The Gilded Age

November 2, 1895

El Dia de los Muertos





7

Nine Twenty Sacramento Street

Death struts the streets with a grin and a swagger, a striped serape thrown rakishly over his shoulder. Death tips his sombrero and hands out little skulls of crystallized sugar to squealing children at the curb who jostle for a better view of the parade.

Zhu wends her way through the crowd at the corner of Montgomery and Market. Clad in her gray silk dress and Newport hat, she clutches a leather-bound Bible. A gift for Donaldina Cameron. Best to have something in her hand for her first appointment with the new temporary director of Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, the Presbyterian mission and home for orphaned Chinese girls, a.k.a. abducted slave girls.

She reminds herself she was supposed to have gone to the mission, asked for a job, and stayed there for the duration of the Gilded Age Project. She was supposed to have taken Wing Sing there. But neither of them is there now. Why not? Were the hatchet men she and the girl confronted that first day an unknown probability that collapsed this reality out of the timeline? That’s just great. Now how can she steer the project back on course?

She has no idea, but a visit to Miss Cameron is definitely in order.

“El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead,” Muse whispers in her ear. “In America we observe Halloween. The Catholic Church calls the following day All Souls’ Day, while the aboriginal people of Mexico observed El Dia de los Muertos. Death and life intertwined in the native Mexicans’ cosmology. Death was neither revered nor feared. Not completely understood, of course, but experienced. Celebrated.”

“And in your cosmology? Have the cosmicists attained this peace of mind?”

“No philosophy or religion will give you peace of mind if you don’t find it within yourself, Z. Wong.”

Death laughs, robust and antic.

“Well, yeah,” she says, annoyed at Muse’s platitudes. “What’s the value of life, then?” Anxiety closes cold fingers over her heart. She’s hatched a plan, but will Cameron cooperate? “The cosmicists speak of the Great Good according to True Value. Does a cosmicist deem the death of a child to be the same as—say—the destruction of a butterfly? Suppose it’s a rare butterfly and the child is one of twelve billion people. Is the aurelia’s destruction more important?”

She catches herself. The aurelia? She didn’t mean to say that, did she?

“All this talk of death and destruction is not healthy for you, Z. Wong,” Muse says. “Are you melancholy again? You must try to fight off this depression.”

Muse solicitous, cajoling. When has Muse ever been cajoling? Capricious Artificial Intelligence—there’s an oxymoron. Even with ambiguity tolerance, AI is never capricious. Or it’s not supposed to be. Muse has been astringent, cantankerous, goading, informative, puzzling, even cruel. But Muse has never been respectful of her feelings. Has she really been depressed?

When? She’s lost all track of time.

“And get on with the Gilded Age Project.” That’s more like Muse.

“I am getting on with it.” She quells her annoyance with a full-blasted sneeze. After four months of agony unabated by the antihistamine in her pharmaceutical supplies, Muse formulated a decongestant that she can mix up out of the stuff the LISA techs supplied her with, plus a touch of fresh powdered nettle. The nettle really does the trick. She went out and bought fresh nettle and a mortar and pestle at the Snake Pharmacy along with a Polyopticon Wonder Camera for Daniel and a Patent Dust Protector for herself—a little nickel-plated gas mask that costs a pricey ninety cents. “I’m on my way to see Donaldina Cameron right now. With a Bible.”

Since the Archivists’ plan for Zhu to seek employment at the home got derailed by her rescue from the hatchet men by Jessie Malone, Zhu’s efforts to contact the mission’s director have met with resistance. The mission has put her off for weeks. Her respectful requests for an audience were turned down rather less respectfully. Muse consulted the Archives and discovered that the director—an old warhorse named Miss Margaret Culbertson—suffers from ill health, and that Donaldina Cameron has assumed new responsibilities as the temporary director. And Cameron has finally granted her an audience.

Muse is excited. “This is a breakthrough for the Gilded Age Project, Z. Wong. You must convince Cameron of your plan to rescue the girl.”

“Now that I know where Wing Sing is, I’ll sure as hell try.” But Zhu is troubled. “You still can’t find any trace of me in the files on Cameron?”

“Don’t worry,” Muse says. “Cameron dealt with hundreds of Chinese women, most of whom remained anonymous and are lost to the Archives.”

“Anonymous. That’s what I am, all right.” She swallows her resentment. Chiron made that clear from the start. Chinese women of this Now are anonymous. But she still doesn’t like the fact that Muse can’t trace her in the Archives. No sign of her. No sign, at all. If she’s here, well, she should be there, somewhere in the historical record.

Zhu slogs through the crowd. The Mexican community of the Bay Area—from the Latin Quarter in North Beach to south o’ the slot to San Jose—has turned out for the grand parade downtown. Horsemen with ringing spurs rear and wheel their steeds. Bands blare with their own unique brassy sound. Guitars strum and maracas clatter. Ole! People promenade in costumes and papier-mache masks depicting skulls. Some costumes are sly caricatures—a rich lady in a stole of chicken feathers and a tiara of cardboard, her skull made glamorous with salacious lipstick and eye paint. A priest piously bearing enormous candelabra comprised of skulls, gaudy flowers dangling from his grinning teeth. A rowdy soldier in full dress uniform dangling red and green skulls from the brim of his cap, his bandoliers, his jacket sleeves, and a cardboard rifle. A morose barefooted peasant, a patch slung over one hollow eye socket of his skull mask, his braided mustache swooping over his jawbone. A hound trots beside him, its clipped black fur painted with a canine skeleton in bright white and green.

No one escapes Death.

People guffaw and point at each new mockery. But Zhu can’t laugh. “What does it all mean?” she asks a boy on the sidelines. A gangling teenager, all long limbs and a narrow swarthy face, he pops candy skulls into his mouth and whoops.

“Well, senorita, you’re going to die sooner than you want to, so why cry about it, eh?”

