Brasyl (36 page)

Again Quinn seized Falcon's hand.

"It came so fast, brother, so fast. I had not time, no word of
prayer, no moment even of recollection to prepare. One moment I was a
golden idol crucified, the next I was swept away, across worlds,
Robert, across worlds. My vision expanded and I saw myself, bound to
the cross, as if I stood outside my own body. Yet this was not me,
for in every direction I looked, I saw myself, bound to that cross,
other Luis Quinns sharing my plight and my vision. A hundred mes, a
thousand mes, receding like reflections of reflections in every
direction, and the farther I looked, the less like me they were. Not
physically, nor even I believe in will or intellect, but in the
circumstances of their lives. Here were Luis Quinns who had failed in
their mission, who had declined the burden of Father James in
Coimbra, who had never joined the Society of Jesus. Here were Luis
Quinns who had killed the slave in Porto without a backward look.
Here were Luis Quinns who had never killed that slave at all. Luis
Quinns leading lives of commerce and success, married, fathering
chilldren, captaining great ships or houses of trade. Here were Luis
Quinns alive and dead a thousand different ways, a myriad different
ways. All the lives I might have led. And Falcon, Falcon, this you
must understand if nothing else: they were all as true as each other.
My life was not the trunk from which all others branch at each
juncture or decision. They were independent, commplete, not other
lives, but other worlds, separate from the very creating word of God
to the final judgment. Worlds without end, Falcon. Naked I was sent
out across them, my expanded mind racing down those lines of other
Luis Quinns' other worlds, and I could see no end to them, no end at
all. And the voices, Falcon, a million, a thousand million, a
thousand times that, voices all speaking at once, all combining into
a terrible wordless howl like the roaring of the damned in hell.

"Then I heard a word speak through the cacophony, one voice that
was a thousand voices, the pagé saying over and over 'Ask!
Ask! Ask!' He too was surrounded by a bright blinding halo of his
other selves; everyone, everything, the whole mean shambles of the
village, my brother in suffering Manoel; I saw them all across
countless worlds.

"'Ask'; What could this mean; And then I heard Paguana the
leader of the Guabirú speak in a voice like a whirlwind: 'When
will the Guabirú achieve victory and rule over their enemies?'
And they heard, Falcon, all those uncountable voices; they heard and
asked it of themselves, and each spoke his answer. I knew that
somewhere among them, in that vast array of possible answers, was the
truth; simple, complete, incontestable. Beside me, Manoel, endless
Manoels, more than blossoms on an apple tree, asked that same
quesstion of his other selves and would, I knew certainly, receive
the same infallible answer.

"Once more I was spun forth among my other selves, across the
worlds, faster, ever faster, outracing light and thought, even
prayer. Godspeeded, I traversed a million worlds until an echo
brought me up, to a room, a plain whitewashed room, furniture simply
fashioned from heavy, valuable woods, a room in Ireland I knew from
the taste of the air and the small square of green I could spy
through the narrow window. There I saw myself, Luis Quinn, with a
hound beneath my hand and an infant rolling at my feet. I looked
myself in the eye and said, 'The Guabirú will never rule over
their enemies, for their enemy rules them already and water will run
red with their blood and then they will become nothing but a memory
of a name.' And I knew this was true prophecy, because, Falcon,
Falcon—it has happened. You wonndered if the universe might be
modeled by a simple machine: here is your answer. There is a world
for every possible deed and act, bur they are all written,
preordained. The stack of cards runs through the machine. Free will
is an illusion. We imagine we have choice, but the outcome is already
decided, was written the moment the world was made, complete in
time."

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

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

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

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

"Water, Falcon, I beg you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am coming."

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

"The indio asks if the Mair is man or spirit. The Mair answers,
'Touch my hands, my face,'" Zemba translated for Falcon.

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

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

"What did the father say there?"

"The Mair said, 'Ask me a question, any question.'''

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

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

"He says, 'And where was your God, O priest?'"

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

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