The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age - By Lisa Mason


1

Fortune Cookies at the Japanese Tea Garden

Out of a tense and arid darkness she steps, her skirts sweeping across the macadam. Her button boot wobbles on the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden. “Steady,” the technician whispers. The shuttle embraces the ancient bridge in a half-moon of silver lattices. The air is susurrous, tinged with menthol, cold. The shuttle hums. High overhead, the dome ripples in a fitful gust. Zhu Wong listens for final instructions. None come. Dread quickens her pulse. She closes her eyes and waits for the moment it takes to cross over.

And then it’s happening--the Event sweeps her across six centuries.

Odd staccato sounds pop in her ears. The Event transforms her into pure energy, suspends her in nothingness, then flings her back into her own flesh and blood. And she stands, unsteadily, her button boot poised on the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden. A brand-new bridge. The scent of fresh-cut wood fills her senses.

“Muse?” she whispers to the monitor. Fear stains her tongue. Tension gathers behind her eyes. Her skin feels fragile. Her heart batters her ribcage, her lungs clench. Now she feels the Event just like they said she would. Again, “Muse?”

“I’m here, Z. Wong,” the monitor whispers. Muse nestles behind Zhu’s left ear between scalp and skull. “We’re here.” Muse automatically checks for points of reference. Alphanumerics dance behind her eyelids. Coordinates are confirmed. “We’re fine.”

But she’s not fine. The tension moves to Zhu’s sinuses, and a soft ache starts to throb.

She opens her eyes. Dappled sunlight shocks her, an azure sky dazzles. Birds cheer, foliage rustles. Sights seem magnified, sounds amplified as if she’s returned from the dead. The herbal scent of eucalyptus infused with a floral perfume nearly overwhelms her. The tension, the ache turn into full-blown congestion. She sneezes once, sneezes again violently. Her eyes spurt tears.

Bang, bang, bang! Odd staccato sounds? Now earsplitting blasts and the stink of gunpowder.

Zhu drops to her knees, evasive action instinctive at the sound, the stink of gunfire. Her breath rasps in her throat. Her fingers twitch, reaching for the handgun she kept strapped beneath her right arm for so many years it was like another limb. Its absence now, an amputation.

She fights panic. Damn! No gun, no decent cover. What a sitting duck she is, perched on the bridge. She blots her eyes on her sleeve and tries to rise, but her feet tangle with the skirts. She stumbles, moving as if hobbled. The ankle-length layers of silk and cotton cushion her knees against abrasion, but not impact. Pain shoots through her kneecaps. There will be bruises.

“Stay calm, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “The loud abrupt sounds suggest combustible explosives, not projectiles aimed at you.”

“What?”

“It’s the Fourth of July. Independence Day, United States of America.”

Zhu crouches, uncomprehending.

“Those are fireworks. San Franciscans always celebrated the Fourth of July in Golden Gate Park. The park was public then. Correction. The park is public now.”

“Independence Day, of course.” Zhu has never celebrated America’s Independence Day. She’d never been to America at all till she was conscripted for the Gilded Age Project.

“This is long before private cosmicist interests acquired the parkland and installed the dome.” Muse’s whisper calms her. Confirmation coordinates continue matching up like winning lottery numbers.

Well, all right. She glances up, squinting. How well she recalls the milky PermaPlast dome rippling overhead as she stepped in the tachyonic shuttle. How wonderful to see the sky with no dome!

“But the dome is old, too, isn’t it, Muse?”

“In your Now? Oh, yes. The dome has been in place since the 2100s when the stratosphere had thinned so dangerously that undomed lands were ruined by excessive radiation. Z. Wong,” Muse says patiently. “This is 1895.”

1895. Zhu bows her head, struck with awe. Then it’s true. They did it. She has t-ported six hundred years in the past.

“Please, Z. Wong,” Muse says. “You haven’t much time before the rendezvous. Get up. Walk around, stretch your legs.”

Zhu frees her skirts, managing not to rip the delicate fabric. How did women ever tolerate such constrictive clothing? Lurching to her feet, she sneezes violently again. “Muse, what’s the matter with my sinuses?”

“Unknown. An allergic response.”

“I’m not allergic to anything.”

“Pollen?”

“No, never.”

Muse pauses. “Perhaps a response aggravated by the Event. I will analyze. In the meantime, you’ve got a handkerchief.” Helpful Muse is becoming impatient. “Please, you have less time now.”

Zhu finds the embroidered square of cotton in her leather feedbag purse. Her hands shake. She can’t get over the impression someone was shooting at her as she stepped out of the tachyonic shuttle. She looks around, alert and wary.