Now Death presents Zhu with a bouquet of pink paper flowers. Why cry? How sensible. This parade and its celebrants mocking death are psychologically healthy. She hands the flowers to the boy and tries to smile, but her mouth refuses. Sooner than you want to. As soon as you are born, you know you will die. And the other way around? As soon as you die, you know you will be born? But that’s reincarnation, a superstition strangely persistent even in Zhu’s Now, though modern science has never proven any truth to it. One of those primitive beliefs that refuses to die, stubborn and irrational.

Or is that what happens if you’re trapped in a Closed Time Loop? Like the infamous Betty in Chiron’s Now. Betty whose rescue polluted all of spacetime. Betty who died, knowing she would be born, knowing she would return to the day of her death and die again—in the past.

Zhu’s heart fills with a chill, and the boy hands the flowers to a girl, then darts away with his friends. These people will never see the massive death modern people will witness--world wars, holocausts, genocides, cancer epidemics, plagues like herpes complex three and nuevo tuberculosis, ecopoisonings, and the dreadful radiation syndrome. So many new forms of massive death.

“They know nothing of death,” Zhu whispers, watching the parade caper past.

“Of course they do,” Muse whispers sardonically. “People of this Now die in their twenties of tuberculosis; there’s no cure. They die of cholera, dysentery, influenza, plague, syphilis, typhoid fever, yellow fever. And yes, of cancer. Women die in childbirth. That’s why a woman’s average life expectancy in this Now is thirty years old.”

“Fair enough. But they revere life, despite el Dia de los Muertos. They believe that life—the creation of life, the preservation of life—is humanity’s highest value. Can we of our Now say the same, Muse?’

Muse is silent.

* * *

Zhu didn’t know if she could say the same in 2495 when spring came to Changchi, and the Daughters of Compassion geared up for another campaign. The World Birth Control Organization had conducted a new lottery under the Generation-Skipping Law. The lottery was random, as always, but critics claimed a disproportionate number of couples in Chihli Province had been chosen to skip. Protesters staged demonstrations, filed complaints in the World Court. Someone firebombed the local office of the WBCO. The ranks of the Society for the Rights of Parents swelled.

Zhu had always loved the spring. It was the time to take off her sour, padded winter jacket, get out from beneath the domes, and bask beneath a new sky under the sun. Cool breezes rippled the feathery leaves of wheat sprouting in the undomed plots. Agriworkers bowed over the land, spreading compost, planting rice, millet, and peas by hand.

She had always loved the spring--but not that spring.

That spring started out with bad omens and, even in 2495, people believed in omens. With the first thaw, wild dogs roamed out of the mountains, harried the agriworkers, and attacked a seven-year-old girl walking alone at dusk from school to her family’s apartment, half devouring her right on the street. Then a hailstorm ripped through the province, damaging four of the big public domes and thousands of residential units and vehicles. When the hailstones melted, they released methane. The air smelled like an open sewer. The undomed fields of rice, millet, and peas faced ruin.

The Daughters of Compassion faced ruin, too. A saboteur dumped excrement in the compound’s water recycler and, before anyone realized their water was contaminated, everyone had contracted dysentery. Always thin, Zhu dropped twelve pounds. She was still weak, wobbly-kneed, and running a fever when she, Sally Chou, Hsien, and Pat Greenberg trudged through Changchi’s civic center, a muddy square of cracked concrete.

“Door to door,” Sally was saying. “That’s how we’ve got to contact them. WBCO will supply us with the names and addresses of the skipcouples. We’ll connect, drop off the literature, schedule an appointment with the women after they’ve looked everything over.”

“We should meet with the husbands, too,” said Pat, “not just the wives. We’ve got to get the men involved.”

“Sure, if the men will agree,” Sally said. “In my experience, that won’t happen.”

“Don’t you think we need to forge a new experience? You’re just reinforcing outmoded attitudes if you make only the women responsible for observing the law.” Pat was another American expatriate who’d come to Changchi looking for her daughter, an exchange student who had fallen in love with a local and had never returned to New York. Pat was brassy and bossy and had the typical expat’s attitude—more radical than the radical and a know-it-all. She argued with Sally night and day, but then everyone had been puking their guts out for weeks. They all felt like hell.

“I say stick with the plan,” Sally said.

“But I think we’re alienating—“ Pat said.

Zhu couldn’t take it anymore. Her head throbbed, a metallic taste rose in her throat, and her gut gurgled. “Could you both please just shut up?” She looked up from the mud, her vision preternaturally clear. “Oh, no,” she added, some instinct kicking her in the butt.

A surly crowd had gathered in the square. The Society for the Rights of Parents had set up a tiny stage and a podium, with a sound system patched to a utility pole. A speaker in a suit and tie paced back and forth.

“The Generation-Skipping Law flies in the face of values held dear to humanity for all time!” said the speaker. “The law robs us of our heritage, robs us of our tradition, robs us of our families, robs of us of our future!”

“We won’t have a future if we don’t enforce the law!” Sally shouted. “We won’t have enough water, enough food, enough living space. You think that shit-smelling hail was bad? How would you like it if the air smelled like that all the time? How would you like it if the water tasted like that all the time?”

“Damn it, Sally, shut up,” Zhu muttered, but for once Pat was clapping Sally on the back.

The crowd began to grumble and boo. Heads snapped around, hard eyes stared. A gang in Parents’ armbands stalked from the edge of the stage to the edge of the square.

“Oh man, here we go,” Zhu whispered, wrapping her arms around her ribs. Her teeth began to chatter.

“You believe that overpopulation propaganda?” the speaker bellowed. “It’s disinformation, people. A hoax! A sham! When we have more people, we have more brainpower, more muscle power. We can overcome problems of supply, overcome pollution. We always have, and we always will!”

