“Then I heard a word speak through the cacophony, one voice that was a thousand voices, the pagé saying over and over ‘Ask! Ask! Ask!’ He too was surrounded by a bright blinding halo of his other selves; everyone, everything, the whole mean shambles of the village, my brother in suffering Manoel; I saw them all across countless worlds.

“’Ask’; What could this mean; And then I heard Paguana the leader of the Guabirú speak in a voice like a whirlwind: ‘When will the Guabirú achieve victory and rule over their enemies?’ And they heard, Falcon, all those uncountable voices; they heard and asked it of themselves, and each spoke his answer. I knew that somewhere among them, in that vast array of possible answers, was the truth; simple, complete, incontestable. Beside me, Manoel, endless Manoels, more than blossoms on an apple tree, asked that same quesstion of his other selves and would, I knew certainly, receive the same infallible answer.

“Once more I was spun forth among my other selves, across the worlds, faster, ever faster, outracing light and thought, even prayer. Godspeeded, I traversed a million worlds until an echo brought me up, to a room, a plain whitewashed room, furniture simply fashioned from heavy, valuable woods, a room in Ireland I knew from the taste of the air and the small square of green I could spy through the narrow window. There I saw myself, Luis Quinn, with a hound beneath my hand and an infant rolling at my feet. I looked myself in the eye and said, ‘The Guabirú will never rule over their enemies, for their enemy rules them already and water will run red with their blood and then they will become nothing but a memory of a name.’ And I knew this was true prophecy, because, Falcon, Falcon — it has happened. You wonndered if the universe might be modeled by a simple machine: here is your answer. There is a world for every possible deed and act, bur they are all written, preordained. The stack of cards runs through the machine. Free will is an illusion. We imagine we have choice, but the outcome is already decided, was written the moment the world was made, complete in time.”

“I cannot believe that,” Falcon said, the first words he had spoken since Quinn began his testimony. “I must believe that the world is shaped by our wills and actions.”

“The Rio Branco will run with the blood of the Guabirú and they will vanish utterly from this world: it will happen, it has already happened. Manoel spoke it first, and Paguana in a fit of rage seized a spear and ran him through, again and again. He would have done the same to me had he not been restrained by the Iguapá, and in truth, what good would it have done? The words spoken cannot be taken back. The Guabirú will be destroyed whether the oracle is spoken or not. This is the true horror of the Iguapá gift: the foreknowledge of that which you are powerless to change.

“For that instant only the truth spoke clear out of all the possible answers; then the roar of voices resumed, doubled, redoubled in volume; a million million voices and I could hear each one of them, Robert. I was driven down and apart so that I forgot who I was, where I was. I fled between worlds, a ghost, a demon. I know now I was cut down from the cross and that the Guabirú, with little grace, bound me to a litter to take me back to the City of God. I believe the Iguapá only let me go because they knew I would certainly die. There are moments of sanity and surcease when I became aware of this world: lurching through the trees, carried by blindfolded bearers, and again, at the river, when the Iguapá seized Paguana and poured poison into his eyes, for he had committed sacrilege against the caraíba.

“I recall Nossa Senhora da Várzea at night, a thousand lights upon her, and Diego Gonçalves’s face looking down upon me: I recall seeing my own face flecked with Iguapá gold in a mirror and my own breath misting my image. And all the while the one sane thought in my head was that he must not have it, that I must exert myself, discipline myself not to give voice to the truth I had learned in my madness and visions of other worlds. Deny him it, deny him it; I believe now it was that simple, potent need that drew me back from destruction. But I had no strength, my body was a traitor. Then among the worlds I heard my name spoken and it called me back, and there was Zemba, good Zemba. He it was who slipped me from my hammock and took a canoe and pushed us out into the stream, and then all the stars of all the universes opened upon me and I was lost in light.

“Water, Falcon, I beg you.”

Hands trembling, Robert Falcon held the water skin up to Luis Quinn’s lips. Again Quinn drank deeply, desperately. The tent fabric glowed with the promise of day: a night had been talked away, and all the birds of the forest joined in one whooping, shrilling, clattering chorus.

“My friend, my friend, I cannot believe what you are saying. If it is true … Rest, restore your strength. You are still very weak, and it is clear that some residue of the curupairá still affects your reason.”

Marie-Jeanne had given Falcon the flask — a precious, pretty little thing, chased silver, easily slipped into the place next to the heart — at the reception in the Hotel Faurichard the night before his embarkation to Brest. For when you are far from home, and wish to remember it, and me. How he wished for a sip of its fine old Cognac. This monstrous river, this dreadful land, this terrifying endless silent forest that hid horrors at its heart but spoke never a word, gave never a sign. One sip of France, of Marie-Jeanne and her bright, birdlike laughter; but he had stowed it, restowed it, stowed it yet again, it was lost. Not one world but many worlds. A drug that enabled the human mind to see reality and to communicate with its counterparts, the implication being — given that the universe ran to explicable, physical laws and not a quixotic divine will or thaumaturgy — that all minds must therefore be aspects of the one, immense mind. Quinn’s image returned to him, a stack of loom cards unfolding one at a time through the toothed mill of a Governing Engine.

Quinn had forced himself upright, gaunt face tight with energy and mania. “Even now I see it, Falcon, though the vision fades — no mind can look on such things and survive. Gonçalveswas correct in his supposition that my particular cast of mind — something in my facility for language, some innate ability to see pattern and meaning — allowed me to survive where those before me that he sent to seek out the oracle perished. But I am ridden by a terrible fear, that in my delirium I betrayed the Iguapá and even now that monstrous blasphemy of a basilica is casting off into the stream to enslave them. Falcon, I must go back. I have betrayed my order and my vows. I have left undone that which I ought to have done. There is no help in me. Doctor, I may have need again of your sword.”

“That you shall not have,” Falcon said, preparing manioc mush. “For I shall have need of it myself, at your side.”

The signs are set, the markers laid down; yet the Iguapá do not come. This is our fourth night upon this strand, and the fear haunts me that they have already been knocked down at the block in São José Tarumás. On the third night of our journey up the Catrimani and the Rio Iguapará we stole past Nossa Senhora de Várzea, the monstrous carbuncle, but was it ascending, or descending with its holds full of red gold? Falcon paused to swipe at a troubling insect, then bent to his journal again. Diliigently I log this journey, leagues traveled, rivers mapped, though the purpose of my expedition is utterly lost. I record villages and missions, navigation hazards and defensible positions; but increasingly I ask myself, to what end? Too readily I convince myself no one will ever read these reports and dispatches. Quinn would tell me that dessperation is a sin, but I dread that I shall never leave this green hell, that my bones will lie down in the heat and the rot and the pestilence and be covered over with veggetation and every trace of me will be lost. And yet, I write …