Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘This is weird, weird. I feel her here much much more.’ She glances up at the plastic cube over her head, gives a small gasp of wonder and climbs the spiral staircase. Edson watches her move around the studio, awakening the quantum cores one by one. The blue glow of quantum dots skeined across universes under-lights her cheekbones in sharp relief, Japans her. He had seen a ghost then, a presence in the empty studio: a quantum echo.

  Edson joins Fia in the glowing blue cube.

  ‘The guys want to move the trailer inside. It’s not secure out here.’

  Fia waves her hand: Whatever. Her tongue protrudes slightly between her teeth, caught in concentration. Edson steadies himself on a stanchion as Cook/Chill Meal Solutions lurches into motion; Fia moves unconsciously with the flow.

  ‘This should be in an art gallery.’ She sounds love-dazed, incoherent with ecstasy. ‘Four quantum-dot Q-cores. And she built them from . . . junk? Where I come from, the São Paulo U Q-frame . . . this is decades ahead of anything we have. It’s like it’s come from the future. Every part of this is beautiful.’

  ‘Can you get it to work?’

  ‘Your language and protocols are different, but I can recode.’

  ‘But can you make it work?’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  She slips off her long coat. The tattoo on her exposed belly glows with reflected quantum-light. The wheels within wheels on her stomach start to turn. Fia feels Edson’s stare.

  ‘It’s just an effect thing, really.’ She taps keys, leans forward into the blue light. She frowns; her lips move as she reads from the screens. Edson has never seen her so beautiful. ‘It’s finding a common communication channel. Ooh!’ Fia starts, smiles as if to some intimate delight. ‘We’re in.’ She rattles keys; her skin crawls with gears in motion. ‘Yah! Yah! Come on, you puta!’ She slaps the desk. As if it has heard and obeyed, the truck lurches to a stop. Fia throws her hands up. ‘What did I do?’

  Voices, echoing from the naked rolled steel girders of the rotting mall. Voices Edson doesn’t recognize. He rattles down the spiral stair, cautiously pokes his head out the Q-blade-cut hole. The glinting sin-black visor of a HUD visor looks up into his face. Beneath it, a grin. Beneath the grin, the muzzle of an assault gun. Visor, visors. The truck is ringed by armed and armored seguranças. The rear doors of the trailer slam open: twenty more seguranças with assault weaponry. The grinning face waves its gun toward the rear of the truck.

  ‘Get your ass out here, favelado.’

  AUGUST 6-15, 1733

  A crowd always gathered for the pendulum. Falcon nodded to his audience as he adjusted the telescope housing and wound the clocks. Children’s voices, underscored with the deeper notes of men for whom this was a famous novelty, chanted greeting. Falcon sighted along his nocturnal on Jupiter rising above the tree line and noted the ascension on his wooden shingle. Tomorrow he would have words with Zemba about getting some more paper. The observatory, which was also Falcon’s library and home, stood five minutes’ walk along forest paths from the quilombo. The canopy had been felled to afford open access to the night sky, and the clearing was popular with couples who wished to take in the moon or the soft ribbon of the Milky Way. With a flick of the stylus Falcon picked three spectators to open the porch roof and operate the clocks; the telescope required protection from the daily downpour, daily oiling to keep the molds from clogging its hair-fine mechanisms. Falcon jabbed again with his stylus at a girl in the front row, breasts budding on her child’s torso.

  ‘What is the name of this celestial body and why is it important? ’ Falcon’s command of the lingua geral had developed to where he could play the curmudgeon, a role he found he enjoyed very much. The girl shot to her feet.

  ‘Aîuba, that is the world Jupiter, and it has moons around it as we have a moon, and the moons are a clock.’

