The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (56 page)

“Okay.”
Chiron considers all the Chinese cosmicist technicians he knows. “Li Chut would
be excellent. She’s very disciplined. And willing to take risks.”

“I
thought of Li,” the Chief Archivist says. “And I agree, she would be a fine
choice. But we wanted to find that vital connection, a link to the data.”

“What
about the boy’s mother?”

“Another
good choice, but she’s due to deliver her second child any day now.”

Chiron
paces across the conference room, thinking. “Is there any other woman of our
Now sufficiently connected with that little boy? Another ancestor of the
family, maybe, however distant?”

“There
is, but we don’t exactly know if she’s an ancestor.” The Chief Archivist smiles
for the first time that afternoon. “We
do
know she’s got a neckjack, so
we can install a monitor, throw in some Archives, subaudio, voice projection, and
holoid capability through her optic nerve. And she’s gene-tweaked so we won’t
have to worry about bacteria, virulent viruses, and food poisoning like we had
to worry about with you, kiddo.”

The
Chief Archivist punches Chiron’s shoulder. In a friendly way.

“Tell
me she’s Chinese.”

“Yep,
you got it. A skipchild. No skipfamily, but that’s another story.”

“All
right.” Chiron smiles, too, though he doesn’t feel like smiling about the
Quantum Probability. He really doesn’t feel like smiling about the little boy—
is
he dead or alive?
“Who is this mystery woman?”

“Get
this, she’s a Daughter of Compassion. A real fanatic, strung out on a black
patch. But not to worry. Once we clean her up, she’ll be as strong as an ox.
Knows karate, can handle a gun, wow can she handle it. I think we can work with
her, I really do. She’s not stupid.”

“A Daughter
of Compassion,” Chiron says. “Wait a minute. Those are the crazies who raided
the illegal birth clinic in Changchi.”

“Yep.
As a matter of fact, she’s the woman who attempted to murder the little boy.”

Chiron’s
jaw drops. “And you want to t-port the woman who set off the Quantum
Probability?”

“Sure,”
the Chief Archivist says. “She’s got green eyes.”

February
22, 1896

Tong Yan Sun Neen

12

Gung
Hay Fat Choy

Clash
of cymbals, brass on brass, and the high thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd
sound like some creature in heat keening.
Bang, bang, bang!
Zhu runs to
her bedroom window. Those are fireworks, of course. Was it really only nine
months ago when she last heard fireworks? Oh, marvelous, that means the parade is
approaching. The parade for the New Year—Chinese New Year—wends its way down
Dupont Street below her window. Quite a hustle-bustle. What a sight! She’s seen
New Year’s parades a dozen times in Changchi, but never like this. Never in the
Gilded Age.

Never
like this.

The
great dragon, Gum Lum, bows and snorts and undulates, the huge puppet carried
aloft on poles borne by exuberant bachelors. His massive papier-mache head
glitters with gold leaf, red silk streamers, black and yellow spangles, little
mirrors reflecting the gaslight like jewels. Gum Lum snaps his hinged jaws at
the pearl of everlasting life, a large paper lantern carried by three laughing
boys. The Eight Immortals stalk by on stilts, twice as tall as a man. Acrobats
turn handsprings, flipping over, leaping high. Shaggy lions, also called fu
dogs—puppets manned by two fellows, one working the head, one the tail—roar at
the children lining the street and scratch at imaginary fleas. Then the Monkey
himself makes his royal appearance, cavorting and leaping as the crowd roars
with delight. For this, 1896, is the Year of the Monkey.

The Year
of the Trickster.

Zhu
has mixed feelings about the clever Trickster. The Monkey with his quick
intelligence often outwits the gods themselves.

“
Gung
hay fat choy!
” Zhu calls from her window. “Happy New Year!”

A
dark sorrow lies beneath the festive air. Zhu senses it, darkness tumbling in
her heart.

A
premonition is just a memory.

A
memory of what? A memory of the future?

It
is done.

Tonight’s
the night when her t-port ends. Muse recites her instructions.

“California
and Mason Streets,” she says. “Right, I got it. Of course I know the spot. Of
course I know that’s where my rendezvous is to be.”

