Brasyl (46 page)

Marcelina looked down into the darkness where her enemy lay. She
lost, but she beat you. You are dead too.

Footsteps on wet rock.

Marcelina spun into defense. A man in loose dark clothing, formless
against the night. A thumbnail of white at his throat; priest's
vestments?

"If you want me you can have me, I'm dead anyway." She
stood upright, opened her arms.

"You can never win against yourself." A big man,
white-skinned, dark hair, hollow-cheeked; gaunt, she thought, with
more than age. His Portuguese was strangely accented, stiffly
archaic.

"So, who are you? Order or player!"

"I was an admonitory," the man said. "Now I am a
visitor. A traveler. An explorer. A recruiter, perhaps."

"Explorer of what?"

The man smiled. Marcelina could make our that he had the palest blue
eyes.

"You know that."

The sirens were close now.

"Recruiter?"

"What does one recruit for, if not a war!"

The sirens had shut down.

"Come with me," the priest said. "Here. Now. This is
the one chance you'll get. It will mean leaving everything you've
ever hoped for and loved behind, but you've lost those anyway, and
there are ways back. There are always ways back. There is a war, but
it's bigger than you ever thought. It's bigger than you can think.
It's your chance to make a universe. You are a maker. Come and make
reality."

Marcelina felt the multiverse open around her like wings, each
feather a universe. The priest turned away; a billion doors opened
before him.

"Who are you?" Marcelina shouted.

"Does it matter?"

What was there?
The Girl Who Came Back from the Dead
would be
a hell of a program, but no producer should ever be the star of her
own show. The husband, the beautiful children, the babies, the
stellar career—they would never happen. One thing she could do.

"I'm not a cop."

"Oh no," the priest said. "Never that."

"That's all right, then," Marcelina Hoffman said, and
stepped after him out among the universes.

The ball hangs motionless at the top of its arc. Freeze-framed behind
it, perfect sky perfect sunset perfect perfect sea. A hand reaches up
and smashes it hard over the net. The girl in the red baseball cap
and matching tanga dives, meets the ball with her two fists, a
beautiful block. Her partner follows the volley, times her jump and
is there to spike it down on to the enemy sand. Thigh muscles belly
muscles upper arms are in perfect definition. Asses in mathematically
curved precision. The breasts are high and firm and big, but they
move like real flesh. Cheekbones knife-sharp. Noses flattened,
kissy-kissy pert lippies.

They're stupidly fabulous, bur Edson's not watching them. He follows
the coconut boy sauntering over the sand with his machete and his
wares slung around his shoulder. He's in good shape, swimmer's
definition, muscles but not too many, natural not surgical. He sees
Edson looking over as he drags past, catches his eye. A toss of the
head. It's on for tonight. Edson turns and leaves the sunset beach
for the strip. Behind him robots scurry from scrapes to rake smooth
the sand, erasing all trace of his presence. The glory-girls do not
even glance away from their game.

Beaches, Edson has ruefully decided, are very overrated. Before him
rises the titanium-and-glass cliff of
Oceanus
. One hundred
and fifty vertical meters of inverted social order. Penthouses fringe
the beach-strip, then the restaurants, sea-view bars, clubs, casinos,
the high-marque specialist shops that consider themselves too
exclusive for the cavernous rain-forest ravine of the Jungle! Jungle!
shopping mall. Next up the apartments and hotels; higher still the
office units and businesses; higher again the medical centers and
manufacturing zones; and over all the airport occupies most of the
kilometer-and-a-half run of the top deck, apart from that sector at
the prow reserved for the golf course.

The great ship cruises just outside Brasilian territorial waters two
hundred kilometers off Pernambuco, shadowing the coast of Brasil
southward. Three hundred and fifty thousand citizens speak thirty
tongues; Portuguese, the only one Edson understands, among the least
and quaintest. Her twelve-million-ton deadweight can punch through
hurricanes, cyclones, taifuns. The nuclear reactor at her core
propels her at a lax, unceasing eight knots: a circumnavigation of
the world's continental shelves every three years; extraterritorial,
beyond national jurisdictions, the ultimate free-trade port and
corporate tax shelter. Category error.
Oceanus
is no ship:
she's an oceangoing city-state.

