The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

They never shut off the lights in the women’s prison. Zhu felt sore all over, dizzy from the interrogation, nauseated and addle-brained with withdrawal from the black patch. Tachyportation? She rolled the unfamiliar word around in her mouth like a spicy poisoned candy.

  “Somebody there will explain,” the lawyer said, taking out a neurobic, popping the bead open, and snorting the fumes. Then sighing with relief from the all-purpose anodyne. The sadist. “They’ll ship you to California. San Francisco. Place called the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. The LISA techs will tell you all about it. Sign here.”

  “Hey, I don’t know,” Zhu said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” the lawyer snapped.

  “I can’t agree to something before I know what’s involved.” Zhu had heard strange stories, jacking prisoners into the computer-constructed reality known as telespace for strange experiments. Radical editing, brainwaving, testing new neural apps. Political prisoners like her were especially vulnerable. “I’ve got my rights.”

  “Your rights. Be grateful they came to me with this deal, Wong.” The lawyer flicked the empty neurobic onto the floor. “Do you have any idea how bad you and your comrades make the Cause look?” She said “the Cause” in capital letters. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn if they jack you into a rehab program and make you compute actuarial margins for twenty years.”

  “Thank you, counselor.”

  “Any idea at all?”

  “Yeah, actually I do,” she said, burning with guilt and shame. The lawyer didn’t need to remind her. It was the last thing in the world the Daughters of Compassion wanted to do—harm the Cause. Zhu had dedicated her life to the Cause. It was crazy. Crazy.

  “But, uh, what’s a tachyportation?” she insisted.

  “Way I understand it, they want to send you six hundred years into the past,” the lawyer said and coughed.

  Zhu gaped. “You mean… .send me… .physically?”

  “That’s right. Physically. Like I said, the LISA techs will explain. It is strange, I admit, since the institute doesn’t conduct t-port projects anymore. Too dangerous. You can ask the techs about that, too. I remember,” the lawyer muses, “when they shut the shuttles down and discontinued t-ports. All very hush-hush. Must have been a couple years after you were born.”

  “Six hundred… .years?”

  Wow. A prickle of excitement, of wonder and anticipation pierced her foggy exhaustion. Why was a t-port dangerous? What was she supposed to do there, six hundred years in the past? A thousand questions tumbled through her mind. She trembled, a strange sensation coursed through her, and suddenly this conversation seemed strangely familiar. As if she’d heard it before, just exactly like this. As if she’d always sat here, on this seat of shame, and the pasty-faced lawyer had always sneered at her as she was sneering now.

  What was that about? Zhu shook her head, trying to clear her mind. A premonition?

  “Why me?” she finally managed to ask.

  “Dunno,” the lawyer admitted, “after what you’ve done. But you’re the one they want, Wong. I say take the deal. They’re ready to go. They call it The Gilded Age Project.”

  *

  Zhu hikes out of the Japanese Tea Garden through a red moon-gate and stands before the shallow bowl of Concert Valley. Ah! She’s never seen such a lush landscape. Towering palm trees, aloe veras as high as her waist, glossy dark pines, flowers blooming pink and purple and gold. Everything so fresh and new! After the cracked old domes of Changchi, the barren concrete and unforgiving millet fields where she’s spent her whole life, Zhu marvels at Golden Gate Park, 1895. A wonderland!

  Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision. Muse downloads a file from the Archives stored in its memory. “The California Midwinter International Exposition was held here in 1894. This is what’s left. Over two million people attended the fair.”

  “Two million?” Zhu is cautious after the monitor’s cool rebuke. “Is that a lot?”

  “Oh, yes. The population of San Francisco then—I mean now—is three hundred thousand souls. Biggest city on the West coast. By our standards merely a neighborhood, right, Z. Wong?”

  Zhu has no pat answer for the monitor’s flippant question. The number of people inhabiting any limited space is the biggest, thorniest problem facing her future.

  Now Muse is amiable again, an eager tour guide in the wake of her silence. “The two million came from all over the country by train on the transcontinental railroad completed in the 1870s, transforming the Wild West into a desirable destination. The park itself is the result of John McLaren’s horticultural hand. Nothing but sand dunes here twenty years ago. McLaren discovered that Scotch sea-bent grass holds to the sand in ocean winds long enough to establish a subsoil in which other plants can thrive. Leave it to a Scot. Look lively, Z. Wong. Perhaps we’ll see Boss Gardener himself.”

