Brasyl (48 page)

Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.

"Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a
computer everything can be a computer. Ah!"

Edson shakes her again. "Get up!"

Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, "What is go away
let me sleep."

"The Order is here."

She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.

"What?"

Edson claps his hand over Fia's mouth. The sound the smell the state
of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him
death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to
the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro
trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of
Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia's mouth two
flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts
of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most
attenuated fringes to pick out nanoshifts of pressure, rustles on the
edge of audibility, a quantum's difference in the slit of light under
the door.

"He's gone. Now, with me. Don't say a word."

Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid
stupid rich man's apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the
balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with
the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks
a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.

"That way." High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are
not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a
twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson
springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a
prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. "Piece of
piss. Just don't look down."

Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the
crossing.

"Hey! Look at me!"

Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson
hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The
great ship swarms like an ants' nest spiked with battery acid. The
hunter is still in there.

Yanzon, admonitory of the Order, moves unopposed through the
residential boulevards of the Teixeira corporacão, destroying
the enemies of the Order. The alarms are irritating him now, and he
has had to eliminate a few of the more bold seguranças; but he
has established dread and awe across the EMBRAÇA headquarters.
They showed him once the order the Order enforces. When he crosses
and becomes superposed with all his alters, that is the truth. There
is a universal mind, and all are notions of it. The prelates and the
presidents, the pontiffs and prime ministers call it the Parousia,
the end-time, but the eye of a simple man's faith can better know it
as the kingdom of God. The Enemy says that is a lie, an endlessly
repeated dream grinding ever slower as the multi verse wheels down,
and they seek to break it, to wake the dreamers. They call this
freedom and hope. To Yanzon it is pride, and annihilation, an endless
drop into the final, eternal cold. A dream is not necessarily a lie.

He glances up. Through three floors he sees Alcides Teixeira trying
to escape within a cadre of his bodyguards. They are heavily armed
and equipped little sensor ghosts. Small avail against a hunter who
can shoot through solid bulkheads. Yanzon sets arrow to his Q-bow,
aims up through the ceiling. He whirls. Multiple contacts, closing
fast.
Oceanus
's marines have found him. Yanzon lowers his bow
and breaks into a loping run. His mission now is to destroy the
Q-cores and reach the extraction point. Or kill himself. The Order
has always understood that its agents die with their secrets. One
fast, easy pass with the Q-blade; almost accidental in its
casualness. Yanzon has often imagined what it would feel like. He
imagines his flesh parting down to the quantum as something silver
and so subtle, so painless you would only suspect when the blood
began to rush. No pain. No pain at all. And no sin, no sin at all.

Edson counts windows. Eleven, twelve.

"I feel sick," Fia says. "Here."

Lights burn behind drapery. If he had a Q-blade, Edson could cut his
way in neat as neat, a big circle of glass just falling away in front
of him onto the bedroom pile. He doesn't, but he can trust that
Oceanus
builders did it as cheap and shoddy and minimum wage
as every other piece of work done for rich people. He grabs the
stanchion, swings up, and punch-kicks forward. The whole doorframe
comes away from its track and swings inward.

"Ruuuunnnnn!" yells Edson at the naked twentyish man
standing starrtled in the middle of the floor. Tech-boy gives a
little scream and flees into the bathroom. By Edson's calculation
they should be opposite a stairwell. Not even an admonitory could be
fast enough to catch both of them on the short dash from door to
stair. Surely. He flings the door open. The corridor is swarming with
Oceanus
marine security. Targeting lasers sweep walls, floors,
ceiling. They catch Edson's heel as he pushes Fia up the stairs.

"This is the quantum computer level," Fia says.

"I know," says Edson grimly. "There's only one way off
this ship. Can you work it? You have to work it."

They exit the stairwell the same instant as Yanzon comes around the
corner. Only the fact that they should be dead saves them. In that
instant of astonishment, Fia hits the security scanner, Edson pushes
her through the door, and they both dive to the floor. The blue bolts
sear through the air where their heads would have been, stab through
the floor like lightning.

"Come on, he can cut his way through here like butter,"
says Edson. The inner lock opens to Fia's blink. Inside, the four
stolen Q-cores and more mess than tidy and precise Edson has ever
seen in his life. Girlie mags makeup drinks cans food wrappers
balled-up tissues pairs of socks pairs of shoes pens and coffee cups
with crusts of mold in their bottoms.

"This is it?" Edson asks. The gateway to the multiverse.
But Fia has pulled off her top, an action Edson always finds deeply
deeply sexy, and coronas of gray light flicker around the cogs on her
belly as the wheels begin to turn. The Q-cores answer with the
ghost-light of other universes. It is a terreiro, Edson thinks. Junk
magic. A loud crash tells Edson the hunter is now in the outer lab.
Of course. They may be invisible to him, but he wants the cores, the
Q-cores. The Order is Jesuitical in its thoroughness. And there is
only one door to this windowless room. No, there are a million doors,
a billlion doors. And in that thought they open. Edson reels,
blinking in the silver light. Figures in the light; he is lost in a
mirror-maze; a thousand Edsons stretch away from him on every side,
an infinite regress. Those closest are mirror images, but as they
recede into the light differences of dress, style, stature appear
until, tear-blind in the glare of the multiverse, they might be
angels, radiant as orixás. And he feels them, he knows them,
every detail of their lives is available to him, just by looking.
Entangled. As he knows them, they know him and one by one turn toward
him. Ghost-wind streams Fia's red hair back from her head: she is the
Mae do Santo, and all her sisters attending her. Some of the doors
are empty, Edson notices. And Edson also notices a squeal of plastic
paneling coming apart at the quantum scale. He whirls as the Q-blade
completes the circle. The wall panel crashes forward. The assassin's
amber I-shades crawl with data and trajectories and killing curves,
none of which he needs because he has them there, right here right
now, at arrow point.

