The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Zhu gestures to a chair for him, seats herself.

  “I said, in your room.”

  It occurs to Zhu that he’s drunk. “We can talk here, Mr. Watkins. I told you, Mariah went out after breakfast. She won’t be back for a while.”

  “In your room,” he repeats. He stands over her, asserting his physical presence. Is he threatening her? Oh, yeah.

  Zhu is no weakling. After years in Changchi, in the fields, in the factories, she’s strong and muscular. During the campaign, the Daughters of Compassion insisted on self-defense training for all comrades. She could hold her own in combat with this man, despite his superior size and weight. She turns this assessment over in her mind, readying herself, bracing herself. He thinks he can push her around, does he? Mr. Daniel J. Watkins, entitled to whatever he wants?

  She leaps to her feet and poises her hands, taking a fighting stance.

  He circles her curiously. She balances herself, turning to face him.

  He seizes her arm, faster than he ought to be after brandy and champagne, and heaves himself at her, using brute force. The single-mindedness of his assault astonishes her, and they stagger back together, she tripping on the damn skirt, he bullying against her like a locomotive.

  She twists away and dashes to her bedroom door, reaching frantically for her second key.

  Daniel springs after her, catching her arm again, her waist. He kicks the door open, flings her inside. She regains her balance, whirls, dives at him, punching, pushing him out the door. But he’s got his foot wedged between the door and the jamb. He pushes back and shoves inside.

  “Go on, fight me, miss,” he says, laughing. “I know you don’t want it. So fight me. A lady would fight me.”

  She gasps beneath the corset, fighting for breath, her lungs bursting against the stays. He shoves her onto the bed, knocking the wind out of her.

  And then something even stranger than his assault happens—the room goes pitch-dark for an instant. Black, then stark white, then black again.

  Is she losing consciousness? Oh, hell!

  Or is this a probability collapsing out of the timeline?

  The LISA techs never told her what happened when a probability collapsed out of the timeline. What that event felt like when you were there. What happened to reality. What should she expect? And does this mean, in the far future, the victim of her murder attempt has died and all of spacetime has changed?

  Is he alive or dead?

  And what about her? Is she dying? Or has she never existed at all, and this is what it feels like to be extinguished from existence?

  But no, she finds herself prone on the bed in the tangle of her skirts, and arousal flares up in her like a fever. Suddenly the struggle with him excites her. She wants him. She needs him. She seizes him, tearing off his jacket, his vest, his shirt.

  He contests her hands as if she still fights against him and not for her own pleasure.

  How long has it been since she’s bedded a man? And it’s crazy, it was never supposed to happen this way. What does the Cause mean in this ancient day? She arches her back, uttering strange sounds. She rocks back, seeking her rapture.

  He seizes her jaw. “Don’t move like that,” he commands. “Only whores move like that. And you’re not a whore, are you, miss?”

  “No.” She stares into his haunted eyes, startled.

  “Then lie still. If you’re a lady, you will lie still.”

  He rears above her, watching as she stills herself. She presses the edge of the coverlet to her mouth, grits her teeth.

  She expects a scolding from Muse, but none comes.

  “Yes, you’re a lady,” Daniel whispers as he pounds into her. “You hate it, don’t you? A lady is supposed to hate it. Do you not know how much I adore you?”

  *

  Zhu pulls the veil over her face and steps out onto Dupont Street, bound for the wine merchant’s shop in North Beach. Her body thrums with the sheer satisfaction of new sex while her commonsense assails her. What in hell are you doing, Zhu? This isn’t supposed to happen.

  Daniel J. Watkins is a bully and a fool. He practically raped her. What pathetic and ignorant attitudes toward sex and women the men of this day have! It will take another seventy-five years before men come close to understanding women. Or understanding sex. Maybe.

  He is a deeply troubled young man. Zhu should complain to Jessie. She should get him thrown out of the boardinghouse. She should stay away from him.

  Daniel, oh Daniel.

  Stop it. What has come over her?