Muse
scoffs, “How do you know?”

“You
told me before.”

Alphanumerics
jitter in her peripheral vision. “No, I never told you, Z. Wong.”

“Of
course
you did. The private ecostructure over Nobhill Park. The luxury hotels. Will
the LISA techs arrange a room for me at the Grande Dome when I return?”

“Oh,
I doubt it. Back to jail for you, Z. Wong. You’ll be charged and stand trial
within the week.”

Grief
and anger strike her like a blow. Everything she’s done for the Gilded Age
Project, everything she’s sacrificed. Does it all amount to nothing? She argues
with Muse. She always argues with Muse. They argue like an old married couple
whose love is long gone.

“I’ve
been used,” she declares. That’s why she resented Chiron. Why she hated him,
feared him. She
knew
right from the start. She’s been used by the Luxon
Institute for Superluminal Applications as a mere courier for an enigma
whirling in a CTL. A pawn to patch up the mistake made by one of their elite.
The CTL is an artifact of tachyportation, unstable, destabilizing all of
spacetime. The aurelia is more important than Wing Sing or Wing Sing’s daughter
or Zhu or whoever the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman is who hands the
aurelia to Chiron in Golden Gate Park in the summer of 1967.

She
goes to the wardrobe, riffles through the clothes hangers. The gray silk dress,
of course. The cosmicists love symbolic gestures. She will return as she went,
in the gray silk dress. From jail to jail, from this When to that When, dust to
dust, ashes to ashes. She sorts through her fragrant silk dresses. So pretty. The
cerulean blue, the mauve.

“Muse,
where is my gray dress?”

“You
gave it to Wing Sing. You took the dress down to Morton Alley, as Jessie
suggested. The girl is just your size. What used to be your size. Remember?”

“I
did no such thing,” Zhu snaps. “She escaped from the cribs by the time I got
there.”

“But
I’m telling you, you did. Anyway, you can hardly fit into that dress now, Z.
Wong.” Muse is prim. “Considering your condition.”

Her
condition.
Zhu goes and stands before the watery glass of her mirror,
studies her swollen breasts, her swollen belly. Even the tightly laced corset can’t
conceal her bulges. Shock reverberates through her blood.

“What
condition? I’ve just grown fat. All that rich food and drink Jessie serves.”

“For
pity’s sake, stop denying it, Z. Wong,” Muse says. “You’ve indulged yourself in
an ill-starred relationship with a questionable young man and now you’re
pregnant.”

“Indulge!
I love Daniel!”

“You
lust for him, nothing more.”

“He
adores me and I. . . .” What
does
she feel for Daniel? “I want to help
him. I want to save him.”

“Nevertheless,
now you’re pregnant. Go put on those other clothes.”

“What
other clothes?”

“The
clothes you bought yesterday.”

Zhu
dashes to the wardrobe, the wood planks squeaking beneath her feet. The new
boarder in the suite below hers bangs on his ceiling with a broom handle, and
an odd buoyant feeling rises in her lungs like the first rush of a black patch.
Or like a breath of fresh air.

There,
hanging in the wardrobe, is a
sahm
of apple-green silk. A lovely tunic
and trousers, a green silk bandeau. At the bottom of the wardrobe,
green-threaded sandals with platforms of straw.

“That’s
better, Z. Wong.” Muse is solicitous. “The
sahm
will conceal your
condition. Much more comfortable for you, too. It’s Chinese New Year.
Gung
hay fat choy
.”

“
Gung
hay fat choy
to you too, Muse.” Zhu unlaces and flings the corset away, and
slips on the
sahm
, which fits her perfectly in spite of her burgeoning
pregnancy. She finds the aurelia on her dressing table, pins the brooch on her
collar.

She
stands at the threshold of her bedroom for the last time. Nostalgia leaks into
her heart.
I’ll never see this place again.
She knows this is true. A
premonition is just a memory of the future.

“Hurry,”
Muse whispers.

