The Gilded Age

March 17, 1896

Saint Patrick’s Day





13

Woodward’s Dancing Bears

On her way back from the Snake Pharmacy with a white paper packet of powdered willow bark, Zhu hears Old Father Elphich announcing the latest hot talk as he tends to his newsstand on Market Street. He holds aloft a copy of the Examiner, displaying the headlines in a hand clawed by arthritis, and proclaims--

TONG WARS RAGE IN CHINATOWN

HATCH MEN HACK AS COPS WATCH

“Hey, newsboy, gimme a Call,” shouts a rotund gentleman fairly bursting out of his chartreuse velvet waistcoat, emerald studs the size of dice winking on his cuffs. The gentlemen of San Francisco’s Gilded Age call Old Father Elphich “newsboy” despite the fact that Old Father Elphich’s chalk-white hair falls to his waist and he must be pushing seventy-five.

Zhu jostles her way to the newsstand amid gentlemen crashing together their steins of green-tinted beer, downing shots of green-tinted gin or whiskey the color of old copper infused with a liquid patina. Everyone in San Francisco is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day and, goodness knows, people need some cheer on this cold rainy spring day. Despite the morning drizzle, celebrants quaff their libations out on the sidewalk, hoping to sight a lucky rainbow in the blustery skies. The saloons along the Cocktail Route are serving up great steaming platters of cabbage and corned beef, pots of freshly ground mustard and horseradish, boiled potatoes and carrots, black loaves of rye bread, sweet pound cake laced with butter, tart San Joaquin strawberries with pale green whipped cream.

A parade careens down Market Street, the white horses, grays, and piebalds dyed various shades of green. Plenty of crepe paper shamrocks, steamers, and rosettes as bright as new grass. A tipsy brass band in kelly-green top hats pounds out “When Irish Eyes are Smilin’” surprisingly in tune, given their red-faced condition.

A gaggle of blond and red-haired Irish sporting ladies ride by in a rented phaeton with a gypsy top. Well oiled, rouged, and whiskeyed, they wave and cheer, kick up their legs revealing green garters, pull down their bodices to show the green lace along the tops of their corsets. One lady boasts a shiny emerald beauty spot on her abundant breast. Gentlemen cheer as they pass, and the proper ladies glare, scandalized. Someone will run off to have a word with the mayor’s staff about such lewd public conduct, but that someone is likely to find the mayor’s staff at the Irish ladies’ sporting house tonight.

“Saint Patrick’s Day,” Muse whispers in her ear, “is generally observed in San Francisco despite the holiday’s ethnic and religious origin because people intuitively want to celebrate the vernal equinox, the rebirth of life after winter, the joyful fertility of spring, the commencement of a new cycle of. . . .”

“Thank you, Muse, that will be all.” Zhu cuts the monitor off. She’s not feeling very joyful. And though she could call her miraculous escape on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen a rebirth of sorts, the commencement of a new cycle, since that night she’s been left with confusion, fear, a child on the way, and Daniel dying.

She buys an Examiner from Old Father Elphich, slips into the shelter of a flower stand in front of the Metropolitan Market, and scans the front-page article. There’s the usual righteous rant against criminal activities in Tangrenbu, though the white community doesn’t really give a damn about the tongs and their nefarious enterprises except when bloodshed proves bad for the tourist trade. In 1896, Tangrenbu is a prime tourist attraction. The bloody skirmish—a man beheaded, another gutted—was apparently a dispute over a girl. A Chinese slave girl. Another pretty girl kidnapped, duped into a false marriage, or simply sold by her parents and smuggled into America through the coolie trade.

As usual, the press writes about the girl as if she’s a criminal, too, and not the victim she most surely is.

“Wing Sing, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Zhu whispers. The grief, the guilt tug hard at her heart.

Alphanumerics scroll across her peripheral vision. “Listen well, Z. Wong. An anonymous Chinese woman in a Western-style gray silk dress got her throat cut in a Barbary Coast saloon on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen.” Muse recites these facts dispassionately and opens the file that Zhu has studied over and over. A collection of newspaper clippings and articles much like the inky paper she holds now in her hands. Muse highlights the relevant text. “She dies. She always dies. No one knows who or what she was. No one has ever known a thing about her except that she did not have bound feet. There was nothing you could do.”

“My throat still aches, Muse.”

Muse is silent.

“That sacrifice was supposed to have been mine.”

“You’ve made other sacrifices. You’ll make more.”

She doesn’t like the sound of that. “I survived the Closed Time Loop.”

“Not quite. You survived that particular CTL, the Prime Probability that collapsed on the Chinese New Year.” Muse is glum. “Permit me to remind you, we’re still here. Still in this Now.” Muse’s tone is accusatory and, for the first time, Zhu considers the monitor’s point of view. What will happen to the sentient Artificial Intelligence when she dies and is buried in an anonymous grave six hundred years before the monitor was manufactured? The steelyn ultrawire and nanochips won’t disintegrate the way her physical brain and nerve cells will. Does Muse face everlasting imprisonment in a coffin buried under centuries of soil? Does Muse have any way of contacting its makers in the future? Any way of escape? Is Muse afraid? “You never made it to the rendezvous.”

