack in and is easing up the left side like he is a superhero: Captain Pitstop. Jack Chocolate takes a wheel off in fifteen seconds with the power wrench. Emerson and Big Steak drag the slashed, hemi-tires away and roll the new ones out of the back of the van. The militars boggle at the skill and speed.

“You should see them at Interlagos,” says Treats, gun trained on his close knot of hostages.

“Fuck up,” says Turkey-Feet.

The first wheel is on. The second. Edson glances at the timer: the truck should be arriving now. And there it is, rounding the intersection with two fragrant biodiesel belches from its chromed exhausts. Waguinho swings it through the gap in the fence, wheels round and backs up close as a kiss to the trailer. Last wheel is on; the Interlagos brothers throw their gear in the back of the van; Emerson and Big Steak jump in behind it. Edson hauls himself up into the truck cab beside Waguinho and Furação. The trailer locks, Waguinho engages, and Cook/Chill Meal Solutions rolls. As they sweep out through the gate Edson sees Treats and Turkey-Feet back toward the open rear of the van. At the last minute Emerson and Big Steak scramble them in. The militars at once go for their guns, but Edimilson spins the wheels and roars out of the pound onto the street. In the wing-mirror Edson watches the van turn in the opposite direction. They’ll burn it and scatter on foot from the drop-point. Edson sees the DNA-drone skip over the cab roof, climb vertically, and vanish among the rooftop water tanks. He pulls off his bandana, leans back into the seat. The butt of the gun is hard and unexpected against his belly muscles as an erection. He never drew it. He kept that honor; he never showed the gun. Edson pushes his head back into the seat-rest, stares at the rosary and the icon of St. Martin dangling from the interior light fitting. Joy beyond utterance cracks through him; he can barely hold himself still from the huge, shaking energy. He did it. He did it. He stole four quantum computers from the São Paulo Zona Norte Military Police car pound. He wants Fia. He wants her waiting for him at the pickup point with nothing but him in her manga eyes; he wants her spread and begging on the hood of Waguinho and Furação’s truck saying, You’re The Man, Edson, malandro of malandros, you are Lord of the Crossings. What you did will be talked up and down the ladeiras for years; that Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, that was wit, that was malicia.

That Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, Dona Hortense’s crazy son; whattever happened to him? That is what they will say. Where did he go?

Edson pulls one knee up onto the seat, hugs his knee to him. The in-cab display shows police cars converging on the car pound. They may not have an arfid lock, but they have a description of the trailer and an idea where it might be headed. Can he hear sirens? Woo woo all you like, militars. In a moment I will pull my last, best trick. On the far side of the city, parked up behind a bakery that does good pão de queijo, Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles glance at an icon on their I-shades and scatter Cook/Chill Meal Solutions’s cloned arfid ID around fifty vehicles in the truck’s immediate vicinity. A smart trick and an expensive one, but there had been enough change from Hamilcar and Mr. Smiles to convert into six cut Amazonian emeralds: They nestle in lubricated, folded latex in Edson’s colon. When he gets to the other side, he’s going to require some convertibility.

And there she is, sitting on the wall where the light from the soccer ground next door falls brightest. She registers the truck swinging in across the stream of taillights; she jumps up and down in un-self-conscious joy. Her little pack bounces on her back. Edson cannot rid himself of the image of her Hello Kitty panties. The truck bowls across the parking lot past the decaying glass and steel hulk of the food court, draws up under the lights and stops in a gasm of airbrakes.

“Great choice of location, Edson,” Fia says. “Between soccer jocks over there whistling at me and alcos and junkies.” Then she runs and kisses him hard full right then right there where he’s dropped to the hardtop, standing on her tiptoes. Maybe it’s relief, maybe it’s the blaze of success, maybe it’s his corajoso leaving him, but Edson feels as if the soccer ground floods have broken into a shower of light raining down on him; photons, actual and ghost, pounding him cleaning him, bouncing softly from the stained concrete, entangled as kitten-wool with other lives, other histories. The city and its ten thousand towers spin around him: he is the axis of Sampa, of all Brasil, of the whole wide planet and all its manifestations across the multiverse in this instant in the parking lot of a dead mall.

Fia runs her finger along the flank of the trailer, stops at the great cirrcular hole cut out of the side. She leans carefully in to stare up into the trailer interior. Edson knows she is thinking, I died in there.

“The back’s open,” he says.

Memory is such a little Judas. So many times Edson has recalled the inteerior of Cook/Chill Meal Solutions, and now, as Fia finds the light switches and illuminates the décor, the sofa isn’t where he remembered and it’s bigger and a different color, and the coffee machine is on the other side of the counter, and the footstools are zebra skin not jaguar, and the spiral staircase is more Kung-fu Kitsch than Guangzhou-Cybercool. Yet Edson feels as if he’s on a first date: this is his place and he’s invited her back. She walks around the furnishings, touching, stroking, deeply fascinated by the trails her fingers leave in the dust that has accumulated on the plastic surfaces.

