The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (60 page)

“Oh,
we have disneylands and playplexes and metaworlds. Plenty of zoos in telespace
for the masses to jack into. When I was a kid, I used to think dinosaurs and
dodos shared American forests with elephants and lynxes at the turn of the millennium
and how lucky people were to actually see them.” At his puzzled look, she adds,
“It was a cheap virtual zoo that didn’t distinguish between extinct species and
living ones or which epochs and habitats they lived in. Or maybe I just wasn’t
paying attention.” She sniffs the air, which smells like new-mown grass and
eucalyptus leaves. “But nothing like this, real live animals. Only the very
rich and very rich private foundations like the Luxon Institute for
Superluminal Applications can afford to maintain live animals in their natural habitats.
New Golden Gate Preserve is one such habitat in San Francisco and, no, the
public isn’t allowed in.”

“Then
you have become very rich being here with me.”

“So
I have.” Her heart clenches with joy at his words, and she flings her arms
around him. They stand embracing in the fresh air amid the beauty of the
gardens. She summons the monitor. “Muse, does this beautiful place last a long
time?”

Muse
searches the Archives, posts a file in Zhu’s peripheral vision. “Woodward’s
Gardens will be torn down five years from now, at the turn of this century. The
site will be paved over and filled in with industrial warehouses and low-cost
multifamily housing. Where the grand entrance stands now will be the on-ramp to
a major elevated freeway. In the earthquake of 2129, the elevation will collapse,
killing two thousand commuters at the height of the rush hour. In 2254--“

“Muse
off,” Zhu says, unexpected tears welling. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

Daniel
takes her hand. He’s somber and pale. “By God, is the future really that
terrible?”

“You’re
beginning to believe me?”

His
hand trembles in hers. “How can you bear it?”

“We
bear it because we must. Oh, listen!” She doesn’t want to see him sink into
depression again on account of her tall tales. “Listen.” In the distance, a
pipe organ strikes up a lively tune. “Let’s go see.”

They
stroll up to a stage set inside of a cage just outside the zoological gardens,
the back wall equipped with a door leading to another cage inside the zoo proper.
A dapper fellow in tails and a top hat steps onstage, equipped with a riding
crop and bucket of chopped apples. “Ladies and gentlemen-ah, we now-ah present
Woodward’s famous dancing bears-ah!”

The
back door rattles open and four sizeable brown bears amble out onto the stage.
Each bear wears a silly hat and a costume. Zhu spies a bellboy’s cap and a necktie;
a sailor’s cap and a life preserver; a lady’s straw boater and an apron; a lace
bonnet and a ballerina’s tutu.

“Hah,
hup, hup, hup!” shouts the dapper fellow, slapping his crop but mostly tossing
apple chunks which the bears catch in their jaws.

The
bears whirl, roll over, climb up onto pedestals, stand up on their hind legs,
paws batting the air, and turn slow shuffling pirouettes. They snuffle and bleat
with strange goatlike cries, bend and lunge.

With
each burst of applause, the dapper fellow winks and sends his performers into
another frenzy of gesticulation and posture. “Woodward’s dancing bears-ah!”

“That’s
probably bear abuse,” Zhu says, enchanted, “but I don’t care.”

Daniel
laughs, a welcome sound. “Bear abuse? I suppose now you’re going to tell me
that people in future worry about whether bears have feelings.”

“Not
just whether bears have feelings, but whether they’re happy.”

“By
God,” he murmurs, “I feel just like that fellow in the bellboy’s cap.”

“Muse,”
Zhu whispers, suddenly inspired. “Shoot a holoid of this. Do it for him. Can
you do it?”

Alphanumerics
flicker in her peripheral vision.

But
as they watch Woodward’s bears dance, Daniel’s smile fades and a wistful mood
falls over him. That awful wooden look steals over his face, and his eyes seem
to sink, their surface icing over. His hand grows cold in hers.

“Daniel,”
she says gaily, “you’ve gotten much too thin. I’m gonna buy you a squarer, and
damn the cholesterol. I know how much you love sautéed oysters.”

