Brasyl (49 page)

The woman throws up her hands, shakes her head in self-exasperation.
"You know, I completely forgot. I just have so much on, I am
completely ditzy." She offers a hand to Edson. "My name is
Marcelina Hoffman, and I am what is known as a Zemba. I'm kind of
like a superheroine; I turn up in the nick of time and rescue people.
Now, come on, there's a lot more to show you." Edson briefly
shakes the offered hand. Glancing back from the tiled lobby, he can
no longer see the coffee stall, but the plaza flickers with
more-guessed than glimpsed figures: ghosts of an old black man, a
short white woman, a dekasegui and a cor-de-canela boy in a sharp
white suit.

"So did Brasil really win in 2030?" The old man falls in
beside Edson as he ascends the sloping entry tunnel. Edson drops his
pace to match him. He whispers, "She really doesn't know
anything about futebol. Television, that's her thing. Was her thing."

"Yeah, we won," Edson says. "Against the United
States."

"The United States?" the old man says, then starts to laugh
so painfully, so wheezily Edson thinks he is having a heart attack.
"The ianques playing futebol? In the World Cup? What was the
score?"

"Hah!" the old man says. "And Uruguay?"

"They haven't qualified since 2010."

The man punches fist into palm. "Heh heh. Son, you have made an
old man so very, very happy. So so happy." Chuckles bubble up in
him all the way along the curving corridor lined with photographs of
the great and glorious. Edson stops; something in a photo of a
goalkeeper making a spectacular save has caught his eye. And the
date. July 16, 1950.

"That's you, isn't it?"

"It's not there in the original Maracana. I mean the one where I
come from. And it never was that photo."

Marcelina holds open the door to the presidential box. Edson steps
into the blinding light. Two hundred thousand souls greet him. He
reels, then draws himself upright and walks deliberately, gracefully
down the red-carpeted steps to the rail where Fia stands, glowing in
the attention.
Senhors, Sennhoras, I present to you, Edson Jesus
Oliveira de Freitas! Superstarrrrrrrrrr!

"I told you it could be a bit overwhelming," Marcelina
said. And in the moment after the tyranny of the eyes tells him,
Two
hundred thousand fans
, the ears tell him different, and more
strange. This thronged stadium is totally silent. Not a cheer, not an
airhorn, not a thunder of a bateria or the chant of a supporters'
samba. Not a firework. Not an announcer screaming
Goooooooooool do
Brasil!
A stadium of ghosts. As his eyes catch up with his ears,
Edson sees something very much like weather blowing across the stands
and the high, almost vertical arquibancadas, like the huge silk team
banners passed hand to hand around the huge circle, a change-wave
rippling between worlds, between realities, between Fluminense and
Flamengo, between decades. The fans of a million universes flicker
through this Maracanã beyond time and space.

"I was finding I couldn't get anything done with the noise,"
Marcelina says. Down in the sacred circle of green a match is in
progress. Edson knows instinctively what game it is. No other game
matters. But it is not one Fateful Final, it is thousands, flickering
through each other, ghosts of players, crosses from other universes,
goal kicks into the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Edson watches
the cursed Barbosa ruefully pick the ball out of the back of the net;
then reality shifts and he is rolling it out past the strikers coming
in on the back of the save on a long throw to Juvenal.

"I'm used to it," says Moaçir Barbosa. "On
average, we win. But hey, the USA two one? Oh, I cannot get used to
that."

Edson lifts his hands from the rail.

"Okay, this is all very good and I'm prepared to believe I'm in
some bubble outside space and time or some private little universe or
whatever, but I have one question. What is it all about?"

Marcelina applauds. The sound rings around the eerily silent
Maracanã. "Correct question!"

"And the answer?"

"The universe—the original universe, the one in which we
all lived out lives the first time—died long ago. Not died—it
never dies, it just goes on expanding forever until every particle is
so far from every other that it's effecctively in a universe of its
own. We haven't reached that stage yet; the universe is so old and
cold there is no longer enough energy to sustain life, or any other
process except quantum computation. But intelligence always tries to
find a way out, a way not to die with the stars, and so it created a
vast quantum simmulation of its own history, and entered it. And we
live it over and over and over again, ever more slowly as the
universe cools toward absolute zero, until in the end-time it stops
completely and we are frozen in the eternal present."

