The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (4 page)

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The
aurelia, the aurelia. All this fuss over a trifle, a bauble, a piece of
decadent jewelry. Why? Did the success of a complex application of arcane high
technology really turn on a piece of old gold? Even after the official
explanation, Zhu had always been troubled by the aurelia.

Not
that she was happy with most of what happened after the lawyer sprang her loose
from the women’s prison facility and sent her in restraints with two copbots on
a transcontinental EM-Trans to San Francisco.

“I’m
just a country gal,” she joked as two copbots hustled her down high-speed
escalators to the underground tubes. The copbots didn’t answer. Either someone
took out their voice chips or issued a gag order. Zhu had heard of the
EM-Trans, but she’d never personally seen or ridden on one. She sure did now. The
mag-lev train—the whole vehicle levitated over a narrow ribbon of track by the
force of electromagnetism—looked like a gigantic black bullet, each end a
streamlined wedge. The EM-Trans reached speeds of over a thousand miles an hour
in tubes cut through the global curvature. The ride lasted the morning, the
trek up to the surface another hour.

And
then--San Francisco!

Zhu
had heard that Hong Kong surpasses San Francisco in management of the coastal
encroachment that threatened seaside cities two hundred years ago. That Tokyo
surpasses San Francisco in modernity, New York City in sheer upward thrust.

But
Zhu had never seen Hong Kong or Tokyo or New York City. Now she glimpsed San
Francisco’s entertainment districts glittering along the offshore dikes, the
containment canals, the iceberg barriers, the gardens planted over ancient traffic
corridors, the magnificent cosmicist dome over New Golden Gate Preserve, the central
megalopolis, the private domed estates of the wealthy, the spectacular
skyscrapers literally touching the clouds.

Wonderful!
And intimidating.

How
isolated Zhu had been her whole life. How provincial. The countryside around
Changchi where she and the Daughters of Compassion had focused their campaign
was burdened with crumbling concrete, polluting ground traffic, the daily
detritus of way too many people. But San Francisco, this megalopolis of five
million souls, had managed to hide away everything ugly. Zhu thought of China
as prostrate, huge and sprawling and horizontal, only too plain to see. San
Francisco was dizzyingly vertical, its gleaming surfaces concealing modern
arcana.

If
San Francisco was intimidating, the Luxon Institute for Superluminal
Applications was formidable. Once topside, the copbots escorted her to the
waterfront. From there she boarded a catamaran that sped her to a silver
monolith rising up out of the north bay waters. Zhu had heard about
hydroplexes--marine-based skyscrapers modeled on the ancient oil drilling
platforms that had bobbed offshore in the days when the technopolistic
plutocracy held a stranglehold on a world economy fueled by petroleum. South
Honshu was mostly hydroplexes these days. South Cork, too.

Zhu
had heard about them. Now she stepped
into
a hydroplex, feeling every inch
the country bumpkin, especially in her prison jumpsuit. The hydroplex perched
high above a polished gridwork into which the catamaran navigated and docked.
If the meticulously groomed denizens of this modern platinum palace were
troubled by the ceaseless rocking and swaying caused by bay tides, they gave no
sign but hurried silently through hushed corridors on what surely must have
been urgent business.

Gah.
Bay tides. Rocking and swaying. Uff! Zhu felt as if she was about to spill her
guts.

When
the red-haired man stepped out to greet her, suddenly she
was
spilling her
guts. Or at least, the spare contents of her stomach. “I. . . .long ride. . .
.detox maybe,” she muttered and, to her embarrassment, keeled over. How could
she explain the vertigo that seized her at that moment?

When
she woke, she felt a little better, but her head was still woozy, her stomach
still sour. She opened her eyes and found herself lying on a chrome-and-leather
divan in a room swathed in a gauzy pale fabric like the inside of a cloud.

The
red-haired man sat watching her.

