Brasyl (16 page)

Edson did not think it was just shoes that brought her here.
Supply-side economics built Nossa Senhora da Lixao from a tiny chip.
The shady, dry understory of the interchange had been a fine place to
set up businesses processing e-waste; out of the way and unseen. In
those days the catadores pushed their handcarts ten kays along the
highway verges to the old municipal dump at São Bernardo do
Campo. The first driver to take a jeitinho to drop his load at the
unfinished intersection had started the slow glacier of trash that
over twenty years of accumulation made Todos os Santos the premier
midden of the Southern Hemisphere. The population of a small town
scavenges the slopes of the tech-trash mountain. By night it is
extravagantly beautiful as twenty thousand torches and oil-lanterns
bob and play across the ridges and valleys. Todos os Santos is big
enough to have a geography: the Forest of Fake Plastic Trees, where
wet ripped bags hang like Spanish moss from every spar and
protrusion. The Vale of Swarf, where the metal industries dump their
coils and spirals of lathe trim. The Ridge of Lost Refrigerators,
where kids with disinfectant-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces
siphon off CFCs into empty plastic Coke bottles slung like bandoliers
around their shoulders. Above them, the peaks: Mount Microsoft and
the Apple Hills; unsteady ziggurats of processor cubes and
interfacers. Pickers crack them open with hammers and pry bars and
deftly unscrew the components. A truck disgorges a load of terminally
last-season I-shades, falling like dying bats. The catadores rush
over the slippery, treacherous garbage. The fermenting trash raises
the ambient air temperature three degrees. Evaporating moisture and
volatiles linger in the peculiar dead spot in the wind patterns
caused by the interchange: Our Lady of Trash is a true urban jungle:
steamy, poisonous, diseased, wet. The scavengers wear plastic
fertilizer sacks as rain capes as they work their way over the
steaming rubbish in a perpetual warm drizzle, extricating a circuit
board here, a washing machine motor there, and throwing them into the
baskets on their backs. Their children—second generation
catadores—are the sorters and runners, grading the emptied
baskets by type and then running them down on handcarts to Circle
Three.

Among the dashing barrows, Fia stops, turns, lays a hand on Edson's
chest.

"I've got to go on now."

Edson walks into her hand. "What?" He sounds dumb. That is
bad. "Ed, you know there's our stuff, and then there's my stuff.
This is my stuff. I'll meet you back at Atom Shop."

A dozen protests occur to Edson. He keeps them: the best sound
clinging. The worst are whining.

"Toys for me," Fia says. She takes Edson's face in her
hands, kisses him hard, full on the mouth, with tongue and saliva.
But he's still not going to let her see him walk away, so he hangs
back as she picks her way up the trash-scree in her impractical
boots, coat hood pulled up against the sour drizzle, climbing up into
the Quantum Valley.

Every guy thinks he wants a Mystery Girl, but what men really want is
all the bases covered and no gaps in the record. Mr. Peach has one
end of the story of Fia Kishida, Edson the other, but the two halves
don't match. There is too much unexplained between her walking out of
São Paulo U and turning up in the back of a Cook/Chill Meal
Solutions trailer. Edson's done some discreet research—he is an
insatiable busybody. Cook/Chill Meal Soluutions Company is a brand
name legally registered with the Department of Trade. His intuition
was right; it's all owned by Metal Guy, Floyd. He made a fist of
money with
Preto
and
Morte
-Metal, sourcing those
little pre- and post-gig peccadilloes that Black/Death Metal bands
demand, like crack cocaine, cheerleaders, American whiskey, lapsed
nuns, live goats, automatic weapons and light mortars, Chinese girls
in latex, and applications to be contestants on
Take Out the Trash
. He invested his money and tips in a little business venture:
Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. The driver is Aristides, ex of the
Goias-São Paulo alco-tanker run. The bicha who runs cover
twelve layers deep reinforced by a strategy of spread-bribery is
Titifreak. And Fia to operate the array of four reconditioned quantum
cores, hacking NP compuutations. Edson's problem, and the reason he
waits until she is out of sight before following her path toward a
steaming ridge of LCD screens, is that if he can find that out in six
discreet inquiries, who else has?

