Brasyl

JUNE 6-8, 2006

Silver rain woke Marcelina Hoffman. Her face and hair were dewed; her sleeping bag gleamed beneath a mist of fine droplets like the pupa of some extraordinary Luna moth. A ceiling of soft, ragged cloud raced above her face, seemingly low enough to lick. The morros were abruptly amputated, their tops invisible in the mist. Marcelina watched the streaming gray tear around the spines and quills of antennae and aerials that capped the taller apartment towers. She put out her tongue, a taste not a kiss, and let the warm drizzle settle on it. The noises from the street were subdued, baffled; car tires slushy on the wet, greasy blacktop. Gulls sobbed, hovering seen and unseen in the mist; the rain-sodden Copacabana lay beneath their yellow avaricious eyes. Raucous weather-prophets. Marcelina shivered in her bag; gulls calling had always disturbed her; the voice of the sea calling her out over its horizon: new worlds, new challenges.

Downstairs the apartment felt chill and abandoned. The furniture was cold to the touch, damp and unfamiliar; the clothes in the closets belonged to a previous, fled tenant. The apartment had reverted to its natural smell, that distinctive pheromone of place that had struck Marcelina with almost physical force the moment the agent had opened the door, that she had worked so hard to banish with scented candles and oil burners and coffee and maconha but that crept back, under doors through air-conditioning vents every time she left it for more than a few days. Marcelina made coffee and felt the kitchen watching her. Carpet-treading in your own house.

Her cellular, charging on the worktop, blinked. Message. Received 2:23. The number was familiar but evoked no name or face.

Bip.

A man’s voice raged at her. Marcelina almost threw the phone from her. It spun on the bare, almost surgically clean worktop, voice gabbling. Marcelina picked up the phone. Raimundo Soares, furious, more furious than she had thought possible for the Last Real Carioca. She killed the message and called back straightaway.

He recognized her number. Seven hours had not mellowed him; he was furious beyond even a hello good morning how are you?

“Wait wait wait wait, I understand you’re angry with me, but what is it you’re actually angry about?”

“What do you mean? Don’t you play any more stupid games with me. Bloody women you’re all the same, tricks and games, oh yes.”

“Wait wait wait wait.” How many times has she said these words in just seven days? “Pretend I don’t know anything, and start at the very beginning.” She could never hear those words without recalling her mother’s medley of hits from The Sound of Music , Samba-ized. Christ on crutches; it was Feijoada Saturday: feijoada and organ, the happy Annunciation of the blessed Iracema. But it was marvelous indeed how the mind reached for the ridiculous, the incongruous in dark and panic.

“Oh no, I’m not to fall for that soft-soap; I know how you reality TV people work. That e-mail; it’s all a joke at my expense, isn’t it? There’s probbably a camera over there watching me right now; you’ve probably even got one in my toilet so you can watch me scratching myself.”

“Mr. Soares, what e-mail are you talking about?”

“Don’t you mister me, don’t you ever mister me. I’ve heard of these things; people hit the wrong button and the e-mail goes out to someone it’s not supposed to; well, I saw it and I know your game. You may have made a fool out of me, but you won’t make a fool out of the people of Rio, oh no.”

“What was this e-mail?”

“You know, maybe you can sound all innocent, maybe you don’t know, seeing as how it was an accident. You wouldn’t deliberately have sent me the proposal for your Moaçir Barbosa show, would you?”

The native smell of her kitchen assaulted Marcelina, cloying and dizzying. There was no help in words here. She had done it. She had lied, she had betrayed, she had joyfully schemed to send an old man to the pillory to build her career. Our Lady of Production Values had averted her eyes. But there was mystery still.

“I didn’t send that e-mail.”

“Look, little girl, I’m no silver surfer, but even I can recognize a return e-mail address. You just think you’re so fucking clever, and we’re all so old and slow and you can just laugh at us. Well, I still know a few people in this town, you know’ You haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long long chalk. So you can fuck yourself and all your fucking TV people as well; I wouldn’t present your show for a million reis.”

“Mr. Soares, Mr. Soares, it’s important, what time…” Dead line. “What time did I send that e-mail?”

You never were going to present that show , Marcelina raged silently at the dead cellular. She knew it was a mealy little vice, her need to have the last word when her enemy had no possibility of reply. Not if you were the last fucking carioca on the planet. But it was bad, worse than she had ever known it. Christ Christ, Christ of Rio, Christ of the Hunchback Mountain with your arms held out the sea, Christ in the fog; help me now. Marcelina glanced at the clock on the microwave, perpetually eight minutes fast. She had just time to get to the office and then out to her mother’s.

Robson didn’t do Saturdays, and his replacement edgy-but-inclusive public-facing homosexual with the nickname Lampiao was new on the desk and asked Marcelina for her ID. She didn’t bite him in two. She would have need of him later.

The drizzle had steepened into full rain; streaks turned the Glass Menagerie into a strange tech jungle. The Sent Items folder on her workstation confirmed: proposal for Barbosa: Trial of the Century sent to raicariocao@wonderfish.br at 23:32 August fifth. While her alt dot family was singularly failing to comfort her. Proper passwords and logins and everything. Marcelina called up the security page and tabbed the change password button. One by one blobs vanished as she deleted them. New password? Her fingers halted over the keys halfway through mestreginga. She knows you. Every thought every reaction every detail and diary entry of your life. She knows you play capoeira. She knows your shoe size dress size playlists how many bottles of beer are in your fridge what kind of batteries you use in the Rabbit. In the streaming gray Marcelina hugged herself, suddenly chilled. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re in a program within a program; a pilot for an ultimate reality TV show: Make Marcelina Mad. Even now the cameras are swiveling to the direction of some dark control room. They’re all in on it: Ceiso and Cibelle and Agnetta, the Black Plumed Bird, even Adriano. They were never going to make your show; he just agreed at Blue Sky Friday because it’s part of the script: the clever clever comedy of a program maker who doesn’t realize she’s starring in her own show. The Girl Who Haunted Herself. Lisandra. That cow. She’d do it. She’d do anything to make it to CE. She’s laughing at you right now up in the gallery with a couple of APs and Leandro the editor.

It has to be all just a show. Any other theory is madness.

Marcelina pulled a book at random off her shelf, opened at page 113, typed the 113th word into the pulsing box. Testament. Good word. One unlikely to be stumbled upon at random in Canal Quatro.

Saturday Boy Lampião was SMSing in a blur of thumbs behind his desk. “Could you do me a favor?”

His lips pursed in irritation at the intertuption to his messaging. “Well I don’t know, I mean what if I got into trouble or something?”

“I know a few people in production.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Tell me what you want, then.”

“Were you on last night?”

He shook his head.

“I need a look at the security footage.”

“What’s that?”

“From the cameras.” She pointed them out like a trolley-dolly indicating the emergency exits. “It all goes on to a hundred-gig hard drive. Back there.” He had been looking in mild panic under his desk. “It’s easy enough to download.”

’Tm not supposed to let anyone round this side of the desk.”

“It’s for a show.”

“There should be something in writing about this.”

“I’ll get it for you on Monday.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“It would be simpler…”

He was at the black LaCie drive.

“How much do you want?”

“A couple of hours. Say from ten thirty to twelve thirty.”

“I’ll burn a DVD.”

I’d rather download it onto my PDA , Marcelina was about to say. She bowed in acquiescence. Never underestimate the Brazilian gift for bureaucracy. She watched the rain and the cable cars vanishing into the cloud-cap of the Sugar Loaf. A helicopter buzzed over Dois Irmãos. Not even winter rain could damp down the embers of the recent unrest. A rich hot magma runs beneath our beautiful streets and avenues; we walk, we jog, we exercise our little dogs on its crust, preening and strutting like we are New York or Paris or London until the hidden order breaks through and the woman who cleans your house, cooks your food, cares for your child; the man who drives your taxi, delivers your flowers, fixes your computer is sudddenly your enemy and the fire runs down to the sea.

Then she thought, What if a helicopter hit a cable car? Now that’s a CNN moment.

“There you are. What’s the show?”

“I’m not supposed to say, but we’re all in it.”

The clouds clung low to the Dois Irmãos and the long ridge of Tijuca, turning Leblon into a bowl of towers, offered to the sea. Hardy boys in toucan-bright neoprene braved the gray-on-gray breakers. In the dash from cab to elevator lobby Marcelina was drenched and shivering. No swirling glissandos of the Queen of the Beija-Flor today. Moisture was bad for the electronics. The cab driver had bought flowers and a surprisingly good bottle of French wine. Most of Canal Quatro’s account drivers were better production assistants than the channel’s own wannabes. Bottle in one hand, flowers — with inscribed card — in the other, Marcelina rode the mirrored box, dripping onto the fake marble floor.

