The Gilded Age Part 8

Muse has turned out to be a serious problem. Her one tenuous, desperate link to her Now, she can't rely on. Very excellent.

Zhu hasn't known what to expect of Muse since the first day of the Gilded Age Project when the monitor spontaneously communicated in projection mode and advised her not to fight the hatchet men, to let them abduct the girl and carry her off. Now how can she secure a position at the Presbyterian mission when Jessie Malone holds a two-and-a-half year contract for Zhu's services and the madam fully intends to enforce the bond? The girl she was supposed to rescue has been abducted, the aurelia never showed up at all, and Zhu is taking orders from the Queen of the Underworld over breakfast.

The Gilded Age Project has turned out to be a disaster. Nothing like what the Archivists planned.

Zhu has no idea how to make things right and Muse is no help at all.

She dallies at the breakfast table, overcome with a peculiar lethargy. Things always change from moment to moment, don't they? At the most basic quantum level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling. s.p.a.cetime spins; it ebbs and flows. Yet in cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity. Isn't that what Chiron said? Reality is a set of probabilities constantly collapsing into the timeline. Multiple universes coexist like motes of dust swirling in a sunbeam.

Quantum physics has long supported these contradictions. Zhu chuckles to herself. Quantum physics, hah. Oh, it ought to be quite painless. You won't know the difference. You awaken transformed, once a Self contemplated yesterday, now a Self scarcely antic.i.p.ated tomorrow.

But what about today?

She yawns and blinks, drowsy, and doesn't know herself. She breathes the scent of red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and b.u.t.ter. Who is this slender woman who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen of the Underworld, conversing with gentlemen boarders, sipping coffee with cream and sugar?

Is it really her, Zhu Wong?

Or some other woman, altogether?

Only three months ago, she stood accused of attempted murder. In a T-shirt, jeans, and worn sneakers, she'd trudged through mud, a Daughter of Compa.s.sion, a handgun strapped beneath her right arm, a black patch behind her left knee. She'd been a comrade, a devotee of Kuan Yin. She'd been an abandoned skipchild, a Generation-Skipping radical working hard for the only sustainable future the world could hope for.

Three months ago. Six centuries in the future.

She tilts her head toward strains of music drifting from the saloon across the street, where they've got a string quarter for the early-morning drinkers. A lilting waltz, romantic and dizzying. She plays with her sleeve, the silk a luminous blue, the b.u.t.tons on her cuff nubs of mother-of-pearl.

Only three months ago, she'd breathed the stink of petroleum fumes from the antiquated ground traffic of Changchi. She'd breathed the stink of fumes from fourth-hand recyclers beneath the shabby dome over the compound where the Daughters of Compa.s.sion lived. She'd breathed the stink of compost, disinfectant, too many human beings living too closely together.

Now the perfume of red roses sends a shiver of pleasure through her.

The Night of Broken Blossoms is a distant nightmare, no longer looming over her every anxious waking moment. In three months, the Gilded Age Project has taken on the quality of a dream.

Who is she?

She is Zhu Wong, of course, a modern Chinese woman. She's tough, morphed for telelink, Blocked for UV radiation, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Her fingernails were always caked with grit, soil and oil, and bits of plastic.

Yet she is Zhu Wong, the runaway mistress of a British gentleman, fleeing to America by way of Hong Kong and Seattle, with nothing but a feedbag purse and traveling togs in tasteful pearl gray silk. The LISA techs gave her manicure right before she stepped over the bridge.

Who is to say she is not that lady? Who is to say who she really is?

"Jar me, missy, you're a dreamy chit," Jessie says. "I said, it's Columbus Day. The day that dago discovered America." Jessie polishes off her customary breakfast of five roasted quail stuffed with oysters sauteed in b.u.t.ter washed down by three bottles of champagne. The madam drinks champagne from morning till morning. Her endurance is staggering, her contempt for sleep awesome. "Pay attention. Ten cases of Chianti should do."

Zhu reaches for the green leather account book lying at her elbow on the dining table. Every morning she goes over the books with Jessie, setting out debits, credits, and cash flow for the Parisian Mansion, the Morton Alley cribs, and the boardinghouse. She actually doesn't mind, finding the work oddly satisfying. She doesn't even use Muse's calculator. She likes to figure the numbers by hand, checks her calculations three times.

"Presently we've got fifty cases of liquor at the Mansion," Zhu says, flipping through the account book. "Ten cases each of whiskey, rum, and gin, and two of champagne. Do we really need red wine, too?"

