The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (46 page)

“Huh,”
Zhu says in the holoid. “That sounds like anarchy.”

“Yes,”
Chiron says in the holoid. “You, Zhu, ought to know a lot about anarchy.”

“And
the resiliency principle?” Zhu whispers now, resentment toward Chiron burning
in her as the joss house priest burns another strip of parchment, mixes the
ashes in a bowl of water. She and the Daughters of Compassion were enforcing
the law, not creating anarchy. But maybe that wasn’t what he was alluding to.
And that sudden thought chills her to the bone.

In
the holoid, Chiron sets down his drink. “Under the resiliency principle,
anything goes. And everything stays just the way we want it to. We witness and
we make it so. We can change the details, and it doesn’t really matter so long
as the end result holds true. All’s well that ends well. Tachyportation is
freely permitted because our technology is part and parcel of reality itself.
The past creates the future, and the future also creates the past. I must
confess, Zhu, I am unhappy with that notion.”

“Why?”
Her voice in the far future, in this holoid, sounds so wispy to her now.

“Because
t-porting is
not
in the natural order of reality,” Chiron snaps in the
holoid. “It’s a technology created by us. T-porting creates probabilities that
would never have existed, except for our technology. That was what the Save
Betty Project unleashed! That’s what the Summer of Love Project tried to fix.
But did we fix it? I don’t know! You get it now?”

More
worshipers enter the joss house. “I get it,” Zhu whispers, glancing down at the
aurelia lying in her hand. “You’ve created new realities, or at least you think
you may have. And that’s why you’re using me.”

In
the holoid Chiron stands, agitated. “Who is to say what reality will be? Who is
to govern all of spacetime? Who is to make the creative decisions that change
everything? Do you think there are powers who want to? Oh, yeah.”

“And
you?” Zhu says in the holoid. “You’re one of them, right? A cosmicist.”

“Oh,
Zhu,” Chiron says in the holoid. “Even cosmicists are not willing to assume
that responsibility. We’ve already proven to ourselves just how wrong we could
be even when our best intentions were beyond reproach.” He sits, looking
exhausted. “No one could assume such responsibility. Oh, and it’s more than
that. We did not want to tempt ourselves. No one with intentions less
altruistic than the cosmicists could be allowed to know what terrible power we
had at our command. So we shut the shuttles down. We vowed never to use
tachyportation again.”

“But
you have,” Zhu whispers in the joss house. She knows he can’t hear her, but she
says it, anyway. “You’ve used t-porting again with me.”

Suddenly—and
of all the strangeness of the session, this was the strangest thing of all—Chiron
searches his pockets. Like an old-timey magician pulling a dove from his sleeve,
he produces something shiny and commands her, “Look at this.”

The
aurelia.

“A
golden butterfly,” Chiron says in the holoid.

Zhu’s
breath catches. The aurelia--the wings, the woman--hovers before her in the holoid.
And now, in this moment, the aurelia--the gold, the diamonds--lies heavily in
the palm of her hand.

In
the holoid Chiron says, “The aurelia is a symbol, you see. In Chinese
mythology, the butterfly has two meanings. Dual meanings.”

“Dual
meanings?” she says in the holoid.

“Dual
meanings,” she whispers now. “Like just about everything in the Gilded Age has
a duality. A light side and a dark side.”

“The
first meaning is beautiful,” Chiron says. “The butterfly is the Chinese symbol
of love. Not platonic love, not the love of a parent for a child, or a sibling
for a sibling, not the love of friends. The love between a man and a woman. Between
lovers. Imagine two golden butterflies, entwined with each other over new
spring flowers.”

“You
mean sex,” she says in the holoid.

“Daniel,”
she whispers now, dizzy from the incense smoke.

In
the holoid, Chiron smiles. “The second meaning is darker, though not
unconnected to the first. The butterfly also symbolizes everlasting life.
Survival of the family through reproduction. Survival of the soul through love.”

“You
mean death,” she says in the holoid.

“Daniel,”
she whispers again now.

“I
mean survival,” Chiron says. “She will have it.”

The
holoid shrinks to a luminous pinpoint and disappears.

She
will have it.

Zhu
crouches in the joss house, clutching the aurelia, as the priest spews ashy water
from his mouth, casting demons out.

