“For a hundred leagues along the Rio Branco the emblem of the Green Lady is an object of dread, the Green Lady, and the Jesuit dress. My own black robe, Falcon. He has made a desert land, the villages empty, rotting; the plantations overgrown, the forest reclaiming all. All gone; dead, fled, or taken to the City of God, or the block in São José Tarumás. The friars at São José said nothing; that is their price. Plague is his herald, fire his vanguard: whole nations have retreated into the igapó and the terra firme only to be annihilated to the last child by the diseases of the white men. But he sees the hand of God; the red man must be tried by the white, must grow strong or perish utterly from the world.

“From the City of God to the Rio Catrimani is five days, and eight farther to the Iguapára. I had not thought there could be so much water in all the world. Endless, empty forest, with only the voices of the beasts for commpany. Manoel had passed into a silent, trancelike state of introspection; even the Guabirú guards were mute. I have heard that the indios may will themmselves to stop living and very soon pass into a melancholic decline and die. Many have chosen to escape that way from slavery. I believe Manoel was on the edges of that state; such were the rumors of what the Iguapá would work upon us.

“The Iguapá are a nation of seers and prophets; pagés and caraibas. They are consulted only on matters of the gravest import and they are never wrong. Thus they have lived a thousand years unmolested by war, famine, or disease. Their legend is that by Amazonian forest drugs they are able to see every posssible answer to the supplicant’s question and so select the true. But the price is terrible indeed. Very soon after the climax of the ritual trance the caraiba descends into confusion, then to full hallucination and a final collapse into insanity and death. They see too much. They try to understand, they overballance, they fail, they fall … I outrun myself. At such a price, the Iguapá do not sacrifice their own. No, their prophets are prisoners of war, hostages, rivals, criminals, outcasts. And of course the black priests of an alien, ineffectual faith. What is our weak prayer, our unseen hope, our whimsical miracles, compared with their iron certainty of the truth, that there is an answer and they will always know it? We could ask them about the mysteries of our God and faith, and they would answer truly. Dare we ask that? Dare we let it darken our imaginations?

“For five days we camped at the designated shore, leaving the signs and markers, invisible to me but as obvious to a native of these forests as a church cross to a European. When you have need of them, they will come to you. On the sixth day they came. They were wary; they have always been jealous with their secrets, but in this time of dying and vast migrations through the várzea they have grown more cautious. Like spirits out of the forest, so silent they were among us, their arrow-points at our hearts, before we knew it. I did not think they were of this world, so uncanny was their appearance: their faces shone gold; they habitually apply the oil of a forest nut they call urocum, and their foreheads, which they shave almost to the crown, slope sharply backward to resemble the shape of a boat. They bind the skulls of their infants with boards and leather while they are still soft and malleable. Manoel and I were bound and led by the hand; the Guabirú guides blindfolded. Their interpreter, a man named Waitacá, told me this was a recent courtesy: the eyes of all but the questioner would have formerly been put out with splinters of bamboo. We of course were never expected to return capable of speech.

“I do not remember how long we stumbled through the forest — days, certainly. The Iguapá trap their forest trails with snares and pitfalls; they could hold at bay an entire colonial army. As we detoured around the strangling nooses, poison arrows, and beds of spines, one question vexed me, what did Gonçalves wish with them? So simple a thing as conquest? The triumph of the tyrant is not his aim. He styles himself a political philosopher, a social experimenter. Were there questions — questions like those I dared posit on faith and the nature of the world — to which he required infallible answers? He believes himself a true man of God: did he seek that prophetic power to destroy it? Or is his overweening vanity so great that he seeks that power for himself, to know without faith, to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

“For all their cunning defenses, their village was poor and mean, foul with the filth of peccaries and dogs, huts sagging, thatch rotted and sprouting. There was not a child there that did not bear sores and boils or sties of the eye and lip on their golden faces. A special maloca was reserved for the caraíbas, as we sacrificial victims were known — a title of great honor, I was informed by Waitacá, though I had by now picked up the gist of their own, quite singular language. The hut was the vilest in the village, the thatch raining insects and spouting rain in a dozen places.

“In my wait I learned the basic tenets of Iguapá belief. They worship no God, have no story of creation or redemption, no sin nor heaven nor hell. Yet their belief system — it can never be a theology — is complex, thorough, and sophisticated. Their totemic creature is a frog — neither the loudest nor the most venomous nor the most colorful, though its skin has a beautiful golden sheen which they copy in their face-painting. This frog, which they call curupairá, was first of all creatures and saw the first light, the true light of the world — or should I say worlds, for they believe in a multiplicity of worlds that reflects every possible expression of human free will — whole and entire. It retains that memory of when reality was whole and undivided, like the pages in a book before they are cut. It still sees that true light, which is the light of all suns, and by the grace of the beings that inhabit those other worlds beside our own, can give that sight to humans. It is the extract of the curupairá, which is slowly boiled to death in a sealed clay pot with a spout, that induces the oracular vision.

“The ceremony seemed designed to lull both petitioners and victims alike into a near-ecstasy. Drumming, the piping of clay ocarinas, circle dancing, figures passing repeatedly in front of the light from the fire: all the old tricks. We were dragged from the hut, stripped, anointed with the golden oil — I bear traces of it still — and lashed to St. Andrew’s crosses. I remember it raining, a punishing downpour, bur the women and children danced on, shuffling around that smoking fire. Their pagé entered at the tail of the dance, the flask in his hand. He came to Manoel, then to me, forced our mouths open with a wooden screw, and poured a jet of the liquid into our gullets. I tried to spit it out but he kept pouring, like the old water ordeal.”

Again Quinn seized Falcon’s hand.

“It came so fast, brother, so fast. I had not time, no word of prayer, no moment even of recollection to prepare. One moment I was a golden idol crucified, the next I was swept away, across worlds, Robert, across worlds. My vision expanded and I saw myself, bound to the cross, as if I stood outside my own body. Yet this was not me, for in every direction I looked, I saw myself, bound to that cross, other Luis Quinns sharing my plight and my vision. A hundred mes, a thousand mes, receding like reflections of reflections in every direction, and the farther I looked, the less like me they were. Not physically, nor even I believe in will or intellect, but in the circumstances of their lives. Here were Luis Quinns who had failed in their mission, who had declined the burden of Father James in Coimbra, who had never joined the Society of Jesus. Here were Luis Quinns who had killed the slave in Porto without a backward look. Here were Luis Quinns who had never killed that slave at all. Luis Quinns leading lives of commerce and success, married, fathering chilldren, captaining great ships or houses of trade. Here were Luis Quinns alive and dead a thousand different ways, a myriad different ways. All the lives I might have led. And Falcon, Falcon, this you must understand if nothing else: they were all as true as each other. My life was not the trunk from which all others branch at each juncture or decision. They were independent, commplete, not other lives, but other worlds, separate from the very creating word of God to the final judgment. Worlds without end, Falcon. Naked I was sent out across them, my expanded mind racing down those lines of other Luis Quinns’ other worlds, and I could see no end to them, no end at all. And the voices, Falcon, a million, a thousand million, a thousand times that, voices all speaking at once, all combining into a terrible wordless howl like the roaring of the damned in hell.