“The only reason you got something to eat today, brother,” Sally shouted back, “is because we enforced the law ten years ago! We restored the atmosphere and maintained production because we maintained negative population growth by enforcing the law. You would not have shoes on your feet if we hadn’t enforced the law!”

“Hey, comrades?” Zhu said. “Can we get out of here?”

“Enforce the law!” Pat shouted and raised her fist, then glanced at Zhu, sudden fear in her eyes. She glanced around, understanding their situation. She and Zhu started backing away from the angry mob advancing on them.

Hsien slipped through the crowd and was gone. Zhu remembered seeing the back of her ragged crew cut, and thinking, ridiculously, Cowardice is the better part of sanity.

But Sally Chou was never one to back down from anyone or anything. “We’ve always had famine in China!” she shouted as Pat yanked on her elbow. “We’ve always had disease! Always bad air, bad food, bad water! I’m talking three hundred years! Try three thousand years! We’ve never had enough! In the old days, the communist redistribution of wealth was a sham. A sham, people! Communism redistributed wealth from the rulers of the empire to the bureaucrats of another empire. That’s all! Don’t you get it? We can never have a decent quality of life for all of us under any form of empire till we the people control ourselves. And that means controlling our reproduction. Nuturing and teaching our families. And educating ourselves. Till we bring our population down.”

“Fascist!” the speaker shouted back. “Traitor to the people!”

“F*cking Daughters of Compassion!” yelled someone in the crowd.

People started pushing, shoving, throwing punches. Suddenly fists were pummeling Zhu’s sore guts, and she was flailing with her own fists, her karate moves only as good as her strength, which was next to nothing. Sally and Pat were screaming, whistles shrieking, the speaker’s voice fuzzy with feedback.

She was down on the ground in no time, curled up in a fetal position, her hands protecting her head, the back of her neck, and not much else. Someone ripped her jeans down, and she felt a man’s hard body pressing against her butt. The unmistakable sting of a knife whipped across the backs of her hands before she vomited in the cold mud and passed out.

They beat up Sally bad, and Zhu too, seriously bruising but not breaking her ribs. Thankfully, the man didn’t rape her, after all. She only fully appreciated her good fortune when she thought about the incident later and nearly vomited again at the memory of that hard male body pressing against her. Pat was stabbed half a dozen times. The WBCO transferred emergency funding and the Changchi medcenter sent her down to Beijing on a whirligig. Zhu heard that Pat died, then later that she was critical, but pulling through.

The mood at the compound became unbearable, a volatile mix of acute fear and red-hot rage. Several comrades quietly moved out. But for those who remained, a new fervor infected everyone.

Sally stood up at the front of the mess hall the very next day, fiercely proud with her face swollen and frightfully black and blue, bandages swathing her head and shoulders and legs. Arm in a sling, she held her cigarette in that hand, insisting on twisting her head down and the broken arm up to suck the herbal smoke in a torturous mime of self-sacrifice. She contaminated the air in the whole dome with her smoke, but no one seemed to care.

“We will not be intimidated!” she shouted in a ragged voice.

“We will not be intimidated!” everyone shouted.

They posted guards around the compound twenty-four hours a day. Sally managed to procure fifty assault rifles, no one knew from where or from whom. And in her feverish struggle to keep the Daughters alive, Sally also managed to procure the patches. The black patches. This was the point when everything really changed, Zhu thought later, when the Daughters of Compassion started using the black patches. They told no one, of course, especially the WBCO.

Zhu was in the dorm, recuperating. Sally wouldn’t let her stay at the medcenter in town, she wanted her in the compound under the Daughters’ guard. The medic had used a mollie knife on Zhu’s cuts, which knit the skin just fine. But bruises still darkened the wound sites, the swelling was ugly, and she was weak. She lay huddled on her cot, bruises throbbing, gut gurgling, despair clogging her heart when Sally strode in and sat beside her.

“Give me your leg, kiddo.” Sally pulled the bed sheet down.

Zhu felt a sting behind her right knee next to her contraceptive patch and slowly—was it possible?—the throbbing eased. Even her gut settled down. She sat up, twisted her leg, and took a look. There, a patch of silky black fabric adhered to her skin next to the bright red square of the contraceptive patch.

“Feel better?” Sally grinned, a cigarette dangling from her lip.

“Yeah! What is it? What did you do to me?”

“Take it easy. You don’t know your own weakness. The patch masks it.”

“What’s the patch?”

“Oh, it’s just some kind of opiate mixed with some kind of upper. What they call a speedball. A black patch.”

“Damn you, Sally.” Zhu had endured her teen years without so much as tasting a beer, let alone experimenting with the drugs that floated through Changchi. She must have looked horrified because Sally guffawed till she choked and fanned her face with her hand.

“Hey, don’t worry, I can get more.”

“This is so not a good idea.”

“I think it’s a great idea. They use the black patch for medical treatment, so it’s okay. The patch releases its stuff over time. Just drizzles that sweet medication right in. Listen, Zhu,” she said seriously, “between the bug in your gut and our pals in the square, you’re halfway to nowhere. And I need you up and running.” She pulled out some hardcopy. “We got info that the Parents hacked our d-base for our stats on skipcouples and skipkids in the Huo-wu District. We gotta get to these folks before they do.”

“All right.” Zhu remembered swinging her legs down from the cot and thinking that a nutribar might actually taste pretty good right about now.

“We gotta go down to the schools, talk to the teens, the twennies.” Sally yammered on, stabbing at the hardcopy with her forefinger. “Plus, we heard they’re aiding and abetting illegal pregnancies, setting up secret birth clinics, crap like that.”

“Okay. All right. I get it.”

But Zhu had not gotten it. She had no clue then, no premonition at all, that this was another step down the road to chaos and madness.

No, she smiled. She felt much better with the black patch. She could hardly feel any pain anymore.

* * *

Now, in the midst of the Gilded Age Project, Zhu pushes those memories away and strides toward the invisible walls of Tangrenbu, determined to speak with Donaldina Cameron.

