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The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

Page 11

by Lisa Mason


  She’s not squatting around a trash fire now.

  Zhu picks up a slice of toasted bread thickly spread with butter and honey while Jessie regales the gentlemen with tales of betting on the ponies. She nibbles. Well, why not? She’s allowed. The technicians at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave her the latest all-purpose inoculation protecting her from virtually any kind of bacteria, virus, or poison. Earlier t-porters had not been so fortunate. Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco was forbidden to eat or drink during his t-port to San Francisco, 1967. An irony, since Chiron, as a rich cosmicist heir, was accustomed to elegant fare. And a second irony, since food and drink in America during 1967 was subject to modern regulations assuring quality and wholesomeness. Still, the LISA techs feared that Chi could get sick. That the food could have been contaminated with toxins or parasites that didn’t affect the people of 1967 due to exposure and natural immunities but could have jeopardized Chiron, perhaps fatally.

  “Do you know I had to carry filters and strain my water for drinking and bathing?” Chiron had told her during her instruction session. “I carried ten thousand prophylaks to 1967. I had to wrap my hands every time I touched something. Or someone.”

  Zhu lhad aughed. “What a hassle!”

  “You don’t know the half of it. I wore a necklace of nutribeads. The calories were supposed to be enough to nourish me, but I was always starving.”

  Chiron had disobeyed the injunction not to eat. He had tasted food and wine during the Summer of Love Project. “Sharing nourishment with the people of that day turned out to be a communal experience that brought me closer to them. Dangerously closer.”

  “Why dangerous?” Zhu had asked, troubled by his dark look.

  “I fell in love.”

  Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, the tall cool sophisticate? Fell in love?

  She eats the toast, her eyes drifting to Daniel again.

  “You hear me, missy?” Jessie is saying. “Jar me, maybe she needs to go back to bed.”

  “Maybe she does,” Daniel says with a wink.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, what did you say?” Zhu says, annoyed at his insinuation.

  “I said, you see that Li’l Lucy stays off the booze. You stay off the booze, too.” Jessie loves to be peremptory and demanding in front of an audience. It probably makes her feel powerful, in control. She knows very well that Zhu never drinks.

  Daniel watches their exchange sardonically, but Mr. Schultz pays no attention at all. Zhu is just the Chinese servant.

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, but you know I never drink.” The prim polite words stick in her mouth, false and gluey. She’s a modern woman, damn it. She isn’t deferential, frightened, shy, or weak. She doesn’t possess a servant’s mentality. She isn’t ignorant. She doesn’t need to play this pathetic game of manners. She doesn’t need to stay at the boardinghouse, at all. She can run away and make her own way in 1895 any time she wants to.

  Ah, but it’s not that simple, and Zhu knows it.

  *

  Jessie bought her from the eyepatch. Bought her, just like that, for a hundred dollars in gold. Zhu should have been flattered. Since working as Jessie’s bookkeeper, she’s seen bills of sale from the Morton Alley cribs, including one recording the purchase of a cross-eyed girl for seventy-five cents plus a bolt of silk.

  But at first Zhu was furious, and frantic to find Wing Sing. That evening, Jessie seized her by the elbow, took her upstairs to the spare bedroom in Mariah’s suite, and promptly locked her in.

  Locked in the room, Zhu argued with Muse. “I don’t understand you, Muse. Finding Wing Sing is the whole reason the LISA techs sent me on this damn t-port. How could you advise me to let her go?”

  “And what were you to do?” the monitor asked. “Single-handedly fight three heavily armed hatchet men? In those long skirts?”

  “Then I should have gone with her.”

  “And be forced into prostitution?”

  “What?”

  “What do you think Wing Sing is?”

  “She’s a teenage girl.”

  “Z. Wong, she was sold to a brothel in Chinatown.”

  “No. No, I can’t accept that.” Zhu frantically thought over what happened. “Then what’s all this stuff about her dowry?”

  “She was tricked. Her mother was probably tricked, too. But maybe not. Her mother could have sold her.”

  “I don’t believe you.” That poor ragged child crouching beneath her table at the Japanese Tea Garden. Sold by her own mother?