When the seguranças made him kneel hands clasped behind neck,
head bowed, Edson had been certain he had seconds to live. Assault
guns had stood over the raiders of the lost car-pound while the
mercenary crew buckled a tautliner cover over Cook/Chill Meal
Solutions. Two men in black had dragged Edson out of line across the
scabby concrete, scraping the polish off the toes of his good shoes,
and thrown him into the back of a black quiet car that said
money
more effectively than any hood ornament. Fia was already belted in,
fidgety with apprehension.

"I asked them to bring you," she whispered as car and truck
accelerated out of the dead mall. "It's not the Order; they
won't touch the guys, it's just us they're after. Me, I mean."
Edson understood. The Order would have left nothing alive in the
mall. There was a third player in the game.

By the third rodovia gantry Edson had worked out they were heading to
the airport. The convoy swept past the militar guard to the
air-freight terminal. Embraer bizjets stood on the apron with their
variable-geometry wings folded like anhingas'. A woman in a very
well-cut suit escorted Edson and Fia onto a bizjet. Her safety
demonstration as the bizjet taxied was as much a declaration of her
absolute power over her guests as instruction on what to do in the
eventuality of landing on water. Edson barely noticed when the plane
left the ground and he left the city of his birth and life for the
first time. He was entranced by a single word on suit-woman's lapel
badge:
Teixeira
.

Every man of business has his saints. Edson's are those who come from
nothing: the favelado become futebol legend; the Minas Gerais boy who
seduces the nation with his voice; the Paulistano who turns his kibe
stand into a global franchise; Alcides Teixeita.

He was born one of the landless; that great Brasilian archetype, the
drought-stricken peasant of the northeast sertão who, like so
many before, embarked on the trek to the silver city. His legend
began where all the others ended: at his first glimpse of the towers
of Fortaleza, and the sprawling favelas around them like scabs.
My
face to the boot, my wife to the streets
, he said, and he and
his wife got straight back onto the bus. The driver didn't charge
them. No one had ever done a return trip before. Alcides Teixeira had
taken a development loan from the MST, the Landless League, and
planted five hundred hectares of dust-poor sertão with
gene-modified rape seed. Within three years he was power farming
three thousand hectares. Within five years, he signed output deals
with Petrobras and Ipiranga and became EMBRAÇA. Twenty-six
years later Alcides Teixeira's land covered four continents with
green soy and yellow rape and was stealthing down the cool cool
hillsides upon the Fazenda Alvaranga. Such a man would be within that
golden circle privy to the secret order of the multiverse. Such a man
would dare use that information to his profit. Multiverse economic
modeling had been Fia's specialty in her world. Where there is a
differential, a boundary, there is money to be made across it.

His mind spinning with plans and potentialities, Edson saw the dawn
through the cabin window, spilling light across the shadowed land so
that it kindled and lit. He felt the breath catch in his throat.
Roads were silver wires. Rivers were gold. Every instant the pattern
of shadows across the land changed. Then Edson saw the blue curve of
the ocean. He pressed his face to his window. Big sea, getting
bigger. Whitecaps, white boats. Land gone now, nothing but open
ocean, and the plane settling toward it. The wing was changing shape,
unfolding its cruise sweepback. Edson felt the wheels slide out and
lock. The whitecaps were growing closer; Edson gripped the armrests.
There was nothing out there. How did that landing on water go again?
Lower. Engines roared, the pilot put the nose up, and the Teixeira
bizjet dropped sweet neat onto a pure white runway scuffed with
grubby tire marks. There were Embraers at stands, a control tower,
even a dinky terminal. Suit was out of her seat while the plane was
still rolling. She stood in the aisle, arms braced on seatbacks.

"Welcome to
Oceanus
."

The daughters of Alcides Teixeira were goddesses. They had been built
that way. Krekamey and Olinda: tall and pale from surgery, languid
hands and thighs of gold. Creatures like Edson Jesus Oliveira de
Freitas were beneath their regard, but their elongated, almond eyes
opened as far as surgery would permit at the sight of the
cyber-wheels turning slowly on Fia's belly.

One thing you can't buy, putas.

