Summer of Love, a Time Travel (24 page)

But
where did the Axis spend the summer? The Archives contained no clue. No
incidents of note took place in Shaker Heights that summer. The Axis made no
mark. Minors didn’t carry scannable IDs, have retinal links to a family database,
get fitted with telelinks. Minors her age didn’t carry a driver’s license since
they weren’t allowed to drive until the age of sixteen. Minors didn’t possess
their own credits in 1967. The Axis didn’t acquire her own Visa card until 1978.

When
it comes to the Axis, the Summer of Love is a classic Dim Spot. Chi sighs. How
Hot? Impossible to say. When the Archivists finally targeted her, too much data
had disappeared.

After
all the frustration, Chi
has
discovered one prime piece of evidence that
compels him to watch and protect Starbright, whoever she turns out to be. He
got an excellent scan as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the Mystic Eye.
The one time he got close enough to press the scanner against Starbright’s
chest, he obtained a full probe. She’s got a sound heart, good lungs, other
functions fine. And that distinctive double blip echoing out of her womb.
Starbright is pregnant.

When
Chi analyzed the results later that night, he almost shouted for joy. Yes!

For
if spacetime is to be preserved, the timeline to be conserved, and the future
survives the Summer of Love, the Axis will be pregnant when she registers for
the ninth grade. Her parents will be compelled to submit this fact to the
school administration. In the spring of 1968, the Axis will deliver a healthy,
six-pound, five-ounce, brown-eyed daughter. The Axis will name her Jessica.

If
Starbright is the Axis, then Starbright must be well and truly pregnant when
Chi transmits from September 4, 1967 to September 4, 2467.

And
she is, Chi rejoices. She is.

*  
*   *

Chi
clatters back down the stairs to the garden, seizes the shovel, and thrusts the
blade in the rocky soil. Physical toil works off some of his frustration. Cabbages
go here, carrots there, lettuce and onions in alternate rows. Chi has always
found gardening a fine meditation, though he’s only worked his family’s gardens
and orchards beneath their private dome. Not under the open sky. Not like this.
It’s taken some getting used to.

A
pair of butterflies called painted ladies flutter around a purple thistle. These
people consider thistles weeds but, in his Now, thistles are prized medicinal plants.

“You’re
not cultivating the yard?” he chastised Ruby.

“Don’t
get back-to-the-land with me, sonny,” Ruby huffed. “I’m running my store. I
haven’t got time.”

“What
a resource,” he persisted. “What a waste.”

When
he woke the next morning, Chi found a long-handled shovel, a bag of live earth,
and seed packets on the floor beside the couch. Ruby has all sorts of ways of
expressing herself.

Now
he flings away rocky soil. Cucumbers will work, tomatoes, too. He’s not sure what
trouble Ruby will have with slugs and rabbits, but she won’t have to worry
about deer in the middle of San Francisco, 1967. Deer wandered here a century
ago, and deer will wander here centuries from now, but not this summer. In two
decades, what people believed would become the greenhouse age will begin with a
scorching summer. But in three decades, the world will experience the coldest
weather in seventy-five years. The technopolistic plutocracy will manipulate the
law based on faulty science and outright fraud. Golden Gate Park will wither in
a prolonged killing cold spell. The Haight-Ashbury and the Avenues will burn to
the ground in the catastrophic fire of 2129 because water mains fail, badly
outdated after the bankrupt government can’t finance retrofitting. In three centuries,
one of the first cosmicist domes will be erected over this entire area. Cosmicists
will privately fund the dome and refuse public admission to New Golden Gate
Preserve.

One
day, after the brown ages have passed, trees will bud in this yard again.
Flowers will bloom and birds will cheer. Raccoons and rabbits will wander
fearlessly because no one except cosmicist caretakers will be allowed inside
the dome. Painted ladies will flutter around purple thistles. White-tailed deer
will nibble at grass along the curbs of a long-vanished Haight Street and
around the pillars of the Portals of the Past.

That’s
when deer will come to this yard again. Only then.

Chi
leans on the shovel, his head spinning.

