by Lisa Mason
“I don’t know when Father realized she was carrying the quadroon’s child.” Daniel suddenly feels much better and the gentlemen’s antechamber hums with new activity. The pharaoh stumbles into the urinals and Louis XIV reels in, too. “God knows she tried to hide it. But there was no hiding a child coming by the time she was well along.”
Zhu tenderly wipes his face with a cool, damp washcloth. “And what did he do, your father?”
“Oh, he beat her. What else could he do? He had social position, a business, political pull, money, property. He had his pride. And his own child. A son. Me. When I think of it now, miss, I can comprehend it. What else, what else could he do?”
“Ah,” Zhu whispers. “And what else did he do?”
“One night he beat her, kicked her, and kicked her again when she fell down, kicked her in the belly, over and over.” Slap of flesh on flesh. Daniel crouching in a corner of Mama’s dressing room, watching as Father beat her. Daniel at Mama’s bedside when she lay bleeding into the bedpan. Haven’t I been good to you, Danny?
“She lost the quadroon’s baby,” Daniel says. “Lost her capacity ever to conceive again. I suppose Father could have killed her that night. Perhaps he should have. Instead, he only damaged her for the rest of her life. It must have been on that night when Dr. Dubose came. He was the one who gave her the iron tonic, but now she needed something stronger. He was the one who first administered morphine to my mother. She was in a lot of pain.”
Zhu is pale, like pale gold marble, her strange green eyes dark with horror behind her tinted spectacles. For once she, who spouts off about everything, has nothing to say.
“And here I am, my mother’s son. Sins of the mother, eh?”
And there, Jeremiah Duff comes striding back into the gentlemen’s facilities. Dour old Duff is positively jovial.
“Now, Mr. Watkins,” Duff says, sitting down before him and taking his arm, tapping the inner aspect of his elbow. “Now that you’ve recovered from your first taste of God’s greatest gift, let us try another shot, shall we?”
February 22, 1896
Chinese New Year
11
Kelly’s Shanghai Special
Clash of cymbals, brass on brass, and the high, thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd sound like some tortured creature crying. Bang, bang, bang! Zhu dashes to her bedroom window to witness quite a hustle-bustle on Dupont Street. It’s the twilight of New Year’s Eve—Chinese New Year’s Eve. Those are fireworks, of course. Combustible explosives, not projectiles aimed at you, that’s what Muse said nine months ago. Was it really nine months ago that she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden? Nine months ago when she last heard fireworks? What a thin, nervous woman she’d been, dropping to her knees, a Daughter of Compassion dodging an imagined bullet.
Nine months, and it is not her wishful thinking—she is not pregnant with Daniel’s child. Muse has run a diagnostic, confirmed this fact. She’s merely grown stouter from the bounty of Jessie Malone’s table, suffers from dyspepsia because butter disagrees with her. She’s lethargic because she’s started drinking and champagne makes her drowsy. She doesn’t get her monthly menses because the contraceptive patch—the bright red square hidden behind her right knee next to the spot where the black patch used to be—halts her cycle completely.
That’s all.
Bang of explosives, stink of gunpowder, clamor of street skirmishes—she remembers street skirmishes nearly every night in Changchi during the last days of the campaign. Remembers? But how can she remember the future? She struggles to sort out the paradoxes in her troubled mind. Because it is her personal past, even though the events she remembers take place six centuries in the future.
Are you telling me I’ve lived six centuries in the past? Then why don’t I remember it?
So familiar this smoke, this clamor. Like a premonition. A premonition is just a memory. A memory of what? A memory of the future.
Early spring has brought other scents to the alleys of Tangrenbu—blooming lilies, quince, almond and cherry branches heavy with aromatic spring flowers. The shops have set up stalls for the New Year celebration displaying a surprising bounty—platters of oranges and kumquats, bags of salted plums, trays of bean-paste pastries, sugared coconut slices, litchi nuts, portly figs, candied strips of winter melon. Strings of gaudy paper flowers festoon the balconies and the balustrades.
Yet Zhu senses a dark sorrow beneath the festive atmosphere whenever she strides down the streets in her Western lady’s disguise, a wicker shopping bag on her arm. Another year has come and gone, and the bachelors of Tangrenbu still long for their families forbidden to immigrate to Gold Mountain. There won’t be a solution for them, not anytime soon.
