Summer of Love, a Time Travel (14 page)

The
job also gives him an unexpected benefit. He watches the crowd inside the shop
and the crowd out on the street, which he gets an eyeful of through the wide shop
windows. He can watch for the Axis.

One
day a longhaired girl sat below his feet, glancing up at him from time to time.
He paid her no attention though she lingered, attracted by his minor celebrity.
He was half-awake at the time, thick-headed with tachyonic lag, when it suddenly
occurred to him:

Is
she the Axis?

Excitement
seized his chest. “Need a break,” he called to Ruby and scrambled down the
ladder. But the girl lost her nerve before he could untangle his legs from the
hem of the djellaba. She fled, darting out the door and onto the street,
disappearing in the crowd, her long hair flying. He cursed his hesitation. He
never got a good look at her.

Was
she the Axis?

Who
knows, Chi thinks with a leaden heart. When the tourists, day-trippers,
military personnel on leave from nearby bases, transient criminals, local
teenagers, and college students are added to the runaways, pilgrims, immigrants,
parents searching for their runaways, law enforcement personnel, and local
residents, a million people will pass through the Haight-Ashbury this summer. Ten
thousand newcomers on any given day, some who stay, some who leave as quickly
as they came.

How
is Chi ever going to find her?

Perched
high in the catbird seat, he raises the knuckletop to his lips. “K-T,” he
whispers and cups the holoid field beneath his palm. The djellaba’s generous
cuff conceals the field of lavender light. Chi tucks a crystal sliver in the
slot beneath the bezel of the ring. This particular sliver is the first of the
contraband holoids his skipmother smuggled into the stash cube.

Bright
red alphanumerics appear in the lavender light:

“Date:
07-01-1967. You may insert Disc 1 now.”

“Go,
K-T,” he whispers.

A miniature
3D scene pops up in the palm of his hand:

A
sandy-haired man in a suit and tie steps off the curb at the corner of Haight
Steet and Ashbury. He’s surrounded by teenagers. Over the man’s shoulder, in
the upper left corner beneath the street signs, stands a longhaired girl in a
high-collared shirt. She is speaking with a tall slim red-haired person. The
red-haired person’s face is blurred, little more than pale skin and a long,
smooth jaw. The sandy-haired man and the teens walk across the intersection. Their
footsteps scuff on the pavement, their bells and necklaces jingle.

The
man says, “CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco
because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the
world.”

From
the left background, the girl catches up with the man, darts behind his
shoulder, and falls into the rhythm of his step. She looks straight at the camera
and nods, as if acknowledging the whole world is watching her. The wind whips
her long, pretty hair. She brushes hair away from her face and smiles. A
radiant smile. An enigmatic smile, as if she knows the secret to everything.

In
the background, someone yells, “Beautiful!”

The
sandy-haired man says, “I’m Harry Reasoner.”

The scene
disappears. The lavender field hovers in the palm of Chi’s hand. “K-T, off,” he
whispers and lowers his hand. Back to work. Ruby gazes up at him, curiosity
written all over her face.

Chi
can’t get over the way the girl smiles.

“Axis,”
he whispers, “where are you?”

They
believe she was televised.
Televised!
The Archivists know when the clip
was aired, but when was the footage shot? That data has long since disappeared.

Is
the red-haired person him? Chi never thought so. He’s never felt the shock of
recognition other t-porters claim after witnessing evidence of their probable
presence in the past. The Chief Archivist herself assured him his lack of
reaction was only because the human mind perceives time as a forward-moving
experience and he, Chi, hasn’t yet experienced this moment in his personal Now.

Chi
was never convinced. That the Archivists, especially his skipfather, believed
the red-haired person was him annoyed him no end.

No,
Chi concludes, the girl who sat at his feet was too short, too brunette, too
insecure. She couldn’t possibly be that confident, smiling girl in the CBS News
holoid.

She
cannot be the Axis.