10

A
Shindig on Snob Hill

“Where
is she?” Daniel demands. “Always disappearing when I need her.” He flings his
shot glass against the baseboard of the smoking parlor, demonstrating his
pique. Shards scatter across the Persian carpet. He seizes the bottle of Scotch
Oats Essence from Mariah’s tray, gulps down half the medicine while Mariah
stands before him, impassive and stern.. Always judging him with those
depthless black eyes of hers. As if she’s got any right to judge him.

“I
do not rightly know, Mr. Watkins.” She is polite, always polite, no matter how
badly he behaves. She will have to get down on her hands and knees and pick up
his broken glass.

There,
you see,
sneers a voice inside his head.
You do know when you’re
behaving badly.

“She
woke,” Mariah adds, “at the crack of dawn and went out with Miss Malone. And
no, I do not know where they went.”

He
runs his fingers through his hair. He’s never heard voices in his head, not
before he met
her
, his lunatic mistress from six hundred years in the
future with a voice of her own that he can hear quite clearly though she never
seems to hear his. Now his voices—there are several—cackle and sneer, admonish
him every time he turns around, call him vile names, especially when there’s a
loud, sudden sound like the hoof-clops of horses.

“I
will not have that madam stealing my mistress away.”

“Miss
Malone is her employer, Mr. Watkins. Miss Malone may avail herself of Miss Zhu’s
services any time she’s got a notion.”

Mariah
holds out her hand for the medicine bottle, which belongs to Jessie. The
stuff’s not cheap. Defiantly he tucks the Scotch Oats Essence into his jacket
pocket. The smeared syrup will catch lint and tobacco crumbs and make a mess of
the pocket.

Never
mind. The medicine is the only thing that seems to soothe his nerves, if only
for a moment. Drink sends him into a rage, and controlling the drink is why he
sniffs cocaine night and day. He
is
cutting down on the drink, he’s
quite sure of it. Poor old Schultz should have given Dr. Mortimer’s cure a try,
and damn the expense. But then poor old Schultz was never long on wits. Other
healthful effects of the cure are plain to see, too. He’s lost the paunch. He’s
as skinny as a kid again. But he cannot understand this hellish anxiety. And
his temper? Merely the aftereffect of cutting down on the drink, Dr. Mortimer
assures him and urges him to persist with the cure till he’s done with the
drink altogether. That will be another five dollars, sir. Ten dollars. Fifteen.

“’Any
time she’s got a notion’?” Daniel says, mocking the maid. “Since when does a
woman get a notion?”

Mariah
says nothing. She harbors a personal vendetta against him though he has never
committed one single transgression against her. He addresses her roughly
sometimes, perhaps, but not beyond the bounds proper for decorum toward
servants.

“Anyway,”
he says, refusing to be shamed before her baleful glare, “my mistress has her
own obligations toward me. She has no right to run off without consulting me
first.”

“Miss
Zhu,” Mariah says, “has the right to do anything she pleases.” She turns on her
heel and stalks out.

“You’re
dismissed,” Daniel calls after her retreating back. She’s got the back of a
stevedore, that one does. “Hell with it,” he mutters, taking out the Scotch
Oats Essence. Zhu claims the stuff is loaded with whiskey, but it cannot be
whiskey that soothes his fevered brow. No, it’s medicine, by God, and he needs
more of the same. Indeed, he needs something stronger.

He
takes out his vial of cocaine and the spoon, and snorts. Excruciating pain
knifes through his sinuses, then numbs to nothing as soon as the cure settles
into his flesh, though not nearly quickly enough. His nosebleeds are getting
worse but then, he suffered from nosebleeds when the drink had him by the
throat. Zhu claims the cocaine is eating holes in his septum, but he scoffed in
disbelief. She’s not a physician like Dr. Mortimer.

Daniel’s
got things to do before he sets off for the shindig on Nob Hill tonight. Snob
Hill, as Jessie calls the place. He needs to pay a visit to Stockton Street and
old man Ekberg. Then he needs to stop by the courthouse and file foreclosure
papers. He was hoping to take Zhu with him. For a woman, she’s awfully clever
at paperwork, at facts and figures. Perhaps he should take her to London and go
meet H.G. Wells himself. That might put an end to her lunacy. Good thing she
doesn’t try to take his cocaine away. “I will kill you if you touch my cure,”
he’s warned her. When his blood is up, he almost means it.

