Ian McDonald - Brasyl

“That’s whar you’re fighting for,” Fia says, and her eyes are bright, seeing to the end of the universe and beyond, reflecting that new light. “Death in the cold and dark, or the hope of rebirth in the fire.”

“You should write scripts,” Marcelina says. “That’s very good. Very poetic. This is what the Order fears; that’s why we are fighting it all across the multiverse, for a chance at something different, something magical. Places like this, they’re a start, a tiny start. Edson, I need a word with your girlfriend, in private.”

Edson turns again to the endless final. The bright watered green, the sky that only Rio makes so blue, the many colors of the crowd: ghosts, echoes. His own hand on the rail seems so thin and insubstantial he could see through it. He turns his face up to the sun and it is cold.

“Scared the hell out of me too, son,” Barbosa says. He leans on the rail, decorously spits over the edge of the presidential box. “But whatever it is, this is the world we live in. We’re men; we make our own way. Maybe it all begins anew; maybe we die and that’s the end of it, no heaven, no hell, nothing. But I know I can’t go on living what happened to me over and over and over, slower and slower until it all freezes. That’s death. This … this is nothing.” He looks around. “That was quick. I’ll leave you young things” He climbs the steps, passes Fia on the red carpet.

“She offered you a job, didn’t she?” Edson says.

“It’s getting to be a habit.”

“And did you take it?”

“What’s the alternative? For someone like me, what’s the alternative?”

“But nothing for Edson.”

She can’t look at him. Below them, in a million universes, Augusto lifts high the Jules Rimet trophy to a silent Maracanã.

“I can’t make that decision for you.”

“Did you even try?”

“It’s too dangerous. You’re not a player; I am, for better or worse. You can’t come with me. Go back; we can send you back, it’s easy. I can do it. The Order is looking for me now.”

“But I wouldn’t see you again, would I? Not if the Order is hunting you.”

She shakes her head, chews her lip. There will be tears soon. Good, Edson thinks. I deserve them .

“Ed … ”

“Don’t call me that. I hate that. Call me my name. I’m Edson.”

“Edson, you have a home to go to. You have all your family, and all those brothers and Dona Hortense and your Aunt Marizete and all those friends. You’ve got Carlinhos … Mr. Peach. He loves you. I don’t know what he’ll do without you.”

“Maybe,” Edson says, biting his lip because he can feel it coming and he does not want her to see it, not while he is hurt and full of rage, “maybe I love you.”

She puts her hand up to her mouth, tries to push his words back into unspokenness.

“Don’t say that, no, have you any idea how hard it is to hear you say that? How can I say this? This sounds the most callous thing. Edson, I died to you once already. I’m not her. I never was.”

“Maybe,” says Edson, “it’s you I love.”

“No!” Fia cries. “Stop saying this. I’m going, I have to go now, I have to do this quickly. You can’t come with me. Don’t look for me, don’t try and get in touch with me. I won’t look for you. Let me go back to being dead.”

She turns and walks up the red carpet. Marcelina opens the door. Edson knows what lies beyond that door: all the worlds in the multiverse. Once she steps through, she will disappear between the worlds and he will never be able to find her again. He will go back to his office at the back of Dona Hortense’s house in respectable hardworking Cidade de Luz. The fuss over the Q-cores will disappear as the police find easier meat to pick over. There will be other Keepie-Uppie Queens, other fut-volley teams, and there is the whole Habibi lanchonete business for De Freitas Global Talent. And on those rare clear nights in autumn and early spring he will look up beyond the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance to the stars themselves and the faint glow of the Milky Way, and see her out there, farther than any star, yet only a weave of the world away. The door is closing; Fia is already stepping through. One more step and he will lose her forever. And Edson finds he is running up those stairs, up that red carpet, toward that closing door. “No!” he shouts. “No!”

In the waxing light the quilombistas on Hope of the Saints Hill stood as one, silent, staring at the angels of God walking over the treetops toward them, haloed by the rising sun. Then Zemba beat his spear against his shield, ran up and down between the ranks, his iâos behind him, roaring and leaping, proud and furious.

“What pacas are you, that stand in awe of wooden puppets? For bauds and gauds you would put your wrists into the manacles? Fight, you pacas! This is the City of God. This!” The iâos in their bridal dresses joined their throats with his: a voice here, a voice there sounded; then of a sudden the whole hill shouted as one. Falcon felt the cry in his throat, the good cry of pride and defiance and laughter; then he too was roaring with the people: Hope of the Saints Hill red with bodies all shouting at the sun.

The hill was still resounding to the great cheer as Falcon took his Manaos down the slope into the flooded forest. There was treachery beneath the opaque, muddied surface: the old trench lines and pit traps remained; one step could leave an unwary warrior floundering in deep water, helpless under the enemy’s blades. Falcon looked back but once, when he saw the angels come to a halt. Through the trees he glimpsed Caixa in her forward trench, passing out serrated wooden knives to the women and children of her command. Moments later the varzea shook to the crash of artillery and the whistle of mortar shells. The hilltop where Zemba had stationed his viable artillery exploded in smoke and red earth. Clods fell like rain, but from the clearing cloud of smoke Falcon heard the cheer of defiance renewed. Zemba’s hasty earthworks had endured; the ballisteiros and trebuchistas danced on the parapet, waved their urocum-dyed man hoods at the hovering angels.

A bird-whistle; Tucuru held his left hand out at his side, fluttered it. Enemy within sight. Falcon peered into the gloom, but all he could see was a waterlogged sloth, lanky and lugubrious, rowing its way across the flooddwaters like a debauched spider. Then in an epiphany of vision, the same as suddenly draws constellations upon scattered stars, he discerned the curved prows of war canoes pressing through the leaf-and-water dazzle. He held out his sword. His archers concealed themselves in the lush cove. They would fire twice, then withdraw to harry the enemy again. Close. Let them close. And closer yet.

“For the Marvelous City!” Falcon cried. Fifty archers fired, their second arrows in the air before the first had found their marks. All was silent. Then the forest exploded in a wall of cannon fire and the air turned to a shrieking, killing cloud of ball and splint. In that opening salvo half of Falcon’s commmand was blown to red wreck.

“Second positions!” he shouted. Beyond the gunboats the waters were solid with canoes, more canoes than he had ever imagined. Crown and church had joined their forces not on a mission of enslavement but of annihilation. “Christ have mercy,” he muttered. Against such odds all he could do, must do, was buy some little time. “Cover and fire!” he commanded. The line of gunboats fired again as it advanced through the trees. Trunks branches twigs flew to splinters and leaves, a deadly storm of splinters, ripped apart by cannister shot. Sword beating at his side, Falcon splashed through the thigh-deep water. He glanced up at the whistle and crash of a salvo of iron-hard wooden balls stabbing through the canopy. The boy slingers on Hope of the Saints Hill were firing blind on ballistic trajectories. Cries in Portuguese; the paddlers raised their wooden shields over their heads. The Manao beside Falcon took the unguarded moment to turn and loose an arrow at a cannoneer. A musket spoke, the man spun on his heel, the arrow skied, he fell back into the leaf-covered water, chest shattered red. As the gunners reloaded their murderous pieces, Zemba’s treetop snipers opened fire. Warm work they perrformed with their repeating crossbows, but each story ended the same: blasts of blunderbuss, clouds of smoke, bodies falling from the trees like red fruit. And still the boats came on. Falcon looked around him at the bodies hunched in rhe water, already prey to piranha. less than a quarter of his archers remained. This was bloody slaughter.