  “Oh!” Zhu looks around. Could the legendary John McLaren stroll right past her?

  “The cosmicist owners of New Golden Gate Preserve revere McLaren. His love of ecosystem, his understanding of Nature, his perseverance and dedication.” There’s a smug tone in Muse’s whisper.

  “Ah, yes, the cosmicists,” Zhu says. “How lovely. Only the cosmicists and their friends can enjoy this place in my time. Is it right that a public place as beautiful as this has been privatized and withheld from the people?”

  “The people,” Muse says. “All twelve billion of them?”

  Zhu ventures down a walkway leading into Concert Valley. “I thought the cosmicists believe in equal rights according to True Value. At least, that’s the line handed to me at the Luxon Institute of Superluminal Applications.”

  “Equal rights?” Muse chuckles. “The cosmicists believe in equal sacrifice to the Great Good. Human interests don’t always take precedence over nonhuman interests. The hyperindustrial era and the Brown Ages taught us that lesson only too painfully. The cosmicists believe in privatizing natural resources when ‘the people’ can’t or won’t properly care for them.”

  “Oh, I see,” Zhu says. “The cosmicists know better?”

  “Well, yes. The Brown Ages were long before your time, Z. Wong. You have no notion of the devastation. Once the dome went up, no one was permitted into New Golden Gate Preserve. If it makes you feel any better, the cosmicists don’t spend time there, either. Nature has the place all to herself.”

  The cosmicists. Guess who programmed Muse? Zhu sneezes more violently than before, tears welling in her eyes.

  “That barnyard smell is from horse manure gathered by the street sweepers downtown,” Muse says wryly. “Boss Gardener has the stuff spread all over the grounds. Keeps the lawns so green.”

  Boxwood and hydrangea border the walkway she strolls down. Now the De Young Art Museum stands to her left, the impression of Egyptian antiquity reinforced by two magnificent concrete sphinxes. In fact, the structure and its statuary were cobbled together in the months before the fair. There, the Temple of Music, a huge sandstone arch in the style of the Italian Renaissance, flanked by Corinthian columns. The medieval castle with unlikely Arabian arabesques is the Administration Building. At the center of the valley stands the Electric Tower, a smaller version of the Eiffel, adorned with international flags. The Bella Vista Café perches on the first mezzanine and a globe crowns the tower’s peak. A life-sized papier-mache California brown bear balances on the globe like a circus performer, the Bear Flag clutched in its paws. The tower is a tribute to the newfangled energy source and Mr. Edison’s electric light bulb.

  Zhu won’t see many electric light bulbs during her t-port. In 1895, San Francisco is still mostly gas-lit.

  She circles back. Tightrope walkers have strung a wire between two trees in front of the Temple of Music, cavort with parasols and chairs. A fellow with a bushy beard and a shiny top hat cracks his whip over a ring of pedestals as two lively hounds leap about, while a forlorn baboon in a yellow satin jacket deigns to perform a wobbly handstand.

  A crowd
promenades alongside Zhu in Concert Valley. The somber suits of the gentlemen are relieved by the pale pastel colors of the ladies’ sweeping dresses. Despite the heat, everyone wears layer upon layer of clothing, from buttoned-up collars to buttoned-down boots. And hats—everyone wears a hat, even the children. The ladies wear veils and carry parasols, the scalloped edges drooping with lace or velvet fringe.

  Zhu gulps. Her daily dress in Changchi? Jeans, a T-shirt, and worn-out sneakers, plus a sweat-stained padded jacket in winter. These people would think her half-naked if they saw her in her T and jeans. Like most post-domers, she’s always worn Block, the fine protective microderm protecting her skin from solar radiation. Her complexion, though golden, is paler than that of these veiled ladies.

  Everyone so elegant in their elaborate formal clothes. Zhu sighs, wistful and resentful at the same time.

  Yet there. Zhu spies a frail little woman in pale blue silk. The veil on her flowered hat barely conceals her battered eye. The pale blue ribbon tied around her chin does not at all conceal the bruise discoloring half her jaw. Her burly husband towers over her, quick anger in his narrow eyes.

  And there. A gust blows off a woman’s broad-brimmed hat. Straps at her chin, ears, and forehead hold a translucent face glove. Her eyes, nostrils, and mouth show through the stitched openings. In the sunlight, Zhu sees serious acne beneath the face glove’s gauzy fabric. The woman retrieves her hat, furiously pins it back on.

