Summer of Love, a Time Travel (19 page)

Chi
glances at Ruby, and she stares back, befuddled. What the devil is he talking
about?

“Dig
this,” says the guy with the eyes. “He sounds like a freakin’ accountant.
I’m
a man from Mars.”

“I’m
not an accountant. I’m a tachyporter.”

“A
tacky-poor-
what?
”

“My
personal Now exists in your future.”

“I
think you’re a narc, man,” says the headband.

“And
I think you’re dirty.”

Chi
slips something from his jacket pocket, flicks it. An orange beam shoots from
the tip of a metal tube the size of a Bic pen. Chi aims the beam at the
sidewalk in the middle of the circle and twists his hand, tracing a shape. A
puff of pulverized concrete rises from the beam’s path. He flicks the pen-thing
again, then tucks it in his pocket. Dust lingers and there, carved in the
concrete, maybe half an inch deep, is a shape:

Ruby
cannot believe her eyes. She knows a thing or two about stage magic. She barges
through the circle and crouches, touching the sidewalk. She doesn’t even think
twice about the wisdom of this till her forefinger informs her the concrete is
still hot.

“What
the hell?” she says to Chi.

He
shrugs, triumphant and apprehensive at the same time.

The
frog girl and the circle stare at the carved heart, openmouthed.

The
elderbeard starts to cackle, “Man oh man oh man.”

Then
Ruby sees something else she cannot believe. Chi—the aloof Beelzebub in his high
tower—whips out something else from his jacket pocket,  reaches over,
and--while everyone’s eyes are riveted on his trick in the concrete--presses
that something against Starbright’s chest between her breasts.

“Hey!”
She recoils, startled. Her eyes widen again. “Ouch!”

She slaps
his shoulder, pushes him away. He’s holding a small dark oblong stone.

The
circle looks up from the carved heart, slowly taking interest in Starbright’s
little struggle. Chi pockets the stone. His face is solemn, intense, faintly
ashamed.

“What
is
your name, man?” says the guy with the eyes.

“Where
are
you from?” says the headband.

Chi’s
got them all so rattled that when a patrol car turns the corner and prowls down
the block, the young dudes stagger to their feet. Two cops hop out, hips thick
with holstered revolvers.

“Party’s
over,” Ruby commands. “All of you, scram.”

At
Ruby’s nod, Chi hustles Starbright around to the alley.

Ruby
hoists the calculating machine, unlocks her door, and heaves the machine inside.
She tosses her CLOSED sign inside, too, steps in, and locks the door but good.

She
stands in semidarkness, peering out the peephole, heart thumping. The cops
disperse the dopers. Far out. Ruby waits one beat, two. Are they coming after
her? Charge her with instigating a public nuisance? Or is this the night to
raid her herb collection and plant a joint on her premises?

But the
cops hang around a minute or two, exchanging a few laughs, climb in their car,
and take off.

Damn!
It’s a Saturday night and the street is still packed with paying customers. But
paranoia drains her dry. She doesn’t know how much more she can take. She shuts
the shop, triple-locks the front door, and dashes upstairs to her apartment.

Chi
and the kid stand on the deck outside the kitchen door. Starbright is nearly as
pale as he is. She furtively checks him out. He stares at her from just about
every angle.

“But
what’s your
real
name?” he’s saying in a wheedling voice.

“That
is
my real name,” the kid snaps, eyes flashing.

Uh-huh.
Now, Ruby has seen Chi glance at the ladies now and then. And she has no idea
what the young dude does with his time outside of the Mystic Eye. But this is
the first time she’s seen him stir his royal self over a female person. A
pretty child, yes, but what’s going on? There’s something odd about the gleam
in his eye.

Ruby
steps out on the deck and lets him have it. “What do you mean by pulling a
stunt like that in front of my shop?”

“I’m
sorry,” he says and looks it.

“You
bet your ass you’re sorry, sonny. What if the city charges me to replace the
sidewalk you ruined?”

“I
didn’t ruin the damn sidewalk, Ruby.”

“None
of your smart-mouth.” She shakes her finger at him, tosses Starbright’s
overnight bag in the kitchen, and slams the door. “You’re gonna help me,” she
says to him and climbs down the stairs. “You too, kid.”

Ruby
leads them to the garage, heaves open the double doors, pulls the chain to the
lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Her Mercedes Benz is parked there, plus
boxes of inventory and an eight-armed brass statue of Kali she’s not sure what
to do with. She picks her way through the boxes to the storeroom. She surveys a
lawn-mower with rusty blades. A ten-inch black-and-white TV. A Hula Hoop. She
keeps forgetting to dump the box of peyote buttons from Morris Orchards in
Laredo, Texas that Stan bought through mail order in ’63. Ah, there’s that old
mattress.

Ruby
slides her hand through the loop on the left side. Chi takes the right.
Starbright navigates from behind. Ruby has never seen such a worried look on a
flower child’s face but, then, ten days is a long stretch for any girl to do
time at the Double Barrel house. They struggle with the unwieldy mattress.

“You
help us carry this upstairs,” Ruby tells Chi, “then you collect your things and
get out.”

They
stand beneath the bare bulb swinging on its chain.

Chi
looks up, startled. “Ah, come on, Ruby.”

“Come
on, nothing.”

“What
did I do? I thought you liked me.”

“You
got it, sonny.
Liked.
Past tense.” Her hand slips, tearing three fingernails
below the quick.

“But
why? What’s wrong?” Chi steadies his side. “I’m here to help you. Haven’t I
helped you?”

