Brasyl

JUNE 11, 2006

The burned skeletons of construction machines still smoked, the orange paint blackened and bleached down to bare metal. The pichaçeiros had already been at work with their busy little rollers. Me me me. A shout out to the world from Rocinha. The slab concrete of the wall resisted fire, resisted even sledgehammers, chipped down to the reinforcing rods but still adamant. So it had been colonized. Every dozen paces the black tag of the ADA, Amigos dos Amigos, laid claim to the territory within. The red CV stamp of the Comando Vermelho challenged it: graffitis struggled to overtag each other. Lord wars: the great favela was one of the last surviving medieval city-states. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people lived draped over this saddle between the two great morros; the apartment blocks rose eleven floors high, balconies flying with laundry, looking down from their mountainside on the lesser towers of comfortable São Conrado and Gávea. The alleys and ladeiras were busy as rats with white plastic waterpipes, the black power cables festooning the sagging poles dipped so low children in their smart school T-shirts and track-suit bottoms ducked under them.

The police barely glanced at Marcelina Hoffman as she joined the throng moving up toward the street market. White was no less rare within the new favela wall than without. Anyone could go in — the São Conradeiros had to buy their cheap meat and cocaine somewhere. The walls were only there to protect passing drivers from ricochets and stray bullets. No other reason but the gunplay, the stray bullets. Anyone could leave, any time, during working hours. Surf boys with great muscles strolled, boards under arms, down to the beach at the Barra da Tijuca. Their Havaianas crunched broken glass and empty cartridge cases. The police looked them over more in envy then enmity. The sun was hot the sky was blue the surf was up and there was peace, of its Rocinha kind.

Ten reggaes bounced from as many windows and verandahs; ram had fallen again that morning and pooled water on the plastic stall roofs turned into treacherous rivers, pouring over the edges of the weather-sheets on to startled, laughing shoppers. Marcelina pressed up against a trestle across which two lambs lay in absolute dismemberment as a tour passed, wheyfaced gringos in two olive-drab open-top Humvees, armored for the Baghdad green line. Devil-incisored teeth grimaced in the stripped sheep-skulls, eyeeballs glared, loira. They were right; she had been around the green globe and even across the Tijuca Bridge but this was the first time she had set Manolo in a favela. Marcelina had grown up at the foot of great Rocinha, but she was as much as tourist as the ianques in their armored tour-buses. And she thought, Why are we ashamed? We decry those tourists in their roll-bar Jeeps bouncing down through the market as if they’re on safari; Brasilia rails against the unstoppable wave of favelization; we tear down shacks and put up walls and declare bairro status like tattooing over the scars from a terrible childhood illness, one the ianques eradicated decades ago. Don’t visit them, don’t look at them, don’t talk about them, like idiot siblings taped to the bed in the back room; but they are not stumbling blocks on Brazil’s march to the future. They are the future. They are our solution to this fearful, uncertain century.

A cellular shop. A man making manioc bread on a little glass-fronted barrow. This was the place. Marcelina leaned against the storefront and watched Rocinha’s busy past. All our worlds, separate yet intersecting. She felt pretty damn pleased with her philosophizing. Worthy of Heitor himself.

The moto-taxi passed once, turned, returned. The rider, a lanky morena-fechada in Rocinha uniform of Bermudas, basketball vest, and Havaianas, drew up beside her.

“You’re the Fisico,” Marcelina said.

“Show me,” the boy ordered.

Marcelina took out the little frog she had bought from the expensive Centro chocolatier. Moto-boy waited. She unwrapped the gold foil and popped it in her mouth. The sweat-heat chocolate left a little print like the spoor of something hunted in her palm. The boy nodded for Marcelina to slip onto the pillion. She locked her arms around his waist, and he hooted his way out into the throng of market-goers. Across the cracked blacktop serpentine of Estrada de Gávea the moto-taxi took to its native element like a monkey, the steep ladeiras zigzagging up between the rough, gray, graffiti-slashed apartment blocks. Amigos dos Amigos. It was half a year since Bem-Te-Vi had been cut down by the police, the ultimate arbiters in the wars between the drug kings, but the CV’s takeover had hardly reached out from the main arterials. Medieval private armies fighting for feudal lords to rule a renaisssance hill town, with walls, even. And cellulares. And a functioning sewerage system and water supply.

Dogs skipped and barked; women toiling uphill with plastic shopping bags moved aside to the shelter of apartment steps; girls smoked in front rooms, tipping ash through window grilles. And everywhere children, children children. Marcelina shouted over the shriek of the laboring engine, “Are you really a physicist?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” the boy said, turning onto an even steeper ladeira. The moto jolted up shallow, foot-worn steps. Marcelina’s toes scraped the rain-wet concrete.

“Nothing. It just seems, well…” Whatever she said would show her Zona-Sul-girl prejudice. Why should Loop Quantum Gravity physicists not live in Rocinha?

They were high now, the tree line visible between the tenements that clung to the almost vertical hillside. Marcelina looked down on the sweep of flat roofs with their blue water tanks and satellite dishes and lines of laundry. But the favela was fecund, uncontrollable; beyond the build-line new houses went up; cubes of brick and concrete, pallets of blocks and mortars sent up by the hoist-load to bare-chested bricklayers. Fisico stopped outside a corner lanchonete so new Marcelina could smell the fresh paint. Yet the Comando Vermehlo had laid claim to its tithe on the shape of a red CV on the ocher brick wall. The owner nodded; a barefoot boy trotted out to mind the bike.

“We walk from here.”

A dark archway led between doorways and windows. Televisions blared behind metal grilles; not one tuned to edgy, noisy Canal Quatro, Marcelina noted. Sudden steps led down into a small court; apartments piled unsteadily on top of each other leaned inquisitively over the open space. Two parrots perched on the web of electricity cables that held the whole assemblage in constructive tension. Down another flight of steps into a lightless passage, past a tiny neon-lit cubby of a bar, the seat built into the wall across the alleyway from the tin counter. A bridge crossed a stream buried beneath the concrete underpinnings of the favela, dashing and foaming down from the green, moist morro into a culvert. Up and out into the light at the foot of the narrowest, sheerest ladeira yet. FIsico held up his hand. Marcelina felt the mass and life of the favela beneath her; but here, high on the upper ranges of Rocinha, they seemed the only two lives. The empty, blank tenement blocks were eerie in their silence. Higher and higher, like Raimundo Soares’s Beckham story. Then Marcelina heard a ringing, slapping sound, a rhythm that made her gooseflesh stir. A soccer ball bounced into the stop of the ladeira from a higher flight, struck the wall and zigzagged down the steep steps. Fisico stepped under the bounce and caught the ball. He beckoned Marcelina up. She rounded the turn in the ladeira. At the top of the steep flights, dark against the bluest sky, was Moaçir Barbosa.

The Man Who Made All Brazil Cry.

Over the ten years she had worked her way up the Canal Quatro hierarchy from production runner to development executive, Marcelina’s life had necessarily been woven with an eclectic warp of celebrity: Cristina Aguilera, Shakira, Paris Hilton, even Gisele Bundchen, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, all of CSS, Bob Burnquist, Iruan Ergui Wu, and more wannabe popsters and telenovela actors than she could remember. Star-sickness she got over the first time she had to run to fix a rider for a spoiled celeb — that brand of water at that temperature and shrimp for the doggie. Many had impressed, but none had ever awed, until Moaçir Barbosa had stepped out of legend and sat down at the table in the Fundaçao Mestre Ginga. Swallow in throat, push back the tears. She had been brought from her childhood bed to look upon the face of Frank Sinatra, but those blue eyes had never moved her the way Barbosa settled heavily, painfully onto the aluminum chair. This was death and resurrection; this man in his pale suit had harrowed hell and returned. It was like the risen Jesus had climbed down from his hill high above this cool cool house.

“Have you read it?” He rested a finger on the book.

“Some. Not all. A little.” She was stammering. She was Day Three on the job, pop-eyed at Mariah Carey.

“It’ll have to do.” Barbosa slipped the little book into his jacket. “I only came for this, really. Well, you’ve found me; and a world of trouble you’ve made for everyone, but most of all yourself. I suppose there’s nothing for it. Ginga will bring you up tomorrow and we will sort it out.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You made the mess; you’re going to have to clean it up.” Barbosa rose as stiffly as he had sat down, yet, like all former athletes, a fit ghost inhabbited him, the lithe and limber orixá of a cat-agile goalkeeper. He threw back a parting question from the door.

“Would you have done it?”

“What?”

“Put me on trial, like Soares said in the papers.”

For the first time Marcelina’s power of professional mendacity fails her.

“Yes. That was always the idea.”

Barbosa laughed, a single, deep chuckle.

“I think you would have found it was I who put Brazil on trial. Tomorrow. Don’t eat too much, and no alcohol.”

“Senhor Barbosa.”

The old man had lingered in the doorframe. “Is it true for you? About the goalposts?”

A smile.

“You don’t want to believe everything Soares says, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all lies.”

High Rocinha opened itself to Barbosa the goalkeeper. The suspicious streets opened shutters, doors, gratings, and grilles. Electrically thin teen mothers with children on their hips greeted the old man; young, haughty males with soldado tattoos at the bases of their spines bid respectful good mornings. Barbosa tipped his hat, smiled, took a pao do quijo from a lanchonete, a cafezzinho from a stall. Fisico dawdled behind.

“I don’t want to have to move on from here. It’s a good place, people have time, people look out for each other. I’m too old, I’ve moved on enough, I deserve a little peace at last. I’ve had five good years; I suppose you can’t ask for much more. I should have told Feijão I was dead.”

Marcelina asked, “What do you have to move on for?”

Barbosa stopped. “What do you think?” He tossed his empty plastic cup into a small brazier tended by two small boys. “You should be at school, learn something useful like my friend here,” he said to the boys. “Well, at least you understand now.”

“The curupairá, the Order? I don’t — ”

“Shut up. We don’t talk about that in front of the gentiles. And that wasn’t what I meant. What it’s like to have everything, to be King of the Sugar Loaf, and have it all taken away from you so that not even your best friends will talk to you.”

They didn’t take your family away , Marcelina thought. They left you that. It was a ramshackle conspiracy: a disgraced World Cup goalkeeper, a favela physicist, a middle-aged capoeira mestre, and now a wrecked television prooducer. The flimsiest of girder-works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even the soccer ball Fisico carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy, were a weave of words and numbers. Solipsism seemed so unnecessary under a blue sky. But it was the world in which Marcelina found herself, and the conspiracy suitably dazed and uncertain, as if both white hats and black hats could not quite believe it. Heroes and villains barely competent for their roles — that was the way a real world would work. An improvised, found-source favela solution.

Fisico unlocked a small green door in a fresh brick wall and flicked on a bare bulb.

“You wait in here.”

“It’s kind of little,” Marcelina said.

“It won’t be long.”

“We have things to get ready,” Barbosa said. Marcelina heard a padlock snap on the hasp.

“Hey! Hey.”

The room was concrete floor, roughly pointed brick, a couple of plastic patio chairs, and a beer-fridge filled with bottled water plugged into the side of the light fitting. The door was badly painted planks nailed across a rudimentary Z-frame, bur they banished the sounds of the streets as utterly as deafness. Spills of light shone through the boards. Alone with your dreads , Marcelina thought. That’s the purpose. Descanso: chilling the head. A place between, the dark in the skull. Half an hour passed. It was a test. She would pass it, but not in the way they wanted. She pulled out her PDA and drew the stylus.

Dear Heitor.

Scratch it out.

Heitor.

Too abrupt, like calling a dog.

Querida. No. Hey. Teenage. Hi Heitor. E-mail-ese. Like Adriano’s acronym -speak.

I said I wouldn’t get in contact so that’s how you’ll know it really is me. That sounded like Marcelina Hoffman. I’m writing this because it’s possible I may not see you again. Ever. Overly melodramatic, going for the first-line grab, like one of her pitches? The stylus hovered over the highlight toggle. This is supposed to be … What is it supposed to be. A confessional?

A love letter.

Let it stand.

That makes this easy because it’s the coward’s way out; I’ll never have to live up to anything I’ve written here. Glib but true: he’d read that and say, “That is Marcelina.” It’s silly, I’m sitting here trying to write this to you and I can think of all the things I want to say — that’s so easy — but for once the hand won’t let me believe them. Funny, isn’t it, I can pitch any number of ideas I don’t really, deep down love, but when it comes to writing about something important, something real, I freeze.

The treacherous hand hovered again, the stylus ready to delete. What could it not believe? This big, bluff, old-fashioned, glum, romantic, pessimistic, hopeful, catastrophically uncool square-headed newsreader-man. His books. His cookery. His wine his time his listening. His big gentle hands. His love of rain. His always availability, states of Brazil and world permitting. His too too many suits and shirts and always-respectable underwear. His sexiness that was never anything so modern or obvious as raunch, but something older, cleverer, dirtier, and more romantic; burlesque, louche, decadent.

She saw her stylus had written, You make me feel like a woman. Almost she consigned it to nothingness. But he did. You do. So long she had burned with acid envy at her sisters and their men and their security, and she had not reallized that she had her man, she had her security; a modern relationship, not something off the shelf marked 21st Century Bride or Hot Teenz. A grown-up thing that had evolved from a meshing of work schedules and body parts but in the end it was a man, a relationship, a love.

