slice of toasted bread thickly spread with butter and honey while Jessie regales the gentlemen with tales of betting on the ponies. She nibbles. Well, why not? She’s allowed. The technicians at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave her the latest all-purpose inoculation protecting her from virtually any kind of bacteria, virus, or poison. Earlier t-porters had not been so fortunate. Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco was forbidden to eat or drink during his t-port to San Francisco, 1967. An irony, since Chiron, as a rich cosmicist heir, was accustomed to elegant fare. And a second irony, since food and drink in America during 1967 was subject to modern regulations assuring quality and wholesomeness. Still, the LISA techs feared that Chi could get sick. That the food could have been contaminated with toxins or parasites that didn’t affect the people of 1967 due to exposure and natural immunities but could have jeopardized Chiron, perhaps fatally.
“Do you know I had to carry filters and strain my water for drinking and bathing?” Chiron had told her during her instruction session. “I carried ten thousand prophylaks to 1967. I had to wrap my hands every time I touched something. Or someone.”
Zhu lhad aughed. “What a hassle!”
“You don’t know the half of it. I wore a necklace of nutribeads. The calories were supposed to be enough to nourish me, but I was always starving.”
Chiron had disobeyed the injunction not to eat. He had tasted food and wine during the Summer of Love Project. “Sharing nourishment with the people of that day turned out to be a communal experience that brought me closer to them. Dangerously closer.”
“Why dangerous?” Zhu had asked, troubled by his dark look.
“I fell in love.”
Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, the tall cool sophisticate? Fell in love?
She eats the toast, her eyes drifting to Daniel again.
“You hear me, missy?” Jessie is saying. “Jar me, maybe she needs to go back to bed.”
“Maybe she does,” Daniel says with a wink.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, what did you say?” Zhu says, annoyed at his insinuation.
“I said, you see that Li’l Lucy stays off the booze. You stay off the booze, too.” Jessie loves to be peremptory and demanding in front of an audience. It probably makes her feel powerful, in control. She knows very well that Zhu never drinks.
Daniel watches their exchange sardonically, but Mr. Schultz pays no attention at all. Zhu is just the Chinese servant.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone, but you know I never drink.” The prim polite words stick in her mouth, false and gluey. She’s a modern woman, damn it. She isn’t deferential, frightened, shy, or weak. She doesn’t possess a servant’s mentality. She isn’t ignorant. She doesn’t need to play this pathetic game of manners. She doesn’t need to stay at the boardinghouse, at all. She can run away and make her own way in 1895 any time she wants to.
Ah, but it’s not that simple, and Zhu knows it.
* * *
Jessie bought her from the eyepatch. Bought her, just like that, for a hundred dollars in gold. Zhu should have been flattered. Since working as Jessie’s bookkeeper, she’s seen bills of sale from the Morton Alley cribs, including one recording the purchase of a cross-eyed girl for seventy-five cents plus a bolt of silk.
But at first Zhu was furious, and frantic to find Wing Sing. That evening, Jessie seized her by the elbow, took her upstairs to the spare bedroom in Mariah’s suite, and promptly locked her in.
Locked in the room, Zhu argued with Muse. “I don’t understand you, Muse. Finding Wing Sing is the whole reason the LISA techs sent me on this damn t-port. How could you advise me to let her go?”
“And what were you to do?” the monitor asked. “Single-handedly fight three heavily armed hatchet men? In those long skirts?”
“Then I should have gone with her.”
“And be forced into prostitution?”
“What?”
“What do you think Wing Sing is?”
“She’s a teenage girl.”
“Z. Wong, she was sold to a brothel in Chinatown.”
“No. No, I can’t accept that.” Zhu frantically thought over what happened. “Then what’s all this stuff about her dowry?”
“She was tricked. Her mother was probably tricked, too. But maybe not. Her mother could have sold her.”
“I don’t believe you.” That poor ragged child crouching beneath her table at the Japanese Tea Garden. Sold by her own mother?
Muse was impatient. “Z. Wong, I thought Chiron explained. Most Chinese women and girls in San Francisco in 1895 were smuggled in to become prostitutes.”
“Chiron said slaves.”
“Household