Onions slid into the pan with a hiss. It was an old family recipe, a slave dish from the coffee estate days. Captains and masters were the Alvarangas, but they faded and failed until only one remains of the name. Edson has an enduring fantasy that Mr. Peach makes him son and heir of fazenda Alvaranga.
“Why so surprised? It’s a big multiverse and a small world, even smaller in quantum computing. I was an adviser on her doctoral dissertation in computational and information physics. Her thesis was that all mind is a multiversal quantum computer and therefore a fundamental element of reality, and also linked across universes by quantum entanglement. I always enjoyed sessions with her; she was one of my top students. Scarily bright. We’d argue the toss — she had a foul temper. Great arguer. Have you discovered that yet? Her theory was that the multiverse is a massively multiply parallel quantum computer and therefore a mindlike state. I’d argue that was metaphysics at best, religion at worst: whatever way you looked at it you ended up back at the strong anthropic principle, and that’s another word for solipsism. There’s nothing special about us. Given enough universes, something like us is bound to occur, many times over.”
A rich tang of garlic, then the astringent perfume of peppers.
“I’m not surprised she’s working with the quantumeiros — I couldn’t see anything in academia or even research giving her that adrenaline rush, but I can’t say I’m delighted.”
Crayfish now, fresh from the pond-farm up on the hill under the wind turbines. The power farms with their rotors and golden fields of rape crept down on the Fazenda Alvaranga while the housing projects crept up; street by overbright street and Mr. Peach gave his heritage away to Edson table-lamp by painting by vase. It is as if he wants the Alvarangas to be gone, wants to disappear completely. Mr. Peach slides a serving straight from the pan onto a plate; drops a little chopped coriander on top, green on yellow. A patriotic dish.
“But the real question is: have you fucked her yet?”
“I thought we’d agreed that we could see whoever we liked, that it didn’t matter.” Knowing that Mr. Peach had a wide circle of friends straight and gay, none of whom he would ever dress up in Lycra and cape.
“It doesn’t matter until it’s one of my ex-students.”
Edson had been uncomfortable with Mr. Peach’s former relationship with Fia since the Captain Superb/Miracle Boy session. They had been through Captain Truth/Domino Boy, Bondage Man/Pony-Lad and Lord Lycra/ Spandex Kid, and Edson still feels as if he is sharing her.
“Well, she may be super-bright, but I bet you didn’t know she watches A World Somewhere. Addicted to the thing. She’ll download it and we could be having a beer or eating something or even at a club and if she doesn’t like the music, I’ll see her watching it on her I-shades.”
“She always was like that.”
Edson pushed his plate away from him.
“I’m nor hungry.”
“Yes you are. You’re always hungry. Does your mother not feed you?”
“My mother loves me. You don’t talk about my mother like that.”
They’re having a fight over a woman. Edson can’t believe it. They’re letting a girl come between them. And Mr. Peach has taught Edson much more than postcoital physics. He has educated him in other disciplines: shaving and how to buy and drink wine and shake cocktails; dressing for style not fashion; ten ways to knot a tie; etiquette and how to talk to people to make them appreciate and remember you and call you back and what women expect and like and what men like and expect and how to be respectful but still get your own way in a hierarchical society.
Once when he was very small, a man hung around outside the house and Edson asked Dona Hortense if he was his father. Why bless the child, no. The days when men would come round to play cards and drink were gone, but Edson remembers the heat of that embarrassment in his cheeks.
Edson glances over at Mr. Peach, the tanned skin, the wiry gray hair sprouting from his shirt collar, the thin legs rattling in the baggy shorts. You are the father I never knew, the father I suck off.
“Just eat it,” says Mr. Peach. “For me. I like making you things.”
Edson suspects that Mr. Peach may not have set the worlds of quantum physics ablaze, but in one area he excels. He’s a great cook of old slave food.
In Atom Shop Edson hunts for kissable moments. As she brushes between him and the big 3-D polymer printers, as she leans over to squirt the design from her I-shades into the renderer, as he bends with her to study the holoographic image of the noo shooz on the screen. A touch, a whisper, the scent of her perfume and honey-sweat and fabric conditioner but never contact.