Her hand shook. She wrote slowly, You know I’ve gotten myself into something bad — if I told yiu I would just scare you and there still wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it. It’s all up to me now. I am very very scared. I can’t help it. I find I have to play the hero, and that’s not a role I know anything about. Give me Jerry Springer trailer trash and Z-list scandal. And I find there are no scripts for this; I’m making it up as I go along. But I’ve been doing that all my life. It’s the thing I know best. I can pitch it. But I honestly don’t know how this is going to end. I don’t want to think. Barbosa: it would have made the program of the century, but not in the way anyone thought. A show I would have been proud of.

Not much of a love letter. Or maybe it was, a Marcelina love letter where she bitches and moans about herself for two pages and then at the end drops in the line, Oh, by the way, I love you. I think I’ve loved you for a long time. Can you do that, love someone without knowing? It would be so much better if you could, clean and quick and none of the mad, embarrassing stuff, none of the phone-bombing and SMS-assaults. And then of course I start to think, is it me? And I’m not sure which is the more difficult answer because one way I’m stupid and I’ve hung my heart out and the other I didn’t know and you didn’t say. Agh! I have to go. I love you. Wish me well. I’m not a very good hero, I’m afraid.

Her thumb waited over the e-mail key. It deserved better. He deserved better. The Lisandras dated by e-mail, dumped by SMS. Show some malicia.

A scrape, a painful wedge of light opening into a parallelogram of day. Fisico stood in the brightness. Marcelina thumbed save and slid the PDA into her bag.

“Okay then,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The bateria had been playing for two hours now, a steady two-tone tick of an agogô begun before sunset and sent out over the cellular network, the call to prayer. The barracão of the Igréja of the Holy Curupaini was a large living room on the first floor of a new-build apartment block. Cheap vinyl was rolled up, the furniture piled against a wall. A folding kitchen table was the altar, pushed against the big window with its breathtaking view down across the glowing carpet of Rocinha to the towers of São Conrado. A fair gold cloth dressed the table and was scattered with assentamento: cubes of cake, cones of yellow farofa, saucers of beer, little oranges stuck with joss-sticks. Holy medals, soccer stickers, animal-game lottery cards, centavos, and cigarettes. The air was sickly and headachy from incense trickling from church-stolen burners and Yankee Colonial scented candles in glass jars. Squat saints and orixás guarded the altar; most had indio features and carried Amazonian plants and animals in their hands, snakes and jacarés beneath their feet, like the vehicles and attributes of Hindu gods. The only one unfamiliar to Marcelina was a near-life-size wood carving depicting an indio woman, naked but her skin painted gold, balancing on one foot and entwined, like a dollar sign, in an S of snake-headed vine. She juggled planets. Marcelina recognized Saturn by its rings, Jupiter by its satellites on projecting sticks. Our Lady of All Worlds. The serpent’s head was pressed to the woman’s pubis. The statue was old; the wood cracked with age, pocked with the flight-holes of woodworm, but the craft and care spoke of an age of faith made manifest. Sweepers worked the floor, two street boys with twig besoms. The susurrus of sacred amaci purification soothed Marcelina.

The bateria occupied the left window corner of the room, and the drummers were already far into their improvisation, trading tempos and breaks. On the opposing wall the kitchen door led to the improvised camarinha. As initiate zemba Marcelina was permitted into the fundamentos, which seemed to consist of Barbosa sitting at a worktop with a cup of coffee reading the soccer results off his WAP cellular. A brass cage stood beside the bottle-gas cooker; within, a golden frog, stupid eyes wide, throat throbbing. A grasshopper skewered on a pin and wired to the bars offered temptation. An antique brass kettle on the gas hob spelled its fate.

Summoned by drums, the egbé had been arriving since twilight; mostly men, some few women, pausing to purify themselves with a splash of holy water from the stoups by the front door. All wore white, though watches and jewelry showed they came from outside Rocinha. Many had painted a single stripe of gold down the center of their faces, brow to chin. Marcelina was dressed in a high-neck racer-back top and capoeira pants — all white — Fisico had sourced down in the town. The pants were a little chafing in the crotch; otherwise Fisico had read her size right. Full dark now, the great favela a fog of light spilling down from the green mountaintops to the sea. The bateria unleashed its full force. The terreiro shook, cups rattled on hooks, the refrigerator door was shaken open. Glancing out into the barracão Marcelina saw the space before the altar was as crowded with white-clad, dancing bodies as any Lapa 4 AM club, and yet more piled in behind. Some wore full bridal dress, gleamingly white and virginal; they pushed up to the very front of the barracão and whirled, already ridden by the orixás. She saw Mestre Ginga arrive, hastily bless himself, and work his way along the wall to the camarinha. He kissed Barbosa on each cheek and set a long flat object wrapped in banana leaves on the table.

“Awo,” he said to Marcelina’s puzzled look. Secret.

Now the alabé was calling, the egbé and the bateria responding, and Marcelina felt the music kick open an inner door so that fear and apprehension flowed into excitement and anticipation. The drums caught her, lifted her. Even the glorious abandoned insanity of the réveillon and its two milllion souls had not thrilled her so, called the deep axé and sent tears down her cheeks, shaken her to the ovaries. Barbosa touched her gently on the hand, rose from his seat. Marcelina fell in behind him, Mestre Ginga at the rear. Before quitting the camarinha he lit the gas under the kettle.

A wall of sound greeted Marcelina. She lifted her fists: Mick walking onto the stage on the Copacabana Beach before half of Rio. The egbé went wild. Over the physical hammer of drums, so hard it hurt, came a shout from the golden faces. Zemba! Zemba! The iâos in their bridal dress whirled in bolar, the deep possession of the saint. The Daime at Recreio dos Bandeirantes had been a security-guarded, middle-class madness: the terreiro of the Curupairá was the true spirit: axé burned along the concrete floor, from light fitting to light fitting. Marcelina was whirled time out of mind; space stretched; time shrank; she may have danced, she may have been lost for a time among the white-clad bodies; then she was back at the altar. Barbosa raised his white cane. Drums, voices, feet fell silent and still. He spoke in a language Marcelina did not understand, part indio, part church Latin, bur its meaning was clear to her, the calls, the shouted responses: she was the zemba, the warrior, the protector of the egbé. Barbosa guided her to the front of the altar. The people murmured greeting. Mestre Ginga brought the copper kettle from the kitchen, dancing a fidgety, malandragem little tap-step as he worked around the assentamento past the drummers. The alabé started a rattle on his agogô; the bateria took it up, whisper of skin on skin. Mestre Ginga lifted the kettle before the congregation, who again murmured, like the sea. Barbosa took the kettle, quick as only a corda vermelha could be; Mestre Ginga caught Marcelina, pinned her arms. Excitement burst inside her. Barbosa brought the kettle up to her lips. She opened her mouth eagerly. This was the sexiest thing she had ever ever done. Pae do Santo Barbosa poured three drops of liquid onto the tip of her tongue. The curupairá was rank, bitter, Marcelina grimaced, tried to spit it our. On the third spit, the multiverse blossomed around her.

The barracão was a dazing blur, room upon room superimposed within, next, above each other, yet each accessible from every other. The eyes perrceived; the comprehension reeled. More people, more people, the population of an entire city, and the entire planet, crammed into this one room. Blinded by the white: Marcelina lifted her hand to shield her eyes and saw a thousand hands halo it. Edit. Everything is edit, cutting down those endless tapes of footage to meaning. Peering through the white barracãos she caught glimpses of other rooms, families coming together, televisions, meals on battered sofas. Car engines on carpets. And beyond them all, the dark forest. She whirled, throwing off a firework spray of alternatives to the window. Rocinha was a universe of stars; galaxies beyond galaxies of lights. Marcelina cried out, her ghosts and echoes called around her. The gravity was irresistible; she might fall forward forever into those clouds of lights. Beyond them, other skylines, other Rios, other entire geographies. She saw unbounded ocean; she saw archipelagos of light; she saw green cordilleras and great pampas.

Marcelina turned to Barbosa. She saw him alive, she saw him dead, she saw him gone, she saw him glorious, a hero, the greatest goalkeeper Brazil ever knew, a government minister, a UN goodwill ambassador. She saw him hounded and humiliated on prime-time television; she saw an old man take off his hat and his jacket and walk into the waves off Ipanema; she saw twenty milllion fingers poised over the TV remote red button to vote: innocent or guilty?

Next the curupairá touched the auditory centers and opened them up. One voice, ten voices, a choir, a cacophony. The reverential silence of the barrracão became an ocean of soft breathing, became a hurricane. Marcelina clapped her hands over her ears, cried out. The cry rang out from a million universes, each clear and distinct. Beyond rhe edges of the cry were voices, her own voice. Eyes squeezed shut against the shatter of the multiverse, Marcelina forced her understanding toward the distant voices, tried to pick them out one by one. There was a way to navigare the multiverse, she discovered; what you sensed depended on what you focused upon. Focus on the terreiro, on the favela light, and you saw geographically. Concentrate on a person, on Barbosa, on her own voice, and you steered from life to life, ignoring distance and time. Mind was the key. Top to bottom, beginning to end, it was all thought.

Marcelina gingerly opened her eyes. She stood at the center of a cloud of selves; a mirror-maze of Marcelina Hoffmans before, behind, to left to right, above, below but all connected to her and to each other. One mind, one life in all its fullness. She saw herself a star, commissioning editor, channel controller, telenovela director, pop producer. She saw herself a journalist, a fashion designer, a party gatinha. She saw herself married, pregnant, children around her; she saw herself divorced, alcoholic; she saw herself down; she saw herself dead more times than she wanted: in a fast German car, in a mugging, with a belt around her forearm, in a toilet, at the end of a blade that could cut through anything. There. Fast as a bat, moving away from her sight as she touched it, crossing from world to world to world. Herself. Her enemy. The anti-Marcelina, the hunter, the cop, the police.

I see you , she thought. In that revelation, she saw beyond, to the blur of quantum computations, to the fundamental stuff of reality, the woven fabric of time and calculation. And she saw, as she remembered sitting backstage with the hands watching the Astonishing Ganymede, the famously bad conjuror of the Beija-Flor, waiting for her mother to sweep up from the band pit on her mirrored Wurlitzer, how the trick was done. It was simple, so very simple. Everything was edit. Take a sample here, another there, put them together, smooth over the joins with a little cutaway. New reality. Innocent and shining with wonder, she reached out her hand to seize reality.

Mestre Ginga’s arms were around her again; fingers forced open her mouth, a million open mouths, a billion fingers. Coffee. Marcelina choked, gagged, heaved in Mestre Ginga’s wire-strong arms. The flocking universes flew away like a storm of butterflies.

“Coffee,” she swore, retching dryly over the assentamentos.

“You’re very much mistaken if you think it’s just coffee,” Mestre Ginga said, slowly releasing her. “Even those three drops can be too much.”

“I saw everything,” Marcelina said. She leaned on the edge of the altar, shaking, head bowed, sweat dripping from her lank hair. “I was … everything.” Every muscle spasmed. No capoeira jogo had ever wrung her so dry. Slowly she became aware that there was a roomful of expectant devotees in white, waiting for the word from the multiverse. “I saw … her.”

“And she saw you,” Barbosa said. “She knows what you are now.”

“The zemba.”

“You are nor the zemba yet,” Barbosa said. Tock-tock , said the agogô, beginning a fresh rhythm. The iâos swayed and swirled, left to right, their dresses floating up around them. Fisico entered from the camarinha carrying the leaf-wrapped object. He set it reverently on the altar. Shards of other worlds flickered around Marcelina. Would it always be this? She suspected so. On the edge of her vision, like a floater in the eye that, when looked at, perrpetually flees the focus of attention, she was aware of the anti-Marcelina, and that she was aware of her. The curupairá, the gathering of the egbé, Barbosa revealing himself as Pae do Santo of the terreiro were to prepare her for the inevitable showdown. Marcelina stripped away the dry, dust-smelling banana leaves. The leather scabbard was the length of her forearm, worked with an image in ridged stitch work of the Lady of All Worlds. She took the handle.

“Careful,” Barbosa warned.

The blade drew like silk over glass. It seemed to Marcelina that it did not actually touch the inside of the sheath bur was suspended in some kind of invisible filmlike oil. The blade was long, curved, beautifully dangerous. She held it up before her eyes. The only sound in the barracão was the clock-tock of the agogô. Marcelina looked closely; the edge was blurred, she could not focus on it, it appeared to fizz and boil, a heat-haze on the edge of vision. Marcelina made a sudden cut. The egbé let out a great coo of wonder. She smelled electricity, saw blue burn across the line of her slash.

’’I’ve seen one of these before.”

“It’s the standard-issue ritual weapon of the Order,” Fisico said. “It looks like a knife, but we think it’s an information weapon. It cuts down to the quantum level. It undoes the braids of quantum loop gravity. This is technology beyond us, beyond any of the worlds of the multiverse. I think it may always be beyond us; it’s part of the fabric of the universal quantum computer itself.”

Marcelina spun with the knife in a wheeling capoeira armada. Did she hear the shriek of fundamental computations coming apart?

“Where did you get this?”

“It came with the book. The annexes say that Our Lady of All Worlds brought it up from the bottom of the Rio Negro.”

Again the multiverse pulsed around Marcelina. Cut. Edit. You are not unarmed now. You are not a victim. She held the knife high over head. The egbé roared. The iâos whirled, petticoats held out. The bateria took up the argument of the agogô as Marcelina strutted around the altar, blade held high.

“Zemba!” Mestre Ginga roared, and the terreiro rook it up.

