they? The atrocities, the Night of Broken Blossoms. She was a Daughter of Compassion, dedicated to the Cause. The Daughters of Compassion fought for the future. They weren’t murderers. She wasn’t a murderer.
Or was she?
She had trouble remembering exactly what happened that night. The door to the room, for instance. Had it opened to the left or to the right? Had there been one sentry or two? Sometimes she remembered a crowd in the room. Other times, only a few people. When had she pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm? And the astonished look on the sentry’s face. Because Zhu had a gun or because she was left-handed?
Memories of that night would flash through her mind, vivid and horrifying, then abruptly grow dim and rearrange themselves. On the morning when the lawyer barged in with the plea deal, Zhu wondered if she was going insane.
“What do they want?” the lawyer said. “Listen up, Wong. They want to send you on a tachyportation.”
“A what?”
“Yeah.” The lawyer rolled her eyes.
They never shut off the lights in the women’s prison. Zhu felt sore all over, dizzy from the interrogation, nauseated and addle-brained with withdrawal from the black patch. Tachyportation? She rolled the unfamiliar word around in her mouth like a spicy poisoned candy.
“Somebody there will explain,” the lawyer said, taking out a neurobic, popping the bead open, and snorting the fumes. Then sighing with relief from the all-purpose anodyne. The sadist. “They’ll ship you to California. San Francisco. Place called the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. The LISA techs will tell you all about it. Sign here.”
“Hey, I don’t know,” Zhu said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” the lawyer snapped.
“I can’t agree to something before I know what’s involved.” Zhu had heard strange stories, jacking prisoners into the computer-constructed reality known as telespace for strange experiments. Radical editing, brainwaving, testing new neural apps. Political prisoners like her were especially vulnerable. “I’ve got my rights.”
“Your rights. Be grateful they came to me with this deal, Wong.” The lawyer flicked the empty neurobic onto the floor. “Do you have any idea how bad you and your comrades make the Cause look?” She said “the Cause” in capital letters. “Frankly, I don’t give a damn if they jack you into a rehab program and make you compute actuarial margins for twenty years.”
“Thank you, counselor.”
“Any idea at all?”
“Yeah, actually I do,” she said, burning with guilt and shame. The lawyer didn’t need to remind her. It was the last thing in the world the Daughters of Compassion wanted to do--harm the Cause. Zhu had dedicated her life to the Cause. It was crazy. Crazy.
“But, uh, what’s a tachyportation?” she insisted.
“Way I understand it, they want to send you six hundred years into the past,” the lawyer said and coughed.
“That’s right. Physically. Like I said, the LISA techs will explain. It is strange, I admit, since the institute doesn’t conduct t-port projects anymore. Too dangerous. You can ask the techs about that, too. I remember,” the lawyer muses, “when they shut the shuttles down and discontinued t-ports. All very hush-hush. Must have been a couple years after you were born.”
“Six hundred. . . .years?”
Wow. A prickle of excitement, of wonder and anticipation pierced her foggy exhaustion. Why was a t-port dangerous? What was she supposed to do there, six hundred years in the past? A thousand questions tumbled through her mind. She trembled, a strange sensation coursed through her, and suddenly this conversation seemed strangely familiar. As if she’d heard it before, just exactly like this. As if she’d always sat here, on this seat of shame, and the pasty-faced lawyer had always sneered at her as she was sneering now.
What was that about? Zhu shook her head, trying to clear her mind. A premonition?
“Why me?” she finally managed to ask.
“Dunno,” the lawyer admitted, “after what you’ve done. But you’re the one they want, Wong. I say take the deal. They’re ready to go. They call it The Gilded Age Project.”
* * *
Zhu hikes out of the Japanese Tea Garden through a red moon-gate and stands before the shallow bowl of Concert Valley. Ah! She’s never seen such a lush landscape. Towering palm trees, aloe veras as high as her waist, glossy dark pines, flowers blooming pink and purple and gold. Everything so fresh and new! After the cracked old domes of Changchi, the barren concrete and unforgiving millet fields where she’s spent her whole