Brasyl (GollanczF.)

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Now this is nonsense, Luis. Travel across the ages as if stepping from one room into the next? I give you an immediate paradox: the simple effect of treading on a forest butterfly in the past might set in motion a chain of events that make it impossible for Luis Quinn Society of Jesus to even exist, let along gavotte merrily through time.’

  Quinn pressed his hands together before his face as if in prayer.

  ‘Of course. And where would I walk, but to the singular moment in my life that shaped it beyond all other ? I have stepped through and in an instant returned to that lodge in Porto. I have looked on my own face, and seen the look on that face to find itself confronted with a spectral visitor beyond horror: his own gaunt, aged form dressed in priestly black; the “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” that having written, moves on. It takes little more to stay the hand, to set the death-dealing mug down on the table, to reel away from friends and comfort and warmth into the street. I have seen myself go on my knees and beg my forgiveness, yet each time, when I flip back to that page that is my own time, this time, I find nothing changed. There is a law here; we may step back through time, but never to the history of our own world. We always walk backward to another world, that world where I appear to myself like a visitation and then vanish never to return, for to do so would violate that great Censor who requires that we may write the stories of others but never our own.’

  ‘Now you offend me,’ Falcon flared. ‘Now this is indeed madness. If I had a piece I would pistol you so that your insanity should not infect others. Airily you claim to breeze between worlds and histories, by whim, by thought, by will-o’-the-wisp or fiery chariot, and with a wave of your hand my world is abolished; rationality, scientific inquiry, the knowability and predictability of the physical world merely a tissue of illusion over a void of . . . magic. Divine fiat, the power of word and thought over mundane reality.’

  ‘But, Falcon, Falcon, what if that is what the world is made from? Word and thought?’

  Falcon slapped the center pole of the hut. ‘This is real, Quinn. This is reality.’

  Quinn smiled weakly. ‘If the simulacrum were detailed enough, how would we ever know?’

  ‘Oh, for the love of God!’ Falcon leaped to his feet. Golden faces looked in at the door, withdrew at Falcon’s hostile glare. ‘The water is up again. That is what I came to tell you. I want to take a canoe and a party of my Manaos away from the cidade.’

  ‘Talk to Zemba. He is protector of the cidade.’

  ‘I desire to talk to you. I desire you to ask me why I want a canoe and a party, why I want to investigate the rising water. You have become remote, distant, aloof, Quinn. You have set colonels and counselors between yourself and me, Luis; between yourself and your people.’

  The bark curtain over the door twitched. Zemba entered, his skin glossy wet from the rain.

  ‘Is all well here?’

  ‘Nothing has occurred here,’ Falcon said. ‘I was merely telling Father Quinn that I am taking a reconnaissance party onto the river to investigate the rising water.’

  ‘All such applications must be made to me as chief of security.’

  Falcon bristled.

  ‘I am not your slave. Good evening, sir.’

  Robert Francois St Honore Falcon: Expedition Log 8th August 1733

  Often I feel that the only important feature of my journal is the date in the heading. Too easily the days slip into an eternal present; without past, facing a future indistinguishable from now, disconnected from human history. But surely the first duty of a chronicler is to establish his own history within the greater flow of time. So I write 8th August 1733 and rejoin common humanity.

  How good it is to be abroad on the river, in a ten-man canoe with Juripari before me, Caixa at my back, and all the vegetable riches of the Rio do Ouro arrayed before me. Cidade Maravilhosa had become oppressive and hostile; not in the physical sense - that would not be tolerated, not even from Zemba and his military claque - but to my qualities, my profession, my beliefs. The City of Marvels is a City of Blind Faith. I had believed in the aîuri, that wise body of índio morbichas and ebomis from the escaped black community, to steer the community sanely and sagely, but it has been filled with pagés and young warriors under Zemba’s sway. A council where older and more careful heads - I count myself among them - are shouted down by the zeal of young males is not beneficial to the community.