She pressed the doorbell. Behind the chime came a fermata, the opposite of an echo, a silence more sensed than heard of conversations abruptly ending. Canal Quatro had made Marcelina experienced in the subtleties of that silent click. Her mother opened.

“Oh, so you decided to come, then.” She pulled away as Marcelina went to kiss her.

They were lined up in neat rows on all the available seating space in her mother’s cramped living room: Gloria and Iracema on the sofa, babies between them, children at their feet caramelly with the sugared treats on the coffee table; husband one perched on the side of an armchair, husband two on a plastic seat brought in from the balcony and wedged between a floor lamp and the organ. A tall glass of vodka stood on a small side table by her mother’s chair. Bubbles rose through the ice cubes, a swizzle stick with a toucan on the end perched against the edge of the glass. A rich smell of the long-simmered meat and the beans filled the little apartment, the mild acridity of the greens, the fresh top note of the sliced orange. Feijoada had always been celebration to Marcelina. The windows were steamed up.

“What is this, a jury of my peers?” Marcelina joked, but the wine felt like a Ronald McDonald mask at a funeral and the flowers the death itself.

“You’ve got a nerve, I should say,” Gloria said. Marcelina heard her mother close the door behind her.

The feijoada was now stifling and sickening.

Iracema slid the card across the table. Twin babies in fuzzy-angel fur-suits ascended to heaven among hummingbirds and little fluffy clouds. Congratulations: it’s two! Marcelina opened it… I hope you miscarry and lose them, and if you don’t lose them I hope they have Down syndrome… Marcelina snapped the card shut. The room wheeled around her. Her family seemed at once removed to cossmological distances and so close she could taste the film on their teeth.

“You have to know I didn’t write this.”

“It’s your handwriting.” Gloria opened the prosecution.

“It looks like it but — ”

“Who else knew Iracema was expecting twins?” Gloria’s husband Paulo rose from his perch.

“Come on, kids, let’s see how the cooking’s getting on.”

“I did not write that, why would I write that?”

Gloria flipped the card over.

“Write it out again on the back.”

… smug with your perfect kids and perfect husband and you never even suspected that he sees other women. Why do you think he goes to the gym four nights a week…

Stroke for stroke. Loop for loop. Scrawl for scrawl.

“I didn’t write this!”

“Keep your voice down,” Marcelina’s mother hissed. “You’ve done enough already without the little ones overhearing.”

“Why would I want to send something like that?” It was the only question she could ask, but she knew even before she spoke the words it was a fatal one.

“Because you’re jealous. You’re jealous because we have things you don’t.” Gloria looked her cold and full, sister to sister, eye to eye. And if she had not done that, Marcelina might have been wise, might have apologized and turned around and walked away. But it was a challenge now, and Marcelina could not to be left without the last word.

“And what could you have that I could possibly be jealous of?”

“Oh, I think we all know that.”

“What, your lovely house and your lovely car and your lovely gym memmbership and lovely medical insurance and lovely lovely kindergarten fees? At least what I have, I earn.” Marcelina stop it. Marcelina shut up. But she never could. “No, no, I’m not the one has the jealousy issues here. I’m not the one who still can’t handle the fact that she wasn’t favorite. And that’s always been your problem. You’re the jealous one; I’m the one having a life.”

“Don’t you dare, dare try and turn this round on me and make it like I’m to blame. I didn’t send that card, and nothing can take away from that.”

“Well I didn’t either, but I’m not going to try to explain it to you because no one can explain anything to you, you’re always so right and sweet and dandy and everything’s just perfect.”

The hum of voices from the kitchen, bass and piccolo, had fallen silent.

You’re hearing right, kids. Your aunt’s a monster. Don’t be expecting any pressents until you finish university. I’ll pay for your therapy. Iracema was in tears. Husband João-Carlos had moved from his plastic chair to kneel beside het, caressing her wrist. Fragrant, festive feijoada now revolted her: smell was the great imprinter of memory and it was forever changed. Get out Marcelina, before you slash deeper than any healing. But she turned back from the door to spew, “Did any of you even stop to think that maybe something wasn’t right, that maybe there was more to this than just your blind assumption that that’s just Marcelina, isn’t it? Have any of you given even one moment’s thought that maybe something is very, very wrong? Fuck you, I don’t need you, any of you.”

She gave the door as good a slam as she could over an over-springy plastic doormat. The elevator doors closed on a two-dimensional strip of her mother flinging open the door, calling, “Marcelina! Marcelina!” Then she turned to a line, to silence.

The wind had come down from the hills and was carrying away the low, weeping clouds, blowing away the tops of the gray waves. Gulls hovered over the spray line, webs outspread, wings tilting a breath here, a feather there to hold them over the wave tops. Handsome boys in cute rubber suits lounged on the sand and waited for the sky to clear. On the black-and-white patterned sidewalk of Avenida Delfim Moreira, Marcelina realized she still had her saturated flowers clutched in her fist. She drew an orchid from the cellophane and launched it at the surfer boys. They laughed and waved. She speared flowers into Leblon’s rain-pocked sand until she had no more. Surf’s up. That noise was back in her head, the whistle of world’s end; tears wrung out of the hollows of her skull.

You said that you said that you said that. But it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. Then what was it? A reality television show? At her most cruel, most desperate for shock, Marcelina would never have done anything like that card. The family, you never touch the family. But didn’t you do that in Filthy Pigs? Friendships ended mothers and daughters sundered, families at war?

At the bridge over the canal that drained the lagoon into the ocean, where Leblon ended and Ipanema began, she chewed the plastic seal off the bottle of wine, pushed the cork in with her thumb, and swigged down hundred-real imported French Margaux. Cyclists and rollerbladers in wet spandex stared as they whirred past, wheels throwing up narrow wakes of rainwater. Stare at me, stare all you like. She had downed the entire bottle by Arpoador, sent the empty bottle arcing up into the air to smash among the power walkers. Marcelina peeled the saturated hair back from her face to scowl at the staring faces.

“So? So?”

The brief woo of sirens sent Marcelina down with a wail onto her ass. She sat gaping at the police cruiser as if it had fallen from an angel’s purse. A policewoman helped her to her feet. Rain spilled from the peak of her cap onto Marcelina’s upturned face.

“You’ve got your pants tucked into your boots,” Marcelina said.

“Come on, now. How much have you had?”

“Only wine officer, only wine.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, in public too. Come on, now.”

’’I’m a corda vermelha, you know,” Marcelina said. “I could make you look very very silly.” But the policewoman’s grip on Marcelina’s elbow was irrefutable. She steered her toward the car. Her partner, a broad-faced mulatinho, shook with laughter.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Marcelina said as the policewoman pressed her down into the seat. “Oh, I’ve gotten all your upholstery wet.” She tried to wipe away the drips with her sleeve. “Where are you taking me?”

“Home.”

Marcelina seized the policewoman’s shirt.

“No, don’t take me there, I can’t go there, she’s there.”

The policewoman quickly and firmly unhooked Marcelina’s fists.

“Well, you’re in no condition to be out on the street. Would you rather I took you in?”

“Heitor,” Marcelina said. “Take me to Heitor. Heitoooor!”

He thanked the officers patiently, who were genuinely awed to be in the presence a television celebrity and delighted at the prospect of profitable gossip. Marcelina sat on the topmost of the terrace steps, runoff from the morro that rose sheer behind Heitor’s apartment block cascading around her.

“This is going to be all over Quem by Monday,” Heitor said. There was the discreet exhibitionism of a woman in a sheer playsuit parading under the lenses across the lagoon; that same woman drunk and shrieking on his back steps was quite another thing. “Jesus. Are you going to come in? My car’s going to be here in five minutes and I’m going to have to change, this suit is ruined.”

“Well boo hoo for your suit,” Marcelina shouted to Heitor’s rain-soaked shoulders as he stepped through the sliding doors into his bedroom. “It’s my fucking life that’s over, that’s all.”

Heitor threw a towel out to her. She wrapped it round her head like Carmen Miranda but got to her feet, glitter pumps careful careful on the treacherous waterfall steps and stumbled into the bedroom. Heitor stood in his shorts and socks, knotting a knitted silk tie Marcelina had brought him back from New York. She stood dripping onto his carpet.

“Do you think it’s like axé, that power can go out and take shapes?”

Heitor pulled on his pants, checked the propriety of his creases.

“What are you talking about?”

Marcelina staggered out of her shoes as Heitor pulled his on with a tortoiseshell shoehorn. Her Capri-cut jeans followed; she fell back onto the bed as she tried to disengage her feet.

“Like some very strong feelings or stress or wanting something too much can go out of you and gather together and take on a life and body of its own,” she said. “Like the umbanda mestres were supposed to be able to tear off part of their souls and make it take the shape of a dog or a monkey.”