“This is weird, weird. I feel her here much much more.” She glances up at the plastic cube over her head, gives a small gasp of wonder and climbs the spiral staircase. Edson watches her move around the studio, awakening the quantum cores one by one. The blue glow of quantum dots skeined across universes underlights her cheekbones in sharp relief, Japans her. He had seen a ghost then, a presence in the empty studio: a quantum echo.

Edson joins Fia in the glowing blue cube.

“The guys want to move the trailer inside. It’s not secure out here.”

Fia waves her hand: Whatever. Her tongue protrudes slightly between her teeth, caught in concentration. Edson steadies himself on a stanchion as Cook/Chill Meal Solutions lurches into motion; Fia moves unconsciously with the flow.

“This should be in an art gallery.” She sounds love-dazed, incoherent with ecstasy. “Four quantum-dot Q-cores. And she built them from… junk? Where I come from, the São Paulo U Q-frame… this is decades ahead of anything we have. It’s like it’s come from the future. Every part of this is beautiful.”

“Can you get it to work?”

“Your language and protocols are different, but I can recode.”

“But can you make it work?”

“Let’s see.”

She slips off her long coat. The tattoo on her exposed belly glows with reflected quantum-light. The wheels within wheels on her stomach start to turn. Fia feels Edson’s stare.

“It’s just an effect thing, really.” She taps keys, leans forward into the blue light. She frowns; her lips move as she reads from the screens. Edson has never seen her so beautiful. “It’s finding a common communication channel. Ooh!” Fia starts, smiles as if to some intimate delight. “We’re in.” She rattles keys; her skin crawls with gears in motion. “Yah! Yah! Come on, you puta!” She slaps the desk. As if it has heard and obeyed, the truck lurches to a stop. Fia throws her hands up. “What did I do?”

Voices, echoing from the naked rolled steel girders of the rotting mall.

Voices Edson doesn’t recognize. He rattles down the spiral stair, cautiously pokes his head out the Q-blade-cut hole. The glinting sin-black visor of a HUD visor looks up into his face. Beneath it, a grin. Beneath the grin, the muzzle of an assault gun. Visor, visors. The truck is ringed by armed and armored seguranças. The rear doors of the trailer slam open: twenty more seguranças with assault weaponry. The grinning face waves its gun toward the rear of the truck.

“Get your ass out here, favelado.”

AUGUST 6-15, 1733

A crowd always gathered for the pendulum. Falcon nodded to his audience as he adjusted the telescope housing and wound the clocks. Children’s voices, underscored with the deeper notes of men for whom this was a famous novelty, chanted greeting. Falcon sighted along his nocturnal on Jupiter rising above the tree line and noted the ascension on his wooden shingle. Tomorrow he would have words with Zemba about getting some more paper. The observatory, which was also Falcon’s library and home, stood five minutes’ walk along forest paths from the quilombo. The canopy had been felled to afford open access to the night sky, and the clearing was popular with couples who wished to take in the moon or the soft ribbon of the Milky Way. With a flick of the stylus Falcon picked three spectators to open the porch roof and operate the clocks; the telescope required protection from the daily downpour, daily oiling to keep the molds from clogging its hair-fine mechanisms. Falcon jabbed again with his stylus at a girl in the front row, breasts budding on her child’s torso.

“What is the name of this celestial body and why is it important?” Falcon’s command of the lingua geral had developed to where he could play the curmudgeon, a role he found he enjoyed very much. The girl shot to her feet.

“Aîuba, that is the world Jupiter, and it has moons around it as we have a moon, and the moons are a clock.”

Aîuba. Falcon had thought the word an honorific in keeping with his fourfold status as geographer and city architect; doctor of physic; archivist of the Cidade Maravilhosa and professor of the University of Rio do Ouro: teacher, wise one, stargazer. He had been gravely discommoded to learn that it was Tupi for his pale, shaven head. He had long ago fixed his longitude by Cassini’s tables and calibrated his three Huygens’ clocks; hundreds of observations, inked in genipapo on the walls of his house, had proved his theory. What Falcon performed was a Mass of science, a memoriam that the proofs of physics were as true in the forests of the Rio do Ouro as the Paris salons. He demonstrated the validity of empiricism to himself as much as to his audience of Iguapás, Manaos, Caibaxés, and runaway slaves. He thought rarely of La Condamine now; his rival’s pamphlet might be under the keenest discussion among the Academicians while his would likely remain trapped in this forest, but it would be held to scorn because it was not empirically true. In his bamboo-and-thatch observatory, Robert Falcon set up his great experiment and declared, See, this is how your world is.