It is inevitable as death that Q-waste should find its way to the
great gehenna of Todos os Santos. It is the weirdness leaking like
CFCs from so much quantum technology piled in one place that gives
Nossa Senhora de Lixao her myths and legends. Quantum technology is
licensed; use is governnment monitored, and stern controls are in
place over manufacture and dissposal. But trash has its own morality
and gravity. One plastic casing is very much like another; get it out
of here, we're filling up with this stuff, send it south. Once a few
months the catadores will unearth an operational Q-array. On those
holy days word flashes across the city like lightning, like scandal.
Tenders come in from as far as Rio, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba. Fia is
here to inspect a fresh lot.

A turn-up on Edson's white flares tears on a jagged edge. Almost he
curses, but to swear is undignified. The basket-people in ragged
shorts and flip-flops ignore him. Edson squats low up just beneath
the skyline, peeps between shattered angular plastic frames. Down in
the valley Fia talks with the two males who summoned her at the
gafieira. A bulky cylinder stands on an upturned crate between them.
Fia crouches, examining the cylinder with her I-shades, turning her
head quizzical as a parrot. Slightly behind them is a figure Edson
does not recognize, a tall chisel-featured man with his hair scraped
back into a greasy ponytail. Incongruously, he is dressed as a
priest. These quantumeiros do all the geek looks. He says something
Edson cannot hear, but Fia looks up and shakes her head. The man
speaks again; again Fia shakes her head: no. She looks frightened
now. As Edson stands up he feels a whisper across his back. His
jacket falls forward around him. Its two severed halves slide down
his arms to flop over his hands. He stares, dumb, miraclestruck, then
turns.

Bicha-boy Titifreak does a martial-arts thing, drawing a pattern of
glowing blue in the air with the Q-blade. He holds it still,
perfectly horiizontal. He looks at Edson under his floppy fringe,
over the blade, then snaps it down to its magnetic sheath. The air
smells wounded, ozonic.

"You favelados really don't have any manners, do you?"

Edson shifts on his feet, surly, stupid stupid stupid with his
disfigured white leather jacket hanging around him.

"She told you not to go but you just had to, didn't you? Look,
there's nothing special about you. There's been dozens before you.
She likes boys of a certain type, but she is out of your class. It
doesn't mean anything. Did you think it did? This is business and you
can't even begin to imagine what we're doing here and, frankly,
ignorance is bliss. Really. Look, you think they give these away in
packets of Ruffles?" He flips back his jacket to reveal the
blade. "So you're going now. And you're not going to come back.
Leave her alone. You are Sorocaba playing against São Paulo.
You won't see her again. Go on. Go; I will cut you."

Edson's face is hot with rage, and humiliation sings in his ears. He
shrugs off the halves of his jacket. Whatever is in the pockets can
stay. He will not bow to pick them up.

"Bicha!" he shouts as he tries to maintain dignity
descending the treacherous scree of tech-trash. The knifeman shrugs.

"Give my head peace, favelado."

On the third day Gerson comes to his kid brother, sixth son of a
sixth son, and stands over him, rocking and raging in the hammock
beside his office. His calls have fallen into dead air. It's that
puta of a bicha blocking him, he's sure of that. Three days, stomping
round the house; kicking over Dona Horttense's little piles of farofa
and cubes of cake offered to the Lady; getting nothing done; earning
no money.

"You're in my light."

"You know, if you were half the man you claimed you were, you'd
be right over there, Q-blade or no Q-blade."

And Edson thinks,
He's right. And Fuck it luck it luck it. And
It's a sorry state when Gerson is right
. Thirty minutes later,
the green-and-yellow scrambler bursts our of the alley behind Dona
Hortense's. But they're not Edson's sweet thighs straddling it.
They're Efrim's; in a short silvery strappy dress like the one Fia
wore at the gafieira (not that Efrim would admit playing copycat)
soft suede calf boots in pink, and his beautiful big Afro. One final
layer of costume: he swapped identities with Petty Cash, his most
trusted alibi.

Edson bumps over the debris-strewn approach to the decaying mall
where the quantumeiros have parked up the truck. He rounds the
collapsed delivery bay. Mothers and kids, escaped debt slaves, a life
lower than even the favela, follow him with their eyes. Edson would
not leave an empty Coke can there, but the quanrumeiros' spooky
reputation keeps the street kids away. The vast parking lot is empty.
Efrim touches one pink suede boot to the blacktop, spins the bike,
accelerates across the weed-strewn parking lot to the highway.