  There, too, a girl so thin, she’s nothing but satin skin over bird bones. She shuffles behind her sisters, dark circles surrounding her eyes, her skin pale celadon. She delicately coughs, and blood blooms in the handkerchief her mother impatiently thrusts into her fragile hands. Zhu recoils, covers her nose and mouth. Tuberculosis. Very, very contagious.

  “Outta sight, you friggin’ hoodlum!” shouts a portly man in a charcoal cutaway coat as he grapples with a fellow in a bowler and a three-piece suit. Sweat pours down their flushed faces, staining the high starched collars strangling their thick necks.

  “I’ll take me knuckledusters to ye,” the bowler shouts back.

  Zhu smells the reek of whiskey. The cutaway passes a silver flask to the bowler, who swigs from it and slams the flask back into the cutaway’s chest. Are they roughhousing or about to commence fisticuffs? Their violent conviviality makes her heart race. Men like this go down to Chinatown, set a house on fire just to see the flames. Men like this chase a Chink, string him up from a lamppost just to see him swing.

  What an Age. The Gilded Age.

  “My calculations indicate your rendezvous is fast approaching,” Muse reminds her, a little too loudly.

  A woman turns and peers at her. Zhu adjusts her veil. That’s all she needs—a disembodied voice hovering over her, and she answering. Muse is perfectly capable of communicating in subaudio so others can’t overhear. Why is the monitor speaking in projection mode? She’ll wind up in Napa Asylum for the Insane if she’s not careful.

  The rendezvous! Time to go!

  Zhu gathers up her skirts, sprints back to the Japanese Tea Garden. She finds the elegant redwood pagoda, takes a place in the queue. A Japanese woman in a kimono and clogs bows and smiles. Zhu returns the bow. The Japanese woman pours tea, sets the cup on a red lacquered tray.

  “No more than a thousand Japanese live in San Francisco,” Muse whispers. “The staff is part of the attraction.”

  An exuberant Japanese fellow in a blue and white kimono and scarlet headband bustles about behind the counter. “I am Mr. Makota, dearie. You try my cookie?” He proffers the treat, a wafer folded over like a half shell, fragrant with vanilla. He breaks the cookie open, extracts a slip of paper from the crumbs.

  Zhu takes the slip and reads:

  THERE IS A PROSPECT OF A THRILLING TIME AHEAD FOR YOU

  The concessionaire laughs at her startled expression. “You like my fortune cookie, dearie? I make them for the fair, number one first, but, oh my! how the Chinese copy me. Every Chinese restaurant in town make fortune cookie now. But I am first!” He pops a piece of cookie in his mouth. “You try? Bake fresh today.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Makota,” Zhu says, taking her tea and fortune cookie to a little table at the back of the pagoda. She unties her veil from beneath her chin, discreetly lifts the cup beneath the netted fabric, and sips. Hot sweet tea soothes her throat, calms her sinuses. The swirling, tenuous feeling—what the techs warned her about, a reaction called tachyonic lag—fades away. She smiles, encouraged, breaks apart the cookie, and takes the paper slip:

  YOU WILL ALWAYS BE SURROUNDED BY LOVING FRIENDS

  Then she sees her. The girl she’s supposed to meet. There she is.

  Crouching behind the table, huddled next to the wall. So still and silent, a bundle of shadows barely breathing, that Zhu didn’t notice her at first. A furtive motion, and a skinny little hand darts toward Zhu’s feedbag purse on the floor.

  Zhu is quicker. She seizes the girl by her wrist, grabs the other flailing arm, and pulls her out from under the table. The girl is strong, much bigger and older than Zhu expected.

  “Oy ching, ching, syau-jye!” the girl squeals.

  “Please, please, yourself, miss,” Zhu says sternly. She deposits her captive on the opposite chair. “Pa liao.” Enough of this, settle down. “Trying to steal my purse, are you?”

  “I not steal purse,” the girl says with haughty authority. Her sulky face is so filmed with grime, Zhu can’t tell if she’s pretty. Her thick black hair unravels from its queue. She wears an apple-green embroidered silk tunic held together with gold satin frogs and green silk trousers. When she lowers her arms to her sides, the sleeves droop below her fingertips, so she looks as if she has no hands. Too bad she doesn’t lower her arms for long because her fingernails are shredded, her knuckles sprinkled with sores. Her straw sandals are threaded with more green silk, but her big bare feet have knobby, filthy toes.