“I shall now observe the satellites of Jupiter.” Greatest of spheres, visibly flattened at its poles even in this traveling telescope. On Earth as it is in heaven. “Bring me the journal.” A Caibaxé girl, keeper of the book, knelt beside Falcon with journal and carved wooden inkwell on a leather pillow. Falcon noted time, date, conditions. So little paper left. And in truth, why make these marks when the truth they represented was partial and lesser? A Jesuit crazed on sacramental forest drugs had hinted at a deeper order, that this oblate world was merely one of a prodigious-perhaps infinite-array of worlds, all differing in greater or lesser degrees. But how would one ever objectively prove such an order of the universe? Yet if it was physical, it must be capable of mathematical description. That would be a challenge for a geographer growing old and alone far from the rememberings of his peers. Such a notation would take up what remained of the house’s wall and floor space. Caixa would complain and throw small things at him; she was clean and house-proud and intolerant of his slovenly habits.

“The time in Paris is precisely twenty-seven minutes past eleven o’clock,” Falcon intoned. “I shall operate the pendulum. On my mark, start the timing-clocks.”

Falcon drew back the bob of the surveying pendulum until the wire matched the inscribed line on the goniometer. He let it fall and lifted his handkerchief, which Caixa kept virtue-white for this purpose. Three hands came down on the starting levers of the chronometers. The pendulum swung, counting out time and space and reality.

“I cannot allow you any more paper.”

The cannon blast dashed any protest from Falcon. Zemba leaned out over the parapet and clapped the pocket-glass-Falcon’s former pocket-glass-to his eye.

“Barrel and breeching are intact,” he declared. “I think we might now try it under full charge. And a ball also.” Since declaring himself protector of the Cidade Maravilhosa, Zemba had increasingly taken the trappings and mannners of an N’golan Imbangala princeling. Falcon climbed up on to the revettment to watch the Iguapá gunners charge the huge cannon, clean-bored from a single trunk of an adamantine mahogany, out on the proving range. He watched the paper-wrapped charge — his paper, as his glass had been requisitioned — vanish into the barrel of the monster.

“I appreciate the necessity for dry powder in this humid miasma, but we apply ourselves so wholly to our defense that we neglect what we are defending,” he commented mildly as the crew loaded the ball. Each wooden shot took a full day for a carpenter to turn and lathe to the necessary smoothhness. Zemba had sneered at the Aîuba’s suggestion: a wooden cannon, such a thing would fly into a million splinters the first time it was touched, more deadly than any fusee of the enemy. But Falcon’s calculations had withstood scorn and gunpowder. Yet it irked that to this great man — a dazzling general and terrible warrior — his learning was respected only insofar as it served millitary ends. Techne, the whore of Sophos , Falcon muttered to himself.

Zemba had drawn his defenses deep and strong on Falcon’s looted drawing books. The Iguapá traps and snares formed the tripwire to a monstrous system. A gargantuan cheval de frise of poisoned stakes embedded in ranks twenty deep directed attackers into murderous crossfire fields between heavy repeating-crossbow bunkers. An inner ring of earthworks modeled on European star-emplacements next poured ballista-fire and buckets of hot stones from trebuchets on the wretched survivors. The inmost line was zigzag trenches three deep from which a sea of quilombistas would charge, armored in padded leather escaupil and targes, armed with hardwood spears. Footarchers gave killing support over hideous distances. Cidade Maravilhosa’s classical defenses would have dismayed a Roman legion, but Zemba desired the destroying power of modern artillery. A bylaw pressed through the city aluri made compulsory the use of public latrines that might be scraped for saltpeter: Falcon’s half-remembered chymistry had produced black powder, but in the Rio do Ouro’s steamy climate it fizzed and puffed in the touch-hole until Falcon, twisting little paper bangers to terrify the children, lit on paper cartridges. The charges, in varying weights, hung from the rafters of the drying hurs like albino bats.

The gunners unwound a long fuse; Zemba lit it with the slow-match. Falcon felt the ground heave beneath him, and a detonation that must have been audible in São José Tarumás drove the wind from his lungs and the sense from his head. In a trice Zemba was at his overlook, glass to eye, Falcon a blink behind him. The cannon had been blasted back a dozen toises into the bush bur stood intact on its sledge.

“We have it, by Our Lady, we have artillery.”

Falcon did not need the proffered glass to see the tree branches, in a rising arc along the trajectory of the ball, waver, then one by one split, splinter, and crash down.

Even at his measuring station by the river he could still hear the booms as Zemba refined his artillery. “River” was generous to a lazy stream barely eight paces wide that eased into the Rio do Ouro carpeted velvet green with jaguar-ear. Pistol cocked over his knee against the jacaré, Falcon watched Caixa wade out, now thigh deep, now belly deep, the soft, dew-teared jaguar-ears brushing against her small breasts, to the farther measuring post. Gold on green, she enchanted him. He had taught her to letter, to number, to read the sky and recite in French. This little tongue of sand, where the forest opened unexpectedly onto the river was his by word of the Mair. Often he made love to her in this place, roused and repelled in equal measure by the soft spicy fullness of her flesh and the golden, alien contours of her skull. She was a generous and appreciative lover, if unimaginative, and by the lights of her people, faithful. But most he loved this place by night when each jaguar-ear and darkblooming water lily held the spark of a glowworm, a carpet of light, the far bank glimmering with fireflies and high over all, the scattered stars.