“No kidding.”

A man whose blond muttonchops have been dyed a variegated green pours his green beer over the head of a swarthy, dark-eyed fellow. The men proceed to punch and wrestle, knocking over buckets of dyed green carnations. Green water pools on the macadam. A rowdy crowd gathers around, cheering them on, the mood turning tense with more violence.

Zhu backs away from the altercation. “No,” she whispers, “I never made it to the rendezvous.” What could she have done? A squad of the local bulls rounded up Zhu, Daniel, and Jessie on the street outside of Kelly’s and hustled them down to the precinct station to file a statement while Harvey and his thugs, the eyepatch and his hatchet men faded like shadows into the night. The morgue’s mournful wagon clattered by and collected Wing Sing’s corpse, listing the girl as a Jane Doe. No identification, no immigration documents, no next of kin. Well, that’s the Barbary Coast. The Nob Hill swells clucked their tongues, mothers pleaded with their sons to stay away from that wicked place, and life in San Francisco went on.

When the precinct station finally released them at four in the morning, Jessie herded them into a cab and spirited Zhu and Daniel away to south o’ the slot. There Jessie prevailed upon a distant cousin of hers working as the concierge in a seedy Tehama Street boardinghouse to put the couple up.

“Jar me, you two cannot come back to my house,” Jessie declared as they fled in the dawn. “I run a class joint.”

“But we’ve done nothing wrong!” Zhu was furious, exhausted, and very scared.

“Harvey’s thugs will come a-lookin’ for the both of you at my place.”

Of course Jessie was right, and Zhu hasn’t seen her bedroom at 263 Dupont Street ever since. That night I knew I’d never return to my room. But is this the way things are supposed to be? She doesn’t know.

Two beat cops confront the grappling men and separate them, escorting each in the opposite direction down Market Street. The baby in Zhu’s belly flutters. She ducks out of the flower stand, finds a corner in the Metropolitan Market where she can rest on a wrought-iron bench.

“What will happen now, Muse? Has all of spacetime become polluted? Have I unleashed another reality?”

“I don’t know.” Muse, honest for once. What a surprise.

“The aurelia is still an enigma, is it not?”

“That it is.”

“And I’m a more reliable courier than the LISA techs bargained for because I know exactly what to do.”

Muse pauses. “I beg to differ, Z. Wong. You haven’t been listening to me. You are not the anonymous Chinese woman who gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967.”

Zhu fusses with the cuff of her sleeve, hoping the shock of the monitor’s statement will pass quickly. “Of course I am. I must be. Who else could it be?” When Muse doesn’t answer, she says the obvious. “I’ve got green eyes.”

“No!” Muse is adamant. “The holoid was shot with modern equipment, not a remastering of ancient television footage shot in 1967. The Archivists would have certainly identified you at any age.”

“Oh, wise up, Muse. Do you really think Chiron and the Institute would have told me they were sending me into the past to die? That if Wing Sing didn’t survive, I would have to take her place? Wasn’t that their secret plan?”

“No, I would have been informed, Z. Wong. And I assure you, I was not.”

She sure as hell has no reason to trust the monitor, but allows that to pass for now. “Okay. But answer me this. What difference does it make under the resiliency principle?”

Muse is silent.

“Without Block or mouth swathe or neurobics, I’ll look like an old woman at a hundred and one years old.” She sighs. In her Now, she’d be in youthful middle age—and look it. “But I’ll make it. Without a new contraceptive patch, who knows? Birth control pills haven’t been invented. I may even have more children.”

“No, no, no. You’d creating a new reality, Z. Wong. You would.”

“Then I’m the only one, Muse, who can decide what to do.”

Zhu cups her hand on her belly. Five months pregnant, that’s what Jessie Malone says. She’s always hungry but whenever she eats, her stomach squeezes against the baby, and then she can’t eat. Of course, there’s no way to tell her baby’s gender. That technology won’t be available for nearly another century.

She tunes out the costermongers and fishmongers and butchers and bakers and cheesemakers bellowing out their specials of the day to the passing shoppers, opens her Examiner, and reads—

A notorious hatchet man who wore a black eyepatch like a pirate on the high seas, was employed by the notorious Chee Song Tong, and was well known for his nefarious and vicious acts of murder, mayhem, and violence contracted for by substantial sums of gold, was among the casualties in the Bartlett Alley massacre yesterday afternoon.



“The eyepatch,” Zhu whispers. She grips her forehead, expels a breath. We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

A shop clerk bends over her. “Are you all right, madame? May I get you something? Do you need a doctor?”

She looks up, sees the startle in his eyes at the sight of her features. She doesn’t need to tell him to leave her alone. He’s gone in a flash. She abandons her newspaper on the bench, heaves herself to her feet, and braces herself for the crowd on Market Street. Time to go home. Time to go to Daniel.

“Heads up, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers as she heads down Fifth Street. “You need to worry about Harvey and his thugs.”

