The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (45 page)

“Take
Broadway to Stockton,” Muse whispers in subaudio, “go through Tangrenbu.
Hurry.”

Tangrenbu
is the last place she wants to go, but she follows Muse’s instructions, slowing
to a walk as the invisible barrier of Chinatown rises before her like a
tangible thing. She’s reasonably safe in her Western dress, her lungs heaving
against the corset’s constriction. Anonymous slim men in denim
sahms
crowd
the street, their fedoras pulled low, their faces averted.

Zhu presses
herself against a shop wall, glances down the block. The hatchet men are
milling around on the sidewalk outside Selena’s. The eyepatch spots her the
moment she ventures across Pacific Avenue and hurries down Stockton. Well, of
course. Who else in Tangrenbu would be dressed in cerulean silk? What she’d
give right now for her denim
sahm
and fedora! She pushes men aside as
the hatchet men pound down the block, scattering a basket of bok choy, kicking over
a cage of clucking chickens.

“Turn
left,” Muse whispers, alphanumerics flickering in her peripheral vision. “Down
that alley, turn right. Go in there.”

Elaborate
gingerbread, a curving roof, gilt balconies—it’s the joss house she passed by
before. Zhu ducks inside, kicks off her button boots.

“Joss
house,” Muse whispers, “means god house. From the Portuguese ‘deos.’ Corrupted
to ‘joss.’”

“Gosh,
I always wanted to know that.”

“Of
course you did.”

The
joss house is smoky from burning incense and lit by a few flickering candles,
but she’s still too visible. Beneath the dress and underskirt, her slip,
corset, and bloomers are white. She rips the cerulean dress off in front of the
astonished priest, popping buttons, and wads the silk into a bundle. She tears
off her hat and veil, and approaches the shrine. If the other worshippers
notice her, they give no sign but serenely continue their meditations. She
finds a place in their midst, bows her head, calms her beating heart, and sits
cross-legged, smoothing her slip around her. You can bet no lady of this time
would ever sit like this. But what will the eyepatch notice in the smoky dimness?

The
hatchet men stride in, their Western boots a clattering contrast to the silence
of Tangrenbu’s sandals and slippers. Zhu huddles next to a wizened old man and
instinctively, perhaps missing his wife or his daughter back in China, the old
man pats her shoulder. She takes his arm, slings it across her shoulders, and huddles
closer. The hush, the darkness, the flickering candlelight, the incense, and especially
the large gilt deity reclining on the shrine piled high with gifts from the
pious—all these subdue the eyepatch and his companions. Or maybe it’s the tug
of tradition. They glance around, jostle a worshipper, and quickly leave.

A hand
on her arm, and Zhu cries out. The priest gently asks her something, but she
can’t understand his lilting words. A dialect she’s not familiar with. She
finds a coin in her feedbag purse, hands it to him. He nods and smiles.

She
catches her breath, looks around. Paper flowers spill from the ceiling to the
floor in long, sumptuous strands. Silk tassels, gold silk flags, loops of
multicolored beads bedeck the shrine. The altarpiece is a huge slab of mottled
green marble. Bronze bowls with the look of antiquity hold smoldering cones of
incense.

She
smiles at the wizened old man, whose face is now shiny with tears. She crawls
toward the shrine in supplication. Thick yellow candles mounted in massive
brass candlesticks send forth their scent and soft golden light. Hundreds of
slim sticks of incense arranged like smoking fans flank the shrine. Supplicants
have heaped fresh fruit, left steaming teas in cloisonné teapots. There is a
tray with a whole roasted pig, clay-pot chickens, bowls of rice. The scents of
food and tea mingle with the incense, the candle smoke.

The
priest takes a strip of parchment scrawled with calligraphy, burns it in a
brass bowl, scoops the ashes into a bowl of water, and sucks the water into his
mouth. He seizes a brass bell and, clanging the bell loudly, sprays ashy water
from his mouth onto the floor as he whirls like a dervish.

The
worshipers murmur in approval. “Cast demons out. Cast demons out.”