“Zemba! Zemba! Zemba!”

The weather closed in as the Rocinha Taxi Company cab took Marcelina up over the top of the town and down toward the floodlit oval of the Jockey Club. Fingers of low cloud that joined together into a great palm of stratus blew in from the west and pressed down on the morros. By the time the taxi reached the lagoon it was raining steadily. Marcelina itched and fidgeted in the middle of the backseat, burning still with the brief vision of the curupairá. Every flash of passing headlights, every flicker of pink and yellow street neon cast shadows of other universes. With the quantum blade tucked into the top of her white Capri pants and her clingy top, Marcelina could have conned free entry to any club in Rio. She was death. She was the hunter. She was beyond cool. The driver had been instructed to take her to a safe house Mestre Ginga knew in Santa Teresa, but as he cruised the Avenida Borges de Medeiros, the lagoon dark, rain-pocked reflections, Marcelina leaned forward between the front seats and said, “Can you take me a detour?”

“I don’t know. I mean the mestre said — ”

“I just want to drop something in; it’ll not take five minutes. It’s just down on Rua Tabatinguera; it’s not even really out of your way.”

“I suppose I could, then.”

Marcelina took the steep concrete steps that rose almost sheer up the face of the morro a reckless two at a time. Love does that. Rain punished her. Good rain. Sweet rain. She pressed the PDA close to her chest, protecting it from water. Pools were already forming on Heitor’s gloomy garden patio, a lightless concrete rectangle between the rear of the apartment tower and the dripping raw rock. His light — and love — starved climbing plants shed rain like sweat. Marcelina knew the key code by heart. Her finger stopped a millimeter above the chrome button.

The door was open a crack.

Marcelina slipped back from the door and pressed herself against the wall. She called up the live Canal Quatro newsfeed on her cellular.

“ … and the police report that Mare and Parada de Lucas are quiet tonight, with armed incidents returning to normal levels,” Fagner “Deathand-Destruction” Meirelles reported Live! from a militar cordon. Hissing through her teeth, Marcelina thumbed the volume down. “And back to the studio.” And there was Heitor standing in front of the giant green-screen map of Brazil. The only newsreader who has to worry about the color of his socks, he always said.

Marcelina sent him into darkness. In one G3 call elation turned to dread, to more fear than she imagined anyone could know and live. Every part of her ached. It would be very very good to be sick, even if it was only hot bile, cold coffee, and terreiro drugs. She could feel the multiverse flickering around her, a cloud of orixás and angels. Now. This was the time. She drew the blade, crouched into a fighting ginga stance. Slowly slowly she pushed the door open. Cat-careful, Marcelina advanced through the lobby of books. Stiff, so stiff, and no time to warm up. She would have to go from cold into explosive action. This was no jogo, no game.

No lights, but squatting in cocorinha by the side of the living-room door Marcelina saw a silhouette cross the glittering panorama of the lagoa. The destruction was to be total: her career, her family, her friends, her lover. Then, one by one, Fisico, Mestre Ginga, Barbosa the goalkeeper: the entire terreiro, any and all who knew the secret shape of the multiverse, and about the Order that protected it. And at some point, Marcelina Hoffman. That point was now. Malandros mestres corda vermelhas all you great fighters and dancers, give me malicia. She stood up, flicked on the main light, and cartwheeled into the room in a one-handed aú. Marcelina came up into ginga, blade ready.

She stood momentarily dazed in the light by the kitchen annex, black to Marcelina’s white. Of course. This was elemental battle. Her. More than any twin could ever be. Curupairá vision flickered around Marcelina, and for an instant she saw herself through her enemy’s eyes, loira angel, white capoeirista. We are each other. One mind shattered across a hundred billion universes. Then the anti-Marcelina came like a jaguar. Marcelina dropped under the blow in a simple resistencia, spun out in a wheeling S-dobrado kick. Her foot grazed her enemy’s head; then Marcelina rolled into a waistbend, one hand on the floor, the other gripping the quantum blade for all love, and came up into the dancing, defensive ginga.

The anti-Marcelina advanced on her in a blinding weave of cuts that struck small lightnings from the air in the apartment. Marcelina ducked, rolled, dived, flipped away from the burning blade. One thing, one edge in malicia. Her enemy did not play capoeira. She did not know jeito.

A scything blow left the glass coffee table in two capsized halves. Marcelina backflipped over one of the leather sofas into ginga.

“Say something, will you! Say my fucking name.”

Her enemy smiled and in three strokes reduced the sofa to hide and spring and stuffing. Now Marcelina realized that she had underestimated the power of her enemy’s weapon. She could run, she could dance, but the anti-Marcelina would cut, cut, keep cutting through anything and everything, keep cutting, keep coming until she was too exhausted to play capoeira anymore. You have lost the initiative. Time to stop playing defensive. But I’m not a killer. Yes you are. Look.

Marcelina aimed an asfixiante punch at her enemy’s nose, then brought the blade in a scything sweep. The anti-Marcelina dodged the punch and brought her own blade cutting down onto the flat of Marcelina’s. There was a flash of light, a cry of reality maimed. Marcelina saw the severed blade of her knife flash up into the air, fall point first into the floor and vanish. She imagined it dropping through the apartments below, level by level. Even solid concrete and rock could not resist it. She hoped there was no one directly beneath.

The anti-Marcelina smiled sweetly, held up her own intact blade. Then she beckoned. Finish it.

Marcelina Hoffman ran. Jeito. Street smart. The true malandro knows when and where to fight. A gashed sofa, a bisected coffee table — these Heitor could explain on an insurance claim. A corpse that looked like your lover and disgraced TV producer: that was a career killer.

Marcelina knocked off the lights (these silly tricks worked, but that was the essence of malandragem, the pant-pull boca de calça that had felled arrogant Jair — the stupid and obvious was the last-seen) and ducked out the elevator lobby door. The slam would betray her, but the few seconds it took for the anti-Marcelina to cut through the lock would give her time and space. Marcelina pelted up the emergency stairs. Two flights up she heard the door crash onto concrete. I’m a dancer not a runner , she shouted at herself. Footsteps slapping on bare concrete. Up up up. But Jesus and Mary the curupairá had taken it out of her. The curupairá and every other torment and mystery and threat and revelation of the past two weeks. From Blue Sky Friday to Fight-for-your Life Sunday. She fell through the door onto the roof. Room to move. Space to fight. Heitor had brought her up here with champagne and coke when she won the commission for UFO Hunt: Live! By night, in the rain, it was moltenly beautiful, strips and clouds of soft light, the flow of head- and taillights along the lagoon road, the soft shurr of tires in the wet, and beyond all, above all, the dark look of the morros.

The door crashed open. Her enemy was here. Marcelina rolled into a defensive stance. The anti-Marcelina hefted her blade to a killing grip. Back and forth they fought, strike and counterstrike, across the puddled rooftop, slipping on the loose gravel, tripping on the satellite cables and water pipes. Feint by feint Marcelina drew her assassin to the sheer face of the morro, pressing to within centimeters of the parapet. Above her concrete pillars rose like organ pipes, stabilizing the rock face. There were service ways up to those piers. She hopped on to the edge and leaped across the gap on to the hill itself. Her enemy followed but Marcelina was already up on to the service path, a precipitous ledge with only a chain for handrail. A sudden tug almost pulled her from the path; Marcelina reeled back hard against the wet rock. The chain that had almost dragged her down fell away into the dark between the flat roofs of the apartment blocks below. Her enemy looked up into her face. With the last of her strength Marcelina ran up the steps onto the top of the morro. Rio lay beneath her, the lagoon an oval of darkness, a jet jewel set in gold. Leblon, Gávea, the shining spill of Rocinha; Ipanema a line of light interrupted by dark hills, beyond it the glowing scimitar of the Barra da Tijuca. To her left the lights of the Copacabana were a golden necklace between the shouldering morros.

The anti-Marcelina appeared over the top of the steps, panting.

“Let’s have it out,” Marcelina said. “Here. No more running or clever stuff. Let’s do it here.”

The anti-Marcelina shook her head. Rain flew from her golden hair.

Marcelina was shivering, wet to the bone, but it would end here, far from the eyes of the world, high above Rio de Janeiro. The enemy launched at her. She was good, but she had no jeito, no malandragem. Marcelina dropped into a banda, caught her enemy’s legs between her own, and twisted. The anti-Marcelina went sprawling. Marcelina followed with a down-and-dirty kick to the side of the head. The anti-Marcelina howled but rolled into a knife-fighting crouch. She menaced, jabbing, feinting with the quantum-blade. You picked the wrong martial art , Marcelina thought, floating in ginga, coiled like a jaguarundi. The true capoeirista will always appreciate a good dodge more than a good blow.

“You know,” she said, “that you don’t give a damn about anything that gets in your way, the casual cruelty, I can understand. I’ve done that myself. But what I can never, ever ever forgive is that part of me that wants to be a fucking cop.”

The anti-Marcelina struck. The tip of the Q-blade grazed the inside of Marcelina’s forearm. There was no pain, no shock; then Marcelina saw blood well from the long, shallow line. The anti-Marcelina reversed her grip, came in again. Marcelina ducked into a defensive cocorinha and saw it. It was simple, it was beautiful, it was malandragem. She grabbed the cuffs of the anti-Marcelina’s pants and pulled up. With a cry the anti-Marcelina went back over the edge of the morro.

Marcelina watched her own face, eyes wide, drop through the spears of rain. There was no cry, no scream, but the quantum-blade cut a line of blue light through the air. She watched her other self strike the edge of a rooftop and bounce, spinning into the greater darkness beneath.

Marcelina stood a long time in the hammering rain, counting breaths. Breathing was good, count them, slow the heart. Count the breaths one two three. Don’t think about what you did. Don’t think about the look in your eyes as you fell down into the dark between the apartment blocks. You died there. You lost. You won; but in winning, you lost. The multiverse pulled a final malicioso move on you. That’s your body down there. Even now she could hear the police sirens, see the flashing lights coming around the dark lagoon. Marcelina Hoffman, the controversial Canal Quatro producer who recently gained national notoriety when she proposed putting disgraced goalkeeper Moafir Barbosa on trial, was found dead at the foot of Morro dos Cabritos on Sunday night. Police are continuing their investigations, but suicide has not been ruled out. Adriano Russo, director of programming at Canal Quatro, said that Senhora Hoffman had been under a lot of strain recently, at work and in her domestic life, and had been acting erratically. She imagined Heitor looking into the autocue. He would be professional. He was always professsional. He would mourn later. Her family would bury something. The police would keep the quantum-blade and wonder among themselves for decades just how a dead television producer came to be in possession of a knife that could cut through anything.

Marcelina looked down into the darkness where her enemy lay. She lost, but she beat you. You are dead too.

Footsteps on wet rock.

Marcelina spun into defense. A man in loose dark clothing, formless against the night. A thumbnail of white at his throat; priest’s vestments?

“If you want me you can have me, I’m dead anyway.” She stood upright, opened her arms.

“You can never win against yourself.” A big man, white-skinned, dark hair, hollow-cheeked; gaunt, she thought, with more than age. His Portuguese was strangely accented, stiffly archaic.

“So, who are you? Order or player!”

“I was an admonitory,” the man said. “Now I am a visitor. A traveler. An explorer. A recruiter, perhaps.”

“Explorer of what?”

The man smiled. Marcelina could make our that he had the palest blue eyes.

“You know that.”

The sirens were close now.

“Recruiter?”

“What does one recruit for, if not a war!”

The sirens had shut down.

“Come with me,” the priest said. “Here. Now. This is the one chance you’ll get. It will mean leaving everything you’ve ever hoped for and loved behind, but you’ve lost those anyway, and there are ways back. There are always ways back. There is a war, but it’s bigger than you ever thought. It’s bigger than you can think. It’s your chance to make a universe. You are a maker. Come and make reality.”

Marcelina felt the multiverse open around her like wings, each feather a universe. The priest turned away; a billion doors opened before him.

“Who are you?” Marcelina shouted.

“Does it matter?”

What was there? The Girl Who Came Back from the Dead would be a hell of a program, but no producer should ever be the star of her own show. The husband, the beautiful children, the babies, the stellar career — they would never happen. One thing she could do.

“I’m not a cop.”

“Oh no,” the priest said. “Never that.”

“That’s all right, then,” Marcelina Hoffman said, and stepped after him out among the universes.

APRIL 18, 2033

The ball hangs motionless at the top of its arc. Freeze-framed behind it, perfect sky perfect sunset perfect perfect sea. A hand reaches up and smashes it hard over the net. The girl in the red baseball cap and matching tanga dives, meets the ball with her two fists, a beautiful block. Her partner follows the volley, times her jump and is there to spike it down on to the enemy sand. Thigh muscles belly muscles upper arms are in perfect definition. Asses in mathematically curved precision. The breasts are high and firm and big, but they move like real flesh. Cheekbones knife-sharp. Noses flattened, kissy-kissy pert lippies.

They’re stupidly fabulous, bur Edson’s not watching them. He follows the coconut boy sauntering over the sand with his machete and his wares slung around his shoulder. He’s in good shape, swimmer’s definition, muscles but not too many, natural not surgical. He sees Edson looking over as he drags past, catches his eye. A toss of the head. It’s on for tonight. Edson turns and leaves the sunset beach for the strip. Behind him robots scurry from scrapes to rake smooth the sand, erasing all trace of his presence. The glory-girls do not even glance away from their game.

