Summer of Love, a Time Travel (20 page)

“Guess
I told everyone.” He brushes back his beautiful red hair and blushes. Charming,
to see this young dude blush, his pale face as fine and chiseled as a movie actor’s.
“They were too drunk and stoned to take me seriously, though, weren’t they?”
His contrite look competes with a smirk of triumph. Won that competition,
brother.

“But
I’m not drunk or stoned,” Ruby says. “And I recall you used a weird word for
what you are.”

“I’m
a tachyporter. I’m on a t-port, and now I’ve blown the hell out of Tenet Five.
I’m not supposed to reveal I’m a t-porter.” As if that explains everything. He
paces around the room. “Ah, the Summer of Love. It’s getting to me, you know?
I’m not allowed to get involved. But I am involved. Only ten days, and I am
involved. Sometimes I give my wages to a sad little runaway.” He faces them. “Well.
I’m not authorized to reveal my identity, but now you know, and it’s all true. My
Now is in your future.”

These
are strange and wondrous days. These are also paranoid days when your lover
turns out to be a dealer and his best friend turns out to be a narc and the
best friend’s lady turns state’s evidence, and you wind up in the slam.

“You’ve
got a more interesting rap than the average head,” Ruby says. “But you can’t
fool me. My ma weaned me on Superhero comics and
Lord of the Rings.”

“I’m
not making this up,” Chi says.

“Uh-huh.
You say you’re from our future. What you mean is, you’re just a time traveler.
Right, am I right?”

“I’m
not
just
a time traveler,” he says, annoyed. “I’m a t-porter. Developing
tachyportation cost us a fortune. And it isn’t exactly
traveling
, like
going from one place to another. All of spacetime is One Day. With our
superluminal application, I
transmit
from my Now to your Now. A When to
a When.”

Chi
glances around the room with such tangible anxiety that alarm needles up Ruby’s
spine. She glances around, too.

“The
good news is everything hasn’t disappeared just because I’ve told you this,”
Chi says, his voice thick with relief.

Starbright’s
jaw just about reaches her collarbones.

“Cool,”
Ruby says. Teach these kids a thing or two. “So. Whereabouts in the future are
you from, sonny?”

“Oh,
I’m from here. San Francisco.” He still looks worried, like she might find out
something she isn’t supposed to know. “Sausalito, actually.”

“Then
we’re next-door neighbors,” Ruby says. “I grew up in Marin City.”

“Sausalito,
2467, Ruby. The When-to-When is five centuries, one hundred twenty-five days,
fifty-three minutes, thirty-nine seconds, and three hundred milliseconds, minus
one picosecond, which accounts for superluminal drift.”

“Minus
one picosecond,” Ruby says. “Is that B.C. or A.D. or A.C. or D.C.?”

“You
don’t believe me?” Chi says, widening his eyes.

“Sonny,
we may be psychedelicized in the Haight-Ashbury, but we’re also
science-fictionalized. Ken Kesey claims his group-mind experience is
Childhood’s
End.
Timothy Leary believes we’re mutating our genes into starseeds.
There’s a house in the Haight called The Shire. This has all happened since
1962. Our lives have become a fantasy, and fantasy is becoming life.” She
laughs, a little ruefully. “These are strange and wondrous days.”

“Yeah,”
Starbright says. “Look at the guy with the eyes. He said he was from Mars,
too.”

“I
never
said
I was from Mars,” Chi says.

“So
where’s your time machine?” Starbright demands. “Like in
The Time Machine.
You can’t fool me, either. I saw the movie with Penny Lane when we were kids.
And, oh, the time machine was the prettiest thing, like a gold and leather
sleigh with a stick shift and everything.” She blushes. “I haven’t learned how
to drive a stick shift.”

“Um,”
Chi says, “I haven’t got a time machine.”

Ruby
says, “Why am I not surprised.”

“The
tachyonic shuttle doesn’t work that way,” he says hastily. “The shuttle exists
only in my Now, not in yours. We install the shuttle at a site that’s been
stable for a long time.”

“And
then what happens?” Ruby says with a wink at Starbright, playing along.

“I
step through the shuttle and arrive in your Now. On a certain day in your Now,
I’ll step back and arrive in my Now. When the shuttle engages this spacetime, I’ll
transmit. It’s not easy—it’s hellish, actually--but now that I’ve done it once,
I’m confident I can do it again.” He grimaces. “Fairly confident.”

“Uh-huh.”
An eerie feeling creeps over Ruby as she sits in the half-lit room, jiving with
this strange young beautiful man. But she doesn’t want to surrender to the
feeling, doesn’t want to let her mind spin off in some half-comprehended
revelation. She’s got work to do! She’s got a pregnant runaway under her roof,
plus a. . . .t-porter? She doesn’t want her whole life changed just this
minute. “Why aren’t you supposed to reveal your identity? I mean, aside from
getting your butt thrown in the laughing academy?”

“Laughing
academy?”

“That’s
tired old Beat talk for the nuthouse.” When he still furrows his brow, she
adds, “A lunatic asylum.”

“Ah.”
Chi nods as if he’s just learned something he’s always wanted to learn. “I’m
not supposed to reveal my identity because the Tenets of the Grandmother
Principle all turn around the mandate of nonintervention to preserve the
timeline and conserve spacetime.”

“Oh!
Well, of course. Silly me,” Ruby says.

Starbright
speaks up in a trembling voice. “What is this Grandmother Principle?”

“That’s
the fundamental principle of t-porting,” Chi says. “Under Tenet One, for
example, you can’t murder your own grandmother. If you could, you wouldn’t exist
in the first place to go do the deed.”

“I
can dig it,” Ruby says. “If you allowed for that kind of anarchy, reality would
be mighty strange. The world as we know it could all disappear. Right, am I
right?”    

