The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (23 page)

Muse
retrieves the file containing her instructions holoid and downloads it:

Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc

All
right, already. There’s the damn thing, thirty-six GB even, the last she saw
it, and she’s seen it a hundred times. Zhu blinks, straining to see as the
field fades away and the holoid commences. But, wait. According to the tool
bar, the file now contains thirty-six GB and two hundred and forty-two KB.

“For
pity’s sake, Muse. Stop it. That can’t be the right file.”

But
Muse doesn’t stop, or maybe the file is already invoked and the monitor can’t
stop it. The holoid pops up before her eyes—the hydroplex housing the Luxon
Institute for Superluminal Applications floating in San Francisco Bay. The
hushed corridors. The room swathed in a gauzy pale fabric like the inside of a
cloud. And Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, so tall and pale and elegant, with his
waist-length red hair, his eyes like sapphires.

She
jolts with the shock of seeing herself. Her old self. Just a glimpse, since the
holoid’s point of view is over her right shoulder. Her ragged hair. Her ragged
hands. The dirty blue jumpsuit, a prison uniform.

Her.
Self.

No!
She is not that person. Was she ever?

She
hadn’t liked him. She’d resented him. She’d barely been able to be polite.

“Please
understand, we cosmicists are conservationists,” he’s saying in the holoid.

Anger
chokes Zhu as she watches the session, watches the two of them talking. Mostly,
she watches herself watching him. She hadn’t liked him? Oh, she’d loathed him!
She’d taken a deep and abiding dislike of the man at once. As if she’d known he
was some kind of enemy behind the polite facade. As if—and this she suddenly
realizes sitting on the steps of Wells Fargo Bank, in 1895—as if she intuited that
he was devious, scheming to lure her into some terrible plan hatched by the
Archivists and the LISA techs, those haughty cosmicists in their ultramodern
platinum palace.

A
secret plan. And what was her role? Well, she was not in on the secret. She’s
just an anonymous young Chinese woman, then and now.

Zhu’s
left eye feels gritty. She rubs it, and the holoid vanishes, only to reappear
as soon as she raises her eyes again.

But
why should she hate Chiron? She’d never laid eyes on him before that moment six
hundred years in the future. Yet somehow she knew him. As if she had a memory,
but it wasn’t really a memory, couldn’t be a memory because she hadn’t yet had
the experience in the forward-moving time of her life.

As
if she had a premonition.

“There
was a Crisis,” Chiron is saying in the holoid.

Zhu
frowns. Does she remember this part?

“The
Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was conducting t-port
experiments. One of their premier physicists, J. Betty Turner, proposed a
t-port project that had special meaning for her. When she was a girl, she had accidentally
killed a woman. The tragedy had obsessed Betty her whole life. She became
depressed, agitated, despondent.

“When
the LISA techs discovered how to t-port someone to the past, Betty wanted to
try the new technology herself. She wanted to return to the day of the accident
and save the woman she killed. The Archivists researched that day and concluded
that the accident generated no significant probabilities that could collapse
out of the timeline. They greenlighted the project and set up a tachyonic
shuttle in a historically stable location.”

In
the holoid, Chiron raises a small cigarette to his lips, inhales deeply.

Zhu
closes her eyes, remembering. Chiron,
smoking?
No way! Then suddenly she
recalls the smoke, the lovely scent of cloves. He opened a gold cigarette case,
offered her one.

Now
she opens her eyes, and the scent of cloves overwhelms her. One of the girls at
the Parisian Mansion had bit into a clove, releasing that spicy scent. The
holoid streams from her left eye, materializing before her.

“No
thanks, I don’t smoke,” she says in the holoid. “So what happened? Betty
t-ported to the day of the accident?”

“Yes,”
Chiron says, blowing smoke rings. “But she didn’t return. She was the first recorded
case of a t-porter trapped in a Closed Time Loop.”

“I
don’t understand,” Zhu says in the holoid.

“She
died. She died in the past, but within her own lifetime. When Betty didn’t
return, the LISA techs reviewed their research, reviewed their perceptions of
the project. Some who knew Betty well saw her as cheerful and enthusiastic just
before she t-ported. Others insisted she was panicked that she wouldn’t succeed
in saving the woman she killed.”