  Aîuba. Falcon had thought the word an honorific in keeping with his fourfold status as geographer and city architect; doctor of physic; archivist of the Cidade Maravilhosa and professor of the University of Rio do Ouro: teacher, wise one, stargazer. He had been gravely discommoded to learn that it was Tupi for his pale, shaven head. He had long ago fixed his longitude by Cassini’s tables and calibrated his three Huygens’ clocks; hundreds of observations, inked in genipapo on the walls of his house, had proved his theory. What Falcon performed was a Mass of science, a memoriam that the proofs of physics were as true in the forests of the Rio do Ouro as the Paris salons. He demonstrated the validity of empiricism to himself as much as to his audience of Iguapás, Manaos, Caibaxés and runaway slaves. He thought rarely of La Condamine now; his rival’s pamphlet might be under the keenest discussion among the Academicians while his would likely remain trapped in this forest, but it would be held to scorn because it was not empirically true. In his bamboo-and-thatch observatory, Robert Falcon set up his great experiment and declared, See, this is how your world is.

  ‘I shall now observe the satellites of Jupiter.’ Greatest of spheres, visibly flattened at its poles even in this traveling telescope. On Earth as it is in heaven. ‘Bring me the journal.’ A Caibaxé girl, keeper of the book, knelt beside Falcon with journal and carved wooden inkwell on a leather pillow. Falcon noted time, date, conditions. So little paper left. And in truth, why make these marks when the truth they represented was partial and lesser? A Jesuit crazed on sacramental forest drugs had hinted at a deeper order, that this oblate world was merely one of a prodigious - perhaps infinite- array of worlds, all differing in greater or lesser degrees. But how would one ever objectively prove such an order of the universe? Yet if it was physical, it must be capable of mathematical description. That would be a challenge for a geographer growing old and alone far from the rememberings of his peers. Such a notation would take up what remained of the house’s wall and floor space. Caixa would complain and throw small things at him; she was clean and house-proud and intolerant of his slovenly habits.

  ‘The time in Paris is precisely twenty-seven minutes past eleven o’clock,’ Falcon intoned. ‘I shall operate the pendulum. On my mark, start the timing-clocks.’

  Falcon drew back the bob of the surveying pendulum until the wire matched the inscribed line on the goniometer. He let it fall and lifted his handkerchief, which Caixa kept virtue-white for this purpose. Three hands came down on the starting levers of the chronometers. The pendulum swung, counting out time and space and reality.

  ‘I cannot allow you any more paper.’

  The cannon blast dashed any protest from Falcon. Zemba leaned out over the parapet and clapped the pocket-glass - Falcon’s former pocket-glass - to his eye.

  ‘Barrel and breeching are intact,’ he declared. ‘I think we might now try it under full charge. And a ball also.’ Since declaring himself protector of the Cidade Maravilhosa, Zemba had increasingly taken the trappings and manners of an N’golan Imbangala princeling. Falcon climbed up on to the revetment to watch the Iguapá gunners charge the huge cannon, clean-bored from a single trunk of an adamantine mahogany, out on the proving range. He watched the paper-wrapped charge - his paper, as his glass had been requisitioned - vanish into the barrel of the monster.

  ‘I appreciate the necessity for dry powder in this humid miasma, but we apply ourselves so wholly to our defense that we neglect what we are defending,’ he commented mildly as the crew loaded the ball. Each wooden shot took a full day for a carpenter to turn and lathe to the necessary smoothness. Zemba had sneered at the Aîuba’s suggestion: a wooden cannon, such a thing would fly into a million splinters the first time it was touched, more deadly than any fusee of the enemy. But Falcon’s calculations had withstood scorn and gunpowder. Yet it irked that to this great man- a dazzling general and terrible warrior - his learning was respected only insofar as it served military ends. Techne, the whore of Sophos, Falcon muttered to himself.

