Ian McDonald - Brasyl

Luis Quinn smelled the man’s perfume and the sweat it scant concealed, read his mild swagger and faint stoop, and knew him for a government man before the tall, still flames of the lanterns disclosed his face. The visitor made leg.

“Your service, Fathers. José Bonafacio da Nóbrega. I represent His Excelllency the viceroy. Please, no introduction. Father Quinn, I was of course informed the instant of your arrival in Salvador; a high-ranking officer of the church will always attract our attention.” He flicked out the tails of his coat, adjusted his sword, and seated himself at the table, legs crossed at the ankle. “The Society of Jesus, in this country at least, has long attracted the favor of the crown. You are the confessors of viceroys and fidalgos. However, the Third Order of St. Francis claims the support of our captains and senhores de engenhos, as reflected in the ornateness of their churches.” He held the basket hilt of his sword as he jerked, laughing silently at his own humor. Luis Quinn thought, Wear your graces and weary sophistications like your fine coat and sharply folded hat, but you are nothing but a legman, a runner. I have seen a dozen of you among the quintas of Porto, English spies tasked to scent out priests waiting to be smuggled back into Ireland.

Father de Magalhães raised a hand to summon fresh coffee. Nóbrega waved him down. “No coffee if you please, Father. I find it disturbs my sleep. I much prefer this of an evening.” He took a small, flat silver case from his sleeve and set it on the table. Within were small balls of rolled leaf, each the size of the tip of the smallest finger. Never taking his eyes from Luis Quinn, Nóbrega produced two limes from a handkerchief with a prestidigitatorial flourish, quartered them with a pocket knife, and squeezed a single segment over three herb-balls. One he lifted daintily and placed on his tongue, the other he presented to Father de Magalhães on the silver lid. The third he offered to Luis Quinn.

“I am unfamiliar with this… refreshment.”

“Oh, it’s the most marvelous stuff. Acculico, the Spaniards call it. The feitores ship it across the Pantanal from Characas. The mines at Cuiabá simply couldn’t function without it. Sharpens the mind most wonderfully, enlarges the faculties, fills body and soul with energy and well-being. Too good for slaves.”

“And excellently potent against the toothache,” Father de Magalhães added. “I do believe it could benefit meditation on all-night vigils and stations.”

“Totally the wrong climate for it here, alas,” said da Nóbrega.

“Thank you, but I will keep my old European ways,” Luis Quinn said, taking out a cigar. The boy brought fire. Quinn drew hard, releasing slow spirals of smoke into the star-soft night. “Senhor da Nóbrega, what do you require from me?”

“Yours is reputed to be a learned order, a scientific order.”

“It’s my particular call to be a linguist, but mathematics and the natural philosophies are widely studied at Coimbra.”

“In the city of Belém do Pará is a madman who intends to take the measure of the world with a pendulum.” Nóbrega leaned toward Luis Quinn, his manner animated, his eyes wide.

“I believe this may be connected with a heretical English theory of gravitation,” said Luis Quinn, marking the influence of the acculico on Nobrega’s body and personality. “The Society reaches the Cartesian theory of vortices, which is a complete physical explanation. As I understand it, the English theory is purely mathematical.”

“As you say, Father. This man — this mad scientist — is a Dr. Robert Falcon, a geographer, from the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.”

“I understood that Brazil was closed to foreigners, save those in the regular orders. Such as myself, by birth an English subject, if not by inclination.”

“His Excellency finds his presence expedient. He arrived with his brother, one Jean-Baptiste, a self-taught mathematician who was inordinately proud of some device he had invented to take all the drudgery out of weaving. I say that’s what slaves are for — it gives them something to do — but that is your French petty intelligentsia. Jean-Baptiste was repatriated with the bloody flux six weeks ago, but Robert Falcon remains. He is in some desperate race with fellow academicians to precisely measure the circumference of the globe. It seems, like everything else in this modern world, there is profound disagreement on the shape of our terrestrial sphere — or rather, not quite sphere. You still have salt water behind your ears, so you will have a keen appreciation of just how imprecise an art navigation at sea is, and Portugal is a maritime, mercantile empire. We have received informations that the rival expedition, which is to measure the globe by mensuration and trigonometry, has been granted leave of access by Spain to its viceroyalty of Peru and will shortly embark for Cartagena. Dr. Falcon has been cooling his heels in Belém do Pará for five months already.”

“Senhor, with respect, what do you require of me?”

Nóbrega dressed and savored a second acculico. Its effect was almost instantaneous: Quinn wondered if Nóbrega might be habituated to this benign, stimulating herb.

“For the most precise measurements, Dr. Falcon must conduct his experiment on the line of the equator. He has picked a spot five hundred miles above São José Tarumás on the Rio Negro as the most favorable, where what he calls ‘continental influences’ are in equilibrium.”

“I understand. I might travel with him.”

“The other way around, Father. He might travel with you. The wrath of the crown is properly turned to the Dutch pirates and adventurers, but the memory of Duguay-Trouin and his pirates strutting around Rio like gamecocks is all too fresh. Has the father-provincial apprised you of the political situation on the Amazon?”

“I understand it is in a state of renegotiation.”

“France has long held ambitions in South America far beyond that plague-hole in the Guianas. An uncertain transfer of territory could hand them their opportunity to annex everything north of the Amazon-Solimões. They could have aldeias fortified, tribes armed with modern weaponry before we could even get a fleet to Belém.”

“You suspect Dr. Falcon is an agent,” Luis Quinn said.

“Versailles would have been insane not to have asked him.”

Magalhães spoke now. “I require you merely to observe and record. I have already alluded to your particular sensory acuity, and your facility at languages … ”

“Was I chosen as an admonitory or a spy?”

“Our duty is of course to the greater glory of God,” de Magalhães said.

“Of course, Father.” Luis Quinn dipped his head. New light fell on the table and the fat-leaved, aromatic shrubs: woman slaves brought baskets to dress the dinner table set up in the cool of the cloister. Candles sparked to life; covered silver dishes were laid on the cloth.

“Excellent,” cried Nóbrega leaping up from his seat, rubbing his hands. “That coca-stuff is all very fine, but it makes you damnable hungry.”

A flurry, a whistle of wings in the night above Luis Quinn’s head. Dark shapes dived on folded, curved wings to perch along the tiled eave of the private garden. Light caught hooked beaks, round cunning eyes, a raised, agile claw. Parrots, thought Luis Quinn. A task most difficult, by God’s grace.

Marcelina loved that minuscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.