Edson, always thin, always undernourished, shivers in his sharp white
malandro's suit.

''I'm alive," he says.

"Yes. No. An accurate-enough simulation is virtually
indistinguishable from reality. It's only when you look up close that
the cracks begin to appear."

"Quantum weirdness," Fia says.

"No way around it. The quantum nature of the simulation would
always betray its true nature. That's what the Order was created to
protect."

"Fia told me the Sesmarias are old fidalgo families. How long
have we known about this?"

"I think there have always been individuals who understood the
multiiverse. But the Order has only existed since the middle-of the
eighteenth cenntury, when a French explorer brought back an Amazonian
drug that allowed the mind to operate on a quantum level."

Edson's head reels.
Stop this stop this. Give me sun and beer;
give me a Keepie-Uppie Queen and a hot deal.

"We're dead. We're ghosts, so what? We all die in the end."

He feels Fia's hand clutch his.

"It doesn't have to be that way," she says. "All
available energy goes into running the multiversal quantum computer."

"The Order calls it the Parousia."

"But instead, all that energy could be put into something else.
Someething unpredictable. A random quantum event, like the one that
inflated into this multiverse in the first place. A new creation. But
you'd have to end the simulation first. You would have to turn off
the Parousia."

"Wait wait wait wait," says Edson. "You turn it off,
we all die."

"Maybe not," Fia says, overbiting her bottom lip in that
way she doesn't know she does but Edson finds sweet-sexy. "'A
black hole does have hair.' Information could be conserved through a
singularity."

''I'm not a scientist, you know," Edson says.

"Me neither," says Marcelina. "But I have made some
science shows. Mostly about plastic surgery."

"That's whar you're fighting for," Fia says, and her eyes
are bright, seeing to the end of the universe and beyond, reflecting
that new light. "Death in the cold and dark, or the hope of
rebirth in the fire."

"You should write scripts," Marcelina says. "That's
very good. Very poetic. This is what the Order fears; that's why we
are fighting it all across the multiverse, for a chance at something
different, something magical. Places like this, they're a start, a
tiny start. Edson, I need a word with your girlfriend, in private."

Edson turns again to the endless final. The bright watered green, the
sky that only Rio makes so blue, the many colors of the crowd:
ghosts, echoes. His own hand on the rail seems so thin and
insubstantial he could see through it. He turns his face up to the
sun and it is cold.

"Scared the hell out of me too, son," Barbosa says. He
leans on the rail, decorously spits over the edge of the presidential
box. "But whatever it is, this is the world we live in. We're
men; we make our own way. Maybe it all begins anew; maybe we die and
that's the end of it, no heaven, no hell, nothing. But I know I can't
go on living what happened to me over and over and over, slower and
slower until it all freezes. That's death. This ... this is nothing."
He looks around. "That was quick. I'll leave you young things"
He climbs the steps, passes Fia on the red carpet.

"She offered you a job, didn't she?" Edson says.

"It's getting to be a habit."

"And did you take it?"

"What's the alternative? For someone like me, what's the
alternative?"

"But nothing for Edson."

She can't look at him. Below them, in a million universes, Augusto
lifts high the Jules Rimet trophy to a silent Maracanã.

"I can't make that decision for you."

"Did you even try?"

"It's too dangerous. You're not a player; I am, for better or
worse. You can't come with me. Go back; we can send you back, it's
easy. I can do it. The Order is looking for me now."

"But I wouldn't see you again, would I? Not if the Order is
hunting you."

She shakes her head, chews her lip. There will be tears soon.
Good,
Edson thinks.
I deserve them
.

"Ed ... "

"Don't call me that. I hate that. Call me my name. I'm Edson."

"Edson, you have a home to go to. You have all your family, and
all those brothers and Dona Hortense and your Aunt Marizete and all
those friends. You've got Carlinhos ... Mr. Peach. He loves you. I
don't know what he'll do without you."

