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The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

Page 41

by Lisa Mason


  “My throat still aches, Muse.”

  Muse is silent.

  “That sacrifice was supposed to have been mine.”

  “You’ve made other sacrifices. You’ll make more.”

  She doesn’t like the sound of that. “I survived the Closed Time Loop.”

  “Not quite. You survived that particular CTL, the Prime Probability that collapsed on the Chinese New Year.” Muse is glum. “Permit me to remind you, we’re still here. Still in this Now.” Muse’s tone is accusatory and, for the first time, Zhu considers the monitor’s point of view. What will happen to the sentient Artificial Intelligence when she dies and is buried in an anonymous grave six hundred years before the monitor was manufactured? The steelyn ultrawire and nanochips won’t disintegrate the way her physical brain and nerve cells will. Does Muse face everlasting imprisonment in a coffin buried under centuries of soil? Does Muse have any way of contacting its makers in the future? Any way of escape? Is Muse afraid? “You never made it to the rendezvous.”

  “No kidding.”

  A man whose blond muttonchops have been dyed a variegated green pours his green beer over the head of a swarthy, dark-eyed fellow. The men proceed to punch and wrestle, knocking over buckets of dyed green carnations. Green water pools on the macadam. A rowdy crowd gathers around, cheering them on, the mood turning tense with more violence.

  Zhu backs away from the altercation. “No,” she whispers, “I never made it to the rendezvous.” What could she have done? A squad of the local bulls rounded up Zhu, Daniel, and Jessie on the street outside of Kelly’s and hustled them down to the precinct station to file a statement while Harvey and his thugs, the eyepatch and his hatchet men faded like shadows into the night. The morgue’s mournful wagon clattered by and collected Wing Sing’s corpse, listing the girl as a Jane Doe. No identification, no immigration documents, no next of kin. Well, that’s the Barbary Coast. The Nob Hill swells clucked their tongues, mothers pleaded with their sons to stay away from that wicked place, and life in San Francisco went on.

  When the precinct station finally released them at four in the morning, Jessie herded them into a cab and spirited Zhu and Daniel away to south o’ the slot. There Jessie prevailed upon a distant cousin of hers working as the concierge in a seedy Tehama Street boardinghouse to put the couple up.

  “Jar me, you two cannot come back to my house,” Jessie declared as they fled in the dawn. “I run a class joint.”

  “But we’ve done nothing wrong!” Zhu was furious, exhausted, and very scared.

  “Harvey’s thugs will come a-lookin’ for the both of you at my place.”

  Of course Jessie was right, and Zhu hasn’t seen her bedroom at 263 Dupont Street ever since. That night I knew I’d never return to my room. But is this the way things are supposed to be? She doesn’t know.

  Two beat cops confront the grappling men and separate them, escorting each in the opposite direction down Market Street. The baby in Zhu’s belly flutters. She ducks out of the flower stand, finds a corner in the Metropolitan Market where she can rest on a wrought-iron bench.

  “What will happen now, Muse? Has all of spacetime become polluted? Have I unleashed another reality?”

  “I don’t know.” Muse, honest for once. What a surprise.

  “The aurelia is still an enigma, is it not?”

  “That it is.”

  “And I’m a more reliable courier than the LISA techs bargained for because I know exactly what to do.”

  Muse pauses. “I beg to differ, Z. Wong. You haven’t been listening to me. You are not the anonymous Chinese woman who gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967.”

  Zhu fusses with the cuff of her sleeve, hoping the shock of the monitor’s statement will pass quickly. “Of course I am. I must be. Who else could it be?” When Muse doesn’t answer, she says the obvious. “I’ve got green eyes.”

  “No!” Muse is adamant. “The holoid was shot with modern equipment, not a remastering of ancient television footage shot in 1967. The Archivists would have certainly identified you at any age.”

  “Oh, wise up, Muse. Do you really think Chiron and the Institute would have told me they were sending me into the past to die? That if Wing Sing didn’t survive, I would have to take her place? Wasn’t that their secret plan?”

  “No, I would have been informed, Z. Wong. And I assure you, I was not.”

  She sure as hell has no reason to trust the monitor, but allows that to pass for now. “Okay. But answer me this. What difference does it make under the resiliency principle?”