Caixa called back the reading. Rising still. But this was not the flood season. Smiling, she plowed through the water toward him, the carpet of green parting around the smooth, plucked triangle of her sex. He recalled his first sight of her, shy and smiling, prodded forward by her girlfriends to walk beside the white man with the uncanny eyes. He had offered to bear for a while the basket she wore from a brow strap; angrily she had stepped away and had not come near him again until the evening when the Iguapá nation straggled into its first camp.

So soon had the sense of the pilgrim nation given way to silent stoicism and that determination that set foot before the other, day in, week in, to helppless anger. The Iguapá nation straggled over half a day through the varzea of the Rio Iguapará and the Rio do Ouro. The last, the oldest, the youngest, the weakest stumbled into the camp many hours after the Mair and his guard of pagés struck for the night. Some never arrived.

The Iguapá nation knew hunger. The varzea, so rich in botany, was meager in forage. Food hooted and whistled in the high branches of the ucuuba and envira; on the ground, in the damp shadows, it was guarded with barbarous spines; fruits and vines sickened or poisoned or drove mad with visions. Falcon’s manioc war flour and beans fed a people; Caixa sharing out the thin rations, making sure the old and sick were not bullied out of their portion. The Manaos gravely reported the state of the supplies; Falcon noted them down and did dismal mathematics. Even then, Zemba had set himself between Falcon and Quinn. It was only with the greatest persistence and the muscular weight of his Manaos that Falcon had been permitted through the circle of pages to the Mair.

“You must give them time to rest and hunt and regather their strength.”

“We cannot, we must go on, I have seen.”

In the end the people walked from insane desperation. There was no other choice than to swing up the hammock-pack, slip the strap over the blistered brow, and push the children before. Caixa freely permitted Falcon to share her load. The chests of war flour were emptied and cast aside. Falcon cut up instrument cases, bookbindings, shoes and laces, and satchels to boil soft enough to chew out a little sustenance. The people starved, but the frogs were fed; the sacred curupairás in their pierced ceramic jars. Old men sat down with a sudden sigh at the side of the track, unable to move or be moved, left behind, the green closing around them and the look on their faces relief, only relief. Falcon pushed one foot in front of the other, scourging himmself in intellectual guilt: his tools, his instruments, the brass and the ebony and the glass; the iron and the lead shot, the books half gone to mold without their covers, the clothes and keepsakes — he must set them down and forget them. Each time he returned the same thunderous denial. No he would not, never, for when all else was reduced to the animal, to the mechanical, they were the dumb witnesses to this indifferent vegetable empire that this was more than a march of ants.

Then Quinn — a haggard, bearded, Deuteronomical patriarch leaning on his stick — declared, This is the place.

Falcon had barely been able to frame the question.

“What have you seen?”

“Enough, my friend.” Then he had turned to his people as they filed into the small, sunlit shard where a tree had fallen, revealing the sky. “This is the Marvelous City. We shall build a church and raise crops and live in peace and plenty. No one who comes to this place shall be turned away. Now, let’s burn.”

That night, in the smoke and the embers, Caixa came to Dr. Robert Falcon and never again left.

The Mass was ended. Women, men, children with their heads bound in the wood and leather casings that forced their still-soft skulls splashed barefoot from the church through the silver twilight rain, through the narrow lanes between the malocas shin-deep in liquid mud, touching their foreheads in salutation to the Aîuba as he passed. Falcon ducked under the dripping thatch. The iâos, the brides of the saints, still danced in the foot-polished clay ring, each bearing the emblem of his or her saint: the three-bladed sword; the hunting bow; the peccary’s tusks; masks of the tinamu, the catfish, the frog. The musicians on their raised dais had worked themselves into trance; drums, clay ocarinas. They would play for the rest of the night, the iâos swirling before them, until they fell over their drums and the blood started from their palms. The great pillared hall of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos reeked of incense and sweat and forest drugs. Falcon passed through the dancers like a specter, pausing to cross himself and kiss his knuckle before the crucified Christ, at his feet a woman, face upturned in marvelment, orbs in each hand and upon her brow, her own feet resting upon a golden frog: Our Lady of All Worlds. Out again into the rain and across the fenced compound to the vestibule. Pagés waited on the verandah, golden faces naked in their suspicion of Falcon, jealous of his privileges.

“I did not see you at the Mass, brother.” Quinn removed his stole, kissed it, hung it on the peg.