  Zemba had drawn his defenses deep and strong on Falcon’s looted drawing books. The Iguapá traps and snares formed the tripwire to a monstrous system. A gargant
uan cheval de frise of poisoned stakes embedded in ranks twenty deep directed attackers into murderous crossfire fields between heavy repeating-crossbow bunkers. An inner ring of earthworks modeled on European star-emplacements next poured ballista-fire and buckets of hot stones from trebuchets on the wretched survivors. The inmost line was zigzag trenches three deep from which a sea of quilombistas would charge, armored in padded leather escaupil and targes, armed with hardwood spears. Foot-archers gave killing support over hideous distances. Cidade Maravilhosa’s classical defenses would have dismayed a Roman legion, but Zemba desired the destroying power of modern artillery. A bylaw pressed through the city aîuri made compulsory the use of public latrines that might be scraped for saltpeter: Falcon’s half-remembered chymistry had produced black powder, but in the Rio do Ouro’s steamy climate it fizzed and puffed in the touch-hole until Falcon, twisting little paper bangers to terrify the children, lit on paper cartridges. The charges, in varying weights, hung from the rafters of the drying huts like albino bats.

  The gunners unwound a long fuse; Zemba lit it with the slow-match. Falcon felt the ground heave beneath him, and a detonation that must have been audible in São José Tarumás drove the wind from his lungs and the sense from his head. In a trice Zemba was at his overlook, glass to eye, Falcon a blink behind him. The cannon had been blasted back a dozen toises into the bush but stood intact on its sledge.

  ‘We have it, by Our Lady, we have artillery.’

  Falcon did not need the proffered glass to see the tree branches, in a rising arc along the trajectory of the ball, waver, then one by one split, splinter, and crash down.

  Even at his measuring station by the river he could still hear the booms as Zemba refined his artillery. ‘River’ was generous to a lazy stream barely eight paces wide that eased into the Rio do Ouro carpeted velvet green with jaguar-ear. Pistol cocked over his knee against the jacaré, Falcon watched Caixa wade out, now thigh deep, now belly deep, the soft, dew-teared jaguar-ears brushing against her small breasts, to the farther measuring post. Gold on green, she enchanted him. He had taught her to letter, to number, to read the sky and recite in French. This little tongue of sand, where the forest opened unexpectedly onto the river was his by word of the Mair. Often he made love to her in this place, roused and repelled in equal measure by the soft spicy fullness of her flesh and the golden, alien contours of her skull. She was a generous and appreciative lover, if unimaginative, and by the lights of her people, faithful. But most he loved this place by night when each jaguar-ear and dark-blooming water lily held the spark of a glowworm, a carpet of light, the far bank glimmering with fireflies and high over all, the scattered stars.

  Caixa called back the reading. Rising still. But this was not the flood season. Smiling, she plowed through the water toward him, the carpet of green parting around the smooth, plucked triangle of her sex. He recalled his first sight of her, shy and smiling, prodded forward by her girlfriends to walk beside the white man with the uncanny eyes. He had offered to bear for a while the basket she wore from a brow strap; angrily she had stepped away and had not come near him again until the evening when the Iguapá nation straggled into its first camp.

  So soon had the sense of the pilgrim nation given way to silent stoicism and that determination that set foot before the other, day in, week in, to helpless anger. The Iguapá nation straggled over half a day through the varzea of the Rio Iguapará and the Rio do Ouro. The last, the oldest, the youngest, the weakest stumbled into the camp many hours after the Mair and his guard of pagés struck for the night. Some never arrived.

  The Iguapá nation knew hunger. The varzea, so rich in botany, was meager in forage. Food hooted and whistled in the high branches of the ucuuba and envira; on the ground, in the damp shadows, it was guarded with barbarous spines; fruits and vines sickened or poisoned or drove mad with visions. Falcon’s manioc war flour and beans fed a people; Caixa sharing out the thin rations, making sure the old and sick were not bullied out of their portion. The Manaos gravely reported the state of the supplies; Falcon noted them down and did dismal mathematics. Even then, Zemba had set himself between Falcon and Quinn. It was only with the greatest persistence and the muscular weight of his Manaos that Falcon had been permitted through the circle of pagés to the Mair.

  ‘You must give them time to rest and hunt and regather their strength.’

  ‘We cannot, we must go on, I have seen.’