He
gestured to a viewer perched in a corner like a predatory bird. “We’re
holoiding the instructions I’m giving you today. The file, called Zhu.doc, is
thirty-five GB and will go in your monitor’s Archive, so you’ll be able to view
it anytime you need to.” He gave her a Classic Coke, which tasted delicious and
settled her stomach. “I’m the one who offered your lawyer the deal.” He fell
silent then, watching her as if she were a specimen in a petri dish.

She
should have been flattered that a man of his stature took any notice of her at
all. She should have been grateful, should have been cordial, should have been
eager to please.

But
she didn’t feel flattered or grateful or cordial
or
eager to please. Instead,
sharp resentment gripped her chest. She instantly disliked the red-haired man.
She puzzled at her unruly emotions, then felt guilty. There was no rational
reason for disliking him.

He’d
done nothing to her. She’d never met him before.

But there
it was and wouldn’t go away--resentment, even anger. As if she knew something
bad about him, but couldn’t say what. Had she met him before? But where? She
swallowed her confusion as best she could, silently scolding herself. She
wasn’t wearing the black patch for the first time in months, that was all. Her
customary state of sullen discontent had simply reasserted itself.

He
sat before her in a leather-and-chrome chair and steepled his fingertips, scrutinizing
her. “I am Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.”

China’s
people may have a thousand kinds of faces, Zhu thought, but Western people are
a crazy quilt, variegated colors of hair and eyes and skin. And this man. This
man was different from anyone Zhu had ever seen. He was tall and slim, his skin
as white as bone. His hair and eyebrows were the astonishing color of ripe
pomegranates, a rare fruit Zhu had found at the farmer’s market just one time,
years ago. The astonishing hair fell over his shoulders and trailed halfway
down his back. His eyes were as clear and blue and deep as the sapphires she
had only seen in a natural history holoid. Young, maybe in his fifties.

“We
want to t-port you to 1895,” he said in a modulated, precise voice. “Do you
understand what that means?”

“I’m
giving everyone such a freakin’ hard time that you want to send me away six
hundred years into the past,” Zhu joked. What was wrong with her? She struggled
to be polite.

“It’s
not meant to be a punishment, Zhu. You find that difficult to believe, don’t
you?”

Zhu
considered. “Mister. . . .”

“You
may call me Chiron.”

Oh,
she
may?
“Chiron, I’m a comrade with the Daughters of Compassion. I’m a
devotee of our patron goddess, Kuan Yin. I’ve been dedicated to the Cause since
I was fifteen. I’ve worked in the fields, in the processing plant, in the
recycler. All I care about is the survival of Mother China. China has struggled
with poverty and famine and oppression of her women for over two thousand
years. Politicians come and go. Social theories come and go. Campaigns,
reforms, platforms, regimes; they all come and go. We struggled years ago. We
struggle now.” She shrugged. Old sentiments, but the words tasted fresh. “The
Mars terraformation and orbital metaworlds and telespace and hyperpoetry. Those
things are all right. Every kid dreams of getting morphed, getting a neckjack,
linking into telespace. But you know what? At this point? I don’t give a rat’s
ass.”

Chiron
smiled. “But you do have a neckjack.”

“Oh,
sure. Because Changchi had a season of prosperity when I was in middle school
and the first thing the administrators did was morph us kids for telespace. So
we could compete globally.” Zhu touches the neckjack installed behind her left
ear. “You think computer-constructed reality did a damn bit of good when the
rains didn’t come for four seasons after that, and they couldn’t seed the
clouds or herd a storm down from Siberia?”

“We owe
much to telespace. The technique for herding rainstorms was developed in
telespace.”

“That’s
nice. But my eyes kept looking at the dust that wouldn’t yield enough peas, not
at telespace. So.” She stirred restlessly on the divan. “You want to t-port me
six hundred years into the past? Why? Sorry, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Then
listen well. Listen carefully.”