His
face looks so pained, she almost relents. Almost. She is Ruby A. Maverick and
she tolerates no nonsense.

“Measles?
You got measles? You know how bad measles are? I’ve got a young woman here who
is. . . .”
Who is pregnant,
she starts to say, but shuts up when she
sees Starbright’s horrified face. “A young woman who doesn’t need to get sick,
and neither do I. Do you have any idea how contagious measles is?”

“I
don’t have measles, Ruby,” Chi says patiently like she’s being dense, which
makes her even madder. “I would probably die from measles.”

“Then
you lied?”

“I
didn’t lie, I implied.” He tugs at the mattress. “They were trying to force me to
ingest illegal drugs.”

Ruby
softens. “Yeah. Well. You’d better go to the clinic tomorrow and get treated.
Don’t you go spreading measles around here.”

“Ruby,”
he says, less patiently. “I don’t have measles.”

“He attacked
me,” Starbright speaks up. Her voice is shrill. “With that black stone-thing.
He stabbed me.” She rubs her breastbone.

Chi
starts to laugh, then stops himself. “I didn’t stab you, Starbright. The
scanner’s got a small probe, that’s all. The probe is a hundred times finer
than a sewing needle. You felt a little prick, that’s all. Isn’t that true?”

“You
stabbed me.” Starbright glares at him with such venom, Ruby revises her opinion
of the kid. Not such a little lamb, after all.

He
turns to Ruby. “I’m complying with your house rules, aren’t I?”

Of
course he is. But her stubbornness and paranoia won’t let it go. “You sat down
with those dudes. Maybe you didn’t partake, but you passed the bong. Tell me
true, once and for all, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. Are you a narc? Did you come
to the Haight-Ashbury to collect evidence?”

“Oh,
I
did
come to collect evidence.”

“A
nonparticipant witness, isn’t that what they call it?” Ruby says in her
sweet-as-poison voice.

“Actually,
that’s a fair description.”

“Damn
it, Chi!”

Starbright
drops the back of the mattress, poised to flee.

Ruby
gestures to her,
cool it.
Call her a fool, but suddenly she’s worried
about the kid. “You stay put, Starbright.”

“I
am
not
a narc!” Chi declares. “I have no wish to harm you! Or
Starbright! I swear it! I swear it on anything you want me to swear on.”

“Swear
it on your mother’s grave, and we’ll never mention it again.”

An
unexpected look of sharp sadness crosses his face. A look that shoots right
into Ruby’s heart and strikes bull’s-eye.

“Oh,
I can do that,” Chi says. “I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

*  
*   *

They
set up a makeshift bedroom in the sitting room on the third floor. At first the
kid is unsure, then she joins in Ruby’s enthusiastic rearrangement of the furniture,
Chi’s tasteful placement of the Persian carpets and potted plants. Soon they’ve
got a cozy little nest all for Starbright with a door that closes and locks, a
sloping skylight, a private bath two steps away, and sheets. Clean sheets. The
kid’s face begins to shine. She shrugs out of her jacket and carefully hangs it
on the hook on the the door.

Chi
beams as if he’s responsible for this minor miracle. “I’ll just go now,” he says,
slipping quickly out and clattering down the first three stairs, “and let you
lasses rest.”

“Not
so fast, sonny,” Ruby calls to him. “You’re packing some kind of weapon. Aren’t
you. Well, aren’t you?”

He
stops and slowly climbs back up.

“I,
for one, will rest a whole lot easier when you tell us what your magic show was
all about. Carving up my sidewalk with that. . . .thingie.”

“This?”
He pulls out the Bic pen.

Ruby
and Starbright both duck.

“It’s
just a maser,” Chi says mildly. He points to tiny graphics along one side. “Microwave
Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This tool is cool. It’s got
quite a range.” The maser is striped with bands of color: red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, and purple. Each stripe is subdivided into tiny measurements like
the divisions on a ruler.

“Pretty,”
Ruby says. “Is it Japanese?”

“Yes,
it is,” he says with a laugh. “You set the beam you want like this.” He slides
a tiny black pointer up and down the tube’s length along the colored stripes,
clicking the pointer at various divisions. “Red is good for really tiny jobs.
Microorganisms, bacteria, and such. The beam destroys the target, but doesn’t
affect anything else.” He points to the orange and yellow bands. “These are
higher intensities. I can cut various materials, cauterize a wound, perform
surgery, if I need to. Concrete is pretty soft, so I carved the sidewalk on the
orange setting. The serious fire-power is here.” He points to the green and
blue bands, taking care not to move the pointer. “And I’ve got a frequency that
doesn’t apply normal physics—the purple beam. The purple beam is an antimatter
emission similar to the energy we employ in the tachyonic shuttle.”

Ruby
is nodding, following along with the logic of his rap, but now she’s stymied.
“I don’t get it.”

“Neither
do we, not completely,” he says darkly. “I’ve come equipped with an active purple
beam only if I need to defeat antimatter. I hope I never need to use it.” He
tucks the maser back in his pocket. “Under Tenet Seven of the Grandmother
Principle, I’m only allowed to use the maser under strict necessity. I’m not
allowed to go masering up your world with a modern tool.” That faintly ashamed
look. “Guess I messed up tonight.”

“Antimatter,
uh-huh.” Ruby is nonplussed. But he’s so earnest. So convincing! An awful
thought strikes her: is Chi insane? Still, she saw him carve concrete with her
own eyes. Suddenly her head is spinning. “The royal
we
again. Who’s
we?
”

“He
said he’s from the future,” Starbright chimes in, looking Chi up and down. “Or
Mars. I can’t tell which.”