“Cameron is a fanatic a lot like you or she will be soon,” Muse whispers archly in her ear, “only she’s doing her work in 1895. With the blessings of the Presbyterian Church, not the World Birth Control Organization.”

“I’m so glad she and I are soul mates.”

“Watch the modernisms,” Muse has the nerve to remind her.

Nine Twenty Sacramento Street is an imposing red-brick building poised at the crest of a hill angling steeply up Nob Hill to the west and down to Tangrenbu to the east. Imposing iron grilles are bolted over the windows. The place looks like a fortress. Or a prison.

The stench of Tangrenbu permeates the autumn air, and the bachelors in their denim sahms trek silently by. Zhu can feel the pressure of their eyes, their muted anger at her presence in front of the controversial Presbyterian mission. In her dress of a Western lady, the veil drawn over her face, and her hair pinned up beneath her Newport hat, she conceals her race. Someone flings a pebble, which strikes her shoulder blade. She doesn’t turn around to catch a glimpse of him. Whoever flung the pebble is long gone. She lifts the door knocker and sends a resounding boom into the rooms behind the massive walnut door.

A young Chinese woman, her brow knit with worry, cracks the door open and peeks out over a chain lock attached inside. She whispers, “Who is?”

“My name is Miss Zhu Wong. I have an appointment with Miss Cameron. She’s expecting me.”

The door bangs shut, and locks click. The door reopens, and the young woman hurries her inside, banging the door shut. She shows Zhu to a plain, straight-backed chair in a brightly lit, barren hall. Zhu sits and waits, sniffing the astringent air, the scents of wood polish and lemon soap. She runs her finger along the arm of the chair. Not a speck of dust.

At last a plump Scotch woman strides down the hall, her graying hair pulled back in a tidy bun, a pince-nez perched on her prominent nose. She too scowls with worry. “Good day, Miss Wong. I am Eleanor Olney.”

“Good day. Pardon me, Miss Olney, but I’m not the bill collector. Why does everyone look so frightened?”

“We had to dispose of a stick of dynamite this morning. On our stoop, it was.”

“Who would put dynamite on your stoop?”

“The highbinders, Miss Wong!” she exclaims. “The tongs are quite displeased with our temporary director. She’s thrown the slavers into quite a whirl.”

“I see.” A peculiar shadow ripples at the far end of the hall, and Zhu looks warily around. Muse posts a string of statistics about the tongs in her peripheral vision. When she looks back, Miss Olney has tucked her pince-nez in her skirt pocket. Or has she? Zhu stares at the woman’s face, glimpsing no marks on her nose. Those telltale indentions you usually see when a habitual wearer of glasses takes them off.

Oh, no. No! Is it happening again? Little changes, little ripples of reality right in front of her eyes. What do they mean? Fear crawls down her spine.

Miss Olney’s watery pale blue eyes regard her suspiciously. “This way, Miss Wong. Lo Mo will see you now.”

“Lo Mo?”

“Lo Mo means The Mother. With Miss Culbertson on leave, that’s what the girls have started calling her. Though her family calls her Dolly, and her closest friends call her Donald. You,” she says sternly, “may call her Miss Cameron.’

Zhu strides down the hushed hall, her button boots clattering on the immaculate plank wood floors. After Jessie’s excesses, she finds this place almost too austere, decorated only with a few sticks of furniture and scrupulously clean. Whitewashed walls are relieved by a couple of tiny paintings parsimoniously doled out—a blond Jesus, his blue eyes gazing up to heaven, surrounded by blond children. A smiling Mary in a hooded robe, coddling lambs and doves in her arms. From a distant room, girls’ voices dutifully recite, “A B C D E F G.”

Two little girls kneel with brushes and pails of soapy water and meticulously scrub the floor. An open door reveals girls seated at tables, busily sewing dresses and shirts, bolts of fabric heaped all around them. Steam and the scent of starch stream from another door where older girls bend over washtubs and piles of laundry. At the end of the hall, girls sit around a huge table heaped with silverware, tea sets, and tea trays, jars of polish and rags stained black. Their low conversation falls silent as Zhu walks by, and they glance at her with their dark eyes. Zhu can’t tell if the girls are fearful or merely curious, but a peculiar tension grips them.

The girls are all Chinese, of course. Wards of the home.

Miss Olney shows Zhu to an office, then strides away.

Donaldina Cameron sits imperiously behind a large rosewood desk with the implements of business precisely arranged before her—pen and inkwell, stationery, leather-bound ledgers, an elegant Underwood typewriter. Zhu knows she is only twenty-five, but her chestnut hair caught up in a pompadour is broadly streaked with white, making her appear much older. Her complexion is ashen, her expression harried. Still, she’s a lovely woman, Zhu thinks. Scotch, with broad bold brows, large expressive eyes, prominent cheekbones, a sensuous mouth. She wears a billowing black voile skirt and a plum shirtwaist with leg-o’-mutton sleeves hand-folded in tiny pleats.

At her throat gleams an Art Nouveau brooch. With a start, Zhu peers more closely, but the curves of gold are the wings of a dove. Not the aurelia, but expensive. The sort of clothes and jewelry a fine lady would wear. Which seems out of place, unexpected even, in this spartan fortress. A Chinese girl brings in a polished silver tray and serves tea in cups of celadon-glazed porcelain.

“A gift for you, Miss Cameron,” Zhu says deferentially and lays the Bible on her desk.

Miss Cameron looks her up and down coldly. “Miss Wong. You look like a proper young lady. Is it true you are employed by that scourge, Jessie Malone?”

Zhu hesitates, her anger quickening at this fine, pampered lady running this bleak mission. Muse flashes a warning in her peripheral vision, and she bites her tongue. Of course she needs Cameron’s help. How else can she rescue Wing Sing ? ”I’m merely her bookkeeper.” At Cameron’s contemptuous glance, she adds, “Miss Malone isn’t so bad. She’s fair.”

