The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (15 page)

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.”