She could procrastinate no longer. Marcelina called her mother.
“Hi. It’s me. Don’t hang up. Are you all right? Are you okay? Have you been, you know? Don’t hang up.”
“Iracema’s very hurt. I can’t even begin to say how hurt she is; Gloria too, and me, well I’m more disappointed than anything. Disappointed and surrprised; it’s not like you, why did you do a thing like that?” An edge of rasp in the voice, a three-day vodka hangover simmering off.
Ask her, ask her now; you have your opening. All the shadow-lengthening afternoon she had toyed with tactics, openings and moves, feints and concesssions, the edged tools from her box of professional instruments but ultimately hinging around the one strategic problem: to apologize and call later with the Hard Question, or to say it once and for all.
Marcelina decided.
“I know you won’t believe me if I say it wasn’t me — and I know I should just have apologized there and then. I don’t know why I started that arguument, bur I did and I’m sorry.” This much is true. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge. Another sharp little tool of the information trade. “You’ve probably seen the stuff in the paper by now.”
“Are you all right? Is everything okay?”
Are you a liar and a hypocrite? Marcelina asked herself. So long and so old and so tired it’s become truth?
“Mum, this is going to sound strange — maybe even the strangest thing I’ve ever said — but, am I the only one?”
Dead air.
“What, love? I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”
“I mean, is there…” The sentence hung unfinished. Marcelina heard her mother’s voice squawking, “What what what?” Standing in the open doorway of the apartment block applying lippy, closing a little Coco bag, the door swinging softly, heavily shut behind her. Her. The one. The evil twin. “Got to go Mum bye I love you.”
Marcelina dashed through the dark loom of the gallery knocking over dummies, sending costumes rocking on their rails. She jumped over the rotten woodwork, took the stairs two at a time. Lilac evening had poured into the streets; lights burned; people stared as she ran past them. Where where where? There. Marcelina ran the intersection; cars jolted to a halt, aggresssively sounded horns.
“Darling… ,” Vitor called after her.
Good suit. Good heels, confident heels — she can see them snapping at the sidewalk twenty, nineteen, eighteen people ahead of her. She walks like me. She is me. Left turn. Where are you going? Do you live within a spit of my home; have you lived here for years without my knowing, our paths and lives always that step out of synchronization; the two Marcelinas? Fifteen, fourteen people. Marcelina shouldered through the evening strollers, the dog-walkers, the power walkers. She could see her now. A little heavier? Hands a little broader, nails unsophisticated. Ten, nine, eight people. I’m behind you now, right behind you, if you looked around right now you would see me. Me. And Marcelina found that she wasn’t afraid. No fear at all. It was the game, the burn, the car lifted on the Rua Sacopa, the pictures coming together in the edit, the pitch when they get it, see it, when it all opens up in front of them; the moment when idea becomes incarnate as program.
I am behind you now.
Marcelina reached out to touch her twin’s shoulder. “Excuse me.”
The woman turned. Marcelina reeled back. This was no twin. A twin she would have known for its differences, its imperfections, the subtle variations spun out of the DNA. This was herself, precise to the moles, to the hair, to the slight scar on the upper lip, to the lines around the eyes.
“Ah,” Marcelina said. “Oh.”
She heard the blade before she saw it, a shriek of energy, an arc of blue.
And the malicia kicked: before sense, long before conscious thought, Marcelina dropped back to the ground in a negativa angola. The blade whistled over her face. Screams, shouts. People fled. Cars stopped, horns blared. Marcelina rolled out of the defensive drop with a kick. The blade cut down again. Marcelina flipped into a dobrado, then wheeled for a crippling kick. Two hands seized her pants and ankles and pulled her away. The knife slashed again, seeming to cut the air itself; the A-frame sign for the Teresina payweight restaurant fell into two ringing halves. The woman turned and ran. Marcelina struggled, but the hands held her.
“Leave it,” a man’s voice ordered. “This is beyond you. Leave it.”
Now she was quite quite mad, for the voice, the hands, the face belonged to Mestre Ginga.
FEBRUARY 2-10, 2033
Mr. Peach adores her.
“First halfway-stimulating conversation I’ve had in months,” he says to Edson in the privacy of breakfast moments while Fia is in the shower. She is a bathroom girl; the sound of her happy splashing carries far up and down the fazenda’s cool tiled corridors.
“Never mind that,” says Edson. “Is all the gear stowed away?”
Mr. Peach holds up a big old iron key. Fia comes in patting the ends of her hair dry with a towel. She knows Mr. Peach as Carlinhos; a kind of uncle in Edson’s far-flung family, scattered like stars linked in a constellation. They’re going to talk science again.
Edson hates it when they do that. He bangs aluminum things in the kitchen while they argue quantum information theory.
The best Edson understands it is this: Fia had been part of a research team using her University of São Paulo quantum mainframe to explore multiversal economic modeling, entangling so many qubits — that, Edson underrstands, is the word — across so many universes that it has the same number of pieces as a real economy. And, Mr. Peach says, if the model is as complex as the things it models, is there any meaningful difference? In Fia’s São Paulo — in Fia’s world — it seems to Edson that tech-stuff took a different turn sometime in the late teens, early twenties. Where Edson’s world solved the problem of processors and circuit boards so small that quantum effects became key elements, Fia’s world learned to use proteins and viruses as processors. Semi living computers you can tattoo on your ass as opposed to cool I-shades and the need to reel out ever-more-complex security codes to satisfy a paranoid, omniscient city. But Fia’s people killed their world. They couldn’t break the oil addiction, and it burned their forests and turned their sky hot sunless gray.
They were on about superpositions again. That’s where a single atom is in two contradictory states at the same time. But a physical object cannot be two things at once. What you measure is that atom and its exact corresponding atom in another universe. And the most likely way for both to be in a state of superposition is for them each to be in quantum computers in their own universes. So in a sense (big brain itch here, right at the back of Edson’s head where he can’t reach it) there are not many many quantum computers across millions of universes. There is just one, spread across all of them. That’s what Fia’s economic model proved; what they’re calling the multiversal quantum computer. Then she created a quantum model of herself and found that it was more than a dumb image. It was Mr. Peach’s storm blowing between worlds. It was a window to all those other Fia Kishidas with whom it was entangled. The ghost Fias Edson had glimpsed in the workshop in Cook/Chill Meal Solutions were counterparts in other worlds spellbound by entanglement.