The Gilded Age Part 13

Wing Sing has bound feet.

A Premonition Selena barges into the bedroom. "Time up!" she says and stands with her arms akimbo, tapping her toe, her face taut with disapproval. "You go now, brother cousin."

Zhu jams the fedora on her head, jams the spectacles on her nose, lurches to her feet. Panic skitters through her. She glances up from the impossible sight of Wing Sing's bound feet to the girl's painted face.

Wing Sing gazes back at her curiously, her head c.o.c.ked to one side. A sly little smile curves her lips. She's the painted doll again, lacquered and masked. A stranger.

"I say go now, brother cousin," says Miss Selena. "Louie? Louie?"

An eager young tong man with superb muscle tone appears at the door. The bouncer, of course.

"I'm going." Zhu's mouth is dry. "Remember what I told you about home," she says to Wing Sing, hoping the girl catches her meaning.

But Wing Sing purses her lips and shrugs. Well, of course. She mustn't let on in front of the madam. Still, the girl's contempt is only too convincing.

Zhu stumbles downstairs and out onto Terrific Street. Afternoon sun slants through the telegraph wires, through the lacy red foliage of a j.a.panese maple tree. Shadows dance and bob on the macadam. From the Barbary Coast, only a block away, Zhu hears the sounds of drunken men guffawing, a woman shrieking, the tinkle of an ineptly played piano. A sulky clatters down Pacific Avenue, kicking up dust. Zhu jumps out of the way, sneezing violently. Three burly Germans stumble drunkenly out of a bar down the block. One spots her and points. The others turn, icy blue eyes staring.

A slender little c.h.i.n.k is what they see, alone and out of his turf.

"Muse," Zhu whispers, "how do I get back to Sutter Street without going through the Barbary Coast?"

Alphanumerics flit through her peripheral vision. "Go back to Dupont," Muse whispers back, "go through Tangrenbu."

I should not sell girl like you to Jessie Malone, the eyepatch said. She's guessing the eyepatch is not a man to linger long on regrets. "I don't think I want to go there, either."

"Then take Columbus to Montgomery," Muse says. "Hurry."

The three Germans swagger toward her. She glimpses the gleam of their teeth beneath enormous blond mustaches, their fists flexing, in the mood for blood sports. A lone Chinaman shares the same plight as a lone sporting lady, and the cops won't help Zhu in either disguise.

She sprints to the corner of Columbus and turns south, heading back downtown. At Montgomery, pedestrian traffic thickens, and she loses them. She pauses at the stairwell in front of Wells Fargo Bank where half a dozen gentlemen have parked themselves for a smoke in the sun. She finds a secluded corner on a far step, and huddles on the chilly granite. She pulls the fedora to one side, s.h.i.+elding her face from the smokers. She cups her hand over her mouth as if she's lighting up one, too.

"Hey, Muse. The girl I just spoke with is not the same girl we met in the j.a.panese Tea Garden."

"Of course she is," the monitor says. "She said she's Wing Sing, didn't she?"

"I'm telling you, she's not the same girl." She s.h.i.+vers at the monitor's nonchalant tone. "She can't be."

"She is as much that girl as any other."

"Oh, really? What about her feet?"

"She's got feet, hasn't she?"

Well yeah, she's got feet. Bound feet. The kind of crippling that takes years of torture starting with a young girl's feet. Really, Zhu fumes. Bu there's no point in arguing with Muse, not now. She is definitely going to have a word with Chiron about the monitor just as soon as she returns to her Now.

If she returns.

"Forget it," she says to Muse. "What about the aurelia?"

"Did you see it in her dowry box this time?"

"Nope."

"Did you not see it?"

That flash of gold, that gleaming curve. "Okay, I didn't not see it, either," Zhu says, exasperated.

"Very good," Muse says calmly. "Then she is as much that girl as she can be."

"You're making no sense!"

"Z. Wong, I recommend that you review your instructions." Muse, the stupid bureaucrat.

Zhu blows out a breath. "No. No. I don't want to read text right now. The print's too small."

The directory scrolls across her peripheral vision.

"You're giving me a headache, Muse!"

"I'm activating your holoid capability. Relax your left eye, please."

Zhu has not taken advantage of this feature Muse possesses, though the monitor has offered it on several occasions. A queasy feeling squeezes her gut, and a throb commences behind her left eye like the start of a migraine.

"Turn toward the building," Muse commands.

She turns, though she doesn't really want to, filling her eyes with a view of plain gray granite. Now data downloads through her optic nerve and projects itself through her retina. And there! A tiny holoid field streams from the pupil of her eye and hovers in front of her face. The holoid field is a slim block of glowing blue light. Zhu sees Muse's directory, white and gold alphanumerics streaming by as hundreds of files scroll down.

Muse retrieves the file containing her instructions holoid and downloads it: Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc All right, already. There's the d.a.m.n 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 Inst.i.tute for Superluminal Applications floating in San Francis...o...b..y. 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 Inst.i.tute 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 s.p.a.cetime. The Save Betty Project polluted all of reality. s.p.a.cetime split open, and another reality, a dreadful alternative universe, a corrupted version of ours, thrust into our reality. Ent.i.ties from that reality, from that Other Now-ent.i.ties 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 Compa.s.sion 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 cannonb.a.l.l.s, 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 s.h.i.+ny and commands, "Look at this, Zhu. Look well."

Zhu stares at the holoid.

It's the aurelia. The decadent Art Nouveau brooch with glittering b.u.t.terfly wings. Didn't African laborers sc.r.a.pe out that gold, extract those diamonds from mines owned by Dutch colonialists? Didn't the bits of stained gla.s.s resemble the windows in churches that preached charity but extorted money from poor paris.h.i.+oners? 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 sauteed 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 das.h.i.+ng itself against the gla.s.s of a lighted window. He needs a cure for that, too-his heart.