The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (32 page)

Death
struts the streets with a grin and a swagger, a striped serape thrown rakishly
over his shoulder. Death tips his sombrero and hands out little skulls of
crystallized sugar to squealing children at the curb who jostle for a better
view of the parade.

Zhu
wends her way through the crowd at the corner of Montgomery and Market. Clad in
her gray silk dress and Newport hat, she clutches a leather-bound Bible. A gift
for Donaldina Cameron. Best to have something in her hand for her first
appointment with the new temporary director of Nine Twenty Sacramento Street,
the Presbyterian mission and home for orphaned Chinese girls, a.k.a. abducted
slave girls.

She
reminds herself she was supposed to have gone to the mission, asked for a job,
and stayed there for the duration of the Gilded Age Project. She was supposed
to have taken Wing Sing there. But neither of them is there now. Why not? Were
the hatchet men she and the girl confronted that first day an unknown
probability that collapsed this reality out of the timeline? That’s just great.
Now how can she steer the project back on course?

She
has no idea, but a visit to Miss Cameron is definitely in order.

“El
Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead,” Muse whispers in her ear. “In America
we observe Halloween. The Catholic Church calls the following day All Souls’
Day, while the aboriginal people of Mexico observed El Dia de los Muertos. Death
and life intertwined in the native Mexicans’ cosmology. Death was neither
revered nor feared. Not completely understood, of course, but experienced.
Celebrated.”

“And
in your cosmology? Have the cosmicists attained this peace of mind?”

“No philosophy
or religion will give you peace of mind if you don’t find it within yourself,
Z. Wong.”

Death
laughs, robust and antic.

“Well,
yeah,” she says, annoyed at Muse’s platitudes. “What’s the value of life,
then?” Anxiety closes cold fingers over her heart. She’s hatched a plan, but will
Cameron cooperate? “The cosmicists speak of the Great Good according to True
Value. Does a cosmicist deem the death of a child to be the same as—say—the
destruction of a butterfly? Suppose it’s a rare butterfly and the child is one
of twelve billion people. Is the aurelia’s destruction more important?”

She
catches herself.
The aurelia?
She didn’t mean to say that, did she?

“All
this talk of death and destruction is not healthy for you, Z. Wong,” Muse says.
“Are you melancholy again? You must try to fight off this depression.”

Muse
solicitous, cajoling. When has Muse ever been cajoling? Capricious Artificial Intelligence—there’s
an oxymoron. Even with ambiguity tolerance, AI is never capricious. Or it’s not
supposed to be. Muse has been astringent, cantankerous, goading, informative, puzzling,
even cruel. But Muse has never been respectful of her feelings. Has she really
been depressed?

When?
She’s lost all track of time.

“And
get on with the Gilded Age Project.” That’s more like Muse.

“I
am
getting on with it.” She quells her annoyance with a full-blasted sneeze. After
four months of agony unabated by the antihistamine in her pharmaceutical
supplies, Muse formulated a decongestant that she can mix up out of the stuff
the LISA techs supplied her with, plus a touch of fresh powdered nettle. The
nettle really does the trick. She went out and bought fresh nettle and a mortar
and pestle at the Snake Pharmacy along with a Polyopticon Wonder Camera for
Daniel and a Patent Dust Protector for herself—a little nickel-plated gas mask
that costs a pricey ninety cents. “I’m on my way to see Donaldina Cameron right
now.
With
a Bible.”

Since
the Archivists’ plan for Zhu to seek employment at the home got derailed by her
rescue from the hatchet men by Jessie Malone, Zhu’s efforts to contact the
mission’s director have met with resistance. The mission has put her off for
weeks. Her respectful requests for an audience were turned down rather less
respectfully. Muse consulted the Archives and discovered that the director—an
old warhorse named Miss Margaret Culbertson—suffers from ill health, and that Donaldina
Cameron has assumed new responsibilities as the temporary director. And Cameron
has finally granted her an audience.

Muse
is excited. “This is a breakthrough for the Gilded Age Project, Z. Wong. You
must convince Cameron of your plan to rescue the girl.”