  In the end the people walked from insane desperation. There was no other choice than to swing up the hammock-pack, slip the strap over the blistered brow, and push the children before. Caixa freely permitted Falcon to share her load. The chests of war-flour were emptied and cast aside. Falcon cut up instrument cases, bookbindings, shoes and laces and satchels to boil soft enough to chew out a little sustenance. The people starved, but the frogs were fed; the sacred curupairás in their pierced ceramic jars. Old men sat down with a sudden sigh at the side of the track, unable to move or be moved, left behind, the green closing around them and the look on their faces relief, only relief. Falcon pushed one foot in front of the other, scourging himself in intellectual guilt: his tools, his instruments, the brass and the ebony and the glass; the iron and the lead shot, the books half gone to mold without their covers, the clothes and keepsakes - he must set them down and forget them. Each time he returned the same thunderous denial. No he would not, never, for when all else was reduced to the animal, to the mechanical, they were the dumb witnesses to this indifferent vegetable empire that this was more than a march of ants.

  Then Quinn - a haggard, bearded, Deuteronomical patriarch leaning on his stick- declared, This is the place.

  Falcon had barely been able to frame the question.

  ‘What have you seen?’

  ‘Enough, my friend.’ Then he had turned to his people as they filed into the small, sunlit shard where a tree had fallen, revealing the sky. ‘This is the Marvelous City. We shall build a church and raise crops and live in peace and plenty. No one who comes to this place shall be turned away. Now, let’s burn.’

  That night, in the smoke and the embers, Caixa came to Dr Robert Falcon and never again left.

  The Mass was ended. Women, men, children with their heads bound in the wood and leather casings that forced their still-soft skulls splashed barefoot from the church through the silver twilight rain, through the narrow lanes between the malocas shin-deep in liquid mud, touching their foreheads in salutation to the Aîuba as he passed. Falcon ducked under the dripping thatch. The iâos, the brides of the saints, still danced in the foot-polished clay ring, each bearing the emblem of his or her saint: the three-bladed sword; the hunting bow; the peccary’s tusks; masks of the tinamu, the catfish, the frog. The musicians on their raised dais had worked themselves into trance; drums, clay ocarinas. They would play for the rest of the night, the iâos swirling before them, until they fell over their drums and the blood started from their palms. The great pillared hall of Nossa Senhora de Todos os Mundos reeked of incense and sweat and forest drugs. Falcon passed through the dancers like a specter, pausing to cross himself and kiss his knuckle before the crucified Christ, at his feet a woman, face upturned in marvelment, orbs in each hand and upon her brow, her own feet resting upon a golden frog: Our Lady of All Worlds. Out again into the rain and across the fenced compound to the vestibule. Pagés waited on the verandah, golden faces naked in their suspicion of Falcon, jealous of his privileges.

  ‘I did not see you at the Mass, brother.’ Quinn removed his stole, kissed it, hung it on the peg.

  ‘You know my opinion. I see little of Christ there.’ At the climax of the Mass, after hours of drum and dance, Quinn was carried around the throng of worshippers, passed overhead hand-to-hand, spewing prophecies. Not even in the grimmest privations of the Long March had Falcon seen him so drained.

  ‘It is like there are no lids to my eyes. I see everything, everywhere. It consumes me, Falcon. The apostles were sterner men than I; the gifts of the Paraclete burn thos
e who bear them.’

  ‘It takes more every time, does it not? Give it up. It will destroy you, if not in body, certainly in the seat of reason,’ Falcon said in French.

  ‘I cannot,’ Quinn whispered. ‘I must not. I must take more, and greater, if I am to be able to turn passive observation into action and join the others who walk between the worlds.’

  ‘You talk arrant nonsense; you are deranged already. Already the quilombo suffers from want of a guiding hand on the tiller.’

  ‘I am not the only traveler - how could I be, when on countless worlds similar to this one, Father Luis Quinn S.J. has taken the curupairá and held in his hands the warp and weft of reality? Throughout history there have been - and will be - ones who travel between worlds and times.’