“You know my opinion. I see little of Christ there.” At the climax of the Mass, after hours of drum and dance, Quinn was carried around the throng of worshipers, passed overhead hand-to-hand, spewing prophecies. Not even in the grimmest privations of the Long March had Falcon seen him so drained.

“It is like there are no lids to my eyes. I see everything, everywhere. It consumes me, Falcon. The apostles were sterner men than I; the gifts of the Paraclete burn those who bear them.”

“It takes more every time, does it not? Give it up. It will destroy you, if not in body, certainly in the seat of reason,” Falcon said in French.

“I cannot,” Quinn whispered. “I must not. I must take more, and greater, if I am to be able to turn passive observation into action and join the others who walk between the worlds.”

“You talk arrant nonsense; you are deranged already. Already the quilombo suffers from want of a guiding hand on the tiller.”

“I am not the only traveler — how could I be, when on countless worlds similar to this one, Father Luis Quinn, SJ, has taken the curupairá and held in his hands the warp and weft of reality? Throughout history there have been — and will be — ones who travel between worlds and times.”

“Now this is nonsense, Luis. Travel across the ages as if stepping from one room into the next? I give you an immediate paradox: the simple effect of treading on a forest butterfly in the past might set in motion a chain of events that make it impossible for Luis Quinn, Society of Jesus, to even exist, let along gavotte merrily through time.”

Quinn pressed his hands together before his face as if in prayer.

“Of course. And where would I walk, but to the singular moment in my life that shaped it beyond all other? I have stepped through and in an instant returned to that lodge in Porto. I have looked on my own face, and seen the look on that face to find itself confronted with a spectral visitor beyond horror: his own gaunt, aged form dressed in priestly black; the ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ that having written, moves on. It takes little more to stay the hand, to set the death-dealing mug down on the table, to reel away from friends and comfort and warmth into the street. I have seen myself go on my knees and beg my forgiveness, yet each time, when I flip back to that page that is my own time, this time, I find nothing changed. There is a law here; we may step back through time, but never to the history of our own world. We always walk backward to another world, that world where I appear to myself like a visitation and then vanish never to return, for to do so would violate that great Censor who requires that we may write the stories of others but never our own.”

“Now you offend me,” Falcon flared. “Now this is indeed madness. If I had a piece I would pistol you so that your insanity should not infect others. Airily you claim to breeze between worlds and histories, by whim, by thought, by will-o’-the-wisp or fiery chariot, and with a wave of your hand my world is abolished; rationality, scientific inquiry, the knowability and preedictability of the physical world merely a tissue of illusion over a void of… magic. Divine fiat, the power of word and thought over mundane reality.”

“But, Falcon, Falcon, what if that is what the world is made from? Word and thought?”

Falcon slapped the center pole of the hut. “This is real, Quinn. This is reality.” Quinn smiled weakly. “If the simulacrum were detailed enough, how would we ever know?”

“Oh, for the love of God!” Falcon leaped to his feet. Golden faces looked in at the door, withdrew at Falcon’s hostile glare. “The water is up again. That is what I came to tell you. I want to take a canoe and a party of my Manaos away from the cidade.”

“Talk to Zemba. He is protector of the cidade.”

“I desire to talk to you. I desire you to ask me why I want a canoe and a party, why I want to investigate the rising water. You have become remote, distant, aloof, Quinn. You have set colonels and counselors between yourself and me, Luis; between yourself and your people.”

The bark curtain over the door twitched. Zemba entered, his skin glossy wet from the rain.

“Is all well here?”

“Nothing has occurred here,” Falcon said. “I was merely telling Father Quinn that I am taking a reconnaissance party onto the river to investigate the rising water.”

“All such applications must be made to me as chief of security.”

Falcon bristled.

“I am not your slave. Good evening, sir.”

Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon: Expedition Log 8th August 1733

Often I feel that the only important feature of my journal is the date in the heading. Too easily the days slip into an eternal present; without past, facing a future indistinguishable from now, disconnected from human history. But surely the first duty of a chronicler is to establish his own history within the greater flow of time. So I write 8th August 1733 and rejoin common humanity.

How good it is to be abroad on the river, in a ten-man canoe with Juripari before me, Caixa at my back, and all the vegetable riches of the Rio do Ouro arrayed before me. Cidade Maravilhosa had become oppressive and hostile; not in the physical sense — that would not be tolerated, not even from Zemba and his military claque — but to my qualities, my profession, my beliefs. The City of Marvels is a City of Blind Faith. I had believed in the aîuri, that wise body of indio morbichas and ebomis from the escaped black community, to steer the community sanely and sagely, but it has been filled with pages and young warriors under Zemba’s sway. A council where older and more careful heads — I count myself among them — are shouted down by the zeal of young males is not beneficial to the community.