Two bruisers circulate through the Saint Patrick’s Day crowd, not participating in the drunken revelry or gratuitous violence but watching, searching, checking out faces. Checking out the few Chinese slipping anonymously through the crowd. Checking out women.

Harvey’s thugs? Maybe, maybe not, but every tough bird merits Zhu’s attention. Since that terrible night, Harvey has circulated the word through the underworld that he’s put a price on Daniel’s head. Jessie heard the rumor from a john at Morton Alley, and Jessie’s distant cousin has turned out to be a terrible gossip.

“You kids better move on,” Jessie told Zhu. That was three weeks ago.

Zhu found a room at another boardinghouse south o’ the slot while Daniel’s lawyers pursued the foreclosure action against Harvey’s poolroom. Dressed in her denim sahm, posing as Daniel’s manservant wielding Daniel’s power of attorney, Zhu has appeared and signed several petitions on Daniel’s behalf, keeping both the foreclosure action and Harvey’s vendetta alive. By now Harvey’s spies know that she may dress as a Western lady, as a Chinese whore, or as a coolie. Harvey’s spies have found out that she is Jade Eyes.

Harvey means to kill Daniel, all right, Zhu thinks, but Daniel may oblige Harvey by dying all on his own. He’s going to die.

No!

Zhu can’t abandon Daniel. She won’t. And she won’t let him die. If there’s anything right she can do for the Gilded Age Project, it’s got to be saving Daniel. And to hell with the Tenets, trying to tell her she can’t help an innocent man whom the project directors haven’t given the nod to. She’s here in this Now. She’s got her own responsibilities. Ah, and what did Muse say? She creates this reality. However it turns out.

The shop clerk calls out at the corner of Market and Fifth. “Say, miss! I say, miss? You forgot your newspaper.”

The two bruisers turn and crane their necks at her.

Zhu flees.

* * *

To south o’ the slot where immigrants the world over newly arrived in San Francisco come to live, the people who sweep the streets and stitch boots and scrub floors. Jessie’s neighborhood is a glossier place, in spite of the saloons on every corner, a place rich with gold and silver coins tumbling carelessly in and out of every pocket. South o’ the slot—south of Mission Street, that is, a stone’s throw from Market Street and the fabulous Palace Hotel—reflects its own dingy economy. It’s not Tangrenbu which, despite its colorful filth and occasional outbreak of the plague, attracts tourists’ coins. Not North Beach or the Latin Quarter, which with their handsome swarthy people, thick red wines, odoriferous cheeses and fish, and bay views also attract the moneyed and the curious.

No, south o’ the slot is just plain poor with no extra zest or exotic quality to attract anything other than penniless immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Belgium, and people of those nationalities from everywhere else in America. Stick saloons, laundries, tiny grocery stores with wilting produce and day-old bread stand side by side with boardinghouses, warehouses, whiskey distilleries, and sugar refineries. The stink of tanneries and butcher’s shops mingles with the bitter clean smell of hops and bleach. Saloons are as plentiful as in the tenderloin and along the Cocktail Route, but these are cheap beer halls or wine dumps where the “wine” is raw alcohol colored and flavored with cherry extract.

Zhu circles the boardinghouse twice, watching for signs of anyone following her. She finally darts in, climbs the stairs, and examines the three deadbolts she installed top, middle, and bottom. An old trick from the Daughters of Compassion compound. Thugs can’t crowbar a door with deadbolts top to bottom without making a racket. You’ll hear them first, get your gun, and step out onto the fire escape.

On the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen, Harvey’s thugs beat Daniel badly. In that freezing dawn after Jessie helped them book the room at the Tehama Street boardinghouse, he slipped in and out of consciousness and cried out for morphine. Could Zhu refuse him? She herself had once lain like this, leaking blood, bruises aching, ready to die if it hadn’t been for the black patch. She found his works in his jacket pocket—a smart brass Parke-Davis emergency kit custom-fitted with a hypodermic needle and vials of cocaine, morphine, atropine, and strychnine.

What every gentleman of the Gilded Age needs.

The atropine and strychnine she could use to keep his ticker pumping. The narcotics she hid in her feedbag purse. No matter much how he cried, she refused to give him morphine.

She refused him.

He went into fullblown withdrawal that morning. Nothing prepared her for the violence of his reaction. He went into shock and a condition resembling a severe case of dysentery, along with cardiac arrhythmia, infection of his needle tracks, and hemorrhaging in his nose. She was terrified he would have a stroke.

“Oh, Kuan Yin,” Zhu prayed. “I’m not a doctor. This isn’t a hospital. Please help me!”

She sent a messenger boy to Dupont Street, and Jessie came to the boardinghouse at four the next morning, bringing hot water in a steaming pot, clean sheets, blankets, and food. Mariah helped haul everything up the stairs and stood guard at the door, her expression stony.

“Sure and I once saw a bird as bad off as him,” Jessie said. “At the Mansion, so do not be too ashamed of him. Fine gentlemen get themselves in a fix from time to time. They usually go take the water cure for the summer season up at San Rafael, bringin’ their fancy doctors with ‘em. Jar me,” she sniffed indignantly, “if there ain’t more dope fiends on Snob Hill than in all of Tangrenbu.”