Marcelina put her arms up and slid off the bed out of her saturated strappy top. Her bra followed. Heitor studied her small, tight-nippled breasts in the full-length mirror. He shrugged on his jacket.

“That’s legend. Magic. Superstition. We live in a scientific, entropic universe.”

“But suppose suppose suppose. … ” Marcelina said in her tanga. The intercom buzzed. Taxi. Heitor kissed her, circled his thumbs over her nipples.

Marcelina pressed close, tried to slip the tongue. Heitor gently pressed her down to the bed.

“I’ll see you in there later. And do try and get some water down you.”

“Heitor!”

The rain streaking across the coffin-narrow concrete garden was now stained ochre with eroded soil. Marcelina sat up under the sheet, knees pulled to chin, watching the morro wash between the potted plants and down the steps, shivering at the horror. Sleep was impossible. She scuffed around on Heitor’s polished hardwood floor in her bare feet, looking for water. Marcelina slowly bent over and bared her ass to the telescopes across the lagoon. Wipe your lenses, boys and girls. She slapped her backside.

But she had still wished her own sister’s twin babies aborted in the womb.

Marcelina flicked on the plasma screen. Noise, chatter, brainpan jabber. Stop you thinking about yourself. And there was Heitor, the remote control camera moving in for a close-up as the title graphics rolled. The headlines tonight. Burning cars, police helicopters, corpses in Bermudas. The walls around the favelas another course of bricks taller. Lula rocked by fresh corruption allegations. Brazil, the nation of the future. Then Marcelina saw Heitor scan the next line on the autocue and his eyes widen. There was the tiniest of pauses. Heitor never did that. Heitor was the old-school public-service commitment to the Truth Well in a jungle of eighteen-to-thirty-four demoographics and noisy edginess. Heitor was professional down to the shine of his shoes. All her attention was focused on the screen.

“And Canal Quatro finds itself in the news with the allegations by journalist Raimundo Soares to be published in the Jornal de Copacabana tomorrow that it is to make a television program about the Maracanaço. He alleges that he received a confidential e-mail from a Canal Quatro producer that the entertainment program will track down the eighty-five-year-old Moaçir Barbosa, seen by many as being chiefly responsible for the Maracanaço, and publicly humiliate him in a mock trial reality show.”

VT insert of Raimundo Soares in surf shirt and shorts on rain-swept Flamengo Beach, his brotherhood nodding over their lines behind him. Cynicism. Lied to. Pillorying an old man. Then Marcelina could not hear anymore because the sound in her eyes in her head in her ears squeezed out into the world.

It was all ended. Our Lady of Production Values had abandoned her.

She pointed the remote and sent Heitor into the dark. Her heartbeat was the loudest sound in the room.

“Who are you?” Marcelina shouted. “Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?”

She fled into the bedroom, emptied her bag onto the bed. There, there, the translucent plastic clamshell. She slid the DVD into the side of Heitor’s plasma screen.

Her finger hesitated over the play button.

She had to know. She had to see.

Marcelina wound through Canal Quatro staff slipping out home, a nod and a silent word to Lampião. There went Leandro. Several fast-scans minutes of Lampião dully gaping at a flickering television. How little he moved. Then Marcelina saw the edge of the door revolve across the shot. A figure in a dark suit entered. Marcelina’s fingers stumbled over the buttons as she tried to find slo-mo. Back. Back. The drive whined. Again the figure entered. A woman. A woman jogging forward frame by frame in a good suit — dark gray. A woman, short, with a lot of naturally curled bouncing blonde hair. A loira woman. Lampião looked up from his TV and smiled.

Frame by frame, the woman turned to check the location of the camera. Marcelina hit pause. The only snow that Rio knew blew across the top of the screen.

Her face. She was looking into her own face.

JANUARY 28-29, 2033

After midnight the axé flows strongest through the Igreja of the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte. Taxis and minibuses bring supplicants from all across the northern suburbs: when the saints are tired the walls between the worlds are weak, and the most powerful workings may be dared. Edson tosses a coin to St. Martin, the Christian aspect of Exu, Lord of the Crossroads, Trickster and Rent-boy of the orixás, patron of all malandros.

The Sisters of the Good Death have orbited Edson’s life like fairy godmothers. His grandmother from the northeast had given the Sisterhood her two daughters, Hortense and Marizete, in exchange for the success of her sons in hard, clutching Sampa. But Dona Hortense had loved pirate radio and dancing and boys with fast cars and the madre had released her from her vows (truly, no God regards the vow of a fourteen-year-old as binding). Tia Marizete found peace and purpose in the discipline of a post-Catholic nun and remained and for twenty-five years had brought the Dignified Burial and unofficial social services to the bairros and favelas of north São Paulo. Unlike their mother church in Bahia, the Paulistana daughters did not practice seclusion: their Baiana crinolines and turbans were familiar and welcome sights on the streets as they gave healings, told fortunes, and collected reis in their baskets. Twice a year, at the Lady Days, Tia Marizete would call on her sister and nephews and the entire bairro would land on Dona Hortense’s verandah with a variety of small but niggling maladies.

“Does your mother know where you are?” Tia Marizete asks, clearing the guest room of gay abiás (“we’ve become icons again, Mother help us”). She sets wards of palm and holy cake on the windowsills and door lintels.

“She knows. She’s not to come looking for me. Don’t let her. I need money. And I may have to stay a while.”

“You are welcome as long as you need. But I have a service to conduct. And Edson, remember, this is God’s house.” Then the drums start so loud he can feel them in his bowels, but they are a comfort; he feels himself slipping down into their rhythm. By the time the tetchy initiate slips a tray of beans and rice and two Cokes through the door he’s nodding, exhausted.

The Sisters have always saved him. When he was twelve he had been given a fluky antibiotic that kicked off a massive allergic reaction that left mouth, tongue, lips covered in white-lipped ulcers and drove him fever-mad, hallucinating that a ball at once chokingly small and jaw-wrenchingly huge was being forced endlessly into his mouth. The doctor had rolled his eyes and shaken his head. Biology would take its course. His brothers had carried him on the back of a HiLux to the Sisters, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets. Tia Marizete had laid him in one of the acolytes’ rooms, bathed him with scented and herbal waters, anointed him with sweet oils, scattered prayers and consecrated farofa over him. Three days he had raged along the borderlands between life and death. The ulcers advanced down his throat. If they reached his tonsils, he would die. They halted at the base of his uvula. Axé. Through it all, the memory the drums and the clapping hands, the stamp and belljingle of the Sisters as they whirled in their ecstasy dances; the cheers and tears and praises to Our Lady, Our Wonderful Lady. Down, into the drums.

Crying. Soft and faltering, at the very end of tears, more gasp than sob. Edson slips from the thin foam mattress. The sound comes from the camarinha, the innermost, holiest sanctuary, the heart of axé. Fia sits in the middle of the floor, legs curled, fingers twined. Around her the statues of the saints on their poles lean against the walls, each draped in his or her sacramental color.

“Hey. It’s only me. You know, we shouldn’t really be in here. It’s for the Sisters and the high initiates only.”

It takes a long time for Fia’s gasps to form words. Edson’s cold and shivering after his sleep; the energy of the night has left him. He could hold Fia; his comfort, her warmth. But it’s not her.

“Did you ever have a dream where you’re at home and you know everyone and everything, but they don’t know you, they’ve never known you, and no matter how much you try and tell them, they never will know you?”

“Everyone has that dream.”

“But you know me, and I’ve never seen you before in my life. You say you are Edson Jesus…”

“Oliveira de Freitas.”

“I think I need to know this now. Who was I?”

So among the shrouded saints Edson tells her about her father with his New Age columns and stable of accountancy bots and her mother with her urban farm and her brother away across the big planet on his gap-year chasing surf and surf-bunnies …

“Sorry, what?”

“Yoshi, your brother. You have a brother, where you come from?”

“Of course I do, but he’s in his first year at the São Paulo Seminary.”

Edson blinks in astonishment.

Fia asks, “Edson, what was I like?”

“You. Not you. She liked bags, clothes, girlie things. Shoes. The last day I saw her, she went to a shop to get these shoes printed.”

He sees the soles, the logos bobbing before him as the crash team slides the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

“Shoes, printed?”

Edson explains the technology as he understands it. When Fia concentrates, she tilts her head to one side. Edson never saw the real Fia do that. It makes this Fia look even less true, like a dead doll.

“She never got on the back of my bike. She always took taxis. She hated getting dirty, even when we were up in Todos os Santos she was immaculate, always immaculate. She had quite a lot of girlfriends.” How little I know , Edson realizes. A few details, a scoop of observations. “She was very direct. I don’t think she was comfortable being too near to things. All those friends, but she was never really close to them. She liked being an outsider. She liked being the rebel, the quantumeira.”