The shuttle has been installed at the historic location they call the Japanese Tea Garden in New Golden Gate Preserve. Zhu smiles, secretly glad the shuttle has vanished from her sight. She never liked the photon guns aimed like assault weapons. The pretty calcite crystals that did unpretty things. The banks of blinking microbots slaved to vast offsite servers. Then there was the chronometer, the savage hook-like heads of the imploders. The whole thing was militaristic, foreboding.

And the Event?

Thanks to a fiendishly clever technology invented by the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications, the Event instantaneously transformed the matter of her body into pure energy and transmitted that energy faster than the speed of light.

Flinging her body and soul from July 4, 2495 to July 4, 1895.

Did the Event actually work? Oh, yeah. She honks into the handkerchief. The hard curving stays of her corset—slender steel strips covered in black satin—dig into her ribs. Quickly, before anyone notices, she stoops and flips up her skirts, examining her knees. No blood leaks through the thick black cotton stockings. Excellent. She starts smoothing back the slip, the skirt, the overskirt, the traveling cloak, all in shades of pale dove gray.

“I beg your pardon, miss, but may I assist you?”

Zhu glances up.

A young man stands, startled, wringing his large mottled hands and staring open-mouthed at her calves. His bright blond muttonchops and clean-shaven chin shape his face into sort of a peculiar square. He’s combed his yellow hair back over his scalp, lets it fall to the shoulders of his black frock coat. A scarlet polka-dot tie throttles his starched wing collar. He’s tilted his porkpie hat at a rakish angle, carelessly unbuttoned his vest in the afternoon heat. Quite the dandy with his bawdy grin and stink of gin. Has his way with the ladies, no doubt.

But his concerned expression closes up like a slamming door when he glimpses Zhu’s pale golden complexion, her black hair and wide cheekbones. Her slanting eyes, the irises gene-tweaked green.

“Why, thank you, sir. Yes, you may.” She extends her hand for him to assist her off the bridge. Gray lace mitts cover her palms, wrists, and forearms, leaving her fingertips bare.

He doesn’t take her hand. No, he frowns, turns without another word, and strides away. He glances at her over his shoulder with eyes of ice.

“Too bad, Muse,” Zhu says to the monitor. She pulls the veil down from the brim of her Newport hat and ties it beneath her chin, shielding her face from the sun. From other prejudiced eyes. “I guess he didn’t want to assist a Chinese lady.”

“You’re not a lady, Z. Wong.” Muse says, the monitor’s tone as cold as the young man’s glance. “You’re a fallen woman.”

* * *

A fallen woman. She certainly was.

It was June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the central women’s prison facility at Beijing and roused her out of an exhausted sleep.

“A deal?” Zhu said warily. “What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t have all the details, but they’re saying they’ll reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter,” the lawyer said and shoved a petition in her face. “If you do what they want.”

“Attempted murder,” Zhu reminded her. “That would make it attempted manslaughter.”

“Whatever.”

“I didn’t mean to do it.” She was too tired to read the tiny print. “And he’s not dead yet. At least, no one’s told me so.” She rubbed her eyes. “What do they want?”

The lawyer was court-appointed, since Zhu had no money. One of those bleary-eyed, pasty-faced public defenders perennially overworked and underpaid. A heart attack waiting to happen at ninety-three years old with an inflamed neckjack beneath her ragged crew cut. Theoretically the people had equal access to due process, but it didn’t happen much in Socialist-Confucianist China. The lawyer glared at Zhu, distaste curving her mouth.

Attempted murder. The charge would be upgraded to murder if her victim died. Sick at heart, Zhu asked the guards every day after her arrest, “Is he alive?” No answer. “Tell me! Is he alive or dead?”

It was just plain crazy. It was never supposed to have happened this way. As she lay in the prison cell, sick with forced detox after they took her black patch away, waiting to be charged with attempted murder, she had trouble believing the campaign could have gone so wrong. How she could have done such a thing? How could they? The atrocities, the Night of Broken Blossoms. She was a Daughter of Compassion, dedicated to the Cause. The Daughters of Compassion fought for the future. They weren’t murderers. She wasn’t a murderer.

Or was she?

She had trouble remembering exactly what happened that night. The door to the room, for instance. Had it opened to the left or to the right? Had there been one sentry or two? Sometimes she remembered a crowd in the room. Other times, only a few people. When had she pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm? And the astonished look on the sentry’s face. Because Zhu had a gun or because she was left-handed?

