Brasyl (40 page)

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

"The back's open," he says.

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

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

Edson joins Fia in the glowing blue cube.

"The guys want to move the trailer inside. It's not secure out
here."

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

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

"Can you get it to work?"

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

"But can you make it work?"

"Let's see."

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

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

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

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

"Get your ass out here, favelado."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I cannot allow you any more paper."

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

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

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

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

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

"We have it, by Our Lady, we have artillery."

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

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

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

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

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