Brasyl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  OUR LADY OF PRODUCTION VALUES

  MAY 17-19, 2006

  SEPTEMBER 22, 2032

  JUNE 19, 1732

  OUR LADY OF SPANDEX

  MAY 24, 2006

  SEPTEMBER 25, 2032

  JULY 22, 1732

  OUR LADY OF TRASH

  MAY 25-28, 2006

  OCTOBER 12, 2032

  AUGUST 22-28, 1732

  OUR LADY WHO APPEARED

  MAY 30-JUNE 4, 2006

  JANUARY 27, 2033

  SEPTEMBER 16-17, 1732

  OUR LADY OF THE FLOOD FOREST

  JUNE 6-8, 2006

  JANUARY 28-29, 2033

  OCTOBER 1-2, 1732

  OUR LADY OF THE TELENOVELAS

  JUNE 9-10, 2006

  FEBRUARY 2-10, 2033

  OCTOBER 29, 1732

  OUR LADY OF THE GOLDEN FROG

  JUNE 10-11, 2006

  FEBRUARY 12, 2033

  AUGUST 6-15, 1733

  OUR LADY OF ALL WORLDS

  JUNE 11, 2006

  APRIL 18, 2033

  AUGUST 18-SEPTEMBER 3, 1733

  GLOSSARY

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Reading

  Also by Ian McDonald from Gollancz:

  River of Gods

  Brasyl

  IAN MCDONALD

  Orion

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Ian McDonald 2007

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Ian McDonald to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 5750 8735 4

  This eBook produced by Jouve, France

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  This one, finally, for Enid

  OUR LADY OF PRODUCTION VALUES

  MAY 17-19, 2006

  Marcelina watched them take the car on Rua Sacopã. It was a C-Class Mercedes, a drug dealer’s car, done up to the tits by the Pimp My Ride: Brasileiro design crew with wheel trim and tail and blue lighting that ran up and down the subframe. Subwoofers the size of suitcases. The design boys had done a good job; it looked a fistful more than the four thousand reis Marcelina had paid at the city car pound.

  One time they passed it: three guys in basketball shorts and vests and caps. The first time is the looking time. A second time, this time the checking time, pretending to be interested in the trim and the rosary and Flamengo key-fob hanging from the mirror (sweet touch) and was it CD multichanger or a hardpoint for MP3?

  Go, my sons, you know you want it, thought Marcelina in the back of the chase car in a driveway two hundred meters up hill. It’s all there for you, I made it that way, how can you resist?

  The third time, that is the taking time. They gave it ten minutes’ safety, ten minutes in which Marcelina sat over the monitor fearing would they come back would someone else get there first? No, here they were swinging down the hill, big pretty boys long-limbed and loose, and they were good, very good. She hardly saw them try the door, but there was no mistaking the look of surprise on their faces when it swung open. Yes, it is unlocked. And yes, the keys are in it. And they were in: door closed, engine started, lights on.

  ‘We’re on!’ Marcelina Hoffman shouted to her driver and was immediately flung against the monitor as the SUV took off. God and Mary they were hard on it, screaming the engine as they ripped out onto the Avenida Epitácio Pessoa. ‘All cars all cars!’ Marcelina shouted into her talkback as the Cherokee swayed into the traffic. ‘We have a lift we have a lift! Heading north for the Rebouças Tunnel.’ She poked the driver, an AP who had confessed a love for car rallying, hard in the shoulder. ‘Keep him in sight, but don’t scare him.’ The monitor was blank. She banged it. ‘What is wrong with this thing?’ The screen filled with pictures, feed from the Mercedes’ lipstick-cams. ‘I need real-time time-code up on this.’ Don’t let them find the cameras, Marcelina prayed to Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão, her divine patroness. Three guys, the one in the black and gold driving, the one in the Nike vest, and the one with no shirt at all and a patchy little knot of wiry hair right between his nipples. Sirens dopplered past; Marcelina looked up from her monitor to see a police car turn across four lanes of traffic on the lagoon avenue and accelerate past her. ‘Get me audio.’

  João-Batista the soundman waggled his head like an Indian, the gesture made the more cartoonish by his headphones. He fiddled with the mixer slung around his neck and gave a tentative thumbs-up. Marcelina had rehearsed this - rehearsed this and rehearsed this and rehearsed this - and now she could not remember a single word. João-Batista looked at her: Go on, it’s your show.

  ‘You like this car ? You like it?’ She was shrieking like a shoutygirl-presenter. João-Batista looking pityingly at her. On the car cams the boys looked as if a bomb had gone off under their Knight Rider LEDS. Don’t bail, Lady Lady Lady, don’t bail. ‘It’s yours! It’s your big star prize. It’s all right, you’re on a TV game show!’

  ‘It’s a shit old Merc with a cheap pimp from graphics,’ Souza the driver muttered. ‘And they know that.’

