The Gilded Age Part 10

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 pa.s.sed, 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 dest.i.tute lived in the street. Teles.p.a.ce, rather than the corner store, distributed p.o.r.nography, but there was still p.o.r.nography. In the junk heaps, semiplast had replaced plastic, which had replaced gla.s.s, 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-cla.s.s 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 teles.p.a.ce 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 Compa.s.sion. It had been a summer outing, and someone had flown a lavender kite in the shape of a fish.

Yu-lai and Li Wong were prosecuted for abandonment, child endangerment, embezzlement, theft, and skipchild abuse. Due to her youth, Zhu was not included in the proceedings. She never saw her skipparents again, but she sure saw their images splattered all over the media: SKIPCHILD ABANDONED BY SKIPPARENTS.

WHILE LOTTERY COUPLES CRY FOR THEIR OWN.

It was when the Parents tried to make an example out of Zhu that she was first approached by the Daughters of Compa.s.sion. Orphaned once by the law, orphaned twice by her skipparents, hara.s.sed and alone at a vulnerable age when everyone needs a friend, Zhu gladly fled to the Cause, to the rigors of comradeship. To the contemplation of Kuan Yin.

A woman came calling as Zhu studied in the library for winter examinations. The village administrators had placed her in the custody of the local cooperative. Another shameful thing. She had to face her neighbors and peers as a ward of the state. No longer was she a skipchild with a family, an inheritance, and the likelihood of going off to the university. She was so depressed at the time she had actually considered taking her own life. A bona fide option, according to the fashionable international death cults.

The sharp-eyed, wiry woman sat down next to her. Zhu glanced up from the rented workstation, the lesson hovering before her--an English translation of a spectacular holoid by Magda Mira, an American filmmaker praised for her celebration of death. Gory gross-out stuff, but Mira's work was as popular as potato chips.

"You the skipkid?" the woman said.

Zhu gathered up her jacket and backpack, preparing to flee, though she'd waited sixteen days to get access to the workstation.

"Don't waste your time with that c.r.a.p," the woman said, pointing to the holoid. "There's work to be done, here, in our mother China. The Cause is much more important than vulgar American entertainments that have no meaning in your life."

"Mira celebrates death," Zhu said automatically. Then, "The Cause has more meaning?" She hesitated, panic skidding through her.

"h.e.l.l, yes!" the woman said. "All the sacrifice and pain you've gone through as a skipkid means nothing if lottery couples are going to go off and have kids illegally. Let alone if parents with one kid-skip or natch-go off and have another. Talk about challenging the odds. Talk about greed. And they say Changchi will have another drought this summer, and they don't know if they'll be able to herd rain from Siberia. It's a d.a.m.n shame."

Zhu remembered listening to all this with her mouth hanging open. "You're talking about negative population growth."

"I'm talking about the Cause," the woman said. "I'm talking about enforcement of the Generation-Skipping Law, the finest gesture of international cooperation ever witnessed in our sad and sorry history of the world. And the only hope for our mother China." She stuck out her hand. "I'm Sally Chou. Born and raised in Chicago, but I came to the motherland with a bunch of Americans during the pilgrimage of '73. I'll not go back to America. I'm a Daughter of Compa.s.sion."

Zhu remembers that first meeting still.

"What are you doing after graduation?" Sally Chou lit a cigarette, and Zhu smelled a tart scent of herbs, not tobacco.

When Zhu shrugged, Sally Chou laughed and said, "You're coming with me, skipkid. The Daughters of Compa.s.sion need you."

Zhu moved to the compound the Daughters of Compa.s.sion owned south of Changchi. A wealthy Californian friend had repossessed the place after the local real estate developers had defaulted on one of countless refinancings. Nothing in Changchi was particularly elegant, but at least the compound was cleaner than most, with excellent air conditioners and the best water recycler and generator that could be had in a provincial burg like Changchi.

"We must fight the Society for the Rights of Parents," Sally Chou declared in the village square during the first rally Zhu attended. "We must stand guard at WBCO clinics. We must chaperone clinic staff. We must trace illegal fund withdrawals. We must restore order in the databases. There is no turning back for mother China. We must break the back of exponential growth."

"So what if another hundred thousand illegal babies are born?" someone heckled from the back. "Why do you care?"

"Because with exponential growth," Sally Chou said, "another hundred thousand illegal babies means another million six people before we've reached our own middle age. Can our fields feed another million six people when we don't have enough to eat right now? Can our factories employ another million six people when we've got thirty percent unemployment?"

"Can our future sustain another three million people in the next generation after that?" Zhu called out.

Sally Chou was sweating and exhausted by the end of this rally. Zhu didn't remember what happened to the heckler in the back.

New campaigns were announced each spring over bowls of millet gruel at the long plywood tables.

