Ian McDonald - Brasyl

“This is the quantum computer level,” Fia says.

“I know,” says Edson grimly. “There’s only one way off this ship. Can you work it? You have to work it.”

They exit the stairwell the same instant as Yanzon comes around the corner. Only the fact that they should be dead saves them. In that instant of astonishment, Fia hits the security scanner, Edson pushes her through the door, and they both dive to the floor. The blue bolts sear through the air where their heads would have been, stab through the floor like lightning.

“Come on, he can cut his way through here like butter,” says Edson. The inner lock opens to Fia’s blink. Inside, the four stolen Q-cores and more mess than tidy and precise Edson has ever seen in his life. Girlie mags makeup drinks cans food wrappers balled-up tissues pairs of socks pairs of shoes pens and coffee cups with crusts of mold in their bottoms.

“This is it?” Edson asks. The gateway to the multiverse. But Fia has pulled off her top, an action Edson always finds deeply deeply sexy, and coronas of gray light flicker around the cogs on her belly as the wheels begin to turn. The Q-cores answer with the ghost-light of other universes. It is a terreiro, Edson thinks. Junk magic. A loud crash tells Edson the hunter is now in the outer lab. Of course. They may be invisible to him, but he wants the cores, the Q-cores. The Order is Jesuitical in its thoroughness. And there is only one door to this windowless room. No, there are a million doors, a billlion doors. And in that thought they open. Edson reels, blinking in the silver light. Figures in the light; he is lost in a mirror-maze; a thousand Edsons stretch away from him on every side, an infinite regress. Those closest are mirror images, but as they recede into the light differences of dress, style, stature appear until, tear-blind in the glare of the multiverse, they might be angels, radiant as orixás. And he feels them, he knows them, every detail of their lives is available to him, just by looking. Entangled. As he knows them, they know him and one by one turn toward him. Ghost-wind streams Fia’s red hair back from her head: she is the Mae do Santo, and all her sisters attending her. Some of the doors are empty, Edson notices. And Edson also notices a squeal of plastic paneling coming apart at the quantum scale. He whirls as the Q-blade completes the circle. The wall panel crashes forward. The assassin’s amber I-shades crawl with data and trajectories and killing curves, none of which he needs because he has them there, right here right now, at arrow point.

“Now Fia, now anywhere!” Edson yells as the hunter draws, fires. Then time gels, time goes solid as the arrow drifts from the bow, cutting a line of Cerenkov radiation through the air. Edson sees it bore toward his heart, and then there is a jump, a quantum jump, and the arrow is in another place, another doorway, flickering from universe to universe as the probability of it killing this Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas dwindles to zero, as he becomes superposed with everywhere at once. The hunter gives an incoherent, rageful cry, drops his astonishing bow, and pulls the Q-blade. And a fourth figure is in the place above universes with them; the blonde short loira woman, the miraculous capoeirista: a thousand, a million alters of her, charging across the multiverse. In one instant she is a universe away; the next she arrives, panting, beside Edson.

“Hello again,” she says, and slaps half a handcuff around Edson’s wrist.

She ducks under the assassin’s Q-blade strike; delivers a crunching kick to the solar plexus that sends him reeling, agonized, out of the sanctorum; and slaps the other half of the handcuffs around the astonished Fia’s arm. “You’d just end up in two hundred kilometers of Atlantic,” she says. “And you’re no use to us there.” She hauls on the chain linking Edson and Fia. The doors swing wide; they fall through every door at once into the silver light. A billion lives, a billion deaths flash through Edson. He needs to cry piss vomit laugh pray ejaculate praise roar in ecstasy. Then he is standing in light, sunlight, on raindamp concrete, by a low curb surrounding a statue of a man in soccer kit holding boldly aloft the kind of torch that only appears in statuary and political party logos. The man is bronze, and on the sides of the plinth are plaques in the same ritual metal bearing names. Legendary names, galactic names. Jairzinho and Ronaldo Fenómeno. Socrates, and that other Edson: Arantes do Nascimento. Before him is a curved triumphal gateway in mold-stained white-and-blue-painted concrete and the words Stadio Mario Filho.

Edson is in a place he’s never been before. The Maracanã Stadium.

“Rio?” Fia asks wearily, as if one more wonder or horror and she would lie down in the damp gutter and pull the trash over her.

“What’s going on here?” Edson demands, frowning at the verdigrised plaques. “Where’s the 2030 Seleçao that won right here, and 2018 in Russia? When are we?”

“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.”