Memories of that night would flash through her mind, vivid and horrifying, then abruptly grow dim and rearrange themselves. On the morning when the lawyer barged in with the plea deal, Zhu wondered if she was going insane.

“What do they want?” the lawyer said. “Listen up, Wong. They want to send you on a tachyportation.”

“A what?”

“Yeah.” The lawyer rolled her eyes.

They never shut off the lights in the women’s prison. Zhu felt sore all over, dizzy from the interrogation, nauseated and addle-brained with withdrawal from the black patch. Tachyportation? She rolled the unfamiliar word around in her mouth like a spicy poisoned candy.

“Somebody there will explain,” the lawyer said, taking out a neurobic, popping the bead open, and snorting the fumes. Then sighing with relief from the all-purpose anodyne. The sadist. “They’ll ship you to California. San Francisco. Place called the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. The LISA techs will tell you all about it. Sign here.”

“Hey, I don’t know,” Zhu said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” the lawyer snapped.

“I can’t agree to something before I know what’s involved.” Zhu had heard strange stories, jacking prisoners into the computer-constructed reality known as telespace for strange experiments. Radical editing, brainwaving, testing new neural apps. Political prisoners like her were especially vulnerable. “I’ve got my rights.”

“Your rights. Be grateful they came to me with this deal, Wong.” The lawyer flicked the empty neurobic onto the floor. “Do you have any idea how bad you and your comrades make the Cause look?” She said “the Cause” in capital letters. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn if they jack you into a rehab program and make you compute actuarial margins for twenty years.”

“Thank you, counselor.”

“Any idea at all?”

“Yeah, actually I do,” she said, burning with guilt and shame. The lawyer didn’t need to remind her. It was the last thing in the world the Daughters of Compassion wanted to do--harm the Cause. Zhu had dedicated her life to the Cause. It was crazy. Crazy.

“But, uh, what’s a tachyportation?” she insisted.

“Way I understand it, they want to send you six hundred years into the past,” the lawyer said and coughed.

Zhu gaped. “You mean. . . .send me. . . .physically?”

“That’s right. Physically. Like I said, the LISA techs will explain. It is strange, I admit, since the institute doesn’t conduct t-port projects anymore. Too dangerous. You can ask the techs about that, too. I remember,” the lawyer muses, “when they shut the shuttles down and discontinued t-ports. All very hush-hush. Must have been a couple years after you were born.”

“Six hundred. . . .years?”

Wow. A prickle of excitement, of wonder and anticipation pierced her foggy exhaustion. Why was a t-port dangerous? What was she supposed to do there, six hundred years in the past? A thousand questions tumbled through her mind. She trembled, a strange sensation coursed through her, and suddenly this conversation seemed strangely familiar. As if she’d heard it before, just exactly like this. As if she’d always sat here, on this seat of shame, and the pasty-faced lawyer had always sneered at her as she was sneering now.

What was that about? Zhu shook her head, trying to clear her mind. A premonition?

“Why me?” she finally managed to ask.

“Dunno,” the lawyer admitted, “after what you’ve done. But you’re the one they want, Wong. I say take the deal. They’re ready to go. They call it The Gilded Age Project.”

* * *

Zhu hikes out of the Japanese Tea Garden through a red moon-gate and stands before the shallow bowl of Concert Valley. Ah! She’s never seen such a lush landscape. Towering palm trees, aloe veras as high as her waist, glossy dark pines, flowers blooming pink and purple and gold. Everything so fresh and new! After the cracked old domes of Changchi, the barren concrete and unforgiving millet fields where she’s spent her whole life, Zhu marvels at Golden Gate Park, 1895. A wonderland!

Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision. Muse downloads a file from the Archives stored in its memory. “The California Midwinter International Exposition was held here in 1894. This is what’s left. Over two million people attended the fair.”

“Two million?” Zhu is cautious after the monitor’s cool rebuke. “Is that a lot?”

“Oh, yes. The population of San Francisco then—I mean now—is three hundred thousand souls. Biggest city on the West coast. By our standards merely a neighborhood, right, Z. Wong?”

Zhu has no pat answer for the monitor’s flippant question. The number of people inhabiting any limited space is the biggest, thorniest problem facing her future.

Now Muse is amiable again, an eager tour guide in the wake of her silence. “The two million came from all over the country by train on the transcontinental railroad completed in the 1870s, transforming the Wild West into a desirable destination. The park itself is the result of John McLaren’s horticultural hand. Nothing but sand dunes here twenty years ago. McLaren discovered that Scotch sea-bent grass holds to the sand in ocean winds long enough to establish a subsoil in which other plants can thrive. Leave it to a Scot. Look lively, Z. Wong. Perhaps we’ll see Boss Gardener himself.”