’’I’m nowhere near as wild and romantic as that,” Fia says. “Just a plain quantum-computing postgrad specializing in multiversal economic moddeling. My world; it’s less paranoid. We don’t watch each other all the time. But it’s more… broken. I’m broken, everyone’s broken. We leave bits of ourselves all over the place: memories, diaries, names, experiences, knowledge, friends, personalities even, I suppose. I loaded everything I could, but there are still important parts of me back there: pictures, childhood memories, school friends. And the world is broken. It’s not like this. This is… like heaven.”

Edson tries to imagine the point at which Fia’s world branched off from his. But that is a trap, Mr. Peach had taught. There is no heart reality from which everything else diverges. Every part of the multiverse exists, has existed, will exist, independently of every other. Edson shivers. How can you live with that sort of knowledge? But Fia notices him shiver.

“Here, you’re freezing.” She peels off her ripped hoodie. Beneath she wears a tight sleeveless T, dragged up to her breasts by the cling of the hoodie. Edson stares. Beneath the crop top is a tattoo like none he has ever seen before. Wheels, cogs, meshing; arcs, spirals, paisleys, fractal sprays, and mathematical blossoms. A silvery machine of slate-gray ink covers her torso from breastbone to the waistband of her leggings. Edson’s hand stays Fia’s as she moves to pull her top down.

“Oh my God, what is that?”

Fia stands up, pulls up her top again, and coyly wiggles her leggings down to the sweet tiny pink bow on the hip-band of her panties where the tattoo coils in to nestle like a snake against her pubis. Not taking her eyes off Edson, she hooks her red hair back behind her left ear. There is a cursive of gray ink over the top of ear and along her hairline, like one of Zezão’s sinuous abstract pichaçãos that now have preservation orders smacked all over them.

“You wear your computers,” Fia says as she restores her clothing. “We’re more… intimate… with ours.”

Edson lifts a finger, whirls into a crouch.

“I hear something.” He slides Mr. Peach’s gun out of the waistband of his Jams and pushes it across the foot-polished wooden floor of the camarinha to Fia. She knows what to do with it. Edson moves cat-careful between the shrouded saints. The layout of the terreiro is as inviolable as its obrigacões. Beyond the sacred camarinha is the great public room of the barracão, then the hall with the ilê where the saints stand when they are awake. He checks the front door. The manioc-paste seals are intact, the coffins of the Good Dead laid out on the floor, dusted with white farofa. Nothing to be scared of there. Probably one of the abiás getting up for a piss. The quarters run around the back of the terreiro and open onto the barracão and the backyard where the chickens and Vietnamese pot-belly pigs are kept and the holy herbs are grown in fake-terracotta planters. The Sisters maintain private room upstairs. Edson opens the door from the corridor to the big kitchen, where the food for the gods, hungry as babies, is prepared.

A foot smashes into his breastbone, sends him sprawling, windless, across the barracão, scattering offerings. He sees a figure wheel out of the darkness in a capoeira meia lua de compasso into a poised ginga. A white woman, in sports top, Adidas baggies, and bare feet. She wears odd metal bracers on her forearms. Edson fights for words breath sanity power.

A shot. From the holy camarinha.

“Shit. He’s already here,” the woman hisses and flicks her right hand into a fist. A blade flashes from the bracer over her balled knuckles. Blue light flickers around its Planck-keen edges. She whirls through the door to the barracão in a one-handed dobrado cartwheel. Gasping for breath, Edson limps after her.

The camarinha is a martyrdom of slashed saints. Fia holds off a man armed with a Q-blade using a statue of Senhor de Bonfim on his pole, golddtassled shroud flapping. Faint hope in the saint: the Q-blade cuts through it like smoke. Mr. Peach’s beautiful silver gun is already in two pieces, cut through the firing chamber. The assassin’s blur of blue light drives Fia back to the wall. By tradition this sacred room has only one door. The killer knows this tradition. The woman wheels into the camarinha and drops into the neggativa fighting crouch. The assassin spins to face her. He is a young man, pale skinned, with floppy hair and a goatee. Blades blur past each other; the capoeira woman’s foot wheels up to deliver a stun-blow to the side of the Q-blade man’s head. But the killer ducks under it and rolls across the camarinha to put space between him and the woman. Fia hunts for a gap, feinting with her mutilated orixá, but the assassin is between her and the door. Frantic with fear, Edson looks for an opportunity. Voices, behind him. The terreiro is awake. Abiás in their underwear, shorts, jog pants, Sisters in their nighttgowns. Their hands are raised in horror at the violation of the sanctuary.

“Get everyone out of here!” Edson shouts. The boys understand and herd the Sisters back to the kitchen and the safety of the garden, but Tia Marizete is paralyzed at the vision of her saints, her murdered saints, their desecration. Arms out, she rushes to comfort them. Edson grabs her by the waist, drags her away. The assassin’s attention flickers to him. The capoeirista uses the moment to spin up into a great flying leap, blade-arm drawn back. With a roar, the assassin leaps to meet her. They clash, they pass in a flash of ionizaation in the middle of the air above the heart of the camarinha. Then they are both crouched like cats, glaring, panting. Their shattered blades spin on the wooden floor, flat sides, safe sides down.

“Yeah,” says the woman. “But I’ve got another one. Have you?” She snaps her left hand into a fist, and a fresh Q-blade flicks our from the magnetic sheathing on her wrist-guard. The killer scores the possibilities in an eyeflash. He dives flat, arm ourstretched, and with the tips of his fingers catches the flat side of the Q-blade and flicks it at the capoeirista. At any speed the quantum-sharp cutting edge is a sure kill. Then Edson’s vision goes into marrtial arts-movie slow motion. The woman bends back from the hips, trying to roll away from the blade cutting toward her throat through a wake of burned blue air. Fia brings the Senhor do Bonfim sweeping up under the flying blade. An orixá-blessed hit. She catches the harmless flat of the shard. The fragment spins up into the air, but the flick is too feeble to carry it to safety. The Q-blade shard loops down and cuts sweetly, cleanly through the man’s shoulder and upper right thigh before vanishing into the floor of the camarinha. He stares a moment at his arm, his severed leg, and then explodes in blood.

The capoeirista seizes Fia while she is still frozen and drags her our into the barracão.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” the woman swears. “That went wrong. I needed to know if he was Sesmaria or Order.” She’s in one place long enough now for Edson to see her properly. She’s short, thin as a cat, loira skin and bubbleblonde hair. “They know where you are. Get out of here.” The little Asian pigs are spooked, turning in their tiny pens, snorting in alarm. Sirens, Sisters, frantic initiates, and in a moment Fia is going to lose it. The entire bairro is awake. Alarm fireworks explode all across the sky. Police and drug lords alike have been blessed by the hands of the Sisters of the Good Death and will come to their aid.

Edson turns to call to the woman to help him with Fia, but she is gone.

Vanished as she appeared. Tia Marizete is there, her arm now around Fia’s shoulder. She stares at Fia’s torso tattoo.

“I’m sorry,” Edson whispers to his aunt. The gay boys are inconsolable, some weeping, most looking petty, vengeful. He cannot begin to imagine the desecration he has worked on the camarinha.

“Edson, what have gotten yourself into? These Take Out the Trash people, we have no argument with them, they have no argument with us. Why have they come here, why have they come for you?”

“It’s not Take Out the Trash ,” Edson says. “It’s…” What indeed, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas? Quantum blades and quantum computers. Priests and orders. A gazillion universes next to each other. Capoeiristas and killers. And this Fia, this refugee with bad clothes and a computer tattooed on her belly. “I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.”

But it won’t be the Yam that takes him to safety. It lies bisected headdlight to exhaust in a pool of aka and engine fluids. The insane energy, the stubborn refusal to believe what is happening to him that has kept Edson running for what feels like lifetimes gushes out of him. He feels old and scared and more tired than any human can be and there is still farther to run. He stares dumbly at the two fillets of his lovely, lovely motorbike.

“Come on, son,” commands Tia Marizete, taking his hand now and drawing him after her with divine strength. “There’s a ladeiro up here.” Past the hysterical pigs, above the herb terraces, is a gate in a wall that leads to a steep, narrow staircase lutching between houses into a greater dank dark that smells of wet green growing. Edson stumbles after Tia Marizete, feet slipping on the slippery concrete steps. He glances back at Fia. Behind her upturned, dazed pale face, beyond the roof tiles of the Igreja, the street pulses blue and red from police beacons. Then they are out into cool and mold, above the build-line, on the hilltop in the forest. The old austral forests of north São Paulo have always been a refuge and highway for the hunted; indios to runaway slaves to drug runners. Now quantumeiros.