  Now a trade wagon passes by her on the street, the body built to look like a gigantic cigar set on wheels, a sign advertising Sloat’s Smoke Shoppe & Sundries on Montgomery. The emaciated driver, clad in tobacco brown, is no doubt his own best patron. With a whip and the reins clutched in his pointed little hands, he looks a lot like a weevil perched on the end of the huge cigar.

  The whimsical cigar wagon turns the corner, advertising Smythe’s Sundries & Smoke Shoppe on Sansome. Zhu chuckles to herself. Almighty advertising. She doesn’t smoke but wonders what clever sundries Mr. Smythe may stock.

  But, wait a minute.

  The gilt lettering across the giant cigar said Montgomery, not Sansome. Smoke Shoppe & Sundries, not the other way around. And Sloat’s. She’s quite sure she saw Sloat’s, not Smythe’s.

  What the hell? Is she suffering from tachyonic lag, a common side effect of a t-port? A disturbance of the mind and the body caused by superluminal drift during the crossing over? Inducing fatigue, disorientation, even hallucinations?

  “Muse?” she whispers. “Excuse me, what’s going on?”

  Muse is silent.

  Oh, come on. Maybe the sign is like the woman wearing the face glove in Golden Gate Park. Zhu was fooled by the illusion of a clear complexion till the sun exposed her mask. Or maybe Zhu saw the other side of the wagon when the driver turned the corner and two smoke shops advertise on this wagon.

  She dashes to the corner before the wagon can clatter out of sight. On the right side, she sees Smythe’s Sundries & Smoke Shoppe on Sansome. She dashes around to the other side. On the left, the same ad. The driver, who now is positively stout and clad in an olive green suit, smiles and tips his bowler, pleased at her attention.

  “Damn it, Muse,” she whispers to the monitor. “What’s happening to the cigar wagon?”

  “I tried to warn you,” Muse whispers. “He’s a man of 1895. A social Darwinist.”

  Zhu stops in her tracks at the monitor’s nonresponsive answer. “Excuse me again. What are you talking about?”

  “I told you he had designs on you. He thinks he’s entitled.”

  “You said no such thing!”

  “Of course I did. I warned you to be careful. He cares nothing for you. To him, you are less than an animal.”

  “Oh, really. He said he adores me.”

  “You of all women should be outraged.”

  “He was forceful. And you know? I didn’t mind. I enjoyed it. Paul”—that was her one-time lover in her twenties—“was always so hesitant. So unsure of himself.” Now she’s irritated. “Why are you opposing me, Muse? You’re supposed to monitor my progress with the project. You’re supposed to help me.”

  “I’m not opposing you. I am helping you.”

  “Oh, really? What about Wing Sing? How can I find her?”

  Muse posts a calendar in her peripheral vision. “The package you ordered should arrive at the Mansion today.” Another non sequitur? Or maybe not.

  Yes, the package. Maybe what the package contains will help her in her search for Wing Sing. “All right,” she says, weary of Muse’s weird behavior. “But what about the cigar wagon?”

  “What cigar wagon?”

  Right. She trudges up the long, slow slope, silent and troubled. Is the monitor deliberately being cruel?

  How much more cruelty can she bear?

  *

  The Generation-Skipping Law was cruel, but a population of twelve billion peo
ple inhabiting this frail Earth caused even more cruelty. Too many pollutants in the air and the water and the soil. Climate change had whittled away rich coastlines, waste clogged rivers and streams, salt water contaminated fresh. Chemicals, radiation, and heavy metals degraded food and drinking water. Desperate poverty crushed eight billion people. Disease wracked their lives. Hunger and thirst dogged their days and nights.

  Yet still the population increased, due to the phenomenon of exponential growth. Fertility outpaced mortality in a cruel game of statistical tag.

  At last the World Birth Control Organization held an emergency meeting and issued a mandate to the nations of the world—control growth. The cosmicists—the movement founded after the turn of the millennium by the second woman president of the United States—proposed a slogan—Live Responsibly or Die. Zero population growth—two children per couple—wasn’t enough. One child per couple was still too many. The world needed negative growth. Fast.