“Now
that I know where Wing Sing is, I’ll sure as hell try.” But Zhu is troubled.
“You still can’t find any trace of me in the files on Cameron?”

“Don’t
worry,” Muse says. “Cameron dealt with hundreds of Chinese women, most of whom
remained anonymous and are lost to the Archives.”

“Anonymous.
That’s what I am, all right.” She swallows her resentment. Chiron made that
clear from the start. Chinese women of this Now are anonymous. But she still
doesn’t like the fact that Muse can’t trace her in the Archives. No sign of
her. No sign, at all. If she’s
here
, well, she should be
there
,
somewhere in the historical record.

Zhu
slogs through the crowd. The Mexican community of the Bay Area—from the Latin
Quarter in North Beach to south o’ the slot to San Jose—has turned out for the
grand parade downtown. Horsemen with ringing spurs rear and wheel their steeds.
Bands blare with their own unique brassy sound. Guitars strum and maracas
clatter.
Ole!
People promenade in costumes and papier-mache masks
depicting skulls. Some costumes are sly caricatures—a rich lady in a stole of
chicken feathers and a tiara of cardboard, her skull made glamorous with
salacious lipstick and eye paint. A priest piously bearing enormous candelabra
comprised of skulls, gaudy flowers dangling from his grinning teeth. A rowdy
soldier in full dress uniform dangling red and green skulls from the brim of
his cap, his bandoliers, his jacket sleeves, and a cardboard rifle. A morose
barefooted peasant, a patch slung over one hollow eye socket of his skull mask,
his braided mustache swooping over his jawbone. A hound trots beside him, its
clipped black fur painted with a canine skeleton in bright white and green.

No
one escapes Death.

People
guffaw and point at each new mockery. But Zhu can’t laugh. “What does it all mean?”
she asks a boy on the sidelines. A gangling teenager, all long limbs and a
narrow swarthy face, he pops candy skulls into his mouth and whoops.

“Well,
senorita,
you’re going to die sooner than you want to, so why cry about
it, eh?”

Now
Death presents Zhu with a bouquet of pink paper flowers.
Why cry?
How
sensible. This parade and its celebrants mocking death are psychologically
healthy. She hands the flowers to the boy and tries to smile, but her mouth
refuses.
Sooner than you want to.
As soon as you are born, you know you
will die. And the other way around? As soon as you die, you know you will be
born? But that’s reincarnation, a superstition strangely persistent even in
Zhu’s Now, though modern science has never proven any truth to it. One of those
primitive beliefs that refuses to die, stubborn and irrational.

Or
is that what happens if you’re trapped in a Closed Time Loop? Like the infamous
Betty in Chiron’s Now. Betty whose rescue polluted all of spacetime. Betty who died,
knowing she would be born, knowing she would return to the day of her death and
die again—in the past.

Zhu’s
heart fills with a chill, and the boy hands the flowers to a girl, then darts
away with his friends. These people will never see the massive death modern
people will witness--world wars, holocausts, genocides, cancer epidemics,
plagues like herpes complex three and nuevo tuberculosis, ecopoisonings, and the
dreadful radiation syndrome. So many new forms of massive death.

“They
know nothing of death,” Zhu whispers, watching the parade caper past.

“Of
course they do,” Muse whispers sardonically. “People of this Now die in their
twenties of tuberculosis; there’s no cure. They die of cholera, dysentery, influenza,
plague, syphilis, typhoid fever, yellow fever. And yes, of cancer. Women die in
childbirth. That’s why a woman’s average life expectancy in this Now is thirty
years old.”

“Fair
enough. But they revere life, despite el Dia de los Muertos. They believe that
life—the creation of life, the preservation of life—is humanity’s highest
value. Can we of our Now say the same, Muse?’

Muse
is silent.

*  
*   *

Zhu
didn’t know if she could say the same in 2495 when spring came to Changchi, and
the Daughters of Compassion geared up for another campaign. The World Birth
Control Organization had conducted a new lottery under the Generation-Skipping
Law. The lottery was random, as always, but critics claimed a disproportionate
number of couples in Chihli Province had been chosen to skip. Protesters staged
demonstrations, filed complaints in the World Court. Someone firebombed the
local office of the WBCO. The ranks of the Society for the Rights of Parents
swelled.

