Brasyl (29 page)

"If I am going to help you, there's stuff I need to know,"
Edson says. "Like priests, and the Order, and that guy with the
Q-blade, and who was that capoeirista?"

"How do I say this without it sounding like the most insane
thing you've ever heard? There's an organization—more a society
really—that controls quantum communication between universes."

"Like a police, government?"

"No, it's much bigger than that. It covers many universes.
Governments can't touch it. It works on two levels. There's the local
level—each universe has its agents—they're known as
Sesmarias. Sesmarias tend to run in famiilies: the same people occupy
the same roles in other universes."

"How can it run in families?"

"I told you it would sound crazy. Some of them are very old and
respectable families. But the Sesmarias are just part of a bigger
thing, and that's the Order. "

"I've head that word twice in one day. You, then that
capoeirista woman. So the man who attacked us at the Igreja, he was
from the Order, right?"

"No, he would have been just a Sesmaria. They aren't terribly
good, really. Sesmarias are allowed to contact each other but not
cross. I'd hoped the Sesmaria back where I come from hadn't been able
to track where I was going. Wrong there. But the Order can go
wherever it wants across the mulltiverse. They have agents:
admonitories. When they send one through, they have to tell everyone
from the president of the United States to the pope."

Edson presses his hands to either side of his skull, as if he might
squeeze madness our or reality in. "So capoeira woman, who is
she?"

"I've never seen or heard of her before in my life. But I do
know one thing."

"What?"

"I think she's on our side."

We could do with that
, Edson thinks, but then a sound, a
rushing sound, makes him look up, the dread back his heart. But it is
not police drones moving carefully between the branches. Edson smiles
and grins: high above the treetops wind turbines are turning.

"Stay as long as you need."

"You don't understand .... "

"I do understand. Stay as long as you need."

The moment Mr. Peach saw Edson on his security camera, and the girl
behind him, he knew nothing would ever be simple again. Beneath the
cherubic ceiling of the baroque living room, Sextinho and the girl
are sprawled unconscious on the Chesterfield, innocently draped
around each other like sibling cats. Sextinho—no, he can't call
him that now. The young woman on his sofa is a refugee from another
part of the polyverse. Swallow that intellectual wad and everything
else follows. Of course they are caught between the ritual assassins
of a transdimensional conspiracy and mysterious saviors. Of course
refuge must be offered, though it marks him irrevocably as a player.

Something has fallen from Edson's fist. Mr. Peach lifts it. An ugly,
massmanufactured icon of Exu. Crossings, gateways. He smiles as he
balances it on the arm of the sofa.
Watch him well, small lord
. The girl sleeps on her back, arms flung back, crop top ridden up.
Mr. Peach bends close to study the tattoo. Liquid protein polymer
circuitry. Infinitely malleable and morphable. There must be
self-organizing nanostructures. Quasi-life. Extraordinary technology.
Direct neural interface; no need for the clumsy, plasticy tech of
I-shades and smart-fabrics. What was the sum of the histories of her
part of the polyverse that gave rise to so similar a society, so
radically different a technology? But they're all out there. There is
a universe for every possible quantum state in the big bang; some as
similar as this girl's, some so different that life is physically
impossible.

Edson is awake, one eye open, watching.

"Hey."

"Hey. I've made you breakfast."

"Such fine design and so ingenious; yes yes, I can immediately
see applications for this device in my own work." Father Diego
Gonçalves turned the crank on the Governing Engine and watched
the click and flop of the card chain through the mill and the rise
and fall of the harnesses. "Drudgery abollished; mere mechanical
labor transformed. Men liberated from the wheel."

"Or a subtler slavery." Through the delicately worked
wooden grille Luis Quinn looked out at the river. Father Gonçalves’s
private apartment was at the rear of the basilica-ship, high to catch
what few cooling breaths the river granted. None this day—only
a heat of oppression and distant growls of thunder. Quinn pressed his
head to the screen. "Someone must put his back to that wheel,
someone must press the holes in the cards, and someone there must be
who writes the sequence of those holes." Quinn watched a small
boy squatting in the stern steering his leaf-light craft in and out
of the larger canoes in Father Diego Gonçalves’s
entourage. The boy's younger sister, a tiny round-faced thing with
her hand in her mouth, sat dumpily in the waist. For three days Quinn
had watched the boy paddle from the black of the Rio Negro into the
white of the Rio Branco, feeding the infant manioc cakes that he
carefully unwrapped from parcels of broad forest leaves. Again, the
soft rattle of Falcon's infernal machine.