As
for the girl in the holoid, her hair color is hard to tell. Not light, not
dark. Long, but not extremely long. She’s taller than most girls, but not
towering. Slim, but not emaciated. Lovely, but not exotic. In hip clothing, but
not outrageously costumed. Her eyes are two dark ovals in the sun’s glare. Even
at the highest magnification, the Archivists never could determine the color of
her eyes.

It
frustrates Chi beyond bearing. The SOL Project is impossible!

And
it gets worse.

The
Archivists believe they know what her
legal
name was, but they also
believe the Axis will use a street name in the Haight-Ashbury. Maybe more than
one, as so many kids did. Who tracked the thousands of street names these transients
used? Who correlated street names to legal names? CBS News never identified the
girl or the teens or, for that matter, the red-haired person in the background.
Of all the names, street or legal, used by people flocking to the Summer of Love,
the Archives contain only a handful.

Worse
and worse. The Axis will change her appearance. About this, the Archivists are
certain. Well. Sort of certain, up to a seventy-two percent probability. It
seems that everyone who journeyed to the Haight-Ashbury this summer changed
themselves, however briefly. Self-transformation was a tradition originating in
the Summer of Love and echoing down the centuries in the bohemian colonies of
spacetime. A tradition emulated by the Vivas, the Hindi Hipsters, the
Handcrafters, the Bon Tons.

Chi
himself changed his appearance to journey here.

And
the Axis—Chi reminds himself—is fourteen years old. An age when a young woman’s
looks change under any circumstances.

His
first object of the SOL project, then, is to find the girl in the CBS News
holoid as soon as possible and verify her legal identity. That’s the only way
to establish that the girl in the holoid is who they believe she is.

But,
worst of all, even if Chi
can
find her and
can
identify her,
there’s a probability the girl in the holoid is
not
the Axis.

The
probability the girl in the CBS News holoid is
not
the Axis was so high
that certain staff at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications
disagreed with the project directors that the t-port should target the Summer
of Love. “You must remember, it’s a
Dim
Spot,” his skipfather had argued.
“Yes. A
Hot
Dim Spot,” his skipmother had countered. She was one of the
dissenters. “What data remain are unreliable.” His skipfather had to agree,
distress tugging at the corners of his mouth.

A
million people. And one may be a fourteen-year-old girl. A girl who holds the
conservation of all spacetime in her hands.

*  
*   *

Chi’s
relief dashes in the door for the four-thirty-to-nine shift. Howie loves the
djellaba. He smooths back his hair, pulls the hood around his face, and pulls
out a lock of hair to flop across his brow, Bub-style. Chi lets Howie borrow
the candy-apple-red Ray-Bans, too. Chi doesn’t need sunglasses out-of-doors;
his corneal shields protect his eyes from ultraviolet radiation a hundred times
more brutal than what beams down from this gentle sky.

Howie
is sixteen, from Kansas City. His parents never fixed his buck teeth. He could never
have landed a groovy gig like this—he doesn’t have to cut his hair or
anything—if it weren’t for the HIP Job Co-op. Howie is grateful for the dollar
an hour Ruby pays him. He pays the crash pad where he’s staying five bucks a
month for a spot to lay out his sleeping bag, toilet privileges, and all the
brown rice he can eat. Working ten afternoons a month, Howie is rich on
four-and-a-half dollars a day.

Chi
goes to the cash drawer to collect his. Ruby insists he take the money, even
though he said he’d work for free.

“Wages
of sin,” Gorgon says, leaning the back of his chair against the wall.

“Sinful
why? Because he prevents knickknackers from ripping off my shop?” Ruby says.

“Because
you’re payin’ him less than minimum wage.”

“It
pays off.”

“For
you or for him?”

Chi
sighs. How much longer can they last?

“For
us both,” Ruby says. “I deduct his wages, he pays no income tax. That’s the
best kind of game. We both benefit.”

“Typical
capitalist,” Gorgon says. “Scorin’ a profit from the love-shuck boom.”