Zhu
crawls closer to the shrine, peering up at the impressive gilt deity. With a
start, she recognizes Her—Kuan Yin.

Here
in this joss house in San Francisco, in 1895?

Of
course. She is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the goddess of mercy. She who
sacrifices that others may live. The virgin, the mother, the destroyer. A
teacher of secrets. Kuan Yin has been worshipped by the people of Tan for five
thousand years.

Astonished,
Zhu crawls closer still, slipping among the worshippers. More fruit, trays of
plum candies, more fans of incense sending steams of wavering smoke into the
close air. Candlelight flickers on gold coins scattered in offering. There are
cabochons of jade, lozenges of lapis lazuli, carved coral, strands of pearls.
Kuan Yin gazes serenely down at Her glittering bounty.

And
there amid the incense and the candles, among the coins and the clay-pot chickens,
lies the aurelia.

A
Premonition is Just a Memory

Zhu
picks the bauble up and holds it for the first time—the aurelia.

The
aurelia is surprisingly heavy for something so delicate. Must be on account of
the solid gold. The diamonds glimmer. The tiny tinted panes project spots of
multicolored light onto the palm of her hand like miniature stained glass
windows. The aurelia. Of course. Zhu would know it anywhere. The aurelia. It
feels alien in her hand, the gold hot from proximity to the candles, the
burning incense. So hot it feels as if it will brand her, burn a cross-shaped stigmata
into her palm.

Then
suddenly the aurelia feels so familiar, the way a ring you always wear feels
familiar on your hand. A wedding ring, perhaps, so familiar. Or terrible, a
ring from a marriage gone wrong. So familiar, too.

Like
a premonition.

A
premonition of disaster, of pain. Of unforgivable loss. Suddenly the Art
Nouveau brooch, this meaningless bauble--an insect wrought in gold with an
anonymous woman caught at its center—fills Zhu with such unreasonable fear that
she kneels and whirls and glances around the joss house.

The
hatchet men. Have they returned for a second look? Did they see her the first
time, after all? Adrenaline soars through her blood. There they are! They’re at
the door, they’ve found her just like she feared, found her at last. They’re
pulling out their knives.

She
scrambles away on her knees, cringing before the eyepatch’s knife.

And
then there’s nothing.

Nothing
in the semidarkness except the priest spewing ashy water from his mouth on the
ground and three men standing at the entrance. Three old Chinese men in denim
sahms
.
They bow, slip off their sandals, drift in, sit. Zhu has never seen them
before.

She
crawls away from the shrine, praying that no one saw her take the offering. The
worshipers only sit, their heads bowed, their eyes closed, or gaze raptly at
Kuan Yin. No one notices her transgression. She finds a smoky corner and
huddles there, cross-legged, cradling the aurelia while sparkles of shock pop
up and down her spine.

Who
in Tangrenbu could have possessed an Art Nouveau gold brooch? Only fancy shops
on Market Street carry such a thing, not the shops in Tangrenbu.

The
aurelia, at last.

Like
a long-long friend.

Or like
a piece of plutonium tossed into her lap, radioactive and deadly.

“Muse,”
she whispers feverishly. Sweat trickles down her temple. “What is happening to
me? What is happening to reality?”
Never supposed to happen this way.
“This isn’t the way the Gilded Age Project is supposed to go, and you know it.
I’m just the chaperon for an anonymous Chinese girl. She was supposed to have
the aurelia, not me. Not me.”

Shivering
with fear, her teeth chattering. It had seemed so real for a moment, that the
hatchet men had stepped back inside searching for her, wielding knives.

Muse
is silent. Only the priest’s chanting monotone, men sighing and murmuring in
the dark.

“Damn
you, Muse. You better tell me what’s going on.”

Alphanumerics
pulse in her peripheral vision, and Muse displays the directory of her Archive,
chooses a file.

Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc.

Thirty-six
GB and eight hundred KB.

“No.
No! There must be some mistake. There’s almost six hundred more KB!”

