Her customary state of sullen discontent had simply reasserted itself.
He sat before her in a leather-and-chrome chair and steepled his fingertips, scrutinizing her. “I am Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco.”
China’s people may have a thousand kinds of faces, Zhu thought, but Western people are a crazy quilt, variegated colors of hair and eyes and skin. And this man. This man was different from anyone Zhu had ever seen. He was tall and slim, his skin as white as bone. His hair and eyebrows were the astonishing color of ripe pomegranates, a rare fruit Zhu had found at the farmer’s market just one time, years ago. The astonishing hair fell over his shoulders and trailed halfway down his back. His eyes were as clear and blue and deep as the sapphires she had only seen in a natural history holoid. Young, maybe in his fifties.
“We want to t-port you to 1895,” he said in a modulated, precise voice. “Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m giving everyone such a freakin’ hard time that you want to send me away six hundred years into the past,” Zhu joked. What was wrong with her? She struggled to be polite.
“It’s not meant to be a punishment, Zhu. You find that difficult to believe, don’t you?”
Zhu considered. “Mister. . . .”
“You may call me Chiron.”
Oh, she may? “Chiron, I’m a comrade with the Daughters of Compassion. I’m a devotee of our patron goddess, Kuan Yin. I’ve been dedicated to the Cause since I was fifteen. I’ve worked in the fields, in the processing plant, in the recycler. All I care about is the survival of Mother China. China has struggled with poverty and famine and oppression of her women for over two thousand years. Politicians come and go. Social theories come and go. Campaigns, reforms, platforms, regimes; they all come and go. We struggled years ago. We struggle now.” She shrugged. Old sentiments, but the words tasted fresh. “The Mars terraformation and orbital metaworlds and telespace and hyperpoetry. Those things are all right. Every kid dreams of getting morphed, getting a neckjack, linking into telespace. But you know what? At this point? I don’t give a rat’s ass.”
Chiron smiled. “But you do have a neckjack.”
“Oh, sure. Because Changchi had a season of prosperity when I was in middle school and the first thing the administrators did was morph us kids for telespace. So we could compete globally.” Zhu touches the neckjack installed behind her left ear. “You think computer-constructed reality did a damn bit of good when the rains didn’t come for four seasons after that, and they couldn’t seed the clouds or herd a storm down from Siberia?”
“We owe much to telespace. The technique for herding rainstorms was developed in telespace.”
“That’s nice. But my eyes kept looking at the dust that wouldn’t yield enough peas, not at telespace. So.” She stirred restlessly on the divan. “You want to t-port me six hundred years into the past? Why? Sorry, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Then listen well. Listen carefully.”
And he told her about tachyportation, how the tachyonic shuttle translates matter into pure energy, transmits that energy across spacetime faster than the speed of light, and retranslates the energy into its original form at a destination. Anywhere, any when. About the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications, the venerable cosmicist think tank that had long devoted its private resources to the study of the Cosmic Mind and the true nature of reality as a set of probabilities always collapsing into and out of the timeline.
“Okay,” Zhu said, scratching her head. “I’m still listening.”
“Don’t worry, the shuttle is safe. We used shuttles to transport laborers up to the Mars terraformation for decades before we attempted the past-travel app.”
“Right, the past-travel app,” Zhu said, unsure whether she was awed or appalled. Changing people into energy packets and back again! Shooting them around space and time like human cannonballs! Don’t worry, it’s safe! Yeah, right. “Have you t-ported, Chiron?”
“I sure have,” Chiron said and smiled wistfully. “I t-ported to San Francisco, 1967. To a space and time called the Summer of Love.”
“But how,” Zhu said, wrestling with these concepts, with the notion they wanted her to do this, “could you go to the past if the past has already happened?”
“That’s where the Archives come in,” Chiron said and poured her another Coke, which she drank greedily, savoring the taste.
The Archives were the repository of all known information about the world, preserved, recorded, and uploaded into telespace. Using telespace and some very fancy