Beaches, Edson has ruefully decided, are very overrated. Before him rises the titanium-and-glass cliff of Oceanus. One hundred and fifty vertical meters of inverted social order. Penthouses fringe the beach-strip, then the restaurants, sea-view bars, clubs, casinos, the high-marque specialist shops that consider themselves too exclusive for the cavernous rain-forest ravine of the Jungle! Jungle! shopping mall. Next up the apartments and hotels; higher still the office units and businesses; higher again the medical centers and manufacturing zones; and over all the airport occupies most of the kilometer-and-a-half run of the top deck, apart from that sector at the prow reserved for the golf course.

The great ship cruises just outside Brasilian territorial waters two hundred kilometers off Pernambuco, shadowing the coast of Brasil southward. Three hundred and fifty thousand citizens speak thirty tongues; Portuguese, the only one Edson understands, among the least and quaintest. Her twelve-million-ton deadweight can punch through hurricanes, cyclones, taifuns. The nuclear reactor at her core propels her at a lax, unceasing eight knots: a circumnavigation of the world’s continental shelves every three years; extraterritorial, beyond national jurisdictions, the ultimate free-trade port and corporate tax shelter. Category error. Oceanus is no ship: she’s an oceangoing city-state.

When the seguranças made him kneel hands clasped behind neck, head bowed, Edson had been certain he had seconds to live. Assault guns had stood over the raiders of the lost car-pound while the mercenary crew buckled a tautliner cover over Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. Two men in black had dragged Edson out of line across the scabby concrete, scraping the polish off the toes of his good shoes, and thrown him into the back of a black quiet car that said money more effectively than any hood ornament. Fia was already belted in, fidgety with apprehension.

“I asked them to bring you,” she whispered as car and truck accelerated out of the dead mall. “It’s not the Order; they won’t touch the guys, it’s just us they’re after. Me, I mean.” Edson understood. The Order would have left nothing alive in the mall. There was a third player in the game.

By the third rodovia gantry Edson had worked out they were heading to the airport. The convoy swept past the militar guard to the air-freight terminal. Embraer bizjets stood on the apron with their variable-geometry wings folded like anhingas’. A woman in a very well-cut suit escorted Edson and Fia onto a bizjet. Her safety demonstration as the bizjet taxied was as much a declaration of her absolute power over her guests as instruction on what to do in the eventuality of landing on water. Edson barely noticed when the plane left the ground and he left the city of his birth and life for the first time. He was entranced by a single word on suit-woman’s lapel badge: Teixeira.

Every man of business has his saints. Edson’s are those who come from nothing: the favelado become futebol legend; the Minas Gerais boy who seduces the nation with his voice; the Paulistano who turns his kibe stand into a global franchise; Alcides Teixeita.

He was born one of the landless; that great Brasilian archetype, the drought-stricken peasant of the northeast sertão who, like so many before, embarked on the trek to the silver city. His legend began where all the others ended: at his first glimpse of the towers of Fortaleza, and the sprawling favelas around them like scabs. My face to the boot, my wife to the streets , he said, and he and his wife got straight back onto the bus. The driver didn’t charge them. No one had ever done a return trip before. Alcides Teixeira had taken a development loan from the MST, the Landless League, and planted five hundred hectares of dust-poor sertão with gene-modified rape seed. Within three years he was power farming three thousand hectares. Within five years, he signed output deals with Petrobras and Ipiranga and became EMBRAÇA. Twenty-six years later Alcides Teixeira’s land covered four continents with green soy and yellow rape and was stealthing down the cool cool hillsides upon the Fazenda Alvaranga. Such a man would be within that golden circle privy to the secret order of the multiverse. Such a man would dare use that information to his profit. Multiverse economic modeling had been Fia’s specialty in her world. Where there is a differential, a boundary, there is money to be made across it.

His mind spinning with plans and potentialities, Edson saw the dawn through the cabin window, spilling light across the shadowed land so that it kindled and lit. He felt the breath catch in his throat. Roads were silver wires. Rivers were gold. Every instant the pattern of shadows across the land changed. Then Edson saw the blue curve of the ocean. He pressed his face to his window. Big sea, getting bigger. Whitecaps, white boats. Land gone now, nothing but open ocean, and the plane settling toward it. The wing was changing shape, unfolding its cruise sweepback. Edson felt the wheels slide out and lock. The whitecaps were growing closer; Edson gripped the armrests. There was nothing out there. How did that landing on water go again? Lower. Engines roared, the pilot put the nose up, and the Teixeira bizjet dropped sweet neat onto a pure white runway scuffed with grubby tire marks. There were Embraers at stands, a control tower, even a dinky terminal. Suit was out of her seat while the plane was still rolling. She stood in the aisle, arms braced on seatbacks.

“Welcome to Oceanus.”

The daughters of Alcides Teixeira were goddesses. They had been built that way. Krekamey and Olinda: tall and pale from surgery, languid hands and thighs of gold. Creatures like Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas were beneath their regard, but their elongated, almond eyes opened as far as surgery would permit at the sight of the cyber-wheels turning slowly on Fia’s belly.

One thing you can’t buy, putas.

Alcides Teixeira led the tour personally, pointing out the offices and company apartments. Heroes are usually shorter than you imagine; but Edson hadn’t expected the bad skin. The sertão had engrained itself in acne pocks and sun-creased lines. Perhaps the thing about Alcides Teixeira’s level of wealth was the power to say, World, live with it.

“And this is where you’ll be working.”

Cute muscly boys in EMBRAÇA high-visibility coveralls were already installing the Q-cores in the huge glass-walled room high above the sea: blue, blue glass. Fia berated them: Not there; when the sun gets round this side of the ship, I won’t be able to see a damn thing.

“We had a hell of a job catching you,” Alcides Teixeira said. “You just kept running.”

“We thought you were the… Order,” Edson said. Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira of EMBRAÇA was standing beside him, close enough to smell his aftershave, talking to him. The glorious daughters moved before him like visions. But he could not deny it was embarrassing, the realization that the pistoleiros at Liberdade from whom Edson had rescued Fia were in fact Teixeira private seguranças. They had been successfully running away from salvation.

“Son, if we know about Fia here, we know about the Order. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos.”

Edson ventured, “Mr. Teixeira, if I could just say, you’ve always been a hero to me. I’m a businessman myself” Never be without a card. First rule of business. He pressed it on Alcides Teixeira.

“Talent and light entertainment. Good on you, son.” He nodded at his glorious daughters. “See those two? Bloody spoiled bitches, the pair of them. Spend all their money on their tits and asses.” Krekamey-taller, blonder, weirder-scowled. “There’s a job for you here if you want it. We’ll find you something to exercise your talents, son.”

“Mr. Teixeira, if you don’t mind, I’d rather exercise my talents for myself.” In thirty minutes down from the landing strip Edson had seen enough of Oceanus to know it was a ship of death. Death to Edson, to all he hoped to be. A kept boy, he would grow lazy and fat and doped and boozed and sun-soaked and dissolve into nothing. Dead.

Alcides Teixeira balked momentarily, not a man accustomed to refusal; then he grinned hugely and slapped Edson on his bird-frail back.

“Of course of course, I’d say that myself. Paulistanos always had a great work ethic.”

Edson rides rhe moveway along the central spine of the great ship. The perspectives of the central strip awe: they’re designed to. A straight kay and half; fifty meters vertical. The walls are lined with baroque balcony walks and cupolas, restaurants hang like weaver bird nests from the roof. Airbridges, elevator shafts, escalator runs crisscross the airspace. Kinetic fabric sculptures flex and bow in the air-conditioning. The air is fresh with ozone and saltiness. Main Street opens up into the central atrium of Jungle! Jungle! the forested heart of Oceanus; the vast cathedral-windows of Dawn and Sunset on opposite sides of the ship flood the chirping, chittering, dripping, reeking mass of verdure with true photosynthesizable light. Macaws whoop, toucans swoop, and birds of paradise flutter. Stores are tiny jeweled nests set among the foliage. Behind the storefronts are labels Edson and Efrim alike would kill for, but his back would blister at the touch of unearned silk. But Efrim lately is a stranger, a woman with whom he once had a fine, elegant affair. Even Edson is numb among the retail opportunities.

It’s a hell of a walk home from the beach, through the twilight ecologies of Oceanus , but Edson knows this world is killing Fia. He doesn’t pretend to understand what she’s doing up in the R D levels — not even Mr. Peach could explain it, he suspects — but he knows what he sees dragging back from the office, piling into the sofa to sit curled up against the armrest silently sullenly flickering her eyes over A World Somewhere on her I-shades, fridge-feeding, putting on weight. And sex is completely out the window.

So Edson has this thing he does, because a man has to.

The security jockey on the desk at the residential level is a Maceio boy watching Bang!Bang on his transparent desktop. He despises Edson but must respect the Teixeira authority on his I-shades. Most of Oceanus’s labor has been shipped in from the northeast. Is this what we aspire to? Edson thinks. Cheap offshore meat exports. Brasil, the nation of the future, and always will be.

The apartment has luxuries Edson could never dream even for his fantasy Ilhabela beach house: an I-wall, a spa bath, massage chairs, a free-flow bed that learns its occupants’ sleep patterns and molds itself to them. Edson has taken to the fold-down in the living room. She’s the worker, she needs the quality sleep , he tells himself. The sun beaming through the glass wall wakes him every morning. He brings Fia morning coffee and takes his out onto the balcony to watch the light out of the sea. Not even a kiss. This is it, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas , he tells himself as he sits at the deck table and feels the warmth on his face. The one thing you wanted.

“Hey.”

The apartment is in darkness, but there is a moon and light from the sea: Oceanus is pushing through a huge current of phosphorescence. Edson lifts his hand to the lights.

A sigh.

“Leave it.”

Fia is on the balcony, curled up on the decking against the partition wall in panties and vest-top. By ocean-light Edson can see she’s been crying again. He knows her enduring fear: she’s a postdoc researcher into quantum economic modeling who stumbled from one universe to another by luck and dessperation, and she is expected to direct the sharpest theoreticians Teixeira money can hire. She fears they know that, that one day one of them will casually ask, Who told you you could do this? Edson has spent his life staying one answer ahead of that question.

“Are you all right?”

“No. Do you want to know, Ed?” She has taken to this nickname. Edson doesn’t like it. It’s not a self he’s made. But he kicks off his shoes, slides out of his jacket. The air is soft and skin-warm, tanged with salt. He never imaggined the sea would smell so strange: like it hates the land and all who come from it.

“Want to know what?”

“Do you want to know what the Order is keeping secret? We’ve found it. It’s a doozy, Edson. Tell me this, why are we alone? Why are humans the only intelligence in the universe?”

“I know this argument. Mr. Peach used to talk abour this; he had a name for it. Something’s paradox.”

“Fermi’s paradox, that’s what you’re looking for. Keep that in your head while I ask you question two: why is mathematics so good at explaining physical reality? What is it about numbers and logic?”

“Well, that’s the universal quantum computing thing.…”

“And Mr. Peach told you that too.”

“Don’t laugh at him. I told you before. Don’t laugh at him.”

Fia starts at the sure ferocity in Edson’s voice.

’’I’m sorry. Okay, let’s just leave that as something I will never get. But why should computation be the root of reality? Why should reality be one huge system of rendering — no different from a very big, very complicated computer game? Why should it all look like a fake? Unless it is a fake. Or a repeat. Maybe there are no alien intelligences out there because what we think of as our universe is a massive quantum computation simulation. A rerun. All of them, reruns.”

Edson slips his arm behind her back.

“Come on. You need to get to bed, you’re tired.”

“No Edson, listen. Before we killed the Amazon, in my world, there was a legend. In it the jaguar made the world, but not very well; and it ended on the third day and we — the world, everything we think is real — are just the dreams of the third night. It’s true Edson, it’s true. We’re the dreams. We’re all ghosts. Think about it: if a universal quantum computer could simulate reality exactly, any numbers of times, what are the odds of us being in the very first, original one, as opposed to any other? Do you want those numbers? I can give you those numbers. We’ve worked them out. They are so so so so small… The real universe died long ago, and we’re just ghosts, at the end of time, in the cold, the final cold. It’s running slower and slower and slower, but it will never stop, over and over again, and we can’t get off. None of us can ever get off. And that’s what the Order is keeping from us. We are not humans. We’re ghosts of humans running on a huge quantum simulation. All of us. All the worlds, all the universes.”

“Fia, come on, you’re not well, come on, I’ll help you.” He doesn’t want her calking about the Order, their Sesmarias and killers. Edson fetches water from the kitchen zone. The water on this boat tastes sick; like sea that has been through too many bladders. He’s added a couple of additions from the farmacia to it. She’s been working too hard. Rantings, mad stuff. “Come on, sleep.”

She’s a solid girl, growing more massy on junk food, no exercise, and homesickness. Edson helps her to the bed.

“Ed, I’m scared.”

“Ssh, sleep, you’ll be all right.” Her eyes close. She is out. Edson arranges the pillow under her head. He looks long at Fia swashing down into sleep like a coin through water. Then Edson pulls on his polished shoes and straightens his hip-ruffled shirt and goes out to meet his coconut boy. Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.

Coco-boy meets Edson at the back of the double-deck driving range stand. The nets are floodlit; stray light glints from the steel sea far below. A whistle.

“Oi.”

“Oi.”

“It’s been delayed. There’s something else coming in ahead of it.”

