Brasyl

“I was finding I couldn’t get anything done with the noise,” Marcelina says. Down in the sacred circle of green a match is in progress. Edson knows instinctively what game it is. No other game matters. But it is not one Fateful Final, it is thousands, flickering through each other, ghosts of players, crosses from other universes, goal kicks into the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Edson watches the cursed Barbosa ruefully pick the ball out of the back of the net; then reality shifts and he is rolling it out past the strikers coming in on the back of the save on a long throw to Juvenal.

“I’m used to it,” says Moaçir Barbosa. “On average, we win. But hey, the USA two one? Oh, I ca

Edson lifts his hands from the rail.

“Okay, this is all very good and I’m prepared to believe I’m in some bubble outside space and time or some private little universe or whatever, but I have one question. What is it all about?”

Marcelina applauds. The sound rings around the eerily silent Maracanã. “Correct question!”

“And the answer?”

“The universe — the original universe, the one in which we all lived out lives the first time — died long ago. Not died — it never dies, it just goes on expanding forever until every particle is so far from every other that it’s effecctively in a universe of its own. We haven’t reached that stage yet; the universe is so old and cold there is no longer enough energy to sustain life, or any other process except quantum computation. But intelligence always tries to find a way out, a way not to die with the stars, and so it created a vast quantum simmulation of its own history, and entered it. And we live it over and over and over again, ever more slowly as the universe cools toward absolute zero, until in the end-time it stops completely and we are frozen in the eternal present.”

Edson, always thin, always undernourished, shivers in his sharp white malandro’s suit.

’’I’m alive,” he says.

“Yes. No. An accurate-enough simulation is virtually indistinguishable from reality. It’s only when you look up close that the cracks begin to appear.”

“Quantum weirdness,” Fia says.

“No way around it. The quantum nature of the simulation would always betray its true nature. That’s what the Order was created to protect.”

“Fia told me the Sesmarias are old fidalgo families. How long have we known about this?”

“I think there have always been individuals who understood the multiiverse. But the Order has only existed since the middle-of the eighteenth ce

Edson’s head reels. Stop this stop this. Give me sun and beer; give me a Keepie-Uppie Queen and a hot deal.

“We’re dead. We’re ghosts, so what? We all die in the end.”

He feels Fia’s hand clutch his.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she says. “All available energy goes into ru

“The Order calls it the Parousia.”

“But instead, all that energy could be put into something else. Someething unpredictable. A random quantum event, like the one that inflated into this multiverse in the first place. A new creation. But you’d have to end the simulation first. You would have to turn off the Parousia.”

“Wait wait wait wait,” says Edson. “You turn it off, we all die.”

“Maybe not,” Fia says, overbiting her bottom lip in that way she doesn’t know she does but Edson finds sweet-sexy. “’A black hole does have hair.’ Information could be conserved through a singularity.”

’’I’m not a scientist, you know,” Edson says.

“Me neither,” says Marcelina. “But I have made some science shows. Mostly about plastic surgery.”

“That’s whar you’re fighting for,” Fia says, and her eyes are bright, seeing to the end of the universe and beyond, reflecting that new light. “Death in the cold and dark, or the hope of rebirth in the fire.”

“You should write scripts,” Marcelina says. “That’s very good. Very poetic. This is what the Order fears; that’s why we are fighting it all across the multiverse, for a chance at something different, something magical. Places like this, they’re a start, a tiny start. Edson, I need a word with your girlfriend, in private.”

Edson turns again to the endless final. The bright watered green, the sky that only Rio makes so blue, the many colors of the crowd: ghosts, echoes. His own hand on the rail seems so thin and insubstantial he could see through it. He turns his face up to the sun and it is cold.

“Scared the hell out of me too, son,” Barbosa says. He leans on the rail, decorously spits over the edge of the presidential box. “But whatever it is, this is the world we live in. We’re men; we make our own way. Maybe it all begins anew; maybe we die and that’s the end of it, no heaven, no hell, nothing. But I know I can’t go on living what happened to me over and over and over, slower and slower until it all freezes. That’s death. This … this is nothing.” He looks around. “That was quick. I’ll leave you young things” He climbs the steps, passes Fia on the red carpet.

“She offered you a job, didn’t she?” Edson says.

“It’s getting to be a habit.”

“And did you take it?”

“What’s the alternative? For someone like me, what’s the alternative?”

“But nothing for Edson.”

She can’t look at him. Below them, in a million universes, Augusto lifts high the Jules Rimet trophy to a silent Maracanã.

“I can’t make that decision for you.”

“Did you even try?”

“It’s too dangerous. You’re not a player; I am, for better or worse. You can’t come with me. Go back; we can send you back, it’s easy. I can do it. The Order is looking for me now.”

“But I wouldn’t see you again, would I? Not if the Order is hunting you.”

She shakes her head, chews her lip. There will be tears soon. Good, Edson thinks. I deserve them.

“Ed … ”

“Don’t call me that. I hate that. Call me my name. I’m Edson.”

“Edson, you have a home to go to. You have all your family, and all those brothers and Dona Hortense and your Aunt Marizete and all those friends. You’ve got Carlinhos … Mr. Peach. He loves you. I don’t know what he’ll do without you.”

“Maybe,” Edson says, biting his lip because he can feel it coming and he does not want her to see it, not while he is hurt and full of rage, “maybe I love you.”

She puts her hand up to her mouth, tries to push his words back into unspoke

“Don’t say that, no, have you any idea how hard it is to hear you say that? How can I say this? This sounds the most callous thing. Edson, I died to you once already. I’m not her. I never was.”

“Maybe,” says Edson, “it’s you I love.”

“No!” Fia cries. “Stop saying this. I’m going, I have to go now, I have to do this quickly. You can’t come with me. Don’t look for me, don’t try and get in touch with me. I won’t look for you. Let me go back to being dead.”

She turns and walks up the red carpet. Marcelina opens the door. Edson knows what lies beyond that door: all the worlds in the multiverse. Once she steps through, she will disappear between the worlds and he will never be able to find her again. He will go back to his office at the back of Dona Hortense’s house in respectable hardworking Cidade de Luz. The fuss over the Q-cores will disappear as the police find easier meat to pick over. There will be other Keepie-Uppie Queens, other fut-volley teams, and there is the whole Habibi lanchonete business for De Freitas Global Talent. And on those rare clear nights in autumn and early spring he will look up beyond the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance to the stars themselves and the faint glow of the Milky Way, and see her out there, farther than any star, yet only a weave of the world away. The door is closing; Fia is already stepping through. One more step and he will lose her forever. And Edson finds he is ru