The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “If your mama could see you, Mr. Watkins.”

  Daniel regards her coolly. “Absinthe is my mother, Miss Malone. The mother of my happiness. She is the Green Fairy. She is holy water, the sacred herb.”

  “The brain lesions will make you mad,” Zhu reminds them both, “if you don’t keel over from a stroke first.”

  “She has green eyes, a cloak of forest green, and opalescent skin. She is ma mere.” Daniel seizes Zhu’s wrist, pulls her down onto his lap. “She is the mistress I love best. Her eyes are greener than yours. Jealous?”

  Someone knocks on the door, and Zhu leaps up, opens it. A waiter enters with a trolley bearing the dark green bottle, its neck wrapped in silver foil, a carafe of sparkling water, a dish of sugar cubes, and three bell-shaped glasses. There are three absinthe spoons of polished silver, their flat bowls punched out in lovely filigrees.

  Jessie sniffs disapprovingly, recalling how this little ceremony goes. She also recalls why she never serves absinthe at the Mansion. Zhu’s protests ring only too true. Madness, indeed. It’s a devilish drink. All the same, she’ll take a taste. Just a wee taste.

  Daniel seizes the trolley and shoos the waiter out. His hands shake with excitement as he sets out the bottle, the carafe, and the sugar cubes just so. He pours out absinthe and places the spoons over the mouth of each glass. But before he proceeds, he shoots Zhu a dark look. “First let’s have a closer look at the knife of yours while I’m still sane and sober.”

  “Yeah, what did she call it? A mollie knife. I want to see it, too,” Jessie says.

  “Sorry, I can’t do that,” Zhu murmurs.

  Daniel seizes her, reaches in her tunic pocket, finds what he’s looking for. Zhu staggers back, frowning, but makes no move to reclaim the knife. She shrugs with a haughty, disdainful look.

  “Say, you don’t have to roughhouse her, mister,” Jessie says but she joins him, peering down at the miraculous knife.

  It’s about the same size and shape as Daniel’s Congress knife, except for the sapphire knob protruding from the hilt. Daniel takes a sugar cube, takes the mollie knife, and cuts the cube in half. Then he pushes in the knob on the hilt, imitating Zhu’s work on Duncan Ross’s skull, and guides the blade back over the cut. The sugar cube mends itself whole.

  “Jar me,” Jessie exclaims. “Like I said, it’s a miracle!”

  She and Daniel exchange astonished glances. She turns to Zhu, but the chit sits wearily on the divan, shaking her head. She plucks the knife from Daniel’s fingers.

  “Don’t look so sour,” Jessie tells her. “Mr. Edison would give his right arm for that.”

  “By God, how true,” Daniel says, that glitter in his eye brighter. “I would give my right arm for that. How is it done?”

  Ah, well. The gentleman does care for something other than pickling his brain. Jessie turns to Zhu expectantly. “How is the trick done?”

  “Matter is made up of molecules. Molecules are made up of atoms connected together by bonds. When you cut something, you break the bonds. The mollie knife merely rearranges the electrons, forming ions. The ions are attracted to each other and reform the bonds. Molecular recombination, like I said. It’s not so difficult, really.”

  “Then let us drink to molecular recombination, ladies,” Daniel says. He balances a sugar cube in the bowl of an absinthe spoon, drizzles water over the cube. The cube dissolves and sugar water drips into the glass, turning the green liquor murky. “After the first glass of the Green Fairy, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. And after the third, you see things as they really are, which is the most terrible thing in the world.” Daniel sips, and his eyes turn as murky as the liquor. “Oscar Wilde said that. Something like that. Cheers.”

  Jessie pours water over her own sugar cube and baptizes Zhu’s cube, too. “To your health, missy.”

  “I’ll pass,” Zhu says.

  Jessie sips. Gah, what a taste! Like chewing on the forbidden herbs in her painting of a celestial mountaintop, the goat-footed satyrs taking liberties with winged nymphs. She peers at the green liquid in her glass, evil and pungent. They say mad monks brew the stuff. Absinthe careens into her blood, and the gaslight glows like molten gold. The eyes of her companions deepen, and their faces take on a strange nobility.

  “Re-form the bonds,” Jessie says. “That’s downright romantic, missy. Ain’t that romantic, Mr. Watkins?’