This is the fifth day of the expedition, and we are now running downstream. At good speed and in good heart we set off from the cidade and made twenty leagues a day upriver, taking us into the high Rio do Ouro beyond the exploration of any Paulista bandeira. Here are indio nations that have never seen a white face before, yet the canoe parties we encountered — Juripari found a simplified Waika could effect basic communiication — knew of the Marvelous City and the great caraiba who walked between worlds.

I was initially nonplussed to find the levels on the Alta Rio do Ouro to be lower that at Cidade Maravilhosa, the precise reverse of what one would expect for a flood descending from the headwaters. But the scientist, in the face of conflicting facts and theory, always modifies theory to reality. A set of measurements taken below the cidade will confirm if the river is filling from the lower courses. I have one set of measurements now, from a point some three leagues beneath the quilombo as drawn on my rudimentary chart of the Rio do Ouro fluvial system — some fifteen as the river wends — and they seem to support my general hypothesis. A second set taken at tonight’s camp will put the seal on it…

“Aîuba!”

Over floods and centuries the Rio do Ouro, rounding a prominent ridge, had eroded a wide bow, almost a bay. Falcon’s canoe cut close to the bluff, doubled the point, and found itself bow to bow with a fleet. Falcon saw paddles, bright brass, the glint of sun from steel, plumed hats.

“Scarlet and buff!” he cried. “Portuguese soldiers!”

The Manaos swiftly, sweetly reversed their seating in the canoe, dug at the water with their paddles. Falcon’s smaller, lighter craft could outpace the heavily laden war canoes, but there was headway to be lost; and as he came about and seized his own paddle to lend his speed to the craft, the pursuers bent to their blades. The chase was on. A dull pop, little louder than a musket, and a plume of water flew up some paddle-lengths to the left of the canoe. Another, and Falcon saw the ball pass with fluttering howl and bounce three times from the water before vanishing.

“Paddle for your lives!” Falcon shouted. He slipped the glass out of his pocket. Six swivel guns bow-mounted in heavy, thirty-man war canoes. As he glassed the soldiery — a dozen colonial infantry in each of the lead boats, dress coats patched and mold-stained after weeks on the river-the swivel gun spoke again. The ball bounced from the river in a splash of spray that soaked Falcon and cleared the canoe between ]uripari and a Manao deserter called Ucalayf. A narrow target and the flat trajectory over which the Portuguese were firing had served thus far, but soon the gunners would load shot rather than ball and make murder of them.

“Caixa! The muskets.”

She was already rodding the first of the two pieces that Falcon had kept sacrosanct from Zemba’s requisitioners. A woman of skills is a pearl beyond price. Falcon drew on the red-and-gold division flag in the stern of the center war canoe. Before it sat an officer in dress uniform, his tricorn hat edged with feathers, grimly gripping the sides of the canoe. Falcon recognized Capitan de Araujo of the Barro do São José do Rio Negro. A simple shot, but Falcon lets his sight slide forward to the buff-coated gunner bent over his piece in the bow.

“Steady, hold her steady!” It was a delicate calculus; the cease-paddling made the shot surer but necessarily brought them into the range to the musskets of the colonial infantry. At his earliest clear shot Falcon discharged in a crack and cloud of smoke. Zemba’s cartridges answered truly. The gunner jerked and went down into the floor of the war canoe, shot clean through the crown of the head. A roaring jeer went up from the pursuers; the body was rolled without let or ceremony into the river. Full five swivel guns replied, their shots falling all around the canoe, some so close water slopped into the dugout. The paddlers bent to their task; dark river water peeled away from the bow. Caixa handed Falcon the second musket and reloaded the discharged piece. The musketeers in the indio canoes were risking longer shots now, at extreme range and wildly inaccurate but sufficient to keep Falcon off his aim. And it was as he had feared: rounds of canister shot were being handed down the length of the gunboats.

“Steady, I have him I have him … ”

“Aîuba, we cannot yield any more headway,” Juripari said. “Steady, steady … ”

The capitan was clear in his sight. Cut the command off at the head. Falcon squeezed the trigger. The lock closed; the flint flared. Falcon saw the hat fly from the officer’s head into the stream; then glowing slow-matches met touch-holes.

“Down! All down!”

The river flew up around Falcon as if shattered like glass; splinters flew up from the raked gunwales, but the hull held, by Jesus and Mary; the shot bounced from that adamant forest trunk. A sigh; Juripari, endlessly surprised to find the side of his head shot away, slid gently into the river.

“Lighten, lighten!” Caixa commanded in lingua geral. Supplies, water, the second musket, all cartridge and shot but for a sniper’s handful, followed Juriipari. Falcon watched with leaden heart the black water close over his beamiful, precise, civilized instruments. He rolled his journal into a tight cylinder and pushed it into the bamboo tube he had designed for just such a pass: so closely capped as to be watertight, in extremis it might be thrown into the river in the vain hope that it might someday, some year be found and returned to the French Academy of Sciences. The canoe surged forward. Pirogues broke through the drifting bank of powder-smoke and gave chase. Falcon lay prone in the stern, sighting over the gunwale, dissuading the musketeers from incautious fire. Alone in the canoe Caixa’s head was up as she read the varzea for a landmark.