Cameron takes the Bible, runs her finger down the leather binding. “That is the first time, Miss Wong, I have ever heard anyone call a purveyor of female flesh fair.” Dark circles underscore her large, pretty eyes. “What can I do for you?”

“I know of a girl, an abducted girl.” And Zhu tells Cameron about Wing Sing and her servitude at Madam Selena’s on Pacific Street.

“Oh indeed, I know all about Selena,” Cameron says, suddenly freed of her foul mood. Her tired eyes light up. “Selena is despicable. Miss Culbertson rescued a five-year-old from that sink last spring. The child had been smuggled in and sold as a mooie-jai, a household slave. When the child didn’t serve tea properly, Selena poured boiling water on her hands. Let me see.” Cameron seizes a ledger, leafs through the pages. “Selena’s house has got a trapdoor in the roof leading up from the southeast bedroom. There’s a butcher’s shop in back, a narrow gap between the rooftops, and a fire escape leading down from the shop. That route of escape will have to be watched.” She slaps the ledger shut and narrows her eyes. “Why do you want me to rescue this girl?”

“Because. . . .” Zhu hates lying to Cameron, but she’s got to. “She’s a distant relative of mine. A distant cousin. I truly do not want to see her live like that.” At least that’s true enough.

“I see. You wouldn’t by any chance intend to recruit your distant cousin for Jessie Malone’s Morton Alley cribs?”

“No, no! I swear it on that Bible! Nothing like that!”

“Well, Miss Wong, your employment hardly recommends you. We’ve been deceived by the likes of you many times before.”

“I want Wing Sing to live here,” she declares with genuine passion. “She must live here. She’s supposed to live here. Please, I implore you, Miss Cameron. Take Wing Sing into your home. Keep her safe.”

This is the truth. This is the object of the Gilded Age Project.

Cameron studies her. Then the gleam returns to her eye, a slow smile to her face. She actually rubs her hands with glee. Glee! “Very well! Let us go rescue Wing Sing.”

Cameron sends a messenger to the callbox on Kearny Street, and the officer with the patrol wagon there takes her message to the Chinatown station. Before Zhu has finished her tea, five local bulls show up at the door bearing hatchets, sledgehammers, crowbars, ropes, wedges, and determined scowls.

“Hallo there, Mr. Cooke, Mr. Andrews, gentlemen,” Cameron greets them briskly. Zhu thinks the policemen are rather dapper in their bowler hats, high starched collars, cravats, and tweed jackets neatly buttoned. “This,” she says to Zhu, “is our raiding squad.” She tells the bulls that Zhu is her informant and mentions Madam Selena, whose name excites their chatter, the flexing of manly muscles, and twitching of mustaches.

Off they go, crammed in a brougham, bound for Pacific Street.

The plug-ugly Stick Victorian has got a red light burning in the window, in spite of the city ordinance. Cameron confers with the police, and two bulls stride around back to stand guard at the fire escape leading down from the roof of the butcher’s shop. The rest of their party climbs the stairs to Madam Selena’s front door. To Zhu’s amazement, Cameron hoists up her skirts and petticoats and bounds up the stairs, leading the way. Zhu follows.

“Even the highbinders dare not harm my person,” Cameron declares. “Stay close to me, Miss Wong. You will need to identify her.”

The door—Zhu notices for the first time—comes equipped with an outer door of iron bars. A security door that is, at the moment, securely locked. Cameron reaches through the bars, seizes the door knocker shaped like a rooster, and knocks. Nothing happens, but curtains stir in an upstairs window.

“Mr. Andrews?” Cameron says. “Break it down.”

Andrews wields his ax and, in a moment, he’s smashed the wood all around the door of iron bars. Cooke applies his crowbar, plucking the bolts right out, and pries the door from its frame. Andrews smashes his ax against the inner front door, splintering the wood. A third bull kicks the door in.

Cameron storms inside, her black skirts a thunderhead of fury, and Zhu steps into the parlor she entered before in her coolie’s disguise. Andrews whirls, smashing rosewood chairs, tables, statuary, the lewd paintings on the walls. Cooke kicks at the spittoons, the vases, sending porcelain shattering against the baseboards. The third bull heaves the lamp with its red light through the front window, shattering the glass. Selena’s girls fly out of their rooms, shrieking, scrambling here and there, to the back of the house, upstairs.

Zhu and Cameron charge up the stairs, Zhu leading the way now, recalling the bedroom where she last saw Wing Sing. Madam Selena, in a black silk nightgown and robe, steps out of Wing Sing’s bedroom. She slams and locks the door, and stands defiantly in their way, barricading the room with her body.

“That’s her room, at the end of the hall!” Zhu cries.

And then she stares—is that a figure darting behind Selena into the room? No, no, no. It can’t be. Selena just closed and locked the door. Zhu’s breath rasps in her throat. Suddenly she’s dizzy, disoriented. Reality is shifting and tilting all around her again.

What on earth is happening?

Selena heaves herself at Zhu, cursing and punching. “You go now! No one here!” One of the cops pulls her off and slams her against the wall.

Andrews swings his ax at the door, and Cooke wedges his crowbar. They pop the bedroom door right open, and Zhu and Cameron rush inside.

“No one here!” Selena shouts and spits. “Fahn quai!”

There is no one here. The bedroom is empty. Cameron throws open the closet, throws back the bedclothes, kicks at the flimsy wire frame of the bed.

“She not here, fahn quai!” Madame Selena shouts. “You go now, white devils!”

“Wait,” Cameron says, cocking her head. She presses her forefinger to her lips.

Zhu strains to listen. And there! A tiny, scratching sound.

“You turn into turtle!” Selena yells. “All your children, they turn into toads!”

