Free Brasyl by Ian McDonald

Seleção;
then he gave up the game, gave up all his friends from the game,
dropped out of society, and eventually disappeared completely. Brazil
has given him fifty years of hell; you don't even get that for
murder.
    "So it's a trial format," Marcelina Hoffman said. This Blue
Sky Friday the pitching session took place in Adriano's conference
room, a glass cube with the titles of Canal Quatro's biggest and
noisiest hits etched into an equatorial strip. There were a couple of
Marcelina's among them. Toys and fresh new puzzles were strewn
deliberately around the floor to encourage creativity. Last week it
was Brain Gym for the PSP; this week, books of paper marked and
precreased for Rude Origami. The Sauna, as its nickname around Rua
Muniz Barreto implied, was notorious for its atrocious
air-conditioning, but the sweat Marcelina felt beading down her sides
was not greenhouse heat. Roda sweat: this glass room was as much a
martial arts arena as any capoeira roda. It would take all her jeito,
all her malicia, to dance down her enemies. Aid me, Nossa Senhora da
Valiosa Producão.
    "We track him down, haul him in, and put him on trial before the
people of Brazil. We present evidence, for and against—he gets
a fair trial. As fair as we want it to be. Maybe get a real judge to
preside. Or Pelé. Then the viewers decide whether to forgive
him or not."
    Glass tables in a glass room; arranged in a quadrilateral.
Community-facilitating and democratic, except that Adriano and the
Black Plumed Bird, so very very Audrey Hepburn today, sat on the side
of the quadra farthest from the sun. Lisandra and her pitch team were
to Marcelina's right; the iiber-bosses on her left. Keep your enemies
in your peripheral vision but never be seen looking; that is
foolishness. Directly across the square from her was Arlindo
Pernambucano from Entertainment; too too old to be creaming and
shrieking over celebrity mags and general girliness but who,
nonetheless, had a phenomenal hit-rate. But he was out of this jogo.
It was Lisandra and Marcelina in the roda.
    "What happens if he's guilty?" Adriano asked. "We make
him apologize on live TV."
    Adriano winced. But that's all right; that's the cringe-TV wince, the
carrcrash/guilty-pleasure wince. Embarrassment TV. He was liking it.
    "And is he still alive?"
    "I ran a check through public records," said Celso,
Marcelina's boy researcher and newest member of her alt dot family.
He was intimidatingly sharp, nakedly ambitious, was always at his
desk before Marcelina arrived and there after she left. She had no
doubt that someday he would reach for Marcelina's crown but not this
day; not when the joy—the old heat of the idea that burned out
of nowhere perfect and complete as if it had Made in Heaven stamped on the base, the joy she thought she had lost forever and
might now only glimpse in Botafogo sunrises and the glow and laughter
of the streets of Copa from her roof garden—glowed in her
ovaries. I'm back, she thought.
    "We could make the search for him part of the program,"
Adriano said. He's making suggestions , Marcelina observed. He's taking ownership of it. She might get this. She might get
this.
    "He must be a very old man by now," the Black Plumed Bird
said. "Eighty-five," said Celso at once.
    "It's an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old
man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by
television?"
    Yes , Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro
than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It's what we
love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment
and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls
taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They
knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public
disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run
them prime time and rule the ratings.
    "It's a chance for us to get closure on something that