Chi
looks around the room with that sharp apprehension.

Ruby’s
skin crawls.

“But
why would anyone go and murder her granma?” Starbright says.

Ruby
turns to find the kid is crying.

“Well,
you wouldn’t,” Chi tells her gently. “It’s just a Tenet developed for t-port
projects, that’s all. A thought experiment, you see? It’s just a way of
thinking.”

“I
think it’s a
terrible
way of thinking,” Starbright sniffs. “My granma was
the only one who ever loved me. I could
never
go and kill my granma.
Never.
Not for
anything.
”

“The
kid’s got a point,” Ruby says. “The way you think about things shapes the way
your reality is. All this talk about killing someone’s grandmother. It’s not
very cool, man from Mars.”

Chi
stares at her and Starbright, aghast. “I don’t want to kill anyone! I don’t
want to hurt a flea,” he says, scratching his ankle.

Uh-huh.
And they all say goodnight.

The
Haight-Ashbury is mobbed with Navajo chiefs, Merlin’s magicians, Egyptian pharaohs,
guys with four eyes, men from Mars.

And
time travelers. The Summer of Love has got plenty of time travelers.

July
9, 1967

A

Dog Day

7

There is a Mountain

Life
is sacred; Susan’s life is sacred. Children are the godhead manifest; she is
the godhead manifest. Freedom means nothing left to lose? At fourteen, she’s
got plenty to lose, and she’s got to get free.

That
doesn’t mean—no thanks to Ruby--she feels good about it.

“I’m
eighteen,” Susan lies to the law clerk in the waiting room outside the hip
lawyer’s office. The lie comes no easier. The lie has not helped Susan one bit.
She’s not even sure why she keeps telling it, except that she scored a fake ID
saying she’s eighteen, though the photo doesn’t look much like her. She’s so
paranoid about coming to the hip lawyer’s office--despite the fact he is, by
definition, cool--she doesn’t want to show the fake ID to the law clerk. He
doesn’t ask to see it.

The
law clerk, a rabbinical guy with a ragged beard and sleepy eyes, peers at her
through steel-rim spectacles. He aims a long-suffering look at Ruby.

Ruby
shrugs and stares out the window at the fog-shrouded morning. Her face is set
in stone. She crosses her arms over her chest, taps her toe.

Next
to NAME, the law clerk scribbles, “Starbrite.” Next to AGE, he scribbles,
“TEEN.” “Even if that’s so,” he says, shifting the clipboard to his other knee,
“and frankly, I find that hard to believe, miss, but even if that’s so, you’re
still a minor at eighteen. So even if you meet the other requirements under
Section 25951, it’s likely you’ll need your parents’ consent to get a legal
abortion.”

At
fourteen, Susan has read Rilke
auf deutsch
and mastered intermediate
algebra. She can identify the bones in the human ear and would have won her
debate against the Vietnam War if the Poli Sci teacher hadn’t been a hawk. So
this scene in the hip lawyer’s office is too weird. This is
her
body.
Doesn’t her body belong to her? If she hasn’t got a right to say what happens
to her body, who does? Isn’t she supposed to be free in the United States of
America? Why does Section 25951 say she’s not free?

“Kid,”
Ruby whispers urgently. “You don’t have to do this. Your folks will help you
out. I’m sure they will.”

“No.”
Susan is
very
sure about that. Mom and Daddy won’t help her out. They
never have.

“You’re
talking about a human life,” Ruby persists.

“Right,”
Susan says.
Her
life.

God,
her head is fuzzy. Her stomach lurches. She recalls the butter-making demonstration
when she was in third grade. The teacher sloshed the milk around inside a milk
churn until greasy gobs floated up. She feels just like that milk churn. She
takes out a Tums and crunches it in her teeth. Every morning she goes through a
whole roll. Sometimes two.

Ruby
agreed to sneak out of the house and take her to the hip lawyer’s office so as
not to disturb Chi, asleep on the living room couch. Ruby is cool. She knows
Susan doesn’t want Chi to know she got knocked up. It’s too embarrassing.

“Have
you gone to Planned Parenthood?” the law clerk asks, cupping his hand over a
yawn.

“Yeah,
they gave me the test.” As if there was any doubt in Susan’s mind.

Three
Gypsy Jokers are whooping it up with the hip lawyer in his office. “So I sez to
him I’ll get mine up, officer, if you get yours up. Haw haw haw.” The trio is
here for legal advice about a midnight bust. Another groovy Saturday night,
apparently. The Gypsy Jokers are accompanied by Dirty David, a member of the
Double Barrel Boogie Band entourage. Dirty David is a small, gaunt man with a
headful of curls he preens obsessively. When Susan first walked in, Dirty David
ignored her as if he’d never seen her before.

Now
Susan catches him giving her the up-and-down--
what’re you doing here?
--written
all over his face.

“What
does Section 25951 say if she claims rape?” Ruby asks the law clerk.

“She’ll
need to swear out an affidavit attesting to the facts of the alleged rape, and
the D.A. um would need to find probable cause that the man she names is the
perpetrator and that a rape occurred. If the D.A. doesn’t find probable cause,
the committee can’t approve the abortion.”

“Wait,
wait,” Ruby says. “You mean she hasn’t pressed criminal charges, but she has to
prove this probable cause business according to a criminal standard in order to
get medical treatment?”

Susan
smiles. She loves seeing Ruby go at it.

The
law clerk is unimpressed. “An unapproved abortion is not medical treatment,
ma’am. An unapproved abortion is a crime in California.”

“Look
here, sonny,” Ruby says. “I revere life. I happen to believe that Starbright
should have the baby, even after what happened to her, and put the child up for
adoption. I also happen to believe that abortion is a moral decision, not a
criminal action.”