After
his business at the court is done, he must stop by the tailor and pick up his
costume. The shindig at the Art Association is a costume party, of all things.
He would never have allowed himself to be talked into accompanying Zhu and
Jessie if he hadn’t overheard along the Cocktail Route that the nabobs of the
city will attend. In particular, a certain Jeremiah Duff will make his annual
appearance. Mr. Duff has a reputation of being a man well versed in narcotics.
Dr. Mortimer has promised to give Daniel a letter of introduction.

By
God, he’s exhausted. If only he could sleep! He hasn’t shut his eyes for more
than a few hours at a time in weeks. Everything seems fragmented and unreal.
Days and nights splinter into shards of consciousness as scattered as his shattered
shot glass on the Persian carpet. Sometimes when he’s sequestered in his suite—lamp
burning low, shades and drapes drawn, a bottle of good brandy, his vial and his
spoon, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing—he does not know whether it’s day or night,
and does not care.

Suddenly
pain chases across the back of his eyes, and the room spins, bits and pieces swelling
into his view and receding. He chuckles at the effect, though he thinks he may
be about to retch. Now, why can he not do this with his kinesis machine?

The
kinesis machine, that’s what he calls the device he’s rigged up in his suite to
experiment with moving photographs, a design not unlike his toy Zoetrope. He’s
mounted translucent sequential images on a large wheel, situated an electric
lightbulb at the wheel’s center. When he spins the wheel, the pictures whirl
past the eye, illuminated from behind. It works, after a fashion.

Still,
the viewer cannot
enter
into the illusion the way he so desperately
desires. Even a peepshow is more engrossing. The apparatus is distancing, the
photographs too small. He considers enlarging the photographs to the size of
paintings, constructing a giant wheel on which to mount them, perhaps forty
feet in diameter. He’d need an auditorium to show the illusion. Frustrated, he
finds it a paltry simulation of what he can envision. He still encounters problems
with continuous motion, cannot quite determine the right acceleration. If he
slows the action, the images jerk about. If he speeds it up, the images blur.

Like
Zhu is a blur. Like Woman is a blur. He adores her, he abhors her. Which is it?

“Where
are you when I need you, my angel?” he shouts in the empty parlor. His voice
echoes strangely. Almost as if the reverberation preceded his cry. By God, he
is going mad.

*  
*   *

Daniel
steps out onto Dupont Street and surveys the traffic with a shrewd eye.
Harvey’s thugs don’t lurk about, but the evil way two streetwalkers glance at
him merits his fingertips poised on his Remington derringer, a hand poised for
the Congress knife. Is that the damnable Fanny Spiggot crossing at the corner?
She has been following him, too, no doubt itching to see if she can lift
another boodle bag off him. And wait—is that poor old Schultz? No, no, it’s
just another portly German gentleman. Poor old Schultz is cold in his grave.

He
sets off at an energetic clip for Stockton Street. They say the plague has
struck Chinatown again. The smuggled coolies his mistress weeps about probably
brought it over from China, which suffered a dreadful dose in ’94. Ah, there’s
the dump, 567 Stockton Street, over which Mr. Ekberg has wept real tears. The
old man has got himself a hidey-hole downstairs and who knows how many Chinese
crammed into the little rooms upstairs. Daniel knocks on the door, impatient,
tapping his toe, and Mr. Ekberg answers. An old prospector he is, his face as
ruined as the termite–riddled boards of this tumbledown wreck. Daniel will have
to chastise Father, extending a loan on such a poor property. Ekberg forks over
thirty-five dollars in gold coins, then slams the door in Daniel’s face. Splendid.
That settles his account for another month, never mind the arrears and
accumulated interest. What will happen when old Ekberg kicks the bucket? What then?
Will Daniel have to manage the place? He shivers and sidesteps a dead rat writhing
with maggots lying in the gutter. Who would buy this dump at a price covering
the loan balance? He can see the wisdom of floating old Ekberg for as long as possible.
He recalls that the plague is spread by rats. Daniel clears out.