The Gilded Age

October 12, 1895

Columbus Day

4

Up and Down Dupont Street

This is the United States of America, 1895. President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation thirty-two years ago. Casualties of the War Between the States have lain in their graves longer than Zhu Wong has been alive in the future. Slavery has been abolished in America. Everyone here is free.

And I’m not, Zhu thinks as she sits at the breakfast table.

“What I need is red wine and plenty of it,” Jessie Malone proclaims, tossing her blond curls. Dissatisfied with her natural endowments, Jessie pins hair switches from the Montgomery Ward catalog here and there in her tremendous coiffure. “Go fetch me red wine, missy, and be quick about it.”

“For breakfast, Miss Malone?”

“Lordy, no, for the Mansion. For the gentlemen tonight. It’s Columbus Day! Don’t you know anything?”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone,” she says deferentially, as is fitting for an indentured servant. She mutters to Muse, “Columbus Day? I can’t keep these American holidays straight.”

“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” Muse whispers in her ear, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Excellent, Zhu mutters under her breath. Now Muse is spouting doggerel.

Jessie looks at her askance. What must she look like, forever muttering to herself and rolling her eyes to the side to view whatever Muse has posted in her peripheral vision?

Muse has turned out to be a serious problem. Her one tenuous, desperate link to her Now, she can’t rely on. Very excellent.

Zhu hasn’t known what to expect of Muse since the first day of the Gilded Age Project when the monitor spontaneously communicated in projection mode and advised her not to fight the hatchet men, to let them abduct the girl and carry her off. Now how can she secure a position at the Presbyterian mission when Jessie Malone holds a two-and-a-half year contract for Zhu’s services and the madam fully intends to enforce the bond? The girl she was supposed to rescue has been abducted, the aurelia never showed up at all, and Zhu is taking orders from the Queen of the Underworld over breakfast.

The Gilded Age Project has turned out to be a disaster. Nothing like what the Archivists planned.

Zhu has no idea how to make things right and Muse is no help at all.

She dallies at the breakfast table, overcome with a peculiar lethargy. Things always change from moment to moment, don’t they? At the most basic quantum level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling. Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. Yet in cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity. Isn’t that what Chiron said? Reality is a set of probabilities constantly collapsing into the timeline. Multiple universes coexist like motes of dust swirling in a sunbeam.

Quantum physics has long supported these contradictions. Zhu chuckles to herself. Quantum physics, hah. Oh, it ought to be quite painless. You won’t know the difference. You awaken transformed, once a Self contemplated yesterday, now a Self scarcely anticipated tomorrow.

But what about today?

She yawns and blinks, drowsy, and doesn’t know herself. She breathes the scent of red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and butter. Who is this slender woman who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen of the Underworld, conversing with gentlemen boarders, sipping coffee with cream and sugar?

Is it really her, Zhu Wong?

Or some other woman, altogether?

Only three months ago, she stood accused of attempted murder. In a T-shirt, jeans, and worn sneakers, she’d trudged through mud, a Daughter of Compassion, a handgun strapped beneath her right arm, a black patch behind her left knee. She’d been a comrade, a devotee of Kuan Yin. She’d been an abandoned skipchild, a Generation-Skipping radical working hard for the only sustainable future the world could hope for.

Three months ago. Six centuries in the future.

She tilts her head toward strains of music drifting from the saloon across the street, where they’ve got a string quarter for the early-morning drinkers. A lilting waltz, romantic and dizzying. She plays with her sleeve, the silk a luminous blue, the buttons on her cuff nubs of mother-of-pearl.

Only three months ago, she’d breathed the stink of petroleum fumes from the antiquated ground traffic of Changchi. She’d breathed the stink of fumes from fourth-hand recyclers beneath the shabby dome over the compound where the Daughters of Compassion lived. She’d breathed the stink of compost, disinfectant, too many human beings living too closely together.

Now the perfume of red roses sends a shiver of pleasure through her.

The Night of Broken Blossoms is a distant nightmare, no longer looming over her every anxious waking moment. In three months, the Gilded Age Project has taken on the quality of a dream.

Who is she?

She is Zhu Wong, of course, a modern Chinese woman. She’s tough, morphed for telelink, Blocked for UV radiation, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Her fingernails were always caked with grit, soil and oil, and bits of plastic.

Yet she is Zhu Wong, the runaway mistress of a British gentleman, fleeing to America by way of Hong Kong and Seattle, with nothing but a feedbag purse and traveling togs in tasteful pearl gray silk. The LISA techs gave her manicure right before she stepped over the bridge.

Who is to say she is not that lady? Who is to say who she really is?

“Jar me, missy, you’re a dreamy chit,” Jessie says. “I said, it’s Columbus Day. The day that dago discovered America.” Jessie polishes off her customary breakfast of five roasted quail stuffed with oysters sautéed in butter washed down by three bottles of champagne. The madam drinks champagne from morning till morning. Her endurance is staggering, her contempt for sleep awesome. “Pay attention. Ten cases of Chianti should do.”

Zhu reaches for the green leather account book lying at her elbow on the dining table. Every morning she goes over the books with Jessie, setting out debits, credits, and cash flow for the Parisian Mansion, the Morton Alley cribs, and the boardinghouse. She actually doesn’t mind, finding the work oddly satisfying. She doesn’t even use Muse’s calculator. She likes to figure the numbers by hand, checks her calculations three times.

“Presently we’ve got fifty cases of liquor at the Mansion,” Zhu says, flipping through the account book. “Ten cases each of whiskey, rum, and gin, and two of champagne. Do we really need red wine, too?”

“Of course we do!” Jessie declares with the expansive joy that always overcomes her after her first champagne for the day. She turns an empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, and Mariah whisks bottle and bucket away. “I love them dagos, don’t you? I told Chong he’s got to cook a special dago spread tonight. Minestrone, melon and prosciutto, yellow squash fried in butter. Veal parmigiana.” Jessie’s lips are still buttery from her breakfast, but her eyes shine with gluttonous anticipation. She knows of more different kinds of dishes than Zhu has ever eaten in her whole life. “Tortellini with pine nuts and heavy cream. Rigatoni in marinara sauce with shredded beef. Macaroni casserole with fontina cheese. That dago bread they bake in North Beach dipped in olive oil. Macaroons and nougat, spumoni with candied cherries. And red wine, missy! We must have plenty of red wine with a spread like that. Make that twelve cases, will you?”

Jessie pops the cork on another champagne bottle. My fog-cutter, she calls her breakfast libation. When she comes to the table particularly haggard and groaning, she tartly informs Zhu that a lady never feels good in the morning. Mr. Ned Greenway, tastemaker for the Smart Set, said so himself. Zhu asked Muse to search the Archives for the quotation. It turns out Ned Greenway said that a gentleman never feels good in the morning. Mr. Greenway does not approve of champagne for ladies. Jessie loves to twist the truth to suit herself.

Jessie splashes champagne into her goblet and tops off Daniel’s. Daniel usually starts his day with half a pound of grilled bacon, an oyster omelette from the secret recipe Mariah pilfered from the chef at the Palace Hotel, and coffee heavily laced with French brandy. Today, however, Daniel and another boarder, one Mr. Schultz, a gentleman who books arrivals and departures for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s China Line, have joined Jessie in quail and champagne.

Zhu studies them as they tuck into their rich food, feeling queasy just watching them. The only nourishment Zhu takes before noon besides black coffee is a glass of orange juice that she or Mariah squeeze fresh every morning. “No wonder you’re skinny as a flea knuckle,” Jessie complained, offended that Zhu wouldn’t try the quail.

“Go see Mr. Parducci on Union Street,” Jessie tells her now. “And chisel him down, he charges too much.” She drains her goblet with alarming speed. “Then go check up on the Mansion for me, missy. I’ve got errands to run before I make my appearance today.”

“I hear the two-year-olds are running at Ingleside,” Mr. Schultz says, grinning.

“You hush,” Jessie says, but Zhu has already figured that Jessie is off to gamble on the horses at the brand-new Ingleside Racetrack out beyond the Western Addition. Jessie is crazy for the colts and shrewd at betting.

The front bell rings, and Mariah goes to answer the door. From her place at the table, Zhu glimpses a sweaty boy in an American Messenger Service uniform, handing over a letter. Mariah brings the letter in to Daniel. He takes it with a contemptuous glance, quickly slips it in his vest pocket.

He catches Zhu’s furtive observation as he reaches for his champagne. She can feel her face burn, a pulse beat in her throat. Daniel Watkins is arrogant, rude, condescending, and bold. He acts as if he’s entitled to whatever he wants. He’s completely unlike any man she’s ever met. He smiles mockingly at her discomfort, and she casts her eyes down. She can just about hear Sally Chou’s sardonic laugh. “Think with your brain, kiddo, not with some other part of your anatomy.” She abruptly turns away and studies the abundant table to conceal her embarrassment.

The table—beautifully set with china and crystal, linen and flowers—is totally foreign to her. A relic out of some museum. And the way Jessie and the others linger over their plates, discuss dishes, extol the virtues of taste and texture? Surely such behavior is odd, quaint, and self-indulgent. Before the Gilded Age Project, Zhu well remembers how often she ignored the aching hollow in her stomach on many a long night, ignored the gritty water, the nutribeads like chalk between her teeth, the nutribars resembling the packaging they came wrapped in—which in fact was edible after you steamed off the germs and the grime. It’s immoral to dwell on food beyond one’s nutritional requirements, uneconomical, and incorrect. The closest the Daughters of Compassion ever came to feasting like this was when there was the occasional surfeit of millet gruel which they scooped out of Styrofoam cups while squatting around a trash fire.

She’s not squatting around a trash fire now.

Zhu picks up a slice of toasted bread thickly spread with butter and honey while Jessie regales the gentlemen with tales of betting on the ponies. She nibbles. Well, why not? She’s allowed. The technicians at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave her the latest all-purpose inoculation protecting her from virtually any kind of bacteria, virus, or poison. Earlier t-porters had not been so fortunate. Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco was forbidden to eat or drink during his t-port to San Francisco, 1967. An irony, since Chiron, as a rich cosmicist heir, was accustomed to elegant fare. And a second irony, since food and drink in America during 1967 was subject to modern regulations assuring quality and wholesomeness. Still, the LISA techs feared that Chi could get sick. That the food could have been contaminated with toxins or parasites that didn’t affect the people of 1967 due to exposure and natural immunities but could have jeopardized Chiron, perhaps fatally.

“Do you know I had to carry filters and strain my water for drinking and bathing?” Chiron had told her during her instruction session. “I carried ten thousand prophylaks to 1967. I had to wrap my hands every time I touched something. Or someone.”

Zhu lhad aughed. “What a hassle!”

“You don’t know the half of it. I wore a necklace of nutribeads. The calories were supposed to be enough to nourish me, but I was always starving.”

Chiron had disobeyed the injunction not to eat. He had tasted food and wine during the Summer of Love Project. “Sharing nourishment with the people of that day turned out to be a communal experience that brought me closer to them. Dangerously closer.”

“Why dangerous?” Zhu had asked, troubled by his dark look.

“I fell in love.”

Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, the tall cool sophisticate? Fell in love?

She eats the toast, her eyes drifting to Daniel again.

“You hear me, missy?” Jessie is saying. “Jar me, maybe she needs to go back to bed.”

“Maybe she does,” Daniel says with a wink.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, what did you say?” Zhu says, annoyed at his insinuation.

“I said, you see that Li’l Lucy stays off the booze. You stay off the booze, too.” Jessie loves to be peremptory and demanding in front of an audience. It probably makes her feel powerful, in control. She knows very well that Zhu never drinks.

Daniel watches their exchange sardonically, but Mr. Schultz pays no attention at all. Zhu is just the Chinese servant.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, but you know I never drink.” The prim polite words stick in her mouth, false and gluey. She’s a modern woman, damn it. She isn’t deferential, frightened, shy, or weak. She doesn’t possess a servant’s mentality. She isn’t ignorant. She doesn’t need to play this pathetic game of manners. She doesn’t need to stay at the boardinghouse, at all. She can run away and make her own way in 1895 any time she wants to.

Ah, but it’s not that simple, and Zhu knows it.

* * *

Jessie bought her from the eyepatch. Bought her, just like that, for a hundred dollars in gold. Zhu should have been flattered. Since working as Jessie’s bookkeeper, she’s seen bills of sale from the Morton Alley cribs, including one recording the purchase of a cross-eyed girl for seventy-five cents plus a bolt of silk.

But at first Zhu was furious, and frantic to find Wing Sing. That evening, Jessie seized her by the elbow, took her upstairs to the spare bedroom in Mariah’s suite, and promptly locked her in.