Cameron seizes the bed, struggles to push it away from the room’s corner. Andrews and Cooke join in, shoving the bed frame across the room. Andrews breaks the washstand with one stroke of his ax, sending water and basin flying. Cameron hugs the walls, tapping, listening. “Listen for a hollow sound,” she tells Zhu. “There’s a secret compartment in here, I can smell it.”

Zhu starts tapping on the walls, too, but she hears nothing unusual.

Cameron wipes her noble forehead with her hand, flushed and sweating.

Again that tiny scratching.

Cameron drops to her knees with a cry of triumph, scratches at the floor with her fingernails. Zhu pushes her aside, takes out and runs the mollie knife down the crack between the floorboards. Cooke applies his crowbar, a loose nail flies out, and two floorboards pop up.

And there, in a narrow space beneath the floor, lies Wing Sing, wide-eyed and trembling.

“Ai!” screams Madam Selena. “All go to hell!”

A tong enforcer stands watching at the door, but he makes no move to interfere. He smiles a little, staring boldly at Zhu.

“Wing Sing,” Zhu says, taking her hand, and helps her sit up. The girl is glassy-eyed, her makeup smeared. Drugged? Her mouth hangs open, her limbs are limp, her hair disheveled. She wears the same apple-green silk pajamas, now soiled and wrinkled. Foreboding rises in Zhu’s throat as she glances at the girl’s feet. She wears the same straw sandals threaded with green silk. But now her feet are concealed by thick white cotton stockings. Bound or unbound? Zhu can’t tell.

“We’re going to go now, just like I promised you. Okay?”

“Jade Eyes?”

“Yes, it’s me. We’re going to take you home.” But that’s not strictly true. How she hates lying to this girl! “We’re going to take you to the home,” she amends.

“My jade, my gold,” Wing Sing says. “My dowry. I take my dowry!”

“Where’s the jewelry she brought with her?” Zhu says to Selena.

The madam shrugs. Zhu exchanges a look with Cameron, and Cameron tears around the bedroom again, tapping, prying. She finds another secret compartment in the floor of the clothes closet. Officer Andrews breaks the planks open with his ax.

And there, the rosewood box!

“I know that my cousin brought a dowry given to her by her mother in China,” Zhu says carefully. “I want to see if Selena has stolen anything, the way she’s stolen Wing Sing’s innocence.”

“Indeed, yes, take a look,” says Cameron.

Zhu eagerly flings back the lid.

The aurelia. She will have it.

Glitter of gold, bracelets of jade, earrings and rings. Zhu peers breathlessly. Several new pieces she doesn’t recognize—amber beads, a necklace of lapis lazuli, a brooch of freshwater pearls. Please. Zhu doesn’t care how or where or when the girl got the aurelia. If a john gave it to her, if she bought it herself at Colonel Andrews’s Diamond Palace, if it materialized out of thin air. It doesn’t matter. Please make this right. Wing Sing has got to have the aurelia. Wing Sing has got to be the girl Zhu is supposed to rescue so that all of spacetime in the future survives.

But the aurelia isn’t there. It isn’t there.

Cameron beams. “Praise Jesus Christ!”

Officer Andrews hands his ax to Officer Cooke. With a gentleness Zhu didn’t think possible, the policeman lifts Wing Sing in his arms.

* * *

At Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, Zhu and Cameron escort the trembling girl into a tiny dormitory with twelve cots and on into the bathroom. Miss Olney is waiting with a basin of steaming hot water, a bar of soap stinking of lye, a burlap wash cloth, and rough cotton towels.

“Let us get you clean in the name of the Lord, my dear,” Miss Olney says. Her tone implies more than physical dirt.

Wing Sing looks at the homely walls, the sticks of furniture, the bare floors. Her drug-addled eyes widen. The other girls peek at her with their scrubbed faces, disciplined hair, homely cotton clothes. Wing Sing backs away from Miss Olney, hugging her silk around her. Her apple-green silk, the intricate black and yellow embroidery, and gold frogs stand out in this plain place like some glorious pennant of sin.

Olney advances on her, gripping the dripping bar of soap. “Tut, tut, dear. Take off those rags and let me wash you.”

“You not touch me, fahn quai.” Wing Sing spits at her.

“The girl may have some trouble adjusting,” Cameron says calmly to Zhu. “They often do.”

Olney seizes a green silk sleeve. “I cannot get you clean, dear, if you won’t take off your clothes.”

‘”Oh ho!” Wing Sing cries. “You not pay, I not take off clothes.”

“Really!” Olney says and glares at Zhu.

“Hey, you know where she’s been,” Zhu says, glaring back.

Wing Sing darts to Zhu, seizes her sleeve. “Please, Jade Eyes, I go home now, okay?’

“You are home, dear,” Cameron says, seizing her hand. Wing Sing flings her hand away. “We’ll get her busy soon enough, Eleanor. Sewing, do you think? She seems to like clothes.” To Zhu, “Do you know if your cousin can sew?”

Zhu shakes her head, worried now. The girl is supposed to live here, stay here, according to the Gilded Age Project. She says harshly, “Wing Sing, take off those dirty clothes and wash that crap off your face. You won’t need any of that here.”

The two Presbyterian women throw startled glances her way. Zhu doesn’t care. Maybe brusqueness will work when kindness fails. The madams and the johns push these young women around as a matter of course. The girl isn’t accustomed to kindness.

“I not sew! I not sew!” Wing Sing wails. “I have maid. She sew!”

“Get the jewelry box,” Cameron says to Olney, and Olney makes a motion to take the box. Wing Sing clutches the box to her chest and backs away, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t think you should take her jewelry,” Zhu says evenly. “This is her dowry. All the wealth she has from her family.”

“Miss Wong, you do not really suppose it is hers?” Cameron snaps.

Zhu turns to Cameron, troubled by her attitude toward her new charge. “This girl and her mother were tricked by a would-be husband, Miss Cameron. I know that for a fact. She’s not a thief. Her mother gave her this dowry to facilitate her marriage. Isn’t that right, Wing Sing?”