  Muse was impatient. “Z. Wong, I thought Chiron explained. Most Chinese women and girls in San Francisco in 1895 were smuggled in to become prostitutes.”

  “Chiron said slaves.”

  “Household slaves when they were between the ages of five and eleven. Sex slaves after that. Immigration authorities bribed, false names, etcetera. Would you like to view your instructions holoid again? I will download Zhu.doc for you.”

  “No.” Zhu paced across the locked room. She smelled the sour odor of her frustration, of her fear. “Then who is this woman who just ‘bought’ me?”

  Alphanumerics flickered in her peripheral vision. “My analysis indicates a high probability that she is a procurer. A madam.”

  “You mean she runs a brothel?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is this a brothel?”

  Muse posted a line of tiny print. “No, it appears to be a residence. The more successful madams lived off the premises.”

  “Oh, that’s just great. Then she’s going to force me into prostitution.” Zhu strode to the window, yanked it open, and looked down. Maybe thirty-five feet to the ground. No pipes. No gutter, no gingerbread, no fire escape. Nothing. Excellent. She’d break her damn neck if she jumped.

  All she had were the clothes on her back, data in the monitor, a feedbag purse filled with neurobics and pharmaceuticals, and a very nice mollie knife. No rope. No pitons. Not even a tube of superglue. She got out the mollie knife and began cutting apart a bed sheet. She could make a rope. Rappel down the wall.

  “Z. Wong, please refrain from causing damage to these premises.”

  That was when a cold needle of fear stitched down her spine. Why was the monitor obstructing her mission?

  “Muse,” Zhu said evenly. “I swore I would fulfill the object of my project. I want the criminal charges against me reduced.”

  “Stay calm, Z. Wong,” the monitor said.

  “I am not staying calm. I’m getting the hell out of here. No way in a million years will I prostitute myself. And I’ve got a duty to rescue Wing Sing.” She felt terrible about abandoning the defenseless girl, for whom she felt a rush of protective loyalty. A teenager forced into prostitution? Tricked? Sold by her mother?

  She was just a kid.

  “Take it easy, Z. Wong,” Muse insisted. “This is the turn of events. I cannot verify your presence in this residence, but neither do the Archives refute it. So deal with it. Try some of that brandy on the nightstand. It’s probably quite good.”

  “’This is the turn of events’? That’s all you’ve got to say?” Zhu snapped. It was almost as if Muse were encouraging her to abandon the project. But why? Was Muse testing her?

  “You don’t know San Francisco in 1895,” Muse continued smoothly. “You could get yourself killed out there. Please review the Closed Time Loop Peril of the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle.” The monitor posted the text in her peripheral vision.

  That shut her up. She paced around the room while Muse rattled on about the technopolistic plutocracy and how employment during the hyperindustrial era closely resembled servitude. As if that was supposed to make her feel better.

  “Imagine taxes so high people’s incomes were halved,” Muse argued. “Imagine housing costs and living costs so high that the rest of people’s incomes were consumed by daily expenses. That it was normal to assume debt in excess of one’s personal resources. That was the heyday of the technopolistic plutocracy. The woman w
ho bought you is a small operator.” Muse added, “She’ll come after you if you run away. She knows this town. She knows the police. She could get you thrown in jail. You don’t want to go to the Pest Hall, the jail for Chinese. Trust me, you don’t. Besides,” and this, Muse’s final argument, clinched it, “you’re more valuable to her for your intelligence. Convince her of that, and she won’t force you into prostitution.”

  In the morning, Jessie Malone unlocked and entered Zhu’s room and introduced herself. Splendid in a lavender shirtwaist and billowing skirts, she reeked of patchouli oil and booze. She had Mariah bring in a tray with fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee with cream and sugar. The black maid silently regarded Zhu with sympathetic eyes.

  “I got a feeling about you, missy,” Jessie said in a blunt manner that Zhu liked in spite of herself. “There’s something I see in you. Maybe you can tell me what it is.”

  Zhu reprised her alibi, embellishing the story with a British education in Hong Kong. She declared, “I didn’t sell myself to him, Miss Malone. I have no intention of selling myself here.” The passion she summoned uttering those words surprised even herself.