Locked in the room, Zhu argued with Muse. “I don’t understand you, Muse. Finding Wing Sing is the whole reason the LISA techs sent me on this damn t-port. How could you advise me to let her go?”

“And what were you to do?” the monitor asked. “Single-handedly fight three heavily armed hatchet men? In those long skirts?”

“Then I should have gone with her.”

“And be forced into prostitution?”

“What?”

“What do you think Wing Sing is?”

“She’s a teenage girl.”

“Z. Wong, she was sold to a brothel in Chinatown.”

“No. No, I can’t accept that.” Zhu frantically thought over what happened. “Then what’s all this stuff about her dowry?”

“She was tricked. Her mother was probably tricked, too. But maybe not. Her mother could have sold her.”

“I don’t believe you.” That poor ragged child crouching beneath her table at the Japanese Tea Garden. Sold by her own mother?

Muse was impatient. “Z. Wong, I thought Chiron explained. Most Chinese women and girls in San Francisco in 1895 were smuggled in to become prostitutes.”

“Chiron said slaves.”

“Household slaves when they were between the ages of five and eleven. Sex slaves after that. Immigration authorities bribed, false names, etcetera. Would you like to view your instructions holoid again? I will download Zhu.doc for you.”

“No.” Zhu paced across the locked room. She smelled the sour odor of her frustration, of her fear. “Then who is this woman who just ‘bought’ me?”

Alphanumerics flickered in her peripheral vision. “My analysis indicates a high probability that she is a procurer. A madam.”

“You mean she runs a brothel?”

“Correct.”

“Is this a brothel?”

Muse posted a line of tiny print. “No, it appears to be a residence. The more successful madams lived off the premises.”

“Oh, that’s just great. Then she’s going to force me into prostitution.” Zhu strode to the window, yanked it open, and looked down. Maybe thirty-five feet to the ground. No pipes. No gutter, no gingerbread, no fire escape. Nothing. Excellent. She’d break her damn neck if she jumped.

All she had were the clothes on her back, data in the monitor, a feedbag purse filled with neurobics and pharmaceuticals, and a very nice mollie knife. No rope. No pitons. Not even a tube of superglue. She got out the mollie knife and began cutting apart a bed sheet. She could make a rope. Rappel down the wall.

“Z. Wong, please refrain from causing damage to these premises.”

That was when a cold needle of fear stitched down her spine. Why was the monitor obstructing her mission?

“Muse,” Zhu said evenly. “I swore I would fulfill the object of my project. I want the criminal charges against me reduced.”

“Stay calm, Z. Wong,” the monitor said.

“I am not staying calm. I’m getting the hell out of here. No way in a million years will I prostitute myself. And I’ve got a duty to rescue Wing Sing.” She felt terrible about abandoning the defenseless girl, for whom she felt a rush of protective loyalty. A teenager forced into prostitution? Tricked? Sold by her mother?

She was just a kid.

“Take it easy, Z. Wong,” Muse insisted. “This is the turn of events. I cannot verify your presence in this residence, but neither do the Archives refute it. So deal with it. Try some of that brandy on the nightstand. It’s probably quite good.”

“’This is the turn of events’? That’s all you’ve got to say?” Zhu snapped. It was almost as if Muse were encouraging her to abandon the project. But why? Was Muse testing her?

“You don’t know San Francisco in 1895,” Muse continued smoothly. “You could get yourself killed out there. Please review the Closed Time Loop Peril of the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle.” The monitor posted the text in her peripheral vision.

That shut her up. She paced around the room while Muse rattled on about the technopolistic plutocracy and how employment during the hyperindustrial era closely resembled servitude. As if that was supposed to make her feel better.

“Imagine taxes so high people’s incomes were halved,” Muse argued. “Imagine housing costs and living costs so high that the rest of people’s incomes were consumed by daily expenses. That it was normal to assume debt in excess of one’s personal resources. That was the heyday of the technopolistic plutocracy. The woman who bought you is a small operator.” Muse added, “She’ll come after you if you run away. She knows this town. She knows the police. She could get you thrown in jail. You don’t want to go to the Pest Hall, the jail for Chinese. Trust me, you don’t. Besides,” and this, Muse’s final argument, clinched it, “you’re more valuable to her for your intelligence. Convince her of that, and she won’t force you into prostitution.”

In the morning, Jessie Malone unlocked and entered Zhu’s room and introduced herself. Splendid in a lavender shirtwaist and billowing skirts, she reeked of patchouli oil and booze. She had Mariah bring in a tray with fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee with cream and sugar. The black maid silently regarded Zhu with sympathetic eyes.

“I got a feeling about you, missy,” Jessie said in a blunt manner that Zhu liked in spite of herself. “There’s something I see in you. Maybe you can tell me what it is.”

Zhu reprised her alibi, embellishing the story with a British education in Hong Kong. She declared, “I didn’t sell myself to him, Miss Malone. I have no intention of selling myself here.” The passion she summoned uttering those words surprised even herself.

“Did it for love, what a shame,” Jessie said, circling her, appraising her as if she were a cut of beef. “Jar me, you are a skinny one. My johns don’t much cotton to skinny ones. You ain’t got the consumption, eh? No pox? No clap? No plague? No worms?”

Chastened by her argument with Muse, Zhu quickly established that she was fit and capable. “My name is Zhu.”

Jessie tried it out. “Shoo? Zoo?”

“It means ‘pearl,’” Zhu said.

“Then I’ll call you Pearl.”

“Also ‘pig,’” Zhu laughed.

Jessie liked that, too. “I’ll call you Pearls Before Swine.”

“Call me Zhu. Zzsh. Zzsh. Zhu.” She demonstrated the buzzing noise.

Zhu proceeded to pull a copy of Poems of Pleasure by Ella Wheeler Wilcox off a bookshelf and read from it. She set out a column of numbers, added them, then divided the result by five.

Jessie Malone didn’t miss a beat. She produced a written contract, crossed out some clauses, scribbled in others. The contract stipulated that Zhu agreed to work for Jessie as her personal servant for a term of two years, during which time Zhu would earn back the hundred dollars in gold and reside, rent free, at the boardinghouse.

“But what am I to live on?” Zhu asked, amazed at the document.

“I’ll feed ya. You got a bed.”

“What about clothes? I’ve got nothing but these. What if I need medicine?” Zhu cast about for other necessities. She needed to get her hands on some cash. If young women were so easily bought and sold in San Francisco, maybe she could buy Wing Sing from Chee Song Tong. “Jewelry,” she tried again. “Books? Entertainment?”

“Lordy, now her highness wants jewels and the theatre.”

“Come on, Miss Malone. Pay me a salary. Something.”

Grumbling, Jessie scribbled in a monthly stipend of five dollars and added six months to the term.

And Zhu signed. She never held a pen like this in her life. You dipped the tip in a pot of ink. She offered her handshake, and Jessie took it. Pulling herself together after the dreadful first day and even more dreadful first night of the Gilded Age Project, Zhu advised Jessie--with all due sympathy and a charm she didn’t know she possessed—that the corpulent madam really ought to loosen her corset because the undergarment could be causing her internal organs to hemorrhage.

* * *

Now Zhu scrapes back her chair from the dining table, strides out of the room. Her face burns with anger. She won’t tolerate abuse from Jessie, not in front of Daniel and Mr. Schultz.

Jessie chases after her, catches up with her in the foyer. “Hell, I’m sorry, missy,” she says. “I know you don’t drink. You’re damn near the only one around here who don’t.”

As the gentlemen drift from the dining room to the smoking parlor, the madam’s eyes pool with sorrow, contrition, and genuine perplexity. A jumble of passions plays across her face. Jessie is only forty years old, but she looks like a centenarian from Zhu’s day. She slips a gold coin into Zhu’s palm. “You know I like you. You’re a smart kid. You’re different from the rest of the girls. In the time you’ve been here, I’ve come to depend a lot on you. Honestly, I don’t know what comes over me.”

“You want them to know you control me. It gives you pleasure. That’s what comes over you.”

Jessie’s cornflower-blue eyes widen. “Lordy, am I as terrible as all that?”

“You are,” Zhu says and pockets the precious coin.

Jessie smiles at her bluntness. “I’m the Queen of the Underworld, and I take crap from no one, no how.”

“And I don’t take crap from you, Miss Malone. I will order your red wine, and I will check up on the Mansion, including Li’l Lucy. But I am my own woman, and I have my own business affairs in San Francisco. Don’t you forget that.”

Jessie’s eyes turn dark and suspicious, then shrewd. Zhu braces herself for Jessie’s challenge, but she only says, “Never met a chit like you, Zhu. You can’t be more than sixteen. That’s why I paid through the nose for you.”

Zhu wants to say that she’s thirty. She wants to boast that she can expect to live to one hundred twenty years and more. That even a bumpkin like her from a jerkwater town like Changchi has been gene-tweaked, edited, Blocked, jacked for telespace, and morphed. But she swallows her boast. It’s not Jessie’s business how old she really is.

“I’m older than you know,” is all Zhu says.

* * *

Zhu climbs the stairs to her room, intending to change her morning dress into suitable outing togs, when Daniel confronts her in the hall.

His suite is on the north side of the house. He has no business on the south side. He smells of tobacco, liquor, a cologne evocative of some exotic spice. He doesn’t hurry down the hall like the other boarders do, but purposefully steps in her path, his expression inexplicable.

“Good day, Mr. Watkins,” she says and attempts to pass him, but he stands in her way. The tension she always feels around him rises in her nerves, making her clumsy. She had a man friend once in her early twenties, but their brief relationship couldn’t survive the rigors of the Cause or Zhu’s dedication to the Daughters of Compassion. She isn’t totally ignorant of sex. Still, she can’t explain why his glance makes her heart lurch. “Mariah’s not in. I believe she went out to the apothecary.”

“I am not here to see Mariah. I am here to see you.”

“Is Miss Malone troubling you for the rent? I’m just the bookkeeper, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Miss Malone does not trouble me. You trouble me, Miss Wong.”

“Oh, indeed?” She ducks around him, hurries down the hall. “But why?”

Close behind her, he catches her wrist. “You are not who you claim to be. The runaway mistress of a British gentleman, by way of Hong Kong and Seattle? I think not.”

She’s speechless. He stands over her less than a hand’s breath away. She is acutely aware of his physical presence, bristling and insistent. Paranoia rushes through her, and her heart knocks in her chest. He and Mr. Schultz are forever regaling her with questions at the dining table, and she isn’t sure her answers are always correct. Damn the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications for rushing her through the training! The shuttle will be ready in two days, Chiron told her. It’s vital that you go on the t-port at once. Muse will fill you in, Chiron told her. Yes, well. Muse seems to have forgotten just exactly why she’s here. The Pest House, the jail for Chinese. Trust me, you don’t want to go there. She’s a Chinese woman without family or allies or documentation in San Francisco, 1895. A wealthy white American man could do so many bad things to her.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she says, polite and deferential, casting her eyes down.

Daniel just stands there, boldly examining her.

“Won’t you tell me what you mean?” she persists. If she’s made errors, she’d better find out about them. She’d better consult with Muse and correct them.

“Mr. Schultz works for the China Line. He says you do not know the proper name of the ship that supposedly brought you from Hong Kong to Seattle.”

“Why, it was the Wandering Jew, sir. I told you that.”

He shakes his head. “The Jew’s port of destination is Cuba, not Seattle.”

She can only stare. How could the Archivists have been wrong about the name of her ship? They knew all sorts of tiny details—that a runaway Chinese girl would seek refuge in the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fourth of July, 1895, for instance. What kind of damn fool did Chiron take her for?

“Go to your room,” he says, “and I shall follow.”

He’s got something on her, and she knows it. The immigration authorities would be very interested in a Chinese woman without proper papers. Under the Exclusion Act of 1888, a Chinese woman like her is strictly forbidden to enter the United States except under specific circumstances. Proper connections. A husband. A family. And documentation. Above all else, documentation.

Does he mean to turn her in, collect a reward? She knows he’s got family assets in town, but he’s hard up for cash. Is that what this is all about?

She takes out her key and unlocks the suite, misgivings pounding in her heart. They enter the small parlor she and Mariah share. Mariah is as secretive as Zhu and considerate beyond the bounds of courtesy. She has created her own aesthetic in the homey room—handcrafted oaken chairs, rustic colorful braided wool rugs, wood carvings of farm animals, black iron tools set before the brick fireplace. One day, the country look will be considered as significant a form of interior decoration as Jessie’s Victorian excesses, the carved animals highly prized antiques. But in this Now, Mariah’s parlor is merely provincial, reflecting the tastes and means of the American lower classes.