“No,
no,” he mutters, distracted. Distant. “I’m not hungry, miss.”

“Oh,
but you haven’t had oysters in such a long time. Come, let’s picnic down by the
lake. Anyway, I want to show you something lovely and amazing.”

She takes
his hand and firmly leads him to a bench set along the path, sits him down. Has
she pushed him too far today? Well, he’s got to eat. She hurries to a food
stall staffed by a hardy Chinese cook with a huge smile and a quick
intelligence sparkling in his dark eyes.

“Could
you make me an oyster loaf, please?” She hands him a silver bit.

“Missy
mean a squarer?”

“I
do, indeed. A squarer, please.”

“For
sick gentleman friend?”

She
looks at him, surprised. “He looks that bad, does he?”

The
cook gives her a look of deep sympathy. “I make good squarer for him.” He
rewards her with that smile. “And for you, too, missy.”

The
cook seizes a loaf of fresh milk bread, slashes the loaf in half with a huge
steel knife, presses out a hollow, and slathers top and bottom with sweet
butter. He pops the bread into a little wood-burning oven to toast. Next he tosses
a bowl of fresh bay oysters into a shiny copper sauté pan with a huge scoop of
butter, pinches coarse salt, black pepper, and garlic shavings onto the shellfish,
and sets everything sizzling on the stovetop above the oven. Then he takes the
toasted bread shell from the oven, spoons the oysters in the bottom, clamps the
lid on top, and divides the gigantic sandwich into quarters. He wraps the
fragrant concoction in crisp white paper.

“Squarer
for you, missy,” says the cook. “Is my San Francisco special.”

“Thank
you, sir. I will always remember your culinary skill.”

Zhu
hurries back to Daniel. He sits slumped and shivering, his face fallen, his
arms folded across his chest like the limbs of a puppet.

“Muse?”
she says, panicked.

“Give
him a neurobic,” Muse advises. “Two, if you’ve got enough left.”

The
LISA techs supplied her with nine months’ worth of neurobics and no more. She’s
taken care to ration them out. She finds the last half a dozen in her feedbag
purse, takes out two without a second thought. She breaks open a capsule under
Daniel’s nose, and his eyes flicker, a little color filters into his cheeks as
he breathes the healing fumes. She breaks open another. Now he smiles wanly.

“What
have you got there, my angel? It smells wonderful.”

She
leads him to the picnic tables set beneath a whispering willow tree. They sit
and munch on the squarer. After two enthusiastic bites, Daniel pauses, becoming
pensive again. “I wasn’t the first,” he says heavily, “to make pictures move.”

“You
don’t have to be the first. This is only the start of the moving picture
business. What’s needed is a creative mind like yours to choose which pictures
will move. To choose which stories to tell with those pictures. And to pioneer more
technological innovations. Believe me, a whole new world is opening up for you.”

If
she was hoping to rouse him with her encouragement, she’s disappointed now.

“By
God, I’d like champagne with my oysters.”

“If
your mother fed you whiskey and morphine to keep a little boy quiet, you’re
going to have to fight every day of your life for sobriety, Daniel. Trust me,
it will be worth it.”

“But
why?” He throws down his food. “Oysters taste so much better with champagne.
Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. We
do
die tomorrow, don’t
we? As life follows birth, so death follows life. That’s the way the world
works, is it not?”

Zhu
sighs. She too wishes she had a glass of champagne to wash down her oysters.
And she wonders. If she dies in the past—which seems inevitable, now—then her
birth and her life are to follow her death. How many times has she made this
loop? How many times has she thought these thoughts? Though, at the moment, her
thoughts feel fresh and new. Eat, drink, and be merry? Why not? Why not? How
will she bear the rest of her life?

“You
know, I can’t see the stars dance anymore,” Daniel mutters.

“The
stars dance?”

“Yes,
in the sky over marvelous Californ’. There was a time when I could look up and
see the stars dance. Not anymore.”

“Muse?”
Zhu whispers. “Help me.”

That
scratchy feeling irritates her left eye as Muse downloads data through her
optic nerve and projects a holoid field. A translucent wall of blue light hovers
over the grass in front of the willow tree.