It’s a sweet little business arrangement. Coconut and guest workers come in on the night flights and with them Pernambuco’s finest mood-shifters. It’s not illegal-very little is illegal on extraterritorial Oceanus , where the corporacãos rule like colonial donatories. Neither is it particularly legal. Oceanus is a nuclear-powered gray economy, and Edson moves through the informal economy like a cat in a favela. Personality adjuncts are marketable: Edson has sent roots down into the club level, and his business plan predicts doubling the number of personalities on Oceanus in six months. God and his Mother; those blandroids need all the character they can get. And tonight tonight tonight eight kilos are coming in from the farm a shops of Recife, and everyone knows the people of the nordeste are the best cooks in all Brasil.

Lights in the dark sky, fast approaching. Now engine noise. Growing up in a flight-path, Edson has noticed how aircraft engines are never on a sliding scale of audibility, from whisper to rush to roar, but go from silence instantly to audible. Quantum noise. The kind of thing you would find in Fia’s fake.

“That’s the other flight,” Coco-boy says. He has the jeitinho with the airport staff.

“That doesn’t sound like a plane,” Edson says. A jet-black helicopter, vissible only by the gleams of moonlight on its sleek, jaguar flanks, slides in over Oceanus. Edson and Coco-boy both see the green and yellow Brasilian Air Force stars morph up on its fuselage. It settles but does not land, hovering a meter and half above the strip. A door opens. A figure drops out, landing lightly on the runway. In an instant he is up and away. In the same instant the helicopter climbs and peels away from Oceanus. It shivers against the sky and then fades into the night, stealth systems engaged.

“Fuck,” says Coco-boy.

“Back,” says Edson. “Hide.” His balls are cold and tight. Wrong here.

His balls have never lied to him. Even as Efrim. Lights come on in the control tower; seguranças run around not quite knowing what has happened or what they should do. The running figure pauses not five meters from Coco-boy and Edson’s hiding place behind a plastic welcome banner. He turns. Backscatter from the driving range floodlights catches on an object slung across his back; at first Edson thinks its bone, a spine, something bizarre. Then he sees it is a bow, cast and shaped to an individual hand. And, as the man runs soft, swift, silent as light to the emergency stairwell, Edson sees another thing: an unforgettable blue glow, seemingly from the arrowheads in their quiver. Quantum-blades.

At age twelve Yanzon could shoot the eye from a monkey among the forks and leaves of the tallest, densest tree in the forest canopy. In those plague days monkeys were not good eating; Yanzon did this merely to display his supreme skill. After the fifth pandemic reduced the Iguapá nation to twenty souls, Yanzon made the long descent of the white and black waters to Manaus. His shooting eye earned money among the people who bet on the street-archery contests. When no one would bet on him anymore, he was taken up by a patron who groomed him to represent his nation in the Olympic games. In Luzon in 2028 he won gold in all his shooting disciplines. The Robin Hood of Rio do Ouro , the papers said, the last Iguapá. But Manaus’s memory flows away like the river, and Yanzon would have slipped down through low-paid jobs into casual alcohol but for the aristocratic alva who arrived at his door one morning and offered him a job with travel prospects beyond his imagination. His old soul was unsurprised; the Iguapá had always known of the labyrinth of worlds and the caraibas who walked between them.

Now he runs lightly down the service stairs from Oceanus’s airport into the heart of the great ship. Yanzon touches the frame of his I-shades: a sunset-colored schematic is projected onto his retina. He can see through bulkheads, into sealed rooms, beyond walls and ceilings. Extraordinary technology; a world where everyone and everything may be located with a thought. A world with no room in which sin may hide. And music too; TV, movies everything. Not for the first time he wonders what his Brazyl might have achieved, but for the seven plagues.

His right hands hold the bow. It is an appallingly beautiful piece of killing gear. The compound limb is printed molecule by molecule from carbon nanofiber and molds to his grip like a prayer to a pain; the tip pivots are spun diamond. Pure titanium wheels give a hundred kilos of pull for an effortless, whip-fast draw. Gyros in the airspaces of the limb ensure exceptional stability and freedom from vibration; Yanzon can sight, aim, and have three arrows in the air and one on the nock before the first has punched home. Seeing it, you would say, That is one beautiful evil bow , but the words would not even leave your lips before Yanzon put an arrow clean through you. The real evil is not the bow, but the arrows.

Yanzon, last archer of the Iguapá, first hunter of the Order, arrives on Avenida Corporacão. The main business thoroughfare is cool, air-conditioned, cypress scented. A touch to the frame of Yanzon’s I-shades blinds the security eyes, but the baroque double doors of EMBRAÇA resist his code. This is what comes from leaving things to a hereditary aristocracy. Amateurs. The Buenos Aires Sesmarias could have handled this, but they are scared the Zemba will appear again as she did at the church when she destroyed the São Paulo family. Let her come. Yanzon has long anticipated matching her fighting art against his Q-bow. Kill the researchers, destroy the Q-cores, and the helicopter will return him to the DOI quantum computer and the crossing back to his Florianopolis beachfront apartment. He should try and pick up something in Brasilia for Rosemeri’s sixth birthday. A pair of these shades would be good, but they’re probably incompatible. It is never clean eliminating someone as prominent as this man of business, but Yanzon has seen every great man as a beggar elsewhere.

The door is quantum coded. Amen. What quantum seals, quantum shall undo. He draws the Q-blade and with one economic gesture cuts the door free from its frames. The two halves hang a moment, then fall backward onto the woven grass carpet of the reception area. As Yanzon’s boot soles crush the faces of carved baroque angels and demons, silent alarms detonate across his expanded vision.

Edson hammers on the elevator call button. Every street-sense, every gene of malandragem says never trust the elevator when your soul and love depends on it. But he’s seen what’s down the stairs. It’s here: bing. Stupid stupid stupid elevator AI: I don’t care about safety instruction. My girlfriend’s down there with an admonitory of the Order and a Q-bow. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos , Alcides Teixeira had said. No you can’t. They don’t care for your money, they don’t care for your empire, they don’t care for your polittical patronage and your power. They are beyond mere economics.

The elevator bid Edson a good night. The door opened on chaos. The great baroque doors of the EMBRAÇA headquarters, appropriated from a church in Olinda, lie on the ground. Twenty alarm lights flash; a panicked sprinkler system douses the hardwood front desk. No one on that desk. Does he spy fingertips on the carpet? Running feet, voices cracking over com channnels. Teixeira’s seguranças will shoot whatever they see. Move out, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. But he takes a grain of reassurance from his eyeblink reconnaissance. The admonitory is working through the corporate levels first. He has still time to make the apartment.

Yanzon sees the running guards through two corridors. He will take one and the other will run away. His weapons are expensive, even for the Order, and should be reserved for the mandatory targets. His mission on this level is complete, all targets accounted for. His I-shades track the two figures through the wall: in one breathtaking, killing move he draws an arrow from the magnetic quiver, nocks, pulls. The bow’s complex pulleys and levers slide with molecular precision. Fires. The Q-blade-tipped arrow cuts through wall, room, wall, running guard, out through the closed-down spaces of EMBRAôA’s corporate headquarters, out through the glass wall of Oceanus. A flash of blue light and a man is down, dead, pooling blood across the pimpled black rubber. Yanzon steps around the corner, a new arrow strung. The terrified survivor throws his hands up, his gun down and, as predicted, flees. Yanzon mouths a brief consignatory prayer for the dead man. The Lord will receive his own. If he does not know the Lord Jesus, then he must prepare for the Lake of Fire. Yanzon has yet to visit a universe that does not know the saving power of Christ. He has seen the true, the unimaginably true, extent of God’s might. The glowing icons of Teixeira security move erratically: panicked, afraid. Slipping through their indecision, Yanzon takes the emergency stairs two at a time down to the residential levels.

Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.

“Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a computer everything can be a computer. Ah!”

Edson shakes her again. “Get up!”

Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, “What is go away let me sleep.”

“The Order is here.”

She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.

“What?”

Edson claps his hand over Fia’s mouth. The sound the smell the state of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia’s mouth two flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most attenuated fringes to pick out nanoshifts of pressure, rustles on the edge of audibility, a quantum’s difference in the slit of light under the door.

“He’s gone. Now, with me. Don’t say a word.”

Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid stupid rich man’s apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.

“That way.” High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. “Piece of piss. Just don’t look down.”

Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the crossing.

“Hey! Look at me!”

Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The great ship swarms like an ants’ nest spiked with battery acid. The hunter is still in there.

Yanzon, admonitory of the Order, moves unopposed through the residential boulevards of the Teixeira corporacão, destroying the enemies of the Order. The alarms are irritating him now, and he has had to eliminate a few of the more bold seguranças; but he has established dread and awe across the EMBRAÇA headquarters. They showed him once the order the Order enforces. When he crosses and becomes superposed with all his alters, that is the truth. There is a universal mind, and all are notions of it. The prelates and the presidents, the pontiffs and prime ministers call it the Parousia, the end-time, but the eye of a simple man’s faith can better know it as the kingdom of God. The Enemy says that is a lie, an endlessly repeated dream grinding ever slower as the multi verse wheels down, and they seek to break it, to wake the dreamers. They call this freedom and hope. To Yanzon it is pride, and annihilation, an endless drop into the final, eternal cold. A dream is not necessarily a lie.

He glances up. Through three floors he sees Alcides Teixeira trying to escape within a cadre of his bodyguards. They are heavily armed and equipped little sensor ghosts. Small avail against a hunter who can shoot through solid bulkheads. Yanzon sets arrow to his Q-bow, aims up through the ceiling. He whirls. Multiple contacts, closing fast. Oceanus’s marines have found him. Yanzon lowers his bow and breaks into a loping run. His mission now is to destroy the Q-cores and reach the extraction point. Or kill himself. The Order has always understood that its agents die with their secrets. One fast, easy pass with the Q-blade; almost accidental in its casualness. Yanzon has often imagined what it would feel like. He imagines his flesh parting down to the quantum as something silver and so subtle, so painless you would only suspect when the blood began to rush. No pain. No pain at all. And no sin, no sin at all.

Edson counts windows. Eleven, twelve.

“I feel sick,” Fia says. “Here.”

Lights burn behind drapery. If he had a Q-blade, Edson could cut his way in neat as neat, a big circle of glass just falling away in front of him onto the bedroom pile. He doesn’t, but he can trust that Oceanus builders did it as cheap and shoddy and minimum wage as every other piece of work done for rich people. He grabs the stanchion, swings up, and punch-kicks forward. The whole doorframe comes away from its track and swings inward.

“Ruuuunnnnn!” yells Edson at the naked twentyish man standing starrtled in the middle of the floor. Tech-boy gives a little scream and flees into the bathroom. By Edson’s calculation they should be opposite a stairwell. Not even an admonitory could be fast enough to catch both of them on the short dash from door to stair. Surely. He flings the door open. The corridor is swarming with Oceanus marine security. Targeting lasers sweep walls, floors, ceiling. They catch Edson’s heel as he pushes Fia up the stairs.

“This is the quantum computer level,” Fia says.

“I know,” says Edson grimly. “There’s only one way off this ship. Can you work it? You have to work it.”

They exit the stairwell the same instant as Yanzon comes around the corner. Only the fact that they should be dead saves them. In that instant of astonishment, Fia hits the security scanner, Edson pushes her through the door, and they both dive to the floor. The blue bolts sear through the air where their heads would have been, stab through the floor like lightning.

“Come on, he can cut his way through here like butter,” says Edson. The inner lock opens to Fia’s blink. Inside, the four stolen Q-cores and more mess than tidy and precise Edson has ever seen in his life. Girlie mags makeup drinks cans food wrappers balled-up tissues pairs of socks pairs of shoes pens and coffee cups with crusts of mold in their bottoms.

“This is it?” Edson asks. The gateway to the multiverse. But Fia has pulled off her top, an action Edson always finds deeply deeply sexy, and coronas of gray light flicker around the cogs on her belly as the wheels begin to turn. The Q-cores answer with the ghost-light of other universes. It is a terreiro, Edson thinks. Junk magic. A loud crash tells Edson the hunter is now in the outer lab. Of course. They may be invisible to him, but he wants the cores, the Q-cores. The Order is Jesuitical in its thoroughness. And there is only one door to this windowless room. No, there are a million doors, a billlion doors. And in that thought they open. Edson reels, blinking in the silver light. Figures in the light; he is lost in a mirror-maze; a thousand Edsons stretch away from him on every side, an infinite regress. Those closest are mirror images, but as they recede into the light differences of dress, style, stature appear until, tear-blind in the glare of the multiverse, they might be angels, radiant as orixás. And he feels them, he knows them, every detail of their lives is available to him, just by looking. Entangled. As he knows them, they know him and one by one turn toward him. Ghost-wind streams Fia’s red hair back from her head: she is the Mae do Santo, and all her sisters attending her. Some of the doors are empty, Edson notices. And Edson also notices a squeal of plastic paneling coming apart at the quantum scale. He whirls as the Q-blade completes the circle. The wall panel crashes forward. The assassin’s amber I-shades crawl with data and trajectories and killing curves, none of which he needs because he has them there, right here right now, at arrow point.

“Now Fia, now anywhere!” Edson yells as the hunter draws, fires. Then time gels, time goes solid as the arrow drifts from the bow, cutting a line of Cerenkov radiation through the air. Edson sees it bore toward his heart, and then there is a jump, a quantum jump, and the arrow is in another place, another doorway, flickering from universe to universe as the probability of it killing this Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas dwindles to zero, as he becomes superposed with everywhere at once. The hunter gives an incoherent, rageful cry, drops his astonishing bow, and pulls the Q-blade. And a fourth figure is in the place above universes with them; the blonde short loira woman, the miraculous capoeirista: a thousand, a million alters of her, charging across the multiverse. In one instant she is a universe away; the next she arrives, panting, beside Edson.