Zhu gestures to a chair for him, seats herself.

“I said, in your room.”

It occurs to Zhu that he’s drunk. “We can talk here, Mr. Watkins. I told you, Mariah went out after breakfast. She won’t be back for a while.”

“In your room,” he repeats. He stands over her, asserting his physical presence. Is he threatening her? Oh, yeah.

Zhu is no weakling. After years in Changchi, in the fields, in the factories, she’s strong and muscular. During the campaign, the Daughters of Compassion insisted on self-defense training for all comrades. She could hold her own in combat with this man, despite his superior size and weight. She turns this assessment over in her mind, readying herself, bracing herself. He thinks he can push her around, does he? Mr. Daniel J. Watkins, entitled to whatever he wants?

She leaps to her feet and poises her hands, taking a fighting stance.

He circles her curiously. She balances herself, turning to face him.

He seizes her arm, faster than he ought to be after brandy and champagne, and heaves himself at her, using brute force. The single-mindedness of his assault astonishes her, and they stagger back together, she tripping on the damn skirt, he bullying against her like a locomotive.

She twists away and dashes to her bedroom door, reaching frantically for her second key.

Daniel springs after her, catching her arm again, her waist. He kicks the door open, flings her inside. She regains her balance, whirls, dives at him, punching, pushing him out the door. But he’s got his foot wedged between the door and the jamb. He pushes back and shoves inside.

“Go on, fight me, miss,” he says, laughing. “I know you don’t want it. So fight me. A lady would fight me.”

She gasps beneath the corset, fighting for breath, her lungs bursting against the stays. He shoves her onto the bed, knocking the wind out of her.

And then something even stranger than his assault happens—the room goes pitch-dark for an instant. Black, then stark white, then black again.

Is she losing consciousness? Oh, hell!

Or is this a probability collapsing out of the timeline?

The LISA techs never told her what happened when a probability collapsed out of the timeline. What that event felt like when you were there. What happened to reality. What should she expect? And does this mean, in the far future, the victim of her murder attempt has died and all of spacetime has changed?

Is he alive or dead?

And what about her? Is she dying? Or has she never existed at all, and this is what it feels like to be extinguished from existence?

But no, she finds herself prone on the bed in the tangle of her skirts, and arousal flares up in her like a fever. Suddenly the struggle with him excites her. She wants him. She needs him. She seizes him, tearing off his jacket, his vest, his shirt.

He contests her hands as if she still fights against him and not for her own pleasure.

How long has it been since she’s bedded a man? And it’s crazy, it was never supposed to happen this way. What does the Cause mean in this ancient day? She arches her back, uttering strange sounds. She rocks back, seeking her rapture.

He seizes her jaw. “Don’t move like that,” he commands. “Only whores move like that. And you’re not a whore, are you, miss?”

“No.” She stares into his haunted eyes, startled.

“Then lie still. If you’re a lady, you will lie still.”

He rears above her, watching as she stills herself. She presses the edge of the coverlet to her mouth, grits her teeth.

She expects a scolding from Muse, but none comes.

“Yes, you’re a lady,” Daniel whispers as he pounds into her. “You hate it, don’t you? A lady is supposed to hate it. Do you not know how much I adore you?”

* * *

Zhu pulls the veil over her face and steps out onto Dupont Street, bound for the wine merchant’s shop in North Beach. Her body thrums with the sheer satisfaction of new sex while her commonsense assails her. What in hell are you doing, Zhu? This isn’t supposed to happen.

Daniel J. Watkins is a bully and a fool. He practically raped her. What pathetic and ignorant attitudes toward sex and women the men of this day have! It will take another seventy-five years before men come close to understanding women. Or understanding sex. Maybe.

He is a deeply troubled young man. Zhu should complain to Jessie. She should get him thrown out of the boardinghouse. She should stay away from him.

Daniel, oh Daniel.

Stop it. What has come over her?

Now a trade wagon passes by her on the street, the body built to look like a gigantic cigar set on wheels, a sign advertising Sloat’s Smoke Shoppe & Sundries on Montgomery. The emaciated driver, clad in tobacco brown, is no doubt his own best patron. With a whip and the reins clutched in his pointed little hands, he looks a lot like a weevil perched on the end of the huge cigar.

The whimsical cigar wagon turns the corner, advertising Smythe’s Sundries & Smoke Shoppe on Sansome. Zhu chuckles to herself. Almighty advertising. She doesn’t smoke but wonders what clever sundries Mr. Smythe may stock.

But, wait a minute.

The gilt lettering across the giant cigar said Montgomery, not Sansome. Smoke Shoppe & Sundries, not the other way around. And Sloat’s. She’s quite sure she saw Sloat’s, not Smythe’s.

What the hell? Is she suffering from tachyonic lag, a common side effect of a t-port? A disturbance of the mind and the body caused by superluminal drift during the crossing over? Inducing fatigue, disorientation, even hallucinations?

“Muse?” she whispers. “Excuse me, what’s going on?”

Muse is silent.

Oh, come on. Maybe the sign is like the woman wearing the face glove in Golden Gate Park. Zhu was fooled by the illusion of a clear complexion till the sun exposed her mask. Or maybe Zhu saw the other side of the wagon when the driver turned the corner and two smoke shops advertise on this wagon.

She dashes to the corner before the wagon can clatter out of sight. On the right side, she sees Smythe’s Sundries & Smoke Shoppe on Sansome. She dashes around to the other side. On the left, the same ad. The driver, who now is positively stout and clad in an olive green suit, smiles and tips his bowler, pleased at her attention.

“Damn it, Muse,” she whispers to the monitor. “What’s happening to the cigar wagon?”

“I tried to warn you,” Muse whispers. “He’s a man of 1895. A social Darwinist.”

Zhu stops in her tracks at the monitor’s nonresponsive answer. “Excuse me again. What are you talking about?”

“I told you he had designs on you. He thinks he’s entitled.”

“You said no such thing!”

“Of course I did. I warned you to be careful. He cares nothing for you. To him, you are less than an animal.”

“Oh, really. He said he adores me.”

“You of all women should be outraged.”

“He was forceful. And you know? I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it. Paul”—that was her one-time lover in her twenties—“was always so hesitant. So unsure of himself.” Now she’s irritated. “Why are you opposing me, Muse? You’re supposed to monitor my progress with the project. You’re supposed to help me.”

“I’m not opposing you. I am helping you.”

“Oh, really? What about Wing Sing? How can I find her?”

Muse posts a calendar in her peripheral vision. “The package you ordered should arrive at the Mansion today.” Another non sequitur? Or maybe not.

Yes, the package. Maybe what the package contains will help her in her search for Wing Sing. “All right,” she says, weary of Muse’s weird behavior. “But what about the cigar wagon?”

“What cigar wagon?”

Right. She trudges up the long, slow slope, silent and troubled. Is the monitor deliberately being cruel?

How much more cruelty can she bear?

* * *

The Generation-Skipping Law was cruel, but a population of twelve billion people inhabiting this frail Earth caused even more cruelty. Too many pollutants in the air and the water and the soil. Climate change had whittled away rich coastlines, waste clogged rivers and streams, salt water contaminated fresh. Chemicals, radiation, and heavy metals degraded food and drinking water. Desperate poverty crushed eight billion people. Disease wracked their lives. Hunger and thirst dogged their days and nights.

Yet still the population increased, due to the phenomenon of exponential growth. Fertility outpaced mortality in a cruel game of statistical tag.

At last the World Birth Control Organization held an emergency meeting and issued a mandate to the nations of the world--control growth. The cosmicists—the movement founded after the turn of the millennium by the second woman president of the United States—proposed a slogan--Live Responsibly or Die. Zero population growth—two children per couple—wasn’t enough. One child per couple was still too many. The world needed negative growth. Fast.

In an unprecedented act of cooperation and self-sacrifice by all of humanity, the Generation-Skipping Law was set into place. Under the law, two billion people were randomly chosen by lottery to forego having children within their lifetimes. They would skip a generation.

But countless people decried the plan. Charges of genetic discrimination were leveled. Some suggested genocide, especially when the lottery happened to choose more citizens of a particular country. People everywhere were reluctant to forego the possibility of producing heirs, of continuing the family. So a compromise solution was offered. The Generation-Skipping Law permitted lottery couples to harvest and preserve their genetic material. From their harvest, a younger generation could create a skipchild. Skipparents were arranged, and after the genetic parents had died and a statutory period had passed, the skipchild would be birthed in a laboratory or implanted in the skipmother and raised by the skipparents as their own.

Like all nations of the world, China, under Socialist-Confucianist rulership, conceded to the law, and charged her people with carrying out its terms. But Chinese people had lived under a one-child policy since the turn of the millennium, at times successfully, at other times less so. Chinese people felt they had already sacrificed to enforce the one-child policy long before the rest of the world.

Producing children—many children—was an honorable and ancient tradition in China. Children were wealth. Children were security. Children ensured proper care for the elderly. Despite degradation of the ecosystem, drought in the south and famine in the north, tradition had changed little over two centuries despite the horrors of the brown ages. Hadn’t China always had drought in the south, famine in the north? What had really changed? In the megalopolises, the rich lived in luxurious domed estates, the destitute lived in the street. Telespace, rather than the corner store, distributed pornography, but there was still pornography. In the junk heaps, semiplast had replaced plastic, which had replaced glass, which had replaced clay pottery, but there were still junk heaps.

Tradition. There were always radicals who decried tradition and always people who revered tradition. Many Chinese had rebelled against the one-child policy. Many more felt the Generation-Skipping Law was an attack on the family. An outrage.

Factions sprang up. The Society for the Rights of Parents organized a virulent opposition to the law. When Zhu was a kid, the Parents burned down and bombed World Birth Control clinics, shot WBCO workers, hacked credits out of local accounts, infected the huge and complex WBCO databases with viruses that turned the data into chaos.

And her? Zhu Wong was raised in the northern village of Changchi, an ancient place long inhabited by humanity. Fields of millet and peas met the bleak concrete of superhighways and processing plants. Chunky patchworked high-rises from the last building boom were nearly indistinguishable from the long, depressing rows of barracks and community housing.

Zhu was entrusted under the law to her skipparents, Yu-lai and Li Wong, each a distant cousin of Zhu’s birth parents. They were in their early forties when Zhu was birthed in a Beijing lab and shipped to Changchi by express mail. Struggling with debts and a fierce desire to own property like their sophisticated upper-class friends in Chihli Province, yearning to escape community housing and the deadening life of agriwork, Yu-lai and Li Wong suddenly found themselves legally saddled with a baby.

She was adorable, of course. Her DNA had been carefully edited, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Some of her parents’ life savings had been invested in equipping the newborn with intelligence, strength, and physical beauty. She arrived with the rest of the savings to provide for her care and rearing.

Who were they really, Zhu’s skipparents? Had they ever loved her? Had they ever considered her their own? Did those questions make any sense when the world groaned under the weight of twelve billion people?

Sometimes she allowed sentimental memories to surface. A lavender kite in the shape of a fish. Her first bicycle, all silver and blue. Shrimp and vegetables for Sunday supper. A trip to the Great Wall, badly eroded from its past glory. The excitement of becoming morphed for telespace when the schools in Changchi were flush with money. Installation of the neckjack and telelink wetware just like kids in the rich countries. The promise of an international profession.

“Little face,” Li would say, “why are you so sad? Such wise green eyes. What do you know?”

But mostly Zhu remembered the day when, at the age of fifteen, she came home from school to the empty apartment. Ransacked drawers, scattered papers. The jewelry her mother—her real mother—had left her, the holoids, the mobiles with bank records, all of it gone. She never forgot the humiliation when she went to school the next day and told the teacher, “My skipparents left me.” The shame and sheer perplexity kept her from tears. She didn’t cry till she was twenty, long after she’d joined the Daughters of Compassion. It had been a summer outing, and someone had flown a lavender kite in the shape of a fish.

Yu-lai and Li Wong were prosecuted for abandonment, child endangerment, embezzlement, theft, and skipchild abuse. Due to her youth, Zhu was not included in the proceedings. She never saw her skipparents again, but she sure saw their images splattered all over the media:

SKIPCHILD ABANDONED BY SKIPPARENTS

WHILE LOTTERY COUPLES CRY FOR THEIR OWN

It was when the Parents tried to make an example out of Zhu that she was first approached by the Daughters of Compassion. Orphaned once by the law, orphaned twice by her skipparents, harassed and alone at a vulnerable age when everyone needs a friend, Zhu gladly fled to the Cause, to the rigors of comradeship. To the contemplation of Kuan Yin.