Daniel
gasps, leaps to his feet, circles the translucent wall. He thrusts his hands
into the field, marveling at the lack of resistance.
Well, of course,
his expression tells her,
this how the future would do it.
He guffaws
with delight, and his cheeks bloom with color. He glances at her, jubilant,
expectant. “Go on, go on! What’s next?”

She
blinks, and Muse’s holoid of Woodward’s dancing bears pops up amid the swaying
leaves of the willow tree. There they are, the bears in their silly hats and
costumes, yelping for apple chunks. The holoid is nothing special to Zhu, just
a digital recapitulation of a previously recorded reality. But Daniel drops to
his knees, ruining his trousers with grass stains as he crawls all around the
holoid, studying the three-dimensional images from every angle.

To
Zhu’s surprise, Muse goes on, showing holoids of megalopolises, the Mars
terraformation, the EM-Trans, the huge infrastructure of space stations
orbiting the Earth. Then holocausts, conquests, visions of apocalypse. The
brown ages that last for terrible centuries. And restoration of the Earth, the
New Renaissance. A stampede of virtual gazelles leaps over a blind where a man
and woman lie hidden together.

Daniel
watches, transfixed. “Will I be able to do this?”

“Not
all of it, not yet,” Zhu says, smiling. “Three-d, let alone holoids, are a long
way away from this day. But look, Daniel. Look and learn. Perhaps with your
moving pictures you’ll tell the story of a young man from Saint Louis who went
to San Francisco.”

*  
*   *

As
the afternoon slips into an evening promising more rain, Zhu hails a cab back
to their south o’ the slot hidey-hole. The cab driver patiently cajoles his young
bay gelding that rolls his eyes at every drunken whoop and bellow. The first
celebrants of Saint Patrick’s Day have staggered off to their favorite brothels
or cribs, passed out in the back rooms of saloons, or lurched home to their
scornful wives. Now another crowd of celebrants streams into the streets and
saloons, workers done with the dayshift at factories, warehouses, and
sweatshops.

“Did
ye see the rainbow this afternoon, miss?” the vegetable vendor cries out as she
and Daniel jostle through the crowd on their way back to the boardinghouse. “Ah,
ye should’ve seen it. Them rowdies from Sausalito were hangin’ around here, and
they saw it.” He adds with a significant wink, “Guess they didn’t see you and
the mister go out earlier.”

A
sharp foreboding pierces her, and Zhu pulls Daniel to a stop. “Let’s circle
around the block.”

“I
cannot around circle the block. I just can’t, my angel. So tired. . . .”

Boom
boom boom!
Fiery debris sprays from their room on the second floor.
People scream, jump back, scramble away from the blast. A knot of five men stand
impassively on the corner, watching. One boldly dangles a can of kerosene in
his hand.

“Stay
here,” Zhu commands, helping Daniel lean up against a lamppost. Cupping her
hand beneath her belly, she runs toward the boardinghouse.
I’m going to get
you.
That’s all she can think. She’s had the place where she sleeps
sabotaged before.
I’m going to freakin’ get you!

A
small dark man with a mane of greasy black hair loiters at the corner.
Harvey—who else? He laughs, holding a match to his cigar. Before he and his
thugs even notice her, Zhu thrusts the side of her hand in his kidneys, in his
neck. He turns, startled, in pain, and brandishes his fists, but he can’t bring
himself to slug a pregnant woman.
Too bad.
She hoists up her skirts and
lets him have it with a kick to his kneecap, the pointy toe of her button boot
connecting with a satisfying
thwack
against his cartilage. Harvey
crumbles to the sidewalk, and his thugs gather around him in confusion.

Men
run toward Zhu from all directions--the local bulls and the local guys, the
bartender at the Devil’s Acre, the landlady’s son, Old Father Elphich’s cadre
of newsboys.

“You
bastard, you bastard,” Zhu yells, kicking Harvey in his ribs, on his back. “You
leave me and the father of my baby alone!” She nearly retches from the stink of
whiskey on him.