The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (55 page)

Chiron
grins. “I decided I liked having hair more than being bald.”

“To
each his or her own.” The Chief Archivist has a very lovely nude skull.

He
can’t help himself. He turns on the viewer again, clicks to the holoid for
maybe the thousandth time, and studies the trampled grass of Golden Gate Park,
the woman in the wheelchair, her companion. Wow.

The
holoid was retrieved from his knuckletop after he returned from the Summer of
Love Project. He took plenty of holoids for the Archives, collected a lot of
data about the hot dim spot. The Archivists could easily identify a richly
documented person like Donaldina Cameron. Dozens of preserved photographs,
abundant sources about Lo Mo, the Mother, rescuer of Chinese slave girls. A
female hero. A modern saint who herself witnessed the darkness of the
nineteenth century come forth into the light of the twentieth.

Well.
Mostly into the light.

But
Chiron himself could barely remember that afternoon.

It
was the day before he was supposed to t-port back to 2467, and he walked
through the park with the girl he’d fallen in love with. Four musicians sat on
the grass, jamming, two acoustic guitars, a banjo, and a tambourine. A knot of
people gathered to listen. He and the girl paused, too, and then the woman in
the wheelchair and her companion passed by. The woman in the wheelchair smiled
and said hello—who knew what her thoughts were? Another piece of data lost to
the Archives. But the companion stared, reached into her padded jacket, walked
across the grass, and handed him a little piece of jewelry. Well, that was the
Summer of Love. People were always giving him things.

He
thought it charming that these two old women embraced the wild and crazy spirit
of the Haight-Ashbury that summer. He respectfully took the companion’s
offering, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and thought no more about it. He had
plenty to think about that day and that night. He thought only of the girl he’d
fallen in love with.

“Okay,
so I forgot! It’s true, I admit it. So who was the companion who gave me the
aurelia? How hard can that be to find out, if she was with Cameron?”

“You’re
not going to like this.”

They
both gaze at the holoid, and Chiron groans.

“Yeah.
We don’t know. It’s a freakin’ dim spot,” the Chief Archivist snaps. She
hates
not knowing. “We have to assume that whatever motivated her to give you the
aurelia occurred before we sent you on the Summer of Love Project.”

“So
it’s a time loop outside of the time loop in my t-port?”

“You
got it. We can’t trace her. She’s a classic Jane Doe. Identity zip in the Archives.”

“Wasn’t
there part of a fingerprint left on the gold? Inside one of the wings?”

“Oh,
sure. If you want to call less than a millimeter a ‘part.’ And you must
remember people weren’t routinely d-based in those days. Oh, the cops started
fingerprinting criminals in the 1890s, but the prints were notoriously
inaccurate. And anyway, the law didn’t mess with regular citizens. We don’t
have prints for these people.”

“And
a couple of skin cells?”

“From
which we generated a  DNA profile. Basic characteristics—race, sex, approximate
age. Didn’t help much. We already knew all that from the holoid.”

“Right.”
Chiron clicks on the companion, magnifying her image. Short gray hair still threaded
with black, sunlight on a round little face. The surprise of her green eyes.
“About seventy years old?”

“Seventy,
seventy-one from the DNA workup.”

“So
she would have been born in 1896. Can we assume in San Francisco?”

“It’s
a reasonable assumption.” The Chief Archivist stands restlessly and paces,
limping painfully on the ankle. She sits down again, annoyed. “If the profile
is right, she was half Caucasian. Which makes things dicey. A baby of mixed
race in 1896 who wound up at Cameron’s place? She’d be pretty rare. You have to
understand, the Chinese were strictly segregated in San Francisco then, and
Chinese women were very scarce, except for certain brothels employing Chinese
slave girls exclusively for a white clientele. You see? That’s got to be the
most probable way the baby was conceived.”

“Okay.”
Chiron’s head is starting to swim. “Do the Archives support the existence of
this baby in 1896?”