“Yes, yes,” she sobs. “Is true.”

Cameron exchanges a long look with Zhu, and Zhu can see in Cameron’s eyes self-righteousness and ferocity. And also that her soul flies out to this abused girl.

Muse posts a file in Zhu’s peripheral vision, alphanumerics dancing as the monitor tabulates the probabilities. The Archives amply support Wing Sing’s presence at Nine Twenty Sacramento Street. Or a girl a lot like Wing Sing.

At least the probabilities look right to Zhu. And that will have to do.

“She may keep the box,” Cameron says. “Go on, then, Eleanor. Clean her up.”

Zhu follows Cameron out of the bathroom. Cameron shuts the door, leaving Miss Olney to her task.

Wing Sing screams, “I go home now, okay? I go home!”

* * *

“I do apologize for any misunderstanding we may have had earlier,” Cameron says as she and Zhu sit again in her office, comparing their notes on Wing Sing’s successful rescue. A new spirit of camaraderie graces them. They sip cocoa out of exquisite rose-glazed cups, the scent of chocolate perfuming the air. “You are good at rescuing, Miss Wong.”

“You’re really good, too, Miss Cameron,” Zhu says. “You always will be.”

“Oh, well, that remains to be seen. But you. You are a strong young woman. You understand them. I confess I’m impressed. We could use you here.”

“I confess I wanted to seek a position here.”

Surprise flickers in Cameron’s eyes. “Why did you not?”

“Something unexpected happened, and everything changed.” She couldn’t possibly leave Daniel now. He needs her. She smiles a little to herself. Even if he doesn’t know it himself yet, he needs her.

Cameron ruefully examines her ravaged fingernails. Perspiration stains the underarms of her plum shirtwaist. Her pompadour is wispy, her skirt less crisp. She unpins the gold brooch at her throat, tosses the dove onto her desk. She takes up a ledger, dips a pen in an inkwell, and commences writing an account of the rescue in precise curling script. “I feel so grateful to Our Father every time we rescue a wretched girl.”

“Everyone is grateful to you, Miss Cameron.” Zhu can’t resist adding, “You enjoy the excitement, don’t you?”

Cameron smiles a little. “Perhaps you are right. I only hope our Wing Sing will find happiness here, but I cannot guarantee that.”

A prickle of alarm climbs up Zhu’s spine. I cannot guarantee that. But of course she can. She must. “How is Miss Culbertson getting on? Is she feeling better?”

Cameron raises her eyebrows. “Forgive me, Miss Wong, but how do you know about Margaret?”

“Everyone knows about Miss Culbertson. She, ah.” Muse helpfully posts a phrase in her peripheral vision. “She’s been doing her good works in the city for years.”

“Very true.” Suddenly Cameron looks gaunt and haggard. And fatigued. She sets down the ledger, the pen, and sips her cocoa. “No, her illness worsens, and I am swiftly assuming more of her duties. It’s a pity there’s so little time to train a replacement. I have not received many responses to the advertisement I placed in our congregation’s newspaper.”

“Advertisement?”

“For a new director. A permanent director.”

Zhu’s alarm deepens. Donaldina Cameron will be the new permanent director. She will manage this mission till the day she dies. The Archives are unequivocal about that. The spartan room suddenly seems gossamer, as if reality trembles. She rubs her eyes. What can she do?

“I assumed you would be the new permanent director.”

“Heavens, no, Miss Wong. I intend to stay on only till the Chinese New Year next February.”

“The Chinese New Year?” Zhu swallows hard. That’s when she’s scheduled to depart from 1895 and return to 2495. “What happens then?”

“Why, I have a fiancé.” Cameron blushes. “We intend to marry in the spring. Charlie is a wonderful man, God bless him.” She gives a troubled little smile. “Well, you know, he is a man. But I am so looking forward to marrying and having my own home, my own children.”

“But you’re superb in this position.”

“Thank you, Miss Wong, but I could not possibly stay.”

“But you have to stay.” Zhu wants to say--because you do stay. Because it is your destiny to stay. The Archivists know all about Donaldina Cameron. Her life is thickly documented. Her single-mindedness, her faith. Her devotion to this Cause. Zhu’s stomach clenches. Will she violate Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle if she tries to influence Cameron? Or will she fulfill the object of the Gilded Age Project by persuading her?

“Help me out here, Muse,” she mutters under her breath.

Cameron glances up curiously from her cocoa.

“Surely,” Zhu says, her voice rasping in her throat, “you know how the girls need you.”

“They need someone, certainly, but they do not need me.” She sets her cup down and slumps, bowing her face in her hands. Her shoulders begin to shake. “I have a life, Miss Wong. A life with books and music and flowers. Pretty clothes and jewelry and fine furniture. I want my life back. I want my own house, not this place. Charlie loves me, and we are going to marry, and that is that. That is our plan.” She raises her face, her eyes anguished. “Oh, but I hate the brothels! I hate the cribs. I hate what the highbinders do to these innocent girls stolen away from their families and their faraway land. It is more loathsome to me than I can possibly express. My very soul shrinks from it.”

“Then, Lo Mo, you must stay.”

“No! I am not Lo Mo. I am not their Mother. Do you not understand? I can barely sleep at night in this place. Food is ashes in my mouth.”

“You’ll endure, Lo Mo.”

“Do not call me that! Why should I give up my future happiness for this?”

And then something outrageous and unexpected happens.

“Because this is your Cause, Donaldina,” Muse says in a high, clear voice, projecting its voice into a corner of Cameron’s office.

Cameron gasps, clasping her hand to her throat, then stares at Zhu, a mix of awe, suspicion, and a good dose of fear in her eyes. “What is this deviltry that clings to you?”

“I am Zhu Wong’s own sweet guardian angel,” Muse says. “Not that she deserves me.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Zhu mutters.