“Okay,
so she died. And that was the end of it?”

“Hardly,”
Chiron says. “The LISA techs authorized the Save Betty Project and sent another
t-porter who brought Betty back to her personal Now so that the natural order
of her life could be restored and she could die at the actual end of her life,
not somewhere in the middle. But because we disrupted a CTL—which by definition
has no beginning and no end—we tore a hole in spacetime. The Save Betty Project
polluted all of reality. Spacetime split open, and another reality, a dreadful
alternative universe, a corrupted version of ours, thrust into our reality.
Entities from that reality, from that Other Now—entities we call demons—began
preying on our reality. And then the Archivists witnessed other
peculiarities—data disappearing from the Archives. Reality itself was
disappearing.

“We
faced a Crisis—the annihilation of our reality as we knew it.” Chiron exhales
from his nostrils, wreathing his head in clove-scented smoke. “The Save Betty
Project was never supposed to have created a catastrophe, but it did.” He shrugged.
“Sometimes science and technology does that, in spite of everyone’s good
intentions.”

“Create
a catastrophe?”

“Sorry,
but yeah. Before all the Archives unraveled and the Other Now could defeat us,
I was drafted to t-port to 1967. To try to set things right. Or as right as
things could be made.”

Sitting
on the cold granite steps now, Zhu nods. She remembers this part of their talk.
Pretty sure she remembers. “The Summer of Love Project?” she says in the
holoid.

“Yes.
The Archivists had always noticed ‘dim spots’, places in the historical record
when what actually happened was unclear. After the Crisis, they began to
witness wholesale disappearance of data that had once been there. They called
these phenomena ‘hot dim spots’. They traced one of the most radical hot dim
spots to San Francisco, 1967, during the Summer of Love. They targeted a girl
as the object of the project.”

A
girl. Zhu remembers how her hostility deepened when Chiron said that. She may
have been an accused criminal, but she was still a Daughter of Compassion and
her hackles rose. “A girl, Chiron? Always a girl?” she says in the holoid. “I
see. So you chose someone anonymous, dispensable, disposable? Is that how you
cosmicists view women, after all?”

“Certainly
not. Cosmicism was founded by a woman. A brilliant woman. And that girl in 1967
was by no means disposable. In fact, her life, and the life of her child,
proved crucial to the continued existence of reality as we know it. You and I
wouldn’t be sitting here now, if it weren’t for her.” He smiles on the holoid, tenderness
in his eyes. “Things got complicated. But when I left her in 1967 and returned
to 2467, she was exactly like she was supposed to be.”

Zhu
remembers how stunned she was by his story. How dare these elite cosmicists
shoot people around like faster-than-light cannonballs, swoop in on hapless
people from the past, and tell them how they’re supposed to be?

But
before she says anything more on the holoid, suddenly—and of all the strange
things she’s noticing on this holoid, this is the strangest thing of all--Chiron
searches his pockets and, like an old-timey stage magician pulling a dove out
of his sleeve, he produces something shiny and commands, “Look at this, Zhu.
Look well.”

Zhu
stares at the holoid.

It’s
the aurelia. The decadent Art Nouveau brooch with glittering butterfly wings. Didn’t
African laborers scrape out that gold, extract those diamonds from mines owned
by Dutch colonialists? Didn’t the bits of stained glass resemble the windows in
churches that preached charity but extorted money from poor parishioners? And
the golden woman at the center. Her blank face, her exposed body, her
outstretched arms burdened by wings, her legs posed as if they’re bound at the
ankles?

“Why,
it’s horrible,” she whispers.

But
surely she didn’t think that when she first saw the aurelia. She’d been
dazzled.

She
reaches into the holoid now, her fingers swiping through the light.

Chiron
holds the aurelia away, as though teasing her—then and now—and, with an
imperious expression, slips the brooch into his pocket.

“She
will have it,” he says.

Muse
closes the file, and the holoid disappears. Zhu pulls her fedora down low over
her forehead, lowers her hand, and turns away from the wall. The men smoking on
the stairs rise and saunter away, bound for their offices or shops.

