The Gilded Age, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  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!”

  “The only reason you got something to eat today, brother,” Sally shouted back, “is because we enforced the law ten years ago! We restored the atmosphere and maintained production because we maintained negative population growth by enforcing the law. You would not have shoes on your feet if we hadn’t enforced the law!”

  “Hey, comrades?” Zhu said. “Can we get out of here?”

  “Enforce the law!” Pat shouted and raised her fist, then glanced at Zhu, sudden fear in her eyes. She glanced around, understanding their situation. She and Zhu started backing away from the angry mob advancing on them.

  Hsien slipped through the crowd and was gone. Zhu remembered seeing the back of her ragged crew cut, and thinking, ridiculously, Cowardice is the better part of sanity.

  But Sally Chou was never one to back down from anyone or anything. “We’ve always had famine in China!” she shouted as Pat yanked on her elbow. “We’ve always had disease! Always bad air, bad food, bad water! I’m talking three hundred years! Try three thousand years! We’ve never had enough! In the old days, the communist redistribution of wealth was a sham. A sham, people! Communism redistributed wealth from the rulers of the empire to the bureaucrats of another empire. That’s all! Don’t you get it? We can never have a decent quality of life for all of us under any form of empire till we the people control ourselves. And that means controlling our reproduction. Nuturing and teaching our families. And educating ourselves. Till we bring our population down.”

  “Fascist!” the speaker shouted back. “Traitor to the people!”

  “Fucking Daughters of Compassion!” yelled someone in the crowd.

  People started pushing, shoving, throwing punches. Suddenly fists were pummeling Zhu’s sore guts, and she was flailing with her own fists, her karate moves only as good as her strength, which was next to nothing. Sally and Pat were screaming, whistles shrieking, the speaker’s voice fuzzy with feedback.

  She was down on the ground in no time, curled up in a fetal position, her hands protecting her head, the back of her neck, and not much else. Someone ripped her jeans down, and she felt a man’s hard body pressing against her butt. The unmistakable sting of a knife whipped across the backs of her hands before she vomited in the cold mud and passed out.

  They beat up Sally bad, and Zhu too, seriously bruising but not breaking her ribs. Thankf
ully, the man didn’t rape her, after all. She only fully appreciated her good fortune when she thought about the incident later and nearly vomited again at the memory of that hard male body pressing against her. Pat was stabbed half a dozen times. The WBCO transferred emergency funding and the Changchi medcenter sent her down to Beijing on a whirligig. Zhu heard that Pat died, then later that she was critical, but pulling through.

  The mood at the compound became unbearable, a volatile mix of acute fear and red-hot rage. Several comrades quietly moved out. But for those who remained, a new fervor infected everyone.

  Sally stood up at the front of the mess hall the very next day, fiercely proud with her face swollen and frightfully black and blue, bandages swathing her head and shoulders and legs. Arm in a sling, she held her cigarette in that hand, insisting on twisting her head down and the broken arm up to suck the herbal smoke in a torturous mime of self-sacrifice. She contaminated the air in the whole dome with her smoke, but no one seemed to care.

  “We will not be intimidated!” she shouted in a ragged voice.

  “We will not be intimidated!” everyone shouted.

  They posted guards around the compound twenty-four hours a day. Sally managed to procure fifty assault rifles, no one knew from where or from whom. And in her feverish struggle to keep the Daughters alive, Sally also managed to procure the patches. The black patches. This was the point when everything really changed, Zhu thought later, when the Daughters of Compassion started using the black patches. They told no one, of course, especially the WBCO.

  Zhu was in the dorm, recuperating. Sally wouldn’t let her stay at the medcenter in town, she wanted her in the compound under the Daughters’ guard. The medic had used a mollie knife on Zhu’s cuts, which knit the skin just fine. But bruises still darkened the wound sites, the swelling was ugly, and she was weak. She lay huddled on her cot, bruises throbbing, gut gurgling, despair clogging her heart when Sally strode in and sat beside her.

  “Give me your leg, kiddo.” Sally pulled the bed sheet down.

  Zhu felt a sting behind her right knee next to her contraceptive patch and slowly—was it possible?—the throbbing eased. Even her gut settled down. She sat up, twisted her leg, and took a look. There, a patch of silky black fabric adhered to her skin next to the bright red square of the contraceptive patch.

  “Feel better?” Sally grinned, a cigarette dangling from her lip.

  “Yeah! What is it? What did you do to me?”

  “Take it easy. You don’t know your own weakness. The patch masks it.”

  “What’s the patch?”

  “Oh, it’s just some kind of opiate mixed with some kind of upper. What they call a speedball. A black patch.”

  “Damn you, Sally.” Zhu had endured her teen years without so much as tasting a beer, let alone experimenting with the drugs that floated through Changchi. She must have looked horrified because Sally guffawed till she choked and fanned her face with her hand.

  “Hey, don’t worry, I can get more.”

  “This is so not a good idea.”

  “I think it’s a great idea. They use the black patch for medical treatment, so it’s okay. The patch releases its stuff over time. Just drizzles that sweet medication right in. Listen, Zhu,” she said seriously, “between the bug in your gut and our pals in the square, you’re halfway to nowhere. And I need you up and running.” She pulled out some hardcopy. “We got info that the Parents hacked our d-base for our stats on skipcouples and skipkids in the Huo-wu District. We gotta get to these folks before they do.”

  “All right.” Zhu remembered swinging her legs down from the cot and thinking that a nutribar might actually taste pretty good right about now.

  “We gotta go down to the schools, talk to the teens, the twennies.” Sally yammered on, stabbing at the hardcopy with her forefinger. “Plus, we heard they’re aiding and abetting illegal pregnancies, setting up secret birth clinics, crap like that.”

  “Okay. All right. I get it.”

