The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (17 page)

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 people 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.