Muse searched the Archives. “Poor water quality, massive problems with dysentery in the nineteenth century. Must be why morphine therapy is so popular in this Day.”

“You’re not helping, Muse. What should I do?” Zhu wailed as her lover and the father of her child lay writhing on a cot. She hoisted him up every quarter of an hour and took him to the water closet down the hall where fluid gushed out of him again and again.

“Go get some paregoric,” Muse advised. “The Snake Pharmacy carries it. But don’t let him get his hands on it, it’s got a bit of opium.” And, “You may try a neurobic, Z. Wong.”

The paregoric helped. The neurobic did him no good at all.

When he finally fell into a fitful sleep, she sat up wakeful, watchful, and considered the specter of the CTL looming all around her. Unstable, destabilizing, an unnatural consequence of tachyportation. She watched for those subtle changes in reality that appeared right before her eyes, proof that the CTL was affecting the timeline in ways no one could predict. And what about Zhu herself? She’s become conscious within her own CTL. Will she eternally become conscious to face this hell, die, be reborn in the future, and return to the past to face her death again and again, without end? Or maybe, because a CTL is unstable, will she be the one to die on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen in Kelly’s Saloon? Will she know it, the next time, that she’s going to die?

Her throat aches and that’s a fact. But then, she’s picked up some kind of fever bug that her gene-tweaking can’t protect her from.

“He needs nourishment through the blood,” Muse whispered, suddenly helpful and kind. “His digestive system isn’t working. He needs sugar, salts, fluids. Especially fluids. And a general nontoxic anodyne and restorative.”

“Are you talking about aspirin?” Zhu said, sitting up.

“Safe synthetic aspirin is a decade away, but you can purchase powdered willow bark at one of the better pharmacies.” Muse chuckles. “You knew that, Z. Wong, didn’t you? That’s what aspirin is. Willow bark.”

The Snake Pharmacy did indeed stock powdered willow bark displayed in the front window where a rattlesnake coiled lazily around the merchandise. The rattlesnake is defanged, of course, but serves as an excellent deterrent against thievery.

Zhu boiled water, prepared a soup for the blood, rigged rubber tubing with Daniel’s hypodermic needle, and constructed a crude intravenous apparatus. She cleaned the needle with isopropyl alcohol—also a chemical well in supply at the Snake Pharmacy.

She worked the mollie knife up Daniel’s nostrils till the ruptured cartilage of his tortured septum healed. She ran the mollie knife up and down his arms where abscesses festered, and slowly the needle wounds healed.

Still he flailed on the cot, crying and groaning.

“Hush,” Zhu whispered. “You’re so much better now, Daniel. Hush.”

“Go get him cigarettes,” Muse advised. “They won’t kill him, not for a couple of decades, anyway. Go on.”

Zhu ran to the Devil’s Acre Saloon on Tehama Street, fetched cigarettes.

Now she unlocks the three deadbolts—click, click, click—and steps into their room.

Daniel lies quietly on the cot where she left him, smoking.

“You look better.”

He stares at the smoke spiraling up to the ceiling as if that image is like his spirit leaving his flesh.

“Eat something?”

The bowl of millet soup is cold, untouched.

“Drink something?”

Only half the orange juice is gone.

“Good.” She swallows her disappointment and checks his pulse, touches his forehead, examines the insides of his arms.

He offers his limbs to her lifelessly.

“Daniel?”

He raises his eyes, dark pools whose depths are denied her. Have been denied her during these long, gray days, Something is broken inside him, and she doesn’t know how to mend it. The mollie knife can’t touch it, and neither can her love.

She sinks down onto the scuffed wood floor, sitting cross-legged, and begins to weep. For Wing Sing, for Daniel, for the little green-eyed boy she nearly beat to death six centuries in the future. She hasn’t wept in years, not since summer camp when someone flew a lavender kite shaped like a fish and the sight reminded her so much of her faithless skipparents, she fled to her sleeping bag and sobbed herself to sleep.

His hand squeezes her shoulder, stronger than she thought possible. “Don’t cry, my angel.” These are his first coherent words since the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen. His face, when she looks up, is vibrant again, his eyes clear.

She wipes the tears from her eyes with the ball of her thumb, leaps to her feet. She wants to scold him, shout at him. It’s all she can do to calm down after this miracle. “I’m no angel.” She helps him back into bed, and he pulls her down onto the cot beside him, cradling her in the shelter of his arm.

“Of course you are. Who else but an angel would save the life of a sinner like me?” He reaches for his ciggie, draws down hard.

She swallows her complaint. Tobacco may actually be alleviating his dysentery. “You’re not a sinner.” A painful shudder she can only call joy squeezes her chest. And then she can’t help herself. “But you still smoke too damn much.” She finds her Patent Dust Protector, pulls the mask over her face.

“Now what you doing?”

“I’m pregnant. I don’t want to breathe your smoke.”

“Oh, a little smoke won’t hurt you.”

