“That’s a slightly tricky question,” the blonde woman says. “You see, we’re not really any time at all. We’re sort of outside time; it just happens to look like the Maracanã from my era. When I come from, we haven’t won yet. We lost. That’s the point. And it’s not really Rio either. All you have to do is go as far as the edge of the dropoff zone and you’ll see.”
Edson almost hauls Fia off her feet. The cuffs the cuffs — he’s forgotten they are chained together. Fia is still looking around her dazed, spun out on the chemical tail of two Teixeira corporação sleeping pills.
“Oh shit sorry about that,” the woman says. She fiddles in a pants pockets for a key. “I didn’t want you wandering off; if you’d got separated, we’d never have found you again.” Two oiled clicks, then the woman stows the shiny chrome handcuffs in her belt. Edson rubs his wrist. He never ever wants to get any closer to things police than that.
“What are you, some kind of cop?” he throws back over his shoulder as he crosses the cobbles.
“Hey. I am not a cop,” the woman snaps. But Edson’s discovered a weird thing: as he stands between the flagpoles that line the curb and moves his head from side to side, the trees and office buildings across the road move with him.
“What is going on here?”
At the same time Fia says, “Where are all the people?”
“Coffee,” the woman says. “This needs explaining over coffee.” She places an order for three cafezinhos from an old black man with gray gray hair at a little tin stall in front of the colonnade Edson cannot remember seeing before. The coffee is dark and sweet and finger-searingly hot in the little translucent plastic cup, but these cariocas cannot make coffee. Paulistanos, now: they grow it, they know it.
“Think of it as a kind of movie set, only it’s solid and real all the way through,” the woman says. The old man leans his elbows on the counter of his little stand. “As real as anything really is. It’s a safe haven. We have hundreds of them, probbably billions of them. This one just happens to be the size and shape of the Maracanã Stadium circa 2006. I’m not actually much of a futebol fan, but the location has a kind of special significance to us. I’ve got places all over the place, but this is sort of our office. Corporate headquarters, so to speak. Fortress of Solitude.”
Fia has been turning slowly around, manga-eyes wide.
“It’s a pocket universe,” she says. “That’s so clever. You found a way into the multiversal quantum computer and hacked it out.”
“It’s a very small universe, like I said — just big enough to fit the stadium into. I’d’ve loved a beach, maybe the Corcovado, the Sugar Loaf, the Copa, but we daren’t get overambitious. The Order knows we’re there somewhere; they just haven’t been able to find us yet.”
Edson crumples his plastic cup and flings it away from him. A gust of wind rattles it across the cracked concrete.
“But that was real, and the coffee was hot and pretty bad. How can you make something out of nothing? I can feel it, I can touch it.”
“It’s not nothing,” the old man on the coffee stand says. “It’s time and information, the most real things there are.”
“You can reprogram the multiversal quantum computer,” Fia says with a light of revelation dawning in her eyes. The woman and the old man look at each other.
“You’ve got it,” the woman says with a cheeky grin. “I knew we hadn’t made a mistake with you. Okay, well I think you’re about ready to go inside. It can be a bit… disorienting at first, but you do get used to it.”
“Just one moment,” Edson demands. Fia, capoeira woman, and bad coffee man are already at the blue-and-white colonnade. “Before I go anywhere, just who are you?”
The woman throws up her hands, shakes her head in self-exasperation. “You know, I completely forgot. I just have so much on, I am completely ditzy.” She offers a hand to Edson. “My name is Marcelina Hoffman, and I am what is known as a Zemba. I’m kind of like a superheroine; I turn up in the nick of time and rescue people. Now, come on, there’s a lot more to show you.” Edson briefly shakes the offered hand. Glancing back from the tiled lobby, he can no longer see the coffee stall, but the plaza flickers with more-guessed than glimpsed figures: ghosts of an old black man, a short white woman, a dekasegui and a cor-de-canela boy in a sharp white suit.
“So did Brasil really win in 2030?” The old man falls in beside Edson as he ascends the sloping entry tunnel. Edson drops his pace to match him. He whispers, “She really doesn’t know anything about futebol. Television, that’s her thing. Was her thing.”
“Yeah, we won,” Edson says. “Against the United States.”
“The United States?” the old man says, then starts to laugh so painfully, so wheezily Edson thinks he is having a heart attack. “The ianques playing futebol? In the World Cup? What was the score?”
“Hah!” the old man says. “And Uruguay?”
“They haven’t qualified since 2010.”
The man punches fist into palm. “Heh heh. Son, you have made an old man so very, very happy. So so happy.” Chuckles bubble up in him all the way along the curving corridor lined with photographs of the great and glorious. Edson stops; something in a photo of a goalkeeper making a spectacular save has caught his eye. And the date. July 16, 1950.
“That’s you, isn’t it?”
“It’s not there in the original Maracana. I mean the one where I come from. And it never was that photo.”
Marcelina holds open the door to the presidential box. Edson steps into the blinding light. Two hundred thousand souls greet him. He reels, then draws himself upright and walks deliberately, gracefully down the red-carpeted steps to the rail where Fia stands, glowing in the attention. Senhors, Sennhoras, I present to you, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas! Superstarrrrrrrrrr!
“I told you it could be a bit overwhelming,” Marcelina said. And in the moment after the tyranny of the eyes tells him, Two hundred thousand fans , the ears tell him different, and more strange. This thronged stadium is totally silent. Not a cheer, not an airhorn, not a thunder of a bateria or the chant of a supporters’ samba. Not a firework. Not an announcer screaming Goooooooooool do Brasil! A stadium of ghosts. As his eyes catch up with his ears, Edson sees something very much like weather blowing across the stands and the high, almost vertical arquibancadas, like the huge silk team banners passed hand to hand around the huge circle, a change-wave rippling between worlds, between realities, between Fluminense and Flamengo, between decades. The fans of a million universes flicker through this Maracanã beyond time and space.
“I was finding I couldn’t get anything done with the noise,” Marcelina says. Down in the sacred circle of green a match is in progress. Edson knows instinctively what game it is. No other game matters. But it is not one Fateful Final, it is thousands, flickering through each other, ghosts of players, crosses from other universes, goal kicks into the farthest reaches of the multiverse. Edson watches the cursed Barbosa ruefully pick the ball out of the back of the net; then reality shifts and he is rolling it out past the strikers coming in on the back of the save on a long throw to Juvenal.
“I’m used to it,” says Moaçir Barbosa. “On average, we win. But hey, the USA two one? Oh, I cannot get used to that.”
Edson lifts his hands from the rail.
“Okay, this is all very good and I’m prepared to believe I’m in some bubble outside space and time or some private little universe or whatever, but I have one question. What is it all about?”
Marcelina applauds. The sound rings around the eerily silent Maracanã. “Correct question!”