over the impression someone was shooting at her as she stepped out of the tachyonic shuttle. She looks around, alert and wary.
The shuttle has been installed at the historic location they call the Japanese Tea Garden in New Golden Gate Preserve. Zhu smiles, secretly glad the shuttle has vanished from her sight. She never liked the photon guns aimed like assault weapons. The pretty calcite crystals that did unpretty things. The banks of blinking microbots slaved to vast offsite servers. Then there was the chronometer, the savage hook-like heads of the imploders. The whole thing was militaristic, foreboding.
And the Event?
Thanks to a fiendishly clever technology invented by the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications, the Event instantaneously transformed the matter of her body into pure energy and transmitted that energy faster than the speed of light.
Flinging her body and soul from July 4, 2495 to July 4, 1895.
Did the Event actually work? Oh, yeah. She honks into the handkerchief. The hard curving stays of her corset—slender steel strips covered in black satin—dig into her ribs. Quickly, before anyone notices, she stoops and flips up her skirts, examining her knees. No blood leaks through the thick black cotton stockings. Excellent. She starts smoothing back the slip, the skirt, the overskirt, the traveling cloak, all in shades of pale dove gray.
“I beg your pardon, miss, but may I assist you?”
Zhu glances up.
A young man stands, startled, wringing his large mottled hands and staring open-mouthed at her calves. His bright blond muttonchops and clean-shaven chin shape his face into sort of a peculiar square. He’s combed his yellow hair back over his scalp, lets it fall to the shoulders of his black frock coat. A scarlet polka-dot tie throttles his starched wing collar. He’s tilted his porkpie hat at a rakish angle, carelessly unbuttoned his vest in the afternoon heat. Quite the dandy with his bawdy grin and stink of gin. Has his way with the ladies, no doubt.
But his concerned expression closes up like a slamming door when he glimpses Zhu’s pale golden complexion, her black hair and wide cheekbones. Her slanting eyes, the irises gene-tweaked green.
“Why, thank you, sir. Yes, you may.” She extends her hand for him to assist her off the bridge. Gray lace mitts cover her palms, wrists, and forearms, leaving her fingertips bare.
He doesn’t take her hand. No, he frowns, turns without another word, and strides away. He glances at her over his shoulder with eyes of ice.
“Too bad, Muse,” Zhu says to the monitor. She pulls the veil down from the brim of her Newport hat and ties it beneath her chin, shielding her face from the sun. From other prejudiced eyes. “I guess he didn’t want to assist a Chinese lady.”
“You’re not a lady, Z. Wong.” Muse says, the monitor’s tone as cold as the young man’s glance. “You’re a fallen woman.”
* * *
A fallen woman. She certainly was.
It was June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the central women’s prison facility at Beijing and roused her out of an exhausted sleep.
“A deal?” Zhu said warily. “What kind of a deal?”
“I don’t have all the details, but they’re saying they’ll reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter,” the lawyer said and shoved a petition in her face. “If you do what they want.”
“Attempted murder,” Zhu reminded her. “That would make it attempted manslaughter.”
“Whatever.”
“I didn’t mean to do it.” She was too tired to read the tiny print. “And he’s not dead yet. At least, no one’s told me so.” She rubbed her eyes. “What do they want?”
The lawyer was court-appointed, since Zhu had no money. One of those bleary-eyed, pasty-faced public defenders perennially overworked and underpaid. A heart attack waiting to happen at ninety-three years old with an inflamed neckjack beneath her ragged crew cut. Theoretically the people had equal access to due process, but it didn’t happen much in Socialist-Confucianist China. The lawyer glared at Zhu, distaste curving her mouth.
Attempted murder. The charge would be upgraded to murder if her victim died. Sick at heart, Zhu asked the guards every day after her arrest, “Is he alive?” No answer. “Tell me! Is he alive or dead?”
It was just plain crazy. It was never supposed to have happened this way. As she lay in the prison cell, sick with forced detox after they took her black patch away, waiting to be charged with attempted murder, she had trouble believing the campaign could have gone so wrong. How she could have done such a thing? How could