butter, pinches coarse salt, black pepper, and garlic shavings onto the shellfish, and sets everything sizzling on the stovetop above the oven. Then he takes the toasted bread shell from the oven, spoons the oysters in the bottom, clamps the lid on top, and divides the gigantic sandwich into quarters. He wraps the fragrant concoction in crisp white paper.
“Squarer for you, missy,” says the cook. “Is my San Francisco special.”
“Thank you, sir. I will always remember your culinary skill.”
Zhu hurries back to Daniel. He sits slumped and shivering, his face fallen, his arms folded across his chest like the limbs of a puppet.
“Muse?” she says, panicked.
“Give him a neurobic,” Muse advises. “Two, if you’ve got enough left.”
The LISA techs supplied her with nine months’ worth of neurobics and no more. She’s taken care to ration them out. She finds the last half a dozen in her feedbag purse, takes out two without a second thought. She breaks open a capsule under Daniel’s nose, and his eyes flicker, a little color filters into his cheeks as he breathes the healing fumes. She breaks open another. Now he smiles wanly.
“What have you got there, my angel? It smells wonderful.”
She leads him to the picnic tables set beneath a whispering willow tree. They sit and munch on the squarer. After two enthusiastic bites, Daniel pauses, becoming pensive again. “I wasn’t the first,” he says heavily, “to make pictures move.”
“You don’t have to be the first. This is only the start of the moving picture business. What’s needed is a creative mind like yours to choose which pictures will move. To choose which stories to tell with those pictures. And to pioneer more technological innovations. Believe me, a whole new world is opening up for you.”
If she was hoping to rouse him with her encouragement, she’s disappointed now.
“By God, I’d like champagne with my oysters.”
“If your mother fed you whiskey and morphine to keep a little boy quiet, you’re going to have to fight every day of your life for sobriety, Daniel. Trust me, it will be worth it.”
“But why?” He throws down his food. “Oysters taste so much better with champagne. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. We do die tomorrow, don’t we? As life follows birth, so death follows life. That’s the way the world works, is it not?”
Zhu sighs. She too wishes she had a glass of champagne to wash down her oysters. And she wonders. If she dies in the past—which seems inevitable, now—then her birth and her life are to follow her death. How many times has she made this loop? How many times has she thought these thoughts? Though, at the moment, her thoughts feel fresh and new. Eat, drink, and be merry? Why not? Why not? How will she bear the rest of her life?
“You know, I can’t see the stars dance anymore,” Daniel mutters.
“The stars dance?”
“Yes, in the sky over marvelous Californ’. There was a time when I could look up and see the stars dance. Not anymore.”
“Muse?” Zhu whispers. “Help me.”
That scratchy feeling irritates her left eye as Muse downloads data through her optic nerve and projects a holoid field. A translucent wall of blue light hovers over the grass in front of the willow tree.
Daniel gasps, leaps to his feet, circles the translucent wall. He thrusts his hands into the field, marveling at the lack of resistance. Well, of course, his expression tells her, this how the future would do it. He guffaws with delight, and his cheeks bloom with color. He glances at her, jubilant, expectant. “Go on, go on! What’s next?”
She blinks, and Muse’s holoid of Woodward’s dancing bears pops up amid the swaying leaves of the willow tree. There they are, the bears in their silly hats and costumes, yelping for apple chunks. The holoid is nothing special to Zhu, just a digital recapitulation of a previously recorded reality. But Daniel drops to his knees, ruining his trousers with grass stains as he crawls all around the holoid, studying the three-dimensional images from every angle.
To Zhu’s surprise, Muse goes on, showing holoids of megalopolises, the Mars terraformation, the EM-Trans, the huge infrastructure of space stations orbiting the Earth. Then holocausts, conquests, visions of apocalypse. The brown ages that last for terrible centuries. And restoration of the Earth, the New Renaissance. A stampede of virtual gazelles leaps over a blind where a man and woman lie hidden together.
Daniel watches, transfixed. “Will I be able to do this?”