  Muse is silent.

  “Without Block or mouth swathe or neurobics, I’ll look like an old woman at a hundred and one years old.” She sighs. In her Now, she’d be in youthful middle age—and look it. “But I’ll make it. Without a new contraceptive patch, who knows? Birth control pills haven’t been invented. I may even have more children.”

  “No, no, no. You’d creating a new reality, Z. Wong. You would.”

  “Then I’m the only one, Muse, who can decide what to do.”

  Zhu cups her hand on her belly. Five months pregnant, that’s what Jessie Malone says. She’s always hungry but whenever she eats, her stomach squeezes against the baby, and then she can’t eat. Of course, there’s no way to tell her baby’s gender. That technology won’t be available for nearly another century.

  She tunes out the costermongers and fishmongers and butchers and bakers and cheesemakers bellowing out their specials of the day to the passing shoppers, opens her Examiner, and reads—

  A notorious hatchet man who wore a black eyepatch like a pirate on the high seas, was employed by the notorious Chee Song Tong, and was well known for his nefarious and vicious acts of murder, mayhem, and violence contracted for by substantial sums of gold, was among the casualties in the Bartlett Alley massacre yesterday afternoon.

  “The eyepatch,” Zhu whispers. She grips her forehead, expels a breath. We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

  A shop clerk bends over her. “Are you all right, madame? May I get you something? Do you need a doctor?”

  She looks up, sees the startle in his eyes at the sight of her features. She doesn’t need to tell him to leave her alone. He’s gone in a flash. She abandons her newspaper on the bench, heaves herself to her feet, and braces herself for the crowd on Market Street. Time to go home. Time to go to Daniel.

  “Heads up, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers as she heads down Fifth Street. “You need to worry about Harvey and his thugs.”

  Two bruisers circulate through the Saint Patrick’s Day crowd, not participating in the drunken revelry or gratuitous violence but watching, searching, checking out faces. Checking out the few Chinese slipping anonymously through the crowd. Checking out women.

  Harvey’s thugs? Maybe, maybe not, but every tough bird merits Zhu’s attention. Since that terrible night, Harvey has circulated the word through the underworld that he’s put a price on Daniel’s head. Jessie heard the rumor from a john at Morton Alley, and Jessie’s distant cousin has turned out to be a terrible gossip.

  “You kids better move on,” Jessie told Zhu. That was three weeks ago.

  Zhu found a room at another boardinghouse south o’ the slot while Daniel’s lawyers pursued the foreclosure action against Harvey’s poolroom. Dressed in her denim sahm, posing as Daniel’s manservant wielding Daniel’s power of attorney, Zhu has appeared and signed several petitions on Daniel’s behalf, keeping both the foreclosure action and Harvey’s vendetta alive. By now Harvey’s spies know that she may dress as a Western lady, as a Chinese whore, or as a coolie. Harvey’s spies have found out that she is Jade Eyes.

  Harvey means to kill Daniel, all right, Zhu thinks, but Daniel may oblige Harvey by dying all on his own. He’s going to die.

  No!

  Zhu can’t abandon Daniel. She won’t. And she won’t let him die. If there’s anything right she can do for the Gilded Age Project, it’s got to be saving Daniel. And to hell with the Tenets, trying to tell her she
can’t help an innocent man whom the project directors haven’t given the nod to. She’s here in this Now. She’s got her own responsibilities. Ah, and what did Muse say? She creates this reality. However it turns out.

  The shop clerk calls out at the corner of Market and Fifth. “Say, miss! I say, miss? You forgot your newspaper.”

  The two bruisers turn and crane their necks at her.

  Zhu flees.

  *

  To south o’ the slot where immigrants the world over newly arrived in San Francisco come to live, the people who sweep the streets and stitch boots and scrub floors. Jessie’s neighborhood is a glossier place, in spite of the saloons on every corner, a place rich with gold and silver coins tumbling carelessly in and out of every pocket. South o’ the slot—south of Mission Street, that is, a stone’s throw from Market Street and the fabulous Palace Hotel—reflects its own dingy economy. It’s not Tangrenbu which, despite its colorful filth and occasional outbreak of the plague, attracts tourists’ coins. Not North Beach or the Latin Quarter, which with their handsome swarthy people, thick red wines, odoriferous cheeses and fish, and bay views also attract the moneyed and the curious.

