The Gilded Age Part 30

"I'm nearly twenty-two." Daniel catches a gla.s.s of champagne and a clever little pastry from a tray sailing by on the shoulder of a harried waiter.

"Twenty-two," Duff says, ignoring the tray. "When I was twenty-two, sir, I trucked goods into the mountains. Even higher than the Gold Country, that's where the Comstock Lode lay. Even higher, even harder, even crueler than the hills. I wore a burlap s.h.i.+rt, sir, and denim like your coolie here, and padded cotton crawling with lice." He casts a baleful glance at Daniel's silk and satin pirate's costume, the spit-and-polished black leather boots. "We climbed rocks, sir. We ate stone soup when winter came to the mountains." Another baleful glance at the champagne and pastry in Daniel's hands. Daniel hastily sets both delicacies down on a side table. "We ate squirrels when we could catch 'em. With no campfire, we ate them raw. Have you ever tasted raw squirrel? Tasted raw squirrel's brains, raw squirrel's intestines?"

"No, Mr. Duff, I have not had that privilege." Daniel swallows hard.

"You young men with your petty troubles, your women, your drink, and your drugs." Duff surveys the whirling party, contempt pulling at his features. "One day I fell, sir. A slip on the ice. Oh, I had slipped many times before. But that slip did me in. I fell down that cliff like a son of a b.i.t.c.h and shattered my G.o.dd.a.m.n leg forever."

Duff raises his right leg, showing Daniel his boot with the heel built up three inches high and a brace that disappears into the leg of his trousers. "That's when I started on the medicine, sir. I had to. Pain all the time."

Daniel murmurs, "I am truly sorry."

Zhu is watching and listening, her slanted green eyes wide behind the tinted spectacles.

"I took whiskey to the miners," Duff says. "G.o.d knows they needed it. I make no apology for it. My wife and her people"-he spits this out-"enjoy chastising me for the source of my wealth. Take pleasure in suggesting my injury was G.o.d's punishment for bringing them whiskey. Well, sir, there are punishments and punishments."

"Real estate is hardly a better enterprise," Daniel says, cringing when Duff's frown deepens. A s.h.i.+ver of panic runs through him. Is he, in his bourgeois pirate's costume, losing his friendly connection to the inestimable Duff?

"I took them whiskey," Duff says, ignoring him. "I took them good whiskey, but I never touched a drop of it myself. No, sir, those were our goods. When we needed the fire of alcohol of warm us in the cold, we drank puma p.i.s.s. Not a drink a fine young gentleman like yourself would know a thing about."

"Ah, puma p.i.s.s," Daniel says. "Terrific rotgut. Homebrew, tobacco juice, and a dose of strychnine. Gave me astonis.h.i.+ng visions."

Duff finally cracks a small smile, and Daniel knows he's in. "Let us find the gentlemen's facilities, Mr. Watkins."

Duff leads the way, Daniel follows, and Zhu dogs his heels again. He turns and whispers, "You cannot come in with us."

"I follow master," she protests in a low voice.

By G.o.d, he could throttle her!

Duff turns in midstride. "Oh, your manservant may attend us. Indeed, he should learn how this is done, Mr. Watkins. Like I said, he may prove very useful to you. And to me."

They find the gentlemen's urinal on the far side of the ballroom. Not too many fellows in here yet. The serious drinking has only just begun. They tour the gilt and scarlet antechamber set with spotless mirrors, marble tables, and upholstered chairs, porcelain sinks and pitchers of water, trays with brushes and combs designed for a gentleman's special needs, freshly laundered towels, smelling salts, pots of mustache wax and hair tonics, tapers burning in candelabra, and colognes in cut-crystal flasks.

Negro attendants in scarlet uniforms swarm around them, politely offering various hygienic services. Duff dismisses them, takes a pitcher of water, and finds a table and a mirror on the far side of the chamber. "Now look here, Mr. Watkins." He takes out a leather case from a pocket inside his tuxedo jacket, unsnaps the top. Inside nestle several vials of powders, a large steel spoon, a thick white rubber thong rather like an oversized rubber band, and a hypodermic needle.

Zhu expels a soft breath. Daniel knows that breath. The sound of her perpetual exasperation.

"Your manservant is impressed, eh?" Duff says, casting a keen look at his mistress who, despite her attempt at this manservant's masquerade, cannot completely conceal her delicate feminine charms.

