Brasyl (47 page)

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.