Muse
accesses the file effortlessly, downloads the holoid into her optic nerve.

A
tiny holoid field like a baseball made of blue light springs up in front of her
face, and she sees the room swathed like a cloud, herself in the prison uniform,
and Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.

“Then
why,” she says in the holoid, “after all the technological breakthroughs, the
expenditure of resources, did you stop t-port projects?” Her tone is wary,
deferent, almost timid.

She
remembers now how terrified she was. The red-haired man had filled her with
nameless dread. The deal her lawyer had struck stunk of cooptation, payoffs,
illicit DNA experiments to be performed on political prisoners who had no one
to defend them. Strange experiments. To be performed on her.

In
the holoid Chiron says, “That’s confidential.” A drink in his hand, something
clear and sparkling in a crystal glass.

Zhu
blinks. Chiron had a drink? She doesn’t remember him having a drink.

“I
have a right to know,” she says in the holoid. “My lawyer said you’d explain.”

Tinkle
of ice in his glass. “Remember I told you about the Save Betty Project?”

“The
t-port project that polluted all of spacetime, permitting another reality to
intrude into our reality.”

“That’s
right. There were those in the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications
who believed they could control the pollution.” Chiron sighs. “Ariel Herbert
and others in control of the majority interests of the Institute persuaded the
dissenters to back down. And they shut tachyportation down. Shut down the most
exciting technological breakthrough since the silicon chip. And the Save Betty
Project? Well. Maybe the disaster was overplayed. Betty died in her personal
past. I’m guessing she knew she was going to die.”

“Betty
had,” Zhu says in the holoid, “a premonition.”

Chiron
nods. “You could say that a premonition is just a memory. A memory of the
future.” He sips his drink. “But Betty didn’t die in the past. We sent a
t-porter and brought her back into her own timeline. Into her personal Now. And
then she died when she was supposed to. We were sure we’d fixed things. And the
Summer of Love Project? The girl in 1967 was supposed to be pregnant, and then
she aborted her fetus, and then she became pregnant again by another man, and then
she
did
have her child. A daughter who changed the course of history.”

“So
I’m right,” Zhu whispers in the holoid, “you did do more than cocreate reality with
the Cosmic Mind.”

In
the holoid, Chiron inclines his head. “Tachyportation itself has become a part
of reality.” He swirls his drink. “So how does t-porting function if all
reality is a process between the observer and the observed? If a multitude of
probabilities are constantly collapsing into or out of the timeline? And the
t-porter herself is another probability? Her observation of and participation
in reality must become a part of the process, right?”

“I
guess so,” Zhu says in the holoid.

“Cosmicist
philosophers could no longer deny the effect. In the aftermath of the Save
Betty Project and the Summer of Love Project, our philosophers set out three
theories of the true nature of reality—superdeterminism, the multiverse theory,
and the resiliency principle. You following me?”

“Uh,
maybe,” Zhu says in the holoid.

But
now, in 1895, Zhu listens and watches, breathless and with full attention. Her hammering
heart tells her that her very life is on the line. On the timeline.

“Superdeterminism,”
Chiron says, “posits that everything already is the way it is in the the
perpetuity that is spacetime. What we perceive as doubts, hesitations, shifts
of position, accidents, happenstance, time paradoxes, even t-porting itself—all
of that is a random blip and all our acts of free will are an illusion. Everything
is and always has been from the very existence of time, and no one and nothing
can change anything.”

“That’s
pretty extreme,” Zhu says in the holoid.

And
she thinks now, in 1895, how can that be? When reality is shifting all around
her?

“Yeah,
it’s a pretty oppressive theory,” Chiron says in the holoid. “Then there’s the
multiverse theory, pretty much the opposite, suggesting that reality is a set
of probabilities constantly collapsing in and out of the timeline, creating
whole new universes all along the way. T-porting is especially dangerous, if
that’s true, because our technology may cause a probability to collapse out of
the timeline we’re living in, a probablility that wasn’t supposed to exist.”