She sits up, infuriated. “Your second-hand smoke can hurt me real bad. And it most certainly will harm the baby. Our baby.”

He stubs the cigarette out at once, heaves a sigh. “And you know all this because you’re from some fiendishly brilliant time in the future?”

“Well, yeah!”

He pulls her down beside him again. “All right. Still, a sinner I am, condemned to hell. A failure like Father. I’ve got no head for business, I admit it. And, well, the drink and the dope got the best of me.” He plants a tender kiss on her forehead. “I would surely be dead if it weren’t for you.”

They lie together for a while in silence, and then she says, “You haven’t done so badly with your father’s business. He left you with a mess in San Francisco. And you went in good faith to a man advertising himself as a doctor who prescribed cocaine as a health therapy. For dipsomania! It’s crazy!”

“I most certainly have been a little crazy myself, miss.” Now he shifts on the cot, turning toward her, his eyes urgent, filled with emotion. “I do apologize.”

“Listen, Daniel. You’ve made some wrong decisions. It happens. But now you’ve got to start making right ones. I mean, look at your mother.”

The minute she says that word, she regrets it, because his face twists with sudden sharp anger.

“Ah, my mother. Such a fine lady. An angel of purity and a whore. Do you know that when I went to London and Paris, I never wanted to see her face again? I was furious when Father summoned me home to watch her die. So beautiful, as always, her deep sea eyes beseeching me.”

“Deep sea eyes?”

“Not emerald-green, like yours, my angel. Sea-green. And her question, always her question, even on her deathbed. ‘Danny, haven’t I been good to you? Haven’t I always been good?’ And I would always give the same answer. ‘Yes, Mama. Of course, Mama.’ By God!”

Zhu pulls the dust protector off, shakes her hair loose of the strap. “Wait a minute. I thought you understood why she took a lover. That your father beat her, aborted her baby. I thought you understood about her addiction. I thought you were angry with your father, not her.”

“Oh, certainly, I cannot abide my father’s self-righteousness, the morality he preaches, the sin he decries, all the while he was an adulterer and a bully. He ought to go to prison for what he’s done. She suffered too much.” He rubs his forehead, remembering. “But she? Quite the expert she became on booze and narcotics. When I was an unruly child, when I ran about too much or shouted too much or simply annoyed her, she knew just what dosage of soothing syrup to spoon-feed me. ‘Time for your medicine, Danny,’ she’d say. ‘Am I not good to you?’”

“She gave you alcohol and morphine to sedate you when you were a kid?”

Daniel lurches up off the bed and unsteadily onto his feet, pacing around the tiny room. But he’s up! He’s moving! His pale face is flushed with anger, his eyes alive. “Ah-ha! Have we just put two and two together, you and I?” He paces past the bed, plants a kiss on her forehead. “My lovely lunatic. I suppose you could say I have been a dope fiend all my life, and that is the terrible truth.” He lights another ciggie, forgetting her warning about second-hand smoke. “By God, I could use a drink.”

“But you can’t have one, Daniel.”

“I know. But I could certainly use some fresh air. I’m stifling in this dive.”

“Look,” Zhu says, sitting up and peering out the window. “The sun has come out.”

* * *

She needs to change her shirtwaist and skirt after her damp morning outing, he needs to change out of his nightclothes, so they tenderly help each other dress. Daniel is still weak and pale and much too thin, but he looks wonderful after Zhu buttons him into the three-piece gabardine suit that Jessie brought over from Dupont Street. Zhu is eager to try on the new maternity dress Jessie brought her. Jessie also brought an undergarment called an abdominal corset constructed expressly to slim the profile of a pregnant woman. Zhu takes one look at the contraption, cups her hand to her belly, and says, “I’d rather look fat.”

Daniel examines the abdominal corset with an avid look.

“No way, mister.”

Zhu is nervous as they stroll downstairs, his arm around her shoulders, her arm around his waist. The stink of whiskey and beer is nearly overwhelming when they get down to the street.

“Daniel,” she says warningly.

He glances hungrily at the celebrants, who have taken the sudden sunshine as a portent that must be toasted with renewed vigor. Cries ring out, “Gah! A rainbow, sir! I do believe I see ‘un!” Guffaws and shouts, “Have another shot o’ the Irish, mate!” Daniel licks his lips, loosens his collar. Despite the chilly spring air, sweat trickles down his temple.

Zhu takes him by his shoulders and shakes him. “Daniel, you wanted to make moving pictures. You wanted to be the first. Well, you’re not the first, but you can still make moving pictures. Plenty of moving pictures. But you’ll never fulfill your dream if you drink yourself to death by the time you’re twenty-two.”

A gentleman staggers into them, raising his shot glass. “To your health, boy!”

“Daniel, are you listening?”

“Why the devil did you bring me out here? It’s an orgy!”

“You said you wanted fresh air.”

“This air is hardly fresh.”

“Take him to Woodward’s Gardens,” Muse whispers just over their heads. “There you’ll find some fresh air.”

Daniel grins, disbelief and wonder warring in his face. “My dear lovely lunatic. Still the voices? And all along I thought it was the drink and the dope and my imagination.”

