The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  Now alphanumerics race across her peripheral vision. “No one knows, Z. Wong, but if that’s what you believe, then you should feel honored to contribute your efforts to the preservation—“

  “The preservation of your reality? Your cosmicist reality? A reality in which my skipparents abandon me? In which I eat gruel and sleep on a cot in a barracks? In which I’m beaten and abused? And your people won’t even put me up in a nice hotel room when I t-port back from six centuries in the past?”

  Muse is silent.

  “No, Muse,” Zhu says, fastening each tiny mother-of-pearl button up the side of her dress. “I never gave a damn about tachyportation. I never knew a thing about the resiliency principle. I am a Daughter of Compassion, dedicated to our Cause in mother China. The cosmicists are elitists who believe they can use people.”

  “They asked you to go, and you accepted.”

  “Then you admit they made a deal with me,” she cries triumphantly. Is she beginning to untangle Muse’s contradictory statements? “Then why do I feel so used? Do you deny the LISA techs are using me to tidy up Chiron’s mistake?”

  Muse is silent.

  “They don’t give a damn about me or Wing Sing or Wing Sing’s daughter. They never did. I’m an accused criminal. She’s a slave. And her daughter? Another kid without luck or a family. We’re all just anonymous Chinese women. Anonymous and expendable.”

  “You are definitely not expendable, Z. Wong,” Muse snaps. “I’ve warned you of the CTL peril when it comes to you on many occasions. I’ve guided you through the perils of this Now.”

  “No, once we’ve played our parts, we’re all expendable. Including me.”

  Is that a threat? Because as long as Zhu has possession of the aurelia, she has the power to collapse the CTL, deliberately or accidentally. She knows that now, and an abyss opens up in her heart. She could weep with despair, but no tears come. How can she care about the object of the project anymore? She was supposed to have been Wing Sing’s caretaker, at least for a little while, helping the girl escape her slavery and adjust to a pious life, but that reality spiraled way out of her control right from the very start.

  She sure isn’t the girl’s caretaker now. Wing Sing escaped from Jessie’s Morton Alley cribs just like she escaped from the Presbyterian home. Zhu first heard about her departure from the new redhead at the Parisian Mansion, then saw the notation in Jessie’s ledger, and hurried down to Morton Alley with the pearl gray dress slung over her arm, half hoping the accounts were right, half hoping they were wrong.

  Someone must have told Wing Sing that the rosewood box and her dowry were gone for good. Or maybe Bertha found out the girl was pregnant and evicted her. Maybe her green-eyed sailor hung around her too often before he left for his next port of call.

  When Zhu asked, Jessie protested. “I don’t kick out no girl for gettin’ in the family way or for havin’ a boyfriend. Not at the cribs. I just add her time for having the kid onto the term of her contract. You ought to know that.” She added, “Anyhow, the chit was wearin’ a hundred bucks worth of lingerie I paid for. Why would I kick her out?”

  Typical Jessie Malone logic.

  Then Zhu spied Wing Sing, a retreating figure on Sutter Street in the winter darkness, as Zhu was catching a cab back to the boardinghouse. A streetwalker. The most dangerous way for a desperate woman to sell her body, prey to the worst kind of degradation and violence. Since that fleeting glimpse, Zhu has heard rumors that Wing Sing and Li’l Lucy are working the street together, sharing some dive on Pacific Street south of Broadway. The parlor girls are having a field day, gossip told in scandalized whispers, a smugness barely concealing their own fear. There but for the grace of God go I. Right. How long will the new redhead last? Her refusal-to-smile gimmick is wearing thin with the clientele, and Jessie is trying to talk her into going to a dentist who will yank out all of her teeth and give her false ones. Dentures, they’re called.

  Yes. One last vital task.

  “I’ll go find Wing Sing and give her the aurelia,” she tells Muse, her voice bitter. She winds her braid around her head and pins on the Newport hat. “I’ll be a good little mule. After that, the aurelia is not my problem. If Wing Sing sells the aurelia for drugs or booze or food, there’s nothing I can do about it. The t-port is over. Over for me.”

