"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.
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.
Edson bangs down the pot and cups.
"Carlinhos. I need to borrow your car." Edson's going
shopping. Out on the streets of his big dirty city with his hands on
the wheel and one of the many backup identities he's stashed all
across northwest Sampa, I-shades feeding him police maps, Edson feels
his mojo returning. Careful. Overconfidence would be easy and
dangerous. For this kind of operation he would normally have picked
up an alibi, but that's not safe after that poor bastard Petty Cash.
The Sesmarias may be out of the game, but there are those other
bastards: the Order, who ever they are; and then the cops, always the
cops. No, a malandro can't be too careful. He takes camera-free local
roads and backstreets to the mall. Among the racks and hangers is
bliss. It is good to buy, but he dare not use his debit account. If
the stores don't give him a disscount for cash—and many will
not even accept notes—he moves on to another one.
"Hey, got you something to make you look less like a freak."
From the glee with which she throws herself on the bright bags, Edson
concludes there are other things than physics that light up Fia
Kishida.
"Did you choose for me or for you?" she asks, holding up
little scraps of stretchy sequined fabric.
"You want to look Paulistana?" Edson says.
"I want not to look like a hooker," Fia says, hooking down
at the bottom of her cheek-clinging shorts. "But I love these
boots." They are mock-jacaré, elasticated with good
heels, and Edson knew she would coo and purr at first try-on. The
crop top shows off the minute detail of her tattoo-computer; in the
low light slanting across the fields of oil-soy it burns like gold.
Edson imagines the wheels and spirals turning, a number mill.
"Where I come from, it's rude to stare."
"Where I come from, people don't have things like that tattooed
on them."
"Do you ever actually apologize for anything?"
"Why should I do that? Come and eat. Carlinhos is making his
moqueça. You need to eat more."
In the cool of the evening, Edson finds Mr. Peach leaning against his
balcony rail with a big spliff in his hand. The burbs glow like sand
beneath him; the stars cannot match them. Even the light-dance of the
Angels of Perpetual Surveillance, like attenuated bioluminous Amazon
insects, up on the edge of space, is muted and astrological. The
night air brings with it the slur of wind turbines up on the old
coffee plantations, a sound Edson has always found comforting and
stimulating. Endless energy.
"Hey, Sextinho." Mr. Peach offers Edson the big sweet
spliff.
"I've told you not to call me that," Edson says, but takes
a good toke anyway and lets it swirl up into the dome of his skull.
Mr. Peach leans toward him. He takes another toke from Edson, slips
an arm comfortably around his back. He holds the spliff up,
contemplates it like holy sinsemilla.
"This the only thing keeping me from running right out that gate
and getting on the first plane to Miami," Mr. Peach says,
looking at the coil of maconha smoke.
"Miami?"
"We've all got our boltholes. Our Shangri-las. When it's
abstract, when it's more universes than there are stars in the sky,
than there are atoms in the universe, I can handle it. Numbers,
theories; comfortable intellecrual games. Like arithmetic with
infinities: terrifying concepts, but ultimately abstract. Head games.
She didn't know me, Sextinho."
Edson lets the name pass.
"She didn't recognize me. She would have known me, same as ...
the other one. Jesus and Mary, the word games this makes us play.
Quantum theory, quantum computing, quantum schmauntum; at that
postgrad level you work across disciplines. But she didn't recognize
me. I wasn't there. Maybe I was dead, maybe I was in jail, maybe I
never was a physicist, maybe there never was a Carlinhos Farah Baroso
de Alvaranga. But I know: I'm in Miami. I could have gone. Twenty
years ago I could have gone. Open arms, they'd have had me. Lovely
doe-eyed Cuban boys with nasty Mafia connecctions. But Dad would have
had to go into a home, and I couldn't do that. Leave him. Leave him
with strangers. So I turned the offer down, and he lived three years
and I think he was happy right up to the end. By then I was too old,
too entangled. Too scared. But he went. He's leading the life I could
have led. I should have led."
Mr. Peach quickly wipes any tears gone before they gather gravity.
Edson says gently, "I remember you told me once that it was all
fixed, from beginning to end; like the universe is one thing made out
of space and time and we only dream we have free will."
"You're not reassuring me."
'Tm just trying to say, there was nothing you could have done."
The spliff has burned down to a sour roach. Edson grinds it flat
under the sale of his Havaiana.
"Sextinho . . . Edson. I think I really need to be with you
tonight."
"I thought we'd agreed."
"I know but, well, why should it matter if it's not her?"
Edson loves the old bastard, and he could come for him, without
games, without boots and costumes, without masks, pretend to be that
nasty Cuban malandro, pretend to be whatever he needs to send him to
Miami in his mind. But still, it does matter. And Mr. Peach can read
that in Edson's body, and he says, "Well, looks like it's not
fated in this universe either."
In retro Hello Kitty panties, Fia backstrokes laps of the pool. From
verandah shadow Edson watches sunlit water dapple her flat
boy-breasts. He checks for stirrings, urgings, dick-swellings.
Curiosity, getting a look, like any male. Nothing more.
"Hey." She treads water, face shatter-lit by reflected
sun-chop. "Give me a towel."
Fia hauls herself out, drapes the towel over the mahogany sun lounger
and herself on the towel. Nipples and little pink panty-bow.
"This is the first time I've felt clean in weeks," Fia
declares. "He's not your uncle, is he? I found your stuff. I
couldn't sleep so I went poking around. I do that, poke around. I
found these costumes and things. They're very . . . sleek."
"I told him to make sure they were locked up."
"Why? If you guys have something going on, I'm cool with it. You
don't have to hide stuff from me. Did you think I would be bothered?
Did she know? That's it, isn't it? She didn't know."
"You're not her, I know. But are you bothered?"
"Me. No. Maybe. I don't know. It bothers me you didn't tell
her."
"But you said—"