The Gilded Age Part 34

"I got something," Jessie says, wheezing from the uphill climb, "for the kid."

"I will not let you near her," Cameron says. "Not after what you did to her mother."

"Miss Cameron," Jessie says. "It's her G.o.dd.a.m.n inheritance. I was keeping it safe for her mother. Sure and I don't need it no more as I'm about to kick the bucket."

Cameron's eyes soften and she reluctantly lets the old madam inside. And that is when Jessie gives the aurelia to Wing Sing's daughter.

"I know it's old-fashioned, kid, but it meant something to the girl I got it from." Jessie hands over the bauble. "Maybe one day you'll figure out what that was. She often told me about a red-haired man who tricked her. Jar me, what a tall tale. She said he was from six hundred years in the future, can you beat that? And that one day, many years from now, you will meet this man with red hair in Golden Gate Park and give it to him. Maybe that's who the aurelia really belongs to."

Wing Sing's daughter has grown up to be a st.u.r.dy girl with wide green eyes from a father she never knew, a moon face from a mother she never knew, and black hair chopped off the way Miss Cameron approves of. She takes the old-fashioned golden bauble. Her hands are chapped from washing dishes. Prim in her gray wool dress, disdainful and a touch frightened of the ugly old woman she says, "Thank you. Good-bye."

June 21, 2495 A Premonition is Just a Memory of the Future "And Donaldina Cameron?" the Chief Archivist says. "She died in 1968. Lived to be ninety-eight years old. Good Scotch genes, you know? No DNA tweaking in those days." The Chief Archivist, herself the same age, runs slender fingers over her shiny bald scalp. She's got an elastic bandage wrapped around her ankle, the ankle propped up on a stool. She twisted it playing racquetball with her skipdaughter, a sprightly kid of thirty-eight. The Chief Archivist is grumpy today. She's snapped at Chiron twice during their conference.

He sighs. "You're sure that's Cameron."

"No doubt about it."

He clicks the viewer and closes the file. The holoid of the old woman in the wheelchair and her elderly Chinese companion fades into a field of gleaming blue. The field shrinks to the size of a luminous blue ping-pong ball and winks off, leaving him and the Chief Archivist sitting in the soft golden light of the conference room. The room rocks gently back and forth. The bay is rough from a summer storm, whitecaps slapping against the hydroplex of the Luxon Inst.i.tute for Superluminal Applications.

"By the way, happy anniversary," says the Chief Archivist, breaking open a neurobic and sniffing greedily. "June 21, the summer solstice. It's been twenty-eight years since we sent you on the Summer of Love Project. And look at you. Still those implants, red hair to your b.u.t.t."

Chiron grins. "I decided I liked having hair more than being bald."

"To each his or her own." The Chief Archivist has a very lovely nude skull.

He can't help himself. He turns on the viewer again, clicks to the holoid for maybe the thousandth time, and studies the trampled gra.s.s of Golden Gate Park, the woman in the wheelchair, her companion. Wow.

The holoid was retrieved from his knuckletop after he returned from the Summer of Love Project. He took plenty of holoids for the Archives, collected a lot of data about the hot dim spot. The Archivists could easily identify a richly doc.u.mented person like Donaldina Cameron. Dozens of preserved photographs, abundant sources about Lo Mo, the Mother, rescuer of Chinese slave girls. A female hero. A modern saint who herself witnessed the darkness of the nineteenth century come forth into the light of the twentieth.

Well. Mostly into the light.

But Chiron himself could barely remember that afternoon.

It was the day before he was supposed to t-port back to 2467, and he walked through the park with the girl he'd fallen in love with. Four musicians sat on the gra.s.s, jamming, two acoustic guitars, a banjo, and a tambourine. A knot of people gathered to listen. He and the girl paused, too, and then the woman in the wheelchair and her companion pa.s.sed by. The woman in the wheelchair smiled and said h.e.l.lo-who knew what her thoughts were? Another piece of data lost to the Archives. But the companion stared, reached into her padded jacket, walked across the gra.s.s, and handed him a little piece of jewelry. Well, that was the Summer of Love. People were always giving him things.

