“But that night you attempted to do so,” Muse says. The monitor’s voice is cold.
“In support of a law your cosmicists dreamed up.”
“Overpopulation of the earth has been the most serious problem facing humanity’s survival and global renewal since the brown ages.”
“Then why is one little boy’s life so important?”
Muse is silent.
“You don’t want to say, do you, Muse? What is the value of a human life in a world burdened with twelve billion people? In cosmicist theory, a human being is no more important than an endangered butterfly. Who will be my judge and jury?”
Muse is silent.
Zhu studies herself in the watery reflection of the nineteenth century mirror. Is he alive or dead? Well. She’ll find out tonight at midnight. The t-port is instantaneous, flinging her from this Now to her Now. There isn’t even movement, not really. Tachyportation is a transmutation, not a traveling, and there is no duration. A second seems to pass, but that’s subjective. A subjective second and the void.
She shudders when she remembers the void.
She pins the aurelia on the collar of her gray silk dress. The final touch. She stands at the threshold of her little bedroom for the last time, nostalgia already leaking into her heart. I’ll never see this place again.
She hurries through Mariah’s parlor, into the hall, downstairs.
She knows where to find Wing Sing so she can hand the aurelia over to the girl. Where the most desperate streetwalkers go to ply their trade—the Barbary Coast.
* * *
Zhu hears shouts in the foyer, Jessie and Daniel. Now what? She tiptoes to the bottom of the stairs, tries to sneak past them to the kitchen, and out the tradesmen’s door. She’s got to go! But Daniel fastens his glittering, red-rimmed eyes on her, seizes her wrist, and drags her into their altercation.
“Zhu will stand me for the month, won’t you, my angel?”
“Hmph! I’ll be damned if you’ll take the wage I pay my servant to pay me,” Jessie says.
“It’s her money after you pay it to her, now isn’t it?”
“She and everything she’s got belongs to me.”
Zhu gazes at Jessie, so like Sally Chou in her proprietary feeling toward her, and so different from any woman she’s ever known, including Sally. The sight of her is unsettling. As if reality is shifting, and shifting again. After the glamour of the Artists’ Ball, Jessie looks sallow and bloated, her mouth pinched with pain. She won’t listen to Zhu about the corset. She won’t stop guzzling Scotch Oats Essence and champagne. Muse says Scotch Oats Essence is not only loaded with whiskey but with morphine. Muse says the Queen of the Underworld is one drink away from the grave.
“Let’s hear what our Zhu has to say,” Daniel says.
“I belong to no one, and I’ve got to go.” Her time in this Now is growing shorter.
“Never mind her, she’s in one of her moods,” Jessie persists. “Mr. Watkins, I happen to know you got money a-rollin’ in from your Chinatown slum, and you sold your Western Addition lot, and you’re gettin’ the goods on Harvey’s Sausalito poolroom.”
“The lawyers are breaking my back, and we haven’t even gone to court.”
“Sure and it’s the lawyers, is it? If you want to go shoot your wad on dope, that’s your biz. But I’ll not be stiffed by the likes of you.”
“When I’m stiffing you, madam, you will know it.” His sarcasm doesn’t help. “I’m telling you, my mistress will tide me over till next month, won’t you, Zhu?” He seizes her arm and pulls her into the smoking parlor. “Now, listen, Zhu. I know she gave you a raise. She’s paying you a pretty good wage, and all I need is. . . .”
Zhu closes her eyes. She’s choking—the air in the parlor is foul with old smoke. His feverish whisper becomes a jumble in her ears, incomprehensible. Why was she ever drawn to this man? How can she account for their mutual attraction, dreadful as it is, except for the vast unseen patterns of pain and atrocity they each have known in their separate lives? That’s how the cosmicists think—correlations and correspondences are not random and not merely synchronicity, but indicative of patterns, of the vast underlying energy flows of space and time. Proof positive of the everpresent force of the Cosmic Mind. Has she ever believed in cosmicist cosmology? Not really. But how else can she account for her and Daniel?
“I just need fifteen more dollars,” he’s saying. “What do you say?”