I see you , she thought. In that revelation, she saw beyond, to the blur of quantum computations, to the fundamental stuff of reality, the woven fabric of time and calculation. And she saw, as she remembered sitting backstage with the hands watching the Astonishing Ganymede, the famously bad conjuror of the Beija-Flor, waiting for her mother to sweep up from the band pit on her mirrored Wurlitzer, how the trick was done. It was simple, so very simple. Everything was edit. Take a sample here, another there, put them together, smooth over the joins with a little cutaway. New reality. Innocent and shining with wonder, she reached out her hand to seize reality.
Mestre Ginga’s arms were around her again; fingers forced open her mouth, a million open mouths, a billion fingers. Coffee. Marcelina choked, gagged, heaved in Mestre Ginga’s wire-strong arms. The flocking universes flew away like a storm of butterflies.
“Coffee,” she swore, retching dryly over the assentamentos.
“You’re very much mistaken if you think it’s just coffee,” Mestre Ginga said, slowly releasing her. “Even those three drops can be too much.”
“I saw everything,” Marcelina said. She leaned on the edge of the altar, shaking, head bowed, sweat dripping from her lank hair. “I was … everything.” Every muscle spasmed. No capoeira jogo had ever wrung her so dry. Slowly she became aware that there was a roomful of expectant devotees in white, waiting for the word from the multiverse. “I saw … her.”
“And she saw you,” Barbosa said. “She knows what you are now.”
“The zemba.”
“You are nor the zemba yet,” Barbosa said. Tock-tock , said the agogô, beginning a fresh rhythm. The iâos swayed and swirled, left to right, their dresses floating up around them. Fisico entered from the camarinha carrying the leaf-wrapped object. He set it reverently on the altar. Shards of other worlds flickered around Marcelina. Would it always be this? She suspected so. On the edge of her vision, like a floater in the eye that, when looked at, perrpetually flees the focus of attention, she was aware of the anti-Marcelina, and that she was aware of her. The curupairá, the gathering of the egbé, Barbosa revealing himself as Pae do Santo of the terreiro were to prepare her for the inevitable showdown. Marcelina stripped away the dry, dust-smelling banana leaves. The leather scabbard was the length of her forearm, worked with an image in ridged stitch work of the Lady of All Worlds. She took the handle.
“Careful,” Barbosa warned.
The blade drew like silk over glass. It seemed to Marcelina that it did not actually touch the inside of the sheath bur was suspended in some kind of invisible filmlike oil. The blade was long, curved, beautifully dangerous. She held it up before her eyes. The only sound in the barracão was the clock-tock of the agogô. Marcelina looked closely; the edge was blurred, she could not focus on it, it appeared to fizz and boil, a heat-haze on the edge of vision. Marcelina made a sudden cut. The egbé let out a great coo of wonder. She smelled electricity, saw blue burn across the line of her slash.
’’I’ve seen one of these before.”
“It’s the standard-issue ritual weapon of the Order,” Fisico said. “It looks like a knife, but we think it’s an information weapon. It cuts down to the quantum level. It undoes the braids of quantum loop gravity. This is technology beyond us, beyond any of the worlds of the multiverse. I think it may always be beyond us; it’s part of the fabric of the universal quantum computer itself.”
Marcelina spun with the knife in a wheeling capoeira armada. Did she hear the shriek of fundamental computations coming apart?
“Where did you get this?”
“It came with the book. The annexes say that Our Lady of All Worlds brought it up from the bottom of the Rio Negro.”
Again the multiverse pulsed around Marcelina. Cut. Edit. You are not unarmed now. You are not a victim. She held the knife high over head. The egbé roared. The iâos whirled, petticoats held out. The bateria took up the argument of the agogô as Marcelina strutted around the altar, blade held high.
“Zemba!” Mestre Ginga roared, and the terreiro rook it up.
“Zemba! Zemba! Zemba!”
The weather closed in as the Rocinha Taxi Company cab took Marcelina up over the top of the town and down toward the floodlit oval of the Jockey Club. Fingers of low cloud that joined together into a great palm of stratus blew in from the west and pressed down on the morros. By the time the taxi reached the lagoon it was raining steadily. Marcelina itched and fidgeted in the middle of the backseat, burning still with the brief vision of the curupairá. Every flash of passing headlights, every flicker of pink and yellow street neon cast shadows of other universes. With the quantum blade tucked into the top of her white Capri pants and her clingy top, Marcelina could have conned free entry to any club in Rio. She was death. She was the hunter. She was beyond cool. The driver had been instructed to take her to a safe house Mestre Ginga knew in Santa Teresa, but as he cruised the Avenida Borges de Medeiros, the lagoon dark, rain-pocked reflections, Marcelina leaned forward between the front seats and said, “Can you take me a detour?”
“I don’t know. I mean the mestre said — ”
“I just want to drop something in; it’ll not take five minutes. It’s just down on Rua Tabatinguera; it’s not even really out of your way.”
“I suppose I could, then.”
Marcelina took the steep concrete steps that rose almost sheer up the face of the morro a reckless two at a time. Love does that. Rain punished her. Good rain. Sweet rain. She pressed the PDA close to her chest, protecting it from water. Pools were already forming on Heitor’s gloomy garden patio, a lightless concrete rectangle between the rear of the apartment tower and the dripping raw rock. His light — and love — starved climbing plants shed rain like sweat. Marcelina knew the key code by heart. Her finger stopped a millimeter above the chrome button.
The door was open a crack.
Marcelina slipped back from the door and pressed herself against the wall. She called up the live Canal Quatro newsfeed on her cellular.
“ … and the police report that Mare and Parada de Lucas are quiet tonight, with armed incidents returning to normal levels,” Fagner “Deathand-Destruction” Meirelles reported Live! from a militar cordon. Hissing through her teeth, Marcelina thumbed the volume down. “And back to the studio.” And there was Heitor standing in front of the giant green-screen map of Brazil. The only newsreader who has to worry about the color of his socks, he always said.
Marcelina sent him into darkness. In one G3 call elation turned to dread, to more fear than she imagined anyone could know and live. Every part of her ached. It would be very very good to be sick, even if it was only hot bile, cold coffee, and terreiro drugs. She could feel the multiverse flickering around her, a cloud of orixás and angels. Now. This was the time. She drew the blade, crouched into a fighting ginga stance. Slowly slowly she pushed the door open. Cat-careful, Marcelina advanced through the lobby of books. Stiff, so stiff, and no time to warm up. She would have to go from cold into explosive action. This was no jogo, no game.
No lights, but squatting in cocorinha by the side of the living-room door Marcelina saw a silhouette cross the glittering panorama of the lagoa. The destruction was to be totaclass="underline" her career, her family, her friends, her lover. Then, one by one, Fisico, Mestre Ginga, Barbosa the goalkeeper: the entire terreiro, any and all who knew the secret shape of the multiverse, and about the Order that protected it. And at some point, Marcelina Hoffman. That point was now. Malandros mestres corda vermelhas all you great fighters and dancers, give me malicia. She stood up, flicked on the main light, and cartwheeled into the room in a one-handed aú. Marcelina came up into ginga, blade ready.