He thought it charming that these two old women embraced the wild and crazy spirit of the Haight-Ashbury that summer. He respectfully took the companion's offering, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and thought no more about it. He had plenty to think about that day and that night. He thought only of the girl he'd fallen in love with.

"Okay, so I forgot! It's true, I admit it. So who was the companion who gave me the aurelia? How hard can that be to find out, if she was with Cameron?"

"You're not going to like this."

They both gaze at the holoid, and Chiron groans.

"Yeah. We don't know. It's a freakin' dim spot," the Chief Archivist snaps. She hates not knowing. "We have to a.s.sume that whatever motivated her to give you the aurelia occurred before we sent you on the Summer of Love Project."

"So it's a time loop outside of the time loop in my t-port?"

"You got it. We can't trace her. She's a cla.s.sic Jane Doe. Ident.i.ty zip in the Archives."

"Wasn't there part of a fingerprint left on the gold? Inside one of the wings?"

"Oh, sure. If you want to call less than a millimeter a 'part.' And you must remember people weren't routinely d-based in those days. Oh, the cops started fingerprinting criminals in the 1890s, but the prints were notoriously inaccurate. And anyway, the law didn't mess with regular citizens. We don't have prints for these people."

"And a couple of skin cells?"

"From which we generated a DNA profile. Basic characteristics-race, s.e.x, approximate age. Didn't help much. We already knew all that from the holoid."

"Right." Chiron clicks on the companion, magnifying her image. Short gray hair still threaded with black, sunlight on a round little face. The surprise of her green eyes. "About seventy years old?"

"Seventy, seventy-one from the DNA workup."

"So she would have been born in 1896. Can we a.s.sume in San Francisco?"

"It's a reasonable a.s.sumption." The Chief Archivist stands restlessly and paces, limping painfully on the ankle. She sits down again, annoyed. "If the profile is right, she was half Caucasian. Which makes things dicey. A baby of mixed race in 1896 who wound up at Cameron's place? She'd be pretty rare. You have to understand, the Chinese were strictly segregated in San Francisco then, and Chinese women were very scarce, except for certain brothels employing Chinese slave girls exclusively for a white clientele. You see? That's got to be the most probable way the baby was conceived."

"Okay." Chiron's head is starting to swim. "Do the Archives support the existence of this baby in 1896?"

"Sort of. Cameron took in a number of Chinese infants, some rescued, some abandoned on her doorstep. No data on where they came from. Most of her foundlings left the home when they turned twenty-one, married, had their own families. But some stayed on with her, kept up the good Cause. Lo Mo was well loved by her girls."

"All right." Chiron closes the file with an air of finality, and the blue field snaps off. "Let's move on to the other child. The child at the illegal birth clinic in Changchi."

"Yeah, the other child." The Chief Archivist heaves a huge sigh, breaks open another neurobic. Chiron can see the strain on her face, a sight that sends a chill through his heart. "Well, his mother immigrated to Chihli Province ten years ago. Part of the Motherland Movement. The way American Jews went to live in Israel on kibbutzim in what--the twentieth century?-and some stayed on, becoming Israeli citizens. Same kind of deal, here."

"The mother is American?"

"From an old San Franciscan family, dating back to the nineteenth century. And yeah, there's Caucasian blood in the family tree."

"Which would account for the child's eyes?"

"Yep. The child's green eyes are avatistic, as the gene-tweakers say. Crop up every other generation or so." The Chief Archivist slips another holoid into the viewer. "The mother married a local guy. Bore the kid in '93. Now she's way illegally pregnant with number two."

"Is she going to be okay?" Chiron swallows hard.

"She got roughed up pretty bad by the Daughters of Compa.s.sion, but she's going to be okay. Same for kid number two, who'll be making her debut in a day or two."

"And the child, the little boy-is he alive or dead?"