  “That is correct, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

  “Excellent. Midnight at the intersection of California and Mason. I’ll be there.” Zhu shakes her head. “And not even a room for one lousy night at Nobhill Park?”

  “I doubt it, Z. Wong,” Muse says, cold as ice. “Not after what you’ve done.”

  *

  What she had done.

  Sometimes Zhu had trouble remembering exactly what she had done. Exactly what had happened. The door to the room—which way had it opened, to the left or to the right? Had there been one sentry or two? Had a crowd gathered or only a few people?

  Changchi. There had been rain, summer rain, amazing rain, the first clean deluge they’d seen in three seasons of drought and poisonous hailstorms. The air was thick with humidity that filmed her skin and made her T-shirt stick to her back. Ten thousand puddles pooled on mud as thick as chocolate pudding. And it was so good, despite the sudden onslaught of mosquitoes, so good the healthy stink of fertilizer. The heat would have made Zhu lazy and lethargic if she hadn’t worn the black patch. Agriworkers slogged out into the fields, fighting weeds that choked the new corn, the tender rice, the peas, the millet. Someone figuring out what they could do with the weeds, which were bitter and stringy, but marginally nourishing. Package them up as an herbal tea and sell them to the rich countries? There was talk of a large groundnut harvest, of carrots and onions.

  The people of Changchi would eat, grow fat, and know the happiness of a full belly. Dusty pantries would be restocked, the storage bins would overflow. The processing plants hired on new shifts. Despite the terrible poisonous spring, there was a chance Changchi would turn a profit come the fall. The children would get neckjacks, telelinks, new workstations. The promise of universal telespace, renewed.

  The Society for the Rights of Parents pointed with glee to their new prosperity. “You see?” shouted the speaker in the civic center. “With technology and hard work, we will have plenty for our children now and plenty for future generations. Plenty! This campaign to force our people to give up having their own children is evil. A tool of globalists who have never flagged in their long effort to rule the world and decimate the world’s population. The Daughters of Compassion are their pawns.”

  Sally Chou was infuriated, more by the temporary glut than by the Parents’ rhetoric. For the rain, the tender green growing things, the mud like pudding lulled people, even educated, enlightened people, into thinking they didn’t have to think about the future.

  “This is a false promise,” Sally told the ranks assembled in the mess hall. Ranks noticeably thinned. “There can be no respite from negative population growth when the earth still bears twelve billion people on her back. There can be no exemptions from the Generation-Skipping Law. For there will be no relief when this temporary boom ends.”

  “But Sally,” someone called out from the back. “Does our campaign produce a good result? Surely a few more unlicensed babies aren’t going to make that big a difference.”

  “A few more unlicensed babies make a huge difference,” Sally said to the backs of those who had risen from the benches and headed out the door. “We must never expand the base for exponential growth. Not in lean times. Not in fat times.”

  The World Birth Control Organization was of little help. The lottery took up most of the agency’s resources. Send enforcement agents? They were the local enforcement agents. Still, Zhu knew Sally felt abandoned. There was nothing any of them could do but carry on. Carry on with the campaign to convince the people of Changchi only enforcement of the law could provide them and their heirs with a viable future.

  The ranks of the Daughters thinned again as the
rains continued, bringing more greenery, bountiful crops, damp heat, fresh smells. Even the insects taunted them with their mating dances over newly formed ponds.

  The ones who stayed, including Zhu, had been using the black patch since that terrible spring. Zhu’s bruises had healed overnight after Sally got her hands on an all-purpose Australian nanofix. The dysentery had cleared up with better food and water at the compound. But in her mind, Zhu attributed her return to health with the relief given by the black patch.

  She began slapping a patch onto the back of her knee every two days, grinding its little teeth into her skin, relishing the moment when she felt the first surge. She carefully saved spent patches, which could be dosed again with the active ingredients if they couldn’t get fresh patches. She had since learned that the active ingredients were a combination of a bootleg Russian opiate and an illegal Vietnamese stimulant released by time-coded microbials in a beautiful combination of rush and bliss.