“Sort
of. Cameron took in a number of Chinese infants, some rescued, some abandoned
on her doorstep. No data on where they came from. Most of her foundlings left
the home when they turned twenty-one, married, had their own families. But some
stayed on with her, kept up the good Cause. Lo Mo was well loved by her girls.”

“All
right.” Chiron closes the file with an air of finality, and the blue field
snaps off. “Let’s move on to the other child. The child at the illegal birth
clinic in Changchi.”

“Yeah,
the other child.” The Chief Archivist heaves a huge sigh, breaks open another
neurobic. Chiron can see the strain on her face, a sight that sends a chill
through his heart. “Well, his mother immigrated to Chihli Province ten years
ago. Part of the Motherland Movement. The way American Jews went to live in
Israel on kibbutzim in what--the twentieth century?—and some stayed on,
becoming Israeli citizens. Same kind of deal, here.”

“The
mother is American?”

“From
an old San Franciscan family, dating back to the nineteenth century. And yeah,
there’s Caucasian blood in the family tree.”

“Which
would account for the child’s eyes?”

“Yep.
The child’s green eyes are avatistic, as the gene-tweakers say. Crop up every
other generation or so.” The Chief Archivist slips another holoid into the
viewer. “The mother married a local guy. Bore the kid in ’93. Now she’s way
illegally pregnant with number two.”

“Is
she going to be okay?” Chiron swallows hard.

“She
got roughed up pretty bad by the Daughters of Compassion, but she’s going to be
okay. Same for kid number two, who’ll be making her debut in a day or two.”

“And
the child, the little boy—
is he alive or dead?”

The
Chief Archivist gives him a dark look, clicks on the new holoid. The Night of
Broken Blossoms received a burst of international attention, especially since
the conflict highlighted the thorny problems of the Generation–Skipping Law. A
fresh virulent debate between opponents and proponents of the law raged in
telespace in every medium.

“This
is strictly confidential, got it?”

“Got
it.” Chiron leans forward as the holoid pops up.

It’s
not the birth clinic, it’s the hospital at Changchi—pale lime-green walls,
gray-green linoleum floors, halogen lights casting a green tinge on the grim
faces of the staff. A brilliantly lit hall leads up to a door. As Chiron
watches, little bright white flashes flicker over the door.

“What
the hell is that?”

“Keep
watching,” the Chief Archivist says.

From
the opposite side of the door dart sharp black flashes like tiny ebony daggers
piercing the white. A doctor gingerly takes the door handle and cracks open the
door, from the left to the right. Suddenly the doctor is thrown back by some invisible
force ramming against her waist. She doubles over in pain, is flung across the
hall, and staggers into the arms of her staff. Now all of them tumble back,
pushed by the force. The focus goes wild for a moment—shots of the ceiling, of the
walls, of the terrified faces whirling by in confusion.

The
focus reestablishes on the door. Now the handle is on the right.

“See
that?” whispers the Chief Archivist.

“It’s
switched!” Chiron says. “Wasn’t the handle on the left?”

“Yeah.”

Before
their astonished eyes, the door handle appears and disappears like the illusion
of a stage magician, now on the left, now on the right, once even protruding
from the middle.

As
Chiron watches, the intrepid doctor darts forward and tries again. She manages
to seize the handle, kicks open the door.

The
room—just an ordinary hospital room with a cot, IV apparatus, a monitor beeping
softly—swirls with a grainy gray fog, and the doctor cries out. On the cot lies
the child. Now so badly bruised, Chiron can bearly look at his disfigured little
face. And then he’s healed as if he’d never been pistol-whipped. And then he’s
lying in a pool of coagulated blood, his green eyes wide open, dead. Clearly
dead, a flat line on the monitor.

And
yet again, the child stirs and cries, blinking up at the monitor. Or laughs,
waving his tiny fists, reaching for a toy stuffed panda.

The
doctor’s distraught face fills the monitor. “What can we do for him? Please
help us! We don’t know what to do!”

“Oh,
man,” Chiron says. “It’s a Prime Probability, isn’t it?”

