The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (2 page)

But
she’s not fine. The tension moves to Zhu’s sinuses, and a soft ache starts to
throb.

She
opens her eyes. Dappled sunlight shocks her, an azure sky dazzles. Birds cheer,
foliage rustles. Sights seem magnified, sounds amplified as if she’s returned
from the dead. The herbal scent of eucalyptus infused with a floral perfume nearly
overwhelms her. The tension, the ache turn into full-blown congestion. She
sneezes once, sneezes again violently. Her eyes spurt tears.

Bang,
bang, bang!
Odd staccato sounds? Now earsplitting blasts
and the stink of gunpowder.

Zhu
drops to her knees, evasive action instinctive at the sound, the stink of
gunfire. Her breath rasps in her throat. Her fingers twitch, reaching for the
handgun she kept strapped beneath her right arm for so many years it was like
another limb. Its absence now, an amputation.

She
fights panic. Damn! No gun, no decent cover. What a sitting duck she is,
perched on the bridge. She blots her eyes on her sleeve and tries to rise, but
her feet tangle with the skirts. She stumbles, moving as if hobbled. The
ankle-length layers of silk and cotton cushion her knees against abrasion, but
not impact. Pain shoots through her kneecaps. There will be bruises.

“Stay
calm, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “The loud abrupt sounds suggest combustible
explosives, not projectiles aimed at you.”

“What?”

“It’s
the Fourth of July. Independence Day, United States of America.”

Zhu
crouches, uncomprehending.

“Those
are fireworks. San Franciscans always celebrated the Fourth of July in Golden
Gate Park. The park was public then. Correction. The park is public
now.”

“Independence
Day, of course.” Zhu has never celebrated America’s Independence Day. She’d
never been to America at all till she was conscripted for the Gilded Age
Project.

“This
is long before private cosmicist interests acquired the parkland and installed
the dome.” Muse’s whisper calms her. Confirmation coordinates continue matching
up like winning lottery numbers.

Well,
all right. She glances up, squinting. How well she recalls the milky PermaPlast
dome rippling overhead as she stepped in the tachyonic shuttle. How wonderful
to see the sky with no dome!

“But
the dome is old, too, isn’t it, Muse?”

“In
your Now? Oh, yes. The dome has been in place since the 2100s when the
stratosphere had thinned so dangerously that undomed lands were ruined by
excessive radiation. Z. Wong,” Muse says patiently. “This is 1895.”

1895
.
Zhu bows her head, struck with awe. Then it’s true. They did it. She has t-ported
six hundred years in the past.

“Please,
Z. Wong,” Muse says. “You haven’t much time before the rendezvous. Get up. Walk
around, stretch your legs.”

Zhu frees
her skirts, managing not to rip the delicate fabric. How did women ever
tolerate such constrictive clothing? Lurching to her feet, she sneezes violently
again. “Muse, what’s the matter with my sinuses?”

“Unknown.
An allergic response.”

“I’m
not allergic to anything.”

“Pollen?”

“No,
never.”

Muse
pauses. “Perhaps a response aggravated by the Event. I will analyze. In the
meantime, you’ve got a handkerchief.” Helpful Muse is becoming impatient.
“Please, you have less time now.”

Zhu
finds the embroidered square of cotton in her leather feedbag purse. Her hands
shake. She can’t get over the impression someone was shooting at her as she
stepped out of the tachyonic shuttle. She looks around, alert and wary.

The
shuttle has been installed at the historic location they call the Japanese Tea
Garden in New Golden Gate Preserve. Zhu smiles, secretly glad the shuttle has
vanished from her sight. She never liked the photon guns aimed like assault
weapons. The pretty calcite crystals that did unpretty things. The banks of
blinking microbots slaved to vast offsite servers. Then there was the
chronometer, the savage hook-like heads of the imploders. The whole thing was
militaristic, foreboding.

And
the Event?

Thanks
to a fiendishly clever technology invented by the Luxon Institute for
Superluminal Applications, the Event instantaneously transformed the matter of
her body into pure energy and transmitted that energy faster than the speed of
light.