  She didn’t notice when the patch became a habit. She didn’t notice she couldn’t get by on the third day without it. She didn’t notice how the combination of rush and bliss came to feel like normal everyday functioning. She just knew she felt good, starting in that ugly spring when she was sick and wounded and dispirited. She began to sleep even less than she ate and prayed to Kuan Yin, prostrating herself every midnight before the shrine.

  She especially didn’t notice—no one noticed—when the Daughters of Compassion transformed themselves from Generation-Skipping activists into negative-growth fanatics.

  Women of Changchi were defying the law, aided and abetted by the Society for the Rights of Parents. Skipmothers assigned to raise skipchildren were getting pregnant. Women who had one child were proudly fat with number two. Teenagers who had no bearing rights at all were leaving school to start families. The expectant mothers stole off to illegal birth clinics provided by the Parents.

  “Dropping their spawn,” Sally sneered, “like there’s no tomorrow.”

  The Daughters fell into a new routine. By day, teachers went around town with knuckletops, holoids, and contraceptive patches. And by night? The elite among them, the warrior women, the most dedicated cadre of which Zhu was a member, spent the short hot nights searching for illegal birth clinics.

  And like a domino striking another and that one striking the next, one night Sally Chou announced that the Daughters of Compassion were going to stage a raid. “We’re gonna break into that freakin’ clinic in the basement of the rice-processing plant and seize the contraband.”

  A shout rose up, “Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband!”

  Zhu gazed around the room, caught her breath. She loved her fellow women warriors, clad in blue or black denim. Some wiry, lean, and muscular, others scrawny, sick, and pale. But all with fire in their eyes, their chests crisscrossed with bandoliers of bullets, their belts bearing butterfly knives and little automatics called spitfires that could gut a man in five seconds. As she gazed, a stray thought struggled up out of her consciousness like a drowning swimmer—What in hell are we doing?—then sank down again into the depths of a mindlessness that numbed her will. Her fellow women warriors—all of them wearing a black patch—shivered with irrationality, with incipient violence, with a bloodlust Zhu never thought any of them capable of, let alone herself.

  “What is the contraband?” asked a fierce teenage girl whose name Zhu didn’t know. But the shouts, the exultation, the impetus for action silenced all questions.

  “Let’s go!” Sally shouted.

  And they swept out into the night.

  They had no trouble breaking into the rice-processing plant, a low concrete building squatting beneath a decrepit old dome stitched by a network of cracks in the PermaPlast. No trouble finding the basement, which turned out to be a utility room sunk below the loading dock, a construction of layered concrete slabs that, in the night lights, possessed the solemnity of an ancient temple. No trouble finding the clinic because pregnant women brazenly climbed up and down the dock, unafraid in the shelter of half-lit darkness, laughing and jostling, fondling their own swollen breasts and bellies.

  Zhu remembered her moment of surprise, remembered trading looks with Sally, with the others, and that stray thought surfaced again—What in hell are we doing? The last thing they expected was laughing women as the Daughters of Compassion marched onto the loading dock, heavily armed, a wildly righteous posse seeking criminals.

  Sally seized a pregnant girl by her wrist, flinging her against the concrete wall, shoving a spitfire under her chin. “Where’s your birth license, bitch?”

  The fierce teenager whose name Zhu didn’t know kicked the girl, a knee thrust hard into the captive’s belly. The girl doubled over, retching.

  They stormed down the stairwell, boots clattering, pregnant women screaming and scattering before them, eyes bright with terror.

  “What did the old chairman say?” Zhu shouted at Sally. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs!”

  “Nah, that’s too weak,” Sally shouted back, flushed and triumphant after her first victim’s subjugation. They reached the door, Sally’s boot smashing the jamb with a high sharp kick. “How about this, comrades? You can’t achieve negative population growth without killing some babies!”