Space and time have plunged forward and crossed over an imaginary boundary. According to the modern Western calendar, on January first the New Year turned into 1896. But with the first new moon of the ancient lunar year, all the revelers of San Francisco join Tangrenbu in observing Tong Yan Sun Neen, the Chinese New Year. To the Chinese, space and time don’t simply plunge forward, the year changes into something new. When Zhu first t-ported to 1895, it was the Year of the Ram when ego, will, and domination prevailed. A year for Daniel J. Watkins. Now the cycle has changed into the Year of the Monkey, the Year of the Trickster, he whose wily intelligence is not to be trusted.
Zhu doesn’t trust the Trickster. Her skipparents abandoned her in the Year of the Monkey, the Trickster. Deep foreboding threads her waking moments, her dreams.
A premonition is just a memory.
Of the future? No, it’s a lie! She doesn’t remember the future. How can she? She’s got no special powers. She’s just an anonymous Chinese woman. She only remembers her past, the life she’s lived like everybody else.
She steps away from the window, and alphanumerics pulse in her peripheral vision.
“You’re going home,” Muse whispers, “to 2496. Tonight at midnight.”
“The t-port is done, then?”
“It’s done.” Muse downloads a file, and Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc displays in her peripheral vision. Thirty-eight GB.
She wants to sigh and forget about it. This isn’t the same file, it can’t be the same file. It’s not the same size, it’s never the same size. But irritation and fear kindle in her heart.
“Go to the intersection of California and Mason Streets,” Muse says. “They’ve installed a shuttle under the Grande Dome. The site has changed in some physical characteristics, of course, but the intersection is still very much the same. You should be fine.”
“The Grande Dome?”
“You’ll see. The private ecostructure over Nobhill Park. Quite mega. Four luxury hotels, refreshed air and water, on-site vegetable gardens and fruit trees. The works. Always was a fancy spot.”
Zhu thinks about the location. “Why, that’s across the street from where we went to the Artists’ Ball.” She smiles. “Are the LISA techs arranging a hotel room for me tonight?”
After all she’s witnessed of the San Francisco of 1895, she’s seen very little of the San Francisco of her Now except for the EM-Trans station, the Institute’s hydroplex bobbing in the bay, and the Japanese Tea Garden Museum in New Golden Gate Preserve. She feels deprived. And entitled. How well she can imagine the luxury and comfort of her Day!
“Oh, I doubt it,” Muse says. “You’re accused of attempted murder. They’ll debrief you at the Institute, then take you back to jail, Z. Wong. You’ll be officially charged and stand trial within the week.”
“What?” Her irritation and fear spark into anger, and she finds herself on the verge of shouting. “You mean all this has been for nothing? I’ve earned no clemency? No credit?”
“Credit for what?”
“For risking my life. For t-porting to the Gilded Age. I agreed to a deal. Chiron promised me he’d arrange for a new lawyer, leniency, reduced charges.”
“You must be mistaken. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Application
s makes no deals, no promises.”
“No way am I mistaken! Why would I t-port to this godforsaken time in the first place?”
“Because you were required to.”
“No, I was never required to. I agreed to, I made a deal. I demand my rights after all I’ve done.”
“And what, exactly, have you done for the Gilded Age Project?” Muse’s tone is arch.
It’s a controversial point, and Zhu swallows her anger. But what has the monitor done for her except berate her and confuse her? To the point that she’s wondered whether Muse is malfunctioning, defective, or programmed by someone to sabotage her and the Gilded Age Project. But by whom? And why?
“I found the girl at the designated rendezvous.” Apparently Muse needs reminding. “When she was kidnapped by the hatchet men, you advised me to let her go. And I found her again at Selena’s, arranged for her rescue, and took her to the home.”
“But she’s not at the home anymore,” Muse reminds her.
“No, she’s not, but that’s not my fault. She’s a human being, right? With thoughts and feelings of her own? Was I expected to become her fulltime bodyguard? You didn’t advise me to. So how would that have worked out, Muse? Huh?” When the monitor doesn’t answer, she adds, “Anyway, she didn’t have the aurelia. She never had the aurelia, not that I can see. So the Archivists were wrong, wrong, wrong. You’re wrong, Muse.”