  In an unprecedented act of cooperation and self-sacrifice by all of humanity, the Generation-Skipping Law was set into place. Under the law, two billion people were randomly chosen by lottery to forego having children within their lifetimes. They would skip a generation.

  But countless people decried the plan. Charges of genetic discrimination were leveled. Some suggested genocide, especially when the lottery happened to choose more citizens of a particular country. People everywhere were reluctant to forego the possibility of producing heirs, of continuing the family. So a compromise solution was offered. The Generation-Skipping Law permitted lottery couples to harvest and preserve their genetic material. From their harvest, a younger generation could create a skipchild. Skipparents were arranged, and after the genetic parents had died and a statutory period had passed, the skipchild would be birthed in a laboratory or implanted in the skipmother and raised by the skipparents as their own.

  Like all nations of the world, China, under Socialist-Confucianist rulership, conceded to the law, and charged her people with carrying out its terms. But Chinese people had lived under a one-child policy since the turn of the millennium, at times successfully, at other times less so. Chinese people felt they had already sacrificed to enforce the one-child policy long before the rest of the world.

  Producing children—many children—was an honorable and ancient tradition in China. Children were wealth. Children were security. Children ensured proper care for the elderly. Despite degradation of the ecosystem, drought in the south and famine in the north, tradition had changed little over two centuries despite the horrors of the brown ages. Hadn’t China always had drought in the south, famine in the north? What had really changed? In the megalopolises, the rich lived in luxurious domed estates, the destitute lived in the street. Telespace, rather than the corner store, distributed pornography, but there was still pornography. In the junk heaps, semiplast had replaced plastic, which had replaced glass, which had replaced clay pottery, but there were still junk heaps.

  Tradition. There were always radicals who decried tradition and always people who revered tradition. Many Chinese had rebelled against the one-child policy. Many more felt the Generation-Skipping Law was an attack on the family. An outrage.

  Factions sprang up. The Society for the Rights of Parents organized a virulent opposition to the law. When Zhu was a kid, the Parents burned down and bombed World Birth Control clinics, shot WBCO workers, hacked credits out of local accounts, infected the huge and complex WBCO databases with viruses that turned the data into chaos.

  And her? Zhu Wong was raised in the northern village of Changchi, an ancient place long inhabited by humanity. Fields of millet and peas met the bleak concrete of superhighways and processing plants. Chunky patchworked high-rises from the last building boom were nearly indistinguishable from the long, depressing rows of barracks and community housing.

  Zhu was entrusted under the law to her skipparents, Yu-lai and Li Wong, each a distant cousin of Zhu’s birth parents. They were in their early forties when Zhu was birthed in a Beijing lab and shipped to Changchi by express mail. Struggling with debts and a fierce desire to own property like their sophisticated upper-class friends in Chihli Province, yearning to escape community housing and the deadening life of agriwork, Yu-lai and Li Wong suddenly found themselves legally saddled with a baby.

  She was adorable, of course. Her DNA had been carefully edited, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Some of her parents’ life savings had been invested in equipping the newborn with intelligence, strength, and physical beauty. She arrived with the rest of the savings to provide for her care and rearing.

  Who were they really, Zhu’s skipparents? Had they ever loved her? Had they ever considered her their own? Did those questions make any sense when the world groaned under the weight of twelve billion people?

  Sometimes she allowed sentimental memories to surface. A lavender kite in the shape of a fish. Her first bicycle, all silver and blue. Shrimp and vegetables for Sunday supper. A trip to the Great Wall, badly eroded from its past glory. The excitement of becoming morphed for telespace when the schools in Changchi were flush with money. Installation of the neckjack and telelink wetware just like kids in the rich countries. The promise of an international profession.

  “Little face,” Li would say, “why are you so sad? Such wise green eyes. What do you know?”