  This is the fifth day of the expedition, and we are now running downstream. At good speed and in good heart we set off from the cidade and made twenty leagues a day upriver, taking us into the high Rio do Ouro beyond the exploration of any Paulista bandeira. Here are índio nations that have never seen a white face before, yet the canoe parties we encountered - Juripari found a simplified Waika could effect basic communication - knew of the Marvelous City and the great caraíba who walked between worlds.

  I was initially nonplussed to find the levels on the Alta Rio do Ouro to be lower than at Cidade Maravilhosa, the precise reverse of what one would expect for a flood descending from the headwaters. But the scientist, in the face of conflicting facts and theory, always modifies theory to reality. A set of measurements taken below the cidade will confirm if the river is filling from the lower courses. I have one set of measurements now, from a point some three leagues beneath the quilombo as drawn on my rudimentary chart of the Rio do Ouro fluvial system - some fifteen as the river wends - and they seem to support my general hypothesis. A second set taken at tonight’s camp will put the seal on it . . . .

  ‘Aîuba!’

  Over floods and centuries the Rio do Ouro, rounding a prominent ridge, had eroded a wide bow, almost a bay. Falcon’s canoe cut close to the bluff, doubled the point, and found itself bow to bow with a fleet. Falcon saw paddles, bright brass, the glint of sun from steel, plumed hats.

  ‘Scarlet and buff!’ he cried. ‘Portuguese soldiers!’

  The Manaos swiftly, sweetly reversed their seating in the canoe, dug at the water with their paddles. Falcon’s smaller, lighter craft could outpace the heavily laden war canoes, but there was headway to be lost; and as he came about and seized his own paddle to lend his speed to the craft the pursuers bent to their blades. The chase was on. A dull pop, little louder than a musket, and a plume of water flew up some paddle-lengths to the left of the canoe. Another, and Falcon saw the ball pass with fluttering howl and bounce three times from the water before vanishing.

  ‘Paddle for your lives!’ Falcon shouted. He slipped the glass out of his pocket. Six swivel guns bow-mounted in heavy, thirty-man war canoes. As he glassed the soldiery - a dozen colonial infantry in each of the lead boats, dress coats patched and mold-stained after weeks on the river - the swivel gun spoke again. The ball bounced from the river in a splash of spray that soaked Falcon and cleared the canoe between Juripari and a Manao deserter called Ucalayí. A narrow target and the flat trajectory over which the Portuguese were firing had served thus far, but soon the gunners would load shot rather than ball and make murder of them.

  ‘Caixa! The muskets.’

  She was already rodding the first of the two pieces that Falcon had kept sacrosanct from Zemba’s requisitioners. A woman of skills is a pearl beyond price. Falcon drew on the red-and-gold division flag in the stern of the center war canoe. Before it sat an officer in dress uniform, his tricorn hat edged with feathers, grimly gripping the sides of the canoe. Falcon recognized Capitan de Araujo of the Barro do São José do Rio Negro. A simple shot, but Falcon lets his sight slide forward to the buff-coated gunner bent over his piece in the bow.

  ‘Steady, hold her steady!’ It was a delicate calculus; the cease-paddling made the shot surer but necessarily brought them into range to the muskets of the colonial infantry. At his earliest clear shot Falcon discharged in a crack and cloud of smoke. Zemba’s cartridges answered truly. The gunner jerked and went down into the floor of the war canoe, shot clean through the crown of the head. A roaring jeer went up from the pursuers; the body was rolled without let or ce
remony into the river. Full five swivel guns replied, their shots falling all around the canoe, some so close water slopped into the dugout. The paddlers bent to their task; dark river water peeled away from the bow. Caixa handed Falcon the second musket and reloaded the discharged piece. The musketeers in the índio canoes were risking longer shots now, at extreme range and wildly inaccurate but sufficient to keep Falcon off his aim. And it was as he had feared: rounds of canister shot were being handed down the length of the gunboats.

  ‘Steady, I have him I have him . . .’

  ‘Aîuba, we cannot yield any more headway,’ Juripari said.