A woman came calling as Zhu studied in the library for winter examinations. The village administrators had placed her in the custody of the local cooperative. Another shameful thing. She had to face her neighbors and peers as a ward of the state. No longer was she a skipchild with a family, an inheritance, and the likelihood of going off to the university. She was so depressed at the time she had actually considered taking her own life. A bona fide option, according to the fashionable international death cults.

The sharp-eyed, wiry woman sat down next to her. Zhu glanced up from the rented workstation, the lesson hovering before her--an English translation of a spectacular holoid by Magda Mira, an American filmmaker praised for her celebration of death. Gory gross-out stuff, but Mira’s work was as popular as potato chips.

“You the skipkid?” the woman said.

Zhu gathered up her jacket and backpack, preparing to flee, though she’d waited sixteen days to get access to the workstation.

“Don’t waste your time with that crap,” the woman said, pointing to the holoid. “There’s work to be done, here, in our mother China. The Cause is much more important than vulgar American entertainments that have no meaning in your life.”

“Mira celebrates death,” Zhu said automatically. Then, “The Cause has more meaning?” She hesitated, panic skidding through her.

“Hell, yes!” the woman said. “All the sacrifice and pain you’ve gone through as a skipkid means nothing if lottery couples are going to go off and have kids illegally. Let alone if parents with one kid—skip or natch—go off and have another. Talk about challenging the odds. Talk about greed. And they say Changchi will have another drought this summer, and they don’t know if they’ll be able to herd rain from Siberia. It’s a damn shame.”

Zhu remembered listening to all this with her mouth hanging open. “You’re talking about negative population growth.”

“I’m talking about the Cause,” the woman said. “I’m talking about enforcement of the Generation-Skipping Law, the finest gesture of international cooperation ever witnessed in our sad and sorry history of the world. And the only hope for our mother China.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Sally Chou. Born and raised in Chicago, but I came to the motherland with a bunch of Americans during the pilgrimage of ’73. I’ll not go back to America. I’m a Daughter of Compassion.”

Zhu remembers that first meeting still.

“What are you doing after graduation?” Sally Chou lit a cigarette, and Zhu smelled a tart scent of herbs, not tobacco.

When Zhu shrugged, Sally Chou laughed and said, “You’re coming with me, skipkid. The Daughters of Compassion need you.”

Zhu moved to the compound the Daughters of Compassion owned south of Changchi. A wealthy Californian friend had repossessed the place after the local real estate developers had defaulted on one of countless refinancings. Nothing in Changchi was particularly elegant, but at least the compound was cleaner than most, with excellent air conditioners and the best water recycler and generator that could be had in a provincial burg like Changchi.

“We must fight the Society for the Rights of Parents,” Sally Chou declared in the village square during the first rally Zhu attended. “We must stand guard at WBCO clinics. We must chaperone clinic staff. We must trace illegal fund withdrawals. We must restore order in the databases. There is no turning back for mother China. We must break the back of exponential growth.”

“So what if another hundred thousand illegal babies are born?” someone heckled from the back. “Why do you care?”

“Because with exponential growth,” Sally Chou said, “another hundred thousand illegal babies means another million six people before we’ve reached our own middle age. Can our fields feed another million six people when we don’t have enough to eat right now? Can our factories employ another million six people when we’ve got thirty percent unemployment?”

“Can our future sustain another three million people in the next generation after that?” Zhu called out.

Sally Chou was sweating and exhausted by the end of this rally. Zhu didn’t remember what happened to the heckler in the back.

New campaigns were announced each spring over bowls of millet gruel at the long plywood tables.

“Women must be the first to understand that having children—skip or natch—is a privilege, not a right,” Sally Chou said. “Women must sacrifice that privilege for the children. Everyone’s children. For the future! As the cosmicists say, ‘To give is best.’”

“Are you a cosmicist, Sally?” Zhu asked.

“We can learn from the cosmicists,” Sally said, a little evasively. “We must all learn that a sustainable future depends on the sacrifices we make now. Let us make those sacrifices gladly! Make them out of compassion! We must win the hearts and minds of our women. All the world watches mother China. Our China must not fail!”

Our mother China. We, the women. Zhu eagerly embraced these words and ideas. If all the world watched mother China, then all the world watched her, too. Zhu, the abandoned skipchild, now a Daughter of Compassion.

The compound was comprised of a scrawny vegetable garden, a fishpond, a small ugly office high-rise, a mediocre medical clinic, a depressing dining hall, an uninspiring recreation room, and a dormitory and communal baths. Zhu thought the compound was the most wonderful thing she’d ever seen. Especially the shrine to Kuan Yin.

Kuan Yin was the patroness of the Daughters of Compassion. A five-thousand-year-old goddess, a mystic presence, an intellectual principle, a metaphor, a heroine of fables, a source of aphorisms, a philosophical statement.

“Who is Kuan Yin?” Zhu asked as she sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor. She gazed at three statuettes on the altar—a seated woman of celadon, a standing woman with a baby on her hip, and a crouching woman in golden armor, her arms raised for battle. She wasn’t sure which aspect of Kuan Yin she preferred—the priestess, the mother, or the warrior.

“She is the bodhisattva of compassion,” Sally Chou said. “She who hears all pleas.”

In one fable, Kuan Yin was a hunter, like the Greek goddess Artemis, who offered women the spiritual life as an alternative to marriage. In another fable, she was an innocent girl whose parents abused her, then sentenced her to death. Each time the executioner took pity on her, and she survived. Then, when the parents fell ill, Kuan Yin carved strips of flesh from her arms and made them meat soup, which nourished the parents and saved their lives.

Zhu was enraged by this story, but Sally Chou whispered, “The Daughters of Compassion are strips of flesh. We are the sacrifice.”

Zhu nodded and embraced the Cause. She threw herself into the life of abstinence and discipline. And she never ate meat after that. Meat of any sort—red flesh, fish, or fowl—tasted too much like a sacrifice.

* * *

Zhu gains the crest of Montgomery Street, troubled by Muse and perplexed by the cigar wagon. She gasps for breath. The Archivists insisted she wear a corset for authenticity. A corset gives the female figure a distinctive curvy look, even a woman as thin as Zhu. At her most anorexic, her waist measured twenty-one inches. Wearing the corset, she’s managed to squeeze her waist down to eighteen inches. Hah. Maybe she hasn’t pulled the laces tight enough. The advertisements promise a reduction of five inches.

She runs her hand down her side. She remembers Daniel circling his hands around her corseted waist, delighting in the bound portion of her body.

A very troubled young man. And very much a man of his times.

Should she begrudge him that? Or try to save him from his ignorance?

Oh, man. There she goes again, trying to save the world and everyone in it.

Not only does a corset restrict a woman’s breathing, but the undergarment compromises her digestive tract, her bowels, her uterus, her liver, her kidneys, her bladder. The exoskeletal construction weakens a woman’s midriff muscles to the point that some long-term corset wearers can’t sit up or stand without the support of their whalebone stays.

“Braced for the day,” Jessie cheerfully says.

Zhu sneezes at the corner of Montgomery and Broadway where street sweepers bend to their task. A man in a sombrero leads the way, driving a one-horse Studebaker wagon. Bolted to the wagon bed is a huge oak cask from which black cast-iron Niagara sprinkling heads protrude. The driver sprinkles water onto the dusty street, but without rain for three months, his efforts don’t help much. Another Studebaker wagon follows, a huge cylindrical brush sweeping the dampened grime into the gutter. Still another wagon follows that, accompanied by a hunchback on foot. The hunchback shovels horse manure, dust, and refuse, and deposits his burden into the back of the wagon. The wagon buzzes with flies. Dust not captured by the sprinkling water rises over the street in a filthy brown haze.

Zhu sneezes again, pulling an antihistamine out of her feedbag purse, as well as a freshly laundered handkerchief. Tears spurt from her eyes and nose. Muse has managed to identify the source of her allergenic reaction—powdered horse manure mingled with fly refuse. The fine particulate matter hovers in the city’s air everywhere. Sometimes luckless horses drop dead on the street and are abandoned. Along with the feral dogs, the flies quickly descend there, too. It’s the fly refuse that really gets to Zhu.

She smelled plenty of compost in Changchi. She breathed carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. But fly shit? Not till 1895.

Now the blare of a brass band fills her ears as a Columbus Day parade wends its way up Columbus Avenue. Leading the way on a prancing black stallion rides the grand marshal, resplendent in a scarlet top hat and cutaway coat, a scarlet sash and a blooming rosette, white breeches, and high black boots. Zhu claps her hands and shouts, enchanted by the sight. Fancy carriages follow with black leather hides and silver chasing, their convertible roofs folded down. Wealthy Italian families ride inside, decked out in bright silks and black gabardine, red, white and green sashes slung over the ladies’ ample breasts. They wave to the crowd, as regal as royalty, and Zhu waves back, happy as a child. Now nuns in crow-black robes trudge solemnly past, called out into the festivities on this honored day to look after their obedient charges who march along next—little girls in white veils, each with prayer books embossed with purple crosses, and little boys in black suits and green and red ties. The children sing, their birdlike voices lost in the air. Orphans, Zhu thinks with a sudden pang. Then jugglers follow, flinging silver balls, painted wood pins, flaming torches. Lovely! Zhu has only seen live jugglers on holoids. Juggling is a lost art in her Day. Now clowns costumed like the great Joey Grimaldi caper and prance, and the goggle-eyed children lining the street curbs scream with laughter. An emaciated brown bear with a muzzled snout snuffles and sways miserably. The clubs and special interest groups from the Italian community bring up the rear, each with its own spangled banner, caps and jackets, and high-stepping drummers beating time to a measured strut.

Zhu follows the parade up Columbus to Union Street and turns the corner there, leaving the parade to promenade north to the waterfront. She sneezes once, twice, three times. Her feedbag purse slides off her shoulder, and her button boot slips on something slick.

Not spillage from the street cleaner’s drudge, thankfully. No, the macadam is slick with squashed grapes, grape pulp, and dark mottled juice. Could this be the wine merchant’s address? Well, yeah. Zhu steps inside.

The place is in a frenzy. The front countertops have been rolled back, revealing a warehouse of surprising size. Huge wooden presses are busily employed by boisterous young men. Young women, their hair caught back in red and black bandanas, fill and cork green bottles as fast as the raw wine can run out of the spigots. Racks of new wine bottled at the start of the season are stacked on the rolled-back counters, ready for a fast sale. Other women fill great wooden casks with the rest of the runoff for proper aging. Bins bulge with purple grapes the wine merchant had carted down from Napa vineyards.

“Ciao, bella,” says the jovial wine merchant, doused with grape juice and sweat. “You take a taste?”

New red wine will surely taste dreadful. Zhu doesn’t drink, and anyway, what does she know about wine? “No, thank you, Mr. Parducci,” she says. “How much for twelve cases of well-aged Chianti for the Parisian Mansion? We’re celebrating Columbus Day tonight.”

“Twelve cases? Eh, fifteen cents a bottle.”

“Dear sir, since Miss Malone is your steady customer, I think that is way too much. Ten cents.”

He’s drunk. He’s also staring at her. “Yeah, okay. Avanti. Ten cents. Is done deal.”

Ah. Each bottle of Chianti from Mr. Parducci, then, costs ten cents. Each drink from that bottle, poured by Jessie’s girls into tiny thimbles, will cost the gentlemen two bits. After two drinks of the stuff, most won’t notice the expense. And Jessie’s girls will make sure they imbibe at least two drinks.

Why should Zhu be surprised? San Francisco, 1895, is capitalism at its finest hour. Yet she has to laugh. Food and water rationing in her Now—corrupt officials, markups through the roof--isn’t so very different from capitalism at its finest hour.

Not so very different. Does this mean people haven’t changed so much in six centuries?

But surely men and women and their relationships with each other have changed. Haven’t they?

Surely women like Zhu have changed. Perhaps Daniel can change, too?

“You work at Miss Malone’s, eh bella?” the wine merchant asks, handing her a receipt. He’s a handsome graying man, though he’s eaten a bit too well over the years and is probably due for his coronary arrest anytime soon. Well, maybe not. They’ve actually proven in Zhu’s Now that consumption of wine, especially red wine, is good for the circulation. “You too nice to work at that place.” He surreptitiously hands her a coin as his dark, round wife watches them suspiciously. “Nice girl, you go find work in a nice house up on Snob Hill. You good washee washee girl, no?”

“Actually, no, Mr. Parducci,” Zhu says. “I am Miss Malone’s bookkeeper and administrative assistant. Sometime I negotiate contracts on her behalf, as well.” She lets the wine merchant puzzle over that. “I am no one’s washerwoman, Mr. Parducci.”