“Oh!” Zhu looks around. Could the legendary John McLaren stroll right past her?

“The cosmicist owners of New Golden Gate Preserve revere McLaren. His love of ecosystem, his understanding of Nature, his perseverance and dedication.” There’s a smug tone in Muse’s whisper.

“Ah, yes, the cosmicists,” Zhu says. “How lovely. Only the cosmicists and their friends can enjoy this place in my time. Is it right that a public place as beautiful as this has been privatized and withheld from the people?”

“The people,” Muse says. “All twelve billion of them?”

Zhu ventures down a walkway leading into Concert Valley. “I thought the cosmicists believe in equal rights according to True Value. At least, that’s the line handed to me at the Luxon Institute of Superluminal Applications.”

“Equal rights?” Muse chuckles. “The cosmicists believe in equal sacrifice to the Great Good. Human interests don’t always take precedence over nonhuman interests. The hyperindustrial era and the Brown Ages taught us that lesson only too painfully. The cosmicists believe in privatizing natural resources when ‘the people’ can’t or won’t properly care for them.”

“Oh, I see,” Zhu says. “The cosmicists know better?”

“Well, yes. The Brown Ages were long before your time, Z. Wong. You have no notion of the devastation. Once the dome went up, no one was permitted into New Golden Gate Preserve. If it makes you feel any better, the cosmicists don’t spend time there, either. Nature has the place all to herself.”

The cosmicists. Guess who programmed Muse? Zhu sneezes more violently than before, tears welling in her eyes.

“That barnyard smell is from horse manure gathered by the street sweepers downtown,” Muse says wryly. “Boss Gardener has the stuff spread all over the grounds. Keeps the lawns so green.”

Boxwood and hydrangea border the walkway she strolls down. Now the De Young Art Museum stands to her left, the impression of Egyptian antiquity reinforced by two magnificent concrete sphinxes. In fact, the structure and its statuary were cobbled together in the months before the fair. There, the Temple of Music, a huge sandstone arch in the style of the Italian Renaissance, flanked by Corinthian columns. The medieval castle with unlikely Arabian arabesques is the Administration Building. At the center of the valley stands the Electric Tower, a smaller version of the Eiffel, adorned with international flags. The Bella Vista Café perches on the first mezzanine and a globe crowns the tower’s peak. A life-sized papier-mache California brown bear balances on the globe like a circus performer, the Bear Flag clutched in its paws. The tower is a tribute to the newfangled energy source and Mr. Edison’s electric light bulb.

Zhu won’t see many electric light bulbs during her t-port. In 1895, San Francisco is still mostly gas-lit.

She circles back. Tightrope walkers have strung a wire between two trees in front of the Temple of Music, cavort with parasols and chairs. A fellow with a bushy beard and a shiny top hat cracks his whip over a ring of pedestals as two lively hounds leap about, while a forlorn baboon in a yellow satin jacket deigns to perform a wobbly handstand.

A crowd promenades alongside Zhu in Concert Valley. The somber suits of the gentlemen are relieved by the pale pastel colors of the ladies’ sweeping dresses. Despite the heat, everyone wears layer upon layer of clothing, from buttoned-up collars to buttoned-down boots. And hats—everyone wears a hat, even the children. The ladies wear veils and carry parasols, the scalloped edges drooping with lace or velvet fringe.

Zhu gulps. Her daily dress in Changchi? Jeans, a T-shirt, and worn-out sneakers, plus a sweat-stained padded jacket in winter. These people would think her half-naked if they saw her in her T and jeans. Like most post-domers, she’s always worn Block, the fine protective microderm protecting her skin from solar radiation. Her complexion, though golden, is paler than that of these veiled ladies.

Everyone so elegant in their elaborate formal clothes. Zhu sighs, wistful and resentful at the same time.

Yet there. Zhu spies a frail little woman in pale blue silk. The veil on her flowered hat barely conceals her battered eye. The pale blue ribbon tied around her chin does not at all conceal the bruise discoloring half her jaw. Her burly husband towers over her, quick anger in his narrow eyes.

And there. A gust blows off a woman’s broad-brimmed hat. Straps at her chin, ears, and forehead hold a translucent face glove. Her eyes, nostrils, and mouth show through the stitched openings. In the sunlight, Zhu sees serious acne beneath the face glove’s gauzy fabric. The woman retrieves her hat, furiously pins it back on.