How
does he know all this? After a frustrating week of testing the contraband
holoids, Chi finally found another crystal sliver he could access. Bright red alphanumerics
popped into the lavender field:

“Date:
07-07-1967. You may insert Disc 2 now.”

“Go,
K-T,” Chi said and, in the dead of night while everyone slept, he boggled his
mind over the future of this neighborhood. At midnight, in the sidebar, the alphanumerics
flashed again:

“Date:
07-08-1967. You may insert Disc 3 now.”

He got
a good look at history, and not the usual drill. Oh, every child knew the world’s
history for the past two and half millennia. Prehistory, the ancient
civilizations, the rise of Christianity, European exploration, and so on. The
rise of the United States of America, the military-industrial complex. The precipitous
rise of the technopolistic plutocracy. The emergence of devolts—an entire
mutant population descended from drug addicts. The First Atomic War, the Second
Atomic War. The brown ages, the world population crisis. A telelinker could
jack into telespace and crunch humanity’s history in thirty minutes.

But
Chi’s never seen the files on Discs 2 and 3. He’s never witnessed the far
changes that flow from the Haight-Ashbury in such intimate detail. He’s never
seen the human faces.

Why
did
Chi’s skipmother slip him the contraband discs?

At
first Chi was grateful, intrigued. But his gratitude turned sour when he
realized she’d prioritized and date-coded the holoids, dribbling access to him
like a game of hide-and-seek. What does his skipmother know? What secret is she
keeping from everyone? Including him? Especially him?

Chi’s
sourness turned to anger after he viewed Discs 2 and 3. The scheming cosmicist.
“Consider impact before you consider benefit, my son,” she said. The cosmicist
mandate of nonintervention resonates with new meaning. After viewing the
holoids, Chi is struck by powerful feelings: rage, despair, sorrow. No one ever
showed him their faces.

And
loneliness. How he longs to share his awful knowledge with someone. He can’t
even talk to K-T.

Who’s
the ghost? These people who will die centuries before he was born? Or him?

He
jabs at the rocky soil with the shovel. He’s got one consolation, anyway. Two
consolations. Sort of.

First,
spacetime didn’t blow up in his face after he violated several Tenets of the Grandmother
Principle. The LISA techs never did say, exactly, what happened when you
violated a Tenet.

And
second, Ruby and Starbright don’t believe him. Strangely, their disbelief
bothers the hell out of him. It offends his pride, challenges his self-worth.
Back off, Chi. Don’t be an idiot like he was, showing off his maser. But there
it is and won’t go away. He resents them for not believing him.

“Say,
brother.” The voice intrudes, jolting Chi just as he’s tamping down a seed in a
fresh patch of live earth. “Workin’ on Ruby’s farm?”

Chi
knows that hateful voice only too well. He stands and blots his sweaty forehead
on the back of his forearm. “What do you want, Leo?”

“I
want to destroy this inhuman, parasitical capitalist system, brother.”

Leo
Gorgon leans up against the fence, grinning. He watches Chi with interest. As
usual, Gorgon’s interest is calculating and sly. Chi has watched Gorgon with
interest, too. Gorgon is one of those people during the Summer of Love who is
more alert, intelligent, and streetwise—not to mention fifteen years older—than
the kids mobbing the Haight-Ashbury. He and his posse are stage-trained actors.
He performs decent sleight-of-hand. Gorgon turns his edge to his advantage,
turns it like you sharpen a blade.

Gorgon
has his rap. The ideology of failure, he calls it. Money is dead. It’s free
because it’s yours. Chi has seen destitute teenage runaways gathering around
Gorgon, listening raptly to his rap.

“So,”
Gorgon says, “workin’ for the bitch-goddess of love?”

“Working
for the joy of it.”

“She
payin’ ya?”

“Work
is its own reward. To give is best.”

Gorgon
laughs. “You’re a Digger, brother.”

“I’d
like to be.”

“At
least till you tire of the adventure of poverty an’ run back home to your rich
daddy’s house, eh?”

Chi
thrusts the shovel.

“Where’s
Miss Ruby?”

“Upstairs,
watching
Star Trek
with Starbright.”