  But Zhu had not gotten it. She had no clue then, no premonition at all, that this was another step down the road to chaos and madness.

  No, she smiled. She felt much better with the black patch. She could hardly feel any pain anymore.

  *

  Now, in the midst of the Gilded Age Project, Zhu pushes those memories away and strides toward the invisible walls of Tangrenbu, determined to speak with Donaldina Cameron.

  “Cameron is a fanatic a lot like you or she will be soon,” Muse whispers archly in her ear, “only she’s doing her work in 1895. With the blessings of the Presbyterian Church, not the World Birth Control Organization.”

  “I’m so glad she and I are soul mates.”

  “Watch the modernisms,” Muse has the nerve to remind her.

  Nine Twenty Sacramento Street is an imposing red-brick building poised at the crest of a hill angling steeply up Nob Hill to the west and down to Tangrenbu to the east. Imposing iron grilles are bolted over the windows. The place looks like a fortress. Or a prison.

  The stench of Tangrenbu permeates the autumn air, and the bachelors in their denim sahms trek silently by. Zhu can feel the pressure of their eyes, their muted anger at her presence in front of the controversial Presbyterian mission. In her dress of a Western lady, the veil drawn over her face, and her hair pinned up beneath her Newport hat, she conceals her race. Someone flings a pebble, which strikes her shoulder blade. She doesn’t turn around to catch a glimpse of him. Whoever flung the pebble is long gone. She lifts the door knocker and sends a resounding boom into the rooms behind the massive walnut door.

  A young Chinese woman, her brow knit with worry, cracks the door open and peeks out over a chain lock attached inside. She whispers, “Who is?”

  “My name is Miss Zhu Wong. I have an appointment with Miss Cameron. She’s expecting me.”

  The door bangs shut, and locks click. The door reopens, and the young woman hurries her inside, banging the door shut. She shows Zhu to a plain, straight-backed chair in a brightly lit, barren hall. Zhu sits and waits, sniffing the astringent air, the scents of wood polish and lemon soap. She runs her finger along the arm of the chair. Not a speck of dust.

  At last a plump Scotch woman strides down the hall, her graying hair pulled back in a tidy bun, a pince-nez perched on her prominent nose. She too scowls with worry. “Good day, Miss Wong. I am Eleanor Olney.”

  “Good day. Pardon me, Miss Olney, but I’m not the bill collector. Why does everyone look so frightened?”

  “We had to dispose of a stick of dynamite this morning. On our stoop, it was.”

  “Who would put dynamite on your stoop?”

  “The highbinders, Miss Wong!” she exclaims. “The tongs are quite displeased with our temporary director. She’s thrown the slavers into quite a whirl.”

  “I see.” A peculiar shadow ripples at the far end of the hall, and Zhu looks warily around. Muse posts a string of statistics about the tongs in her peripheral vision. When she looks back, Miss Olney has tucked her pince-nez in her skirt pocket. Or has she? Zhu stares at the woman’s face, glimpsing no marks on her nose. Those telltale indentions you usually see when a habitual wearer of glasses takes them off.

  Oh, no. No! Is it happening again? Little changes, little ripples of reality right in front of her eyes. What do they mean? Fear crawls down her spine.

  Miss Olney’s watery pale blue eyes regard her suspiciously. “This way, Miss Wong. Lo Mo will see you now.”

  “Lo Mo?”

  “Lo Mo means The Mother. With Miss Culbertson on leave, that’s what the girls have started calling her. Though her family calls her Dolly, and her closest friends call her Donald. You,” she says sternly, “may call her Miss Cameron.’

  Zhu strides down the hushed hall, her button boots clattering on the immaculate plank wood floors. After Jessie’s excesses, she finds this place almost too austere, decorated only with a few sticks of furniture and scrupulously clean. Whitewashed walls are relieved by a couple of tiny p
aintings parsimoniously doled out—a blond Jesus, his blue eyes gazing up to heaven, surrounded by blond children. A smiling Mary in a hooded robe, coddling lambs and doves in her arms. From a distant room, girls’ voices dutifully recite, “A B C D E F G.”

  Two little girls kneel with brushes and pails of soapy water and meticulously scrub the floor. An open door reveals girls seated at tables, busily sewing dresses and shirts, bolts of fabric heaped all around them. Steam and the scent of starch stream from another door where older girls bend over washtubs and piles of laundry. At the end of the hall, girls sit around a huge table heaped with silverware, tea sets, and tea trays, jars of polish and rags stained black. Their low conversation falls silent as Zhu walks by, and they glance at her with their dark eyes. Zhu can’t tell if the girls are fearful or merely curious, but a peculiar tension grips them.

  The girls are all Chinese, of course. Wards of the home.

  Miss Olney shows Zhu to an office, then strides away.

  Donaldina Cameron sits imperiously behind a large rosewood desk with the implements of business precisely arranged before her—pen and inkwell, stationery, leather-bound ledgers, an elegant Underwood typewriter. Zhu knows she is only twenty-five, but her chestnut hair caught up in a pompadour is broadly streaked with white, making her appear much older. Her complexion is ashen, her expression harried. Still, she’s a lovely woman, Zhu thinks. Scotch, with broad bold brows, large expressive eyes, prominent cheekbones, a sensuous mouth. She wears a billowing black voile skirt and a plum shirtwaist with leg-o’-mutton sleeves hand-folded in tiny pleats.

  At her throat gleams an Art Nouveau brooch. With a start, Zhu peers more closely, but the curves of gold are the wings of a dove. Not the aurelia, but expensive. The sort of clothes and jewelry a fine lady would wear. Which seems out of place, unexpected even, in this spartan fortress. A Chinese girl brings in a polished silver tray and serves tea in cups of celadon-glazed porcelain.