There, too, a girl so thin, she’s nothing but satin skin over bird bones. She shuffles behind her sisters, dark circles surrounding her eyes, her skin pale celadon. She delicately coughs, and blood blooms in the handkerchief her mother impatiently thrusts into her fragile hands. Zhu recoils, covers her nose and mouth. Tuberculosis. Very, very contagious.

“Outta sight, you friggin’ hoodlum!” shouts a portly man in a charcoal cutaway coat as he grapples with a fellow in a bowler and a three-piece suit. Sweat pours down their flushed faces, staining the high starched collars strangling their thick necks.

“I’ll take me knuckledusters to ye,” the bowler shouts back.

Zhu smells the reek of whiskey. The cutaway passes a silver flask to the bowler, who swigs from it and slams the flask back into the cutaway’s chest. Are they roughhousing or about to commence fisticuffs? Their violent conviviality makes her heart race. Men like this go down to Chinatown, set a house on fire just to see the flames. Men like this chase a Chink, string him up from a lamppost just to see him swing.

What an Age. The Gilded Age.

“My calculations indicate your rendezvous is fast approaching,” Muse reminds her, a little too loudly.

A woman turns and peers at her. Zhu adjusts her veil. That’s all she needs--a disembodied voice hovering over her, and she answering. Muse is perfectly capable of communicating in subaudio so others can’t overhear. Why is the monitor speaking in projection mode? She’ll wind up in Napa Asylum for the Insane if she’s not careful.

The rendezvous! Time to go!

Zhu gathers up her skirts, sprints back to the Japanese Tea Garden. She finds the elegant redwood pagoda, takes a place in the queue. A Japanese woman in a kimono and clogs bows and smiles. Zhu returns the bow. The Japanese woman pours tea, sets the cup on a red lacquered tray.

“No more than a thousand Japanese live in San Francisco,” Muse whispers. “The staff is part of the attraction.”

An exuberant Japanese fellow in a blue and white kimono and scarlet headband bustles about behind the counter. “I am Mr. Makota, dearie. You try my cookie?” He proffers the treat, a wafer folded over like a half shell, fragrant with vanilla. He breaks the cookie open, extracts a slip of paper from the crumbs.

Zhu takes the slip and reads:

THERE IS A PROSPECT OF A THRILLING TIME AHEAD FOR YOU

The concessionaire laughs at her startled expression. “You like my fortune cookie, dearie? I make them for the fair, number one first, but, oh my! how the Chinese copy me. Every Chinese restaurant in town make fortune cookie now. But I am first!” He pops a piece of cookie in his mouth. “You try? Bake fresh today.”

“Thank you, Mr. Makota,” Zhu says, taking her tea and fortune cookie to a little table at the back of the pagoda. She unties her veil from beneath her chin, discreetly lifts the cup beneath the netted fabric, and sips. Hot sweet tea soothes her throat, calms her sinuses. The swirling, tenuous feeling—what the techs warned her about, a reaction called tachyonic lag—fades away. She smiles, encouraged, breaks apart the cookie, and takes the paper slip:

YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SURROUNDED BY LOVING FRIENDS

Then she sees her. The girl she’s supposed to meet. There she is.

Crouching behind the table, huddled next to the wall. So still and silent, a bundle of shadows barely breathing, that Zhu didn’t notice her at first. A furtive motion, and a skinny little hand darts toward Zhu’s feedbag purse on the floor.

Zhu is quicker. She seizes the girl by her wrist, grabs the other flailing arm, and pulls her out from under the table. The girl is strong, much bigger and older than Zhu expected.

“Oy ching, ching, syau-jye!” the girl squeals.

“Please, please, yourself, miss,” Zhu says sternly. She deposits her captive on the opposite chair. “Pa liao.” Enough of this, settle down. “Trying to steal my purse, are you?”

“I not steal purse,” the girl says with haughty authority. Her sulky face is so filmed with grime, Zhu can’t tell if she’s pretty. Her thick black hair unravels from its queue. She wears an apple-green embroidered silk tunic held together with gold satin frogs and green silk trousers. When she lowers her arms to her sides, the sleeves droop below her fingertips, so she looks as if she has no hands. Too bad she doesn’t lower her arms for long because her fingernails are shredded, her knuckles sprinkled with sores. Her straw sandals are threaded with more green silk, but her big bare feet have knobby, filthy toes.

Just the girl Zhu is looking for.

“I not steal purse from fahn quai,” she says with a toss of her head.

“Fahn quai?” Zhu says. “You think I’m a white devil?” She flings the veil up. “Look. Not a white devil.”