"Maybe," Edson says, biting his lip because he can feel it
coming and he does not want her to see it, not while he is hurt and
full of rage, "maybe I love you."

She puts her hand up to her mouth, tries to push his words back into
unspokenness.

"Don't say that, no, have you any idea how hard it is to hear
you say that? How can I say this? This sounds the most callous thing.
Edson, I died to you once already. I'm not her. I never was."

"Maybe," says Edson, "it's you I love."

"No!" Fia cries. "Stop saying this. I'm going, I have
to go now, I have to do this quickly. You can't come with me. Don't
look for me, don't try and get in touch with me. I won't look for
you. Let me go back to being dead."

She turns and walks up the red carpet. Marcelina opens the door.
Edson knows what lies beyond that door: all the worlds in the
multiverse. Once she steps through, she will disappear between the
worlds and he will never be able to find her again. He will go back
to his office at the back of Dona Hortense's house in respectable
hardworking Cidade de Luz. The fuss over the Q-cores will disappear
as the police find easier meat to pick over. There will be other
Keepie-Uppie Queens, other fut-volley teams, and there is the whole
Habibi lanchonete business for De Freitas Global Talent. And on those
rare clear nights in autumn and early spring he will look up beyond
the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance to the stars themselves and the
faint glow of the Milky Way, and see her out there, farther than any
star, yet only a weave of the world away. The door is closing; Fia is
already stepping through. One more step and he will lose her forever.
And Edson finds he is running up those stairs, up that red carpet,
toward that closing door. "No!" he shouts. "No!"

In the waxing light the quilombistas on Hope of the Saints Hill stood
as one, silent, staring at the angels of God walking over the
treetops toward them, haloed by the rising sun. Then Zemba beat his
spear against his shield, ran up and down between the ranks, his iâos
behind him, roaring and leaping, proud and furious.

"What pacas are you, that stand in awe of wooden puppets? For
bauds and gauds you would put your wrists into the manacles? Fight,
you pacas! This is the City of God. This!" The iâos in
their bridal dresses joined their throats with his: a voice here, a
voice there sounded; then of a sudden the whole hill shouted as one.
Falcon felt the cry in his throat, the good cry of pride and defiance
and laughter; then he too was roaring with the people: Hope of the
Saints Hill red with bodies all shouting at the sun.

The hill was still resounding to the great cheer as Falcon took his
Manaos down the slope into the flooded forest. There was treachery
beneath the opaque, muddied surface: the old trench lines and pit
traps remained; one step could leave an unwary warrior floundering in
deep water, helpless under the enemy's blades. Falcon looked back but
once, when he saw the angels come to a halt. Through the trees he
glimpsed Caixa in her forward trench, passing out serrated wooden
knives to the women and children of her command. Moments later the
varzea shook to the crash of artillery and the whistle of mortar
shells. The hilltop where Zemba had stationed his viable artillery
exploded in smoke and red earth. Clods fell like rain, but from the
clearing cloud of smoke Falcon heard the cheer of defiance renewed.
Zemba's hasty earthworks had endured; the ballisteiros and
trebuchistas danced on the parapet, waved their urocum-dyed man hoods
at the hovering angels.

A bird-whistle; Tucuru held his left hand out at his side, fluttered
it. Enemy within sight. Falcon peered into the gloom, but all he
could see was a waterlogged sloth, lanky and lugubrious, rowing its
way across the flooddwaters like a debauched spider. Then in an
epiphany of vision, the same as suddenly draws constellations upon
scattered stars, he discerned the curved prows of war canoes pressing
through the leaf-and-water dazzle. He held out his sword. His archers
concealed themselves in the lush cove. They would fire twice, then
withdraw to harry the enemy again. Close. Let them close. And closer
yet.

"For the Marvelous City!" Falcon cried. Fifty archers
fired, their second arrows in the air before the first had found
their marks. All was silent. Then the forest exploded in a wall of
cannon fire and the air turned to a shrieking, killing cloud of ball
and splint. In that opening salvo half of Falcon's commmand was blown
to red wreck.