“That’s not a hallucination,” Zhu says, “that’s my guardian angel. Right, Muse?”

“I am indeed her guardian angel,” the monitor says, sounding pleased with the charade. “Not that she deserves me.”

* * *

They take the steam train to Mission and Fourteenth where Woodward’s Gardens stretches over several city blocks from Thirteenth Street to Fifteenth, Mission to Valencia. Zhu claps her hands with delight at the grand entrance, the snapping flags, banks of ivy spilling over the wrought iron fence, colorful posters announcing events and attractions. She and Daniel enter a lush labyrinth, stroll along meandering paths amid little lakes and tumbling streams, admire sculptures, fountains, and monuments, visit the glass-paned conservatory with its tropical flowers and trees, tour the art museum where Virgil Williams, founder of the School of Design, has hung a new exhibition. The former residence of Mr. Woodward, who made his fortune during the Gold Rush with a hotel called What Cheer House, now shelters a natural history museum. Zhu is amazed by the zoological garden, which boasts small but nicely appointed cages and yards for curious lamas, shy deer, shouting peacocks, twittering South American birds with wings of emerald, ruby, and gold. California sea lions cavort and beg for raw fish at the seal pond.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she exclaims. “It’s like some trillionaire’s private preserve under a dome. I’m amazed the public is allowed in.”

“Of course the public is allowed in,” Daniel says. “Why wouldn’t they be?” He gives her a skeptical glance. “Are you telling me that six hundred years in the future people won’t have amusement parks anymore? How very dull!”

“Oh, we have disneylands and playplexes and metaworlds. Plenty of zoos in telespace for the masses to jack into. When I was a kid, I used to think dinosaurs and dodos shared American forests with elephants and lynxes at the turn of the millennium and how lucky people were to actually see them.” At his puzzled look, she adds, “It was a cheap virtual zoo that didn’t distinguish between extinct species and living ones or which epochs and habitats they lived in. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.” She sniffs the air, which smells like new-mown grass and eucalyptus leaves. “But nothing like this, real live animals. Only the very rich and very rich private foundations like the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications can afford to maintain live animals in their natural habitats. New Golden Gate Preserve is one such habitat in San Francisco and, no, the public isn’t allowed in.”

“Then you have become very rich being here with me.”

“So I have.” Her heart clenches with joy at his words, and she flings her arms around him. They stand embracing in the fresh air amid the beauty of the gardens. She summons the monitor. “Muse, does this beautiful place last a long time?”

Muse searches the Archives, posts a file in Zhu’s peripheral vision. “Woodward’s Gardens will be torn down five years from now, at the turn of this century. The site will be paved over and filled in with industrial warehouses and low-cost multifamily housing. Where the grand entrance stands now will be the on-ramp to a major elevated freeway. In the earthquake of 2129, the elevation will collapse, killing two thousand commuters at the height of the rush hour. In 2254--“

“Muse off,” Zhu says, unexpected tears welling. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

Daniel takes her hand. He’s somber and pale. “By God, is the future really that terrible?”

“You’re beginning to believe me?”

His hand trembles in hers. “How can you bear it?”

“We bear it because we must. Oh, listen!” She doesn’t want to see him sink into depression again on account of her tall tales. “Listen.” In the distance, a pipe organ strikes up a lively tune. “Let’s go see.”

They stroll up to a stage set inside of a cage just outside the zoological gardens, the back wall equipped with a door leading to another cage inside the zoo proper. A dapper fellow in tails and a top hat steps onstage, equipped with a riding crop and bucket of chopped apples. “Ladies and gentlemen-ah, we now-ah present Woodward’s famous dancing bears-ah!”

The back door rattles open and four sizeable brown bears amble out onto the stage. Each bear wears a silly hat and a costume. Zhu spies a bellboy’s cap and a necktie; a sailor’s cap and a life preserver; a lady’s straw boater and an apron; a lace bonnet and a ballerina’s tutu.

“Hah, hup, hup, hup!” shouts the dapper fellow, slapping his crop but mostly tossing apple chunks which the bears catch in their jaws.

The bears whirl, roll over, climb up onto pedestals, stand up on their hind legs, paws batting the air, and turn slow shuffling pirouettes. They snuffle and bleat with strange goatlike cries, bend and lunge.

With each burst of applause, the dapper fellow winks and sends his performers into another frenzy of gesticulation and posture. “Woodward’s dancing bears-ah!”

“That’s probably bear abuse,” Zhu says, enchanted, “but I don’t care.”

Daniel laughs, a welcome sound. “Bear abuse? I suppose now you’re going to tell me that people in future worry about whether bears have feelings.”

“Not just whether bears have feelings, but whether they’re happy.”

“By God,” he murmurs, “I feel just like that fellow in the bellboy’s cap.”

“Muse,” Zhu whispers, suddenly inspired. “Shoot a holoid of this. Do it for him. Can you do it?”

Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision.

But as they watch Woodward’s bears dance, Daniel’s smile fades and a wistful mood falls over him. That awful wooden look steals over his face, and his eyes seem to sink, their surface icing over. His hand grows cold in hers.