And
he told her about tachyportation, how the tachyonic shuttle translates matter
into pure energy, transmits that energy across spacetime faster than the speed
of light, and retranslates the energy into its original form at a destination.
Anywhere, any when. About the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications,
the venerable cosmicist think tank that had long devoted its private resources
to the study of the Cosmic Mind and the true nature of reality as a set of
probabilities always collapsing into and out of the timeline.

“Okay,”
Zhu said, scratching her head. “I’m still listening.”

“Don’t
worry, the shuttle is safe. We used shuttles to transport laborers up to the
Mars terraformation for decades before we attempted the past-travel app.”

“Right,
the past-travel app,” Zhu said, unsure whether she was awed or appalled.
Changing people into energy packets and back again! Shooting them around space
and time like human cannonballs! Don’t worry, it’s safe! Yeah, right. “Have
you
t-ported, Chiron?”

“I
sure have,” Chiron said and smiled wistfully. “I t-ported to San Francisco,
1967. To a space and time called the Summer of Love.”

“But
how,” Zhu said, wrestling with these concepts, with the notion they wanted
her
to do this, “could you go to the past if the past has already happened?”

“That’s
where the Archives come in,” Chiron said and poured her another Coke, which she
drank greedily, savoring the taste.

The
Archives were the repository of all known information about the world,
preserved, recorded, and uploaded into telespace. Using telespace and some very
fancy searchware, the Archivists could analyze moments in the past.

“Analyze
moments at a level of detail unknown to historians before,” Chiron said,
standing and pacing, his hands clenched behind his back. “The Archivists began
to realize that the closer they examined any given moment, the less they knew
about the complete reality. About people’s inner lives, what they heard and
smelled and tasted. What they remembered. What they
felt
.”

The
Archivists also discovered that certain moments contained historical
ambiguities. They found gaps in the data, gaps they call
dim
spots
.

“Theory
and practice and philosophy intertwined.” Chiron sat uneasily back down in his
chair. “We cosmicists believe in a cocreatorship between humanity and the
Cosmic Mind, the force of Universal Intelligence. We’ve always wondered how you
could travel to a past that already exists, but the cosmicist answer is
consistent with the time paradox. If you’ve traveled to the past, you have
already done so. Quite simply, you
must
do so.

“Please
understand, Zhu,” he added, “we cosmicists are conservationists. We believe in
the mandate of nonintervention. Nonaction is as vital as action. We scorn the
aggressive, exploitative pursuit of oppressive new technologies that so
typified the technopolistic plutocracy three hundred years ago. We approached
t-porting cautiously, mindful of its dangers. We formulated the Tenets of the
Grandmother Principle for the proper conduct of t-port projects.”

He
pulled out a page of hardcopy, handed it to Zhu. “We want you to learn the Tenets
backwards and forwards before you go. You must make every effort to observe
them. There are seven, plus the Closed Time Loop Peril. Trust me, you do
not
want to create a new probability.”

“Okay,”
Zhu said, taking the paper page, turning it around curiously in her hands. And
sighed. Now she had to, like, study? “Because if I
do
create a new
probability, that could unravel all of spacetime as we know it. Right? Am I
getting this right?”

He gave
her a sharp look. “Exactly right.”

“Then,”
Zhu said, “you’re really serious? I’ve already lived in 1895? Before I was
born
?”

Chiron’s
sapphire eyes bored into her.

“But
how can that be?” she wailed. “I don’t remember!”

“Of
course you don’t. You don’t remember because you haven’t yet experienced it in
your personal timeline. Time is a forward-moving experience for us, Zhu. Till
you experience your life in 1895, you haven’t experienced it in your
consciousness yet. Not till you t-port there. Understand?”

She
shifted on the divan, clutching her prison uniform. She wasn’t sure she
understood. “But why me?”

He
nodded, expecting the question. “We’ve got evidence that you—or someone like
you—were there.”

“Really!
What evidence?”

“Well,
first off. . . .you’re a Chinese woman.”