by Ian McDonald
It will take about an hour for the shoes to print, so Fia leads Edson up into the third circle of Todos os Santos, the circle of the vendors. Recycled reconditioned reengineered reimagined are the straplines here. Car parts, washing machine engines, lathes taps and dies, entertainment equipment, jerry-built white goods, custom mopeds, domestic and civil robots, surveillance systems, computers and memory, I-shades and guns - all constructed from the flow of parts that comes down the spiral from the next circle in, the circle of the dismantlers.
Circuit boards cook on coal griddles, release their lead solder like fat from pig-meat. Mercury baths grab gold from plated plugs and sockets. Homemade stills vaporize the liquid metal, depositing the heavy treasure. Two boys stir a stream of sand-sized processors into a plastic vat of reagent, dissolving the carbon nanotubes from their matrix. Two eight-year-olds sitting cross-legged on a soy bean sack test plastic from the heap beside them by heating it over a cigarette lighter and sniffing the fumes. Younger children rush handcarts of e-junk down from the central dump. This is the circle of the slaves, sold into debt indenture by parents crushed by 5,000 percent interest. The drones pause only to pick and scratch at their skins. The loudest sound is coughing. Wrecked neurology and heavy metal poisoning are endemic. Few here are out of teenage; few live so long. Those who make it do so with ruined health. Edson chokes on a waft of acid. All around him is a sense of heat, a sense of defilement. The air is sick with fumes. He folds a handkerchief over his mouth. Fia marches blithely ahead, untouched, untouchable, stepping over the rivulets of diseased cadmium yellow, toward the heart of Todos os Santos.
Edson did not think it was just shoes that brought her here.
Supply-side economics built Nossa Senhora da Lixão from a tiny chip. The shady, dry understory of the interchange had been a fine place to set up businesses processing e-waste; out of the way and unseen. In those days the catadores pushed their handcarts ten kays along the highway verges to the old municipal dump at São Bernardo do Campo. The first driver to take a jeitinho to drop his load at the unfinished intersection had started the slow glacier of trash that over twenty years of accumulation made Todos os Santos the premier midden of the southern hemisphere. The population of a small town scavenges the slopes of the tech-trash mountain. By night it is extravagantly beautiful as twenty thousand torches and oil-lanterns bob and play across the ridges and valleys. Todos os Santos is big enough to have a geography: the Forest of Fake Plastic Trees, where wet ripped bags hang like Spanish moss from every spar and protrusion. The Vale of Swarf, where the metal industries dump their coils and spirals of lathe trim. The Ridge of Lost Refrigerators, where kids with disinfectant-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces siphon off CFCs into empty plastic Coke bottles slung like bandoliers around their shoulders. Above them, the peaks: Mount Microsoft and the Apple Hills; unsteady ziggurats of processor cubes and inter-facers. Pickers crack them open with hammers and pry bars and deftly unscrew the components. A truck disgorges a load of terminally last-season I-shades, falling like dying bats. The catadores rush over the slippery, treacherous garbage. The fermenting trash raises the ambient air temperature three degrees. Evaporating moisture and volatiles linger in the peculiar dead spot in the wind patterns caused by the interchange: Our Lady of Trash is a true urban jungle: steamy, poisonous, diseased, wet. The scavengers wear plastic fertilizer sacks as rain capes as they work their way over the steaming rubbish in a perpetual warm drizzle, extricating a circuit board here, a washing machine motor there and throwing them into the baskets on their backs. Their children - second-generation catadores - are the sorters and runners, grading the emptied baskets by type and then running them down on handcarts to Circle Three.
Among the dashing barrows, Fia stops, turns, lays a hand on Edson’s chest.
‘I’ve got to go on now.’
Edson walks into her hand. ‘What?’ He sounds dumb. That is bad.
‘Ed, you know there’s our stuff, and then there’s my stuff. This is my stuff. I’ll meet you back at Atom Shop.’
A dozen protests occur to Edson. He keeps them: the best sound clinging. The worst are whining.