"Now Fia, now anywhere!" Edson yells as the hunter draws,
fires. Then time gels, time goes solid as the arrow drifts from the
bow, cutting a line of Cerenkov radiation through the air. Edson sees
it bore toward his heart, and then there is a jump, a quantum jump,
and the arrow is in another place, another doorway, flickering from
universe to universe as the probability of it killing this Edson
Jesus Oliveira de Freitas dwindles to zero, as he becomes superposed
with everywhere at once. The hunter gives an incoherent, rageful cry,
drops his astonishing bow, and pulls the Q-blade. And a fourth figure
is in the place above universes with them; the blonde short loira
woman, the miraculous capoeirista: a thousand, a million alters of
her, charging across the multiverse. In one instant she is a universe
away; the next she arrives, panting, beside Edson.

"Hello again," she says, and slaps half a handcuff around
Edson's wrist.

She ducks under the assassin's Q-blade strike; delivers a crunching
kick to the solar plexus that sends him reeling, agonized, out of the
sanctorum; and slaps the other half of the handcuffs around the
astonished Fia's arm. "You'd just end up in two hundred
kilometers of Atlantic," she says. "And you're no use to us
there." She hauls on the chain linking Edson and Fia. The doors
swing wide; they fall through every door at once into the silver
light. A billion lives, a billion deaths flash through Edson. He
needs to cry piss vomit laugh pray ejaculate praise roar in ecstasy.
Then he is standing in light, sunlight, on raindamp concrete, by a
low curb surrounding a statue of a man in soccer kit holding boldly
aloft the kind of torch that only appears in statuary and political
party logos. The man is bronze, and on the sides of the plinth are
plaques in the same ritual metal bearing names. Legendary names,
galactic names. Jairzinho and Ronaldo Fenómeno. Socrates, and
that other Edson: Arantes do Nascimento. Before him is a curved
triumphal gateway in mold-stained white-and-blue-painted concrete and
the words Stadio Mario Filho.

Edson is in a place he's never been before. The Maracanã
Stadium.

"Rio?" Fia asks wearily, as if one more wonder or horror
and she would lie down in the damp gutter and pull the trash over
her.

"What's going on here?" Edson demands, frowning at the
verdigrised plaques. "Where's the 2030 Seleçao that won
right here, and 2018 in Russia? When are we?"

"That's a slightly tricky question," the blonde woman says.
"You see, we're not really any time at all. We're sort of
outside time; it just happens to look like the Maracanã from
my era. When I come from, we haven't won yet. We lost. That's the
point. And it's not really Rio either. All you have to do is go as
far as the edge of the dropoff zone and you'll see."

Edson almost hauls Fia off her feet. The cuffs the cuffs—he's
forgotten they are chained together. Fia is still looking around her
dazed, spun out on the chemical tail of two Teixeira corporação
sleeping pills.

"Oh shit sorry about that," the woman says. She fiddles in
a pants pockets for a key. "I didn't want you wandering off; if
you'd got separated, we'd never have found you again." Two oiled
clicks, then the woman stows the shiny chrome handcuffs in her belt.
Edson rubs his wrist. He never ever wants to get any closer to things
police than that.

"What are you, some kind of cop?" he throws back over his
shoulder as he crosses the cobbles.

"Hey. I am not a cop," the woman snaps. But Edson's
discovered a weird thing: as he stands between the flagpoles that
line the curb and moves his head from side to side, the trees and
office buildings across the road move with him.

"What is going on here?"

At the same time Fia says, "Where are all the people?"

"Coffee," the woman says. "This needs explaining over
coffee." She places an order for three cafezinhos from an old
black man with gray gray hair at a little tin stall in front of the
colonnade Edson cannot remember seeing before. The coffee is dark and
sweet and finger-searingly hot in the little translucent plastic cup,
but these cariocas cannot make coffee. Paulistanos, now: they grow
it, they know it.

"Think of it as a kind of movie set, only it's solid and real
all the way through," the woman says. The old man leans his
elbows on the counter of his little stand. "As real as anything
really is. It's a safe haven. We have hundreds of them, probbably
billions of them. This one just happens to be the size and shape of
the Maracanã Stadium circa 2006. I'm not actually much of a
futebol fan, but the location has a kind of special significance to
us. I've got places all over the place, but this is sort of our
office. Corporate headquarters, so to speak. Fortress of Solitude."

Fia has been turning slowly around, manga-eyes wide.

"It's a pocket universe," she says. "That's so clever.
You found a way into the multiversal quantum computer and hacked it
out."

"It's a very small universe, like I said—just big enough
to fit the stadium into. I'd've loved a beach, maybe the Corcovado,
the Sugar Loaf, the Copa, but we daren't get overambitious. The Order
knows we're there somewhere; they just haven't been able to find us
yet."

Edson crumples his plastic cup and flings it away from him. A gust of
wind rattles it across the cracked concrete.

"But that was real, and the coffee was hot and pretty bad. How
can you make something out of nothing? I can feel it, I can touch
it."

"It's not nothing," the old man on the coffee stand says.
"It's time and information, the most real things there are."

"You can reprogram the multiversal quantum computer," Fia
says with a light of revelation dawning in her eyes. The woman and
the old man look at each other.

"You've got it," the woman says with a cheeky grin. "I
knew we hadn't made a mistake with you. Okay, well I think you're
about ready to go inside. It can be a bit . . . disorienting at
first, but you do get used to it."

"Just one moment," Edson demands. Fia, capoeira woman, and
bad coffee man are already at the blue-and-white colonnade. "Before
I go anywhere, just who are you?"