  “Did it for love, what a shame,” Jessie said, circling her, appraising her as if she were a cut of beef. “Jar me, you are a skinny one. My johns don’t much cotton to skinny ones. You ain’t got the consumption, eh? No pox? No clap? No plague? No worms?”

  Chastened by her argument with Muse, Zhu quickly established that she was fit and capable. “My name is Zhu.”

  Jessie tried it out. “Shoo? Zoo?”

  “It means ‘pearl,’” Zhu said.

  “Then I’ll call you Pearl.”

  “Also ‘pig,’” Zhu laughed.

  Jessie liked that, too. “I’ll call you Pearls Before Swine.”

  “Call me Zhu. Zzsh. Zzsh. Zhu.” She demonstrated the buzzing noise.

  Zhu proceeded to pull a copy of Poems of Pleasure by Ella Wheeler Wilcox off a bookshelf and read from it. She set out a column of numbers, added them, then divided the result by five.

  Jessie Malone didn’t miss a beat. She produced a written contract, crossed out some clauses, scribbled in others. The contract stipulated that Zhu agreed to work for Jessie as her personal servant for a term of two years, during which time Zhu would earn back the hundred dollars in gold and reside, rent free, at the boardinghouse.

  “But what am I to live on?” Zhu asked, amazed at the document.

  “I’ll feed ya. You got a bed.”

  “What about clothes? I’ve got nothing but these. What if I need medicine?” Zhu cast about for other necessities. She needed to get her hands on some cash. If young women were so easily bought and sold in San Francisco, maybe she could buy Wing Sing from Chee Song Tong. “Jewelry,” she tried again. “Books? Entertainment?”

  “Lordy, now her highness wants jewels and the theatre.”

  “Come on, Miss Malone. Pay me a salary. Something.”

  Grumbling, Jessie scribbled in a monthly stipend of five dollars and added six months to the term.

  And Zhu signed. She never held a pen like this in her life. You dipped the tip in a pot of ink. She offered her handshake, and Jessie took it. Pulling herself together after the dreadful first day and even more dreadful first night of the Gilded Age Project, Zhu advised Jessie—with all due sympathy and a charm she didn’t know she possessed—that the corpulent madam really ought to loosen her corset because the undergarment could be causing her internal organs to hemorrhage.

  *

  Now Zhu scrapes back her chair from the dining table, strides out of the room. Her face burns with anger. She won’t tolerate abuse from Jessie, not in front of Daniel and Mr. Schultz.

  Jessie chases after her, catches up with her in the foyer. “Hell, I’m sorry, missy,” she says. “I know you don’t drink. You’re damn near the only one around here who don’t.”

  As the gentlemen drift from the dining room to the smoking parlor, the madam’s eyes pool with sorrow, contrition, and genuine perplexity. A jumble of passions plays across her face. Jessie is only forty years old, but she looks like a centenarian from Zhu’s day. She slips a gold coin into Zhu’s palm. “You know I like you. You’re a smart kid. You’re different from the rest of the girls. In the time you’ve been here, I’ve come to depend a lot on you. Honestly, I don’t know what comes over me.”

  “You want them to know you control me. It gives you pleasure. That’s what comes over you.”

  Jessie’s cornflower-blue eyes widen. “Lordy, am I as terrible as all that?”

  “You are,” Zhu says and pockets the precious coin.

  Jessie smiles at her bluntness. “I’m the Queen of the Underworld, and I take crap from no one, no how.”

  “And I don’t take crap from you, Miss Malone. I will order your red wine, and I will check up on the Mansion, including Li’l Lucy. But I am my own woman, and I have my own business affairs in San Francisco. Don’t you forget that.”

  Jessie’s eyes turn dark and suspicious, then shrewd. Zhu braces herself for Jessie’s challenge, but she only says, “Never met a chit like you, Zhu. You can’t be more than sixteen. That’s why I paid through the nose for you.”