  Marcelina knocked off the talkback.

  ‘Are you the director here? Are you? Are you? It’ll do for the pilot.’

  The SUV veered abruptly, sending Marcelina reeling across the backseat. Tires squealed. God she loved this.

  ‘They decided against the tunnel. They’re taking a trip to Jardim Botânica instead.’

  Marcelina glanced at the satnav. The police cars were orange flags, their careful formation across Rio’s Zona Sul breaking up and reordering as the chase car refused to drive into their trap. That’s what it’s about, Marcelina said to herself. That’s what makes it great TV. Back on the talkback again.

  ‘You’re on Getaway . It’s a new reality show for Canal Quatro, and you’re on it! Hey, you’re going to be big stars!’ That got them looking at each other. Attention culture. It never failed to seduce the vain Carioca. Best reality show participants on the planet, cariocas. ‘That car is yours, absolutely, guaranteed, legal. All you have to do is not get arrested by the cops for half an hour, and we’ve told them you’re out there. You want to play?’ That might even do for the strapline: Getaway: You Want to Play?

  Nike vest boy’s mouth was moving.

  ‘I need audio out,’ Marcelina shouted. João-Batista turned another knob. Baile funk shook the SUV.

  ‘I said, for this heap of shit?’ Nike vest shouted over the booty beat. Souza took another corner at tire-shredding speed. The orange flags of the police were flocking together, route by route cutting off possible escape. For the first time Marcelina believed she might have a program here. She thumbed the talkback off. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘It could be Rocinha or up through Tijuca on the Estrada Dona Castorina.’ The SUV slid across
another junction, scattering jugglers, their balls cascading around them, and windshield-washers with buckets and squeegees. ‘No, it’s Rocinha.’

  ‘Are we getting anything usable?’ Marcelina asked João-Batista. He shook his head. She had never had a soundman who wasn’t a laconic bastard, and that went for soundwomen too.

  ‘Hey hey hey, could you turn the music down a little?’

  DJ Furação’s baile beat dropped to thumbs-up levels from João-Batista.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Marcelina shouted at Nike vest.

  ‘You think I’m going to tell you, in a stolen car with half Zona Sul up my ass? This is entrapment.’

  ‘We have to call you something,’ Marcelina wheedled.

  ‘Well, Canal Quatro, you can call me Malhação, and this América’ - the driver took his hands off the wheel and waved - ‘and O Clono.’ Chest-hair pushed his mouth up to the driver’s headrest minicam in the classic MTV rock-shot.

  ‘Is this going to be like Bus 174?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you want to end up like the guy on Bus 174?’ Souza murmured. ‘If they try and take that into Rocinha, it’ll make Bus 174 look like a First Communion party.’

  ‘Am I going to be like a big celebrity then?’ O Clono asked, still kissing the camera.

  ‘You’ll be in Contigo. We know people there, we can set something up.’

  ‘Can I get to meet Gisele Bundchen?’

  ‘We can get you on a shoot with Gisele Bundchen, all of you, and the car. Getaway stars and their cars.’

  ‘I like that Ana Beatriz Barros,’ América said.

  ‘Hear that? Gisele Bundchen!’ O Clono had his head between the seats, bellowing in Malhação’s ear.

  ‘Man, there is going to be no Gisele Bundchen, or Ana Beatriz Barros,’ Malhação said. ‘This is TV; they’ll say anything to keep the show going. Hey Canal Quatro, what happens if we get caught? We didn’t ask to be in this show.’

  ‘You took the car.’

  ‘You wanted us to take the car. You left the doors open and the keys in.’

  ‘Ethics is good,’ João-Batista said. ‘We don’t get a lot of ethics in reality T V.’

  Sirens on all sides, growing closer, coming into phase. Police cars knifed past on each side, a blast, a blur of sound and flashing light. Marcelina felt her heart kick in her chest, that moment of beauty when it all works together, perfect, automatic, divine. Souza slid the SUV into top gear as he accelerated past the shuttered-up construction gear where the new favela wall was going up.

  ‘And it’s not Rocinha,’ Souza said, pulling out past a tanker-train. ‘What else is down there? Vila Canoas, maybe. Whoa.’

  Marcelina looked up from her monitor, where she was already planning her edit. Something in Souza’s voice.

  ‘You’re scaring me, man.’

  ‘They just threw a three-sixty right across the road.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Coming right at us.’

  ‘Hey, Canal Quatro.’ Malhação was grinning into the sun-visor cam. He had very good, white big teeth. ‘I think there’s a flaw in your format. You see, there’s no motivation for me to risk jail just for a shit secondhand Merc. On the other hand, something with a bit of retail potential . . .’

  The Mercedes came sliding across the central strip, shedding graphics’ loving pimp job all over the highway. Souza stood on the antilocks. The SUV stopped a spit from the Mercedes. Malhação, América, and O Clono were already out, guns held sideways in that way that had become fashionable since City of God.