"Women must be the first to understand that having children-skip or natch-is a privilege, not a right," Sally Chou said. "Women must sacrifice that privilege for the children. Everyone's children. For the future! As the cosmicists say, 'To give is best.'"

"Are you a cosmicist, Sally?" Zhu asked.

"We can learn from the cosmicists," Sally said, a little evasively. "We must all learn that a sustainable future depends on the sacrifices we make now. Let us make those sacrifices gladly! Make them out of compa.s.sion! We must win the hearts and minds of our women. All the world watches mother China. Our China must not fail!"

Our mother China. We, the women. Zhu eagerly embraced these words and ideas. If all the world watched mother China, then all the world watched her, too. Zhu, the abandoned skipchild, now a Daughter of Compa.s.sion.

The compound was comprised of a scrawny vegetable garden, a fishpond, a small ugly office high-rise, a mediocre medical clinic, a depressing dining hall, an uninspiring recreation room, and a dormitory and communal baths. Zhu thought the compound was the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen. Especially the shrine to Kuan Yin.

Kuan Yin was the patroness of the Daughters of Compa.s.sion. A five-thousand-year-old G.o.ddess, a mystic presence, an intellectual principle, a metaphor, a heroine of fables, a source of aphorisms, a philosophical statement.

"Who is Kuan Yin?" Zhu asked as she sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor. She gazed at three statuettes on the altar-a seated woman of celadon, a standing woman with a baby on her hip, and a crouching woman in golden armor, her arms raised for battle. She wasn't sure which aspect of Kuan Yin she preferred-the priestess, the mother, or the warrior.

"She is the bodhisattva of compa.s.sion," Sally Chou said. "She who hears all pleas."

In one fable, Kuan Yin was a hunter, like the Greek G.o.ddess Artemis, who offered women the spiritual life as an alternative to marriage. In another fable, she was an innocent girl whose parents abused her, then sentenced her to death. Each time the executioner took pity on her, and she survived. Then, when the parents fell ill, Kuan Yin carved strips of flesh from her arms and made them meat soup, which nourished the parents and saved their lives.

Zhu was enraged by this story, but Sally Chou whispered, "The Daughters of Compa.s.sion are strips of flesh. We are the sacrifice."

Zhu nodded and embraced the Cause. She threw herself into the life of abstinence and discipline. And she never ate meat after that. Meat of any sort-red flesh, fish, or fowl-tasted too much like a sacrifice.

Zhu gains the crest of Montgomery Street, troubled by Muse and perplexed by the cigar wagon. She gasps for breath. The Archivists insisted she wear a corset for authenticity. A corset gives the female figure a distinctive curvy look, even a woman as thin as Zhu. At her most anorexic, her waist measured twenty-one inches. Wearing the corset, she's managed to squeeze her waist down to eighteen inches. Hah. Maybe she hasn't pulled the laces tight enough. The advertis.e.m.e.nts promise a reduction of five inches.

She runs her hand down her side. She remembers Daniel circling his hands around her corseted waist, delighting in the bound portion of her body.

A very troubled young man. And very much a man of his times.

Should she begrudge him that? Or try to save him from his ignorance?

Oh, man. There she goes again, trying to save the world and everyone in it.

Not only does a corset restrict a woman's breathing, but the undergarment compromises her digestive tract, her bowels, her uterus, her liver, her kidneys, her bladder. The exoskeletal construction weakens a woman's midriff muscles to the point that some long-term corset wearers can't sit up or stand without the support of their whalebone stays.

"Braced for the day," Jessie cheerfully says.

Zhu sneezes at the corner of Montgomery and Broadway where street sweepers bend to their task. A man in a sombrero leads the way, driving a one-horse Studebaker wagon. Bolted to the wagon bed is a huge oak cask from which black cast-iron Niagara sprinkling heads protrude. The driver sprinkles water onto the dusty street, but without rain for three months, his efforts don't help much. Another Studebaker wagon follows, a huge cylindrical brush sweeping the dampened grime into the gutter. Still another wagon follows that, accompanied by a hunchback on foot. The hunchback shovels horse manure, dust, and refuse, and deposits his burden into the back of the wagon. The wagon buzzes with flies. Dust not captured by the sprinkling water rises over the street in a filthy brown haze.

Zhu sneezes again, pulling an antihistamine out of her feedbag purse, as well as a freshly laundered handkerchief. Tears spurt from her eyes and nose. Muse has managed to identify the source of her allergenic reaction-powdered horse manure mingled with fly refuse. The fine particulate matter hovers in the city's air everywhere. Sometimes luckless horses drop dead on the street and are abandoned. Along with the feral dogs, the flies quickly descend there, too. It's the fly refuse that really gets to Zhu.