  Zhu wants to say that she’s thirty. She wants to boast that she can expect to live to one hundred twenty years and more. That even a bumpkin like her from a jerkwater town like Changchi has been gene-tweaked, edited, Blocked, jacked for telespace, and morphed. But she swallows her boast. It’s not Jessie’s business how old she really is.

  “I’m older than you know,” is all Zhu says.

  *

  Zhu climbs the stairs to her room, intending to change her morning dress into suitable outing togs, when Daniel confronts her in the hall.

  His suite is on the north side of the house. He has no business on the south side. He smells of tobacco, liquor, a cologne evocative of some exotic spice. He doesn’t hurry down the hall like the other boarders do, but purposefully steps in her path, his expression inexplicable.

  “Good day, Mr. Watkins,” she says and attempts to pass him, but he stands in her way. The tension she always feels around him rises in her nerves, making her clumsy. She had a man friend once in her early twenties, but their brief relationship couldn’t survive the rigors of the Cause or Zhu’s dedication to the Daughters of Compassion. She isn’t totally ignorant of sex. Still, she can’t explain why his glance makes her heart lurch. “Mariah’s not in. I believe she went out to the apothecary.”

  “I am not here to see Mariah. I am here to see you.”

  “Is Miss Malone troubling you for the rent? I’m just the bookkeeper, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Miss Malone does not trouble me. You trouble me, Miss Wong.”

  “Oh, indeed?” She ducks around him, hurries down the hall. “But why?”

  Close behind her, he catches her wrist. “You are not who you claim to be. The runaway mistress of a British gentleman, by way of Hong Kong and Seattle? I think not.”

  She’s speechless. He stands over her less than a hand’s breath away. She is acutely aware of his physical presence, bristling and insistent. Paranoia rushes through her, and her heart knocks in her chest. He and Mr. Schultz are forever regaling her with questions at the dining table, and she isn’t sure her answers are always correct. Damn the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications for rushing her through the training! The shuttle will be ready in two days, Chiron told her. It’s vital that you go on the t-port at once. Muse will fill you in, Chiron told her. Yes, well. Muse seems to have forgotten just exactly why she’s here. The Pest House, the jail for Chinese. Trust me, you don’t want to go there. She’s a Chinese woman without family or allies or documentation in San Francisco, 1895. A wealthy white American man could do so many bad things to her.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” she says, polite and deferential, casting her eyes down.

  Daniel just stands there, boldly examining her.

  “Won’t you tell me what you me
an?” she persists. If she’s made errors, she’d better find out about them. She’d better consult with Muse and correct them.

  “Mr. Schultz works for the China Line. He says you do not know the proper name of the ship that supposedly brought you from Hong Kong to Seattle.”

  “Why, it was the Wandering Jew, sir. I told you that.”

  He shakes his head. “The Jew’s port of destination is Cuba, not Seattle.”

  She can only stare. How could the Archivists have been wrong about the name of her ship? They knew all sorts of tiny details—that a runaway Chinese girl would seek refuge in the Japanese Tea Garden on the Fourth of July, 1895, for instance. What kind of damn fool did Chiron take her for?

  “Go to your room,” he says, “and I shall follow.”

  He’s got something on her, and she knows it. The immigration authorities would be very interested in a Chinese woman without proper papers. Under the Exclusion Act of 1888, a Chinese woman like her is strictly forbidden to enter the United States except under specific circumstances. Proper connections. A husband. A family. And documentation. Above all else, documentation.

  Does he mean to turn her in, collect a reward? She knows he’s got family assets in town, but he’s hard up for cash. Is that what this is all about?

  She takes out her key and unlocks the suite, misgivings pounding in her heart. They enter the small parlor she and Mariah share. Mariah is as secretive as Zhu and considerate beyond the bounds of courtesy. She has created her own aesthetic in the homey room—handcrafted oaken chairs, rustic colorful braided wool rugs, wood carvings of farm animals, black iron tools set before the brick fireplace. One day, the country look will be considered as significant a form of interior decoration as Jessie’s Victorian excesses, the carved animals highly prized antiques. But in this Now, Mariah’s parlor is merely provincial, reflecting the tastes and means of the American lower classes.

 

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