The Chief Archivist gives him a dark look, clicks on the new holoid. The Night of Broken Blossoms received a burst of international attention, especially since the conflict highlighted the th.o.r.n.y problems of the GenerationaSkipping Law. A fresh virulent debate between opponents and proponents of the law raged in teles.p.a.ce in every medium.

"This is strictly confidential, got it?"

"Got it." Chiron leans forward as the holoid pops up.

It's not the birth clinic, it's the hospital at Changchi-pale lime-green walls, gray-green linoleum floors, halogen lights casting a green tinge on the grim faces of the staff. A brilliantly lit hall leads up to a door. As Chiron watches, little bright white flashes flicker over the door.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?"

"Keep watching," the Chief Archivist says.

From the opposite side of the door dart sharp black flashes like tiny ebony daggers piercing the white. A doctor gingerly takes the door handle and cracks open the door, from the left to the right. Suddenly the doctor is thrown back by some invisible force ramming against her waist. She doubles over in pain, is flung across the hall, and staggers into the arms of her staff. Now all of them tumble back, pushed by the force. The focus goes wild for a moment-shots of the ceiling, of the walls, of the terrified faces whirling by in confusion.

The focus reestablishes on the door. Now the handle is on the right.

"See that?" whispers the Chief Archivist.

"It's switched!" Chiron says. "Wasn't the handle on the left?"

"Yeah."

Before their astonished eyes, the door handle appears and disappears like the illusion of a stage magician, now on the left, now on the right, once even protruding from the middle.

As Chiron watches, the intrepid doctor darts forward and tries again. She manages to seize the handle, kicks open the door.

The room-just an ordinary hospital room with a cot, IV apparatus, a monitor beeping softly-swirls with a grainy gray fog, and the doctor cries out. On the cot lies the child. Now so badly bruised, Chiron can bearly look at his disfigured little face. And then he's healed as if he'd never been pistol-whipped. And then he's lying in a pool of coagulated blood, his green eyes wide open, dead. Clearly dead, a flat line on the monitor.

And yet again, the child stirs and cries, blinking up at the monitor. Or laughs, waving his tiny fists, reaching for a toy stuffed panda.

The doctor's distraught face fills the monitor. "What can we do for him? Please help us! We don't know what to do!"

"Oh, man," Chiron says. "It's a Prime Probability, isn't it?"

"A Prime Probability that won't collapse," says the Chief Archivist, clicking the holoid off. "It just won't freakin' collapse, into or out of our timeline. We're not even sure which way we want the probability to collapse."

"Hey, I'm sorry I screwed up. But we are talking about a little boy's life."

"We are talking about another Crisis."

"I'm really, really sorry."

"Yeah, you should be. The LISA techs are calling the child a Quantum Probability."

"Why won't it collapse?" Chiron says miserably.

"Well! You know the discredited Schrodinger's Cat metaphor used to demonstrate the probable nature of reality. A cat is placed in a gas chamber, and is alive and dead at the same time till the experimenter opens the chamber and observes the result."

"I despise that metaphor."

"Yeah, well, this Quantum Probability won't collapse one way or the other because some event connected to that child has become unresolved, uncertain, jeopardized in the past. And there's only one way that could happen, Chiron. It must be an event connected to tachyportation."

"But the Inst.i.tute had never t-ported to that Now!"

"Hah. Not yet."

Chiron stands and paces across the conference room. "So you're saying that the fact the companion gave me the aurelia is directly connected to my Summer of Love Project. But what does the aurelia have to do with that little boy?"

"Like Cameron's companion, the boy is probably a descendant of an old San Franciscan family, Chinese mixed with Caucasian. Cameron's anonymous companion was Chinese mixed with Caucasian, too, and it's likely she was born in the late 1890s. The aurelia itself is in the style and workmanship of that period." The Chief Archivist shrugs. "All we have is a theory. That's all we ever have when we undertake a t-port project. That's why we shut t-porting down decades ago. Too risky. Too tricky. Too d.a.m.n theoretical."