From her nightdress Tia Marizete finds a fist of reis — such is the axé of aunts and Sisterhood attorney generals — and presses them into Edson’s hand. There’s another object in there.

“Take care, be clever, be safe. This man will protect you.”

More by touch than sight Edson identifies the object in his hand, a little cheap bronze statue cast from recycled wire, a malandro in a suit and porkpie hat: Exu, Lord of the Crossings.

The last place the light fills is the hollow where the water drops over the ledge into the shallow pool. The cold cold water strikes away the daze and dreams of the night. Edson gasps, paralyzed by the chill. An edge of light shines between the skinny boles of the trees, growing brighter with every moment, its dazzle burning away the silhouettes of the trunks until they disssolve into sun. Edson climbs up into the light. Fia sits as he left her, knees pulled to chest for warmth. Bronze sky, brass city. The sun pours into the bowl of São Paulo, touching first the flat roofs and sat-dishes of the favelas just beneath their feet where the people have been up for hours, on their long journeys to work in the endless city. It flows from the hilltops down the roads like spilled honey, catching on the mirrors and the chrome, turning the rodovias that curl along the hillsides to arcs of gold. Now it lights the smoke spires: the plumes from the industry and powerplant stacks, the more diffuse auras from the scattered bairros; then caught the tops of the high towers rising above of the dawn smog, towers marching farther and farther than Edson can imagine, city without end and expanding every moment as the swift-climbing sun draws lesser towers up out of the shadow. He watches an aircraft catch the light and kindle like a star, like some fantastic starship, as it banks on approach. A big plane, from another country, perhaps even another continent. It has flown farther and yet never as far as this woman beside me, Edson thinks.

“We lost the sun,” Fia says, face filled with light. “We gave it away, we killed it. It’s gray all the time; we had to fix the sky to beat the warming. Constant clouds, constant overcast. It’s gray all the time. It’s a gray world. I think everyone should be made to come up here and watch it so no one can take it for granted.” She gives a small, choked laugh. “I’m sitting here looking at the light, but I’m thinking, Sunburn Fia, sunburn. I used to be in this university bike club, and there was this crazy thing we used to do every year: the nude bike run. Everyone would cycle this loop from liberdade through the Praça de Sé and back wearing nothing but body paint. We used to paint each other in the wildest designs. But I’d never have burned.” She bows her head to her bent knees. “I’ve just thought; they’ll be wondering what happened to me. I just disappeared. Gone. Walked away and never came back. Oh yeah, that Fia Kishida, I wonder what happened to her? I couldn’t even say good-bye to any of them. That’s a cruel thing for me to do. That’s one of the cruelest things anyone can do, walk away and never look back. But I could go to their houses, knock on their doors — I know where they live — and they wouldn’t know me.”

Edson says, “The way you’re talking, it’s like you’ll never see them again.”

Fia looks up into the holy sun.

“The crossing only works one way, there to here.”

Edson thinks, There is a smart brilliant creative Edson answer to this problem. But there is nothing but morning out there. Everyone hits that wall at the end of his competence. Impresarios cannot solve problems in quantum computing. But a good impresario, like any man of business, knows someone who can.

“Come on.” He offers a hand. “Let’s go. We’re going to see someone.” Five hillsides over the sound of voices drives Edson down into the undergrowth, creeping forward under cover. From behind a fallen log he and Fia watch a gang of eight favela boys camp around an old dam from the coffee age. Empty Antarctica cans and roach ends are scattered around a stone-ringed fire burned down to white ash. Three of the teenagers splash ass-naked in the pool; the others loll around on the bubble-mats, stripped down to their Jams, talking futebol and fucking. They’re good-looking, beautiful-bodied, laughing boys; sex gods caught at play. Like gods, they are creatures of pure caprice.

“They’re cute,” Fia whisper. “Why are we hiding?”

“Look.” One of the men rolls onto his side. No one could miss the skeleton gun butt in his waistband. “Malandros come up here all the time to lie low from the police. The cops have no chance of catching them; they all learn jungle skills on national service.”

“Even you?”

“A businessman can’t afford to give two years to the army. I worked myself a medical discharge after two months. But they would rob us, and they would have no reason not to kill us too. We’re going, but move very slowly and don’t make any noise.”

They make no noise; they move slowly; the boys’ voices recede into the forest buzz. The sun climbs high, pouring heat and dazzle through the leaf canopy. Minutes’ walk on either side of this ridge trail are rodovias, lanchonetes, coffee, and gossip; the morning news is a touch away on the I-shades, but Edson feels like an old, bold Paulista bandeirante, pushing into strange new worlds.

“If I am going to help you, there’s stuff I need to know,” Edson says. “Like priests, and the Order, and that guy with the Q-blade, and who was that capoeirista?”

“How do I say this without it sounding like the most insane thing you’ve ever heard? There’s an organization — more a society really — that controls quantum communication between universes.”

“Like a police, government?”

“No, it’s much bigger than that. It covers many universes. Governments can’t touch it. It works on two levels. There’s the local level — each universe has its agents — they’re known as Sesmarias. Sesmarias tend to run in famiilies: the same people occupy the same roles in other universes.”

“How can it run in families?”

“I told you it would sound crazy. Some of them are very old and respectable families. But the Sesmarias are just part of a bigger thing, and that’s the Order. ”

“I’ve head that word twice in one day. You, then that capoeirista woman. So the man who attacked us at the Igreja, he was from the Order, right?”

“No, he would have been just a Sesmaria. They aren’t terribly good, really. Sesmarias are allowed to contact each other but not cross. I’d hoped the Sesmaria back where I come from hadn’t been able to track where I was going. Wrong there. But the Order can go wherever it wants across the mulltiverse. They have agents: admonitories. When they send one through, they have to tell everyone from the president of the United States to the pope.”

Edson presses his hands to either side of his skull, as if he might squeeze madness our or reality in. “So capoeira woman, who is she?”

“I’ve never seen or heard of her before in my life. But I do know one thing.”

“What?”

“I think she’s on our side.”

We could do with that , Edson thinks, but then a sound, a rushing sound, makes him look up, the dread back his heart. But it is not police drones moving carefully between the branches. Edson smiles and grins: high above the treetops wind turbines are turning.

“Stay as long as you need.”

“You don’t understand … ”

“I do understand. Stay as long as you need.”

The moment Mr. Peach saw Edson on his security camera, and the girl behind him, he knew nothing would ever be simple again. Beneath the cherubic ceiling of the baroque living room, Sextinho and the girl are sprawled unconscious on the Chesterfield, innocently draped around each other like sibling cats. Sextinho — no, he can’t call him that now. The young woman on his sofa is a refugee from another part of the polyverse. Swallow that intellectual wad and everything else follows. Of course they are caught between the ritual assassins of a transdimensional conspiracy and mysterious saviors. Of course refuge must be offered, though it marks him irrevocably as a player.

Something has fallen from Edson’s fist. Mr. Peach lifts it. An ugly, massmanufactured icon of Exu. Crossings, gateways. He smiles as he balances it on the arm of the sofa. Watch him well, small lord. The girl sleeps on her back, arms flung back, crop top ridden up. Mr. Peach bends close to study the tattoo. Liquid protein polymer circuitry. Infinitely malleable and morphable. There must be self-organizing nanostructures. Quasi-life. Extraordinary technology. Direct neural interface; no need for the clumsy, plasticy tech of I-shades and smart-fabrics. What was the sum of the histories of her part of the polyverse that gave rise to so similar a society, so radically different a technology? But they’re all out there. There is a universe for every possible quantum state in the big bang; some as similar as this girl’s, some so different that life is physically impossible.

Edson is awake, one eye open, watching.

“Hey.”

“Hey. I’ve made you breakfast.”

OCTOBER 1-2, 1732

“Such fine design and so ingenious; yes yes, I can immediately see applications for this device in my own work.” Father Diego Gonçalves turned the crank on the Governing Engine and watched the click and flop of the card chain through the mill and the rise and fall of the harnesses. “Drudgery abollished; mere mechanical labor transformed. Men liberated from the wheel.”

“Or a subtler slavery.” Through the delicately worked wooden grille Luis Quinn looked out at the river. Father Gonçalves’s private apartment was at the rear of the basilica-ship, high to catch what few cooling breaths the river granted. None this day — only a heat of oppression and distant growls of thunder. Quinn pressed his head to the screen. “Someone must put his back to that wheel, someone must press the holes in the cards, and someone there must be who writes the sequence of those holes.” Quinn watched a small boy squatting in the stern steering his leaf-light craft in and out of the larger canoes in Father Diego Gonçalves’s entourage. The boy’s younger sister, a tiny round-faced thing with her hand in her mouth, sat dumpily in the waist. For three days Quinn had watched the boy paddle from the black of the Rio Negro into the white of the Rio Branco, feeding the infant manioc cakes that he carefully unwrapped from parcels of broad forest leaves. Again, the soft rattle of Falcon’s infernal machine.