  ‘Out out out out out.’ Marcelina and crew piled onto the road, traffic blaring past.

  ‘I need the hard drive. If I haven’t got the hard drive I haven’t got a show, at least leave me that.’

  América was already behind the wheel.

  ‘This is sweet,’ he declared.

  ‘Okay, take it,’ Malhação said, handing monitor and terabyte LaCie to Marcelina.

  ‘You know, you kinda have hair like Gisele Bundchen,’ O Clono called from the rear seat. ‘But curlier, and you’re a lot smaller.’

  Engines cried, tires smoked, América handbraked the SUV around Marcelina and burned out west. Seconds later police cars flashed.

  ‘Now that,’ said João-Batista, ‘is what I call great TV.’

  The Black Plumed Bird smoked in the edit suite. Marcelina hated that. She hated most things about the Black Plumed Bird, starting with the 1950s’ clothes she wore unironically in defiance of trend and fashion (there is no fashion without personal style, querida) and that nevertheless looked fantastic, from the real nylon stockings, with seams - never pantyhose, bad bad thrush - to the Coco Chanel jacket. If she could have worn sunglasses and a headscarf in the edit suite, she would have. She hated a woman so manifestly confident in her mode, and so correct in it. She hated that the Black Plumed Bird could exist on a diet of import vodka and Hollywood cigarettes, had never been seen taking a single stroke of exercise and yet would have emerged from an all-night edit radiating Grace Kelly charm and not skull-fucked on full-sugar guaraná. Most of all she hated that, for all her studious retro and grace, the Black Plumed Bird had graduated from media school one year ahead of Marcelina Hoffman and was her senior commissioning editor. Marcelina had bored so many researchers and development producers over Friday cocktails at Café Barbosa about the stunts and deviations the Black Plumed Bird had pulled to get head of Factual Entertainment at Canal Quatro that they could recite them now like Mass. She didn’t know the mike was still live and the guys in the scanner heard her say . . . (All together) Fuck me till I fart . . .

  ‘The soundtrack is a key USP; we’re going for Grand Theft Auto/Eighties retro. That’s that English new romantic band who did that song about Rio but the video was shot in Sri Lanka.’

  ‘I thought that one was “Save a Prayer,” ’ said Leandro, moving a terracotta ashtray with an inverted flowerpot for a lid toward the Black Plumed Bird. He was the only editor in the building not to have banned Marcelina from his suite and was considered as imperturbable as the Dalai Lama, even after an all-nighter. ‘ “Rio” was shot in Rio. Stands to reason.’

  ‘Are you like some ninja master of early eighties English new romantic music?’ Marcelina sniped. ‘Were you even born in 1984?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that particular Duran Duran track was 1982,’ the Black Plumed Bird said, carefully stubbing her cigarette out in the proffered ashtray and replacing the lid. ‘And the video was shot in Antigua, actually. Marcelina, what happened to the crew car ?’

  ‘The police found it stripped to the subframe on the edge of Mangueira. The insurance will cover it. But it shows it works; I mean, the format needs a little tweaking, but the premise is strong. It’s good TV.’

  The Black Plumed Bird lit another cigarette. Marcelina fretted around the door to the edit suite. Give me it give me it give it just give me the series.

  ‘It is good TV. I’m interested in this.’ That was as good as you ever got from the Black Plumed Bird. Marcelina’s heart misfired, but that was likely the stimulants. Come down slowly, all say, and then a normal night’s bed; that, in her experience, was the best descent path out of an all-nighter. Of course if it was a commission, she might just go straight down to Café Barbosa, bang on Augusto’s door with the special Masonic Knock and spend the rest of the day on the champagne watching roller boys with peachlike asses blade past. ‘It’s clever and it’s sharp and it hits all our demographics, but it’s not going to happen.’ The Black Plumed Bird held up a lace-gloved hand to forestall Marcelina’s protests. ‘We can’t do it.’ She tapped at the wireless control pad and called up the Quatro news channel. Ausiria Menendes was on the morning shift. Heitor would probably call her midday for a little lunch hour. The scuttling fears and anxieties of a middle-aged news anchor were the very un-thing she needed this day. A fragment seemed to have fallen out of her brain onto the screen: Police cars pulled in around a vehicle on the side of a big highway. São Paulo, said the
caption. Cut to a helicopter shot of military cruisers and riot-control vehicles parked up outside the gate of Guarulhos Main Penitentiary. Smoke spiraled up from inside the compound; figures occupied the half-stripped roof with a bedsheet banner, words sprayed in red.

  ‘The PCC has declared war with the police,’ said the Black Plumed Bird. ‘There are at least a dozen cops dead already. They’ve got hostages in the jail. Benfica will start next and then . . . No, we can’t do it.’