“Is
she, now.” Gorgon taps out a cigarette, plays it through his fingers. “Say
listen, Bub.”

“My
name is Chiron, Leo.” Chi leans on the shovel.

“Yeah.
‘To give is best,’ Bub. Why, I call that a moral imperative. Y’know, Bub, I got
me a truck out front, an’ she’s got a flat tire.” He glances up at the deck.
He’s subtle, but not subtle enough. “I happen to know Miss Ruby has got herself
a jack in that storeroom in her garage. Yeah. You wanna go fetch it for me,
Bub?”

Chi
flings down the shovel, strolls over to the fence. He pointedly follows
Gorgon’s glance up to the deck and the unlocked kitchen door. An easy mark.
From upstairs with the TV on, Ruby would never hear someone letting himself in.
She would never hear someone rummaging through her apartment for things to
knickknack.

“Why
don’t you ring the front bell and ask her if you can borrow it?”

Gorgon
gets it. He laughs and slaps his knee. “I’m shuckin’ you, man. Just shuckin’
you. Ain’t no flat tire. Oh, but I got me a truck out front. She’s parked at
the curb, just waitin’ for a strappin’ young dude like you to take her out for
a spin. Pick up some chick, do your thing. Why should you work on this
beautiful day?”

“Someone’s
got to work.”

“Nah.
No, you don’t, brother.”

“If
I don’t,” Chi says, “who will?”

“Man,
this is the Great Society,” Gorgon says. “This society is rollin’ in the dough.
It’s a Society of Surplus. If you don’t want to work, you shouldn’t have to.
Especially not for a capitalist like Ruby Maverick. Whaddaya say?”

He
dangles the ignition key.

Chi
takes the key. “I say the Society of Surplus is a shuck. A shuck now, and a
shuck later.”

“What
tha’ hell?”

“You’ll
watch the Society of Surplus vanish before your very eyes.” Chi palms the key,
plucks Gorgon’s unlit cigarette from his lip, and palms that, too. “In three
decades, people will wonder how anyone could have ever talked about a Society of
Surplus. And the worst of it is, the rich will get
much
richer, the poor
much
poorer. Oh, in centuries society will have plenty again. In
centuries, people who call themselves cosmicists because they believe in the
Cosmic Mind will finally be wise enough to know that a surplus is not a
surplus, but a hard-earned gift not to be squandered.”

Gorgon
turns scarlet. “Gimme my key, you lyin’ punk.”

Chi
produces the key from Gorgon’s left ear, the cigarette from his right.

“Asshole!”
Gorgon stomps down the driveway to his truck.

Chi
picks up the shovel again, thrusts the blade.
Clang.
He unearths a rock
the size of his boot. He’s not working for free. He’s receiving Ruby’s charity,
good will, and the benefits of her bounty from her hard work.

No,
Chi never thought much of the Free-Thieves. He doesn’t think much of Leo
Gorgon. And the t-port has been no adventure in poverty, but a harrowing
nightmare from which he cannot wake.

Yes,
Chi is the heir to a cosmicist dynasty and a domed estate in Sausalito. He has
never been poor. And he knows from the Archives that Leo Gorgon was, and is,
and will be. In seven years, Gorgon will die in a New York City subway from a
heroin overdose.

And
there is nothing Chi can do.

The
painted ladies rise from the thistle and flutter away.

*  
*   *

Chi
lets himself in the kitchen, locks the door behind him, and stalks into the
living room. Leo Gorgon always sets his teeth on edge. He still hears them
murmuring upstairs. The third floor is their domain, their little queendom. He
starts to climb the stairs, then stops. He hears them laughing. Throwing
things? Then murmurs as thick as jasmine incense.

Women.
What are they all about?

Strategy,
Chi. He needs a better strategy.

He
wishes he could take Starbright away and lock her up somewhere. Someplace safe.
A cabin in Mendocino, say. Lock her up for two months and escort her to the
airport on September 4. That would keep her out of trouble and protect her and
her fetus from disease, the strange drugs and stranger people lurking around
the Haight-Ashbury. Protect her and her fetus from demons.