Brasyl

“Hello again,” she says, and slaps half a handcuff around Edson’s wrist.

She ducks under the assassin’s Q-blade strike; delivers a crunching kick to the solar plexus that sends him reeling, agonized, out of the sanctorum; and slaps the other half of the handcuffs around the astonished Fia’s arm. “You’d just end up in two hundred kilometers of Atlantic,” she says. “And you’re no use to us there.” She hauls on the chain linking Edson and Fia. The doors swing wide; they fall through every door at once into the silver light. A billion lives, a billion deaths flash through Edson. He needs to cry piss vomit laugh pray ejaculate praise roar in ecstasy. Then he is standing in light, sunlight, on raindamp concrete, by a low curb surrounding a statue of a man in soccer kit holding boldly aloft the kind of torch that only appears in statuary and political party logos. The man is bronze, and on the sides of the plinth are plaques in the same ritual metal bearing names. Legendary names, galactic names. Jairzinho and Ronaldo Fenómeno. Socrates, and that other Edson: Arantes do Nascimento. Before him is a curved triumphal gateway in mold-stained white-and-blue-painted concrete and the words Stadio Mario Filho.

Edson is in a place he’s never been before. The Maracanã Stadium.

“Rio?” Fia asks wearily, as if one more wonder or horror and she would lie down in the damp gutter and pull the trash over her.

“What’s going on here?” Edson demands, frowning at the verdigrised plaques. “Where’s the 2030 Seleçao that won right here, and 2018 in Russia? When are we?”

“That’s a slightly tricky question,” the blonde woman says. “You see, we’re not really any time at all. We’re sort of outside time; it just happens to look like the Maracanã from my era. When I come from, we haven’t won yet. We lost. That’s the point. And it’s not really Rio either. All you have to do is go as far as the edge of the dropoff zone and you’ll see.”

Edson almost hauls Fia off her feet. The cuffs the cuffs — he’s forgotten they are chained together. Fia is still looking around her dazed, spun out on the chemical tail of two Teixeira corporação sleeping pills.

“Oh shit sorry about that,” the woman says. She fiddles in a pants pockets for a key. “I didn’t want you wandering off; if you’d got separated, we’d never have found you again.” Two oiled clicks, then the woman stows the shiny chrome handcuffs in her belt. Edson rubs his wrist. He never ever wants to get any closer to things police than that.

“What are you, some kind of cop?” he throws back over his shoulder as he crosses the cobbles.

“Hey. I am not a cop,” the woman snaps. But Edson’s discovered a weird thing: as he stands between the flagpoles that line the curb and moves his head from side to side, the trees and office buildings across the road move with him.

“What is going on here?”

At the same time Fia says, “Where are all the people?”

“Coffee,” the woman says. “This needs explaining over coffee.” She places an order for three cafezinhos from an old black man with gray gray hair at a little tin stall in front of the colo

“Think of it as a kind of movie set, only it’s solid and real all the way through,” the woman says. The old man leans his elbows on the counter of his little stand. “As real as anything really is. It’s a safe haven. We have hundreds of them, probbably billions of them. This one just happens to be the size and shape of the Maracanã Stadium circa 2006. I’m not actually much of a futebol fan, but the location has a kind of special significance to us. I’ve got places all over the place, but this is sort of our office. Corporate headquarters, so to speak. Fortress of Solitude.”

Fia has been turning slowly around, manga-eyes wide.

“It’s a pocket universe,” she says. “That’s so clever. You found a way into the multiversal quantum computer and hacked it out.”

“It’s a very small universe, like I said — just big enough to fit the stadium into. I’d’ve loved a beach, maybe the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, the Copa, but we daren’t get overambitious. The Order knows we’re there somewhere; they just haven’t been able to find us yet.”

Edson crumples his plastic cup and flings it away from him. A gust of wind rattles it across the cracked concrete.

“But that was real, and the coffee was hot and pretty bad. How can you make something out of nothing? I can feel it, I can touch it.”

“It’s not nothing,” the old man on the coffee stand says. “It’s time and information, the most real things there are.”

“You can reprogram the multiversal quantum computer,” Fia says with a light of revelation dawning in her eyes. The woman and the old man look at each other.

“You’ve got it,” the woman says with a cheeky grin. “I knew we hadn’t made a mistake with you. Okay, well I think you’re about ready to go inside. It can be a bit… disorienting at first, but you do get used to it.”

“Just one moment,” Edson demands. Fia, capoeira woman, and bad coffee man are already at the blue-and-white colo

The woman throws up her hands, shakes her head in self-exasperation. “You know, I completely forgot. I just have so much on, I am completely ditzy.” She offers a hand to Edson. “My name is Marcelina Hoffman, and I am what is known as a Zemba. I’m kind of like a superheroine; I turn up in the nick of time and rescue people. Now, come on, there’s a lot more to show you.” Edson briefly shakes the offered hand. Glancing back from the tiled lobby, he can no longer see the coffee stall, but the plaza flickers with more-guessed than glimpsed figures: ghosts of an old black man, a short white woman, a dekasegui and a cor-de-canela boy in a sharp white suit.

“So did Brasil really win in 2030?” The old man falls in beside Edson as he ascends the sloping entry tu

“Yeah, we won,” Edson says. “Against the United States.”

“The United States?” the old man says, then starts to laugh so painfully, so wheezily Edson thinks he is having a heart attack. “The ianques playing futebol? In the World Cup? What was the score?”

“Hah!” the old man says. “And Uruguay?”

“They haven’t qualified since 2010.”

The man punches fist into palm. “Heh heh. Son, you have made an old man so very, very happy. So so happy.” Chuckles bubble up in him all the way along the curving corridor lined with photographs of the great and glorious. Edson stops; something in a photo of a goalkeeper making a spectacular save has caught his eye. And the date. July 16, 1950.

“That’s you, isn’t it?”

“It’s not there in the original Maracana. I mean the one where I come from. And it never was that photo.”

Marcelina holds open the door to the presidential box. Edson steps into the blinding light. Two hundred thousand souls greet him. He reels, then draws himself upright and walks deliberately, gracefully down the red-carpeted steps to the rail where Fia stands, glowing in the attention. Senhors, Se