The Gilded Age Part 1

The Gilded Age, A Time Travel.

Lisa Mason.

July 4, 1895.

Independence Day.

1.

Fortune Cookies at the j.a.panese Tea Garden.

Out of a tense and arid darkness she steps, her skirts sweeping across the macadam. Her b.u.t.ton boot wobbles on the bridge over the brook in the j.a.panese Tea Garden. "Steady," the technician whispers. The shuttle embraces the ancient bridge in a half-moon of silver lattices. The air is susurrous, tinged with menthol, cold. The shuttle hums. High overhead, the dome ripples in a fitful gust. Zhu Wong listens for final instructions. None come. Dread quickens her pulse. She closes her eyes and waits for the moment it takes to cross over.

And then it's happening--the Event sweeps her across six centuries.

Odd staccato sounds pop in her ears. The Event transforms her into pure energy, suspends her in nothingness, then flings her back into her own flesh and blood. And she stands, unsteadily, her b.u.t.ton boot poised on the bridge over the brook in the j.a.panese Tea Garden. A brand-new bridge. The scent of fresh-cut wood fills her senses.

"Muse?" she whispers to the monitor. Fear stains her tongue. Tension gathers behind her eyes. Her skin feels fragile. Her heart batters her ribcage, her lungs clench. Now she feels the Event just like they said she would. Again, "Muse?"

"I'm here, Z. Wong," the monitor whispers. Muse nestles behind Zhu's left ear between scalp and skull. "We're here." Muse automatically checks for points of reference. Alphanumerics dance behind her eyelids. Coordinates are confirmed. "We're fine."

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. d.a.m.n! 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 a.n.a.lyze. 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.sault 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 Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sist 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 a.s.sist 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 a.s.sist 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 pet.i.tion 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 Compa.s.sion, dedicated to the Cause. The Daughters of Compa.s.sion 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 s.a.d.i.s.t. "They'll ship you to California. San Francisco. Place called the Luxon Inst.i.tute 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 teles.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.n 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 Compa.s.sion 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 inst.i.tute 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 p.r.i.c.kle of excitement, of wonder and antic.i.p.ation 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 j.a.panese 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!

Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision. Muse downloads a file from the Archives stored in its memory. "The California Midwinter International Exposition was held here in 1894. This is what's left. Over two million people attended the fair."

"Two million?" Zhu is cautious after the monitor's cool rebuke. "Is that a lot?"

"Oh, yes. The population of San Francisco then-I mean now-is three hundred thousand souls. Biggest city on the West coast. By our standards merely a neighborhood, right, Z. Wong?"

Zhu has no pat answer for the monitor's flippant question. The number of people inhabiting any limited s.p.a.ce is the biggest, th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t problem facing her future.

Now Muse is amiable again, an eager tour guide in the wake of her silence. "The two million came from all over the country by train on the transcontinental railroad completed in the 1870s, transforming the Wild West into a desirable destination. The park itself is the result of John McLaren's horticultural hand. Nothing but sand dunes here twenty years ago. McLaren discovered that Scotch sea-bent gra.s.s holds to the sand in ocean winds long enough to establish a subsoil in which other plants can thrive. Leave it to a Scot. Look lively, Z. Wong. Perhaps we'll see Boss Gardener himself."

"Oh!" Zhu looks around. Could the legendary John McLaren stroll right past her?

"The cosmicist owners of New Golden Gate Preserve revere McLaren. His love of ecosystem, his understanding of Nature, his perseverance and dedication." There's a smug tone in Muse's whisper.

"Ah, yes, the cosmicists," Zhu says. "How lovely. Only the cosmicists and their friends can enjoy this place in my time. Is it right that a public place as beautiful as this has been privatized and withheld from the people?"

"The people," Muse says. "All twelve billion of them?"

Zhu ventures down a walkway leading into Concert Valley. "I thought the cosmicists believe in equal rights according to True Value. At least, that's the line handed to me at the Luxon Inst.i.tute of Superluminal Applications."

"Equal rights?" Muse chuckles. "The cosmicists believe in equal sacrifice to the Great Good. Human interests don't always take precedence over nonhuman interests. The hyperindustrial era and the Brown Ages taught us that lesson only too painfully. The cosmicists believe in privatizing natural resources when 'the people' can't or won't properly care for them."