She smelled plenty of compost in Changchi. She breathed carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. But fly s.h.i.t? Not till 1895.

Now the blare of a bra.s.s band fills her ears as a Columbus Day parade wends its way up Columbus Avenue. Leading the way on a prancing black stallion rides the grand marshal, resplendent in a scarlet top hat and cutaway coat, a scarlet sash and a blooming rosette, white breeches, and high black boots. Zhu claps her hands and shouts, enchanted by the sight. Fancy carriages follow with black leather hides and silver chasing, their convertible roofs folded down. Wealthy Italian families ride inside, decked out in bright silks and black gabardine, red, white and green sashes slung over the ladies' ample b.r.e.a.s.t.s. They wave to the crowd, as regal as royalty, and Zhu waves back, happy as a child. Now nuns in crow-black robes trudge solemnly past, called out into the festivities on this honored day to look after their obedient charges who march along next-little girls in white veils, each with prayer books embossed with purple crosses, and little boys in black suits and green and red ties. The children sing, their birdlike voices lost in the air. Orphans, Zhu thinks with a sudden pang. Then jugglers follow, flinging silver b.a.l.l.s, painted wood pins, flaming torches. Lovely! Zhu has only seen live jugglers on holoids. Juggling is a lost art in her Day. Now clowns costumed like the great Joey Grimaldi caper and prance, and the goggle-eyed children lining the street curbs scream with laughter. An emaciated brown bear with a muzzled snout snuffles and sways miserably. The clubs and special interest groups from the Italian community bring up the rear, each with its own spangled banner, caps and jackets, and high-stepping drummers beating time to a measured strut.

Zhu follows the parade up Columbus to Union Street and turns the corner there, leaving the parade to promenade north to the waterfront. She sneezes once, twice, three times. Her feedbag purse slides off her shoulder, and her b.u.t.ton boot slips on something slick.

Not spillage from the street cleaner's drudge, thankfully. No, the macadam is slick with squashed grapes, grape pulp, and dark mottled juice. Could this be the wine merchant's address? Well, yeah. Zhu steps inside.

The place is in a frenzy. The front countertops have been rolled back, revealing a warehouse of surprising size. Huge wooden presses are busily employed by boisterous young men. Young women, their hair caught back in red and black bandanas, fill and cork green bottles as fast as the raw wine can run out of the spigots. Racks of new wine bottled at the start of the season are stacked on the rolled-back counters, ready for a fast sale. Other women fill great wooden casks with the rest of the runoff for proper aging. Bins bulge with purple grapes the wine merchant had carted down from Napa vineyards.

"Ciao, bella," says the jovial wine merchant, doused with grape juice and sweat. "You take a taste?"

New red wine will surely taste dreadful. Zhu doesn't drink, and anyway, what does she know about wine? "No, thank you, Mr. Parducci," she says. "How much for twelve cases of well-aged Chianti for the Parisian Mansion? We're celebrating Columbus Day tonight."

"Twelve cases? Eh, fifteen cents a bottle."

"Dear sir, since Miss Malone is your steady customer, I think that is way too much. Ten cents."

He's drunk. He's also staring at her. "Yeah, okay. Avanti. Ten cents. Is done deal."

Ah. Each bottle of Chianti from Mr. Parducci, then, costs ten cents. Each drink from that bottle, poured by Jessie's girls into tiny thimbles, will cost the gentlemen two bits. After two drinks of the stuff, most won't notice the expense. And Jessie's girls will make sure they imbibe at least two drinks.

Why should Zhu be surprised? San Francisco, 1895, is capitalism at its finest hour. Yet she has to laugh. Food and water rationing in her Now-corrupt officials, markups through the roof--isn't so very different from capitalism at its finest hour.

Not so very different. Does this mean people haven't changed so much in six centuries?

But surely men and women and their relationships with each other have changed. Haven't they?

Surely women like Zhu have changed. Perhaps Daniel can change, too?

"You work at Miss Malone's, eh bella?" the wine merchant asks, handing her a receipt. He's a handsome graying man, though he's eaten a bit too well over the years and is probably due for his coronary arrest anytime soon. Well, maybe not. They've actually proven in Zhu's Now that consumption of wine, especially red wine, is good for the circulation. "You too nice to work at that place." He surrept.i.tiously hands her a coin as his dark, round wife watches them suspiciously. "Nice girl, you go find work in a nice house up on Sn.o.b Hill. You good washee washee girl, no?"

"Actually, no, Mr. Parducci," Zhu says. "I am Miss Malone's bookkeeper and administrative a.s.sistant. Sometime I negotiate contracts on her behalf, as well." She lets the wine merchant puzzle over that. "I am no one's washerwoman, Mr. Parducci."