The girl’s eyes widen. Zhu has the same golden skin, the same wide cheekbones as the girl. But the irises in Zhu’s slanting eyes are a brilliant gene-tweaked green.

“Oy.” Perplexity clouds the girl’s black eyes. “Jade Eyes.”

“I’m Zhu.” She smiles at the girl’s wonder. “But you may call me Jade Eyes.”

“Oy, Jade Eyes,” the girl pleads. “I not thief. This true. You must believe! Look.” From some hidden pocket in her tunic, she takes out a small carved rosewood box, sets it on the table. “I have jewels. My mama give me for dowry.”

“Let me see.” Zhu waits impatiently as the girl fumbles with the latch.

Amazing! So the Archivists were right, after all. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was right. Wow! And after all that random data, after all these centuries. So much the Archivists didn’t know about Chinese women in fin de siècle America. Still, the Archivists had actually traced this girl—or a girl like her. An anonymous Chinese girl in the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fourth of July, 1895.

Well, all right! Excitement rises in Zhu’s throat. The Archivists also said she would have jewelry. They said she would have the aurelia.

The aurelia—what is it? A peculiar Art Nouveau brooch made of gold and diamond chips and colored glass as bright as gemstones. The Archivists said the aurelia holds the key to the Gilded Age Project. If only Zhu can get her hands on the aurelia, then everything—the past and the future—will turn out all right.

The girl lifts the rosewood lid, and Zhu peers in eagerly. There are three bracelets of jade, one of ivory. A pair of fillgreed gold earrings. A gold ring with a nice jade cabochon.

Zhu frowns, stirring the pieces, turning them over. “This is it? This is all you’ve got?”

“All I got? Mama give! This my dowry!” The girl’s eyes flash. “This jade, this gold.”

Damn. For the second time since she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden, Zhu feels a painful jolt of fear.

The girl doesn’t have the aurelia.

* * *

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.”

Zhu laughed out loud. Was he racist and sexist, after all, this sophisticated cosmicist with his Cosmic Mind rap? “Well, yeah. Just me and several billion other Chinese women.”

“And you’ve got a neckjack. Primitive as it is, yours is better than several billion other Chinese women.” He licked his lips nervously. “We’ll be installing a monitor in your neckjack that will carry an Archive of relevant files, including Zhu.doc, as I mentioned. The monitor will make sure you get to where you’re supposed to go, keep you informed, stuff like that. Muse will have full holoid capability, if you ever need to view a file. Much more advanced equipment than the knuckletop I took on my Summer of Love Project.” He gives her another sharp look. “Okay. So prepare yourself, Zhu. The shuttle will be ready in two days.”

“Two days?”

“Yes. Because of the unfortunate incident at Changchi”--he was choosing his words carefully, now, which instantly raised her hackles again--“the monitor will also ensure that you’re fulfilling the object of the project.”

“Oh, I see. You’re really installing the monitor because you don’t trust me. Because I’m an accused criminal.”

“Oh, you’ve got other qualities,” he said as if she’d made a joke. “You’re educated. Decent gene-tweaking. Nice eyes, by the way. And no family responsibilities.”

“I’m a Daughter of Compassion, sir. And a skipchild.”

“I’m a skipchild, too.”

“Yeah, but you’re Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. My skipparents got tired of playing mommy and daddy with me. They abandoned me to the State when I was fifteen.”

“I know. The Generation-Skipping Law can be harsh.” Chiron was fumbling for the right words, a condition that looked odd on him. “Listen, Zhu. We’ve researched the project. And we’ve chosen you. I’ve chosen you.” He plunged on. “There’s isn’t much data on Chinese women in San Francisco, 1895. Mostly they were smuggled into the city as slaves. Immigration authorities never knew who they were. Their masters changed their names, falsified family relationships. When they died, they were buried in anonymous graves.”

“So their identities are lost to the Archives,” Zhu said. She was getting it, all right.

“Yes. Like so many of the kids who ran away to the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.”

“Oh, man. You’re sending me to a dim spot?”

“Exactly.” Chiron smiled, a real smile at last, warm and encouraging. “We’ve constructed an identity for you.”

“And who will I be?”

“The runaway mistress of a British gentleman. That will explain your presence in San Francisco. Your proficiency in English. You’ll go to a home in Chinatown established by Presbyterian missionaries for rescued slave girls. You’ll stay there, work for the director. It’s all women, you’ll like it. I understand that the mission was a lot like the compound you lived in with the Daughters of Compassion.”

