Brasyl (28 page)

"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.