"Of course we do!" Jessie declares with the expansive joy that always overcomes her after her first champagne for the day. She turns an empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, and Mariah whisks bottle and bucket away. "I love them dagos, don't you? I told Chong he's got to cook a special dago spread tonight. Minestrone, melon and prosciutto, yellow squash fried in b.u.t.ter. Veal parmigiana." Jessie's lips are still b.u.t.tery from her breakfast, but her eyes shine with gluttonous antic.i.p.ation. She knows of more different kinds of dishes than Zhu has ever eaten in her whole life. "Tortellini with pine nuts and heavy cream. Rigatoni in marinara sauce with shredded beef. Macaroni ca.s.serole with fontina cheese. That dago bread they bake in North Beach dipped in olive oil. Macaroons and nougat, spumoni with candied cherries. And red wine, missy! We must have plenty of red wine with a spread like that. Make that twelve cases, will you?"

Jessie pops the cork on another champagne bottle. My fog-cutter, she calls her breakfast libation. When she comes to the table particularly haggard and groaning, she tartly informs Zhu that a lady never feels good in the morning. Mr. Ned Greenway, tastemaker for the Smart Set, said so himself. Zhu asked Muse to search the Archives for the quotation. It turns out Ned Greenway said that a gentleman never feels good in the morning. Mr. Greenway does not approve of champagne for ladies. Jessie loves to twist the truth to suit herself.

Jessie splashes champagne into her goblet and tops off Daniel's. Daniel usually starts his day with half a pound of grilled bacon, an oyster omelette from the secret recipe Mariah pilfered from the chef at the Palace Hotel, and coffee heavily laced with French brandy. Today, however, Daniel and another boarder, one Mr. Schultz, a gentleman who books arrivals and departures for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's China Line, have joined Jessie in quail and champagne.

Zhu studies them as they tuck into their rich food, feeling queasy just watching them. The only nourishment Zhu takes before noon besides black coffee is a gla.s.s of orange juice that she or Mariah squeeze fresh every morning. "No wonder you're skinny as a flea knuckle," Jessie complained, offended that Zhu wouldn't try the quail.

"Go see Mr. Parducci on Union Street," Jessie tells her now. "And chisel him down, he charges too much." She drains her goblet with alarming speed. "Then go check up on the Mansion for me, missy. I've got errands to run before I make my appearance today."

"I hear the two-year-olds are running at Ingleside," Mr. Schultz says, grinning.

"You hush," Jessie says, but Zhu has already figured that Jessie is off to gamble on the horses at the brand-new Ingleside Racetrack out beyond the Western Addition. Jessie is crazy for the colts and shrewd at betting.

The front bell rings, and Mariah goes to answer the door. From her place at the table, Zhu glimpses a sweaty boy in an American Messenger Service uniform, handing over a letter. Mariah brings the letter in to Daniel. He takes it with a contemptuous glance, quickly slips it in his vest pocket.

He catches Zhu's furtive observation as he reaches for his champagne. She can feel her face burn, a pulse beat in her throat. Daniel Watkins is arrogant, rude, condescending, and bold. He acts as if he's ent.i.tled to whatever he wants. He's completely unlike any man she's ever met. He smiles mockingly at her discomfort, and she casts her eyes down. She can just about hear Sally Chou's sardonic laugh. "Think with your brain, kiddo, not with some other part of your anatomy." She abruptly turns away and studies the abundant table to conceal her embarra.s.sment.

The table-beautifully set with china and crystal, linen and flowers-is totally foreign to her. A relic out of some museum. And the way Jessie and the others linger over their plates, discuss dishes, extol the virtues of taste and texture? Surely such behavior is odd, quaint, and self-indulgent. Before the Gilded Age Project, Zhu well remembers how often she ignored the aching hollow in her stomach on many a long night, ignored the gritty water, the nutribeads like chalk between her teeth, the nutribars resembling the packaging they came wrapped in-which in fact was edible after you steamed off the germs and the grime. It's immoral to dwell on food beyond one's nutritional requirements, uneconomical, and incorrect. The closest the Daughters of Compa.s.sion ever came to feasting like this was when there was the occasional surfeit of millet gruel which they scooped out of Styrofoam cups while squatting around a trash fire.

She's not squatting around a trash fire now.

Zhu picks up a slice of toasted bread thickly spread with b.u.t.ter 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 Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.suring 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 ha.s.sle!"

"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, d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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 prost.i.tution?"

"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 j.a.panese 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 prost.i.tutes."

"Chiron said slaves."

"Household slaves when they were between the ages of five and eleven. s.e.x 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 prost.i.tution." 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 d.a.m.n 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 st.i.tched 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 h.e.l.l out of here. No way in a million years will I prost.i.tute 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 prost.i.tution? 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 a.s.sume debt in excess of one's personal resources. That was the heyday of the technopolistic plutocracy. The woman who 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 prost.i.tution."

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 pa.s.sion 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 Wilc.o.x 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 doc.u.ment.