A sigh.
“Leave it.”
Fia is on the balcony, curled up on the decking against the partition wall in panties and vest-top. By ocean-light Edson can see she’s been crying again. He knows her enduring fear: she’s a postdoc researcher into quantum economic modeling who stumbled from one universe to another by luck and dessperation, and she is expected to direct the sharpest theoreticians Teixeira money can hire. She fears they know that, that one day one of them will casually ask, Who told you you could do this? Edson has spent his life staying one answer ahead of that question.
“Are you all right?”
“No. Do you want to know, Ed?” She has taken to this nickname. Edson doesn’t like it. It’s not a self he’s made. But he kicks off his shoes, slides out of his jacket. The air is soft and skin-warm, tanged with salt. He never imaggined the sea would smell so strange: like it hates the land and all who come from it.
“Want to know what?”
“Do you want to know what the Order is keeping secret? We’ve found it. It’s a doozy, Edson. Tell me this, why are we alone? Why are humans the only intelligence in the universe?”
“I know this argument. Mr. Peach used to talk abour this; he had a name for it. Something’s paradox.”
“Fermi’s paradox, that’s what you’re looking for. Keep that in your head while I ask you question two: why is mathematics so good at explaining physical reality? What is it about numbers and logic?”
“Well, that’s the universal quantum computing thing.…”
“And Mr. Peach told you that too.”
“Don’t laugh at him. I told you before. Don’t laugh at him.”
Fia starts at the sure ferocity in Edson’s voice.
’’I’m sorry. Okay, let’s just leave that as something I will never get. But why should computation be the root of reality? Why should reality be one huge system of rendering — no different from a very big, very complicated computer game? Why should it all look like a fake? Unless it is a fake. Or a repeat. Maybe there are no alien intelligences out there because what we think of as our universe is a massive quantum computation simulation. A rerun. All of them, reruns.”
Edson slips his arm behind her back.
“Come on. You need to get to bed, you’re tired.”
“No Edson, listen. Before we killed the Amazon, in my world, there was a legend. In it the jaguar made the world, but not very well; and it ended on the third day and we — the world, everything we think is real — are just the dreams of the third night. It’s true Edson, it’s true. We’re the dreams. We’re all ghosts. Think about it: if a universal quantum computer could simulate reality exactly, any numbers of times, what are the odds of us being in the very first, original one, as opposed to any other? Do you want those numbers? I can give you those numbers. We’ve worked them out. They are so so so so small… The real universe died long ago, and we’re just ghosts, at the end of time, in the cold, the final cold. It’s running slower and slower and slower, but it will never stop, over and over again, and we can’t get off. None of us can ever get off. And that’s what the Order is keeping from us. We are not humans. We’re ghosts of humans running on a huge quantum simulation. All of us. All the worlds, all the universes.”
“Fia, come on, you’re not well, come on, I’ll help you.” He doesn’t want her calking about the Order, their Sesmarias and killers. Edson fetches water from the kitchen zone. The water on this boat tastes sick; like sea that has been through too many bladders. He’s added a couple of additions from the farmacia to it. She’s been working too hard. Rantings, mad stuff. “Come on, sleep.”
She’s a solid girl, growing more massy on junk food, no exercise, and homesickness. Edson helps her to the bed.
“Ed, I’m scared.”
“Ssh, sleep, you’ll be all right.” Her eyes close. She is out. Edson arranges the pillow under her head. He looks long at Fia swashing down into sleep like a coin through water. Then Edson pulls on his polished shoes and straightens his hip-ruffled shirt and goes out to meet his coconut boy. Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.
Coco-boy meets Edson at the back of the double-deck driving range stand. The nets are floodlit; stray light glints from the steel sea far below. A whistle.
“Oi.”
“Oi.”
“It’s been delayed. There’s something else coming in ahead of it.”
It’s a sweet little business arrangement. Coconut and guest workers come in on the night flights and with them Pernambuco’s finest mood-shifters. It’s not illegal-very little is illegal on extraterritorial Oceanus , where the corporacãos rule like colonial donatories. Neither is it particularly legal. Oceanus is a nuclear-powered gray economy, and Edson moves through the informal economy like a cat in a favela. Personality adjuncts are marketable: Edson has sent roots down into the club level, and his business plan predicts doubling the number of personalities on Oceanus in six months. God and his Mother; those blandroids need all the character they can get. And tonight tonight tonight eight kilos are coming in from the farm a shops of Recife, and everyone knows the people of the nordeste are the best cooks in all Brasil.
Lights in the dark sky, fast approaching. Now engine noise. Growing up in a flight-path, Edson has noticed how aircraft engines are never on a sliding scale of audibility, from whisper to rush to roar, but go from silence instantly to audible. Quantum noise. The kind of thing you would find in Fia’s fake.
“That’s the other flight,” Coco-boy says. He has the jeitinho with the airport staff.
“That doesn’t sound like a plane,” Edson says. A jet-black helicopter, vissible only by the gleams of moonlight on its sleek, jaguar flanks, slides in over Oceanus. Edson and Coco-boy both see the green and yellow Brasilian Air Force stars morph up on its fuselage. It settles but does not land, hovering a meter and half above the strip. A door opens. A figure drops out, landing lightly on the runway. In an instant he is up and away. In the same instant the helicopter climbs and peels away from Oceanus. It shivers against the sky and then fades into the night, stealth systems engaged.
“Fuck,” says Coco-boy.
“Back,” says Edson. “Hide.” His balls are cold and tight. Wrong here.
His balls have never lied to him. Even as Efrim. Lights come on in the control tower; seguranças run around not quite knowing what has happened or what they should do. The running figure pauses not five meters from Coco-boy and Edson’s hiding place behind a plastic welcome banner. He turns. Backscatter from the driving range floodlights catches on an object slung across his back; at first Edson thinks its bone, a spine, something bizarre. Then he sees it is a bow, cast and shaped to an individual hand. And, as the man runs soft, swift, silent as light to the emergency stairwell, Edson sees another thing: an unforgettable blue glow, seemingly from the arrowheads in their quiver. Quantum-blades.
At age twelve Yanzon could shoot the eye from a monkey among the forks and leaves of the tallest, densest tree in the forest canopy. In those plague days monkeys were not good eating; Yanzon did this merely to display his supreme skill. After the fifth pandemic reduced the Iguapá nation to twenty souls, Yanzon made the long descent of the white and black waters to Manaus. His shooting eye earned money among the people who bet on the street-archery contests. When no one would bet on him anymore, he was taken up by a patron who groomed him to represent his nation in the Olympic games. In Luzon in 2028 he won gold in all his shooting disciplines. The Robin Hood of Rio do Ouro , the papers said, the last Iguapá. But Manaus’s memory flows away like the river, and Yanzon would have slipped down through low-paid jobs into casual alcohol but for the aristocratic alva who arrived at his door one morning and offered him a job with travel prospects beyond his imagination. His old soul was unsurprised; the Iguapá had always known of the labyrinth of worlds and the caraibas who walked between them.