“That sounds okay,” Zhu said slowly. Why did she sense he wasn’t telling her something? Something important?

Suddenly Chiron searched his pockets and, like an old-timey magician, produced something shiny from his pocket. He commanded, “Look at this.”

His sudden movements startled her, and an odd prickly feeling rose in her throat. “What is it?”

“We call it the aurelia. A golden butterfly.”

It was a piece of jewelry, not a golden butterfly. A fantastic Art Nouveau brooch, its elaborate wings crafted out of swirls of gold set with marquise-cut diamonds and bits of multicolored glass that caught the light like tiny stained glass windows. Instead of an insect, the body of a tiny, graceful woman cast in gold stood at the center, her outstretched arms bearing the fabulous wings, her shapely legs poised as if she were about to dive. She had the heart-shaped face of a classic Gibson girl--large eyes, full cheeks, delicate mouth. Her hair was swept up in a sort of futuristic hood. Her expression was impassive, yet charged with some hidden passion.

Zhu reached out, amazed. “For me?”

But Chiron held the aurelia away, as if teasing her, though his expression was anything but. “This is an artifact of 1895. This is a crucial point of reference for you, Zhu. You must look for this artifact in 1895.”

“Look where?” How the gold glinted! How the glass sparkled like gems!

“She will have it.”

“Okay, I give up. Who’s she?”

“The Chinese slave girl you’re supposed to meet. Muse will guide you to the rendezvous. You’ll know she’s the one because she’ll have the aurelia. Understand? That’s the object of your project. Once you’ve found the girl, the two of you must go at once to the Presbyterian mission. She’ll live in safety there, eventually meet and marry a Caucasian man, and bear his child. A daughter.”

“Wait, don’t tell me,” Zhu said. “I’m this girl’s great-great-granddaughter.”

“No, no, the Archives clearly establish that your lineage is based in China.” Chiron tucked the aurelia away in his hidden pocket. “So that’s about it. Find the girl, verify that she’s got the aurelia, win her confidence so she’ll go with you to the mission on Sacramento Street. Meet the new director—a remarkable young woman named Donaldina Cameron—and take a job with her. Make sure the girl settles in. You must stay there, watching over her, till the Chinese New Year in 1896. That’s when the dim spot closes and we have data supporting the existence of the girl’s daughter. Or a female half-Chinese, half-Caucasian baby like her. Then you’ll t-port back to this Now. Okay, Zhu? Sign here.”

She took the petition he offered, thought about it. The Gilded Age Project did sound simple. Mostly simple. Exciting, even. After the wearying campaign in Changchi, an adventure! She was sick to death of prison. But Chiron still wasn’t telling her everything. “And then what?”

“Then we’ll see about the handling of your trial. By the time you return, we should know what the charge is.”

“You mean you’ll know the status of the victim.” She swallowed hard. “My victim.”

“Yes.”

“Is he alive or dead?”

Chiron wouldn’t answer. Apparently he didn’t like being reminded of the despicable incident any more than she did. “We’ve arranged for a delay in your arraignment.”

Excellent. They’d arranged for a lot of things, apparently. Zhu congratulated herself. It wasn’t just a matter of reducing the charge against her. Maybe this was a chance to redeem herself. She hadn’t known how badly she’d wanted that till now. Of course, she’d t-port to 1895. Of course, she’d know exactly what to do.

* * *

“Now what do I do?” Zhu mutters to Muse as she hauls the girl by her elbow out of the Japanese Tea Garden. “She doesn’t have the aurelia. She was supposed to have the aurelia, and she doesn’t. She doesn’t have it!”

“Stay calm, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “You’re attracting too much attention.”

“Stay calm? I’m freaking out!” This must sound like Zhu’s got two voices coming out of her throat, one answering the other. A devil woman? Oh, yeah. She can sympathize when the girl howls, fear, puzzlement, and dismay screwing up her face. “Muse, you will switch to subaudio mode. Now.”

“Assume she is the contact,” Muse insists, still blasting in projection mode. “She was there. Take her to the mission, and we’ll look for the aurelia.”

“Look for the aurelia? Look where?”

“I not go! I not go!” the girl wails.

“I don’t know,” Muse says. “I will analyze, okay? Ask her name. We believe she was called Wing Sing.”

Zhu seizes the girl by her shoulders. She’s much bigger than Zhu expected, as tall and thin as Zhu. Are they attracting attention? No. No one promenading in the park pays any attention to a woman dressed in Western clothes taking forcible custody of a scruffy Chinese girl. ”What’s your name?”

“I Wing Sing.” She points toward the Pacific Ocean. “I go home, Jade Eyes!”