Zhu’s
head throbs. Why all this fuss over a trifle, a bauble, a piece of decadent
jewelry. Why? And it’s not pretty at all, she decides. The thing is repulsive.

A
bad taste pools on her tongue.
You chose someone anonymous, dispensable,
disposable.
On that first day of the Gilded Age Project, Muse had been more
concerned about the aurelia than about Wing Sing. More concerned about a gold
bauble than a young girl’s life.

“Hey,
you. Move along, Chinaboy.”

Zhu
looks up at a swarthy young man standing over her. Well, if it isn’t the wine
merchant’s driver, sweaty and belligerent. Since she last saw him a few hours
ago, he’s been working hard on getting pie-eyed. He holds a shot of something
potent from the saloon across the street, and four equally muscular and
belligerent pals stand by his side.

“Look
at ‘im, Joey, he’s got hisself in a pipe dream,” says one of the pals.

The
driver kicks her thigh with his boot toe. “I said move along, Chinaboy. We
wanna sit here, an’ we don’t wanna sit here wit’ the likes of you.”

Zhu
pulls her fedora down low and stands. She glances up at him through her
green-tinted spectacles. Should she rebuke him for kicking a lady? Whip off her
disguise and give him a purple cow?

“
I’ve
never seen a purple cow, I never hope to see one. But I can tell you anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
Ambrose Bierce wrote that doggerel, circa
1895,” Muse whispers.

“Cute,
Muse,” she whispers back.

No,
Zhu won’t give the driver a purple cow. The driver’s eyes are opaque with his
hatred of Chinaboys. He doesn’t see her as the angel or the fallen angel. He
doesn’t see Zhu at all.

5

Strolling
Along the Cocktail Route

“You
going to get up, Mr. Watkins?’ Mariah says, her dark eyes glowering. “Or you
going to lie about all the day like a sick puppy?”

Daniel
lounges in a morning jacket on the satin settee in the smoking parlor. He lets
loose a forlorn doggy howl for Mariah’s benefit, but he can’t persuade the
auntie to crack a smile. Has he ever seen her teeth? He grins fetchingly,
hoping to win her over, but she continues to glare, tapping her toe, holding
the tray he ordered in arms that look as if they can lift a twenty-pound sack
of potatoes.

“Dunno,”
he concedes.

Will
this feeling of oppression ever lift itself from his soul? He feels limp, every
shred of ambition he may have ever possessed drained from his blood by this
vampirish mood. A listlessness that refuses to sharpen into something more
despotic against which he could rebel. The crudely scrawled letter delivered by
the messenger at breakfast lies half-crumpled at his feet. He belches, queasy
from the quail and sautéed oysters. No wonder Jessie Malone is so well endowed.
And that was only her breakfast. He should have had his usual omelette. Ah, but
perhaps that’s the cure? Something drenched in butter, would that settle his
gut? The champagne giddiness, the jolt of brandy, all the comfort of his
morning libations has worn away. A drowsy ache settles behind his eyes, and a
peculiar anxiety thumps in his heart like a moth dashing itself against the
glass of a lighted window. He needs a cure for that, too—his heart.

He
may be baffled by his soul’s disturbance, but at least he knows the source of
his heart’s perturbation—that accursed Chinese servant girl, Zhu Wong. She’s
quite unlike any other woman he’s ever known. But in what way?

He
ponders his understanding of the female sex. Women want to suffer pain, that’s
what Krafft-Ebing writes in his scholarly treatise,
Psychopathia Sexualis
.
Sacher-Masoch’s novels—not to mention those of the great Zola, the great
Tolstoy—amply bear out these assertions. Women by nature want to suffer and, hardly
knowing their own minds, thus are instinctively subordinate to men. Authorities
like Lombroso, Ferrero, Schopenhauer, Michelet, Comte, Spencer—dare he go
on?—have scientifically proven the feeblemindedness and masochism of women.
Craniologists, too, the eminent Carl Vogt. A woman’s skull is so different from
a man’s that she might as well belong to another species. Smaller skulls,
smaller brains.