“Oh, that is simplicity itself, Father Quinn: an industrial engine would be harnessed to a water sluice, or even a windmill. And the very first engine you build is the one that copies the pattern of holes for all its successors. But your third point raises an intriguing philosophical question: is it possible to construct an engine that writes the sequence for any other, and therefore loggically itself!”

Thunder boomed, closer now, as if summoned by the clack of the Governing Engine. A universe ruled by number, running like punched cards through the loom of God. Luis Quinn had thought to destroy it privately, cast it into the huge waters: he had delivered it into the hands of his enemy.

Nossa Senhora da Várzea, Out Lady of the Floodplain: that was the name of the green saint on the banner and of this construct of which she was patron, a saint alien to Luis Quinn’s hagiography. It had not been until he saw the short, thin figure in black descend the basilica steps that Luis Quinn realized that with every oar-sweep and paddle-stroke upstream he had been mentally drawing a picture of Father Diego Gonçalves, one sketched, like Dr. Falcon’s intelligence maps, from the crude charcoal of supposition. Now as they shared the fraternal kiss of Christ, he had found those lines erased completely, beyond even this phenomenal recall, save that the Diego Gonçalves he had envisioned bore no resemblance to this bounding, energetic, almost boyish man. This is the brother I must return to the discipline of the Order , Luis Quinn had thought. Open your eyes, your ears, all your senses as you did in Salvador; see what is to be seen.

“You know what I am?”

Father Diego Gonçalves had smiled. “You are the admonitory of provinncial de Magalhães of the Colégio of Salvador in Bahia.”

So it was to be a duel, then.

“Would that news traveled as swiftly downriver as it travels up. Kindly have your men stop that immediately.”

Indio sailors, naked but for geometrical patterns of black genipapo juice on their faces, torsos, and thighs, with feather bands plaited around upper arms and calves, were unloading Quinn’s bales and sacks from the pirogue. Zemba watched suspiciously, paddle gripped two-handed, an attitude of defense.

“Forgive me, I presumed you would accept my hospitality, Brother.”

Father Diego’s Portuguese was flawless, but Quinn heard old Vascongadas in the long vowels.

“If you are aware of my task, then you must surely be aware that I cannot compromise myself. I shall sleep in the pirogue with my people.”

“As you wish.” Father Diego gave orders. Quinn identified a handful of Tupi loan words. “But may we at least share the Sacrament?”

“I should at the least be interested to see if the interior of your… misssion… matches its exterior.”

“You will find Nossa Senhora da Várzea a complete testimony to the glory of God in every aspect.” Gonçalves hesitated an instant on the steps. “Father Quinn, I trust it would not offend you if I said that word has also preeceded you that you enjoy a repuration with the sword.”

“I trained under Jésus y Portugal of Leon.” Quinn was in no humor for false humility.

“Montoya of Toledo was my master,” Father Diego said with the smallest smile, the shallowest dip of the head. “Now that would be fine exercise.”

Passing beneath the watchword of his order into the basilica, Luis Quinn was at once brought up by profound darkness. Shafts fell from the high clerestory, broken into leaf-dapple by the intricate grille-work, revealing glimpses of extravagant painted bas-reliefs. An altar light glowed in the indeeterminate distance; ruddy Mars to the scattered constellations of the votives. This was the dimension of a more intimate organ than the fickle eye. Luis Quinn breathed deep and extended his sense of smell. Sun-warmed wood, the rancid reek of smoking palm oil, incenses familiar and alien; green scents, herbs and foliages. Quinn starred, caught by a sudden overpowering scent of verdure: green rot and dark growing. Now his sense of space and geometry came into focus; he felt great masses of heavy wood above him, decorated buttresses and bosses, a web of vaulting like the tendrils of the strangling fig, galleries and lofts. Figures looked down upon him. Last of all his eyes followed his other senses into comprehension. The exuberance the craftsmen had dissplayed on the basilica’s exterior had within been let run into religious ecstasy. The nave was a vast depiction of the Last judgment. Christ the judge formed the entire rood screen; a starveling, crucified Messiah, his bones the ribs of the screen, his head thrown back in an agony of thorns each the length of Quinn’s arm. His outflung arms judged the quick and the dead, his fingertips breaking into coils and twines of flowering vines that ran the length of the side panels. On his right, the rejoicing redeemed, innocent and naked Indios. Hands pressed together in thanksgiving, they sporred and rolled in the petals that blossomed from Christ’s fingers. On the left hand of Jesus, the damned writhed within coils of thorned liana, faces upturned, begging impossible surcease. Demons herded the lost along the vines: Quinn recognized forest monsters; the deceiving curupira; the boar-riding Tupi lord of the hunt; a onelegged black homunculus in a red Phrygian cap who seemed to be smoking a pipe. Father Gonçalves waited at Quinn’s side, awaiting response. When none came, he said mildly, “What does Salvador believe of me?”

“That you have transgressed the bounds of your vows and faith and brought the Society into perilous disrepute.”

“You are not the first to have come here bearing that charge.”

“I know that, but I believe I am the first with the authority to intervene.” Gonçalvesbowed his head meekly.

“I regret that Salvador considers intervention necessary.”

“My predecessors, none of them returned; what befell them?”

“I would ask you to believe me when I tell you that they departed ftom me hale in will and wind and convinced of the value of my mission. We are far from Salvador here; there are many perils to body and soul. Fierce forest tigers, terrible snakes, bats that feed on man’s blood, toothed fish that can strip the flesh from his bones in instants, let alone any number of diseases and sicknesses.” Father Gonçalves gestured for Quinn to precede him to the choir. The screen gate was in the shape of the heart of Christ; Gonçalves pushed it open and bade Quinn enter.

The altar was the conventional wooden table, worked in the fever-dream fashion of Gonçalves’s craftmasters to resemble twined branches, the crucifix its only adornment, an indio Christ, exquisitely worked, sufferings incompreehensible to the Old World borne on his face and scourged, pierced body. But the crucifix had not taken Father Quinn’s breath, powerful and alien though it was; it was so monumentally overshadowed by the altarpiece behind it that it seemed an apostrophe. The east end of the church, where lights and ladychapel would have been in a basilica of stone and glass, was fashioned into one towering reredos. A woman, the green woman, the Saint of the Flood, wreathed in life and glory. Nude she was, Eve-innocent, but never naked. The saint was clothed in the forest: jewel-bright parrots and toucans, some decorated with real plumage, were her diadem; from her full breasts and milkproud nipples burst flowers, fruit, and tobacco; while from her navel, the divine omphalos, sprouted vines and lianas that clothed her torso and thighs. The beasts of the várzea dropped from her womb to crouch in adoration at the one foot that touched the ground and struck roots across the floor into the rear of the altar: capybara, paca, peccary, and tapir, the green sloth and the crouching jaguar. Her other leg was bent, sole pressed to thigh, a dancer’s pose; an anaconda circled it, its head pressed to her pubis. Her right hand held the manioc bush, her left the recurved hunting bow of the flood forest; and fish attended her, a star-swarm like the milky band of the galaxy reflected in black water, swimming through the woven tracery of tree boles and vines against which Nossa Senhora danced. But true stars also attended her, the Lady twinkled with glowing points of soft radiance: glowworms pinned to the altarpiece with thorns. Again Luis Quinn caught the noble rot of vegetation; as his eyes grew accustomed to the deeper gloom around the altar and the monstrous scale of the work revealed itself to him, he saw that where rays of light struck down through the tracery of the clerestory, precious orchids and bromeliads had been planted in niches in the screen of trees: a living forest. Our Lady of the Floods was beautiful and terrible, commanding awe and reverence. Luis Quinn could feel her forcing him to his knees and by that same token knew that to genuflect before her would be true blasphemy.

“I cannot receive Mass from you, Father Gonçalves.”

Again, the coy dip of the head that Quinn understood now concealed fury.

“Does not your soul crave the solace of the Sacrament?”

“It surely does, and yet I cannot.”

“Is it because of the Lady, or because of the hand that gives it?”

“Father Gonçalves, did you attack and raze a Carmelite mission and take its people into slavery’”

“Yes.” Quinn had expected no worming denial from Father Diego, yet the flatness of the acknowledgment shocked Quinn as if a pistol had suddenly been discharged.

“You did this contrary to the act of 1570 prohibiting enslavement of the indigenous peoples and the rule and example of our Order?”

“Come, Father, each to his role; you the admonitory, I the examiner. You are aware what that means?”