“A
Prime Probability that won’t collapse,” says the Chief Archivist, clicking the
holoid off. “It just won’t freakin’ collapse, into or out of our timeline.
We’re not even sure which way we
want
the probability to collapse.”

“Hey,
I’m sorry I screwed up. But we are talking about a little boy’s life.”

“We
are
talking
about another Crisis.”

“I’m
really, really sorry.”

“Yeah,
you should be. The LISA techs are calling the child a Quantum Probability.”

“Why
won’t it collapse?” Chiron says miserably.

“Well!
You know the discredited Schrodinger’s Cat metaphor used to demonstrate the
probable nature of reality. A cat is placed in a gas chamber, and is alive and
dead at the same time till the experimenter opens the chamber and observes the
result.”

“I
despise that metaphor.”

“Yeah,
well,
this
Quantum Probability won’t collapse one way or the other
because some event connected to that child has become unresolved, uncertain,
jeopardized
in the past. And there’s only one way that could happen, Chiron. It must be an
event connected to tachyportation.”

“But
the Institute had never t-ported to that Now!”

“Hah.
Not yet.”

Chiron
stands and paces across the conference room. “So you’re saying that the fact
the companion gave me the aurelia is directly connected to my Summer of Love
Project. But what does the aurelia have to do with that little boy?”

“Like
Cameron’s companion, the boy is probably a descendant of an old San Franciscan
family, Chinese mixed with Caucasian. Cameron’s anonymous companion was Chinese
mixed with Caucasian, too, and it’s likely she was born in the late 1890s. The
aurelia itself is in the style and workmanship of that period.” The Chief
Archivist shrugs. “All we have is a theory. That’s all we ever have when we
undertake a t-port project. That’s why we shut t-porting down decades ago. Too
risky. Too tricky. Too damn
theoretical.
”

“And
your theory is now?”

The
Chief Archivist glares at him. “The little boy has become a Quantum Probability
because the birth of his probable ancestor, Cameron’s companion, is in
jeopardy.
In the past,
okay? If that green-eyed woman is never born, she
won’t be able to give you the aurelia. Period. And then all bets are off when
it comes to our spacetime. Total annihilation? Could be.” The Chief Archivist
looks around the conference room so warily that a chill crawls down Chiron’s
spine.

“But
the aurelia was never a part of my project! I never meant to take it. I
certainly never meant to bring it to our Now. I put it in my pocket and forgot all
about it, plain and simple.” He gets on his knees before the Chief Archivist.
“It’s just a minor detail. A small mistake. I’m
sorry.
”

“I
accept your apology, but it doesn’t help.”

“Are
you suggesting that because I inadvertently took the aurelia to the future,
I’ve affected events in a past I know nothing about?”

“I’m
suggesting there’s a link,” the Chief Archivist says, “between the Quantum Probability
that the little boy has become and
you
, Chiron. And that link is the
anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman and the aurelia. I’m suggesting we don’t
know what will happen if the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman is never born.
Is the child her descendant? There’s a probability he is. And if that’s true
and she’s never born, that little boy in the hospital room right now? He will
die. We’ll all be sorry. His death will be another Generation-Skipping Law
tragedy. But it’s more than that. You following me?”

“I’m
following.”

“If
that woman never gives you the aurelia, your t-port to 1967 will be changed.
Everything you worked for will be changed. Your successful return to our Now
will be changed. And we don’t know what will happen then. Nothing? A minor
detail? A massive hole in the Archives? Or the destruction of all reality as we
know it?”

Chiron
shakes his head, disgusted. With t-porting. With the Archivists. Mostly with
himself. “Oh, fine. When do I go?”

“We
don’t want to send you, pal. We need to send someone who can get close to the
companion’s mother. Close enough to protect her and her baby to be. Close
enough to impress her with the importance of keeping the aurelia in the family.
We need a woman. Sit down and stop looming over me, thank you very much.” The
Chief Archivist rubs her ankle. “We need a Chinese woman.”