Among the dashing barrows, Fia stops, turns, lays a hand on Edson’s chest.
“I’ve got to go on now.”
Edson walks into her hand. “What?” He sounds dumb. That is bad. “Ed, you know there’s our stuff, and then there’s my stuff. This is my stuff. I’ll meet you back at Atom Shop.”
A dozen protests occur to Edson. He keeps them: the best sound clinging. The worst are whining.
“Toys for me,” Fia says. She takes Edson’s face in her hands, kisses him hard, full on the mouth, with tongue and saliva. But he’s still not going to let her see him walk away, so he hangs back as she picks her way up the trash-scree in her impractical boots, coat hood pulled up against the sour drizzle, climbing up into the Quantum Valley.
Every guy thinks he wants a Mystery Girl, but what men really want is all the bases covered and no gaps in the record. Mr. Peach has one end of the story of Fia Kishida, Edson the other, but the two halves don’t match. There is too much unexplained between her walking out of São Paulo U and turning up in the back of a Cook/Chill Meal Solutions trailer. Edson’s done some discreet research — he is an insatiable busybody. Cook/Chill Meal Soluutions Company is a brand name legally registered with the Department of Trade. His intuition was right; it’s all owned by Metal Guy, Floyd. He made a fist of money with Preto and Morte -Metal, sourcing those little pre- and post-gig peccadilloes that Black/Death Metal bands demand, like crack cocaine, cheerleaders, American whiskey, lapsed nuns, live goats, automatic weapons and light mortars, Chinese girls in latex, and applications to be contestants on Take Out the Trash. He invested his money and tips in a little business venture: Cook/Chill Meal Solutions. The driver is Aristides, ex of the Goias-São Paulo alco-tanker run. The bicha who runs cover twelve layers deep reinforced by a strategy of spread-bribery is Titifreak. And Fia to operate the array of four reconditioned quantum cores, hacking NP compuutations. Edson’s problem, and the reason he waits until she is out of sight before following her path toward a steaming ridge of LCD screens, is that if he can find that out in six discreet inquiries, who else has?
It is inevitable as death that Q-waste should find its way to the great gehenna of Todos os Santos. It is the weirdness leaking like CFCs from so much quantum technology piled in one place that gives Nossa Senhora de Lixao her myths and legends. Quantum technology is licensed; use is governnment monitored, and stern controls are in place over manufacture and dissposal. But trash has its own morality and gravity. One plastic casing is very much like another; get it out of here, we’re filling up with this stuff, send it south. Once a few months the catadores will unearth an operational Q-array. On those holy days word flashes across the city like lightning, like scandal. Tenders come in from as far as Rio, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba. Fia is here to inspect a fresh lot.
A turn-up on Edson’s white flares tears on a jagged edge. Almost he curses, but to swear is undignified. The basket-people in ragged shorts and flip-flops ignore him. Edson squats low up just beneath the skyline, peeps between shattered angular plastic frames. Down in the valley Fia talks with the two males who summoned her at the gafieira. A bulky cylinder stands on an upturned crate between them. Fia crouches, examining the cylinder with her I-shades, turning her head quizzical as a parrot. Slightly behind them is a figure Edson does not recognize, a tall chisel-featured man with his hair scraped back into a greasy ponytail. Incongruously, he is dressed as a priest. These quantumeiros do all the geek looks. He says something Edson cannot hear, but Fia looks up and shakes her head. The man speaks again; again Fia shakes her head: no. She looks frightened now. As Edson stands up he feels a whisper across his back. His jacket falls forward around him. Its two severed halves slide down his arms to flop over his hands. He stares, dumb, miraclestruck, then turns.
Bicha-boy Titifreak does a martial-arts thing, drawing a pattern of glowing blue in the air with the Q-blade. He holds it still, perfectly horiizontal. He looks at Edson under his floppy fringe, over the blade, then snaps it down to its magnetic sheath. The air smells wounded, ozonic.
“You favelados really don’t have any manners, do you?”
Edson shifts on his feet, surly, stupid stupid stupid with his disfigured white leather jacket hanging around him.
“She told you not to go but you just had to, didn’t you? Look, there’s nothing special about you. There’s been dozens before you. She likes boys of a certain type, but she is out of your class. It doesn’t mean anything. Did you think it did? This is business and you can’t even begin to imagine what we’re doing here and, frankly, ignorance is bliss. Really. Look, you think they give these away in packets of Ruffles?” He flips back his jacket to reveal the blade. “So you’re going now. And you’re not going to come back. Leave her alone. You are Sorocaba playing against São Paulo. You won’t see her again. Go on. Go; I will cut you.”
Edson’s face is hot with rage, and humiliation sings in his ears. He shrugs off the halves of his jacket. Whatever is in the pockets can stay. He will not bow to pick them up.
“Bicha!” he shouts as he tries to maintain dignity descending the treacherous scree of tech-trash. The knifeman shrugs.
“Give my head peace, favelado.”
On the third day Gerson comes to his kid brother, sixth son of a sixth son, and stands over him, rocking and raging in the hammock beside his office. His calls have fallen into dead air. It’s that puta of a bicha blocking him, he’s sure of that. Three days, stomping round the house; kicking over Dona Horttense’s little piles of farofa and cubes of cake offered to the Lady; getting nothing done; earning no money.
“You’re in my light.”
“You know, if you were half the man you claimed you were, you’d be right over there, Q-blade or no Q-blade.”