Muse is silent.
Which infuriates her. “I have the aurelia. I do. And it’s no accident that I found it in a joss house dedicated to Kuan Yin, is it? That eventually I would go inside that joss house? Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, he knew I’d find the aurelia there. Didn’t he? Didn’t he?”
“Who?” Muse whispers.
“You know damn well who.” Zhu clutches the hardware at the base of her neck, wishing she could rip Muse right out of her skull. Out of her life. “So the aurelia is a time enigma, isn’t it? The old anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman gives it to Chiron in 1967, and he takes from her, takes it back with him to 2467. Then an anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman finds it in a joss house in 1895—that would be me—so I can give it to Wing Sing. Am I getting this right?”
Muse is silent.
“And Wing Sing will give it to her daughter, the green-eyed daughter she’ll have from her fling with Rusty the sailor-man. The Archives support the existence of the green-eyed girl-baby, half Chinese, half Caucasian, right? It doesn’t matter that Rusty will desert Wing Sing, go sailing off to India or wherever. It doesn’t matter that the girl is a child out of wedlock, the child of a prostitute, a child who will never know her father. Donaldina Cameron and the home specialize in girls like her, and all that matters is that she gets born and lives to be seventy-one when, as a servant wheeling Cameron’s wheelchair, she’ll hand the aurelia to Chiron, and the whole goddamn cycle starts all over again. Right?”
Muse is silent.
“So where does it all begin, huh?” Zhu goes to her dressing table, picks up the aurelia, carelessly tossing the precious object back and forth in her hands. “What really is the true object of the Gilded Age Project? Tell me, Muse. Why spend all that money? Why assemble another tachyonic shuttle when the t-port program was shut down because the technology was too dangerous? Why another t-port project when the danger of spacetime pollution is so terrible? When there’s so much potential for error? For a thousand violations of the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle. Why trap me into this t-port with promises of leniency that the LISA techs have no intention of honoring if and when I return? Answer me! Why?”
“The aurelia is a fine hand-made brooch in the Art Nouveau style with two carats’ worth of diamonds… .”
“Oh, shut up, Muse. I’ll tell you why.” Zhu’s anger tightens into fury, a vise around her heart. She slams the aurelia down on her dressing table, nearly smashing it to pieces. “I’m just a courier for a goddamn enigma. Right? That’s all. Oh, how Chiron moaned and groaned over his own t-port to 1967, to the Summer of Love. Where he ate forbidden food, enjoyed forbidden love. The truth is, he made a mistake, didn’t he? What happened, Muse? Did he forget that he took the aurelia from some old Chinese lady, just another cool thing that happened in the park that summer, tucking some insignificant freebee into his pocket?”
Muse is silent.
“He forgot he had the aurelia in his jacket pocket when he t-ported back to his Now, didn’t he? So he accidentally created another CTL. Didn’t he. Didn’t he?”
Muse is silent.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think happened. That’s the secret the LISA techs have kept from me. And a CTL is an artifact of tachyportation, isn’t that what Chiron was trying to tell me?” She holds this thought clear and steady—the file Zhu.doc is different each time Muse downloads it. The holoid of her interview with Chiron, it’s different each time, too. “A CTL always exists in the One Day of spacetime,. Without beginning, without end. But it’s artificial, a human construct. CTLs don’t exist in nature. They’re unstable. And t-porting, it’s not natural, either. What happens, Muse, if a CTL once ascertained by the t-porter caught in it starts to unravel?”
Muse is silent.
“I mean, under the uncertainty principle, the observer affects the observed, right? That affect must be magnified a thousand times if the thing observed is unstable, like a CTL. And what if the observer herself is unstable, too? Troubled? Accused? In love? What then?”
Zhu picks up the aurelia, finding—thank goodness—nothing of the brooch is broken or loose. She’s stronger than she appears, the tiny golden woman trapped in a butterfly’s wings. Tonight’s the night, then. The t-port is over. She’s accomplished nothing. But before she leaves the Gilded Age behind forever, she’s got one last vital task to do as the courier covering up Chiron’s blunder.