“I’ve
been running my shop since this street was a sleepy little ghetto. When did you
blow into town, Leo?”

“Seniority
don’t make priority.”

“Sure
it does. Anyway, I’m not Standard Oil.”

“A
capitalist is a capitalist. Begrudgin’ knickknackers who need a buck more than
you.”

“I
donate to the Free Clinic. Not to knickknackers.”

“Typical
capitalist, hirin’ desperate flower children.”

“Who
couldn’t find work otherwise. Who would starve on the street or hook themselves.
Listen. I didn’t ask these kids to come here.”

That
stops Gorgon for maybe half a minute.

“But
you’re scorin’ all this bread!”

Ruby
smiles. “You bet your ass. My ma taught me. She said, “Daughter, you do for
yourself.”

Chi
takes his four dollar bills and two quarters. “Thanks, Ruby.”

Gorgon
bangs the chair down on all fours, goes over and stands behind Ruby, wrapping
his hands around her shoulders. He always changes his tactics, Chi observes, when
he can’t bully her with his political agenda. “Since you’re passing out all
this bread, lay a fiver on me.”

“Why
should I?” Ruby shoots him one of her looks. “You’re an able-bodied man. Why
don’t you work for it?”

“I’ll
be glad to work for it.” He kneads the nape of her neck, nuzzles her ear. “Want
to know how?”

Ruby
flutters her eyes, flexing her neck against his hands. “Tell me.”

“First,
I’ll score a bottle of that wine you dig,” he says. “And then. This is how
I
work.” He whispers in her ear.

She
chuckles and smiles her bedroom smile. Damn if she doesn’t hand him a
five-dollar bill.

Gorgon
winks at Chi.

Chi
shakes his head. In his autobiographical novel, Leo Gorgon will assassinate the
character of an exotic hip merchant. He will cast her as an evil, manipulating,
stupid, greedy whore. Chi feels his face heat up.

Gorgon
laughs, taking his reaction the wrong way.

There
are so many things Chi wishes he could tell Ruby. Ah, but Tenet Three, Tenet
Three. And what about Tenet Six? He cannot reveal Ruby’s future to her. How the
exotic hip merchant will sue Leo Gorgon for implying she prostituted herself,
and she’ll win in court. But by then Gorgon will have a heroin habit in him,
and he’ll be judgment-proof.

It’s
too depressing. Chi tucks the money in his jeans pocket and strides out of the
Mystic Eye.

All
he can say—all he’s
allowed
to say—is, “See you later, Ruby.”

*  
*   *

“Whatever
you do, son,” his skipfather said, “don’t get busted by the Man.”

“The
Man?” Chi said.

That
was Brax, showing off. During Chi’s training for the t-port, his skipparents
learned sixties’ slang with a childlike glee and practiced on him every chance
they got.

“They’ll
try to roll you. They’ll be looking for your shit.” Tears misted Brax’s eyes. He
knew very well he might never see Chi again after they t-ported his skipson
over five centuries. The realization had made him emotional. Chi privately
wondered if Brax was having a midlife crisis. He
was
pushing ninety-six.
“They’ll freak out over your neckjack. If they throw you in the laughing
academy, there’s nothing we can do on this side.”

Laughing
academy? Chi didn’t want to ask.

“And
don’t let the Man rip you on,” his skipmother added, and Brax looked at her,
like
Not quite, Ariel.

Chi
smiles, thinking of their gentle scholarly disputes.

But
he hadn’t smiled ten days ago, standing in the Portals of the Past, dread
beating in his chest.

The
Archives were unclear about so much. “The Man” was the military arm of the
civil service—the police, the heat, the fuzz, the pigs. And “the Man” also
meant a dealer, especially a pusher, a major criminal trafficker in illegal
drugs. Which was a very odd contradiction, Chi thought, if the Archivists were
correct. How did people of this Day know which usage someone meant? The Man? Or
the Man? Even context might not clarify.