“You are empowered to judge and declare Just War against those who scorn the salvation of Christ’s Church. I saw the house of God burned to the waterline, our brothers and sisters in Christ put to the sword. I spoke with a postulant, a survivor, dreadfully burned. Before she died she told me she had seen angels walking on the treetops, the angels that adorn the masts of this self-consecrated basilica.”

Gonçalves shook his head sorrowfully, as at a woodenly obtuse schoolboy. “You speak of enslavement; I see liberation. When you have seen what I have worked for Christ in this place, then presume to judge me.”

Quinn strode from the choir. Day was a plane of blinding white beyond the door.

“I shall call upon you this evening to begin the examination of your soul.”

Bur Father Gonçalves’s words, thrown after him, hung in Luis Quinn’s memory.

“They were animals, Father. They had no souls, and I gave them mine.” A flicker of lightning momentarily lit the receiving room. By its brief illumination Quinn saw Father Gonçalves’s face as he took apart the Governing Engine; the delight and energy, the pride and intelligence. It had not been the soul of Diego Gonçalves that had been examined in this hot, high airless room; it was his own, and it had been found light. I am of so little connsequence that you prefer to study a machine. Now came the thunder. The cloud line was almost upon them; Luis Quinn felt warm wind buffet his face. Hands ran to the rigging, reefing sails. A tap at the door; a lay brother in a white shift.

“Fathers, we have raised the City of God.”

Gonçalves looked up from his study, face bright and beaming.

“Now this you must see, Father Quinn. I said you could not presume to judge me until you had seen my work; there is no better introduction.”

As admonitory and pai climbed by ladders to the balcony above the portico, the basilica was simultaneously lit by lightning and beaten by thunder, a rolling constant roar that defeated very word or thought. Luis Quinn emerged into deluge; the threatened storm had broken. Such was the weight of the rain Quinn could hardly see the shore through wet gray, but it was evident that Nossa Senhora cia Várzea was preparing for landfall. The greater body of the canoe fleet had fallen back, and now only two remained, big dugouts, thirty men apiece, each hauling a thigh-thick rope from its bowser beneath the narthex. Combing otter-wet hair out of his eyes, Quinn could now discern piers running far into the river; mooring posts, each the entire trunk of some forest titan sunk hip-deep in mud rapidly reverting to its proper elemental state. A cross, three times the height of a man, stood at the highest point of the bank.

The double doors opened, men and women in feather and genipapo bearing drums, rattles, maracas, reed instruments, and clay ocarinas. They stood impassive on the steps, the teeming rain running from their bodies. Father Gonçalves raised a hand. Bells pealed from the tower, an insane thunder audible even over the punishing rain. In the same instant, the assembly burst into song. Lightning backlit the monstrous cross; when his eyes had recovered their acuity, Quinn saw two streams of people pouring over the top of the bank, slipping and sliding on the mud and rain-wash, summoned by the beating bells. Again Gonçalves lifted his hand. Nossa Sennhora da Várzea shook from narthex to sanctuary as she shipped oars. Now the shore folk stood waist deep in the water, fighting to seize hold of the mooring lines. More joined every moment, men and women, children alike, jamming together on the jetties. The ropes were handed up to them; the men pulled themselves out of the blood-warm water to join the effort. Hand over hand, arm by arm, Nossa Senhora da Várzea was hauled in to dock.

“Come come,” Father Diego commanded, darting lightly down the perrilous rain-slick companionway. Quinn could refuse neither his childlike delight nor his galvanic authority. Gonçalvesraised a hand in blessing. The jetties, the piers and canoes, the haulers in the water and all across the hilllside, went down on their knees in the hammering rain and crossed themmselves. Then Gonçalvesthrew up his arms, and choir, tolling bells, thunder, and rain were drowned out by the roar of the assembled people. The choir fell in behind him, a crucifix on a pole at their head, a dripping, feather-work banner of Our Lady of the Várzea at the rear. Quinn hung on Gonçalves’s shoulder as they slogged across the slopping red mud, canoes running up onto the bank on every side. Bodies were still pouring over the hill; the steep bank was solid with people.

“Citizens of heaven, subjects of Christ the King,” Gonçalvesshouted to Quinn. “They come to me as animals, deceptions in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers all: Accept his standard and have life in all its fullness, become men, become souls. Or choose the second standard and accept the inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel.”

Quinn wiped away the streaming water from his face. He stood with Gonçalves on a rise at the lip of the bank; before him palm-thatched longhouses ranged in concentric circles across a bare plain to the distant, rain-smudged tree-line. Remnant palms, cajus, and casuarinas gave shade, otherwise the city — no mere aldeia this — was as stark as a sleeping army. At the vacant center rose a statue of Christ risen, arms outstretched to show the stigmata of his passion, ten, ten times the height of a man. The smoke of ten thousand fires rose from the plain. And still people came, mothers with infants slung from brow straps, children, the old women with drooping flat breasts, pouting from the malocas into the muddy lanes between, their feet and shins spattered red. Striped peccaries rooted in the foot-puddled morass; dogs skipped and quarreled. Parrots bobbed on bamboo perches.

“There must be forty thousand souls here,” Quinn said.

The leaping rain was easing, following the storm front into the north, set to flight by bells. To the south, beyond the masts and crowning angels of the floating basilica, shafts of yellow light broke through curdling clouds and moved across the white water.

“Souls, yes. Guabirú, Capueni, Surara nations — all one in the Cidade de Deus.”

Luis Quinn grimaced at the bitter liquor. The Guabirú boy who had offered him the gourd cringed away. The storm had passed entirely, and sun rays piercing as psalms swept the plantation. Leaves dripped and steamed; a bug kicked on its back in the puddle, spasming, dying. What Luis Quinn had thought from the purview of the bank was the edge of the great and intractable forest was the gateway to a series of orchards and plantations so extensive that Quinn could see no end to them. Manioc, cane, palm and caju, cotton and tobacco, and these shady trees that Gonçalves had been so insisstent he see: Jesuit’s Bark, he called them.

“The key that unlocks the Amazon.”

“I assume from its bitterness it is a most effective simple against some affliction. ”

“Against the ague, yes, yes; very good, Father. What is it holds us back from taking full stewardship of this land, as Our Lord grants us? Not the vile snakes or the heat, not even the animosity of the indios, though many of them display a childlike enthusiasm for violence. Sickness, disease, and espeecially the ague of the bad air, the shivering ague. A simple preparation from the bark of this tree affords complete cure and immunity, if taken as a reggular draft. Can you imagine such a boon to the development and exploitation of this God-granted land? A thousand cities like my City of God; the Amazon shall be the cornucopia of the Americas. The Spanish have souls only for gold and so dismissed it as desert, wilderness; they could not see the riches that grew on every branch and leaf, under their very steel boots! As well as my Jesuit’s Bark there are simples against many of the sicknesses that afflict us; I have potent analgesics against all aches and pains, herbal preparations that can treat the sepsis and even the gangrene if caught early enough; I can even cure disorders of the mind and spirit. We need not cast out with superstitious exorcism when a tincture, carefully administered, can take away the melancholy or the rage and quiet the demons.”

Luis Quinn could still taste the bitter desiccation of the almost-luminous juice on his tongue and lips. A chew of cane would cleanse it; a good cigar better. He had smelled the curing leaf from the drying barns, and his heart had beat sharp in want. Now he felt a fresh cool on his still-wet back; glancing round he saw the sun halo the giant Christ, its shadow long over him. The mass bell of Nossa Senhora da Várzea intoned the Angelus; in maloca, field, and orchard the people went to their knees.

As they returned along the foot-hardened walkways, the field workers bowing in deference to their Father, Quinn let himself slip down the march to fall in with Zemba. The swift night was running down the sky; the shifting layers of air around the river pressed the smoke of the cook-fires to the ground, dense as fog.

“So friend, is this the City of God you have been looking for?” Quinn spoke in Imbangala. In the weeks chasing legends up to the confluence of the Rio Branco, Luis had been fascinated by, and learned a conversational facility with, Zemba’s language. Learn the tongue, learn the man. Zemba was not so much a name as a title, a quasi-military rank, a minor princeling betrayed to Portuguese slavers by a rival royal faction of the N’gola. His letters of mannumission, sealed by the royal judge of São Luis, were forgeries; Zemba, he was an escapee from a small lavrador de cana in Pernambuco who had lived five years in a quilombo before it was destroyed, as all the colonies of escaped slaves were destroyed, and ever since had searched for the true City of God, the city of liberty, the quilombo that would never be overthrown.

“The City of God is paved with gold and needs neither sun nor moon, for Christ is her light,” Zemba said. “Nor soldiers, for the Lord himself is her spear and shield.”