She cannot hide her smile—yes, of pride and triumph—as the wine merchant’s jaw drops. He could not be more surprised at her reprise of her job description if she were a talking dog.

“Happy Columbus Day,” she says, oddly cheered by the man’s discomfort, and signs the wine merchant’s receipt. “Ciao.”

Zhu supervises the wine merchant’s driver as he loads the cases onto the wagon and climbs up next to him on the driver’s seat. The ride is welcome. The afternoon has warmed beneath this beneficent sun. It’s hot and that dreadful dust billows. Zhu holds her handkerchief over her face.

The wagon clatters up to the Parisian Mansion. A conservative brass plaque simply announces the moniker of the place between two simpering but decently clad cupids. Nice. Such plaques have been the subject of much civic dispute. Lucy Mellon, also known as Miss Luce, caused a quite a stir by mounting a brass plaque above her Sacramento Street house announcing, “Ye Olde Whore Shoppe.” The bulls made her take it down.

Zhu sniffs. And a good thing, too. How crude.

The Parisian Mansion’s plaque is the most conservative item of its exterior. Cast plaster cupids smile from every newel, post, archway, portico, and window hood. Jessie calls the paint job Pompeiian red. The elaborate gingerbread is detailed in ivory, eggplant purple, and a startling pale teal. The place is positively hallucinogenic. Zhu can’t quite decide if it’s dreadful or magnificent. Daniel only remarked, “How else does one paint a maison du joi?”

Zhu steps down from the wagon, carelessly swishing her skirts, revealing a flash of her calf, the lace hem of her slip. Although she is swathed in traveling togs, her collar buttoned up tight against her sweaty throat, the driver—a dashing dark-eyed swain with olive skin and masses of black hair—stares, openmouthed. She wears stockings of a pale pink silk. She gets them from Jessie. They’re far more comfortable than the heavy black cotton stockings proper ladies are supposed to wear.

That snippet of pink silk, however, is an unmistakable sign to the driver—homewrecker. A sporting lady, a moll, an owl, a fallen angel, a hooker. A whore.

Suddenly she is fair game.

“Well, well, miss. How much for a whistle?” And he’d been such respectful boy just a moment ago, chatting about the drought.

Zhu ignores his rude question, points to the trademen’s entrance around the side of the Mansion down a well-swept narrow alley. “You may take the cases there.”

“I got time.” He fishes a coin from his shirt pocket. “And I got jack.”

“I don’t have time. Please hurry up.”

He steps in her path, slaps his fist in the palm of his hand. “Who do you think you are, chit? I said I got jack.”

She waves the receipt at him, stamps her foot. “Take the cases in there or I’ll speak to Mr. Parducci about you.” She looks around. “And I’ll call the cops.”

“Cops ain’t gonna help you none.” He spits. But he shoulders a case and follows her down the alley. He deposits her purchases on the floor of the hall, one by one, sweat and anger rolling off his skin.

She watches him, tapping her toe. She reaches into her feedbag purse for the mollie knife, closes her fingers over the smooth little shaft. The mollie knife is mostly intended for mending and healing, but she can hurt him with it if she has to. Hurt him bad. She can also aim the side of her hand against his windpipe and really hurt him bad. And to think she was going to tip him. She says instead, “Get out.”

All over the glimpse of her pink silk stocking.

* * *

Zhu steps into the kitchen of the Parisian Mansion.

“How you, miss?” Chong, Jessie’s chef at the Mansion, abandons his huge cast-iron pot boiling with wide flat ribbons of lasagne noodles and comes to inspect her delivery. A wiry, shrunken fellow with a graying queue that reaches to the backs of his knees when he unwinds it from around his head, Chong’s usual expression is dour. Now he positively scowls. “Miss Malone want me cook Eye-talian. I no cook Eye-talian. French my special!”

“I know, Chong. But you know Miss Malone. Once she gets something in her head.”

Chong’s scowl deepens. Even Zhu, Miss Malone’s right-hand girl, can’t save him. He scurries back to his pot, cursing softly. Chong is one of the finest French chefs in San Francisco, hired away from Marchand’s. Jessie covers her overhead at the Mansion with the girls, but she makes her real profit from the food and drink. The Mansion has a culinary reputation, along with its other reputation. Chong’s specialty is terrapin in heavy cream, sweet butter, and sherry cooked in its own shell with a certain spice Chong will not reveal. Jessie traditionally serves Chong’s terrapin at 4:00 A.M., along with sentimental songs on the calliope, after the gentlemen are well soused and sexed.

“Five dollars for a tiny dish of turtle meat?” Zhu asked, scandalized when she first observed this ritual. “Never mind that this species of turtle will be endangered in less than a century and will never be seen on menus again.”

“In danger,” Jessie said. “In danger of what?”

“That must be a thousand percent markup.”

“Jar me, missy,” Jessie said, furrowing her brow. “We gotta make a profit.”

Now Zhu inspects the large immaculate kitchen. Chong’s sideboard is stacked with zucchini and yellow squash, Roma tomatoes, sacks of every kind of dried noodle known to North Beach, casks of olive oil, salmon and crabs dripping with bay water, a saddle of veal, a side of beef, fat garlic bulbs, bunches of scallions, bouquets of oregano and basil fresh from the farms in Cow Hollow, wheels of Parmesan cheese. Chong can cook anything, French or otherwise. He’d be a celebrity chef in Zhu’s Now.

She goes to the parlor, dreading what she’ll see. She hears tinny chords from the calliope, but everything else is still and deserted. Not much business this time of day. Stale tobacco smoke clogs the room. She wrinkles her nose at the stink of spilled booze mingled with the animal scent of sweat and semen. The spittoons are spattered and slick, the ashtrays overflowing.

Another busy night, apparently, and no one has freshened the place up. This is definitely not acceptable. Zhu storms down the hall to the bedroom where the parlor maid sleeps. The biz is the biz, as Jessie says. Zhu raps sharply on the door. “Myrtle.” Silence. “Myrtle?”

She tries the door, swings it open. A rustle of bedclothes, soft laughter. Myrtle is a black woman who trained for service at the Palace Hotel, but she’s much younger and wilder than Mariah. Zhu peers in. Myrtle is trying to hide another body on the bed beside her. Zhu doesn’t want to know and doesn’t much care.

“You’d better attend to the parlor before Miss Malone shows up,” Zhu says. “She’ll tan your hide.”

She doesn’t wait for Myrtle’s answer and returns to the parlor, fuming. Red velvet curtains are drawn over the windows, shielding all but a sliver of sunshine. The lamp with the scarlet shade is turned down low. The city has forbidden red lights over the doors of sporting houses, so Jessie—and every other madam in town—has resorted to placing the table lamp with its scarlet shade by the window and tossing lacy undergarments over the telegraph wires outside. The parlor has a tired, overused air, but at night it transforms itself into an opulent, dark scarlet cave. Gaslight is so much more flattering than sunshine or electricity.

“Hey, Miss Zhu,” says Li’l Lucy. She hunches at the calliope, staring at the keys as they automatically depress and spring back. Her fingers curl around jigger of whiskey. She raises the glass to her lips. “Drink?”

Zhu shakes her head. “You’re stinking, Li’l Lucy.”

She pouts. “Some Snob Hill gorilla slugged me.”

“It’s barely past noon, kid.”

“Day and night don’t mean nothin’ to me, Miss Zhu.”

“Where is Daphne?”

“Hell if I know, Miss Zhu.”

Daphne is the door maid for this shift. She’s supposed to manage the biz in Jessie’s absence—screen men, serve drinks, collect money, monitor the girls. Jessie will be furious.

Now Li’l Lucy’s personal maid, Pichetta, drifts in. “There you are,” Pichetta says coldly, eyeing Li’l Lucy with barely concealed contempt. Pichetta is a swarthy young Peruvian with the hint of a mustache over her lip. Her black and white maid’s uniform crackles with starch. “You need to get some sleep, Lucy.”

“Ain’t tired yet, Pichetta,” Li’l Lucy drawls.

“Hmph.” Pichetta surveys the parlor with disgust and commences emptying ashtrays, though that isn’t her job. Now Myrtle rushes into the parlor. “Hmph,” Pichetta says again when she sees Myrtle. Together the maids lift and carry the Persian carpets to the patio to be beaten free of ashes.

Li’l Lucy giggles. “You gonna tattle-tale on me to Miss Malone?”

“I don’t have to,” Zhu says, raising her eyebrows at Pichetta’s retreating back.

“Ooh, you think she’s a rat?” Li’l Lucy stands unsteadily and stretches, finds the bottle and pours herself another round. She wears a thin, low-cut silk slip over her corset and garters. Large dark bruises stain her flabby thigh, her drooping arm, her thick neck. Dark circles underscore her pouchy eyes. Even with her golden blond hair gleaming in the semidarkness, Li’l Lucy doesn’t look good at nineteen years old.

“I don’t think so, I know so,” Zhu says.

“Hells bells, that can’t be. I gotta pay her wage outta my draw.”

Zhu shrugs. “She’s hired to rat on you.”

“Says who?”

“Says no one.”

Zhu finds a silk fan, flips it open, circulates the stale air in front of her face. She ought to know, she’s Jessie’s bookkeeper. That’s the standard arrangement—each girl pays Jessie a flat fee per day, scaled to her marketability, to stay at the Parisian Mansion for the stipulated term of her contract. Each pays extra for clothing and personal effects and must take what Jessie purchases for her. Such items are of the best quality and taste, and Jessie gets a discount for purchasing in bulk. Still the wardrobe is expensive. Jessie pays six thousand dollars a month for dresses, undergarments, stockings, and fans. Jessie demands the best, demands that everything is fresh and new. Each girl also pays for a personal maid, who is required to groom her and dress her properly and—surprise--Jessie pays the maids extra for information. The maids don’t have it so bad. Pichetta is probably thrilled that Li’l Lucy has turned out to be such a mess.

Well. Zhu knows that Jessie is considered one of the fairest madams in town. A girl’s fees and tips are all hers after expenses are paid. But Jessie does not tolerate deadbeats or drunks or drug addicts. She does not tolerate slovenliness or bad behavior. She does not tolerate any girl who doesn’t earn out a pro rata amount of her expenses each night. The biz is the biz.

Zhu says no more. Li’l Lucy is heading for trouble.

“Why in the blue blazes,” Li’l Lucy says, swallowing the shot and pouring out another, “would Pichetta rat on me when I pay her? Huh? That don’t make no sense, Miss Zhu.”

“Take care of yourself, kid,” Zhu says. “Just take care of yourself.” Under Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle, she’s not allowed to help Li’l Lucy, but that’s not the worst of it. In truth, she doesn’t know what she can do to help Li’l Lucy even if she could. “Did anything come for me by post?”

“Why, yes.” Li’l Lucy stumbles to the foyer. There, behind an umbrella stand, is a package wrapped in string and brown paper. She picks it up. “You mean this?”

“That’s it!” At last, the package Zhu has been waiting for. Muse was right, it’s here!

Li’l Lucy shakes the package, listening for telltale sounds. “Is it from a gentleman?”

“No. Give that to me!”

Zhu lunges, and Li’l Lucy holds the package high over her head, ducking away, giggling. She darts across the parlor, trying to read the label. Li’l Lucy hasn’t had more than a third-grade education. “Go. . . .gold. See? I know ‘gold!’ Tray. . . .tray. . . .”

“It says Lucky Gold Trading Company. Now hand it over.”

“Why, that’s in dirty ol’ Chinatown. Did you order somethin’ from a Chinaman’s store? Oh, I bet I know. You got yourself some of them pink silk bloomers everybody’s talkin’ about. Can I see? Oh, please, please?”

“It’s not, but would you like pink silk bloomers?”

“Oh, yes, and Miss Malone keeps promisin’, but you know what a skinflint she can be.”

“Give me my package, and I’ll buy you pink silk bloomers.”

“You would do that for me?” Tears start in Li’l Lucy’s eyes. “You really would?”

“Of course.” Zhu looks away, embarrassed. Li’l Lucy is like a beaten animal. The slightest kindness overwhelms her. “Is your bedroom empty?”

“Help yourself.”

Zhu runs upstairs with her package, finds Li’l Lucy’s room, and locks the door behind her. She dared not request delivery at the boardinghouse. If Jessie intercepted the package—and Jessie has to know everything that goes on at her private residence—she would never understand. Instead, Zhu told the clerk at Lucky Gold Trading Company to deliver the order in her name to the Mansion for a manservant employed there. Now she tears at the string, rips the package open.