Flinging
her body and soul from July 4, 2495 to July 4, 1895.

Did
the Event actually
work?
Oh, yeah. She honks into the handkerchief. The
hard curving stays of her corset—slender steel strips covered in black
satin—dig into her ribs. Quickly, before anyone notices, she stoops and flips
up her skirts, examining her knees. No blood leaks through the thick black cotton
stockings. Excellent. She starts smoothing back the slip, the skirt, the overskirt,
the traveling cloak, all in shades of pale dove gray.

“I
beg your pardon, miss, but may I assist you?”

Zhu
glances up.

A
young man stands, startled, wringing his large mottled hands and staring
open-mouthed at her calves. His bright blond muttonchops and clean-shaven chin
shape his face into sort of a peculiar square. He’s combed his yellow hair back
over his scalp, lets it fall to the shoulders of his black frock coat. A
scarlet polka-dot tie throttles his starched wing collar. He’s tilted his
porkpie hat at a rakish angle, carelessly unbuttoned his vest in the afternoon
heat. Quite the dandy with his bawdy grin and stink of gin. Has his way with
the ladies, no doubt.

But
his concerned expression closes up like a slamming door when he glimpses Zhu’s
pale golden complexion, her black hair and wide cheekbones. Her slanting eyes,
the irises gene-tweaked green.

“Why,
thank you, sir. Yes, you may.” She extends her hand for him to assist her off
the bridge. Gray lace mitts cover her palms, wrists, and forearms, leaving her
fingertips bare.

He
doesn’t take her hand. No, he frowns, turns without another word, and strides
away. He glances at her over his shoulder with eyes of ice.

“Too
bad, Muse,” Zhu says to the monitor. She pulls the veil down from the brim of
her Newport hat and ties it beneath her chin, shielding her face from the sun.
From other prejudiced eyes. “I guess he didn’t want to assist a Chinese lady.”

“You’re
not a lady, Z. Wong.” Muse says, the monitor’s tone as cold as the young man’s
glance. “You’re a fallen woman.”

*   *  
*

A
fallen woman. She certainly was.

It
was June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the central women’s prison facility at
Beijing and roused her out of an exhausted sleep.

“A
deal?” Zhu said warily. “What kind of a deal?”

“I
don’t have all the details, but they’re saying they’ll reduce the charges from
murder to manslaughter,” the lawyer said and shoved a petition in her face. “If
you do what they want.”

“
Attempted
murder,” Zhu reminded her. “That would make it
attempted
manslaughter.”

“Whatever.”

“I
didn’t mean to do it.” She was too tired to read the tiny print. “And he’s not
dead yet. At least, no one’s told me so.” She rubbed her eyes. “What do they
want?”

The
lawyer was court-appointed, since Zhu had no money. One of those bleary-eyed,
pasty-faced public defenders perennially overworked and underpaid. A heart
attack waiting to happen at ninety-three years old with an inflamed neckjack
beneath her ragged crew cut. Theoretically the people had equal access to due
process, but it didn’t happen much in Socialist-Confucianist China. The lawyer
glared at Zhu, distaste curving her mouth.

Attempted
murder. The charge would be upgraded to murder if her victim died. Sick at
heart, Zhu asked the guards every day after her arrest, “Is he alive?” No
answer. “Tell me!
Is he alive or dead?
”

It
was just plain crazy. It was
never
supposed to have happened this way.
As she lay in the prison cell, sick with forced detox after they took her black
patch away, waiting to be charged with attempted murder, she had trouble
believing the campaign could have gone so wrong. How she could have done such a
thing? How could they? The atrocities, the Night of Broken Blossoms. She was a
Daughter of Compassion, dedicated to the Cause. The Daughters of Compassion
fought for the future. They weren’t murderers. She wasn’t a murderer.

Or was
she?

She
had trouble remembering exactly what happened that night. The door to the room,
for instance. Had it opened to the left or to the right? Had there been one sentry
or two? Sometimes she remembered a crowd in the room. Other times, only a few
people. When had she pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm? And the
astonished look on the sentry’s face. Because Zhu had a gun or because she was
left-handed?