  But Daniel’s mood has shifted again, and now he glares at Zhu over his glass. “You’re lying again. You’re making up stories like Mr. Wells and his time machine.”

  “I don’t lie,” Zhu says. “That’s one thing I never do, Daniel.”

  The waiter knocks and brings in another trolley with covered dishes, shell crackers, long-stemmed forks, bowls of melted butter. He whips the covers off the dishes, revealing steaming scarlet crabs and lovely slender frog’s legs drowning in a pool of white sauce.

  Jessie assembles a plate for Daniel, hoping to appease him. Drink ought to cheer a man, not make him violent and mean, though so often that is the result. “Now, Mr. Watkins. Our Zhu did a wonderful thing tonight. She saved a man’s life.”

  “We don’t know what the hell she did. Perhaps Duncan Ross will wind up a lunatic with blood on his brain.” He pours himself another round. “If the mollie knife is real, where can I purchase one?”

  “You can’t,” Zhu says with a wistful smile and pushes her glass away.

  “What about the Montgomery Ward catalog?” Jessie says, taking another tiny sip. The walls of the suite soften into lovely pink clouds, and she notices a moth swirling and circling in the glow of the gaslight. Like a little angel it is, a tiny woman with golden wings. She jolts with alarm. Champagne never makes her see visions! “Montgomery Ward’s got everything.”

  “I’ve never seen a mollie knife in the Montgomery Ward catalog,” Daniel says. “Or in Sears, Roebuck.”

  “Not even Sears, Roebuck stocks a mollie knife,” Zhu says with a laugh.

  “Then where did you steal yours?” he demands.

  “See here, Daniel,” Zhu says, flushing, her words spilling out in a rush. “I don’t lie and I don’t steal. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave me the knife for the Gilded Age Project. I am a Daughter of Compassion, and I’ve had just about enough of both of you today. Columbus Day, red wine, and man’s conquest.” She glares back at him. “You should be grateful I agreed to t-port to this spacetime.”

  “Spacetime,” Daniel says. “You said that word before. What the devil do you mean?”

  “Why, all of space and time, which are a whole. One doesn’t exist without the other.”

  “You see, Miss Malone?” Daniel says to her, smirking. “You women are all confused. There is space. Then there is time. The one has nothing to do with the other.”

  “Each is the other, Daniel,” Zhu insists. “There is only One Day that exists always.”

  “Yet you keep talking about ‘our Now’ and ‘your Now,’” Daniel points out.

  “That’s right,” Jessie chimes in. “She mentioned ‘her Now’ to me, too.”

  Zhu sighs. “They told me I’m not supposed to do that, either.”

  Jessie loves a good spoof, but the sip of absinthe and all this strange talk are spinning her head around. Still, she saw the mollie knife work with her own eyes. And what about that little voice, that spirit she hears talking to Zhu? “All right, then, why did you agree to… .t-port to our Now?” She laughs at herself. How quickly she picks up trade talk. “To this spacetime?”

  Zhu sighs again. “I’m not so sure myself, anymore.”

  “Oh, come now, miss,” Daniel says. “You were doing so well. Surely you can dream something up.”

  Zhu turns to him angrily. “The girl I’m supposed to rescue is in jeopardy. More jeopardy than anyone knew. I must get her to the safety of the mission. I must.” She takes off her fedora and her spectacles, runs her hand over her brow, smoothing back stray hair.
“Look. It’s like this. I’m not supposed to reveal my true identity under Tenet Five of the Grandmother Principle.”

  “Ah,” Jessie says with a wink at Daniel. “And what is your true identity?”

  “I’m Zhu Wong, all right, but I’m from 2495,” she answers somberly.

  “Are you sure?” Jessie teases. “You’re not from, say, a million years in the future like the girl in Mr. Wells’s Time Machine?”

  “Miss Malone, I’m not making this up. I’m really from six hundred years in your future. So is the mollie knife, if you must know.”

  “Well, that’s settled,” Jessie says, cracking open a crab claw and picking out the delicate meat. “You’ll have to wait a wee while to purchase your mollie knife, Mr. Watkins.”

  But Daniel is more taken with the chit’s story than he ought to be. “How,” he says, furrowing his brow, “can you really be from six hundred years in the future? The future doesn’t exist yet.”

