They make no noise; they move slowly; the boys’ voices recede into the forest buzz. The sun climbs high, pouring heat and dazzle through the leaf canopy. Minutes’ walk on either side of this ridge trail are rodovias, lanchonetes, coffee, and gossip; the morning news is a touch away on the I-shades, but Edson feels like an old, bold Paulista bandeirante, pushing into strange new worlds.
“If I am going to help you, there’s stuff I need to know,” Edson says. “Like priests, and the Order, and that guy with the Q-blade, and who was that capoeirista?”
“How do I say this without it sounding like the most insane thing you’ve ever heard? There’s an organization — more a society really — that controls quantum communication between universes.”
“Like a police, government?”
“No, it’s much bigger than that. It covers many universes. Governments can’t touch it. It works on two levels. There’s the local level — each universe has its agents — they’re known as Sesmarias. Sesmarias tend to run in famiilies: the same people occupy the same roles in other universes.”
“How can it run in families?”
“I told you it would sound crazy. Some of them are very old and respectable families. But the Sesmarias are just part of a bigger thing, and that’s the Order. ”
“I’ve head that word twice in one day. You, then that capoeirista woman. So the man who attacked us at the Igreja, he was from the Order, right?”
“No, he would have been just a Sesmaria. They aren’t terribly good, really. Sesmarias are allowed to contact each other but not cross. I’d hoped the Sesmaria back where I come from hadn’t been able to track where I was going. Wrong there. But the Order can go wherever it wants across the mulltiverse. They have agents: admonitories. When they send one through, they have to tell everyone from the president of the United States to the pope.”
Edson presses his hands to either side of his skull, as if he might squeeze madness our or reality in. “So capoeira woman, who is she?”
“I’ve never seen or heard of her before in my life. But I do know one thing.”
“What?”
“I think she’s on our side.”
We could do with that , Edson thinks, but then a sound, a rushing sound, makes him look up, the dread back his heart. But it is not police drones moving carefully between the branches. Edson smiles and grins: high above the treetops wind turbines are turning.
“Stay as long as you need.”
“You don’t understand … ”
“I do understand. Stay as long as you need.”
The moment Mr. Peach saw Edson on his security camera, and the girl behind him, he knew nothing would ever be simple again. Beneath the cherubic ceiling of the baroque living room, Sextinho and the girl are sprawled unconscious on the Chesterfield, innocently draped around each other like sibling cats. Sextinho — no, he can’t call him that now. The young woman on his sofa is a refugee from another part of the polyverse. Swallow that intellectual wad and everything else follows. Of course they are caught between the ritual assassins of a transdimensional conspiracy and mysterious saviors. Of course refuge must be offered, though it marks him irrevocably as a player.
Something has fallen from Edson’s fist. Mr. Peach lifts it. An ugly, massmanufactured icon of Exu. Crossings, gateways. He smiles as he balances it on the arm of the sofa. Watch him well, small lord. The girl sleeps on her back, arms flung back, crop top ridden up. Mr. Peach bends close to study the tattoo. Liquid protein polymer circuitry. Infinitely malleable and morphable. There must be self-organizing nanostructures. Quasi-life. Extraordinary technology. Direct neural interface; no need for the clumsy, plasticy tech of I-shades and smart-fabrics. What was the sum of the histories of her part of the polyverse that gave rise to so similar a society, so radically different a technology? But they’re all out there. There is a universe for every possible quantum state in the big bang; some as similar as this girl’s, some so different that life is physically impossible.
Edson is awake, one eye open, watching.
“Hey.”
“Hey. I’ve made you breakfast.”
OCTOBER 1-2, 1732
“Such fine design and so ingenious; yes yes, I can immediately see applications for this device in my own work.” Father Diego Gonçalves turned the crank on the Governing Engine and watched the click and flop of the card chain through the mill and the rise and fall of the harnesses. “Drudgery abollished; mere mechanical labor transformed. Men liberated from the wheel.”
“Or a subtler slavery.” Through the delicately worked wooden grille Luis Quinn looked out at the river. Father Gonçalves’s private apartment was at the rear of the basilica-ship, high to catch what few cooling breaths the river granted. None this day — only a heat of oppression and distant growls of thunder. Quinn pressed his head to the screen. “Someone must put his back to that wheel, someone must press the holes in the cards, and someone there must be who writes the sequence of those holes.” Quinn watched a small boy squatting in the stern steering his leaf-light craft in and out of the larger canoes in Father Diego Gonçalves’s entourage. The boy’s younger sister, a tiny round-faced thing with her hand in her mouth, sat dumpily in the waist. For three days Quinn had watched the boy paddle from the black of the Rio Negro into the white of the Rio Branco, feeding the infant manioc cakes that he carefully unwrapped from parcels of broad forest leaves. Again, the soft rattle of Falcon’s infernal machine.
“Oh, that is simplicity itself, Father Quinn: an industrial engine would be harnessed to a water sluice, or even a windmill. And the very first engine you build is the one that copies the pattern of holes for all its successors. But your third point raises an intriguing philosophical question: is it possible to construct an engine that writes the sequence for any other, and therefore loggically itself!”
Thunder boomed, closer now, as if summoned by the clack of the Governing Engine. A universe ruled by number, running like punched cards through the loom of God. Luis Quinn had thought to destroy it privately, cast it into the huge waters: he had delivered it into the hands of his enemy.
Nossa Senhora da Várzea, Out Lady of the Floodplain: that was the name of the green saint on the banner and of this construct of which she was patron, a saint alien to Luis Quinn’s hagiography. It had not been until he saw the short, thin figure in black descend the basilica steps that Luis Quinn realized that with every oar-sweep and paddle-stroke upstream he had been mentally drawing a picture of Father Diego Gonçalves, one sketched, like Dr. Falcon’s intelligence maps, from the crude charcoal of supposition. Now as they shared the fraternal kiss of Christ, he had found those lines erased completely, beyond even this phenomenal recall, save that the Diego Gonçalves he had envisioned bore no resemblance to this bounding, energetic, almost boyish man. This is the brother I must return to the discipline of the Order , Luis Quinn had thought. Open your eyes, your ears, all your senses as you did in Salvador; see what is to be seen.
“You know what I am?”
Father Diego Gonçalves had smiled. “You are the admonitory of provinncial de Magalhães of the Colégio of Salvador in Bahia.”
So it was to be a duel, then.
“Would that news traveled as swiftly downriver as it travels up. Kindly have your men stop that immediately.”
Indio sailors, naked but for geometrical patterns of black genipapo juice on their faces, torsos, and thighs, with feather bands plaited around upper arms and calves, were unloading Quinn’s bales and sacks from the pirogue. Zemba watched suspiciously, paddle gripped two-handed, an attitude of defense.