*  
*   *

Zhu
flees into the night, Jessie and Daniel dogging her heels. Four bruisers follow
them up Montgomery Street to the Barbary Coast, and three shadows slip out of
Tangrenbu. She feels a hand on her shoulder, a hand on her elbow. She stops and
whirls, facing Daniel J. Watkins and Jessie Malone. “I’m leaving you tonight,”
she tells them, gratified at their look of despair. How on earth did she ever
get involved with these people? These ignorant misguided people of the Gilded
Age?

YOU
WILL ALWAYS BE SURROUNDED BY LOVING FRIENDS

That
was
her fortune in the Japanese Tea Garden. Daniel and Jessie, loving friends? The
very idea is outrageous. Yet seeing their despair at her announced departure,
she can’t help but think there’s some truth to it. Jessie rescued her from the
hatchet men, took her into the boardinghouse, fed and clothed her and gave her
a chance to survive. And Daniel? He’s her lover, the most compelling lover
she’s ever known. The father of her unborn child.

Zhu
loves the Gilded Age, how can she deny it? The pleasures and debaucheries of
this ancient night are beautiful, wild and free. Free in a way Zhu has never
known freedom before. She wasn’t free as a Daughter of Compassion. She was
empty, emaciated, gripped with the blind yearning to belong to something.
Gripped always, ever since she could remember, with the need to numb the deep
apprehension of incipient disaster. Burdened with a presentiment of doom, a
premonition
.
She was brutalized, and became brutal.

Daniel
and Jessie love her in the only way they know how, she knows this now. Why did
she stay in the employ of the Queen of the Underworld? Why have an affair with
Daniel? This has got to be the final, irrational answer. They have always loved
her, and she has always loved them.

Not
a pattern of pain, of atrocity. No! Zhu won’t accept that.

“Don’t
you make fun of no mermaids,” Jessie is shouting at the peepshow entrepreneur
with his sad little pickled monkey, and he mutters, “Sorry, lady. It’s just a
peepshow.”

“Watch
out for that Muldoon,” Jessie says in Zhu’s ear, pointing out the weasel of a
man in the scarlet cutaway. “He’s a crimp.”

Daniel
slings his arm around her shoulders, grins at her, and Zhu smiles back. In the
golden glow of the gaslight, he’s so beautiful, his dark hair spilling over his
collar, his pale skin stretched over his cheekbones.
He’s going to die.
And there’s nothing she can do.

But
why? Why must that be? Are they all like the aurelia, human beings trapped on
the cross of destiny? No! Zhu will not accept that.

Daniel
had a life before the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications decided to
t-port her six centuries into the past. He must have a life now. He must go to
Paris to see the Lumiere brothers’ moving picture machine. Perhaps he’ll work
with Thomas Edison. Perhaps he’ll return to California, to Los Angeles next
time. He’ll know the work of another Charles Chaplin, not the painter of
broken-back nymphs, but an actor who goes by Charlie and will make people
laugh.

They
stride past the Lively Flea, the most debased showcase on the Barbary Coast.
Zhu stares at the nightmarish shows, live on stage. She presses her fingertips to
her throat.

Temperance
women crowd outside the swinging doors to the Lively Flea, commence a song,
ring brass bells, bang on drums. “Shall we gather by the river, the beautiful,
beautiful river? Shall we gather by the river. . . .”

A temperance
woman approaches Zhu and hands her a leaflet. “Turn away from sin, my child.
Turn away from the degradation of women and children. Turn away from the
oppression of the colored races. Turn away from cruelty to God’s creatures.”

“Thank
you,” Zhu says and hands the leaflet to Jessie. Alphanumerics flicker in her
peripheral vision.

“Heads
up, Z. Wong,” Muse says urgently.

Striding
along the waterfront, there she is.

Wing
Sing.

Zhu
would know her moon face anywhere, her delicate cheekbones, the bow of her
mouth. Her tall slim figure in the gray silk dress, a Newport hat pinned over
the shiny black braid that swings down her back. Wing Sing strides freely on
fashionable lady’s button boots with daring broad square toes. Beside her
strides a blond woman. Li’l Lucy? Maybe, though if she is, Lucy has lost a lot
of weight. Wing Sing and her companion duck into Kelly’s Saloon & Eye-Wink
Ballroom.