“Hello again,” she says, and slaps half a handcuff around Edson’s wrist.

She ducks under the assassin’s Q-blade strike; delivers a crunching kick to the solar plexus that sends him reeling, agonized, out of the sanctorum; and slaps the other half of the handcuffs around the astonished Fia’s arm. “You’d just end up in two hundred kilometers of Atlantic,” she says. “And you’re no use to us there.” She hauls on the chain linking Edson and Fia. The doors swing wide; they fall through every door at once into the silver light. A billion lives, a billion deaths flash through Edson. He needs to cry piss vomit laugh pray ejaculate praise roar in ecstasy. Then he is standing in light, sunlight, on raindamp concrete, by a low curb surrounding a statue of a man in soccer kit holding boldly aloft the kind of torch that only appears in statuary and political party logos. The man is bronze, and on the sides of the plinth are plaques in the same ritual metal bearing names. Legendary names, galactic names. Jairzinho and Ronaldo Fenómeno. Socrates, and that other Edson: Arantes do Nascimento. Before him is a curved triumphal gateway in mold-stained white-and-blue-painted concrete and the words Stadio Mario Filho.

Edson is in a place he’s never been before. The Maracanã Stadium.

“Rio?” Fia asks wearily, as if one more wonder or horror and she would lie down in the damp gutter and pull the trash over her.

“What’s going on here?” Edson demands, frowning at the verdigrised plaques. “Where’s the 2030 Seleçao that won right here, and 2018 in Russia? When are we?”

“That’s a slightly tricky question,” the blonde woman says. “You see, we’re not really any time at all. We’re sort of outside time; it just happens to look like the Maracanã from my era. When I come from, we haven’t won yet. We lost. That’s the point. And it’s not really Rio either. All you have to do is go as far as the edge of the dropoff zone and you’ll see.”

Edson almost hauls Fia off her feet. The cuffs the cuffs — he’s forgotten they are chained together. Fia is still looking around her dazed, spun out on the chemical tail of two Teixeira corporação sleeping pills.

“Oh shit sorry about that,” the woman says. She fiddles in a pants pockets for a key. “I didn’t want you wandering off; if you’d got separated, we’d never have found you again.” Two oiled clicks, then the woman stows the shiny chrome handcuffs in her belt. Edson rubs his wrist. He never ever wants to get any closer to things police than that.

“What are you, some kind of cop?” he throws back over his shoulder as he crosses the cobbles.

“Hey. I am not a cop,” the woman snaps. But Edson’s discovered a weird thing: as he stands between the flagpoles that line the curb and moves his head from side to side, the trees and office buildings across the road move with him.

“What is going on here?”

At the same time Fia says, “Where are all the people?”

“Coffee,” the woman says. “This needs explaining over coffee.” She places an order for three cafezinhos from an old black man with gray gray hair at a little tin stall in front of the colonnade Edson cannot remember seeing before. The coffee is dark and sweet and finger-searingly hot in the little translucent plastic cup, but these cariocas cannot make coffee. Paulistanos, now: they grow it, they know it.

“Think of it as a kind of movie set, only it’s solid and real all the way through,” the woman says. The old man leans his elbows on the counter of his little stand. “As real as anything really is. It’s a safe haven. We have hundreds of them, probbably billions of them. This one just happens to be the size and shape of the Maracanã Stadium circa 2006. I’m not actually much of a futebol fan, but the location has a kind of special significance to us. I’ve got places all over the place, but this is sort of our office. Corporate headquarters, so to speak. Fortress of Solitude.”

Fia has been turning slowly around, manga-eyes wide.

“It’s a pocket universe,” she says. “That’s so clever. You found a way into the multiversal quantum computer and hacked it out.”

“It’s a very small universe, like I said — just big enough to fit the stadium into. I’d’ve loved a beach, maybe the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, the Copa, but we daren’t get overambitious. The Order knows we’re there somewhere; they just haven’t been able to find us yet.”

Edson crumples his plastic cup and flings it away from him. A gust of wind rattles it across the cracked concrete.

“But that was real, and the coffee was hot and pretty bad. How can you make something out of nothing? I can feel it, I can touch it.”

“It’s not nothing,” the old man on the coffee stand says. “It’s time and information, the most real things there are.”

“You can reprogram the multiversal quantum computer,” Fia says with a light of revelation dawning in her eyes. The woman and the old man look at each other.

“You’ve got it,” the woman says with a cheeky grin. “I knew we hadn’t made a mistake with you. Okay, well I think you’re about ready to go inside. It can be a bit… disorienting at first, but you do get used to it.”

“Just one moment,” Edson demands. Fia, capoeira woman, and bad coffee man are already at the blue-and-white colonnade. “Before I go anywhere, just who are you?”

The woman throws up her hands, shakes her head in self-exasperation. “You know, I completely forgot. I just have so much on, I am completely ditzy.” She offers a hand to Edson. “My name is Marcelina Hoffman, and I am what is known as a Zemba. I’m kind of like a superheroine; I turn up in the nick of time and rescue people. Now, come on, there’s a lot more to show you.” Edson briefly shakes the offered hand. Glancing back from the tiled lobby, he can no longer see the coffee stall, but the plaza flickers with more-guessed than glimpsed figures: ghosts of an old black man, a short white woman, a dekasegui and a cor-de-canela boy in a sharp white suit.

“So did Brasil really win in 2030?” The old man falls in beside Edson as he ascends the sloping entry tunnel. Edson drops his pace to match him. He whispers, “She really doesn’t know anything about futebol. Television, that’s her thing. Was her thing.”

“Yeah, we won,” Edson says. “Against the United States.”

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

“Hah!” the old man says. “And Uruguay?”

“They haven’t qualified since 2010.”

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

“That’s you, isn’t it?”

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

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

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

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

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

Edson lifts his hands from the rail.

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

Marcelina applauds. The sound rings around the eerily silent Maracanã. “Correct question!”

“And the answer?”

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

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

’’I’m alive,” he says.

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

“Quantum weirdness,” Fia says.

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

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

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

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

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

He feels Fia’s hand clutch his.

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

“The Order calls it the Parousia.”

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

“Wait wait wait wait,” says Edson. “You turn it off, we all die.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s getting to be a habit.”

“And did you take it?”

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

“But nothing for Edson.”

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

“I can’t make that decision for you.”

“Did you even try?”

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

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

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

“Ed … ”

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe,” says Edson, “it’s you I love.”

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

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

AUGUST I8-SEPTEMBER 3, 1733

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Quinn’s command the Iguapá archers laid down suppressing fire while a final croak of encouragement eked the last effort from the paddlers. The canoes collided with the massive wooden piers. With a roar Quinn swung up onto the dam and charged the sentries, sword grasped two-handed. Some of the braver old men hefted their war-clubs; then age and caution decided and they fled to the southern end of the dam.

“Let them go,” Quinn ordered. “We do not make war on old men and boys.”

While the Iguapá lashed the canoes into a tight raft between the piers, shifting barrels as close to the structure as possible, Quinn studied the construction of the dam. The upper surface was eight paces wide, of clay tamped on wicker hurdles. The earth rampart, already greening with fecund forest growth, sloped at an angle of forty-five degrees. The drop to the clay, trickling bed of the dead Rio do Ouro was ten times the height of man. Again he marveled at the energy and vision of his adversary. Could any amount of explosive blast away such massive soil and wood, such concentration of will and strength? A tiny crack was all that was needed. The water would accommplish the rest, the incalculable mass of flood penned league after league up the valley of the Rio do Ouro.

An arrow drove into the clay a span from Quinn’s foot. Eight war canoes had emerged from the southern shore and were stroking fast for the dam, finding range for their archers.

“I would have been surprised had Father Gonçalves entrusted the protection of his dam to old men and boys alone,” Quinn said. “Lay the fuse; there is not a moment to be lost.”

The loading was complete. The Iguapá scrambled up onto the dam; Waitacá plugged the end of a fuse line into the barrel and reeled it out behind him as Quinn’s archers laid down covering fire. The old men remembered their honor and picked up their war-clubs for a charge. Quinn and Waitacá ran for the northern shore: the reinforcements had given up their firing and were now stroking flat-out for the bomb.

“We must blow it now,” Waitacá said.

“We’re too close.”

“Mair, now or never.”

“Lord have mercy,” Quinn whispered as he took the carefully guarded slow-match from the wooden pail and touched it to the end of the line. The fuse burned in a blink. A stupendous, stupefying blast knocked Quinn and the Iguapá to the ground. Winded, deafened, Quinn saw a great wave blow back from the dam and crash against it in the same instant as a pillar of water leapt up the same height that the dam stood above the dry riverbed. Dark objects turned and tumbled in its breaking white crown: war canoes, tossed up as light as leaves in a forest squall. “Christ have mercy.”

Spray drenched Quinn; splinters of wood rained around him. His head rang from the explosion; his body ached. Slowly he rose to his feet. On the far side of the dam the old men halted their charge. The Guabirú boys stood up in their canoes, dumb with astonishment. Those reinforcements who had survived the blast stroked for their capsized canoes. The cloud of smoke and steam cleared away. The dam stood. The world hung; then the old men took up their charge again, the boys swung round to the aid of the stricken men in the water. The dam stood.

Dripping from every hem and seam, Falcon threw himself through the safe gap in the bamboo palisades into the foremost trench. Dry earth beneath his cheek. Leeches clung to the exposed flesh where his stockings had rolled down. An Iguapá pagé applied paste ground from forest bark. Stones, wooden shot, arrows flew overhead in a constant gale. Then Falcon heard a deeper report from the hilltop and, leeches to the devil, stood up to see five loads of hot stones arc over his head and burst in an impressive roar of steam where they struck among the gunboats. As trebuchets were recranked and fresh stones heated in the hilltop fires, the ballistas spoke, spears of fire stabbing out at the canoes. Falcon had devised the adhesive coating of resins and gums: a dreadful threat to gunboats heavy with shot and powder. Those so struck battled beneath a withering fire of slingshots and poison barbs to extinguish the clinging fire; when a gunboat blew up, a cheer rang around the hill, and a second when the swivel-guns retreated into the cover of the varzea, there to lay down a steady bombardment of Zemba’s artillery.

Falcon worked his way uphill through the linked trench-lines, past battalions of grim-faced boys; gold-faced, strange-skulled 1guapá; Caibaxé with lip-plates, though they were too young to have undergone the formal rites of manhood, war makes any boy a man; the Manaos, their foreheads and crowns shaved into a singular tonsure. Each clutched a spear and wooden knife, waiting, waiting for the word from Zemba’s Imbangala lieurenants. Falcon threw himself to the earth, hands clutched around his shaven head, as fresh bombard came screaming in. He felt the hilltop quake through his belly; blind, primal panic, what to clasp hold of when the earth itself shakes?

A dulled roar of voices from behind him; the war-rejoicing of the Guabirú. Pushing his green glasses up his nose, Falcon saw the hilltop in ruin; a trebuchet smashed, two ballistas burning. Yet Zemba’s artillerists spoke again; hot stone plunged down through the leaf canopy, and now the heavy bowmen opened up, lying on their backs, bow braced against feet, bowstring hauled back with all the strength of two arms.

Zemba himself waited with his reserves and the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds in the trench-line beneath the battery. A constant chain of girl-runners darted in and out of his position, bearing reports, carrying his orders.

“Aîuba.”

“General, the water is still rising. The foremost positions will be inundated within the hour.”

“I am aware of it. You suggest that the Mair has failed?”

“I suggest only that we evacuate the women and children, the old, the sick and halt, while the way is still open.”

“They will surely perish in that forest.”

“They will surely perish here. This is no entrada. This is destruction.”

Zemba hesitated but an instant.

“Evacuate the women and children.”

His runners, crouching at his feet, bowed their heads to concentrate on his orders. Falcon zigzagged downslope to the trench to give the word to Caixa and her command.

“I will not desert you,” she said fiercely. The women and smallest chilldren quit the trench, the infants tear-streaked, wailing past all fear. “You need someone to watch over you.”

A new mortar barrage punished the hill. The smoke and dust cleared, and there was silence from the battery. A great cry came from the hilltop. Zemba stood, spear raised, the cross of Nossa Senhora do Todos os Mundos lifted high behind him, burning in the sun. Falcon turned to see canoes push out from the deep forest. There was not clear water between the hulls, so many were they; Portuguese in buff and blood, the genipapo-stained skins of the Guabirú. The gunboats laid down a suppressing bombardment, but the cry sounded again and was taken up by the Imbangala captains and iâos, the morbichas and the pagés, by Caixa beside him, and then by Falcon himself as he drew his sword and went over the top of the trench, roaring down to meet the enemy.

Quinn stood senseless as a plaster saint. This was a world he had never traveled to before: the muted, desperate land beyond the battle song, beyond the glorious rage and the joy of the fight and of holding a life in his two hands, and the breaking of that life. This was defeat. This was failure; a quiet, ashen world. True humility and obedience, where the knee is bowed to the inevitable, the ring is kissed without pride or restraint. He gazed, thoughtless, heedless of the falling arrows, at the dam. Then there came a shriek like the teeth of the world being pulled. A tremor ran across the surface of the lake, another, a third, a fourth. Massive trunks of forest hardwood, adamant as iron, snapped with explosive force. Quinn felt the dam shake beneath his feet. Cracks opened in the clay roadway; the tops of the reinforcing piles leaned back toward the water.