  No, south o’ the slot is just plain poor with no extra zest or exotic quality to attract anything other than penniless immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Belgium, and people of those nationalities from everywhere else in America. Stick saloons, laundries, tiny grocery stores with wilting produce and day-old bread stand side by side with boardinghouses, warehouses, whiskey distilleries, and sugar refineries. The stink of tanneries and butcher’s shops mingles with the bitter clean smell of hops and bleach. Saloons are as plentiful as in the tenderloin and along the Cocktail Route, but these are cheap beer halls or wine dumps where the “wine” is raw alcohol colored and flavored with cherry extract.

  Zhu circles the boardinghouse twice, watching for signs of anyone following her. She finally darts in, climbs the stairs, and examines the three deadbolts she installed top, middle, and bottom. An old trick from the Daughters of Compassion compound. Thugs can’t crowbar a door with deadbolts top to bottom without making a racket. You’ll hear them first, get your gun, and step out onto the fire escape.

  On the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen, Harvey’s thugs beat Daniel badly. In that freezing dawn after Jessie helped them book the room at the Tehama Street boardinghouse, he slipped in and out of consciousness and cried out for morphine. Could Zhu refuse him? She herself had once lain like this, leaking blood, bruises aching, ready to die if it hadn’t been for the black patch. She found his works in his jacket pocket—a smart brass Parke-Davis emergency kit custom-fitted with a hypodermic needle and vials of cocaine, morphine, atropine, and strychnine.

  What every gentleman of the Gilded Age needs.

  The atropine and strychnine she could use to keep his ticker pumping. The narcotics she hid in her feedbag purse. No matter much how he cried, she refused to give him morphine.

  She refused him.

  He went into fullblown withdrawal that morning. Nothing prepared her for the violence of his reaction. He went into shock and a condition resembling a severe case of dysentery, along with cardiac arrhythmia, infection of his needle tracks, and hemorrhaging in his nose. She was terrified he would have a stroke.

  “Oh, Kuan Yin,” Zhu prayed. “I’m not a doctor. This isn’t a hospital. Please help me!”

  She sent a messenger boy to Dupont Street, and Jessie came to the boardinghouse at four the next morning, bringing hot water in a steaming pot, clean sheets, blankets, and food. Mariah helped haul everything up the stairs and stood guard at the door, her expression stony.

  “Sure and I once saw a bird as bad off as him,” Jessie said. “At the Mansion, so do not be too ashamed of him. Fine gentlemen get themselves in a fix from time to time. They usually go take the water cure for the summer season up at San Rafael, bringin’ their fancy doctors with ‘em. Jar me,” she sniffed indignantly, “if there ain’t more dope fiends on Snob Hill than in all of Tangrenbu.”

  Muse searched the Archives. “Poor water quality, massive problems with dysentery in the nineteenth century. Must be why morphine therapy is so popular in this Day.”

  “You’re not helping, Muse. What should I do?” Zhu wailed as her lover and the father of her child lay writhing on a cot. She hoisted him up every quarter of an hour and took him to the water closet down the hall where fluid gushed out of him again and again.

  “Go get some paregoric,” Muse advised. “The Snake Pharmacy carries it. But don’t let him get his hands on it, it’s got a bit of opium.” And, “You may try a neurobic, Z. Wong.”

  The paregoric helped. The neurobic did him no good at all.

  When he finally fell into a fitful sleep, she sat up wakeful, watchful, and considered the specter of the CTL looming all around her. Unstable, destabilizing, an unnatural consequence of tachyportation. She watched for those subtle changes in reality that appeared right before her eyes, proof that the CTL was affecting the timeline in ways no one could predict. And what about Zhu herself? She’s become conscious within her own CTL. Will she eternally become conscious to face this hell, die, be reborn in the future, and return to the past to face her death again and again, without end? Or maybe, because a CTL is unstable, will she be the one to die on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen in Kelly’s Saloon? Will she know it, the next time, that she’s going to die?

  Her throat aches and that’s a fact. But then, she’s picked up some kind of fever bug that her gene-tweaking can’t protect her from.