  But mostly Zhu remembered the day when, at the age of fifteen, she came home from school to the empty apartment. Ransacked drawers, scattered papers. The jewelry her mother—her real mother—had left her, the holoids, the mobiles with bank records, all of it gone. She never forgot the humiliation when she went to school the next day and told the teacher, “My skipparents left me.” The shame and sheer perplexity kept her from tears. She didn’t cry till she was twenty, long after she’d joined the Daughters of Compassion. It had been a summer outing, and someone had flown a lavender kite in the shape of a fish.

  Yu-lai and Li Wong were prosecuted for abandonment, child endangerment, embezzlement, theft, and skipchild abuse. Due to her youth, Zhu was not included in the proceedings. She never saw her skipparents again, but she sure saw their images splattered all over the media:

  SKIPCHILD ABANDONED BY SKIPPARENTS

  WHILE LOTTERY COUPLES CRY FOR THEIR OWN

  It was when the Parents tried to make an example out of Zhu that she was first approached by the Daughters of Compassion. Orphaned once by the law, orphaned twice by her skipparents, harassed and alone at a vulnerable age when everyone needs a friend, Zhu gladly fled to the Cause, to the rigors of comradeship. To the contemplation of Kuan Yin.

  A woman came calling as Zhu studied in the library for winter examinations. The village administrators had placed her in the custody of the local cooperative. Another shameful thing. She had to face her neighbors and peers as a ward of the state. No longer was she a skipchild with a family, an inheritance, and the likelihood of going off to the university. She was so depressed at the time she had actually considered taking her own life. A bona fide option, according to the fashionable international death cults.

  The sharp-eyed, wiry woman sat down next to her. Zhu glanced up from the rented workstation, the lesson hovering before her—an English translation of a spectacular holoid by Magda Mira, an American filmmaker praised for her celebration of death. Gory gross-out stuff, but Mira’s work was as popular as potato chips.

  “You the skipkid?” the woman said.

  Zhu gathered up her jacket and backpack, preparing to flee, though she’d waited sixteen days to get access to the workstation.

  “Don’t waste your time with that crap,” the woman said, pointing to the holoid. “There’s work to be done, here, in our mother China. The Cause is much more important than vulgar American entertainments that have no meaning in your life.”

  “Mira celebrates death,” Zhu said automatically. Then, “The Cause has more meaning?” She hesitated, panic skidding through her.

  “Hell, yes!” the woman said. “All the sacrifice and pain you�
��ve gone through as a skipkid means nothing if lottery couples are going to go off and have kids illegally. Let alone if parents with one kid—skip or natch—go off and have another. Talk about challenging the odds. Talk about greed. And they say Changchi will have another drought this summer, and they don’t know if they’ll be able to herd rain from Siberia. It’s a damn shame.”

  Zhu remembered listening to all this with her mouth hanging open. “You’re talking about negative population growth.”

  “I’m talking about the Cause,” the woman said. “I’m talking about enforcement of the Generation-Skipping Law, the finest gesture of international cooperation ever witnessed in our sad and sorry history of the world. And the only hope for our mother China.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Sally Chou. Born and raised in Chicago, but I came to the motherland with a bunch of Americans during the pilgrimage of ’73. I’ll not go back to America. I’m a Daughter of Compassion.”

  Zhu remembers that first meeting still.

  “What are you doing after graduation?” Sally Chou lit a cigarette, and Zhu smelled a tart scent of herbs, not tobacco.

  When Zhu shrugged, Sally Chou laughed and said, “You’re coming with me, skipkid. The Daughters of Compassion need you.”

  Zhu moved to the compound the Daughters of Compassion owned south of Changchi. A wealthy Californian friend had repossessed the place after the local real estate developers had defaulted on one of countless refinancings. Nothing in Changchi was particularly elegant, but at least the compound was cleaner than most, with excellent air conditioners and the best water recycler and generator that could be had in a provincial burg like Changchi.

  “We must fight the Society for the Rights of Parents,” Sally Chou declared in the village square during the first rally Zhu attended. “We must stand guard at WBCO clinics. We must chaperone clinic staff. We must trace illegal fund withdrawals. We must restore order in the databases. There is no turning back for mother China. We must break the back of exponential growth.”