“Daniel,” she says gaily, “you’ve gotten much too thin. I’m gonna buy you a squarer, and damn the cholesterol. I know how much you love sautéed oysters.”

“No, no,” he mutters, distracted. Distant. “I’m not hungry, miss.”

“Oh, but you haven’t had oysters in such a long time. Come, let’s picnic down by the lake. Anyway, I want to show you something lovely and amazing.”

She takes his hand and firmly leads him to a bench set along the path, sits him down. Has she pushed him too far today? Well, he’s got to eat. She hurries to a food stall staffed by a hardy Chinese cook with a huge smile and a quick intelligence sparkling in his dark eyes.

“Could you make me an oyster loaf, please?” She hands him a silver bit.

“Missy mean a squarer?”

“I do, indeed. A squarer, please.”

“For sick gentleman friend?”

She looks at him, surprised. “He looks that bad, does he?”

The cook gives her a look of deep sympathy. “I make good squarer for him.” He rewards her with that smile. “And for you, too, missy.”

The cook seizes a loaf of fresh milk bread, slashes the loaf in half with a huge steel knife, presses out a hollow, and slathers top and bottom with sweet butter. He pops the bread into a little wood-burning oven to toast. Next he tosses a bowl of fresh bay oysters into a shiny copper sauté pan with a huge scoop of butter, pinches coarse salt, black pepper, and garlic shavings onto the shellfish, and sets everything sizzling on the stovetop above the oven. Then he takes the toasted bread shell from the oven, spoons the oysters in the bottom, clamps the lid on top, and divides the gigantic sandwich into quarters. He wraps the fragrant concoction in crisp white paper.

“Squarer for you, missy,” says the cook. “Is my San Francisco special.”

“Thank you, sir. I will always remember your culinary skill.”

Zhu hurries back to Daniel. He sits slumped and shivering, his face fallen, his arms folded across his chest like the limbs of a puppet.

“Muse?” she says, panicked.

“Give him a neurobic,” Muse advises. “Two, if you’ve got enough left.”

The LISA techs supplied her with nine months’ worth of neurobics and no more. She’s taken care to ration them out. She finds the last half a dozen in her feedbag purse, takes out two without a second thought. She breaks open a capsule under Daniel’s nose, and his eyes flicker, a little color filters into his cheeks as he breathes the healing fumes. She breaks open another. Now he smiles wanly.

“What have you got there, my angel? It smells wonderful.”

She leads him to the picnic tables set beneath a whispering willow tree. They sit and munch on the squarer. After two enthusiastic bites, Daniel pauses, becoming pensive again. “I wasn’t the first,” he says heavily, “to make pictures move.”

“You don’t have to be the first. This is only the start of the moving picture business. What’s needed is a creative mind like yours to choose which pictures will move. To choose which stories to tell with those pictures. And to pioneer more technological innovations. Believe me, a whole new world is opening up for you.”

If she was hoping to rouse him with her encouragement, she’s disappointed now.

“By God, I’d like champagne with my oysters.”

“If your mother fed you whiskey and morphine to keep a little boy quiet, you’re going to have to fight every day of your life for sobriety, Daniel. Trust me, it will be worth it.”

“But why?” He throws down his food. “Oysters taste so much better with champagne. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. We do die tomorrow, don’t we? As life follows birth, so death follows life. That’s the way the world works, is it not?”

Zhu sighs. She too wishes she had a glass of champagne to wash down her oysters. And she wonders. If she dies in the past—which seems inevitable, now—then her birth and her life are to follow her death. How many times has she made this loop? How many times has she thought these thoughts? Though, at the moment, her thoughts feel fresh and new. Eat, drink, and be merry? Why not? Why not? How will she bear the rest of her life?

“You know, I can’t see the stars dance anymore,” Daniel mutters.

“The stars dance?”

“Yes, in the sky over marvelous Californ’. There was a time when I could look up and see the stars dance. Not anymore.”

“Muse?” Zhu whispers. “Help me.”

That scratchy feeling irritates her left eye as Muse downloads data through her optic nerve and projects a holoid field. A translucent wall of blue light hovers over the grass in front of the willow tree.

Daniel gasps, leaps to his feet, circles the translucent wall. He thrusts his hands into the field, marveling at the lack of resistance. Well, of course, his expression tells her, this how the future would do it. He guffaws with delight, and his cheeks bloom with color. He glances at her, jubilant, expectant. “Go on, go on! What’s next?”

She blinks, and Muse’s holoid of Woodward’s dancing bears pops up amid the swaying leaves of the willow tree. There they are, the bears in their silly hats and costumes, yelping for apple chunks. The holoid is nothing special to Zhu, just a digital recapitulation of a previously recorded reality. But Daniel drops to his knees, ruining his trousers with grass stains as he crawls all around the holoid, studying the three-dimensional images from every angle.