But if Duff is distressed by her charade, he gives no indication and promptly sets about tapping a quant.i.ty of powder into the spoon. He carefully pours drops of water from the pitcher and stirs the concoction with a silver toothpick over the hot tongue of a burning candle. Like an alchemist he sits, intently stirring, and says at last, "It is done. Take off your coat, Mr. Watkins and roll up your sleeve. Lay your arm down on the table, like this." He proceeds to roll the thong up Daniel's arm. "You must cook the medicine as a chef cooks a fine sauce. Like a fine sauce, it requires the right ingredients and attentive care." Duff draws the liquid in the spoon into the hypodermic needle in one neat suction.

Daniel watches, enthralled. "This will help me sleep without the drink?"

"Has the drink ever helped you sleep?"

"Not really, now that you mention it, Mr. Duff." He asks again, his hope soaring higher. "And this will calm my nerves from the dipsomaniac cure?" So tired, so overwrought, what he would give for relief! "I will rest?'

"You will rest," Duff says and, tapping the inner aspect of Daniel's elbow, promptly jabs the needle into his arm and pushes in the plunger.

Pain! But not so much, Daniel can take a bit of pain, and then- --then he's torn from his body, this pale wriggling worm, flung like a stone into the sea, waves of pleasure, sheer pleasure, pressing his very soul into oblivion. Flat as death, dying without dying. A rush-by G.o.d!-the most incredible. . . .pleasure, pressure, pain so vast he is transformed into. . . .sensation itself, mindless, nerveless pleasure like the moment of s.e.xual release but wrought a hundredfold, a thousandfold, tongues of pleasure caressing him all over his body, and his brain, his poor sleepless harried haggard brain- Rest, my son, says a voice in his head, and a chorus of voices sing, discordant yet beautiful, the way the sea smas.h.i.+ng into rocks on the sh.o.r.e is beautiful.

Like in a dream, a distant dream, hazy and meaningless, he hears his lunatic mistress shouting at Duff, "What did you just shoot him up with, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d?"

"Ah, I'm a b.a.s.t.a.r.d now," Duff murmurs. "You will be very, very useful to him. And to me."

"I asked you what?"

"I hope you followed how to do the procedure. What, you ask? Only one of the most beneficent medicines G.o.d has ever granted to us poor mortals exceeding, in my estimation, the gift of the Incas."

"What is it?"

"Calm down, boy, or whatever you are, and hold your tongue," Duff commands. He packs up his leather bag and strides out of the gentlemen's facilities, heading out to the Artists' Ball. "I merely graced Mr. Watkins with G.o.d's great gift of morphine."

Daniel is sick, then, of course. Somehow that seems inevitable. The price of admission. He retches, clutching his gut, retches over and over till there's nothing left inside, nothing but his gut. And it feels as if the gut itself will come up, too.

His face is filmed with tears and sweat and bile. By G.o.d, he looks like h.e.l.l in the spotless mirror confronting him. "My poor mistress," he says as she leans over him with a basin, a washcloth, a pitcher of water, ice cubes. The sound of her breath, quick and close, thunders in his ears. She does not weep, but he can see the sorrow molding her face like the carved grief of an icon. "What I make you endure."

"There's nothing I can do for you, Daniel," she says over and over. A catechism of despair. "I'm not supposed to. I'm not allowed to. I can't save you."

b.l.o.o.d.y sleeve, b.l.o.o.d.y face-his nose is going out on him, again. "Save me? You silly goose. Save me from what? You're not responsible for me."

"No, I'm not," she says miserably.

"I mean, you're not my mother," he clarifies, and as soon as he says that word-mother-a cold draft blows over him like an exhalation of the dead. s.h.i.+vering, teeth chattering.

Zhu summons an attendant, a handsome black fellow, all high cheekbones and dark glancing eyes, who sets down a pot of steaming hot tea.

"She had a lover," Daniel says.

"Who?" Zhu says and directs the attendant to wrap a blanket over his shoulders. The attendant pours out tea. Daniel can smell the bitter steam, waves the cup away.

"I know that now, though I didn't understand it at the time. I cast the memory from my mind. I was a boy of seven. I didn't understand that the lovely proper lady, my mother, had taken a lover."

The incipient summer, the heat fecund and poisonous, winding like a serpent through the blackness of his heart. The river black beneath the bending hickory trees, the cypress sighing, and the beautiful girl with deep sea eyes who had married a cold, scowling man found herself in love with a man who conducted a gambling business up and down the river. A quadroon. Daniel saw him perhaps once or twice. One of those quick-eyed men with charm, even little Daniel could see his charm. Mama crying, always crying, slap of flesh on flesh. That would be Daniel's father. But she couldn't-wouldn't-give up her quadroon, her quick-eyed man with his high cheeks and crinkled hair, his laugh like the crack of a branch breaking. Like a woman's heart breaking.

Her quadroon left her. Montgomery Ward iron tonic after that. And then Daniel watched his slender mother grow fat and luminous as the moon waxing full.