‘Toys for me,’ Fia says. She takes Edson’s face in her hands, kisses him hard, full on the mouth, with tongue and saliva. But he’s still not going to let her see him walk away, so he hangs back as she picks her way up the trash-scree in her impractical boots, coat hood pulled up against the sour drizzle, climbing up into the Quantum Valley.
Every guy thinks he wants a Mystery Girl, but what men really want is all the bases covered and no gaps in the record. Mr Peach has one end of the story of Fia Kishida, Edson the other, but the two halves don’t match. There is too much unexplained between her walking out of São Paulo U and turning up in the back of a Cook/Chill Meal Solutions trailer. Edson’s done some discreet research - he is an insatiable busybody. Cook/Chill Meal Solutions Company is a brand name legally registered with the Department of Trade. His intuition was right; it’s all owned by Metal Guy, Floyd. He made a fist of money with Preto and Morte-Metal, sourcing those little pre- and post-gig peccadilloes that Black/Death Metal bands demand, like crack cocaine, cheer-leaders, American whiskey, lapsed nuns, live goats, automatic weapons and light mortars, Chinese girls in latex, and applications to be contestants on Take Out the Trash. He invested his money and tips in a little business venture: Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. The driver is Aristides, ex of the Goias-São Paulo alco-tanker run. The bicha who runs cover twelve layers deep reinforced by a strategy of spread-bribery is Titifreak. And Fia to operate the array of four reconditioned quantum cores, hacking NP computations. Edson’s problem, and the reason he waits until she is out of sight before following her path toward a steaming ridge of LCD screens, is that if he can find that out in six discreet inquiries, who else has?
It is inevitable as death that Q-waste should find its way to the great gehenna of Todos os Santos. It is the weirdness leaking like CFCs from so much quantum technology piled in one place that gives Nossa Senhora de Lixão her myths and legends. Quantum technology is licensed; use is government monitored, and stern controls are in place over manufacture and disposal. But trash has its own morality and gravity. One plastic casing is very much like another; get it out of here, we’re filling up with this stuff, send it south. Once every few months the catadores will unearth an operational Q-array. On those holy days word flashes across the city like lightning, like scandal. Tenders come in from as far as Rio, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba. Fia is here to inspect a fresh lot.
A turn-up on Edson’s white flares tears on a jagged edge. Almost he curses, but to swear is undignified. The basket-people in ragged shorts and flip-flops ignore him. Edson squats low up just beneath the skyline, peeps between shattered angular plastic frames. Down in the valley Fia talks with the two males who summoned her at the gafieira. A bulky cylinder stands on an upturned crate between them. Fia crouches, examining the cylinder with her I-shades, turning her head quizzical as a parrot. Slightly behind them is a figure Edson does not recognize, a tall chisel-featured man with his hair scraped back into a greasy ponytail. Incongruously, he is dressed as a priest. These quantumeiros do all the geek looks. He says something Edson cannot hear, but Fia looks up and shakes her head. The man speaks again; again Fia shakes her head: no. She looks frightened now. As Edson stands up he feels a whisper across his back. His jacket falls forward around him. Its two severed halves slide down his arms to flop over his hands. He stares, dumb, miracle-struck, then turns.
Bicha-boy Titifreak does a martial-arts thing, drawing a pattern of glowing blue in the air with the Q-blade. He holds it still, perfectly horizontal. He looks at Edson under his floppy fringe, over the blade, then snaps it down to its magnetic sheath. The air smells wounded, ozonic.
‘You favelados really don’t have any manners, do you?’
Edson shifts on his feet, surly, stupid stupid stupid with his disfigured white leather jacket hanging around him.
‘She told you not to go but you ju
st had to, didn’t you? Look, there’s nothing special about you. There’s been dozens before you. She likes boys of a certain type, but she is out of your class. It doesn’t mean anything. Did you think it did? This is business and you can’t even begin to imagine what we’re doing here and, frankly, ignorance is bliss. Really. Look, you think they give these away in packets of Ruffles?’ He flips back his jacket to reveal the blade. ‘So you’re going now. And you’re not going to come back. Leave her alone. You are Sorocaba playing against São Paulo. You won’t see her again. Go on. Go; I will cut you.’