“Fear not, beloved sister,” Muse says shamelessly. Talk about violating every Tenet! “Gird up thy strength and plunge ever onward, oh lady of mercy. Your blessed path lies before you. Do not shrink from it.”

“My blessed path lies with my husband-to-be and my family,” Cameron declares. “As you surely must know, angel, since God knows all and everything that is to be.”

Zhu snorts. Cameron is one tough nut. Zhu doesn’t know whether she would have the nerve to argue with a disembodied voice claiming to be a guardian angel if she were from a time before radio and television, never mind computers and telespace. Zhu blinks and her left eye begins to throb. Damn. She hates when this happens. Muse downloads a file from the Archives through her optic nerve.

“Open your eyes, Z. Wong,” Muse commands.

Zhu does, and Muse projects a holoid field into the center of Cameron’s office, a blue wall of light hovering above the polished wood floor.

Cameron’s cup of cocoa crashes to the floor.

“Don’t give her a cardiac arrest, all right?” Zhu mutters.

“Behold what is to be,” Muse says, its voice ringing like a little silver bell.

Zhu sits bolt upright. This gets her immediate attention. What is to be?

A pastoral scene appears in the holoid field. Young people saunter across a grassy field past a well-worn carousel, a gothic stone mansion.

“Why, that’s Golden Gate Park,” Cameron says. “The carousel and the Sharon Building. We took an outing there only last week to see the brand-new attractions. The girls love the carousel.”

Now a young man strolls by in a Prince Albert cutaway and top hat, his hair straggling over his collar. Strangely, he also wears the blue denim trousers of a coolie. He turns, and both Zhu and Cameron gasp. He wears no shirt beneath the cutaway, and his face is painted pink, blue, and green, the bright colors fashioned in the paisley shapes so popular for wallpaper and fabrics during the Gilded Age.

“What in heaven’s name has he done to his face?” Cameron whispers.

A young woman runs up to him, and again Zhu and Cameron gasp. She wears a thin cotton T-shirt through which her bare breasts bob alarmingly, a long paisley skirt, and no shoes. Her feet are muddy. Zhu meets Cameron’s look—no shoes? No San Franciscan, not even a very small child, walks about with no shoes in the Gilded Age.

More young men and women stroll past. Some appear more disheveled than immigrants after a transoceanic steamship journey. Shaggy matted hair spills down skinny shoulders. They wear clothes with holes and patches such as only the most destitute beggars wear in the Gilded Age. Yet there strides a woman in a long scarlet velvet dress and a feathered hat, a man in muttonchops and a straw boater.

Zhu has never seen such a strange sight in her life.

“Behold what is to be,” Muse declares again.

Now an elderly Chinese woman, perhaps in her sixties or seventies, pushes a wheelchair across the grass. She’s sturdy looking, her gray hair still threaded with black, and wearing a padded jacket just like a thousand other Chinese women in San Francisco. In the wheelchair reclines a very elderly woman, slim and fragile, her white hair neatly tucked into a pompadour.

“Dear God,” Cameron says, “is that me?”

Zhu stares. The strong Scotch face, the mouth, the hairstyle. It’s Cameron, all right. Now a tall, slim man in jeans and a leather jacket steps into view, his bright red hair tumbling down his back.

“Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco!” It’s Zhu’s time to shout.

“You know that young man?”

“Yes! It’s 1967. Got to be!”

A pretty young woman with light brown hair walks beside him. The lovely couple strolls past Cameron and her escort.

And, as Zhu stares, something really outrageous and totally unexpected happens.

Cameron nods and smiles at Chiron, exchanges a few words, and the elderly Chinese woman turns to stare at him. Zhu clearly sees the gleam of green in her eyes. Her mouth gapes open, and she reaches into her padded jacket. She pulls out a tiny object--something shiny, something gold, winking with diamonds and bits of multicolored glass.

The aurelia.

She hands the aurelia to Chiron, and he slips it in his jacket pocket.

Then the holoid winks off, leaving only the wall of blue light. The wall shrinks to a pinpoint and disappears.

“Thanks, Muse,” Zhu whispers, struck to her soul. “We both needed that.”

She sits in silence with Cameron, the ticking of a clock the only sound, cocoa pooling at Cameron’s feet. Then she says, “The reality is, Miss Cameron, that you will never marry or live the lovely life you planned. But you will have this—your Cause.” Just as Zhu has her Cause in 2495. And will have her Cause if and when she returns to her Now. “Will you argue with an angel? With this vision of what is to be?”

Cameron stands unsteadily, goes the door, and summons a girl, who dashes in, sweeps up the shattered cup, and mops up the cocoa, staining a white rag dirty brown. Cameron’s lips are tight. “The vision proves nothing but my longevity, for which I am duly grateful, Miss Wong.”

“But don’t you see? Your companion is a Chinese woman. A green-eyed Chinese woman.”

“Are you about to tell me that is you?”

“I don’t think so, but I really don’t know.” In truth, Zhu doesn’t know. She doesn’t feel that jolt of recognition other t-porters report when they witness Archival evidence of themselves in the past. Still, she’s as shaken by the vision as Cameron must be. Because she’s not supposed to stay in the Gilded Age. If she does, she’ll be trapped in a Closed Time Loop. A Closed Time Loop that could pollute the timeline. A Closed Time Loop that never ends.

Cameron snaps at the girl cleaning up. “You may go.” She glares at Zhu. “I repeat, your vision proves nothing! I have Chinese servants now. I will surely have Chinese servants in my own house in the future.”

“How cruel, Miss Cameron.”

“Nothing can compare to the cruelty of this so-called vision. I shall always be kind to the fair sex of the Chinese race. I shall always observe my Christian obligations. What more, what more do you have a right to demand of me?”

Zhu stands. “Then I shall leave you, Miss Cameron, to your obligations.”