There, in the crisp brown wrapping paper, is a pair of loose trousers made of soft blue denim and a long matching tunic, specially cut nice and loose to her measurements. It’s called a sahm, the customary garb the men of Chinatown wear. There is a pair of cloth slippers with straw soles, too. She tears off her hat and veil, the cloak, the shirtwaist, the strangling collar, the skirt, the underskirt, the slip, the bloomers, the garters, the stockings. She unlaces the corset and tears it off, breathing gratefully.

“You must maintain authenticity, Z. Wong,” Muse says sternly.

“Buzz off, Muse. I don’t need a corset in a sahm.”

She slips everything on. What freedom! Is this really the freedom she so casually took for granted three long months ago before she stepped onto the bridge in the Japanese Tea Garden? Yes! Everything feels so loose and easy. The sleeves of her new tunic hang inches below her fingertips, concealing her feminine hands. She unwinds her braid from around her head and lets it hang down her back like a queue. She rummages in the package. Joy! The clerk didn’t fail her. She takes out the soft, charcoal-gray felt fedora with a high crown and a broad brim. A Western-style hat like many men in Chinatown wear. She pulls the brim down low, concealing her brow and her eyes. She rummages in the package again. Ah-ha! The final touch. Spectacles with round lenses tinted a beautiful watery shade of sea green. She pushes the spectacles up her nose. Between the hat and the glasses, she conceals nearly half her face. Conceals her gene-tweaked eyes.

She stands before Li’l Lucy’s mirror, slouching her shoulders, lowering her chin. She looks crude and common, just like a slim Chinese man. She could pass for any one of the tens of thousands of bachelors who crowd Chinatown. She looks anonymous.

Excellent. Exactly what she wants.

Zhu hides her clothes in a corner of Li’l Lucy’s closet, then silently pads downstairs. Her slippers whisper on the Persian carpets. Li’l Lucy sits again at the calliope, the half-empty whiskey bottle on the bench beside her. Between Myrtle and Pichetta, the parlor is tidy again and fragrant with fresh roses and lilac water.

Daphne the door maid, a robust German woman with a harelip, has materialized at last. She heaves herself onto the couch and gulps a mug of beer.

The doorbell rings. Li’l Lucy leaps up, adjusts her slip, checks her face in a gilt-framed mirror, and smooths away tears from her eyes.

“Company, girls!” Daphne yells and slaps Li’l Lucy’s sagging butt as she ambles to the door.

Two women stumble out of their bedrooms and down the stairs, cursing, pulling on silk chemises, hands fluttering at their hair.

“I ain’t had more’n four hours of sleep today.”

“I ain’t had more’n four hours of sleep this year.”

They laugh and groan, striding past her. Someone bites into a clove, releasing spicy scent. Zhu bends to examine a brass spittoon. The women pass her without a single glance.

As if she were invisible.

Very excellent.

* * *

Zhu treks down Dupont Street to a completely different neighborhood along this thoroughfare. From a block away, she spies the tumbledown Stick-Eastlake town houses huddled on the narrow streets, the exotic jury-rigged rooftops. A pall hangs before the intersection at Dupont and Post like an invisible curtain. Invisible, but very real. The boundaries of the neighborhood are so well marked—California Street to Broadway, Kearney Street to Powell—that when a tong war rages or bubonic plague breaks out, the police simply barricade all those intersections. The street sweepers never venture here with their Studebaker wagons. The shadowed cobblestones are always slick with mud, butcher shop blood, fish juice, and spittle.

Zhu steps across that intersection into Chinatown. What people call the “City of the People of Tan”--Tangrenbu.

She enters a peculiar silence. The sounds of downtown—horses trotting, bootheels clattering—are suddenly hushed. Somber men stride by in denim sahms, straw slippers, queues wrapped tightly around their heads or trailing down their backs. They wear felt fedoras like Zhu’s, brimless embroidered caps, or the peasant’s broad-brimmed straw cone.

She is overwhelmed by a distinctive stench: raw sewage infused with the scent of sandalwood, the spice of ginger, cloying incense. A sickly sweet smell mingles with scents of roast pork and frying peanut oil—the odor of opium. Opium is legally imported by those willing to pay the tariff and illegally smuggled by those who would rather keep the extra twelve dollars a pound for themselves. Nowhere else and nowhen else has Zhu ever smelled such a unique blend of olfactory stimulation. The essence of Tangrenbu.

Zhu steels herself. She knows the history—Muse has filled her in on many a long sleepless night.

Chinatowns are scattered through the West, but only San Francisco’s Chinatown is known as Tangrenbu. For decades, Tangrenbu has been the primary port of entry for immigrants from the Far East. The bachelors who fled the war-torn, drought-ridden homeland in the 1850s came to California—Gum Saan or Gold Mountain—seeking their fortunes. They panned streams in the Sierras, seeking out rich veins hidden behind shafts deserted by less patient Forty-niners, only to be terrorized, robbed of their findings, or murdered by gangs of mountain men. They planted vegetables, coaxing lettuce, onions, and celery from soil abandoned by less diligent farmers. They set up small factories—dubbed sweatshops because they worked long hours for little pay—producing boots, trousers, or cigars. They willingly performed women’s work---cooking and cleaning—and opened restaurants or laundries of such skill that the fine gentlemen of the West Coast no longer sent their shirts to Hong Kong by steamship for proper washing, starching, and ironing, but patronized the local laundries. The bachelors toiled sixteen hours a day laying track for Mr. Huntington’s transcontinental railroad, taking half the wage—a dollar-fifty a day—other workmen demanded. And when the Golden Spike was driven and the great task completed, opening up the West to the rest of America, they returned to their port of entry, to their home away from the homeland, to the only place they could go. They returned to Tangrenbu.

To those with a poetic bent, the enigmatic industrious aliens—young men who came without their families, wives, or children—were called the Celestials. To American politicians and American laborers--fearful of the possible immigration of half a billion workers in a stuttering economy—they were called the Yellow Peril.

Few Americans were feeling poetic in 1873 when Jay Cooke, who financed the Union army, squandered $15 million on five hundred miles of Northern Pacific track and failed to float a bond issue of $100 million to complete the job. Mr. Cooke announced that his bank could not pay depositors on demand. The subsequent bank panic caused a stock market crash. Debtors defaulted on loans, business owners slashed payrolls. Bankruptcy and unemployment ran rampant. The ensuing depression lasted a grueling five years and, in its wake, arose militant sandlot movements, angry mobs, and violent gangs who roamed the cities seeking loot and revenge. There were riots, hangings, stonings, burnings. British and Irish and German and Italian immigrants seeking a better life in America welcomed no one new in an increasingly competitive job market.

How much the world has changed, Zhu thinks, striding down Dupont Street into Chinatown. And how much the world has stayed the same. Now she joins the throng of silent men. Men everywhere, but no Chinese women or children.

During the past three months when Zhu wandered through Chinatown in her Western lady’s clothes, a shopping basket on her arm, she was a barely tolerated intruder in Tangrenbu. Yet, veil drawn over her face, passing for Caucasian, she never feared for her safety, either. Neither whore nor slave, she was untouchable, and the bachelors gave her a wide berth.

But as a Western lady, she couldn’t venture down the alleys where Wing Sing could be held captive. The bachelors would always turn her away, block her path, or unceremoniously escort her clear out of Tangrenbu. When she asked about a girl in apple-green silk, all she got was a blank stare or a frown.

Now, as an anonymous bachelor, Zhu can go anywhere. No one turns her away from any place in Tangrenbu. Now hands beckon, shadowed doors swing open, secret smiles greet her as she hikes down the sloping block.

“Well done, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “Your disguise is working.”

Yes! For the first time in three months, she doesn’t have to hurry through Tangrenbu, searching in vain for Wing Sing. She saunters at her leisure. She belongs. She ducks out of the pedestrian traffic, pauses on a street corner. She takes off the tinted spectacles and looks around.

A certain splendor adorns Tangrenbu. From the plain facades of the Stick houses jut elaborate balconies painted yellow or green. Vermilion paper bulletins punctuated with ebony calligraphy cover every available wall, announcing local and international news. Gilt signs and flowered lanterns hang in doorways. Gleaming brass plaques of the T’ai Chi tacked on lintels bring good luck. Silk streamers tied to railings drift in the wind amid tinkling wind chimes made of abalone shell. Potted geraniums, stunted fuchsia, cineraria, and starry lilies seek sun in stray nooks and corners.

Elaborate gingerbread, a curving roof, and gilt balconies adorn a joss house—one of the multidenominational shrines in which those who worship any number of deities may stop, rest, and contemplate the divine. Zhu peeks in, sees a shrine in the back tucked amid candles, smoking incense burners, and glimmering offerings.

She moves on, passing a few fancy shops amid the vegetable stalls, fishmongers, and butcher shops. She pauses. A shop window displays brocades and embroideries, jade and ivory carvings, painted porcelains, jewelry of pearls and coral. She examines a rack of brooches. Is that the flash of multicolored glass on golden wings, the golden curves of a tiny woman’s body?

Her breath catches.

Oh! Is it the aurelia?

But no. Her eyes have deceived her. It’s only a tiny dragon wrought of jade and gold. Lovely, but not the aurelia. Not what she’s searching for. She pushes the fedora back and rubs her forehead, frustrated.

She presses on, turning off Dupont, and striding freely through a labyrinth of alleys previously denied her. She sees a wizened fortune-teller in his black skullcap and denim sahm crouching on the sidewalk with his low table and a basket of bark, an oracular tome. He had summarily dismissed the Western lady. Now the fortune-teller looks up at the anonymous bachelor and grins, his mouth a black slash. He waves her on. This is the place Muse identified in the Archives as a probable location where Wing Sing could be held captive—Spofford Alley.

Now Zhu hears reedy voices, birdlike but ominously monotone, “Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee.” Tiny clapboard shacks line the alley, two or three cribs per shack. Each crib is six feet wide and set with a sturdy narrow door, relieved only by a small barred window. Girls in black silk blouses stand at each window, beckoning and murmuring, “Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee.”

A skinny arm snakes out between the bars and seizes Zhu’s sleeve. “China girl nice,” the girl says. She pulls her blouse up to her shoulder, and Zhu glimpses slack little breasts, a ribcage. Her front teeth are missing, her cheek bruised blue. Even white face powder can’t conceal the deep, dark circles beneath the slits of her eyes. Tuberculosis, probably. An old woman materializes out of nowhere and smacks the girl’s arm with a stick. The girl whimpers, jerks her arm back inside the crib. She whispers to Zhu, “China girl nice. Five bittee doee, okay?”

Zhu recoils, her blood boiling. Why was she sent here? Why was she sent here if she can’t right this wrong? She reaches in her pocket, rolls the mollie knife in her fingers. How she longs to rip open these cribs, lead these young women to safety, to refuge, to freedom, to the light. To the Presbyterian Mission where she was supposed to have taken Wing Sing.

“Sorry, Z. Wong,” whispers Muse and posts the Tenets in her peripheral vision. “Please review Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle.”

Tenet Three. Right. Under Tenet Three, she can’t affect any person in the past, and that includes aiding, coercing, deceiving, deterring, killing, or saving that person except as authorized by the project directors. She can’t take out her mollie knife, can’t tear down these bars, can’t free these girls from their loathsome slavery. Like Li’l Lucy, they’re on their own.

Zhu snorts, disgusted. There’s one person, and one person only, she’s authorized—ordered to help in 1895. And that’s Wing Sing. She tours the alley, examining every prisoner at every barred window.

“Wing Sing?” she murmurs. “Is Wing Sing here?”

“I Wing Sing.”

Zhu studies the swarthy, broad-cheeked girl. She must be Mongolian. Definitely not the girl she met in Golden Gate Park three months ago. Zhu was certain she’d recognize Wing Sing again but now, with every strange new face, her confidence falters.

Another voice, “I Wing Sing!”

And another, “I Wing Sing!”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “No. No.”

She flees Spofford Alley. The fortune-teller gives her a reproving look, then shrugs. She trudges on to Bartlett Alley, to Brooklyn Alley, to Stout. Always the same shacks, the barred windows, the grim little faces posed behind those bars reciting fee scales in a birdlike monotone.

So many slave girls. But Wing Sing is nowhere in sight.

Zhu rejoins the shuffling throng on Dupont, her heart heavy. Maybe Wing Sing is dead. Maybe three months of a life like this has killed her.

“Careful, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

With a start she sees them before she registers Muse’s warning, her intuition sounding off alarm bells. They shoulder their way through the crowd, striding directly toward her, the wiry fellow, the fat man, and the eyepatch. Hatchet men. Their hands purposefully shoved in their jacket pockets as they march behind an elderly gentleman in a gold-embroidered cap and an air of self-importance. The Big Boss, he’s got to be. The other men on the street yield to their entourage.

