of Chinese women, most of whom remained anonymous and are lost to the Archives.”
“Anonymous. That’s what I am, all right.” She swallows her resentment. Chiron made that clear from the start. Chinese women of this Now are anonymous. But she still doesn’t like the fact that Muse can’t trace her in the Archives. No sign of her. No sign, at all. If she’s here, well, she should be there, somewhere in the historical record.
Zhu slogs through the crowd. The Mexican community of the Bay Area—from the Latin Quarter in North Beach to south o’ the slot to San Jose—has turned out for the grand parade downtown. Horsemen with ringing spurs rear and wheel their steeds. Bands blare with their own unique brassy sound. Guitars strum and maracas clatter. Ole! People promenade in costumes and papier-mache masks depicting skulls. Some costumes are sly caricatures—a rich lady in a stole of chicken feathers and a tiara of cardboard, her skull made glamorous with salacious lipstick and eye paint. A priest piously bearing enormous candelabra comprised of skulls, gaudy flowers dangling from his grinning teeth. A rowdy soldier in full dress uniform dangling red and green skulls from the brim of his cap, his bandoliers, his jacket sleeves, and a cardboard rifle. A morose barefooted peasant, a patch slung over one hollow eye socket of his skull mask, his braided mustache swooping over his jawbone. A hound trots beside him, its clipped black fur painted with a canine skeleton in bright white and green.
No one escapes Death.
People guffaw and point at each new mockery. But Zhu can’t laugh. “What does it all mean?” she asks a boy on the sidelines. A gangling teenager, all long limbs and a narrow swarthy face, he pops candy skulls into his mouth and whoops.
“Well, senorita, you’re going to die sooner than you want to, so why cry about it, eh?”
Now Death presents Zhu with a bouquet of pink paper flowers. Why cry? How sensible. This parade and its celebrants mocking death are psychologically healthy. She hands the flowers to the boy and tries to smile, but her mouth refuses. Sooner than you want to. As soon as you are born, you know you will die. And the other way around? As soon as you die, you know you will be born? But that’s reincarnation, a superstition strangely persistent even in Zhu’s Now, though modern science has never proven any truth to it. One of those primitive beliefs that refuses to die, stubborn and irrational.
Or is that what happens if you’re trapped in a Closed Time Loop? Like the infamous Betty in Chiron’s Now. Betty whose rescue polluted all of spacetime. Betty who died, knowing she would be born, knowing she would return to the day of her death and die again—in the past.
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