all those artifacts of modern civilization already timeworn in her day. Now pearl gray in the late morning light, the virginal sea stretches out to an azure horizon, empty and pure. Just the sea, gulls wheeling, a colony of sea lions sunbathing on the rocks, and the good fresh smell of brine unsullied by toxic fumes. The timeless view fills her with melancholy, a sense of her own transience.
The Cliff House, newly rebuilt after a catastrophic fire and reopened by Mayor Sutro in February of this year, boasts an ocean view from all five of its stories. Tourist concessions selling hot roasted peanuts and trinkets for a penny line the first story. An art gallery graces the second story. How San Franciscans love their art galleries, Zhu thinks. The rest of the stories of the Cliff House are devoted to eating, drinking, and dallying. Plenty of private suites for amorous affairs. The turreted chateau was to be styled after San Diego’s inestimable Hotel del Coronado, but the architects, Mr. Lemme and Mr. Colley, have given the place its very own rococo character. Mr. Ambrose Bierce has pronounced the new Cliff House a monstrosity, but diners celebrating Bastille Day find the view and the food and the drink very fine indeed.
Changes. Things always change from moment to moment. Isn’t that what Zhu has pondered from the very start of the Gilded Age Project? At the most basic quantum level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great trembling. Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. In cosmicist theory, reality is One Day, existing for all eternity. And yet reality is like a beam of light, swirling with infinite worlds.
It’s a paradox, inscrutable, Zhu knows that now. If it weren’t for that paradox, she wouldn’t have been able to t-port to the past. Or return to her future?
Changes. The first Cliff House burned down to the ground. Where Zhu sits now with her daughter Hope is its second incarnation. When Muse whispers in her ear that this Cliff House will also burn to the ground in just a few short years, she tells the monitor to shut up. She doesn’t want to hear it.
More changes. Jessie finally went to a doctor who told her what she already knew from Zhu. That she’s got to cut down on the drinking or her liver will bust. Jessie proudly proclaims that she’s reduced her intake of champagne from twenty bottles a day to three, plus a brandy nightcap. Well, two brandy nightcaps. As a result of this regimen, she’s slimmed down two whole dress sizes in a mere three months. “Mr. Worth is showing the cinched waist for the fall,” Jessie says. “Sure and it’s a good thing I dropped some of that lard.”
And more changes. Daniel has started drinking again, though he says this time he can control himself. So far, he takes a bottle of wine with his dinner and that’s all. Still. Zhu shifts Hope to her other arm, displeased with Jessie’s toasts. Champagne for breakfast. That’s a throwback to Dupont Street. Daniel really ought to stay sober for breakfast.
But it is Bastille Day, and Daniel is leaving for Paris.
The dining room is draped with red, white, and blue bunting, sprays of white and red carnations, bowers of smilax, and hundreds of flags of France, California, and the United States. On the deck, a string quartet plays the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.
“The fall of the Bastille is France’s Independence Day,” Jessie explains to Hope as if the newborn understands her perfectly. Jessie’s words are slurred; she’s tying one on already. The baby wakes and squeals, and Jessie says, “Aw, lemme hold her, missy.”
Zhu hands the baby over. Hope’s eyes, when she opens them, are green. Though it’s still hard to tell, not gene-tweaked green. Could Zhu have passed on her gene-tweak to her child? Yes, but the odds are against it. Gene-tweaks are resilient in the recipient, but weak in genetic descent. No, Hope’s green eyes probably come from the deep sea eyes of Daniel’s mother, from some atavistic gene running through the maternal side of his family. From Hope’s Caucasian ancestors.
The ambiguity is not lost on Zhu. Whose green eyes? Hers? Or Daniel’s mother’s? Under the resiliency principle, we could become the Cosmic Mind, Chiron told her. We could change the details, and it didn’t matter. The outcome we wanted still happened.
Is that why Zhu had this baby? The birth was quick and easy, over almost as