"I don't know when Father realized she was carrying the quadroon's child." Daniel suddenly feels much better and the gentlemen's antechamber hums with new activity. The pharaoh stumbles into the urinals and Louis XIV reels in, too. "G.o.d knows she tried to hide it. But there was no hiding a child coming by the time she was well along."

Zhu tenderly wipes his face with a cool, damp washcloth. "And what did he do, your father?"

"Oh, he beat her. What else could he do? He had social position, a business, political pull, money, property. He had his pride. And his own child. A son. Me. When I think of it now, miss, I can comprehend it. What else, what else could he do?"

"Ah," Zhu whispers. "And what else did he do?"

"One night he beat her, kicked her, and kicked her again when she fell down, kicked her in the belly, over and over." Slap of flesh on flesh. Daniel crouching in a corner of Mama's dressing room, watching as Father beat her. Daniel at Mama's bedside when she lay bleeding into the bedpan. Haven't I been good to you, Danny?

"She lost the quadroon's baby," Daniel says. "Lost her capacity ever to conceive again. I suppose Father could have killed her that night. Perhaps he should have. Instead, he only damaged her for the rest of her life. It must have been on that night when Dr. Dubose came. He was the one who gave her the iron tonic, but now she needed something stronger. He was the one who first administered morphine to my mother. She was in a lot of pain."

Zhu is pale, like pale gold marble, her strange green eyes dark with horror behind her tinted spectacles. For once she, who spouts off about everything, has nothing to say.

"And here I am, my mother's son. Sins of the mother, eh?"

And there, Jeremiah Duff comes striding back into the gentlemen's facilities. Dour old Duff is positively jovial.

"Now, Mr. Watkins," Duff says, sitting down before him and taking his arm, tapping the inner aspect of his elbow. "Now that you've recovered from your first taste of G.o.d's greatest gift, let us try another shot, shall we?"

February 22, 1896 Chinese New Year

11.

Kelly's Shanghai Special Clash of cymbals, bra.s.s on bra.s.s, and the high, thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd sound like some tortured creature crying. Bang, bang, bang! Zhu dashes to her bedroom window to witness quite a hustle-bustle on Dupont Street. It's the twilight of New Year's Eve-Chinese New Year's Eve. Those are fireworks, of course. Combustible explosives, not projectiles aimed at you, that's what Muse said nine months ago. Was it really nine months ago that she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the j.a.panese Tea Garden? Nine months ago when she last heard fireworks? What a thin, nervous woman she'd been, dropping to her knees, a Daughter of Compa.s.sion dodging an imagined bullet.

Nine months, and it is not her wishful thinking-she is not pregnant with Daniel's child. Muse has run a diagnostic, confirmed this fact. She's merely grown stouter from the bounty of Jessie Malone's table, suffers from dyspepsia because b.u.t.ter disagrees with her. She's lethargic because she's started drinking and champagne makes her drowsy. She doesn't get her monthly menses because the contraceptive patch--the bright red square hidden behind her right knee next to the spot where the black patch used to be--halts her cycle completely.

That's all.

Bang of explosives, stink of gunpowder, clamor of street skirmishes-she remembers street skirmishes nearly every night in Changchi during the last days of the campaign. Remembers? But how can she remember the future? She struggles to sort out the paradoxes in her troubled mind. Because it is her personal past, even though the events she remembers take place six centuries in the future.

Are you telling me I've lived six centuries in the past? Then why don't I remember it?

So familiar this smoke, this clamor. Like a premonition. A premonition is just a memory. A memory of what? A memory of the future.

Early spring has brought other scents to the alleys of Tangrenbu-blooming lilies, quince, almond and cherry branches heavy with aromatic spring flowers. The shops have set up stalls for the New Year celebration displaying a surprising bounty-platters of oranges and k.u.mquats, bags of salted plums, trays of bean-paste pastries, sugared coconut slices, litchi nuts, portly figs, candied strips of winter melon. Strings of gaudy paper flowers festoon the balconies and the bal.u.s.trades.

Yet Zhu senses a dark sorrow beneath the festive atmosphere whenever she strides down the streets in her Western lady's disguise, a wicker shopping bag on her arm. Another year has come and gone, and the bachelors of Tangrenbu still long for their families forbidden to immigrate to Gold Mountain. There won't be a solution for them, not anytime soon.

s.p.a.ce and time have plunged forward and crossed over an imaginary boundary. According to the modern Western calendar, on January first the New Year turned into 1896. But with the first new moon of the ancient lunar year, all the revelers of San Francisco join Tangrenbu in observing Tong Yan Sun Neen, the Chinese New Year. To the Chinese, s.p.a.ce and time don't simply plunge forward, the year changes into something new. When Zhu first t-ported to 1895, it was the Year of the Ram when ego, will, and domination prevailed. A year for Daniel J. Watkins. Now the cycle has changed into the Year of the Monkey, the Year of the Trickster, he whose wily intelligence is not to be trusted.