Alcides Teixeira led the tour personally, pointing out the offices
and company apartments. Heroes are usually shorter than you imagine;
but Edson hadn't expected the bad skin. The sertão had
engrained itself in acne pocks and sun-creased lines. Perhaps the
thing about Alcides Teixeira's level of wealth was the power to say,
World, live with it.

"And this is where you'll be working."

Cute muscly boys in EMBRAÇA high-visibility coveralls were
already installing the Q-cores in the huge glass-walled room high
above the sea: blue, blue glass. Fia berated them:
Not there; when
the sun gets round this side of the ship, I won't be able to see a
damn thing.

"We had a hell of a job catching you," Alcides Teixeira
said. "You just kept running."

"We thought you were the . . . Order," Edson said.
Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira, Alcides Teixeira of EMBRAÇA was
standing beside him, close enough to smell his aftershave, talking to
him. The glorious daughters moved before him like visions. But he
could not deny it was embarrassing, the realization that the
pistoleiros at Liberdade from whom Edson had rescued Fia were in fact
Teixeira private seguranças. They had been successfully
running away from salvation.

"Son, if we know about Fia here, we know about the Order. We can
take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos."

Edson ventured, "Mr. Teixeira, if I could just say, you've
always been a hero to me. I'm a businessman myself" Never be
without a card. First rule of business. He pressed it on Alcides
Teixeira.

"Talent and light entertainment. Good on you, son." He
nodded at his glorious daughters. "See those two? Bloody spoiled
bitches, the pair of them. Spend all their money on their tits and
asses." Krekamey-taller, blonder, weirder-scowled. "There's
a job for you here if you want it. We'll find you something to
exercise your talents, son."

"Mr. Teixeira, if you don't mind, I'd rather exercise my talents
for myself." In thirty minutes down from the landing strip Edson
had seen enough of Oceanus to know it was a ship of death. Death to
Edson, to all he hoped to be. A kept boy, he would grow lazy and fat
and doped and boozed and sun-soaked and dissolve into nothing. Dead.

Alcides Teixeira balked momentarily, not a man accustomed to refusal;
then he grinned hugely and slapped Edson on his bird-frail back.

"Of course of course, I'd say that myself. Paulistanos always
had a great work ethic."

Edson rides rhe moveway along the central spine of the great ship.
The perspectives of the central strip awe: they're designed to. A
straight kay and half; fifty meters vertical. The walls are lined
with baroque balcony walks and cupolas, restaurants hang like weaver
bird nests from the roof. Airbridges, elevator shafts, escalator runs
crisscross the airspace. Kinetic fabric sculptures flex and bow in
the air-conditioning. The air is fresh with ozone and saltiness. Main
Street opens up into the central atrium of Jungle! Jungle! the
forested heart of
Oceanus
; the vast cathedral-windows of Dawn
and Sunset on opposite sides of the ship flood the chirping,
chittering, dripping, reeking mass of verdure with true
photosynthesizable light. Macaws whoop, toucans swoop, and birds of
paradise flutter. Stores are tiny jeweled nests set among the
foliage. Behind the storefronts are labels Edson and Efrim alike
would kill for, but his back would blister at the touch of unearned
silk. But Efrim lately is a stranger, a woman with whom he once had a
fine, elegant affair. Even Edson is numb among the retail
opportunities.

It's a hell of a walk home from the beach, through the twilight
ecologies of
Oceanus
, but Edson knows this world is killing
Fia. He doesn't pretend to understand what she's doing up in the R&D
levels—not even Mr. Peach could explain it, he suspects—but
he knows what he sees dragging back from the office, piling into the
sofa to sit curled up against the armrest silently sullenly
flickering her eyes over
A World Somewhere
on her I-shades,
fridge-feeding, putting on weight. And sex is completely out the
window.

So Edson has this thing he does, because a man has to.

The security jockey on the desk at the residential level is a Maceio
boy watching
Bang!Bang
on his transparent desktop. He despises
Edson but must respect the Teixeira authority on his I-shades. Most
of
Oceanus
's labor has been shipped in from the northeast.
Is
this what we aspire to?
Edson thinks.
Cheap offshore meat
exports. Brasil, the nation of the future, and always will be.