She goes to her wardrobe, pulls out her pearl gray silk dress. She was going to lend the dress to Wing Sing, as Jessie had suggested. Now the dress is too tight even to slip on. How did she ever fit into it?
She relaces her corset so tightly she can barely breathe. “You know what, Muse? I think I finally get it. This CTL is causing instability up and down the timeline. That’s why reality has become so mutable since I t-ported to this Now. Why things keep changing right before my eyes.”
“What keeps changing?” Muse whispers.
“The billboard on the cigar wagon. Eleanor Olney’s pince-nez. Wing Sing’s feet, are they bound or unbound? My skin tanning, for pity’s sake, when I’m supposed to be protected by Block. Your goddamn file, Zhu.doc.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Zhu.doc is exactly the same as it’s always been. How can it possibly change? It’s a file in the Archives.”
“Oh, stop this ridiculous charade, Muse. You yourself keep changing. You’re supportive, then you’re subversive. You goad me to fulfill the object of the project, then give me advice directly counter to that objective.”
“I’ve done no such thing.“
“Stop it! Are you defective? Are you damaged? Would you know if you were? Would you know if someone programmed you to sabotage me? And what about me? I’ve changed.”
“That’s what people do, Z. Wong,” Muse says soothingly. “Unlike an Archive file or an Artificial Intelligence like me, people change all the time. And you’ve had quite a few novel experiences during your t-port, haven’t you?”
“You mean Daniel J. Watkins?” She feels a sharp contraction in her soul and her heart whenever she thinks about Daniel. “He’s a part of the disintegrating CTL, too, isn’t he? One minute he’s courteous, charming, tender, loving, intelligent. The next minute, he’s a monster. Physically abusive. Mentally abusive, calling me a lunatic. He loves me, he loves me not. No, wait. He adores me, he reviles me.”
“Daniel J. Watkins is a shining example of the privileged male intellectual of this period with his misogynist and racist views, Z. Wong,” Muse says, stern now. “He would call you a lunatic even if you hadn’t revealed your identity as t-porter. Which you were not
supposed to do under the Tenets.”
“Yeah, right.” But Muse doesn’t seem all that upset over her many violations of the Tenets, so she leaves it alone. Of course, Muse is right about Daniel, but she mulls over everything she’s seen and heard. “Views of this period. It’s as if the views of this period are a part of the CTL, too, shifting from one extreme to the other. Women are either angels or whores, neither and both. Men think women are powerful, all-consuming, dangerous. And then they think women are weak, objects to be consumed, beneath contempt.”
“Men of this Now are confused about women,” Muse admits. “But you know very well he’s a man of his times in other ways, too.”
“Yeah. He’s succumbed to the temptations of hellishly strong drink, cocaine therapy, and morphine relaxation.”
“It’s a pity, I know—“
“It’s a pity I can do nothing to help him under your goddamn Tenets.”
“Dear me, Z. Wong, I do believe you’ve fully informed him of the dangers he faces. You’ve stood by his side during his worst moments. That’s more than many other women would do. I shall mention your patience and kindness at your clemency hearing.”
Small hope uplifts her for a moment. Then she inhales sharply. “Wait a minute. I thought you just told me I won’t get a clemency hearing. That I’m going to jail, standing trial for attempted murder.”
Muse is silent.
She feels stifled, nearly faint for a minute. Her gut throbs beneath the relaced corset. She yanks the pearl gray silk dress on, and the dress floats over her, a perfect fit.
“What will happen if the CTL falls to pieces?” She spies a pulsing black dot in her peripheral vision. Muse is very, very unhappy. Good. “What will happen if the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman never gives the aurelia to Chiron in the Golden Gate Park of 1967? Will the impact disrupt all of spacetime the way the Save Betty Project did? Only worse, much worse this time? Will the disruption cause a massive dim spot in the Archives that jeopardizes Chiron’s Summer of Love Project? Will that disruption unleash another alternate reality? If I don’t deliver the aurelia to Wing Sing, and her daughter doesn’t deliver it to Chiron, will I be the one to destroy the universe as we know it?”