“Good bag,” says the girl on the reception, who has eyes the size of mangoes and a cloud-catching look from the fumes. The place smells strongly of plastics, like glue-sniffers’ paradise. “This original?” Fia hands it to her. She holds it up to the light, turns it this way that way, squinting, peering. Atom Shop prints print necklaces, hats, earrings, formal masks, body armor, watches, costume shades, I-clothing, anything you can weave from smart polymers. Topmarque handbags. “Looks like it. We couldn’t print at that resolution.”
“I know,” says Fia clutching her bag back to her. “But you can do me these shoes.” She touches her I-shades and loads the pattern onto Atom Shop’s house system. Edson does not doubt it’s stolen. Bad thing to get shot for; copywrong violation on a pair of top-marque shoes. The girl loads up the cartridges, closes the transparent cover. Lights blink on, mostly yellow. The print heads rear like striking snakes, then bend to their furious business, mollecule by molecule, millimeter by millimeter, building the soles and heel-tips of a pair of Manolo slingbacks.
It will take about an hour for the shoes to print, so Fia leads Edson up into the third circle of Todos os Santos, the circle of the vendors. Recycled reconditioned reengineered reimagined are the straplines here. Car parts, washing machine engines, lathes taps and dies, entertainment equipment, jerry-built white goods, custom mopeds, domestic and civil robots, surveilllance systems, computers and memory, I-shades and guns — all constructed from the flow of parts that comes down the spiral from the next circle in, the circle of the dismantlers.
Circuit boards cook on coal griddles, release their lead solder like fat from pig-meat. Mercury baths grab gold from plated plugs and sockets. Homemade stills vaporize the liquid metal, depositing the heavy treasure. Two boys stir a stream of sand-sized processors into a plastic vat of reagent, dissolving the carbon nanotubes from their matrix. Two eight-year-olds sittting cross-legged on a soy bean sack test plastic from the heap beside them by heating it over a cigarette lighter and sniffing the fumes. Younger children rush handcarts of e-junk down from the central dump. This is the circle of the slaves, sold into debt indenture by parents crushed by 5,000 percent interest. The drones pause only to pick and scratch at their skins. The loudest sound is coughing. Wrecked neurology and heavy metal poisoning are endemic. Few here are our of teenage; few live so long. Those who make it do so with ruined health. Edson chokes on a waft of acid. All around him is a sense of heat, a sense of defilement. The air is sick with fumes. He folds a handkerchief over his mouth. Fia marches blithely ahead, untouched, untouchable, stepping over the rivulets of diseased cadmium yellow; toward the heart of Todos os Santos.
Edson did not think it was just shoes that brought her here. Supply-side economics built Nossa Senhora da Lixao from a tiny chip. The shady, dry understory of the interchange had been a fine place to set up businesses processing e-waste; out of the way and unseen. In those days the catadores pushed their handcarts ten kays along the highway verges to the old municipal dump at São Bernardo do Campo. The first driver to take a jeitinho to drop his load at the unfinished intersection had started the slow glacier of trash that over twenty years of accumulation made Todos os Santos the premier midden of the Southern Hemisphere. The population of a small town scavenges the slopes of the tech-trash mountain. By night it is extravagantly beautiful as twenty thousand torches and oil-lanterns bob and play across the ridges and valleys. Todos os Santos is big enough to have a geography: the Forest of Fake Plastic Trees, where wet ripped bags hang like Spanish moss from every spar and protrusion. The Vale of Swarf, where the metal industries dump their coils and spirals of lathe trim. The Ridge of Lost Refrigerators, where kids with disinfectant-soaked handkerchiefs over their faces siphon off CFCs into empty plastic Coke bottles slung like bandoliers around their shoulders. Above them, the peaks: Mount Microsoft and the Apple Hills; unsteady ziggurats of processor cubes and interfacers. Pickers crack them open with hammers and pry bars and deftly unscrew the components. A truck disgorges a load of terminally last-season I-shades, falling like dying bats. The catadores rush over the slippery, treacherous garbage. The fermenting trash raises the ambient air temperature three degrees. Evaporating moisture and volatiles linger in the peculiar dead spot in the wind patterns caused by the interchange: Our Lady of Trash is a true urban jungle: steamy, poisonous, diseased, wet. The scavengers wear plastic fertilizer sacks as rain capes as they work their way over the steaming rubbish in a perpetual warm drizzle, extricating a circuit board here, a washing machine motor there, and throwing them into the baskets on their backs. Their children — second generation catadores — are the sorters and runners, grading the emptied baskets by type and then running them down on handcarts to Circle Three.