“Saved your life,” says Edson. Fia holds his eyes for three seconds. That’s enough to signal a kiss. But Edson hesitates. The moment is lost. She lets slip his hand and heads up into the second circle. This is the district of the ware shops, the copywrong vendors, the black pharmers. Your child has tubercuulosis, flu, malaria? HIV? Here’s a pill for your ill, at noncorporation prices. You can’t get yourself up in the morning, your husband just wants to sit and watch telenovelas all day, your children won’t go to school and are eating the walls? We can give you something for that. It’s been how long since you last had an erection? Oh my man, I feel for you. Here. And it will make you come buckets. You really like this track this movie this installment of BangBang! or A World Somewhere but you can’t keep up the rental payments and don’t want to lose it at the end of the month? We strip it, you keep it. Entertainnment is for life not for hire. You want, you need, the futebol feeds but you can’t afford the payments? We have a chip for every need. You are a man of debts, mistresses, crimes; seguranças police priests lawyers lovers wives after you? Here are eyes, here are fingerprints, here are names and faces and alibis and doppelgängers and ghosts and people who never lived. We can wash you purer than the crentes’ Jesus. And among them, a spray-bombed pink door to a tottering upstairs office and a hand-rollered pichacão sign slung on a selfadhesive peg: Atom Shop Is Open.

It wasn’t always sex and spandex. Today Mr. Peach was making Edson a mogueca. You need feeding up, Sextinho; you don’t look after yourself. Wasting away like a love-struck fool. Superhero costumes were hung up in the Bat-wardrobe. Mr. Peach was dressed now in dreadful shorts and a beach shirt. Edson in his sharp-creased whites said, “I still can’t believe you knew her at São Paulo U.”

Onions slid into the pan with a hiss. It was an old family recipe, a slave dish from the coffee estate days. Captains and masters were the Alvarangas, but they faded and failed until only one remains of the name. Edson has an enduring fantasy that Mr. Peach makes him son and heir of fazenda Alvaranga.

“Why so surprised? It’s a big multiverse and a small world, even smaller in quantum computing. I was an adviser on her doctoral dissertation in computational and information physics. Her thesis was that all mind is a multiversal quantum computer and therefore a fundamental element of reality, and also linked across universes by quantum entanglement. I always enjoyed sessions with her; she was one of my top students. Scarily bright. We’d argue the toss — she had a foul temper. Great arguer. Have you discovered that yet? Her theory was that the multiverse is a massively multiply parallel quantum computer and therefore a mindlike state. I’d argue that was metaphysics at best, religion at worst: whatever way you looked at it you ended up back at the strong anthropic principle, and that’s another word for solipsism. There’s nothing special about us. Given enough universes, something like us is bound to occur, many times over.”

A rich tang of garlic, then the astringent perfume of peppers.

“I’m not surprised she’s working with the quantumeiros — I couldn’t see anything in academia or even research giving her that adrenaline rush, but I can’t say I’m delighted.”

Crayfish now, fresh from the pond-farm up on the hill under the wind turbines. The power farms with their rotors and golden fields of rape crept down on the Fazenda Alvaranga while the housing projects crept up; street by overbright street and Mr. Peach gave his heritage away to Edson table-lamp by painting by vase. It is as if he wants the Alvarangas to be gone, wants to disappear completely. Mr. Peach slides a serving straight from the pan onto a plate; drops a little chopped coriander on top, green on yellow. A patriotic dish.

“But the real question is: have you fucked her yet?”

“I thought we’d agreed that we could see whoever we liked, that it didn’t matter.” Knowing that Mr. Peach had a wide circle of friends straight and gay, none of whom he would ever dress up in Lycra and cape.

“It doesn’t matter until it’s one of my ex-students.”

Edson had been uncomfortable with Mr. Peach’s former relationship with Fia since the Captain Superb/Miracle Boy session. They had been through Captain Truth/Domino Boy, Bondage Man/Pony-Lad and Lord Lycra/ Spandex Kid, and Edson still feels as if he is sharing her.

“Well, she may be super-bright, but I bet you didn’t know she watches A World Somewhere. Addicted to the thing. She’ll download it and we could be having a beer or eating something or even at a club and if she doesn’t like the music, I’ll see her watching it on her I-shades.”

“She always was like that.”

Edson pushed his plate away from him.

“I’m nor hungry.”

“Yes you are. You’re always hungry. Does your mother not feed you?”

“My mother loves me. You don’t talk about my mother like that.”

They’re having a fight over a woman. Edson can’t believe it. They’re letting a girl come between them. And Mr. Peach has taught Edson much more than postcoital physics. He has educated him in other disciplines: shaving and how to buy and drink wine and shake cocktails; dressing for style not fashion; ten ways to knot a tie; etiquette and how to talk to people to make them appreciate and remember you and call you back and what women expect and like and what men like and expect and how to be respectful but still get your own way in a hierarchical society.

Once when he was very small, a man hung around outside the house and Edson asked Dona Hortense if he was his father. Why bless the child, no. The days when men would come round to play cards and drink were gone, but Edson remembers the heat of that embarrassment in his cheeks.

Edson glances over at Mr. Peach, the tanned skin, the wiry gray hair sprouting from his shirt collar, the thin legs rattling in the baggy shorts. You are the father I never knew, the father I suck off.

“Just eat it,” says Mr. Peach. “For me. I like making you things.”

Edson suspects that Mr. Peach may not have set the worlds of quantum physics ablaze, but in one area he excels. He’s a great cook of old slave food.

In Atom Shop Edson hunts for kissable moments. As she brushes between him and the big 3-D polymer printers, as she leans over to squirt the design from her I-shades into the renderer, as he bends with her to study the holoographic image of the noo shooz on the screen. A touch, a whisper, the scent of her perfume and honey-sweat and fabric conditioner but never contact.

“Good bag,” says the girl on the reception, who has eyes the size of mangoes and a cloud-catching look from the fumes. The place smells strongly of plastics, like glue-sniffers’ paradise. “This original?” Fia hands it to her. She holds it up to the light, turns it this way that way, squinting, peering. Atom Shop prints print necklaces, hats, earrings, formal masks, body armor, watches, costume shades, I-clothing, anything you can weave from smart polymers. Topmarque handbags. “Looks like it. We couldn’t print at that resolution.”

“I know,” says Fia clutching her bag back to her. “But you can do me these shoes.” She touches her I-shades and loads the pattern onto Atom Shop’s house system. Edson does not doubt it’s stolen. Bad thing to get shot for; copywrong violation on a pair of top-marque shoes. The girl loads up the cartridges, closes the transparent cover. Lights blink on, mostly yellow. The print heads rear like striking snakes, then bend to their furious business, mollecule by molecule, millimeter by millimeter, building the soles and heel-tips of a pair of Manolo slingbacks.

It will take about an hour for the shoes to print, so Fia leads Edson up into the third circle of Todos os Santos, the circle of the vendors. Recycled reconditioned reengineered reimagined are the straplines here. Car parts, washing machine engines, lathes taps and dies, entertainment equipment, jerry-built white goods, custom mopeds, domestic and civil robots, surveilllance systems, computers and memory, I-shades and guns — all constructed from the flow of parts that comes down the spiral from the next circle in, the circle of the dismantlers.