Zhu
had always loved the spring. It was the time to take off her sour, padded
winter jacket, get out from beneath the domes, and bask beneath a new sky under
the sun. Cool breezes rippled the feathery leaves of wheat sprouting in the
undomed plots. Agriworkers bowed over the land, spreading compost, planting rice,
millet, and peas by hand.

She
had always loved the spring--but not that spring.

That
spring started out with bad omens and, even in 2495, people believed in omens. With
the first thaw, wild dogs roamed out of the mountains, harried the agriworkers,
and attacked a seven-year-old girl walking alone at dusk from school to her
family’s apartment, half devouring her right on the street. Then a hailstorm
ripped through the province, damaging four of the big public domes and
thousands of residential units and vehicles. When the hailstones melted, they
released methane. The air smelled like an open sewer. The undomed fields of rice,
millet, and peas faced ruin.

The
Daughters of Compassion faced ruin, too. A saboteur dumped excrement in the
compound’s water recycler and, before anyone realized their water was
contaminated, everyone had contracted dysentery. Always thin, Zhu dropped
twelve pounds. She was still weak, wobbly-kneed, and running a fever when she,
Sally Chou, Hsien, and Pat Greenberg trudged through Changchi’s civic center, a
muddy square of cracked concrete.

“Door
to door,” Sally was saying. “That’s how we’ve got to contact them. WBCO will
supply us with the names and addresses of the skipcouples. We’ll connect, drop
off the literature, schedule an appointment with the women after they’ve looked
everything over.”

“We
should meet with the husbands, too,” said Pat, “not just the wives. We’ve got
to get the men involved.”

“Sure,
if the men will agree,” Sally said. “In my experience, that won’t happen.”

“Don’t
you think we need to forge a new experience? You’re just reinforcing outmoded
attitudes if you make only the women responsible for observing the law.” Pat
was another American expatriate who’d come to Changchi looking for her
daughter, an exchange student who had fallen in love with a local and had never
returned to New York. Pat was brassy and bossy and had the typical expat’s
attitude—more radical than the radical and a know-it-all. She argued with Sally
night and day, but then everyone had been puking their guts out for weeks. They
all felt like hell.

“I
say stick with the plan,” Sally said.

“But
I think we’re alienating—“ Pat said.

Zhu
couldn’t take it anymore. Her head throbbed, a metallic taste rose in her
throat, and her gut gurgled. “Could you both please just shut
up?
” She
looked up from the mud, her vision preternaturally clear. “Oh, no,” she added,
some instinct kicking her in the butt.

A
surly crowd had gathered in the square. The Society for the Rights of Parents
had set up a tiny stage and a podium, with a sound system patched to a utility
pole. A speaker in a suit and tie paced back and forth.

“The
Generation-Skipping Law flies in the face of values held dear to humanity for
all time!” said the speaker. “The law robs us of our heritage, robs us of our
tradition, robs us of our families, robs of us of our future!”

“We
won’t have a future if we don’t enforce the law!” Sally shouted. “We won’t have
enough water, enough food, enough living space. You think that shit-smelling
hail was bad? How would you like it if the air smelled like that all the time?
How would you like it if the water tasted like that all the time?”

“Damn
it, Sally, shut up,” Zhu muttered, but for once Pat was clapping Sally on the
back.

The
crowd began to grumble and boo. Heads snapped around, hard eyes stared. A gang
in Parents’ armbands stalked from the edge of the stage to the edge of the
square.

 “Oh
man, here we go,” Zhu whispered, wrapping her arms around her ribs. Her teeth
began to chatter.

“You
believe that overpopulation propaganda?” the speaker bellowed. “It’s
disinformation, people. A hoax! A sham! When we have more people, we have more
brainpower, more muscle power. We can overcome problems of supply, overcome
pollution. We always have, and we always will!”