Zhu stands back, too. Yet instead of striding away in the opposite direction like she ought to, she hesitates, drawn by curiosity. The eyepatch approaches, his good eye peering about with uncanny acuity. She tries to shrink back into the shadows, but he zeroes right in on her. She yanks the fedora over her brow, dons the tinted spectacles, pushes them up her nose so the lenses cover her eyes.

Too late.

He practically pounces on her, backing her up against a shop window. “Jade Eyes,” he says in an ominous whisper.

“Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know you,” she says, lowering her voice as best she can. He stands so close she can feel the hard curve of the grip of the gun tucked in his waistband.

“Oh, you know me,” he says. He taps the frame of the spectacles with a long fingernail. “Jade Eyes, that’s what the girl called you.”

“Act friendly,” Muse whispers in her ear. “Ask him where the girl is.”

Great advice from her monitor. At last.

“We. . . .we are all strangers here in Gold Mountain, aren’t we,” Zhu says. She tries a little smile. “All far from our homeland, from mother China. You and me and Wing Sing.”

“So we are,” he says, a glimmer of surprise lighting up his eye. He looks her up and down, checks out her sahm, the fedora, the sandals. He shakes his head, and then an astute look springs into his eye.

Okay. Maybe he’s not such a thug and a murderer. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, I’m looking for Wing Sing.”

“Why?”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Why?” he says again. The wiry fellow and the fat man gather behind him, peering over his shoulder. The Big Boss waits, annoyance creasing his brow.

“She’s my friend.”

The eyepatch shrugs. “She got no friend. She our girl. We pay gold.”

“I’ve got money.” Zhu fumbles in her pocket for her coins. Jessie gave her a double eagle after their tiff at breakfast. Mr. Parducci tipped her another bit for the large order of wine. “How much for her?”

The eyepatch laughs when he sees her coins. “We pay two thousand in gold for her, Jade Eyes. She sixteen. And pretty. Pretty girl earn much gold for Chee Song Tong.”

Zhu gasps. Two thousand dollars in gold for Wing Sing! Zhu has earned exactly fifteen dollars over the past three months as Jessie’s bookkeeper while her services pay off the hundred in gold Jessie paid for her indenture. She shoves the coins back in her pocket, feeling ridiculous. “It’s just that I miss her. I want to talk to her.”

“Talk of what?”

“Talk of mother China. Talk of family.”

“Ah.” Now an unexpected sheen clouds the eyepatch’s eye. Then he frowns, tosses words over his shoulder at the others. Dismissed by him, the wiry fellow and the fat man rejoin the Big Boss, who resumes his haughty promenade.

“We are all strangers in Gold Mountain. Yes. And you pretty girl, too, Jade Eyes,” he says. “You should not walk about in rags.” He touches her cheek, her lip. “I should not sell girl like you to Jessie Malone. I should keep you for myself.”

Suddenly she’s aware of his fierce masculinity. Aware of the value in gold he places on her femininity. He’s one of the bachelors, too, after all.

“Where is Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “Please tell me.”

“She not in Tangrenbu,” the eyepatch says. “You go to Selena’s. You go to Terrific Street.”

He turns on his heel and rejoins his entourage.

* * *

“Muse,” Zhu whispers as the hatchet men stride away, “look up ‘Terrific Street.’ Look up ‘Selena’s.’”

“I’m on it,” Muse whispers back. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision as Muse scans its Archives. Zhu watches a directory zoom by, dizzying. All kinds of file and folder names, with strange extensions. She glimpses her instructions holoid, Zhu.doc, thirty-six GB. She blinks. Wait, that can’t be right. The holoid is thirty-five GB. Muse locates and opens a file, San Francisco.1895.geography, and searches the data.

“’Terrific Street.’ He means Pacific Street,” Muse reports back. “And Selena’s? He means a ‘chop suey palace’ on the border of Tangrenbu and the Barbary Coast. The women are Chinese or Japanese, maybe some Koreans or Filipinas. But the male clientele is all white. Your disguise won’t work there, Z. Wong.”

“Hah. I won’t be a client.”

Zhu hikes north on Dupont to Pacific, turns east. Bang, bang, bang. She whirls at the muffled sound of gunfire, crouches against a shop. She sniffs for gun powder, but there’s only a faint whiff of it. Okay. There must be a shooting gallery in a basement below the cobblestone street, one of the cavernous illegal halls where white men mingle with Chinese to practice their skill with firearms. And there. Denim-clad bachelors in an uncharacteristically jovial mood stream in and out of another doorway set below the street level, jingling coins in their fists. A sentry stands watch at the door. Oh, yeah. Must be a gambling den down in that basement.

Once again Zhu approaches the invisible boundary between Tangrenbu and the rest of San Francisco. No longer does she see colorful touches of Oriental splendor. No longer can she smell that distinctive stench. From here, the Barbary Coast stretches down to the docks and the waterfront, a dense collection of dancehalls, saloons, gambling dens, opium dens, hideouts, low-end brothels, and bagnios.

Poised near the corner of Dupont Street and Columbus Avenue like a halfway house between Oriental and Occidental vice is the plug-ugly Stick Victorian with its brass plaque announcing “Miss Selena.” The sporting house boasts neither the excesses of the Parisian Mansion nor the calligraphy above the cribs on Spofford Alley. The red lamp over the door is not lit, and Miss Selena hasn’t yet stationed a red lampshade by the window. Zhu does notice lace bloomers dangling from the sill of a second-story window.

Right. She knows her way around a brothel by now. She pulls the fedora low over her forehead, pushes up the spectacles. She seizes the heavy brass door knocker cast in the shape of a rooster, squares her shoulders, and tries on a manly frown.

A middle-aged Chinese woman, her golden skin tight over her cheekbones and chin, peers suspiciously out the door, still secured inside by a chain lock. “What you want?”

“You Miss Selena?” Zhu mutters. “I need to see Wing Sing.”

“This place not for you, boy. You go to Tangrenbu. You go to Spofford Alley.”

“No, I’m her brother. Cousin. I’m her cousin from Shanghai. I have news of our family. May I speak with her, please?”

“Her time not free, brother cousin.”

“I have money.” Zhu produces the double eagle.

Selena studies her contemptuously, then slams the door. The chain lock clangs. She swings the door open and stands aside.

Zhu enters a parlor far more elegant than she would have expected from the street. There’s rosewood furniture, painted porcelains, the usual red velvet drapes mixed with unusual swathes of pink and purple silk. Chinese carpets with calligraphic and floral designs in muted pastel shades. The heady scent of plum incense makes Zhu’s head swim. A musician sits cross-legged in a corner on the floor, softly playing a moon fiddle, the strange lilting keen like mother China herself singing.

The wall hangings and painted screens are also a departure from Jessie’s obsession with female nudes. Here Oriental couples copulate on mountainsides, by brooks, in barnyards, in the midst of battlefields strewn with bloody corpses. Zhu knows from her t-port training that the European erotic art of the fin de siècle seldom shows the Caucasian man explicitly engaged in carnal pursuits. Asian art, apparently, doesn’t have a problem with that.

She hears whispers, soft laughter. Slowly—feeling just like the country bumpkin she actually is six hundred years in the future—she turns away from the pornographic scenes. Now she faces golden-skinned girls lounging about in embroidered silk robes of scarlet or black, the half-open robes showing plenty of décolleté and leg. They wear thick white pancake makeup, glossy black eye paint, vermilion lip paint so shiny it looks like lacquer. Their shiny ebony hair is impeccably styled in astonishing waves and winglike coiffures.

Dolls. They look just like Chinadolls.

A black door maid in uniform serves plum wine, coconut pastries, bits of meat or fish wrapped in wontons. A portly gray-haired gentleman relaxes in his shirt and vest on a scarlet velvet divan, drinking and smoking, snacking on the hors d’oeuvres as he makes his selection from among the Chinadolls. Zhu glances at him. Oh, no! Could that be Mr. Heald? Jessie will be miffed! She keeps her head down. He can’t possibly recognize her in this getup, can he? She pushes the spectacles up her nose again, peers at the girls more closely.

“Wing Sing?” she says in a husky voice. “I want to see Wing Sing,” she repeats to Miss Selena.

“She right there in front of your face, brother cousin,” Selena says sarcastically. The madam points to a girl. “You pay five dollar now.”

Zhu pulls out more coins. She goes to the girl and anxiously studies her. White makeup is spread so thickly over her face, red lip lacquer defines her mouth so falsely, her hair is so bizarrely styled that Zhu isn’t sure it’s the girl she’s searching for. After that dirty little face, that disheveled braid? She’s not sure, at all. The girl barely looks human, let alone sixteen years old.

There’s a ping inside Zhu’s forehead, and the strange events of the day fast-forward through her memory in a kaleidoscope of images—Daniel stalking her, Daniel making love to her. The sign on the cigar wagon changing—she’s sure it changed!—and the driver of the wagon, first skinny, then stout. She herself in a long silk dress nibbling on buttered toast. And now this, the girl who is the object of her project, dolled up beyond recognition.

Reality changing. Reality changing right before her eyes. And she’s aware of it. She’s seeing it!

“Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “May I speak with you?”

This fantastic creature called Wing Sing shrugs disdainfully. The other girls giggle and whisper, their dark eyes darting back and forth. The gray-haired gentleman—it is Mr. Heald—yawns, exposing his big yellow teeth, and holds out his goblet for more plum wine. Wing Sing dutifully takes Zhu by the hand and leads her upstairs to her bedroom. She lies down on the bed like a mannequin and awaits her fate.

Zhu closes the door and locks it with the flimsy little chain lock that could easily be kicked apart by someone wanting in. She takes off the fedora, shakes out her hair, takes the spectacles off her face, and reveals her eyes, gene-tweaked green. “Hi. Remember me?”

The girl sits up. Her painted mouth drops open, her painted eyes widen. “Oy! Jade Eyes?”

“Thank goodness! Don’t yell. Call me ‘brother cousin,’ okay?” Zhu breathes a sigh of relief. “So you do remember me?”

Wing Sing nods—at least that part of reality hasn’t changed--and glances fearfully at the door. “Sure, I remember you.” Someone listening at the keyhole, apparently.

Zhu pulls the girl to the farthest corner of the room. They crouch on the floor beside a chamber pot.

“Are you all right? How are they treating you?”

As if it isn’t obvious how the madam is treating one of her girls. But Wing Sing says, “I do okay, Jade Eyes.” In fact, she looks well-fed, healthy, even sleek beneath the doll mask. No bruises, as far as Zhu can see. No disease. Not yet. “Chee Song Tong pay much gold for me,” she says, glowing with pride. “Miss Selena treat me nice. I lucky. I sign good contract. One day I go home.”

Go home. Yes. Zhu has got to get this girl to the home, to the Presbyterian mission where she’ll be safe. But how, now that she’s working at Selena’s? How, now that she believes she’s lucky, working at Selena’s?

“How many johns do you see in a day?”

“Oh, ten, maybe. Maybe ten more after that.”

“Wing Sing, ten or twenty? There’s a big difference.”

She only shrugs, no longer the frightened teenager. Even to herself, she’s become a commodity. “I earn much gold.”

“Wing Sing, do you still have your dowry box of jewelry?”

The girl nods. She reaches beneath the bed, pulls out the rosewood box.

Zhu inhales sharply, her breath catching in her throat. Oh! The aurelia? Is it finally there?

Wing Sing flips open the lid, flashes the contents at Zhu. “This jade, this gold.”

Is that the curve of a golden wing? Zhu reaches for the box, but Wing Sing claps the lid shut and shoves the box under the bed.

“Let me see.”

“No.” Wing Sing gives her a suspicious look. “Why you want to see my dowry, anyway?”

Zhu sighs. Could the aurelia appear in the dowry box now, like it was supposed to be there in the first place? Well, why not? Reality is shifting and changing all around her, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly. Why can’t something go right for a change?

“I could give you an appraisal. An idea of what it’s worth. With such a fine dowry, you’ll surely find a husband, a man who will be happy to marry you. You’ll have your own daughter, your own place in life. Your own home.”

Wing Sing only stares, her dark eyes revealing nothing.

“Wing Sing,” Zhu says, “isn’t that what you really want?”

The girl shifts uncomfortably, and her eyes dart away.

“It’s a lot to think about, I know.” Win her over. She’s got to win her over. “Why don’t you tell me your story. How did you get to Gold Mountain?”

