The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (51 page)

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?”