  “He needs nourishment through the blood,” Muse whispered, suddenly helpful and kind. “His digestive system isn’t working. He needs sugar, salts, fluids. Especially fluids. And a general nontoxic anodyne and restorative.”

  “Are you talking about aspirin?” Zhu said, sitting up.

  “Safe synthetic aspirin is a decade away, but you can purchase powdered willow bark at one of the better pharmacies.” Muse chuckles. “You knew that, Z. Wong, didn’t you? That’s what aspirin is. Willow bark.”

  The Snake Pharmacy did indeed stock powdered willow bark displayed in the front window where a rattlesnake coiled lazily around the merchandise. The rattlesnake is defanged, of course, but serves as an excellent deterrent against thievery.

  Zhu boiled water, prepared a soup for the blood, rigged rubber tubing with Daniel’s hypodermic needle, and constructed a crude intravenous apparatus. She cleaned the needle with isopropyl alcohol—also a chemical well in supply at the Snake Pharmacy.

  She worked the mollie knife up Daniel’s nostrils till the ruptured cartilage of his tortured septum healed. She ran the mollie knife up and down his arms where abscesses festered, and slowly the needle wounds healed.

  Still he flailed on the cot, crying and groaning.

  “Hush,” Zhu whispered. “You’re so much better now, Daniel. Hush.”

  “Go get him cigarettes,” Muse advised. “They won’t kill him, not for a couple of decades, anyway. Go on.”

  Zhu ran to the Devil’s Acre Saloon on Tehama Street, fetched cigarettes.

  Now she unlocks the three deadbolts—click, click, click—and steps into their room.

  Daniel lies quietly on the cot where she left him, smoking.

  “You look better.”

  He stares at the smoke spiraling up to the ceiling as if that image is like his spirit leaving his flesh.

  “Eat something?”

  The bowl of millet soup is cold, untouched.

  “Drink something?”

  Only half the orange juice is gone.

  “Good.” She swallows her disappointment and checks his pulse, touches his forehead, examines the insides of his arms.

  He offers his limbs to her lifelessly.

  “Daniel?”

  He raises his eyes, dark pools whose depths are denied her. Have been denied her during these long, gray days, Something is broken inside him, and she doesn’t know how to mend it. The mollie knife can’t touch it, a
nd neither can her love.

  She sinks down onto the scuffed wood floor, sitting cross-legged, and begins to weep. For Wing Sing, for Daniel, for the little green-eyed boy she nearly beat to death six centuries in the future. She hasn’t wept in years, not since summer camp when someone flew a lavender kite shaped like a fish and the sight reminded her so much of her faithless skipparents, she fled to her sleeping bag and sobbed herself to sleep.

  His hand squeezes her shoulder, stronger than she thought possible. “Don’t cry, my angel.” These are his first coherent words since the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen. His face, when she looks up, is vibrant again, his eyes clear.

  She wipes the tears from her eyes with the ball of her thumb, leaps to her feet. She wants to scold him, shout at him. It’s all she can do to calm down after this miracle. “I’m no angel.” She helps him back into bed, and he pulls her down onto the cot beside him, cradling her in the shelter of his arm.

  “Of course you are. Who else but an angel would save the life of a sinner like me?” He reaches for his ciggie, draws down hard.

  She swallows her complaint. Tobacco may actually be alleviating his dysentery. “You’re not a sinner.” A painful shudder she can only call joy squeezes her chest. And then she can’t help herself. “But you still smoke too damn much.” She finds her Patent Dust Protector, pulls the mask over her face.

  “Now what you doing?”

  “I’m pregnant. I don’t want to breathe your smoke.”

  “Oh, a little smoke won’t hurt you.”

  She sits up, infuriated. “Your second-hand smoke can hurt me real bad. And it most certainly will harm the baby. Our baby.”

  He stubs the cigarette out at once, heaves a sigh. “And you know all this because you’re from some fiendishly brilliant time in the future?”

  “Well, yeah!”

  He pulls her down beside him again. “All right. Still, a sinner I am, condemned to hell. A failure like Father. I’ve got no head for business, I admit it. And, well, the drink and the dope got the best of me.” He plants a tender kiss on her forehead. “I would surely be dead if it weren’t for you.”

 

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