Edson’s face is hot with rage, and humiliation sings in his ears. He shrugs off the halves of his jacket. Whatever is in the pockets can stay. He will not bow to pick them up.
‘Bicha!’ he shouts as he tries to maintain dignity descending the treacherous scree of tech-trash. The knifeman shrugs.
‘Give my head peace, favelado.’
On the third day Gerson comes to his kid brother, sixth son of a sixth son, and stands over him, rocking and raging in the hammock beside his office. His calls have fallen into dead air. It’s that puta of a bicha blocking him, he’s sure of that. Three days, stomping round the house; kicking over Dona Hortense’s little piles of farofa and cubes of cake offered to the Lady; getting nothing done; earning no money.
‘You’re in my light.’
‘You know, if you were half the man you claimed you were, you’d be right over there, Q-blade or no Q-blade.’
And Edson thinks, He’s right. And Fuck it fuck it fuck it. And, It’s a sorry state when Gerson is right. Thirty minutes later, the green-and-yellow scrambler bursts out of the alley behind Dona Hortense’s. But they’re not Edson’s sweet thighs straddling it. They’re Efrim’s; in a short silvery strappy dress like the one Fia wore at the gafieira (not that Efrim would admit playing copycat) soft suede calf boots in pink, and his beautiful big Afro. One final layer of costume: he swapped identities with Petty Cash, his most trusted alibi.
Edson bumps over the debris-strewn approach to the decaying mall where the quantumeiros have parked up the truck. He rounds the collapsed delivery bay. Mothers and kids, escaped debt slaves, a life lower than even the favela, follow him with their eyes. Edson would not leave an empty Coke can there, but the quantumeiros’ spooky reputation keeps the street kids away. The vast parking lot is empty. Efrim touches one pink suede boot to the blacktop, spins the bike, accelerates across the weed-strewn car park to the highway.
The tail is back to three kilometers, says the traffic report on his Chillibeans, but Efrim slips up the side of the convoy of food trucks up from Santos. He can see the top of the truck over the cars and gridlocked executivo coaches. The roof slants at an odd angle. The police have traffic cones out and are trying to wave vehicles into one lane. There are three cruisers, one ambulance, and a lot of rotating orange lights. Two camera drones circle overhead. Now sick with dread, Efrim duck-waddles the Yam up between the grinding cars. No one will notice another rubbernecker among all the passengers craning out their windows.
The truck lists as if capsized by a sudden melting of the road. The line of the cut starts just above fender and slices perfectly through cab, engine and coupling. The driver’s side front wheel has a neat spiral of glittering swarf sheared off from it. Efrim knows that if you were to touch that bright metal, it would cut you quicker than any razor. Sharp down to the quantum level. The slash runs the length of the trailer, makes the same strange spiral pattern on the rear wheels before exiting at the rear. The sheared-away material lies some hundred meters down the highway. Oils and hydraulic fluids spread from severed lines.
It would have been like this, Efrim thinks as he paddles his scrambler bike past the wreckage of Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. He would have waited on the verge, like a hitcher. Aristide would have given him the horns: You’re too close to the road, fool. But he needed to be close; he needed to be at fingertip reach. All he would have to do was flick out the Q-blade and let the truck drive straight down his cut. The pattern of the wheels would be a turning tire intersecting a moving line of incision. A miracle the driver kept it upright. A clean circle is cut into the side of the trailer.
Analyze, script it, play it. Stops it being real. Stops the dreading. Makes that lingering glance at the figure under the plastic sheet just curiosity. Those are not hydraulic fluids. The roadway is black with flies. There are black vultures overhead. Sticking out from the sheet, a hand, palm upturned, imploring the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. Shirt cuff, silver links, ten centimeters of good jacket. That would be enough to identify Titifreak, let alone the broken blade, severed almost to a stump. He fought, then. No point looking for the rest of the blade. It’s on its way down to the center of the Earth.
‘Hey, what are you staring at?’
Caught. Efrim throws his hands up in dismay. The cop fixes him with her mirrored visor.
‘Go on, get out of here before I lift you for obstructing a police investigation.’