“Oh, I like many northern girls,” she says, leaning back against the bed. “One day a man come to my mama. He say he want to marry me. She cry, but she say okay. She give me dowry box and I go. Then this man sell me in Shanghai to another man, who take me to San Francisco. It is the way, Jade Eyes. It is my fate. Same for many, many girls here.” There’s a little noise at the door. “Okay, brother cousin,” Wing Sing calls out. “Listen, Jade Eyes, at first I scared. At first I want to run away from Miss Selena. Now I see what I must do. I very, very lucky! I finish contract with Miss Selena, then I go home, okay? I go home rich, Jade Eyes.”

“Listen to me, Wing Sing. You’re never going to get rich working here. If you stay here, you’ll never go home. You’ll never have your own daughter. You’ll never have your own home. It’s going to wear you out, Wing Sing. It’s going to make you sick and sad and desperate. You’ll die before your contract is finished.”

The girl’s face darkens. She plugs her fingers in her ears. “No. No!”

“You’ve got to get out of here, Wing Sing. Get out before it’s too late.”

“But how? Chee Song Tong kill me!”

“If I could arrange it, if I could get you safely out of here and find a new life for you, would you come with me?”

“I do not know, Jade Eyes.”

“A new life, Wing Sing. Where you’ll be safe from Chee Song Tong. Where you’ll learn about this country and grow up like a normal girl. Where you’ll eventually meet a good husband and have a family of your own. You want that, don’t you? Oh, I know you want that!”

Wing Sing stares at Zhu, trembling, as if she’s just offered her the moon. “Yes, I go. You really take me?”

“Of course!”

Someone knocks furiously on the bedroom door. Wing Sing shrinks back against the bed, curling up her legs. “Okay, brother cousin!” she calls out in a quavering voice.

Zhu raises her hands—stay calm—and tidies her queue. “I can’t take you now. I’ve got to go get help. But I’ll be back for you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Oh, but Jade Eyes, I cannot run. You have to carry me.”

She stretches out her legs.

And that’s when Zhu sees her feet.

In the Japanese Tea Garden, Wing Sing’s feet were unfashionable peasant’s feet, sturdy and whole. Feet made for standing while planting peas or millet. Feet made for walking across the whole country if she had to, to find work. Zhu clearly recalls the straw sandals threaded with green silk. Her big bare feet, her knobby toes.

Zhu rubs her forehead, and that little ping thumps behind her eyes again.

No. No. No no no no no no.

Yes. There is no mistaking the awful crippling inflicted on a girl-child in the China of 1895 and in centuries past. Her toes have been broken and bent under the rest of her foot and brutally tied there with strips of cloth. The bone of her arch has been slowly bowed and broken over long torturous years so that the whole of her foot resembles a clenched fist.

Wing Sing has bound feet.

A Premonition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A slender little Chink is what they see, alone and out of his turf.

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

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

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

“Then take Columbus to Montgomery,” Muse says. “Hurry.”

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

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

“Hey, Muse. The girl I just spoke with is not the same girl we met in the Japanese Tea Garden.”

“Of course she is,” the monitor says. “She said she’s Wing Sing, didn’t she?”

“I’m telling you, she’s not the same girl.” She shivers at the monitor’s nonchalant tone. “She can’t be.”

“She is as much that girl as any other.”

“Oh, really? What about her feet?”

“She’s got feet, hasn’t she?”

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

If she returns.

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

“Did you see it in her dowry box this time?”

“Nope.”

“Did you not see it?”

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

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

“You’re making no sense!”

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

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

The directory scrolls across her peripheral vision.

“You’re giving me a headache, Muse!”

“I’m activating your holoid capability. Relax your left eye, please.”

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

“Turn toward the building,” Muse commands.

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

Muse retrieves the file containing her instructions holoid and downloads it:

Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc

All right, already. There’s the damn thing, thirty-six GB even, the last she saw it, and she’s seen it a hundred times. Zhu blinks, straining to see as the field fades away and the holoid commences. But, wait. According to the tool bar, the file now contains thirty-six GB and two hundred and forty-two KB.

“For pity’s sake, Muse. Stop it. That can’t be the right file.”

But Muse doesn’t stop, or maybe the file is already invoked and the monitor can’t stop it. The holoid pops up before her eyes—the hydroplex housing the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications floating in San Francisco Bay. The hushed corridors. The room swathed in a gauzy pale fabric like the inside of a cloud. And Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, so tall and pale and elegant, with his waist-length red hair, his eyes like sapphires.

She jolts with the shock of seeing herself. Her old self. Just a glimpse, since the holoid’s point of view is over her right shoulder. Her ragged hair. Her ragged hands. The dirty blue jumpsuit, a prison uniform.

Her. Self.

No! She is not that person. Was she ever?

She hadn’t liked him. She’d resented him. She’d barely been able to be polite.

“Please understand, we cosmicists are conservationists,” he’s saying in the holoid.

Anger chokes Zhu as she watches the session, watches the two of them talking. Mostly, she watches herself watching him. She hadn’t liked him? Oh, she’d loathed him! She’d taken a deep and abiding dislike of the man at once. As if she’d known he was some kind of enemy behind the polite facade. As if—and this she suddenly realizes sitting on the steps of Wells Fargo Bank, in 1895—as if she intuited that he was devious, scheming to lure her into some terrible plan hatched by the Archivists and the LISA techs, those haughty cosmicists in their ultramodern platinum palace.

A secret plan. And what was her role? Well, she was not in on the secret. She’s just an anonymous young Chinese woman, then and now.

Zhu’s left eye feels gritty. She rubs it, and the holoid vanishes, only to reappear as soon as she raises her eyes again.

But why should she hate Chiron? She’d never laid eyes on him before that moment six hundred years in the future. Yet somehow she knew him. As if she had a memory, but it wasn’t really a memory, couldn’t be a memory because she hadn’t yet had the experience in the forward-moving time of her life.

As if she had a premonition.

“There was a Crisis,” Chiron is saying in the holoid.

Zhu frowns. Does she remember this part?

“The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was conducting t-port experiments. One of their premier physicists, J. Betty Turner, proposed a t-port project that had special meaning for her. When she was a girl, she had accidentally killed a woman. The tragedy had obsessed Betty her whole life. She became depressed, agitated, despondent.

“When the LISA techs discovered how to t-port someone to the past, Betty wanted to try the new technology herself. She wanted to return to the day of the accident and save the woman she killed. The Archivists researched that day and concluded that the accident generated no significant probabilities that could collapse out of the timeline. They greenlighted the project and set up a tachyonic shuttle in a historically stable location.”

In the holoid, Chiron raises a small cigarette to his lips, inhales deeply.

Zhu closes her eyes, remembering. Chiron, smoking? No way! Then suddenly she recalls the smoke, the lovely scent of cloves. He opened a gold cigarette case, offered her one.

Now she opens her eyes, and the scent of cloves overwhelms her. One of the girls at the Parisian Mansion had bit into a clove, releasing that spicy scent. The holoid streams from her left eye, materializing before her.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke,” she says in the holoid. “So what happened? Betty t-ported to the day of the accident?”

“Yes,” Chiron says, blowing smoke rings. “But she didn’t return. She was the first recorded case of a t-porter trapped in a Closed Time Loop.”

“I don’t understand,” Zhu says in the holoid.

“She died. She died in the past, but within her own lifetime. When Betty didn’t return, the LISA techs reviewed their research, reviewed their perceptions of the project. Some who knew Betty well saw her as cheerful and enthusiastic just before she t-ported. Others insisted she was panicked that she wouldn’t succeed in saving the woman she killed.”

“Okay, so she died. And that was the end of it?”

“Hardly,” Chiron says. “The LISA techs authorized the Save Betty Project and sent another t-porter who brought Betty back to her personal Now so that the natural order of her life could be restored and she could die at the actual end of her life, not somewhere in the middle. But because we disrupted a CTL—which by definition has no beginning and no end—we tore a hole in spacetime. The Save Betty Project polluted all of reality. Spacetime split open, and another reality, a dreadful alternative universe, a corrupted version of ours, thrust into our reality. Entities from that reality, from that Other Now—entities we call demons—began preying on our reality. And then the Archivists witnessed other peculiarities—data disappearing from the Archives. Reality itself was disappearing.

“We faced a Crisis—the annihilation of our reality as we knew it.” Chiron exhales from his nostrils, wreathing his head in clove-scented smoke. “The Save Betty Project was never supposed to have created a catastrophe, but it did.” He shrugged. “Sometimes science and technology does that, in spite of everyone’s good intentions.”

“Create a catastrophe?”

“Sorry, but yeah. Before all the Archives unraveled and the Other Now could defeat us, I was drafted to t-port to 1967. To try to set things right. Or as right as things could be made.”

Sitting on the cold granite steps now, Zhu nods. She remembers this part of their talk. Pretty sure she remembers. “The Summer of Love Project?” she says in the holoid.

“Yes. The Archivists had always noticed ‘dim spots’, places in the historical record when what actually happened was unclear. After the Crisis, they began to witness wholesale disappearance of data that had once been there. They called these phenomena ‘hot dim spots’. They traced one of the most radical hot dim spots to San Francisco, 1967, during the Summer of Love. They targeted a girl as the object of the project.”

A girl. Zhu remembers how her hostility deepened when Chiron said that. She may have been an accused criminal, but she was still a Daughter of Compassion and her hackles rose. “A girl, Chiron? Always a girl?” she says in the holoid. “I see. So you chose someone anonymous, dispensable, disposable? Is that how you cosmicists view women, after all?”

“Certainly not. Cosmicism was founded by a woman. A brilliant woman. And that girl in 1967 was by no means disposable. In fact, her life, and the life of her child, proved crucial to the continued existence of reality as we know it. You and I wouldn’t be sitting here now, if it weren’t for her.” He smiles on the holoid, tenderness in his eyes. “Things got complicated. But when I left her in 1967 and returned to 2467, she was exactly like she was supposed to be.”

Zhu remembers how stunned she was by his story. How dare these elite cosmicists shoot people around like faster-than-light cannonballs, swoop in on hapless people from the past, and tell them how they’re supposed to be?

But before she says anything more on the holoid, suddenly—and of all the strange things she’s noticing on this holoid, this is the strangest thing of all--Chiron searches his pockets and, like an old-timey stage magician pulling a dove out of his sleeve, he produces something shiny and commands, “Look at this, Zhu. Look well.”

Zhu stares at the holoid.

It’s the aurelia. The decadent Art Nouveau brooch with glittering butterfly wings. Didn’t African laborers scrape out that gold, extract those diamonds from mines owned by Dutch colonialists? Didn’t the bits of stained glass resemble the windows in churches that preached charity but extorted money from poor parishioners? And the golden woman at the center. Her blank face, her exposed body, her outstretched arms burdened by wings, her legs posed as if they’re bound at the ankles?

“Why, it’s horrible,” she whispers.

But surely she didn’t think that when she first saw the aurelia. She’d been dazzled.

She reaches into the holoid now, her fingers swiping through the light.

Chiron holds the aurelia away, as though teasing her—then and now—and, with an imperious expression, slips the brooch into his pocket.

“She will have it,” he says.

Muse closes the file, and the holoid disappears. Zhu pulls her fedora down low over her forehead, lowers her hand, and turns away from the wall. The men smoking on the stairs rise and saunter away, bound for their offices or shops.

Zhu’s head throbs. Why all this fuss over a trifle, a bauble, a piece of decadent jewelry. Why? And it’s not pretty at all, she decides. The thing is repulsive.

A bad taste pools on her tongue. You chose someone anonymous, dispensable, disposable. On that first day of the Gilded Age Project, Muse had been more concerned about the aurelia than about Wing Sing. More concerned about a gold bauble than a young girl’s life.

“Hey, you. Move along, Chinaboy.”

Zhu looks up at a swarthy young man standing over her. Well, if it isn’t the wine merchant’s driver, sweaty and belligerent. Since she last saw him a few hours ago, he’s been working hard on getting pie-eyed. He holds a shot of something potent from the saloon across the street, and four equally muscular and belligerent pals stand by his side.

“Look at ‘im, Joey, he’s got hisself in a pipe dream,” says one of the pals.

The driver kicks her thigh with his boot toe. “I said move along, Chinaboy. We wanna sit here, an’ we don’t wanna sit here wit’ the likes of you.”

Zhu pulls her fedora down low and stands. She glances up at him through her green-tinted spectacles. Should she rebuke him for kicking a lady? Whip off her disguise and give him a purple cow?

“I’ve never seen a purple cow, I never hope to see one. But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one. Ambrose Bierce wrote that doggerel, circa 1895,” Muse whispers.

“Cute, Muse,” she whispers back.

No, Zhu won’t give the driver a purple cow. The driver’s eyes are opaque with his hatred of Chinaboys. He doesn’t see her as the angel or the fallen angel. He doesn’t see Zhu at all.