Brasyl

Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.

“Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a computer everything can be a computer. Ah!”

Edson shakes her again. “Get up!”

Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, “What is go away let me sleep.”

“The Order is here.”

She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.

“What?”

Edson claps his hand over Fia’s mouth. The sound the smell the state of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia’s mouth two flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most attenuated fringes to pick out nanoshifts of pressure, rustles on the edge of audibility, a quantum’s difference in the slit of light under the door.

“He’s gone. Now, with me. Don’t say a word.”

Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid stupid rich man’s apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.

“That way.” High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. “Piece of piss. Just don’t look down.”

Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the crossing.

“Hey! Look at me!”

Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The great ship swarms like an ants’ nest spiked with battery acid. The hunter is still in there.

Yanzon, admonitory of the Order, moves unopposed through the residential boulevards of the Teixeira corporacão, destroying the enemies of the Order. The alarms are irritating him now, and he has had to eliminate a few of the more bold seguranças; but he has established dread and awe across the EMBRAÇA headquarters. They showed him once the order the Order enforces. When he crosses and becomes superposed with all his alters, that is the truth. There is a universal mind, and all are notions of it. The prelates and the presidents, the pontiffs and prime ministers call it the Parousia, the end-time, but the eye of a simple man’s faith can better know it as the kingdom of God. The Enemy says that is a lie, an endlessly repeated dream grinding ever slower as the multi verse wheels down, and they seek to break it, to wake the dreamers. They call this freedom and hope. To Yanzon it is pride, and a

He glances up. Through three floors he sees Alcides Teixeira trying to escape within a cadre of his bodyguards. They are heavily armed and equipped little sensor ghosts. Small avail against a hunter who can shoot through solid bulkheads. Yanzon sets arrow to his Q-bow, aims up through the ceiling. He whirls. Multiple contacts, closing fast. Oceanus’s marines have found him. Yanzon lowers his bow and breaks into a loping run. His mission now is to destroy the Q-cores and reach the extraction point. Or kill himself. The Order has always understood that its agents die with their secrets. One fast, easy pass with the Q-blade; almost accidental in its casualness. Yanzon has often imagined what it would feel like. He imagines his flesh parting down to the quantum as something silver and so subtle, so painless you would only suspect when the blood began to rush. No pain. No pain at all. And no sin, no sin at all.

Edson counts windows. Eleven, twelve.

“I feel sick,” Fia says. “Here.”

Lights burn behind drapery. If he had a Q-blade, Edson could cut his way in neat as neat, a big circle of glass just falling away in front of him onto the bedroom pile. He doesn’t, but he can trust that Oceanus builders did it as cheap and shoddy and minimum wage as every other piece of work done for rich people. He grabs the stanchion, swings up, and punch-kicks forward. The whole doorframe comes away from its track and swings inward.

“Ruuuu

“This is the quantum computer level,” Fia says.

“I know,” says Edson grimly. “There’s only one way off this ship. Can you work it? You have to work it.”

They exit the stairwell the same instant as Yanzon comes around the corner. Only the fact that they should be dead saves them. In that instant of astonishment, Fia hits the security sca

“Come on, he can cut his way through here like butter,” says Edson. The i

“This is it?” Edson asks. The gateway to the multiverse. But Fia has pulled off her top, an action Edson always finds deeply deeply sexy, and coronas of gray light flicker around the cogs on her belly as the wheels begin to turn. The Q-cores answer with the ghost-light of other universes. It is a terreiro, Edson thinks. Junk magic. A loud crash tells Edson the hunter is now in the outer lab. Of course. They may be invisible to him, but he wants the cores, the Q-cores. The Order is Jesuitical in its thoroughness. And there is only one door to this windowless room. No, there are a million doors, a billlion doors. And in that thought they open. Edson reels, blinking in the silver light. Figures in the light; he is lost in a mirror-maze; a thousand Edsons stretch away from him on every side, an infinite regress. Those closest are mirror images, but as they recede into the light differences of dress, style, stature appear until, tear-blind in the glare of the multiverse, they might be angels, radiant as orixás. And he feels them, he knows them, every detail of their lives is available to him, just by looking. Entangled. As he knows them, they know him and one by one turn toward him. Ghost-wind streams Fia’s red hair back from her head: she is the Mae do Santo, and all her sisters attending her. Some of the doors are empty, Edson notices. And Edson also notices a squeal of plastic paneling coming apart at the quantum scale. He whirls as the Q-blade completes the circle. The wall panel crashes forward. The assassin’s amber I-shades crawl with data and trajectories and killing curves, none of which he needs because he has them there, right here right now, at arrow point.

“Now Fia, now anywhere!” Edson yells as the hunter draws, fires. Then time gels, time goes solid as the arrow drifts from the bow, cutting a line of Cerenkov radiation through the air. Edson sees it bore toward his heart, and then there is a jump, a quantum jump, and the arrow is in another place, another doorway, flickering from universe to universe as the probability of it killing this Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas dwindles to zero, as he becomes superposed with everywhere at once. The hunter gives an incoherent, rageful cry, drops his astonishing bow, and pulls the Q-blade. And a fourth figure is in the place above universes with them; the blonde short loira woman, the miraculous capoeirista: a thousand, a million alters of her, charging across the multiverse. In one instant she is a universe away; the next she arrives, panting, beside Edson.