‘Yes yes yes,’ Efrim mumbles, ducking his head. For he was staring. Staring at the paramedics in their green and hi-visibility yellow lifting a stretcher into the back of the ambulance. On that stretcher, a body under plastic, but the sheet is too short and the body’s feet stick out, feet flopping away from each other; feet in shoes. Efrim recognizes the soles of those shoes. The last time he saw them was in a Todos os Santos print-shop, being woven layer upon layer from smart plastic.
AUGUST 22-28, 1732
Fé em Deus
Rio Amazonás: above Pauxi Fort
My dearest Heloise,
Finally, my dear sister, finally, I sail the calm waters of the great Amazon and I find myself in the realm of the mythological. The island of Marajó, which in former times was the habitation of many advanced Indian tribes, is the size of Brittany and Normandy together yet lies easily in the mouth of the river. A flow equal to that of every river in Europe passes out of the river every day. The water, so our Captain Acunha tells us, is sweet up to seventy leagues out to sea. Yet the Amazon drops only fifty toises over its entire length, and its flow is so gentle it may take a leaf a month to drift from the rank, miasmic foothills of the Peruvian Andes to pass beneath the hull of our Fé em Deus.
While I languished in Belém at the governor-general’s pleasure, not a day passed that I did not see La Condamine and his expedition descending upon the coast in a cloud of sail. But now our vessel beats upstream under the command of her master Acunha, a river trader of surly and aloof disposition, yet I was assured at Belém do Pará that there was none more experienced in the ever-treacherous seasonal patterns of shoals and banks that form and shift in this great stream. What with the manioc and beans, powder and shot required to equip an expedition into the high Amazon - I am assured I can find bearers, guides, and crew in plenty at São José Tarumás - let alone the many cases of scientific equipment, Captain Acunha mutters about the loading of his barque. But we make excellent haste: we have already put the narrows at the Fort of the Pauxis behind us; São José Tarumás lies before us. This far inland from coastal influences the winds are too light and variable and the river too excessively braided to allow us to raise sail, so it is by the power of human muscle we ascend the mighty Amazon, bent to oars, a true classical slave-galley.
Slavery is an alien state to me; those few I have seen in Paris are novelties: as a society we practice the subtler oppressions of seigneury. God forfend that this plague of draft animals should cross to France! Not a day passes that we are not passed by flotillas of tethered rafts laden to the waterline with bound slaves: men, women, children, all red, all naked as innocent Adam and Eve. This is a monstrous traffic. The prices at Belém do Pará are insultingly low; the Indian has not our resistance to diseases, and life on the engenhos is so hard and dispiriting few see more than five years - few desire more than five years. This economy serves the senhores de engenhos well: a slave pays for himself in two cruelly hard sugar harvests; everything after that is profit. In five years the owner has
returned double on his investment, so there is no incentive not to work them to death. I am told many Indians simply put an end to themselves rather than face such an existence. Yet the supply of red flesh up the great river is seemingly as endless as its flow of waters: whole nations are being ‘descended,’ as the euphemism runs here.
What may I tell you of my traveling companion? For a start, he is more chaperone than traveling companion: I am in no doubt whatsoever that his advent alone secured my permission to travel upriver, the usefulness of my researches to the mercantile Portuguese being balanced against their sensitivities at being tenuous owners of a vast, largely unmapped, and almost wholly undefended territory that our kingdom has historically viewed with envy. No matter, it is the least of incivilities; indeed, it is almost a flattery that they consider me so important a spy that they have placed me under the watchfulness of as extraordinary a man as Father Quinn S.J.
You know well my scant regard for the religious, but every so often one meets a member in holy orders of such force of personality, such qualities and charisms that one is forced to speculate, what could possibly have moved this man to take his vows? Luis Quinn is surely one of these. Of an Old Catholic family dispossessed of its lands and forced into the port trade by the accession of the House of Orange, he is a great bear of a man - Irish, a race of lumbering, uncouth giants much given to brooding and the taking of slights and offenses - yet in the Ver-o-Peso, when we fought in mock duel, he moved with a grace, an energy and economy that I have never seen in any of his compatriots, and also an unregenerate ferocity that leads me to speculate what may have led him to his vow and habit.