Zhu doesn't trust the Trickster. Her skipparents abandoned her in the Year of the Monkey, the Trickster. Deep foreboding threads her waking moments, her dreams.

A premonition is just a memory.

Of the future? No, it's a lie! She doesn't remember the future. How can she? She's got no special powers. She's just an anonymous Chinese woman. She only remembers her past, the life she's lived like everybody else.

She steps away from the window, and alphanumerics pulse in her peripheral vision.

"You're going home," Muse whispers, "to 2496. Tonight at midnight."

"The t-port is done, then?"

"It's done." Muse downloads a file, and Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc displays in her peripheral vision. Thirty-eight GB.

She wants to sigh and forget about it. This isn't the same file, it can't be the same file. It's not the same size, it's never the same size. But irritation and fear kindle in her heart.

"Go to the intersection of California and Mason Streets," Muse says. "They've installed a shuttle under the Grande Dome. The site has changed in some physical characteristics, of course, but the intersection is still very much the same. You should be fine."

"The Grande Dome?"

"You'll see. The private ecostructure over n.o.bhill Park. Quite mega. Four luxury hotels, refreshed air and water, on-site vegetable gardens and fruit trees. The works. Always was a fancy spot."

Zhu thinks about the location. "Why, that's across the street from where we went to the Artists' Ball." She smiles. "Are the LISA techs arranging a hotel room for me tonight?"

After all she's witnessed of the San Francisco of 1895, she's seen very little of the San Francisco of her Now except for the EM-Trans station, the Inst.i.tute's hydroplex bobbing in the bay, and the j.a.panese Tea Garden Museum in New Golden Gate Preserve. She feels deprived. And ent.i.tled. How well she can imagine the luxury and comfort of her Day!

"Oh, I doubt it," Muse says. "You're accused of attempted murder. They'll debrief you at the Inst.i.tute, then take you back to jail, Z. Wong. You'll be officially charged and stand trial within the week."

"What?" Her irritation and fear spark into anger, and she finds herself on the verge of shouting. "You mean all this has been for nothing? I've earned no clemency? No credit?"

"Credit for what?"

"For risking my life. For t-porting to the Gilded Age. I agreed to a deal. Chiron promised me he'd arrange for a new lawyer, leniency, reduced charges."

"You must be mistaken. The Luxon Inst.i.tute for Superluminal Applications makes no deals, no promises."

"No way am I mistaken! Why would I t-port to this G.o.dforsaken time in the first place?"

"Because you were required to."

"No, I was never required to. I agreed to, I made a deal. I demand my rights after all I've done."

"And what, exactly, have you done for the Gilded Age Project?" Muse's tone is arch.

It's a controversial point, and Zhu swallows her anger. But what has the monitor done for her except berate her and confuse her? To the point that she's wondered whether Muse is malfunctioning, defective, or programmed by someone to sabotage her and the Gilded Age Project. But by whom? And why?

"I found the girl at the designated rendezvous." Apparently Muse needs reminding. "When she was kidnapped by the hatchet men, you advised me to let her go. And I found her again at Selena's, arranged for her rescue, and took her to the home."

"But she's not at the home anymore," Muse reminds her.

"No, she's not, but that's not my fault. She's a human being, right? With thoughts and feelings of her own? Was I expected to become her fulltime bodyguard? You didn't advise me to. So how would that have worked out, Muse? Huh?" When the monitor doesn't answer, she adds, "Anyway, she didn't have the aurelia. She never had the aurelia, not that I can see. So the Archivists were wrong, wrong, wrong. You're wrong, Muse."

Muse is silent.

Which infuriates her. "I have the aurelia. I do. And it's no accident that I found it in a joss house dedicated to Kuan Yin, is it? That eventually I would go inside that joss house? Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco, he knew I'd find the aurelia there. Didn't he? Didn't he?"

"Who?" Muse whispers.

"You know d.a.m.n well who." Zhu clutches the hardware at the base of her neck, wis.h.i.+ng she could rip Muse right out of her skull. Out of her life. "So the aurelia is a time enigma, isn't it? The old anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman gives it to Chiron in 1967, and he takes from her, takes it back with him to 2467. Then an anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman finds it in a joss house in 1895-that would be me--so I can give it to Wing Sing. Am I getting this right?"

Muse is silent.