"Oh, that is simplicity itself, Father Quinn: an industrial
engine would be harnessed to a water sluice, or even a windmill. And
the very first engine you build is the one that copies the pattern of
holes for all its successors. But your third point raises an
intriguing philosophical question: is it possible to construct an
engine that writes the sequence for any other, and therefore
loggically itself!"

Thunder boomed, closer now, as if summoned by the clack of the
Governing Engine. A universe ruled by number, running like punched
cards through the loom of God. Luis Quinn had thought to destroy it
privately, cast it into the huge waters: he had delivered it into the
hands of his enemy.

Nossa Senhora da Várzea, Out Lady of the Floodplain: that was
the name of the green saint on the banner and of this construct of
which she was patron, a saint alien to Luis Quinn's hagiography. It
had not been until he saw the short, thin figure in black descend the
basilica steps that Luis Quinn realized that with every oar-sweep and
paddle-stroke upstream he had been mentally drawing a picture of
Father Diego Gonçalves, one sketched, like Dr. Falcon's
intelligence maps, from the crude charcoal of supposition. Now as
they shared the fraternal kiss of Christ, he had found those lines
erased completely, beyond even this phenomenal recall, save that the
Diego Gonçalves he had envisioned bore no resemblance to this
bounding, energetic, almost boyish man.
This is the brother I must
return to the discipline of the Order
, Luis Quinn had thought.
Open your eyes, your ears, all your senses as you did in Salvador;
see what is to be seen.

"You know what I am?"

Father Diego Gonçalves had smiled. "You are the
admonitory of provinncial de Magalhães of the Colégio
of Salvador in Bahia."

So it was to be a duel, then.

"Would that news traveled as swiftly downriver as it travels up.
Kindly have your men stop that immediately."

Indio sailors, naked but for geometrical patterns of black genipapo
juice on their faces, torsos, and thighs, with feather bands plaited
around upper arms and calves, were unloading Quinn's bales and sacks
from the pirogue. Zemba watched suspiciously, paddle gripped
two-handed, an attitude of defense.

"Forgive me, I presumed you would accept my hospitality,
Brother."

Father Diego's Portuguese was flawless, but Quinn heard old
Vascongadas in the long vowels.

"If you are aware of my task, then you must surely be aware that
I cannot compromise myself. I shall sleep in the pirogue with my
people."

"As you wish." Father Diego gave orders. Quinn identified a
handful of Tupi loan words. "But may we at least share the
Sacrament?"

"I should at the least be interested to see if the interior of
your . . . misssion . . . matches its exterior."

"You will find Nossa Senhora da Várzea a complete
testimony to the glory of God in every aspect." Gonçalves
hesitated an instant on the steps. "Father Quinn, I trust it
would not offend you if I said that word has also preeceded you that
you enjoy a repuration with the sword."

"I trained under Jésus y Portugal of Leon." Quinn
was in no humor for false humility.

"Montoya of Toledo was my master," Father Diego said with
the smallest smile, the shallowest dip of the head. "Now that
would be fine exercise."