“Mair, I think … ” Waitacá did not need to complete the warning.

Quinn, Iguapá, old men, boys in their little canoes fled as a twenty-pace section of the dam tilted into the lake and burst in a jetting plume of foaming water. Smashed tree trunks were tossed like twigs; with every second the rush of water tore away more earth and wood. The gap became a chasm as whole sections of dam broke free and slid into the fall.

“The men; mother of worlds, the men!” Waitacá cried. The capsized Guabirú tried to strike for the shore, for the upturned canoes, for the disintegrating dam itself, but the torrent was too strong. Their cries joined with the crash of rending timbers and the roar of water as they were swept under and sent spinning out in the crushing mill of wood and earth. Quinn whispered a prayer and kissed the cross of his rosary; then the earth beneath his feet cracked and fissured and he ran for the northern bank. Behind him the dam split loose, pivoted, and slid down the scarp face, breaking into great clods and piles of clay-clogged wicker. The dam was now one great waterfall, the lake a millrace of torn branches and dead creatures, the riverbed beneath a bounding cream-white torrent. Boles of wood burst from the surface like rockets only to tumble end for end and be dragged under again, the flood scouring bushes and trees from the shore. The Rio do Ouro was tearing a new channel from the varzea; now the very boulders were stripped from the soil to join the destroying wall of water and wood.

Quinn scrambled up the buttress of earth that joined the dam to the high terra firme. He felt Falcon’s bamboo cylinder pressed next to his bosom. Quinn withdrew it, weighed it in his hand. He imagined it in the shatter of the great flood, that flood in time subsiding, the cylinder bobbing unregarded among the greater bulks of the forest trees, Rio do Ouro to Iguapáni, Iguapáni to Catrimani, to Rio Branco, to Rio Negro, to Amazonas. To the sea, on the currents to the shores of Ireland or the coast of Portugal, wavelets rolling it up a white strand. More to tell in this story. He slid the rube inside his black robe.

Canoes had been beached on this earthen ramp, run up above the floodline, light pirogues.

“Waitacá, would it be possible to make headway against the flood?”

Waitacá studied the river, the flow changing with every second as Father Gonçalves’s dam was scoured away.

“It could be done through the varzea, with caution.”

“I have need of speed.”

“It could be done with both of those.”

“Very good, then. Waitacá, I have need of your help at the paddle. I still have an admonishment to visit upon Father Diego Gonçalves.”

Soldiers’ boots, the bare feet of indios splashed into the water as the canoes ran through the flooded stake-lines onto the shore. Archers threw away their bows, took their knives in their hands to grapple hand to hand with the attackers. The hillside was a landslide of yelling, whooping indio bodies part running, part slipping, part falling in their charge; Zemba at their head, flinging light javelins as he charged, more airborne than earthbound as he leaped over bodies and half-filled trenches. And among them, Dr. Robert Falcon, sword held out ahead of him like a cuirassier’s blade, screaming hate and obscenities never to be thought of a Fellow of the French Academy.

The two lines met with a shock that quailed Hope of the Saints Hill to its roots. Falcon found himself sword to bayonet with a charging Portuguese infantryman. He sidestepped and cut the man’s legs from under him. Caixa finished the work with her spear. Falcon threw her the bladed musket, took the man’s sword for himself. As he tested its weight and mettle, a Guabirú spearman lunged out of nowhere: Caixa caught him full on her bayonet, twisted the musket. The man gave a terrible wailing shriek and slid from her blade. She nodded in approval.

Two-bladed, Falcon did a demon’s work along the front line, cutting halfway to the enemy’s battle standard of a naked woman entwined in green, but for every man who fell three sprang up and more canoes packed in behind those run onto the shore, indio conscripts in half-uniform — a jacket, breeches, sometimes only a tricorn hat — running lightly from hull to hull to leap into the fight. And still the water rose.

Zemba led the nation like some relentless forest legend; the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds surged across the battlefront, a daring drive here, a feint and full-blooded attack there. But Out Lady of the Flood Forest commanded the waters, and the attackers were a red tide. The City of God drove the City of Marvels back across the first and second trenches. Beyond all thought, all reason, all language, Dr. Robert Falcon worked wrath and slaughter with his twin blades, and it was good. It was very good. He knew Luis Quinn’s abiding sin in all its ecstasy and horror. To be so present within the moment and one’s skin, the immediate and imperious liveliness of all the senses, the precipice of every second wherein one might kill or die, the luxury of such complete control over another. The Art of Defense, even the foot-boxing tricks he had learned from the waterfront men, were pale eunuchs of the ecstasy of battle.

Feathers waving upon the bloody hillside. Blood and buff and a shining sword.

“Araujo!” Falcon called through the clatter of war. “Now you shall have your contest.”

The colonial officer ran to meet him as Falcon threw down his second, looted sword. Abruptly Araujo pulled up, whipped a pistol out of his sash of office. And Caixa was there between Falcon and the ball. A discharge, a gust of smoke, and Caixa went tumbling headlong. French, Portuguese, lingua geral, Iguapá — Falcon’s shouts were incoherent. Caixa rose unsteadily to her feet, then grinned and opened her left hand to show her bloody stigmata where the ball had passed through.

“Kill him, husband!”

Araujo flung the useless pistol at Falcon, who deftly sidestepped. Falcon spread his hand in invitation, then dropped into the stance. Araujo saluted and returned the attitude. A new round of mortar fire howled down onto the hilltop, but nothing remained there but shattered flesh and wood. Falcon feinted, then attacked. Araujo, for all his European airs, was no practitioner of the Art of Defense. In five moves Falcon had sent his blade whirling away across the red earth and the Portuguese captain found a sword-point at his chest.

“Senhor, as a fidalgo to a fidalgo, I cast myself on your mercy.”

“Senhor, alas, I am no fidalgo,” Falcon said, and ran him cleanly through in one lunge.

A tumult from downslope; Falcon glanced up from cleaning his sword on Araujo’s coat to see the great cross of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos teetering madly in the center of a ring of Portuguese indio-conscripts. Zemba leaped and whirled, his spear and hide shield dashing and darting. Men fell, men reeled away bloody and ripped, but every moment more piled in. Falcon ran, sword ready. He could feel Caixa at his back, her wounded hand bound in Araujo’s neckcloth, her spear held underhand to stab up into an enemy’s bowels. Terrible, wondrous woman. The cross wavered, the cross went down, then Zemba snatched it up again, clutched against the back of his tattered shield.

Falcon threw himself into the circle of soldiers, cut and cut again. Zemba gave a cry, arched backward, and went down on his knees in the water, blood gouting from his severed hamstrings. His face wore a look of immeasurable sadness and wonder.

“Get them out of here, lead them, we are done for here,” he gasped, and flung the cross on its pole like a javelin. Ribbon and streamers fluttered in the train of the Lady of All Worlds; then Caixa’s bloody hand reached up and caught it.

Zemba smiled, eyes wet with tears. An auxiliary in a tanga and infantryman’s jacket stabbed with his spear. The blade point burst from Zemba’s throat and he fell forward into the flood, still smiling.

A pillar of smoke and fire stood over Cidade Maravilhosa, a sign for leagues up and down the Rio do Ouro. Again the great guns of the Nossa Senhora da Varzea fired. Quinn and Waitacá paddled steadily, stealthily, by root and branch. Quinn had glassed the basilica from the cover of a felled tree half a league downstream; Gonçalvesthought the mortar crews-Portuguese gunners with Guabirú loaders-sufficient garrison. The east end of the basilica was undefended, and the flying buttresses and baroqueries afforded ample concealment. Waitacá and Quinn handed along the basilica’s waterline to the cable eye they had agreed wordlessly from telescope-distance as the best entrance. Waitacá seized the mooring cable, slung his legs up, and climbed it like a golden sloth. Quinn’s sword jammed momentarily on the narrow eyelet; a rattle and he was inside, in the reeking, oozy gloom of the stern bowser.

“Free the slaves before anything,” Quinn said. “You will be able to easily overpower the mortar batteries.”

Waitacá dipped his head and drew his steel knife. He knew the rest by heart. Cut the anchor lines, then take the galley slaves to attack the rear of Gonçalves’s army.

I have given you the task most difficult , Quinn thought. Mine is the task most necessary. Boys’ voices from the lavabo; chalice and paten were being cleansed for the celebratory Mass. Black on black, Quinn spirited past.

Quinn was prepared for the spiritual assault of Nossa Senhora da Varzea, yet his attuned, attenuated senses reeled as if from a physical blow. He walked down the center of the nave, heaven on his left hand, damnation on his right, judgment all around. Christ spread his arms wide across the titanic choir screen. His thorn-pierced heart stood open. Quinn freed his sword. Beyond the choir stalls a shaft of light fell on the altar, the crucified Amazonian Christ’s head crowned with strange sufferings. Before the stellar glow of the Lady of the Flood Forest a figure in simple black knelt. The thunder of mortars beat the basilica like a drum. The Lady’s dress of lights quivered; debris shook loose from the ceiling and fell in a snow of gold and Marian blue. Quinn strode up the choir, sword held low by his side.

“Would you murder me in my own cathedral, like St. Thomas à Becket?”

“I am the admonitory of Father de Magalhães, and I command you in the name of Christ to submit to my authority.”

“I recall I refused you, as I refuse you again now.”

“Silence. Enough of this. You will return with me to our Order in Salvador.”

“The Order in Salvador. Yes. Some of us, however, are called to a higher service.”

Gonçalves rose to his feet and turned to his admonisher. The Lady of the Flood Forest seemed to embrace him in her cope of verdure. “Still you persist in this, you ridiculous little man.”

“Then I must compel you,” Quinn said, and lifted his sword to let its blade catch the many lights of the reredos.

“You will not find me unprepared.” Father Diego swept back his surplice to show the basket-hilted Spanish sword buckled at his side.

“In God’s house,” Quinn said, backing away from the treacheries of altar and choir stalls to the open nave.

“Come now, everywhere is God’s house. If it is meet and right in that pigsty you call a city, that Capitan de Araujo is reducing to dust, then it is equally so here.” Gonçalvescocked his headáthat strange, infuriating bird-motion — at a sudden clamor of voices, shots, and steel from outside. His eyes widened with rage.

“Your former slaves, spiking your artillery,” Quinn said. “Come now, no more delay. Let us try it here, your master against mine, Leon against Toledo.”

He ran into the open nave. With a cry like a hunting bird, Gonçalvescast off his confining surplice and drew his sword. He flew at Quinn, blade dancing in a flickering flurry of cuts that caught the Mair off guard and drove him back across the floor, halfway to the narthex. Grunting with exertion Quinn formed a defense and beat Gonçalvesback almost to the choir screen. The two men parted, saluted, circled each other, blinded with sweat in the stifling heat of the basilica.

And to it again. A crashing rally across the front of the roodscreen, Quinn driving, scoring a tear on Gonçalves’s side, Gonçalvesrecovering and pressing Quinn back, trading the nick for a cut along Quinn’s hairline — an unseen, unstoppable cut he had just managed to roll beneath, that would surely have taken the top of his skull. Quinn felt the floor move under him, saw the uncertainty reflected in Father Diego’s thin, boyish face.

“The mooring lines are cut,” he panted. “We are adrift.” They both felt the basilica turn in the stream, captive of the ebbing waters. With a cry in Irish Quinn launched himself at Gonçalves; a jetée with mass and brute power behind it. Gonçalves slapped his spearing sword away; Quinn went sprawling and the Spaniard was on him, Quinn saving himself only by an instinctual block that struck sparks from both blades. He regained his feet but was at once driven hard against the base of the pulpit. Again Quinn rallied, and the two Jesuits dueled back and forth along the line of the side chapels. But it was clear to Quinn, with a chill clench in his testicles, that he had exerted himself too far on the destruction of the dam and the pursuit of Nossa Senhora da Varzea. His advantage in size and strength was used up, and in the pure way of the sword Diego Gonçalves was master.

The counterattack was immediate. Quinn retreated back through the open heart of Christ into the choir; his intention that the narrow files of box pews would constrain Gonçalves’s balletic style. They battled up and down the choir stalls scattering psalteries and missals until Quinn was backed to the very altar. He could not get away. He could not escape. Fury swelled inside him; that he would die in this stupid vain place, this pagan altar, at the hands of this slight, effeminate Spaniard, that all he had wrought would be strewn to the winds and the waters in this desolate, wordless forest. He summoned the rage, his old demon, his old ally. It blazed hot and delicious inside him. And with a thought he pushed it down. Gonçalvesknew of his old thorn; he would have tactics prepared for the rush of brute anger and unstoppable passion. Quinn opened his inner sight to the worlds. A blink, a flicker, but in that vision he saw all that Gonçalveswould do. He saw the expression of anger and bafflement on Father Diego’s face as he drove him back from the altar, his sword-point always ahead of the Spaniard’s, back down the choir and through the gaping heart of Christ into the nave. Beneath the Christ of the Varzea, his outstretched hands blossoming into the twin apocalypses of the just and the lost, Quinn caught Gonçalves’ sword and sent it across the floor.

“Kneel and submit,” Quinn panted, sword-point at Gonçalves’s eye. “Kneel and submit to the authority of the Society of Jesus.”