  “But it does,” she says. “Look, I’m no expert on this. But, as I understand it, spacetime isn’t a line, it’s a whole. For every moment in the past, there is a future. The future always is, just as the past always is. Then it gets more complicated.” She sips water right out of the carafe. “What cosmicist theory has always suggested, and what the technology of t-porting has proven, is that reality doesn’t always exist the same. That the probable nature of reality on the quantum level applies to everything. So that each moment has probabilities that collapse into or out of the timeline.”

  “That’s quite a tall tale,” Daniel says. But his smirk has vanished.

  “I know,” Zhu says miserably. “The fact that I’m here in your Now is constantly affecting what happens. What happens in the past affects the future and, ever since tachyportation got invented in the future, the future also affects the past.”

  Daniel is shaking his head, but suddenly Jessie stops teasing. Something in Zhu’s words strikes a chord in her heart. “I do believe I see what you mean, missy. It’s like when you remember something, and then you learn something new about what happened or you feel something new, understand something new about it, and suddenly the memory ain’t the same anymore. It’s as if the whole world, the whole past, has changed because of what you thought of today.”

  Zhu gazes at her. “I’ll remember you said that, Miss Malone.”

  “Like me and Rachael,” Jessie rambles on. “My sweet innocent Rachael, long ago.” Sorrow wells in her heart, and she dabs at the tears welling in her eyes. “I thought she was wicked, but now I understand she was just young. Young and innocent.” No more of the Green Fairy for the Queen of the Underworld. She checks her pocket watch. Lordy! It’s after midnight. She’s got to make her appearance at the Parisian Mansion. “If only I could see things as I wish they were.”

  “I think I’m starting to see things as they are not,” Daniel says.

  Zhu frowns. “Me, too.”

  November 2, 1895

  El Dia de los Muertos

  7

  Nine Twenty Sacramento Street

  Death struts the streets with a grin and a swagger, a striped serape thrown rakishly over his shoulder. Death tips his sombrero and hands out little skulls of crystallized sugar to squealing children at the curb who jostle for a better view of the parade.

  Zhu wends her way through the crowd at the corner of Montgomery and Market. Clad in her gray silk dress and Newport hat, she clutches a leather-bound Bible. A gift for Donaldina Cameron. Best to have something in her hand for her first appointment with the new temporary director of Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, the Presbyterian mission and home for orphaned Chinese girls, a.k.a. abducted slave girls.

  She reminds herself she was supposed to have gone to the mission, asked for a job, and stayed there for the duration of the Gilded Age Project. She was supposed to have taken Wing Sing there. But neither of them is there now. Why not? Were the hatchet men she and the girl confronted that first day an unknown probability that collapsed this reality out of the timeline? That’s just great. Now how can she steer the project back on course?

  She has no idea, but a visit to Miss Cameron is definitely in order.

  “El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead,” Muse whispers in her ear. “In America we observe Halloween. The Catholic Church calls the following day All Souls’ Day, while the aboriginal people of Mexico observed El Dia de los Muertos. Death and life intertwined in the native Mexicans’ cosmology. Death was neither revered nor feared. Not completely understood, of course, but experienced. Celebrated.”

  “And in your cosmology? Have the cosmicists attained this peace of mind?”

  “No philosophy or religion will give you peace of mind if you don’t find it within yourself, Z. Wong.”

  Death laughs, robust and antic.

  “Well, yeah,” she says, annoyed at Muse’s platitudes. “What’s the value of life, then?” Anxiety closes cold fingers over her heart. She’s hatched a plan, but will Cameron cooperate? “The cosmicists speak of the Great Good according to True Value. Does a cosmicist deem the death of a child to be the same as—say—the destruction of a butterfly? Suppose it’s a rare butterfly and the child is one of twelve billion people. Is the aurelia’s destruction more important?”

  She catches herself. The aurelia? She didn’t mean to say that, did she?

  “All this talk of death and destruction is not healthy for you, Z. Wong,” Muse says. “Are you melancholy again? You must try to fight off this depression.”