  They slammed through the door, which swung open to the right. A sentry posted inside leapt off the stool she’d been sitting on and brandished it at them like a tamer facing lions, but that’s all in the way of weapons she had. Oh, and a whistle, which she jammed in her lips and blew, letting loose a piercing shriek. Crowds of women cowered against the back wall. How stupid of them, there was no other exit in the utility room. Newborns wailed, toddlers and children who’d been brought along by their mothers screamed and cried. Zhu smelled the stink of blood and baby shit and unwashed female bodies, a stink that infuriated her. Selfish, greedy bitches, thinking only with their wombs, oblivious of the world’s future, of the deprivation for all, of the potential ruin they unleashed by the act of illicit procreation. And all in the name of family, of Chinese tradition.

  A voice—hers—shouted, “You want tradition? We’re here to uphold a very old Chinese tradition. Infanticide!”

  She pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm as a woman nine months pregnant and her young son quailed on the concrete floor before her. The astonished look on the woman’s face—that Zhu had pulled a gun on an unarmed pregnant woman and her two-year-old son? Or that Zhu was left-handed?

  Zhu laughed wildly at the absurdity of her thoughts, but she didn’t shoot. A bullet would have been too easy. She flipped the gun over, taking the barrel in her fist, and slammed the grip on the woman’s shoulders, her back, her kidneys, aiming for her belly. Her obscenely swollen belly. The woman crouched, wrapping her arms around her knees, protecting herself and her unborn child. Her little boy screamed and cried and clung to his mother while Zhu slammed the grip of the gun, whump, whump, whump. And then she was beating the kid, smacking the kid, whump, whump, whump, his little hands, his neck, his soft round skull, his face canting back to look at her with wide green eyes, opaque with incomprehension, his little mouth an O of shock.

  *

  Is he alive or dead?

  That’s all Zhu kept asking, all she wanted to know, after they arrested her, Sally Chou, and the warrior women that night.

  The Changchi police stormed the clinic, and everything was chaos. Zhu couldn’t remember much afterwards except the screams, the blood, the stink. The shock of the little boy’s eyes, like cabochons of emerald. Of course the police beat her on the way to jail and ripped off the black patch, forcing her into detox. She lost consciousness. She didn’t feel any trauma till she lay in the cell in the central women’s prison facility at Beijing, semicomatose for nearly five days while an interrogator asked her over and over, “What is your name?” And then the guilt, the horror, the shame.

  Is he alive or dead?

  The media called it the Night of Brok
en Blossoms. Zhu’s face was featured in telespace—the abandoned skipchild gone wrong. She never found out what happened to Sally Chou. It was late June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the prison cell, roused her out of an exhausted sleep, and said, “Listen up, Wong. I’ve got a deal.”

  Bang, bang, bang in the street.

  Where is she now? When?

  San Francisco, 1896, on the eve of Chinese New Year.

  “I am not a murderer,” Zhu says, collecting her feedbag purse. “Not even for the Cause. A lot of things happened before that night. I was not myself. I never meant to kill a child.”

  “But that night you attempted to do so,” Muse says. The monitor’s voice is cold.

  “In support of a law your cosmicists dreamed up.”

  “Overpopulation of the earth has been the most serious problem facing humanity’s survival and global renewal since the brown ages.”

  “Then why is one little boy’s life so important?”

  Muse is silent.

  “You don’t want to say, do you, Muse? What is the value of a human life in a world burdened with twelve billion people? In cosmicist theory, a human being is no more important than an endangered butterfly. Who will be my judge and jury?”

  Muse is silent.

  Zhu studies herself in the watery reflection of the nineteenth century mirror. Is he alive or dead? Well. She’ll find out tonight at midnight. The t-port is instantaneous, flinging her from this Now to her Now. There isn’t even movement, not really. Tachyportation is a transmutation, not a traveling, and there is no duration. A second seems to pass, but that’s subjective. A subjective second and the void.

  She shudders when she remembers the void.

  She pins the aurelia on the collar of her gray silk dress. The final touch. She stands at the threshold of her little bedroom for the last time, nostalgia already leaking into her heart. I’ll never see this place again.