The tail is back to three kilometers, says the traffic report on his
Chilllibeans, but Efrim slips up the side of the convoy of food
trucks up from Santos. He can see the top of the truck over the cars
and gridlocked executivo coaches. The roof slants at an odd angle.
The police have traffic cones out and are trying to wave vehicles
into one lane. There are three cruisers, one ambulance, and a lot of
rotating orange lights. Two camera drones circle overhead. Now sick
with dread, Efrim duck-waddles the Yam up between the grinding cars.
No one will notice another rubber-necker among all the passsengers
craning out their windows.

The truck lists as if capsized by a sudden melting of the road. The
line of the cut starts just above the fender and slices perfectly
through cab, engine, and coupling. The driver's side front wheel has
a neat spiral of glittering swarf sheared off from it. Efrim knows
that if you were to touch that bright metal, it would cut you quicker
than any razor. Sharp down to the quantum level. The slash runs the
length of the trailer, makes the same strange spiral pattern on the
rear wheels before exiting at the rear. The sheared-away material
lies some hundred meters down the highway. Oils and hydraulic fluids
spread from severed lines.

It would have been like this
, Efrim thinks as he paddles his
scrambler bike past the wreckage of Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. He
would have waited on the verge, like a hitcher. Aristide would have
given him the horns: You're too close to the road, fool. But he
needed to be close; he needed to be at fingertip reach. All he would
have to do was flick out the Q-blade and let the truck drive straight
down his cut. The pattern of the wheels would be a turning tire
intersecting a moving line of incision. A miracle the driver kept it
upright. A clean circle is cut into the side of the trailer.

Analyze, script it, play it. Stops it being real. Stops the dreading.
Makes that lingering glance at the figure under the plastic sheet
just curiosity. Those are not hydraulic fluids. The roadway is black
with flies. There are black vulltures overhead. Sticking out from the
sheet, a hand, palm upturned, imploring the Angels of Perpetual
Surveillance. Shirt cuff, silver links, ten centimeters of good
jacket. That would be enough to identify Titifreak, let alone the
broken blade, severed almost to a stump. He fought, then. No point
looking for the rest of the blade. It's on its way down to the center
of the Earth.

"Hey, what are you staring at?"

Caught. Efrim throws his hands up in dismay. The cop fixes him with
her mirrored visor.

"Go on, get out of here before I lift you for obstructing a
police investigation."

"Yes yes yes," Efrim mumbles, ducking his head. For he was
staring.Staring at the paramedics in their green and hi-visibility
yellow lifting a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. On that
stretcher, a body under plastic, but the sheet is too short and the
body's feet stick out, feet flopping away from each other; feet in
shoes. Efrim recognizes the soles of those shoes. The last time he
saw them was in a Todos os Santos print-shop, being woven layer upon
layer from smart plastic.

Fé em Deus

Rio Amazonas: above Pauxi Fort

My dear Heloise,

Finally, my dear sister, finally, I sail the calm waters of the great
Amazon and I find myself in the realm of the mythological. The island
of Marajó, which in former times was the habitation of many
advanced Indian tribes, is the size of Brittany and Normandy together
yet lies easily in the mouth of the river. A flow equal to that of
every river in Europe passes out of the river every day. The water,
so our Captain Acunha tells us, is sweet up to seventy leagues out to
sea. Yet the Amazon drops only fifty toises over its entire length,
and its flow is so gentle it may take a leaf a month to drift from
the rank, miasmic foothills of the Peruvian Andes to pass beneath the
hull of our
Fé em Deus
.

While I languished in Belém at the governor-general's
pleasure, not a day passed that I did not see La Condamine and his
expedition descending upon the coast in a cloud of sail. But now our
vessel beats upstream under the command of her master Acunha, a river
trader of surly and aloof disposition, yet I was assured at Belém
do Pará that there was none more experienced in the
ever-treacherous seasonal patterns of shoals and banks that form and
shift in this great stream. What with the manioc and beans, powder
and shot required to equip an expedition into the high Amazon—I
am assured I can find bearers, guides, and crew in plenty at São
José Tarumás—let alone the many cases of
scientific equipment, Captain Acunha mutters about the loading of his
barque. But we make excellent haste: we have already put the narrows
at the Fort of the Pauxis behind us; São José Tarumás
lies before us. This far inland from coastal influences the winds are
too light and variable and the river too excessively braided to allow
us to raise sail, so it is by the power of human muscle we ascend the
mighty Amazon, bent to oars, a true classical slave-galley.