  ‘Steady, steady . . .’

  The capitan was clear in his sight. Cut the command off at the head. Falcon squeezed the trigger. The lock closed; the flint flared. Falcon saw the hat fly from the officer’s head into the stream; then glowing slow-matches met touch-holes.

  ‘Down! All down!’

  The river flew up around Falcon as if shattered like glass; splinters flew up from the raked gunwales, but the hull held, by Jesus and Mary; the shot bounced from that adamant forest trunk. A sigh; Juripari, endlessly surprised to find the side of his head shot away, slid gently into the river.

  ‘Lighten, lighten!’ Caixa commanded in lingua geral. Supplies, water, the second musket, all cartridge and shot but for a sniper’s handful, followed Juripari. Falcon watched with leaden heart the black water close over his beautiful, precise, civilized instruments. He rolled his journal into a tight cylinder and pushed it into the bamboo tube he had designed for just such a pass: so closely capped as to be watertight, in extremis it might be thrown into the river in the vain hope that it might someday, some year be found and returned to the French Academy of Sciences. The canoe surged forward. Pirogues broke through the drifting bank of powder-smoke and gave chase. Falcon lay prone in the stern, sighting over the gunwale, dissuading the musketeers from incautious fire. Alone in the canoe Caixa’s head was up as she read the varzea for a landmark.

  ‘Cover me!’ Caixa shouted. Falcon wiped the spray from his green glasses and let crack at the lead musketeer. The weapon flew from the soldier’s hands, shattered in the lock. Caixa touched a fuse from Falcon’s smoldering pan; with a shriek and rush the signal rocket went up beside his head and burst in brief bright raining stars. Its detonation rolled across the roof of the forest; startled hoatzins plunged clumsily from their roost. The soldiers exchanged hand signals; the two hindmost canoes backed water and turned.

  Then two gleaming bolts stabbed out like lightning from either bank and pierced the disengaging canoes through and again. A wavering shriek rose from the canoe on the left bank; a ballista bolt had run an índio paddler through the thigh, a terrible, mortal wound. The water rippled and parted, lines appeared from beneath the surface. Invisible defenders hauled the hapless canoes in to shore. The soldiers tried to hack the lines with bayonets, but they were already within the short range of the repeating crossbows. A storm of bolts annihilated the crews; those who leaped into the river to save their souls were run down by bowmen loping along the shore. The soldiers’ thigh-boots filled with water and dragged them under the black water.

  The chase had become a rout, the entrapped canoes circling, firing into the varzea as they tried to withdraw. Twice again Zemba’s ballistas struck, once capsizing an entire canoe. Soldiers and índios alike cried pitifully as the Iguapá hunters waded thigh-deep into the water, shooting them like fish with their poisoned darts. Falcon found his body trembling from the excitement and the pure, dispassionate efficiency with which Cidade Maravilhosa’s defenders set about destroying their enemies to the last man. Yet Falcon’s exultation was partial, and brief. Even as Zemba’s defenders had repulsed the attack by water, raiding parties of índios and caboclo mercenaries had attacked and set torch to the manioc plantations.

  The boy poled the pirogue through the trees. An oil lamp, a wick in a clay pot set on the prow, struck reflections from the night-black water. Cayman eyes shone red then sank beneath the surface. Father Luis Quinn stood in the center of the frail skiff; black on darkness, an occlusion. To the boy he seemed to float over the drowned forest. Fragments of voice carried across the water, heated and impatient; the lights of the observatory passed in and out of view as the boy steered among the root buttresses and strangler figs. A fish leaped, splashed, its belly pale.

  ‘Here,’ Luis Quinn said softly. The pirogue halted without a ripple. Quinn stepped into the knee-deep water and waded toward the light and the voices. The observatory had been built on a high point to give an uninterrupted window onto the sky; now it was the only building of any consequence above water in Cidade Maravilhosa and therefore the natural conclave for the aîuri. Worlds flickered across Quinn’s vision as he slogged from the water, leaves clinging to his black robe; worlds so close he could touch them, worlds of water. The voices were clear now.

