“Just tell me, and maybe then I might tell you,” Miracle Boy says, springing out from beneath the tormenting fingers, the stub on the maconha in his hand. Someday Edson hopes to graduate from being something Boy to something Man, or even Captain something.

“Okay. Come on back to bed, but you tell me, right?” He cups his hands over Miracle Boy’s semierect cock and begins the story.

Says Captain Superb, there are two classes of computations: the doable and the budget-busters. Time is money in computing as in any enterprise, so you need to know how long it’s going to take to do your computation: now, or longer than the universe has left to run. A surprising number of everyday problems fall into that latter category and are called NP problems. The most common problem is factorizing prime numbers.

Miracle Boy says, “I know about prime numbers. They’re the magic numbers from which all the others are built. Like the chemical elements for mathematics. ”

“That’s a good analogy, Sextinho,” says Captain Superb. “It’s easy and quick ro multiply two prime numbers-doesn’t really matter how big, even up to a hundred thousand digits-together. What’s not so easy is to take that number apart again-what we call factorization. There are a number of mathhematical tricks you can pull to eliminate some obvious no-contenders, but at some point you still have to divide your original number by every odd number until you find a result that divides evenly. If you add a single extra digit to your original number, it triples the amount of time a computer needs to run through all the calculations. A two-hundred-and-fifty-digit number would take our fastest conventional computers over ten million years. That’s why very large primes are code-makers’ best friends. It’s easy to take twodigit primes as your keys that unlock your arfid chip and multiply them together. But to take that million-digit product down into its prime factors, there literally isn’t enough time left in the universe for a single computer to crank out that sum. But quantum computers can crack a problem like that in milliseconds. But what if you divided a number that would take ten billion years to factor up into chunks and farmed them out to other computers?

“Ten computers, it would only take a billion years to solve. A million computers, a thousand years. Ten million computers would be a hundred years; a hundred million …

“There is at least that number of processors in São Paulo. But with modern crypto, you’re looking at computation runs at least ten billion times that. There aren’t enough computers in the world. In fact, if every atom of the Earth was a tiny nanocomputer, there still wouldn’t be enough.”

“But there are ghost universes,” Miracle Boy says. The rain lashes hard on the roof, then eases. The eaves drip. Sun breaks through the shutter slats.

“Correct. At the smallest level, the quantum level, the universe — all the universes of the multiverse — display what we call coherence. In a sense, what seem like separate particles in the other universes are all the same particle, just different aspects of it. Information about them, about the state they’re in, is shared between them. And where you have information, you have computing.”

“She’d said ten to the eight hundred universes. There was this glowing thing, they had to keep it cold.” He thinks about the frogs that can see into quantum worlds.

“That sounds like a high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in one uniform quantum state. An array like that could do compuutations in, let me see, ten to the hundred thousand universes. That’s a lot for a handbag. It’s approaching what we’d call a general-purpose quantum computer. Most quantum computers are what we call special purpose-they’re algorithm crackers for encryption. But a general-purpose QC is a much more powerful and dangerous beast.”

“What could you do with one?”

“What couldn’t you do? One thing that immediately springs to mind is that no secret over three years old is safe. Certainly the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA, and the FBI are open for business. But the big picture is rendering, what we would call a universal simulator, one that can get down to that level. What’s the difference between the real weather, and the rendering?”

Miracle Boy tried to imagine a hurricane that blows between worlds. He shivers. He says, “Do you think she might be in danger?”

Captain Superb shrugs in his spandex suit.

“Isn’t everyone these days? Everyone’s presumed to be guilty of something. Hell, they can cut you up just for a television show. But the gringos and the government guard their quantum technology very carefully; if she’s using an unlicensed machine, someone will be interested. Even at São Paulo U the quantum cores were so heavily monitored you had to have a security officer with you. You’ve got yourself a scary girlfriend, Sextinho. So who is she, this Quantum Girl?”

“She’s called Fia Kishida.”

And it is as if Captain Superb has been struck by a White Event and been turned into a real superhero, for he flies off the bed. Miracle Boy sees him clearly suspended in midair. Captain Superb leans over Miracle Boy, spandex puffing and sucking around his mouth. He fumbles for the zips, pulls it down, shakes his graying, wavy hair out.

“What did you say? Fia Kishida? Fia Kishida?”

“So you’re the swordsman,” the bishop of Grão Pará said as Luis Quinn touched his lips to the proffered ring. “Younger than I’d expected. And bigger. Most of the swordsmen I’ve met were small things, scrawny chickens of things. Effete. But then many big men are light on their feet, I’ve found.”

“The sword belongs to another life, Your Grace.” Luis Quinn regained his feet and stood, hands folded in submission. Bishop Vasco da Mascarennhas’s chamber was dark, furnished in heavily carved woods from the Tocantins, deep reds and blacks. The ornate putti and seraphs had African mouths and noses, Indio eyes and cheekbones. The heat was oppression, the light beyond the drawn shutters painful.

“Yours is a military order, is it not? Of course I cannot compel you, but it would be no bad thing for your society to be seen to be… muscular. Brazil respects power and little else. There are fellows here aplenty — big idle lumps, up from the captaincies to make their fortunes — who fancy themmselves a rip with the blade. Yes, the very thing: I shall arrange a sport.”

“Your Grace, I have foresworn-”

“Of course you have, of course. Wooden swords, a good poke in the arse, that sort of thing. It would be good to show those arrogant turkey cocks a thing or two. Teach them a little respect for Church authority and keep them away from the indio girls. We get little enough novelty here, as you might imagine.” The bishop rose from his ornate chair. Wood scraped heavily over stone. “Are you a man for the sport, Father? I tell you, there is a great game they have here, the indios brought it, played with a ball of blown latex, though the blacks have the best skill at it. It’s all in the feet; you’re allowed to use the head as well, but not the hands, never the hands. You steer it to the enemy’s goal purely by foot. A splendid sight. You’ll come with me to the cloister garden; the heat is intolerable indoors this time of the day.”

Bishop Vasco was a big man and not at all light on his feet. He sweated luxuriously as he ambled around the shaded garden. Decorative panels of handpainted blue-on-white Portuguese tiles depicted allegories of the theological virtues. A fountain trickled in the center of the worn limestone Bags, a sound as fragile and deep as years. Birds peered and whooped from the eaves.

“I wish they had sent you to me, Quinn. Sometimes I wish Belem were a dog, that I might shake it by the throat. Carnality and lust, I tell you, carrnality and lust. Lust for gold; not merely the Vila Rica gold, but the red gold and the black gold, especially in this time of plague and madness. You know what I speak of. Oh, for a dozen — half a dozen — stout mission fathers: even just one examiner from the Holy Office! That would set them about their ears. I have heard about your railing at the porters of the Cidade Baixa. That is exactly the type of thing we need here, Quinn, exactly. A tedious enough passage, I take it?”