The two-man patrols were ubiquitous; skins patterned in what Quinn now recognized as the tribal identity of the Guabirú and armed with skillfully fashioned wooden crossbows, cunningly hinged in the middle with a magazine atop the action. Quinn recognized the Chinese repeating crossbow he had encountered in his researches into that greatest of empires, when he had thought his wished-for task most difficult might lead him there, rather than to this private empire on the Rio Branco. Quinn did not doubt that the light wooden bolts derived much of their lethality from poisons. He murrmured phrases in Irish.

“Your pardon, Father?”

“A poem in my own language, the Irish.

“There is truth in that.” Zemba moved close to Luis Quinn. “I took my own diversion while the Spanish father showed you the fields. I looked into one of the huts. You should do that, Father. And the church, look in the church; down below.”

“Father!” Gonçalves called brightly. “Confidence in Our Lord is surely the mark of a Christian; having seen what I have shown you, are you with me? Will you help me in my great work?”

Zemba dropped his head and stepped back, but Luis Quinn had caught the final flash of his eyes.

“What is your work, Father?”

Gonçalves halted, smiling at the ignorance of a lumbering adult, his hands held our in unconscious mimicry of the great Christ-idol that dominated his city.

“I take beasts of the field and I give souls to those that will receive them; what other work is there?”

You seek me to provoke me , Luis Quinn thought. You desire me to react to what I see as arrogance and self-aggrandizement. Luis Quinn folded his hands into the still-damp sleeves of his habit.

“I am nearing a judgment, Father Gonçalves. Soon, very soon, I promise you.”

That night he came to the maloca that Diego Gonçalves kept as his private quarters. Pacas fled from Luis Quinn’s feet; Father Diego knelt at a writing desk, penning by the yellow, odorous glow of a palm-oil lamp in a book of rag-paper. Luis Quinn watched the concentration cross Gonçalves’s face as his pen creaked over the writing surface. Ruled lines, ticks, and copperplate, an account of some kind. Quinn’s approach was unseen, unheard; he had always been quiet, furtive even, for a man of his size.

“Father Diego.”

The man did not even start. Had he been aware all the timel Gonçalves set down the nubbin of quill.

“A judgment by night?”

The prie-dieu was the only solid furniture in this long, palm-fragrant building. Quinn settled his large frame to kneel on elaborately appliqued cushions.

“Father Diego, who are those men and women beneath the deck of the ship?”

“They are the damned, Father. The ones who have rejected Christ and His City and so condemn themselves to animal slavery. In time they will all be sold.”

“Men and women; children, Father Diego.”

“They have brought it on themselves; do not pity them, they neither deserve nor understand it.”

“And the sick, Father Diego?”

Gonçalves’s boyish face was bland innocence.

“I am not quite certain what you mean.”

“I looked into one of the malocas. I could not believe what I saw, so I looked into another, and then another and another. This is not the City of God; this is the City of Death.”

“Overtheatrical, Father.”

“I see no play, no amusement in whole households dead from disease. The smallpox and the measles rend entire malocas and leave not one alive. Your ledger there, so neatly ruled and inscribed — have you records there for the numbers who have died since being liberated into your City of God?”

Gonçalvessighed.

“The indio is a race under discipline. They have been given over to us by God to be tried, tested, and, yes, admonished, Father. Through discipline, through exercise, comes spiritual perfection. God requires no less than the best of us as men and as a nation sacred to Him. These diseases are the refiner’s fire. God has a great plan for this land; with His grace, I will build a people worthy of it.”

“Silence.” Luis Quinn’s accent cut like a spade. “I have seen all you have wrought here, but I take none of that into account into my judgment, which is, that you are guilty of preaching false doctrine: namely, that the people to whom you have been sent to minister are born without souls and that it has been granted you the power to bestow them. That is a deadly error, and with it, I find you also guilty of the sin of hubris, which is the fatal sin of our Enemy himself. In the name of Christ and for the love you bear Him, I require you to place yourself under my authority and return with me to São José Tarumás, and then to Salvador.”

Gonçalves’s lips moved as if telling beads or chewing sins.

“Buffoon.”

Rage burned up in Quinn’s heart, hot and sickening and adorable. That is what he wants. Quinn continued in the same flat, emotionless voice, “We will leave at dawn in my canoe. Instruct your headmen and morbichas in whatever they require to maintain the aldeia until your replacement has been sent from Salvador.”

“I truly had expected more.” Gonçalves’s hands were folded piously in his lap. Palm-oil lamps cast unreadable shadows on his face. “A man of languages, from Coimbra indeed; not one of those local peons who can barely even read their own names, let alone the missal, and hear devils in every thunderstorm and várzea frog, a man of learning and perception. Refinement. Have you any idea how I long for a brother with whom I could discuss ideas and speculations as far beyond the comprehension of these dear, simple people as the firmament? I am disappointed, Quinn. I am sadly disappointed.”

“You refuse my authority?”

“Authority without power is empty, Father. Brazil has no place for empty authority.”

“You have seen my commission; you are aware of the license Father Maggalhaes has given me.”

“Really? Do you really imagine you could? Against me? Almost, almost I might try it. But no, it would be a waste.” An index finger lifted a fraction, and directly a dozen crossbows were trained on Luis Quinn. Quinn let his hands fall meekly open: See, like Christ I offer no resistance. How soon he had forgotten the guile and skill of the people of the rain forest.

“’I ask for a task most difficult,’ — you said that once.” Was there no limit to this man’s information’ “I have such a task for you. I had hoped you might embrace it willingly, even gladly; recall. Now it seems I must compel you.”

“I do not fear martyrdom at your hands,” Luis Quinn said.

“Of course not, nor do I imagine I could coerce you by threat to your life. Merely consider that for every bow pointed at you, three are trained on Dr. Robert Falcon as he sleeps in his hammock at the meeting of the White and Black rivers.”

The two men knelt unspeaking. The compline of the forest spoke around them: insects, frogs, shrieking birds of night passage. Luis Quinn gave the barest of nods. Father Diego’s finger scarcely flickered, but the bowmen dissappeared like thoughts.

“Your task most difficult.”

“There is a tribe beyond the Iguapárá River, a vagrant people, the Iguapá, forced from their traditional terrains as other peoples flee the bandeirantes and lesser orders. You will be interested to note that their language is neither a Tupi derivative nor an Aruak/Carib variant. Among all the people of the Rio Catrimani and Rio Branco, they are known as a race of prophets. They seem to believe in a form of dream-time, akin ro real time, inverted. All tribes and nations consult them, and they are always right. Their legend has bought them immunity: the Iguapá have never been involved in any of the endemic warfare that so delights these people. It is my burden to bring the Iguapá the love of Christ and his Salvation, but they are a fugitive, elusive nation. The tribes protect them, even those assimilated into my City of God, and my missionaries have so far been unsuccessful.”

“My predecessors,” Luis Quinn said. “The ones you said departed from you hale in will and wind. You sent them to martyrdom.”

Gonçalves pursed his lips in contemplation.

“Why, I had not considered it in that fashion, but you are right, yes, yes, martyrdom I suppose it is. Certainly none survived.”

“They returned to you?”

“Burning with visions and ravings, insanities and impossibilities. Their minds were quite destroyed; some were babbling and incoherent; a few even had lost the power of speech or were completely insensate.” Gonçalves pressed his hands into unconscious prayer, touched them to his lips in wonder and devotion. “Most succumbed after a few days. One individual, a stout German, endured two weeks. Father Kaltenbacher led me to speculate that an individual with even more highly developed mental faculties might survive, even with the mind intact to communicate what they had seen among the Iguapá.”

“Your overweening pride leads you to madness if you believe that my coming was anything other than at the order of Provincial-General de Magalhães.”

“Is that what you believe?” Gonçalves asked. “Truly?” Again he touched his praying hands to his lips. “Tomorrow you will leave with your native slave and a crew of my Guabirús and travel up the Catrimani and the Iguapára. The peoples who make use of the Iguapás’ talents know how to find them when they need them. You will understand if I do not take you upon your honor to travel unescorted.”

“Manoel is not my slave. Neither is Zemba; he has papers of manumisssion, he is a free man.”

“No longer; he will become a member of my personal entourage. Now I bid you a good night, Father; you have a long and arduous journey tomorrow, and you would do well to refresh yourself. Eat, rest, and devote yourself to prayer and contemplation. Rejoice, Father, you will behold glories none have ever seen and lived.”

Again, the merest twitch of a finger and crossbows emerged silently from the darkness. Luis Quinn, a giant among his painted captors, glanced back. Gonçalves knelt at his desk, the quill again moving steadily over the paper. Sensible of Quinn’s regard, he looked and smiled in pure, broad pleasure.

“I envy you, Father. Truly, I envy you.”