  Muse solicitous, cajoling. When has Muse ever been cajoling? Capricious Artificial Intelligence—there’s an oxymoron. Even with ambiguity tolerance, AI is never capricious. Or it’s not supposed to be. Muse has been astringent, cantankerous, goading, informative, puzzling, even cruel. But Muse has never been respectful of her feelings. Has she really been depressed?

  When? She’s lost all track of time.

  “And get on with the Gilded Age Project.” That’s more like Muse.

  “I am getting on with it.” She quells her annoyance with a full-blasted sneeze. After four months of agony unabated by the antihistamine in her pharmaceutical supplies, Muse formulated a decongestant that she can mix up out of the stuff the LISA techs supplied her with, plus a touch of fresh powdered nettle. The nettle really does the trick. She went out and bought fresh nettle and a mortar and pestle at the Snake Pharmacy along with a Polyopticon Wonder Camera for Daniel and a Patent Dust Protector for herself—a little nickel-plated gas mask that costs a pricey ninety cents. “I’m on my way to see Donaldina Cameron right now. With a Bible.”

  Since the Archivists’ plan for Zhu to seek employment at the home got derailed by her rescue from the hatchet men by Jessie Malone, Zhu’s efforts to contact the mission’s director have met with resistance. The mission has put her off for weeks. Her respectful requests for an audience were turned down rather less respectfully. Muse consulted the Archives and discovered that the director—an old warhorse named Miss Margaret Culbertson—suffers from ill health, and that Donaldina Cameron has assumed new responsibilities as the temporary director. And Cameron has finally granted her an audience.

  Muse is excited. “This is a breakthrough for the Gilded Age Project, Z. Wong. You must convince Cameron of your plan to rescue the girl.”

  “Now that I know where Wing Sing is, I’ll sure as hell try.” But Zhu is troubled. “You still can’t find any trace of me in the files on Cameron?”

  “Don’t worry,” Muse says. “Cameron dealt with hundreds of Chinese women, most of whom remained anonymous and are lost to the Archives.”

  “Anonymous. That’s what I am, all right.” She swallows her resentment. Chiron made that clear from the start. Chinese women of this Now are anonymous. But she still doesn’t like the fact that Muse can’t trace her in the Archives. No sign of her. No sign, at all. If she’s here, well, she should be there, somewhere in the historical record.

  Zhu slogs through the crowd. The Mexican community of the Bay Area—from the Lati
n Quarter in North Beach to south o’ the slot to San Jose—has turned out for the grand parade downtown. Horsemen with ringing spurs rear and wheel their steeds. Bands blare with their own unique brassy sound. Guitars strum and maracas clatter. Ole! People promenade in costumes and papier-mache masks depicting skulls. Some costumes are sly caricatures—a rich lady in a stole of chicken feathers and a tiara of cardboard, her skull made glamorous with salacious lipstick and eye paint. A priest piously bearing enormous candelabra comprised of skulls, gaudy flowers dangling from his grinning teeth. A rowdy soldier in full dress uniform dangling red and green skulls from the brim of his cap, his bandoliers, his jacket sleeves, and a cardboard rifle. A morose barefooted peasant, a patch slung over one hollow eye socket of his skull mask, his braided mustache swooping over his jawbone. A hound trots beside him, its clipped black fur painted with a canine skeleton in bright white and green.

  No one escapes Death.

  People guffaw and point at each new mockery. But Zhu can’t laugh. “What does it all mean?” she asks a boy on the sidelines. A gangling teenager, all long limbs and a narrow swarthy face, he pops candy skulls into his mouth and whoops.

  “Well, senorita, you’re going to die sooner than you want to, so why cry about it, eh?”

  Now Death presents Zhu with a bouquet of pink paper flowers. Why cry? How sensible. This parade and its celebrants mocking death are psychologically healthy. She hands the flowers to the boy and tries to smile, but her mouth refuses. Sooner than you want to. As soon as you are born, you know you will die. And the other way around? As soon as you die, you know you will be born? But that’s reincarnation, a superstition strangely persistent even in Zhu’s Now, though modern science has never proven any truth to it. One of those primitive beliefs that refuses to die, stubborn and irrational.

  Or is that what happens if you’re trapped in a Closed Time Loop? Like the infamous Betty in Chiron’s Now. Betty whose rescue polluted all of spacetime. Betty who died, knowing she would be born, knowing she would return to the day of her death and die again—in the past.