The Gilded Age Project has turned out to be a disaster. Nothing like what the Archivists planned.
Zhu has no idea how to make things right and Muse is no help at all.
She dallies at the breakfast table, overcome with a peculiar lethargy. Things always change from moment to moment, don’t they? At the most basic quantum level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling. Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. Yet in cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity. Isn’t that what Chiron said? Reality is a set of probabilities constantly collapsing into the timeline. Multiple universes coexist like motes of dust swirling in a sunbeam.
Quantum physics has long supported these contradictions. Zhu chuckles to herself. Quantum physics, hah. Oh, it ought to be quite painless. You won’t know the difference. You awaken transformed, once a Self contemplated yesterday, now a Self scarcely anticipated tomorrow.
But what about today?
She yawns and blinks, drowsy, and doesn’t know herself. She breathes the scent of red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and butter. Who is this slender woman who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen of the Underworld, conversing with gentlemen boarders, sipping coffee with cream and sugar?
Is it really her, Zhu Wong?
Or some other woman, altogether?
Only three months ago, she stood accused of attempted murder. In a T-shirt, jeans, and worn sneakers, she’d trudged through mud, a Daughter of Compassion, a handgun strapped beneath her right arm, a black patch behind her left knee. She’d been a comrade, a devotee of Kuan Yin. She’d been an abandoned skipchild, a Generation-Skipping radical working hard for the only sustainable future the world could hope for.
Three months ago. Six centuries in the future.
She tilts her head toward strains of music drifting from the saloon across the street, where they’ve got a string quarter for the early-morning drinkers. A lilting waltz, romantic and dizzying. She plays with her sleeve, the silk a luminous blue, the buttons on her cuff nubs of mother-of-pearl.
Only three months ago, she’d breathed the stink of petroleum fumes from the antiquated ground traffic of Changchi. She’d breathed the stink of fumes from fourth-hand recyclers beneath the shabby dome over the compound where the Daughters of Compassion lived. She’d breathed the stink of compost, disinfectant, too many human beings living too closely together.
Now the perfume of red roses sends a shiver of pleasure through her.
The Night of Broken Blossoms is a distant nightmare, no longer looming over her every anxious waking moment. In three months, the Gilded Age Project has taken on the quality of a dream.
Who is she?
She is Zhu Wong, of course, a modern Chinese woman. She’s tough, morphed for telelink, Blocked for UV radiation, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Her fingernails were always caked with grit, soil and oil, and bits of plastic.
Yet she is Zhu Wong, the runaway mistress of a British gentleman, fleeing to America by way of Hong Kong and Seattle, with nothing but a feedbag purse and traveling togs in tasteful pearl gray silk. The LISA techs gave her manicure right before she stepped over the bridge.
Who is to say she is not that lady? Who is to say who she really is?
“Jar me, missy, you’re a dreamy chit,” Jessie says. “I said, it’s Columbus Day. The day that dago discovered America.” Jessie polishes off her customary breakfast of five roasted quail stuffed with oysters sautéed in butter washed down by three bottles of champagne. The madam drinks champagne from morning till morning. Her endurance is staggering, her contempt for sleep awesome. “Pay attention. Ten cases of Chianti should do.”
Zhu reaches for the green leather account book lying at her elbow on the dining table. Every morning she goes over the books with Jessie, setting out debits, credits, and cash flow for the Parisian Mansion, the Morton Alley cribs, and the boardinghouse. She actually doesn’t mind, finding the work oddly satisfying. She doesn’t even use Muse’s calculator. She likes to figure the numbers by hand, checks her calculations three times.
“Presently we’ve got fifty cases of liquor at the Mansion,” Zhu says, flipping through the account book. “Ten cases each of whiskey, rum, and gin, and two of champagne. Do we really need red wine, too?”
“Of course we do!” Jessie declares with the expansive joy that always overcomes her after her first champagne for the day. She turns an empty bottle neck-down in the ice bucket, and