Memories
of that night would flash through her mind, vivid and horrifying, then abruptly
grow dim and rearrange themselves. On the morning when the lawyer barged in
with the plea deal, Zhu wondered if she was going insane.

“What
do they want?” the lawyer said. “Listen up, Wong. They want to send you on a
tachyportation.”

“A
what?
”

“Yeah.”
The lawyer rolled her eyes.

They
never shut off the lights in the women’s prison. Zhu felt sore all over, dizzy
from the interrogation, nauseated and addle-brained with withdrawal from the
black patch. Tachyportation? She rolled the unfamiliar word around in her mouth
like a spicy poisoned candy.

“Somebody
there will explain,” the lawyer said, taking out a neurobic, popping the bead
open, and snorting the fumes. Then sighing with relief from the all-purpose
anodyne. The sadist. “They’ll ship you to California. San Francisco. Place
called the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. The LISA techs will
tell you all about it. Sign here.”

“Hey,
I don’t know,” Zhu said.

“What
do you mean, you don’t know?” the lawyer snapped.

“I
can’t agree to something before I know what’s involved.” Zhu had heard strange
stories, jacking prisoners into the computer-constructed reality known as
telespace for strange experiments. Radical editing, brainwaving, testing new
neural apps. Political prisoners like her were especially vulnerable. “I’ve got
my rights.”

“Your
rights. Be grateful they came to me with this deal, Wong.” The lawyer flicked
the empty neurobic onto the floor. “Do you have any idea how bad you and your
comrades make the Cause look?” She said “the Cause” in capital letters.
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn if they jack you into a rehab program and make
you compute actuarial margins for twenty years.”

“Thank
you, counselor.”

“Any
idea at all?”

“Yeah,
actually I do,” she said, burning with guilt and shame. The lawyer didn’t need
to remind her. It was the last thing in the world the Daughters of Compassion
wanted to do--harm the Cause. Zhu had dedicated her
life
to the Cause. It
was crazy.
Crazy
.

“But,
uh, what’s a tachyportation?” she insisted.

“Way
I understand it, they want to send you six hundred years into the past,” the
lawyer said and coughed.

Zhu
gaped. “You mean. . . .send me. . . .
physically?
”

“That’s
right. Physically. Like I said, the LISA techs will explain. It
is
strange, I admit, since the institute doesn’t conduct t-port projects anymore. Too
dangerous. You can ask the techs about that, too. I remember,” the lawyer
muses, “when they shut the shuttles down and discontinued t-ports. All very
hush-hush. Must have been a couple years after you were born.”

“Six
hundred. . . .
years?
”

Wow.
A prickle of excitement, of wonder and anticipation pierced her foggy
exhaustion. Why was a t-port dangerous? What was she supposed to
do
there, six hundred years in the past? A thousand questions tumbled through her
mind. She trembled, a strange sensation coursed through her, and suddenly this
conversation seemed strangely familiar. As if she’d heard it before, just
exactly like this. As if she’d always sat here, on this seat of shame, and the
pasty-faced lawyer had always sneered at her as she was sneering now.

What
was
that
about? Zhu shook her head, trying to clear her mind. A
premonition?

“Why
me?” she finally managed to ask.

“Dunno,”
the lawyer admitted, “after what you’ve done. But you’re the one they want, Wong.
I say take the deal. They’re ready to go. They call it The Gilded Age Project.”

*   *  
*

Zhu
hikes out of the Japanese Tea Garden through a red moon-gate and stands before
the shallow bowl of Concert Valley. Ah! She’s never seen such a lush landscape.
Towering palm trees, aloe veras as high as her waist, glossy dark pines,
flowers blooming pink and purple and gold. Everything so fresh and new! After
the cracked old domes of Changchi, the barren concrete and unforgiving millet fields
where she’s spent her whole life, Zhu marvels at Golden Gate Park, 1895. A
wonderland!