“Wing Sing.” Zhu sighs with relief. “Thank goodness. Yes, home. That’s exactly where we’re going. We’re going to the home, Donaldina Cameron’s home. The nice mission on Sacramento Street.” Zhu points downtown, in the opposite direction.

“Not go to fahn quai!” Wing Sing cries, struggling. “I die first!”

“You’re going to be just fine.” Alternately pushing and pulling, Zhu wrestles the girl to the Park and Ocean Railroad station where they can catch the steam train downtown. Zhu puffs, sweat drizzling beneath her corset. The stays gouge her ribcage, making her breath catch. “When is the next train, sir?” she asks the conductor.

Now people in the passing crowd begin to take notice of her struggle. A buxom blond woman watches them shrewdly. The woman wears elaborate pink flounces and a grotesque hat studded with carcasses of Brazilian humming birds. A black brougham drawn by two lathered geldings waits at the curb. The driver of the brougham notices Zhu and Wing Sing, too.

“Well, miss.” The conductor, a well-whiskeyed fellow in a rumpled uniform, clicks open his pocket watch, checks it with drunken precision. “I reckon it’ll get here when it gets here.”

Zhu catches his small gesture to the driver. The driver knocks his whip handle on the brougham’s door. The conductor pockets the watch. He turns a gold coin through his fingers.

What is going on? A chill runs through Zhu. She picks up at once the covert communication between the conductor, the driver, and whoever waits in the brougham. All of them, on the lookout.

Suddenly three Chinese men leap out. Dressed entirely in black, they wear queues tightly braided, oiled, and wrapped in buns at the napes of their necks. Black slouch hats are pulled low over their foreheads, black slippers on their feet. One is a wiry little fellow, tattoos covering his hands, a curved knife tucked in his belt. The second is a fat man, diamond rings on every finger. Silent and steely-eyed, he surveys the crowd. The third is tall and gaunt, a black eyepatch over his left socket. Beneath his black overcoat, bandoliers of bullets are slung across his chest, two pistols visible in his belt.

The eyepatch spots Wing Sing first. In an instant, the men in black surround Zhu and the struggling girl.

“Highbinders!” shouts the buxom blond woman. “Say, fellas!” she says to the gentlemen standing around. “You gonna let them goddamn highbinders ruin our Fourth of July?”

The men laugh nervously, look away. Chinese business is Chinese business.

“Z. Wong, please exit immediately,” Muse whispers. “These are hatchet men. Enforcers for a tong.”

“Boo how doy,” Wing Sing whispers, going limp.

“Queues coiled to the left,” Muse says, opening a file. “Chee Song Tong.”

“I say, fellas!” shouts the buxom blond woman. “What kinda lousy cowards are ya, anyway? You gonna let them highbinders trouble a lady?”

“I’ve got no quarrel with you,” Zhu says to the eyepatch, boldly staring into his eye. “Let us go.”

“This our girl,” the eyepatch says. “We pay gold for her. We take now.”

“I don’t think so,” Zhu says, circling her arm around Wing Sing’s shoulders. “She’s mine.” The girl huddles passively, casting her eyes to the ground.

“Z. Wong, preservation of your person is the first priority,” Muse whispers. “Please review ‘The CTL Peril’.” Muse posts the text in her peripheral vision.

“I don’t think I’m going to review files right now, Muse,” Zhu whispers, jerking away when the eyepatch plants his hand on her shoulder.

“Our girl.”

“Chee Song Tong,” Muse whispers, “sponsors slavery, opium smugging, and assassination. These are assassins, Z. Wong.”

“What about the girl?”

“Let them take her.”

“Damn it, Muse, she’s the reason I’m here!”

“It appears you have no choice at the moment,” Muse whispers.

“It’s a goddamn shame!” the buxom blond woman shouts at the crowd. “You all oughta be ashamed!”

“Please step away, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “They don’t want you. I said go!”

“Too late.”

The wiry fellow and the fat man seize Zhu’s elbows. The eyepatch smacks Wing Sing across her face with the back of his hand.

“Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing whimpers.

Heart pounding, Zhu shoves the hatchet men away. She clutches the girl, anger parching her throat. Can she protect her? Or is she too late?

The girl clings to her, murmuring, “Jade Eyes.”

The eyepatch stoops, stares at Zhu. He flips up her veil, his eye widening when he sees her Chinese face, her irises gene-tweaked green.

The hatchet men hustle them into the brougham. The driver yells, whipping the horses.

With a lurch and a jolt, the brougham speeds away.