Gonçalveswent to his knees. Never once removing his eyes from Quinn, he reached into the open neck of his cassock; a rosary, to kiss and yield. Quinn saw a flash of light, and half his sword fell to the ground. Gonçalvesheld up the blade.

“Do you imagine they would have called us to defend the Kingdom without ensuring we are properly armed?” He came up in a sweeping blow that sheared Quinn’s sword down to a useless stump and cut cleanly in two a stand of a tray of votives before the statue of Nossa Senhora Aparaçida. The lamps fell and rolled, spilling burning oil behind them. Tongues of fire licked toward the choir screen. Gonçalvesleaned into a knife-fighter’s crouch. Quinn hastily ripped the sleeve from his robe and opened it into a cape, which he held like a bullfighter’s cloak.

“A cunning idea,” Gonçalvessaid, with a lunging cut that left an arc of smoking blue in the air. “But quite ineffectual.”

But Quinn had seen the fire leap up the open fretwork of the choir screen, a Christ wreathed in flame. He circled away from the blade, all the while keeping Gonçalves’s back to the growing blaze.

“When did the Enemy seduce you?”

“You mistake. I am not the enemy. I am the Order. They have engines and energies beyond your imagining; did you think I built that dam unaided?”

Feint, slash, the tip of the blade cut a slit in the fabric. Quinn permitted himself a flicker of multiversal vision. In too many he saw himself kneel, gutted, on the floor, his entrails around his knees. Out there in the cornucopia of universes was the answer to Father Diego Gonçalves. The Spaniard lunged, the blade from beyond the world shrieking down to cut Quinn shoulder to waist. Quinn leaped back and saw the moment, the single true searing instant. He flung the cloth over Gonçalves’shead, blinding him, seized the loose end and swung him around. Gonçalves reeled backward into the burning altar screen. The fragile screen swayed. Gonçalves ripped the cloth from his face, fled from the fire. Too slow, too late; the huge burning Christ, haloed in flames, heart ablaze, fire streaming from his outstretched fingers to turn both heaven and hell into purgatory, crashed down and drove Diego Gonçalves to the floor.

Quinn shielded his face and edged toward the inferno of blazing wood. Nothing could survive that pyre. Flames were leaping up the piers from angel to angel, licking across the clerestory screens, caressing the ceiling bosses. The choir stalls and screens were already ablaze; at the end of his strength, numb with awe, Luis Quinn watched the flames coil up and engulf Our Lady of the Varzea. The basilica was disintegrating, blazing timbers and embers raining from the ceiling, the smoke descending. Choking, Quinn rushed from the wooden hell. In a rending crash the roof fell and flames leaped up among the guardian angels, igniting the sails. Quinn marveled at the destruction. With every moment the current was taking the church farrther from safety, closer to the falls at the destroyed dam. Quinn dived lightly into the water. Canoes pushed out from beneath the flood-canopy; a golden face glinted among the Guabirú. Quinn stroked toward Waitacá; then the fire reached the powder magazine. An apocalyptic explosion sent every bird flapping and screaming from the flood forest. Quinn saw the angels of Nossa Sennhora da Varzea ascend, flung high into the air by the blast, and fall, tumbling end for end. Fragments of burning wood plunged hissing into the water around Quinn; as hands helped him into the canoe, he saw the blazing hulk of Nossa Senhora da Varzea spin slowly away on the current.

It was a rout now. The cross of Our Lady of All Worlds stood in the trench beneath the shattered hilltop, a sign and hope for the people. Portuguese snipers let fly with musket-fire; the Guabirú dispatched the wounded. Falcon leaned on his sword, the weight of the worlds suddenly upon him, a desire to lie down among the dead and be numbered with them. The floodwaters were thick with already-swelling bodies. He bowed his head and saw that the water was tunning away from around his sodden, cracked shoes. The water drained away from around his feet. The bodies were stirring, moving, drawn together into the recesses of the varzea. And the angels, the terrible visitants of wrath upon the mast tops of Nossa Senhora da Varzea, were moving. Very slowly, but with gathering impetus, moving downstream.

Falcon stood on firm land now.

I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood , the Mair had said.

“But not here!” Falcon shouted. “Not this world!”

Now the army of Nossa Senhora da Varzea became aware of the water ebbing around their canoes and turned to stare as their patron angels vanished behind the treetops. Smoke rose, blacker, denser by the second. A great flash of light lit up the southern sky, momentarily outshining the sun. A plume of smoke in the shape of a mushroom climbed skyward; a few seconds later the explosion shook Hope of the Saints Hill. A grin formed on Falcon’s face, broke into wonderful, insane laughter.

“At them?” he roared, circling his sword over his head. “One last charge for the honor of the Mair! At them!”

The canoe lightly rode the white water. A gray morning of low cloud after rain, scarves of mist clung to the trees. On such a dripping day they shouldered close to the river, dark and rich with rot and spurt. The canoe skipped among great boulders and the trunks of forest trees, smashed and splintered, wedged across rocks, half buried in the grit. The paddlers steered it down a channel that poured gray and white between two tumbled rocks each the size of a church. The golden cross set up in the prow wavered but did not fall. It shone like a beacon, as if by its own light.

The man on the shore raised his arm again, but the smoke from his fire was unmistakable now. Heaven knows how he found anything combustible on such a day , Robert Falcon thought. But his intent, he suspected, was always smoke, not heat.

The steersman ran the little pirogue in. Falcon splashed over the cobbles to shore. The strand was littered with leaves, twigs, whole branches and boles, drowned and bloating animals, reeking fish. He heard the grind of hull over stone. Caixa waded ashore and firmly planted the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds in the gritty sand.

“Dr. Falcon.”

Luis Quinn sat on a boulder, a smoldering cigar clenched in his fist. A flaw of mist waved between the trees.

“Father Quinn.”

The two men kissed briefly, formally. “Well, we live,” Falcon said.

On a plaited strap around his shoulder Quinn wore the bamboo tube that held the history of the Marvelous City.

“I am most glad, friend, that you ignored me and did not consign this to the waters,” Falcon said. “The history of the Marvelous City may be finished, bur that of the City of God has yet to be started.”

“With your permission, that will be a new history from this,” Quinn said. “This story has far to travel.”

“Of course. You know they are already making legends of you. The Mair can foretell the future. The Mair has a knife that can cut through anything, even men’s hearts and secrets to read their deepest desires. The Mair can walk between worlds and from one end of the arch of time to the other. The Mair will come again in the hour of his people’s sorest need and lead them away from this world to a better one where the manioc grows in all seasons and the hunting is always rich and bountiful, a world the bandeirantes and the pais can never reach.”

“I had expected tales, but not that last one.”

The vanguard of the Cidade Maravilhosa’s fleet appeared around the widely incised river bend, bobbing on the white water.

“What do you expect when you destroy the enemy’s stronghold and then, the tide of battle turned and on the verge of victory, you disappear from the field of battle?”

Falcon had shouted his voice red raw, standing on that hill, sword in hand. Caixa waved the ragged cross of Out Lady of All Worlds, taking up Falcon’s rallying cry in her own tongue. The destruction of Nossa Senhora da Varzea held the army of the City of God in thrall. Many Guabirú were on their knees in the bloody mud, rosaries folded in their hands. Some had already fled the field of battle. The Portuguese regulars faltered, conscious of how grossly they were outnumbered. And the water was running, away from the feet of the soldiers, eddying around the bodies of the dead, draining from the trenches in fast-running streams and little torrents, flowing out from under the beached canoes.

“At them!” A lone cry, then the last of the quilombo’s men, red and black, came over the crest, arms beating, war-clubs, swords, captured bayoonets waving, all roaring, all cheering. Caixa was swept up, Our Lady of All Worlds flying over their heads; then Falcon was caught up and carried away. The Portuguese formed defensive lines, but as the counterattack crashed into them a second wave of warriors broke from the varzea, brushed past the dazed Guabirú, and piled into their rear. Tribe won out; the vacillating Guabirú, seeing the charge of their liberated brothers, took up their weapons and joined the attack. Falcon glimpsed a figure in Jesuit black at the forest’s edge. The Portuguese lines broke; the men fled for the gunboats. The Iguapá gave chase, slashing and clubbing at the soldiers as they tried to run their big canoes into deeper water. Now the women and children were coming down the hill, the women executing the wounded, the children picking the bodies clean. The flame of battle was snuffed out. Falcon rested on his sword, weary to the marrow, sickened by the slaughter under the dark eaves of the flood forest. None of those men would ever see São José Tarumás again. In that cold understanding was a colder one: Falcon would never see Paris again, never tease Marie-Jeanne in the Tuileries, never again climb the Fourviere with his brother Jean-Baptiste. His world would now be green and mold, water and heat and broken light, mists and vapors, and the flat, gray meanders of endless rivers. Canoes and bows and creatures heard but seen only in glimpses, a world without vistas, its horizon as distant as the next tree, the next vine, the next bend in the river. A vegetable world, vast and slow.

Luis Quinn prodded again at his smudge fire. “Have you thought what you will do at the City of God?”

“Destroy it.” He saw surprise flicker on Quinn’s face.

Then the Jesuit said, “Yes, of course. It is too big, too vulnerable. Break them up, send them off into the forest. How long do you think you can hold off the bandeirantes?”

“A generation with luck. It is the diseases that will destroy the red man before any slave-takers.”

“All men are helpless before their legends, but do this for me if you can: disabuse that story that I will come again and take them to the New Jerusalem. ”

The main body of the fleet was passing now, families and groups of friends, nations and tribes, all riding the turbulent water through the rags of mist; children in tiny frail skins of bark, peccaries and pacas in bamboo cages loaded onto rafts, the sacred curupairá frogs in their terracotta pots, sacks filled with what manioc could be scavenged from the twice-ruined fields. The crazy yellow bill of a toucan tied to a perch in the prow of a family canoe was a splendid mote of color. It had taken many days to portage past the falls, the canoes slid on vines down slick clay slides, the terrified livestock lowered in cages or slings, the people winding down the paths, treacherous with spray, hacked from the stub of the dam, still an impressive barrage across the Rio do Ouro.

A raft of watercraft had now built up behind the flume, the gray river black with them as one by one they entered the white water and made the run between the two boulders. Some recognized the Mair on his rock and raised their paddles in salutation as they passed. Behind them the prison-rafts negotiated the run, the Guabirú guarded by the swivel-guns of the captured Portuguese war canoes. They might ransom their lives by negotiating a union of cities: Cidade Maravilhosa with war-weakened Cidade de Deus.

“As you rightly say, we are helpless before our legends,” Falcon said, for he was no longer Aîuba, the yellow-head, the Frenchman, but protector of the City of Marvels, the zemba; and Caixa, war hero, the Senhora da Cruz, standard-bearer of the new nation.

“I will return as often as is safe,” Quinn said. “I am still a novice in this; there are disciplines and arts of defense of which I know nothing. It is a war, but mine has always been a martial order.”

Warm gray drizzle gusted in Falcon’s face. He blinked and opened his eyes on a kaleidoscope. Each rock, each tree, each bird and wisp of mist, Luis Quinn and his stick and fire, were shattered into a thousand reflections that seemed to lie behind the objects they mirrored and at the same time beside, each adjacent to every other image, yet differing in greater or lesser detail. Even as he struggled to comprehend what he was seeing, the vision was lifted from him.

“It can be manipulated,” Quinn said. “I am less than a novice in this compared to some walkers of the worlds; I possess enough skill to share my vision.”

“This chaos, this uncertainty and clamor of the eyes, how can you ever know what is real and what is false? How can you ever find your way back to the true world?”

“They are all true worlds, that is the thing. We live in the last whispered syllable of time, dreams within dreams. Our lives, our worlds, have been lived a thousand, ten thousand times before. The Order believes that we must dream on, that all else is cold and death. But some believe that we must wake, for only then will we see a morning. For though our lives have been lived ten thousand times, our world reborn time after time after time, in every rebirth there is a flaw, an error, something copied imperfectly. A trick of the enemy, if you would have it. In our world, our times, that flaw is the curupairá, a window on the plethora of worlds and the reality that lies behind it, and thus our hope.”

The greater party of the Cidade Maravilhosa had passed down the white-water gut; now the children, grinning and wet in their little skimming pirogues, took to the run. They waved to Caixa; she stood fast, the cross of Our Lady of All Worlds gripped in her wounded fist. Falcon shook his head.

“I cannot believe in such a world.”

“The world persists whether you believe it or not.” Quinn rose. “I must be getting on now. They are waiting for me.” He dipped his head toward the forest edge, dark and dripping. Falcon imagined he saw two women standing there in the dim, one a white woman with a head of curling golden hair, the other of an Asiatic cast and complexion, her hair a dark red. A black man waited under the eaves of the forest. All wavered like mist on the edges of Falcon’s perception; then he picked his way over the stones to the shore. When he looked back only the smoldering fire remained.

The Iguapá nation had passed, the children’s boats melted into the mist. Caixa had rerurned the cross to its figurehead place in the canoe; the paddlers pushed out. Waitacá gave a cry; an object running the gut. For an instant Falcon thought it was a capsized canoe, a great war boat. It cleared the run into slack water. The paddlers hauled it in. An angel face, blank yet smiling, gazed up at the fast-running gray mist. Its hands held a three-bladed sword; an angel fallen from the pinnacles of Nossa Senhora da Varzea. Falcon pushed it out into the stream, and the rippling water running fast and chattering over the stones took it and carried it away.