To Zhu’s surprise, Muse goes on, showing holoids of megalopolises, the Mars terraformation, the EM-Trans, the huge infrastructure of space stations orbiting the Earth. Then holocausts, conquests, visions of apocalypse. The brown ages that last for terrible centuries. And restoration of the Earth, the New Renaissance. A stampede of virtual gazelles leaps over a blind where a man and woman lie hidden together.

Daniel watches, transfixed. “Will I be able to do this?”

“Not all of it, not yet,” Zhu says, smiling. “Three-d, let alone holoids, are a long way away from this day. But look, Daniel. Look and learn. Perhaps with your moving pictures you’ll tell the story of a young man from Saint Louis who went to San Francisco.”

* * *

As the afternoon slips into an evening promising more rain, Zhu hails a cab back to their south o’ the slot hidey-hole. The cab driver patiently cajoles his young bay gelding that rolls his eyes at every drunken whoop and bellow. The first celebrants of Saint Patrick’s Day have staggered off to their favorite brothels or cribs, passed out in the back rooms of saloons, or lurched home to their scornful wives. Now another crowd of celebrants streams into the streets and saloons, workers done with the dayshift at factories, warehouses, and sweatshops.

“Did ye see the rainbow this afternoon, miss?” the vegetable vendor cries out as she and Daniel jostle through the crowd on their way back to the boardinghouse. “Ah, ye should’ve seen it. Them rowdies from Sausalito were hangin’ around here, and they saw it.” He adds with a significant wink, “Guess they didn’t see you and the mister go out earlier.”

A sharp foreboding pierces her, and Zhu pulls Daniel to a stop. “Let’s circle around the block.”

“I cannot around circle the block. I just can’t, my angel. So tired. . . .”

Boom boom boom! Fiery debris sprays from their room on the second floor. People scream, jump back, scramble away from the blast. A knot of five men stand impassively on the corner, watching. One boldly dangles a can of kerosene in his hand.

“Stay here,” Zhu commands, helping Daniel lean up against a lamppost. Cupping her hand beneath her belly, she runs toward the boardinghouse. I’m going to get you. That’s all she can think. She’s had the place where she sleeps sabotaged before. I’m going to freakin’ get you!

A small dark man with a mane of greasy black hair loiters at the corner. Harvey—who else? He laughs, holding a match to his cigar. Before he and his thugs even notice her, Zhu thrusts the side of her hand in his kidneys, in his neck. He turns, startled, in pain, and brandishes his fists, but he can’t bring himself to slug a pregnant woman. Too bad. She hoists up her skirts and lets him have it with a kick to his kneecap, the pointy toe of her button boot connecting with a satisfying thwack against his cartilage. Harvey crumbles to the sidewalk, and his thugs gather around him in confusion.

Men run toward Zhu from all directions--the local bulls and the local guys, the bartender at the Devil’s Acre, the landlady’s son, Old Father Elphich’s cadre of newsboys.

“You bastard, you bastard,” Zhu yells, kicking Harvey in his ribs, on his back. “You leave me and the father of my baby alone!” She nearly retches from the stink of whiskey on him.

The local guys seize Harvey’s thugs, including the one with the can of kerosene. The landlady’s son pulls out a pistol and trains it on them. “Don’t you move or I’ll blow your friggin’ heads off!” he warns. The newsboys pile on Harvey and gleefully pummel him with their fists till the bulls pull them off and handcuff the lot. A paddy wagon gallops up to the scene and hauls them off to the cooler.

* * *

“We don’t have to hide anymore?” Daniel says, leaning heavily on her shoulder.

Firemen dash in and out of the boardinghouse, tamping out the blaze with admirable efficiency, saving the place from the certain annihilation most blazes of this nature inflict on the ill-starred buildings of this day. Zhu breathes a huge sigh of relief. She likes the landlady and her son, who have both been kind to her and Daniel in spite of the cloud of disrepute they’ve brought with them.

“Muse, is there anyone else Daniel must hide from?” Zhu whispers.

Muse posts a string of statistics in her peripheral vision. “Negative. My analysis indicates that Daniel’s opponents will go to prison for fifteen years.”

“We don’t have to hide anymore,” she tells him.

“The luck of the Irish has smiled on us today!” Daniel crows. “I’m going to book us a room at Lucky Baldwin’s Hotel straightaway. We shall eat, drink, and. . . . Well, we shall eat and be merry, by God. I cannot think of anyone else I should want to be merry with besides you.”

She smiles, her heart bursting with joy, hoping this hell is over and all she has to do is live out the rest of her life. Whatever that amounts to. If she’s trapped in a Closed Time Loop, if she has to live and die, live and die, over and over, then so be it. She accepts that.

Daniel hails a cab. A smart black brougham halts for them, and they board and collapse, laughing, on the plush leather seat.

“My angel,” he says, cradling her in her arms.

“I’m not an angel, Daniel.”

“Oh, yes! Yes, you are.”

“No! I’m not an angel and I’m not a whore. I have intelligence and passion, strength and perseverance. I am capable of abstract thought, intellectual accomplishment, and artistic expression. Just like you, sir.”

He ponders that as the brougham trots up Fifth Street to Market. “What shall I call you, then?”

Zhu smiles. “You may call me a Woman.”