"And your theory is now?"

The Chief Archivist glares at him. "The little boy has become a Quantum Probability because the birth of his probable ancestor, Cameron's companion, is in jeopardy. In the past, okay? If that green-eyed woman is never born, she won't be able to give you the aurelia. Period. And then all bets are off when it comes to our s.p.a.cetime. Total annihilation? Could be." The Chief Archivist looks around the conference room so warily that a chill crawls down Chiron's spine.

"But the aurelia was never a part of my project! I never meant to take it. I certainly never meant to bring it to our Now. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it, plain and simple." He gets on his knees before the Chief Archivist. "It's just a minor detail. A small mistake. I'm sorry."

"I accept your apology, but it doesn't help."

"Are you suggesting that because I inadvertently took the aurelia to the future, I've affected events in a past I know nothing about?"

"I'm suggesting there's a link," the Chief Archivist says, "between the Quantum Probability that the little boy has become and you, Chiron. And that link is the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman and the aurelia. I'm suggesting we don't know what will happen if the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman is never born. Is the child her descendant? There's a probability he is. And if that's true and she's never born, that little boy in the hospital room right now? He will die. We'll all be sorry. His death will be another Generation-Skipping Law tragedy. But it's more than that. You following me?"

"I'm following."

"If that woman never gives you the aurelia, your t-port to 1967 will be changed. Everything you worked for will be changed. Your successful return to our Now will be changed. And we don't know what will happen then. Nothing? A minor detail? A ma.s.sive hole in the Archives? Or the destruction of all reality as we know it?"

Chiron shakes his head, disgusted. With t-porting. With the Archivists. Mostly with himself. "Oh, fine. When do I go?"

"We don't want to send you, pal. We need to send someone who can get close to the companion's mother. Close enough to protect her and her baby to be. Close enough to impress her with the importance of keeping the aurelia in the family. We need a woman. Sit down and stop looming over me, thank you very much." The Chief Archivist rubs her ankle. "We need a Chinese woman."

"Okay." Chiron considers all the Chinese cosmicist technicians he knows. "Li Chut would be excellent. She's very disciplined. And willing to take risks."

"I thought of Li," the Chief Archivist says. "And I agree, she would be a fine choice. But we wanted to find that vital connection, a link to the data."

"What about the boy's mother?"

"Another good choice, but she's due to deliver her second child any day now."

Chiron paces across the conference room, thinking. "Is there any other woman of our Now sufficiently connected with that little boy? Another ancestor of the family, maybe, however distant?"

"There is, but we don't exactly know if she's an ancestor." The Chief Archivist smiles for the first time that afternoon. "We do know she's got a neckjack, so we can install a monitor, throw in some Archives, subaudio, voice projection, and holoid capability through her optic nerve. And she's gene-tweaked so we won't have to worry about bacteria, virulent viruses, and food poisoning like we had to worry about with you, kiddo."

The Chief Archivist punches Chiron's shoulder. In a friendly way.

"Tell me she's Chinese."

"Yep, you got it. A skipchild. No skipfamily, but that's another story."

"All right." Chiron smiles, too, though he doesn't feel like smiling about the Quantum Probability. He really doesn't feel like smiling about the little boy-is he dead or alive? "Who is this mystery woman?"

"Get this, she's a Daughter of Compa.s.sion. A real fanatic, strung out on a black patch. But not to worry. Once we clean her up, she'll be as strong as an ox. Knows karate, can handle a gun, wow can she handle it. I think we can work with her, I really do. She's not stupid."

"A Daughter of Compa.s.sion," Chiron says. "Wait a minute. Those are the crazies who raided the illegal birth clinic in Changchi."

"Yep. As a matter of fact, she's the woman who attempted to murder the little boy."

Chiron's jaw drops. "And you want to t-port the woman who set off the Quantum Probability?"

"Sure," the Chief Archivist says. "She's got green eyes."

February 22, 1896 Tong Yan Sun Neen