  ‘The revetments will be overtopped by morning,’ he heard Zemba’s musical voice say as he entered the observatory.

  ‘God and Mary be with all here.’ The aîuri of Cidade Maravilhosa were seated in a democratic circle on the floor of the great room, Falcon’s calculations and theorems crawling around them like regiments of ants. Quinn kicked off his saturated leather slippers and took his place among them. The hem of his black robe dripped on to the foot-polished wood. The aldermen crossed themselves.

  ‘This is clearly an artificial phenomenon,’ Falcon said in his halting lingua geral. Even in the half-light of palm-oil lamps he wore his glasses. Quinn noticed Caixa squatting on her hams in the deeper shadow at the edge of the hut. The waiting woman. ‘If my expedition had been permitted to continue its planned course I am in no doubt that we would have encountered a . . . a . . .’ He gave the word in French.

  ‘A dam,’ Quinn said in the lingua.

  ‘Yes, a dam. It is clear that the Rio do Ouro has been dammed with the intention of flooding the quilombo and rendering us helpless,’ Falcon said. ‘To construct such an artifact - I have made some calculations as to the size and strength required- requires an army of labor. There is only one person in this vicinity who can set whole populations to work.’

  ‘And set whole populations to war,’ Zemba said. He turned to Luis Quinn. ‘Did you see, Mair? Were you there when the Portuguese maggots burned our crops? I had thought we might see you, leading us to battle with the high cross. But I did not see you. Did anyone see the Mair? Anyone here?’ Zemba’s young cocks crowed behind him. Quinn hung his head. He had expected the admonition; it was meet and right, but his pride, his damnable, Satanic pride wanted to crow back. He saw a pewter mug in his hand as he had seen it in so many worlds, in those worlds stopped himself from murder and yet in this world nothing could be changed.

  ‘I was . . . away.’ He caught Falcon’s look of surprise. Murmurs sped from mouth to mouth; the aîuri rolled and swayed on their thin kapok-stuffed cushions. Oil flames bent on their wicks as a sudden warm gust possessed the observatory. ‘You must trust me when I tell you that our troubles here are only part of a greater conflict, a war waged across all worlds and times, so vast that I cannot encompass it.’

  ‘Troubles. Ah, that explains it, then.’

  Flames flickered across worlds.

  ‘I cannot explain it to you; I barely apprehend it myself. Nothing is at it seems. Our existence is a veil of illusion, and yet in a thousand worlds, I see the quilombo between fire and water, the torch and the flood.’

  Consternation among the old men, muttered aggressions among the young.

  ‘And among these thousand worlds, did you find an answer?’ For all his feathers and finery Zemba seemed diminished, dismissed, desperate to regain some degree of stature before his men. This is when we are at our most dangerous, thought Luis Quinn the swordsman, when our pride is broken before our friends. ‘For if I understand this rightly, the Portuguese capitan’s great guns and Father Diego Gonçalves’ men can sail right over our defenses and annihilate us to the last infant.’

  ‘
I do not need to go out among the worlds to find the answer to that,’ Quinn said. ‘Dr Falcon.’

  The Frenchman pushed his glasses up his nose.

  ‘It is very simple. The dam must be destroyed.’

  The young, aggressive men all started to bellow questions.

  ‘Silence,’ Zemba shouted. ‘How may this be achieved?’

  ‘This also is quite simple. A sufficient charge of powder, placed in proximity to that part of the dam under greatest hydrostatic pressure, would effect a breach that would swiftly carry all away.’

  Zemba squatted on his hams, supporting himself with his stick.

  ‘How much powder would be required?’

  ‘I have done calculations on this as well. It is a simple linear analysis; every hour the pressure on the dam increases, thus decreasing the amount of explosive we require. However, every hour we wait makes an attack more likely; if we attack within the next day, I believe our magazine of powder would suffice to breach the dam.’