Ian McDonald - Brasyl

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!”

“And the answer?”

“The universe — the original universe, the one in which we all lived out lives the first time — died long ago. Not died — it never dies, it just goes on expanding forever until every particle is so far from every other that it’s effecctively in a universe of its own. We haven’t reached that stage yet; the universe is so old and cold there is no longer enough energy to sustain life, or any other process except quantum computation. But intelligence always tries to find a way out, a way not to die with the stars, and so it created a vast quantum simmulation of its own history, and entered it. And we live it over and over and over again, ever more slowly as the universe cools toward absolute zero, until in the end-time it stops completely and we are frozen in the eternal present.”

Edson, always thin, always undernourished, shivers in his sharp white malandro’s suit.

’’I’m alive,” he says.

“Yes. No. An accurate-enough simulation is virtually indistinguishable from reality. It’s only when you look up close that the cracks begin to appear.”

“Quantum weirdness,” Fia says.

“No way around it. The quantum nature of the simulation would always betray its true nature. That’s what the Order was created to protect.”

“Fia told me the Sesmarias are old fidalgo families. How long have we known about this?”

“I think there have always been individuals who understood the multiiverse. But the Order has only existed since the middle-of the eighteenth cenntury, when a French explorer brought back an Amazonian drug that allowed the mind to operate on a quantum level.”

Edson’s head reels. Stop this stop this. Give me sun and beer; give me a Keepie-Uppie Queen and a hot deal.

“We’re dead. We’re ghosts, so what? We all die in the end.”

He feels Fia’s hand clutch his.

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” she says. “All available energy goes into running the multiversal quantum computer.”

“The Order calls it the Parousia.”

“But instead, all that energy could be put into something else. Someething unpredictable. A random quantum event, like the one that inflated into this multiverse in the first place. A new creation. But you’d have to end the simulation first. You would have to turn off the Parousia.”

“Wait wait wait wait,” says Edson. “You turn it off, we all die.”

“Maybe not,” Fia says, overbiting her bottom lip in that way she doesn’t know she does but Edson finds sweet-sexy. “’A black hole does have hair.’ Information could be conserved through a singularity.”

’’I’m not a scientist, you know,” Edson says.

“Me neither,” says Marcelina. “But I have made some science shows. Mostly about plastic surgery.”