The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (58 page)

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

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

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

“My
throat still aches, Muse.”

Muse
is silent.

“That
sacrifice was supposed to have been mine.”

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

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

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

“No
kidding.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That
it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muse
is silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No!

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

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

The
two bruisers turn and crane their necks at her.

Zhu
flees.

*  
*   *

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

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

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

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

What
every gentleman of the Gilded Age needs.

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

She
refused him.

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

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

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

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