  Just the girl Zhu is looking for.

  “I not steal purse from fahn quai,” she says with a toss of her head.

  “Fahn quai?” Zhu says. “You think I’m a white devil?” She flings the veil up. “Look. Not a white devil.”

  The girl’s eyes widen. Zhu has the same golden skin, the same wide cheekbones as the girl. But the irises in Zhu’s slanting eyes are a brilliant gene-tweaked green.

  “Oy.” Perplexity clouds the girl’s black eyes. “Jade Eyes.”

  “I’m Zhu.” She smiles at the girl’s wonder. “But you may call me Jade Eyes.”

  “Oy, Jade Eyes,” the girl pleads. “I not thief. This true. You must believe! Look.” From some hidden pocket in her tunic, she takes out a small carved rosewood box, sets it on the table. “I have jewels. My mama give me for dowry.”

  “Let me see.” Zhu waits impatiently as the girl fumbles with the latch.

  Amazing! So the Archivists were right, after all. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was right. Wow! And after all that random data, after all these centuries. So much the Archivists didn’t know about Chinese women in fin de siècle America. Still, the Archivists had actually traced this girl—or a girl like her. An anonymous Chinese girl in the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fourth of July, 1895.

  Well, all right! Excitement rises in Zhu’s throat. The Archivists also said she would have jewelry. They said she would have the aurelia.

  The aurelia—what is it? A peculiar Art Nouveau brooch made of gold and diamond chips and colored glass as bright as gemstones. The Archivists said the aurelia holds the key to the Gilded Age Project. If only Zhu can get her hands on the aurelia, then everything—the past and the future—will turn out all right.

  The girl lifts the rosewood lid, and Zhu peers in eagerly. There are three bracelets of jade, one of ivory. A pair of fillgreed gold earrings. A gold ring with a nice jade cabochon.

  Zhu frowns, stirring the pieces, turning them over. “This is it? This is all you’ve got?”

  “All I got? Mama give! This my dowry!” The girl’s eyes flash. �
�This jade, this gold.”

  Damn. For the second time since she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden, Zhu feels a painful jolt of fear.

  The girl doesn’t have the aurelia.

  *

  The aurelia, the aurelia. All this fuss over a trifle, a bauble, a piece of decadent jewelry. Why? Did the success of a complex application of arcane high technology really turn on a piece of old gold? Even after the official explanation, Zhu had always been troubled by the aurelia.

  Not that she was happy with most of what happened after the lawyer sprang her loose from the women’s prison facility and sent her in restraints with two copbots on a transcontinental EM-Trans to San Francisco.

  “I’m just a country gal,” she joked as two copbots hustled her down high-speed escalators to the underground tubes. The copbots didn’t answer. Either someone took out their voice chips or issued a gag order. Zhu had heard of the EM-Trans, but she’d never personally seen or ridden on one. She sure did now. The mag-lev train—the whole vehicle levitated over a narrow ribbon of track by the force of electromagnetism—looked like a gigantic black bullet, each end a streamlined wedge. The EM-Trans reached speeds of over a thousand miles an hour in tubes cut through the global curvature. The ride lasted the morning, the trek up to the surface another hour.

  And then—San Francisco!

  Zhu had heard that Hong Kong surpasses San Francisco in management of the coastal encroachment that threatened seaside cities two hundred years ago. That Tokyo surpasses San Francisco in modernity, New York City in sheer upward thrust.

  But Zhu had never seen Hong Kong or Tokyo or New York City. Now she glimpsed San Francisco’s entertainment districts glittering along the offshore dikes, the containment canals, the iceberg barriers, the gardens planted over ancient traffic corridors, the magnificent cosmicist dome over New Golden Gate Preserve, the central megalopolis, the private domed estates of the wealthy, the spectacular skyscrapers literally touching the clouds.

  Wonderful! And intimidating.

  How isolated Zhu had been her whole life. How provincial. The countryside around Changchi where she and the Daughters of Compassion had focused their campaign was burdened with crumbling concrete, polluting ground traffic, the daily detritus of way too many people. But San Francisco, this megalopolis of five million souls, had managed to hide away everything ugly. Zhu thought of China as prostrate, huge and sprawling and horizontal, only too plain to see. San Francisco was dizzyingly vertical, its gleaming surfaces concealing modern arcana.