She cannot hide her smile-yes, of pride and triumph-as the wine merchant's jaw drops. He could not be more surprised at her reprise of her job description if she were a talking dog.

"Happy Columbus Day," she says, oddly cheered by the man's discomfort, and signs the wine merchant's receipt. "Ciao."

Zhu supervises the wine merchant's driver as he loads the cases onto the wagon and climbs up next to him on the driver's seat. The ride is welcome. The afternoon has warmed beneath this beneficent sun. It's hot and that dreadful dust billows. Zhu holds her handkerchief over her face.

The wagon clatters up to the Parisian Mansion. A conservative bra.s.s plaque simply announces the moniker of the place between two simpering but decently clad cupids. Nice. Such plaques have been the subject of much civic dispute. Lucy Mellon, also known as Miss Luce, caused a quite a stir by mounting a bra.s.s plaque above her Sacramento Street house announcing, "Ye Olde Wh.o.r.e Shoppe." The bulls made her take it down.

Zhu sniffs. And a good thing, too. How crude.

The Parisian Mansion's plaque is the most conservative item of its exterior. Cast plaster cupids smile from every newel, post, archway, portico, and window hood. Jessie calls the paint job Pompeiian red. The elaborate gingerbread is detailed in ivory, eggplant purple, and a startling pale teal. The place is positively hallucinogenic. Zhu can't quite decide if it's dreadful or magnificent. Daniel only remarked, "How else does one paint a maison du joi?"

Zhu steps down from the wagon, carelessly swishing her skirts, revealing a flash of her calf, the lace hem of her slip. Although she is swathed in traveling togs, her collar b.u.t.toned up tight against her sweaty throat, the driver-a dashing dark-eyed swain with olive skin and ma.s.ses of black hair-stares, openmouthed. She wears stockings of a pale pink silk. She gets them from Jessie. They're far more comfortable than the heavy black cotton stockings proper ladies are supposed to wear.

That snippet of pink silk, however, is an unmistakable sign to the driver-homewrecker. A sporting lady, a moll, an owl, a fallen angel, a hooker. A wh.o.r.e.

Suddenly she is fair game.

"Well, well, miss. How much for a whistle?" And he'd been such respectful boy just a moment ago, chatting about the drought.

Zhu ignores his rude question, points to the trademen's entrance around the side of the Mansion down a well-swept narrow alley. "You may take the cases there."

"I got time." He fishes a coin from his shirt pocket. "And I got jack."

"I don't have time. Please hurry up."

He steps in her path, slaps his fist in the palm of his hand. "Who do you think you are, chit? I said I got jack."

She waves the receipt at him, stamps her foot. "Take the cases in there or I'll speak to Mr. Parducci about you." She looks around. "And I'll call the cops."

"Cops ain't gonna help you none." He spits. But he shoulders a case and follows her down the alley. He deposits her purchases on the floor of the hall, one by one, sweat and anger rolling off his skin.

She watches him, tapping her toe. She reaches into her feedbag purse for the mollie knife, closes her fingers over the smooth little shaft. The mollie knife is mostly intended for mending and healing, but she can hurt him with it if she has to. Hurt him bad. She can also aim the side of her hand against his windpipe and really hurt him bad. And to think she was going to tip him. She says instead, "Get out."

All over the glimpse of her pink silk stocking.

Zhu steps into the kitchen of the Parisian Mansion.

"How you, miss?" Chong, Jessie's chef at the Mansion, abandons his huge cast-iron pot boiling with wide flat ribbons of lasagne noodles and comes to inspect her delivery. A wiry, shrunken fellow with a graying queue that reaches to the backs of his knees when he unwinds it from around his head, Chong's usual expression is dour. Now he positively scowls. "Miss Malone want me cook Eye-talian. I no cook Eye-talian. French my special!"

"I know, Chong. But you know Miss Malone. Once she gets something in her head."

Chong's scowl deepens. Even Zhu, Miss Malone's right-hand girl, can't save him. He scurries back to his pot, cursing softly. Chong is one of the finest French chefs in San Francisco, hired away from Marchand's. Jessie covers her overhead at the Mansion with the girls, but she makes her real profit from the food and drink. The Mansion has a culinary reputation, along with its other reputation. Chong's specialty is terrapin in heavy cream, sweet b.u.t.ter, and sherry cooked in its own sh.e.l.l with a certain spice Chong will not reveal. Jessie traditionally serves Chong's terrapin at 4:00 A.M., along with sentimental songs on the calliope, after the gentlemen are well soused and s.e.xed.

"Five dollars for a tiny dish of turtle meat?" Zhu asked, scandalized when she first observed this ritual. "Never mind that this species of turtle will be endangered in less than a century and will never be seen on menus again."

"In danger," Jessie said. "In danger of what?"

"That must be a thousand percent markup."