“Cover me!” Caixa shouted. Falcon wiped the spray from his green glasses and let crack at the lead musketeer. The weapon flew from the soldier’s hands, shattered in the lock. Caixa touched a fuse from Falcon’s smolldering pan; with a shriek and rush the signal rocket went up beside his head and burst in brief bright raining stars. Its detonation rolled across the roof of the forest; startled hoatzins plunged clumsily from their roost. The soldiers exchanged hand signals; the two hindmost canoes backed water and turned.

Then two gleaming bolts stabbed out like lightning from either bank and pierced the disengaging canoes through and again. A wavering shriek rose from the canoe on the left bank; a ballista bolt had run an indio paddler through the thigh, a terrible, mortal wound. The water rippled and parted, lines appeared from beneath the surface. Invisible defenders hauled the happless canoes in to shore. The soldiers tried to hack the lines with bayonets, but they were already within the short range of the repeating crossbows. A storm of bolts annihilated the crews; those who leaped into the river to save their souls were run down by bowmen loping along the shore. The soldiers’ thighboots filled with water and dragged them under the black water.

The chase had become a rout, the entrapped canoes circling, firing into the varzea as they tried to withdraw. Twice again Zemba’s ballistas struck, once capsizing an entire canoe. Soldiers and indios alike cried pitifully as the Iguapá hunters waded thigh-deep into the water, shooting them like fish with their poisoned darts. Falcon found his body trembling from the exciteement and the pure, dispassionate efficiency with which Cidade Maravilhosa’s defenders set about destroying their enemies to the last man. Yet Falcon’s exultation was partial, and brief. Even as Zemba’s defenders had repulsed tbe attack by water, raiding parties of indios and caboclo mercenaries had attacked and set torch to the manioc plantations.

The boy poled the pirogue through the trees. An oil lamp, a wick in a clay pot set on the prow, struck reflections from the night-black water. Cayman eyes shone red then sank beneath the surface. Father Luis Quinn stood in the center of the frail skiff; black on darkness, an occlusion. To the boy he seemed to float over the drowned forest. Fragments of voice carried across the water, heated and impatient; the lights of the observatory passed in and our of view as the boy steered among the root buttresses and strangler figs. A fish leaped, splashed, its belly pale.

“Here,” Luis Quinn said softly. The pirogue halted without a ripple.

Quinn stepped into the knee-deep water and waded toward the light and the voices. The observatory had been built on a high point to give an uninterrupted window onto the sky; now it was the only building of any conseequence above water in Cidade Maravilhosa and therefore the natutal conclave for the aîuri. Worlds flickered across Quinn’s vision as he slogged from the water, leaves clinging to his black robe; worlds so close he could touch them, worlds of water. The voices were clear now.

“The revetments will be overtopped by morning,” he heard Zemba’s musical voice say as he entered the observatory.

“God and Mary be with all here.” The aîuri of Cidade Maravilhosa were seated in a democratic circle on the floor of the gteat room, Falcon’s calculations and theorems crawling around them like regiments of ants. Quinn kicked off his saturated leather slippers and took his place among them. The hem of his black robe dripped on to the foot-polished wood. The aldermen crossed themselves.

“This is clearly an artificial phenomenon,” Falcon said in his halting lingua geral Even in the half-light of palm-oil lamps he wore his glasses. Quinn noticed Caixa squatting on her hams in the deeper shadow at the edge of the hut. The waiting woman. “If my expedition had been permitted to continue its planned course, I am in no doubt that we would have encountered a … a … ” He gave the word in French.

“A dam,” Quinn said in the lingua.

“Yes, a dam. It is cleat that the Rio do Ouro has been dammed with the intention of flooding the quilombo and rendering us helpless,” Falcon said. “To construct such an artifact — I have made some calculations as to the size and strength required — requires an army of labor. There is only one person in this vicinity who can set whole populations to work.”

“And set whole populations to war,” Zemba said. He turned to Luis Quinn “Did you see, Mair? Were you there when the Portuguese maggots burned our crops? I had thought we might see you, leading us to battle with the high cross. But I did not see you. Did anyone see the Mair? Anyone here?” Zemba’s young cocks crowed behind him. Quinn hung his head. He had expected the admonition; it was meet and right, but his pride, his damnable, Satanic pride wanted to crow back. He saw a pewter mug in his hand as he had seen it in so many worlds, in those worlds stopped himself from murder and yet in this world nothing could be changed.