Passing beneath the watchword of his order into the basilica, Luis
Quinn was at once brought up by profound darkness. Shafts fell from
the high clerestory, broken into leaf-dapple by the intricate
grille-work, revealing glimpses of extravagant painted bas-reliefs.
An altar light glowed in the indeeterminate distance; ruddy Mars to
the scattered constellations of the votives. This was the dimension
of a more intimate organ than the fickle eye. Luis Quinn breathed
deep and extended his sense of smell. Sun-warmed wood, the rancid
reek of smoking palm oil, incenses familiar and alien; green scents,
herbs and foliages. Quinn starred, caught by a sudden overpowering
scent of verdure: green rot and dark growing. Now his sense of space
and geometry came into focus; he felt great masses of heavy wood
above him, decorated buttresses and bosses, a web of vaulting like
the tendrils of the strangling fig, galleries and lofts. Figures
looked down upon him. Last of all his eyes followed his other senses
into comprehension. The exuberance the craftsmen had dissplayed on
the basilica's exterior had within been let run into religious
ecstasy. The nave was a vast depiction of the Last judgment. Christ
the judge formed the entire rood screen; a starveling, crucified
Messiah, his bones the ribs of the screen, his head thrown back in an
agony of thorns each the length of Quinn's arm. His outflung arms
judged the quick and the dead, his fingertips breaking into coils and
twines of flowering vines that ran the length of the side panels. On
his right, the rejoicing redeemed, innocent and naked Indios. Hands
pressed together in thanksgiving, they sporred and rolled in the
petals that blossomed from Christ's fingers. On the left hand of
Jesus, the damned writhed within coils of thorned liana, faces
upturned, begging impossible surcease. Demons herded the lost along
the vines: Quinn recognized forest monsters; the deceiving curupira;
the boar-riding Tupi lord of the hunt; a onelegged black homunculus
in a red Phrygian cap who seemed to be smoking a pipe. Father
Gonçalves waited at Quinn's side, awaiting response. When none
came, he said mildly, "What does Salvador believe of me?"

"That you have transgressed the bounds of your vows and faith
and brought the Society into perilous disrepute."

"You are not the first to have come here bearing that charge."

"I know that, but I believe I am the first with the authority to
intervene." Gonçalvesbowed his head meekly.

"I regret that Salvador considers intervention necessary."

"My predecessors, none of them returned; what befell them?"

"I would ask you to believe me when I tell you that they
departed ftom me hale in will and wind and convinced of the value of
my mission. We are far from Salvador here; there are many perils to
body and soul. Fierce forest tigers, terrible snakes, bats that feed
on man's blood, toothed fish that can strip the flesh from his bones
in instants, let alone any number of diseases and sicknesses."
Father Gonçalves gestured for Quinn to precede him to the
choir. The screen gate was in the shape of the heart of Christ;
Gonçalves pushed it open and bade Quinn enter.

The altar was the conventional wooden table, worked in the
fever-dream fashion of Gonçalves's craftmasters to resemble
twined branches, the crucifix its only adornment, an indio Christ,
exquisitely worked, sufferings incompreehensible to the Old World
borne on his face and scourged, pierced body. But the crucifix had
not taken Father Quinn's breath, powerful and alien though it was; it
was so monumentally overshadowed by the altarpiece behind it that it
seemed an apostrophe. The east end of the church, where lights and
ladychapel would have been in a basilica of stone and glass, was
fashioned into one towering reredos. A woman, the green woman, the
Saint of the Flood, wreathed in life and glory. Nude she was,
Eve-innocent, but never naked. The saint was clothed in the forest:
jewel-bright parrots and toucans, some decorated with real plumage,
were her diadem; from her full breasts and milkproud nipples burst
flowers, fruit, and tobacco; while from her navel, the divine
omphalos, sprouted vines and lianas that clothed her torso and
thighs. The beasts of the várzea dropped from her womb to
crouch in adoration at the one foot that touched the ground and
struck roots across the floor into the rear of the altar: capybara,
paca, peccary, and tapir, the green sloth and the crouching jaguar.
Her other leg was bent, sole pressed to thigh, a dancer's pose; an
anaconda circled it, its head pressed to her pubis. Her right hand
held the manioc bush, her left the recurved hunting bow of the flood
forest; and fish attended her, a star-swarm like the milky band of
the galaxy reflected in black water, swimming through the woven
tracery of tree boles and vines against which Nossa Senhora danced.
But true stars also attended her, the Lady twinkled with glowing
points of soft radiance: glowworms pinned to the altarpiece with
thorns. Again Luis Quinn caught the noble rot of vegetation; as his
eyes grew accustomed to the deeper gloom around the altar and the
monstrous scale of the work revealed itself to him, he saw that where
rays of light struck down through the tracery of the clerestory,
precious orchids and bromeliads had been planted in niches in the
screen of trees: a living forest. Our Lady of the Floods was
beautiful and terrible, commanding awe and reverence. Luis Quinn
could feel her forcing him to his knees and by that same token knew
that to genuflect before her would be true blasphemy.