“I was… away.” He caught Falcon’s look of surprise. Murmurs sped from mouth to mouth; the aîuri rolled and swayed on their thin kapok-stuffed cushions. Oil flames bent on their wicks as a sudden warm gust possessed the observatory. “You must trust me when I tell you that our troubles here are only part of a greater conflict, a war waged across all worlds and times, so vast that I cannot encompass it.”

“Troubles. Ah, that explains it, then.”

Flames flickered across worlds.

“I cannot explain it to you; I barely apprehend it myself. Nothing is as it seems. Our existence is a veil of illusion, and yet in a thousand worlds, I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood.”

Consternation among the old men, muttered aggressions among the young.

“And among these thousand worlds, did you find an answer?” For all his feathers and finery Zemba seemed diminished, dismissed, desperate to regain some degree of stature before his men. This is when we are our most dangerous , thought Luis Quinn the swordsman, when our pride is broken before our friends. “For if I understand this rightly, the Portuguese capitan’s great guns and Father Diego Gonçalves’s men can sail right over our defenses and annihilate us to the last infant.”

“I do not need to go out among the worlds to find the answer to that,” Quinn said. “Dr. Falcon.”

The Frenchman pushed his glasses up his nose. “It is very simple. The dam must be destroyed.”

The young, aggressive men all started to bellow questions.

“Silence,” Zemba shouted. “How may this be achieved?”

“This also is quite simple. A sufficient charge of powder, placed in proximity to that part of the dam under greatest hydrostatic pressure, would effect a breach that would swiftly carry all away.”

Zemba squatted on his hams, supporting himself with his stick. “How much powder would be required?”

“I have done calculations on this as well. It is a simple linear analysis; every hour the pressure on the dam increases, thus decreasing the amount of explosive we require. However, every hour we wait makes an attack more likely; if we attack within the next day, I believe our magazine of powder would suffice to breach the dam.”

“All our powder.”

“That is what I have calculated.”

“Our artillery, our musketry … ” Falcon had helped the quilombistas haul the massive mahogany cannon up the greasy, mud-slick hill called Hope of the Saints. Now he was telling Zemba they were useless, worse than useeless; they squatted on valuable strategic positions. “And if it is not sufficient, we would be defenseless.”

“That is not my calculation to make.”

Zemba laughed, a deep, house-shaking chuckle. “Aîuba, you offer me some chance and no chance, which is better than damnation by a hair. How would this charge be delivered?”

“Our magazine could be transported in six large war canoes.”

“You shall have the best navigators,” Zemba said, gesturing to his lieutenant, who at once loped from the observatory.

“They would of necessity travel by night-without doubt, our enemy has moved his basilica and war-fleet upstream. At the dam … ” Falcon shook his head. “Once I see it I believe I could quickly calculate the weakest point of the structure.”

“Of course, Father Gonçalves would not fail to have posted guards against just such an eventuality,” Luis Quinn said. “There will be a fight while you make your calculations, Doctor. No, what is needed is someone who can in an instant know where to set the explosive.”

Cries of dismay and protest rang out around the circle of the aîuri. “Silence!” Zemba roared again. He beat the heel of his staff of office on the floor planks. “The Mair is correct.”

“I will know where best to site the powder; I will know where Gonçalves should set his guards. And, though I have forsworn the way of the sword, there must be a time for the setting aside of oaths. Would God hold me in greater contempt if I renounced my word or failed to protect His people?” Then he murmured in Irish, “I should wish for a task most difficult.”

“It’s decided,” Zemba said. “The Mair will lead the attack on the dam. The powder will be ready with canoes and good fighting men, with what steel we can spare. I will prepare for the defense of the Kingdom of God. Christ and Our Lady bless us.”

The aîuri broke up, old men stiff from the floor.

“Luis.” Falcon held out a short, thick bamboo tube with a plaited lanyard to Quinn. “Take this for me, would you?”

“What is it?”

“The history of the quilombo of Cidade Maravilhosa; partial and poorly styled, overly emotional and lacking in any academic objectivity, yet true nonetheless. If the dam cannot be breached; if the charge is insufficient; if you, God between us and evil, should fail, surrender this to the waters downnstream and pray to whatever God is left to us that it will find a safe landfall.”

The glow of early light leaked through the woven walls. Quinn lit a cigar. “The last I shall enjoy for some time,” he quipped. Falcon felt a touch on his arm; Caixa, her golden face telling him he had done right for her and that was all this woman wanted. He wondered if she might be with child. A distant cry, like a bird but no bird of the varzea, came across the lightening sky. A second voice picked it up, a third until the canopy rang as if to the roars of the howler monkeys. Zemba rushed to the railing, snapped out his glass, but Falcon had already swiveled the great observatory telescope in its mount and was scanning the skyline beyond the eyries of the Cidade Maravillhosa’s lookouts. He let out a cry. In the objective, distant yet kindling in the rising sun, angels-vast angels in red and green and heaven’s blue, the instruments of divine warfare in their hands-advanced over the distant treetops.