Summer of Love, a Time Travel (27 page)

Heart
knocking, she climbs the back stairs, the kid trailing after. But the kitchen
door is locked up tight. They go inside. Nothing amiss. Upstairs on her bed,
the Siamese cats are curled up in a mound of gray and brown fur. The white cats
perch on the windowsill, enjoying the stirring dusk. Ruby rechecks all the
windows and doors, leaves plenty of fresh water and cat kibbles. No Jim Beam,
but she’s got a fifth of Wild Turkey in the pantry.

Her
stomach is rumbling. None of them has had dinner. She packs a picnic basket
with sourdough bread, sharp cheddar, apples, a couple of carob bars. She thinks
again, packs a bottle of Napa burgundy, plus a jar of Salvatore Espresso, the
only instant coffee worthy of human consumption and drinkable black. Paper
cups, paper napkins, plastic utensils, a Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew, and
that should do it. She goes to the half-bath, retrieves blankets and pillows, a
canvas bag. She finds an Irish sweater in the coat closet for her, a
hand-loomed shawl for Starbright.

Ah,
Starbright.

What
a tangled, bittersweet surprise, her sudden feelings toward the kid. What is
this fierce rush of tenderness? What do you do when someone tells you she loves
you and hugs you?

It’s
the Summer of Love. You hug her back.

Starbright
bustles about in the kitchen, packing bedding and clothes in the canvas bag.
Suddenly she notices something. “Ruby, look at this!” She stoops, picks up a scrap
of paper from the floor, pushed under the door apparently, and hands it to her.

A
crude scrawl:

SHUCKING THE
REVOLUTION WE WILL NOT TOLERATE

PEOPLE (HIP OR
STRAIGHT) TRANSFORMING OUR TRIP INTO CASH

BE ADVISED

Ruby
exhales sharply. “Some revolution.”

“You’re
not hurting anyone, Ruby,” Starbright cries. “You’re offering things and ideas
people can’t find anywhere else. The Mystic Eye is wonderful. I
love
the
Mystic Eye. Who would do this?”

“Kid,
there are crazy tribes in the Haight-Ashbury these days. You’ve seen that for yourself.
The Diggers, the dealers, the acid mystics, the cultists, the musicians, the
politicos, the Panthers, the Krishna devotees, the anarchists, the speed
freaks, the hip elite, the hoodies, the bikers, even the flower children.
They’ve all got their own agenda. No wonder the Man can get away with beating
us up on the street. Or maybe this is from the Man. Who knows.”

“Revolution.
That’s the second time I’ve heard that word today.”

“Uh-huh.
You know what we used to say in the old days? We used to say the revolution is
in your mind. First and foremost, above everything else, you’ve got to open
your mind in new ways. The personal revolution, that’s what we called it. And
it had nothing to do with threatening other people or telling them what to do.”

“Are
they trying to scare us?”

“You
scared?”

“Yeah!”

“Then
their love letter worked, didn’t it. Let’s you and me not be scared anymore.
Come on.”

Ruby
carefully relocks the kitchen door, and they climb down the stairs. In the
twilight, Ruby can see that someone has uprooted part of Chi’’s garden, two
rows of his careful plantings ravaged like an open grave. Who would do this? She
recalls the strange intruder in her yard weeks ago. The gray beggar woman? Was
it her, then? Is it her, now?

Ruby
shudders. She closes and locks the gate.

Her
bitter nostalgia about the way things used to be, her paranoia about the Man,
her resentment at being excluded from the Council for a Summer of Love--all of
it, all of it boils up in her like an herbal brew. A strange brew with a sting
of nettle. Boils up and clarifies till she can extract an essence of where she
stands today.

A
New Explanation, yes. There
is
a New Explanation, somewhere. In the
Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love? She never thought so. But these are
strange and wondrous days and they’ve become a catalyst. The New Explanation
still hovers, a half-glimpsed mirage above a street stained with blood.

The
two men wait silently beside the dark garage.

“Where
to, Leo?” Ruby says.

“How
‘bout Morning Star Ranch?” Gorgon says. “I could use some fresh country air. I
know people there. We can hide out for the night.”

“We’re
gone,” Ruby says.

*  
*   *

Gorgon
knocks back two fingers of Wild Turkey before they’ve crossed the Golden Gate Bridge
and slumps in the front seat, snoring. Starbright huddles against Chi in the
back seat. He circles his arm around her shoulders, takes her hand.

Ruby
speeds through the dark, northbound. She knows the way. She drove to Morning
Star Ranch in May to see a sculptor friend who’d retreated there to finish his latest
masterpiece: a man of car-chrome with a red garden hose dangling between his
shiny legs, clutching a woman of hammered steel. The drive takes a good hour.

After
the first volley of Gorgon’s snores, she says, “Tell me true, Chiron Cat’s Eye
in Draco. What were those women? You used another one of your words that
doesn’t quite mean what I think it means.” She shivers. “You called them
demons.
”

Silence,
and the thrumming of the wheels. At last Chi says, “Yes, it’s an acronym. Devolved
Entities Manifested from the Other Now. We call them
demons.
”

“Devolved
entities, uh-huh. You want to tell us about it?”

And
the elegant lad tells his strange tale.

*  
*   *

One
day last spring, Chi says, he and his skipparents were visiting his skipcousin’s
new penthouse condominium at Cloud View Maze. She was throwing a housewarming party.
Cloud View Maze was a self-sufficient mega-complex perched high atop the
Oakland hills--a breathtaking minicity of residences, business and commercial
spaces, swimming pools, tennis courts, clubs, and restaurants with its own
security force, fire department, recycling enforcers, sex police, fishponds,
vegetable gardens, fruit arbors, and a bicycle Path.

Sky-seeding
was kicking in. Atmospheric thickening had abated, allowing the sun’s warming
rays to heat our precious blue planet away from the brink of another ice age. Radiation
levels from the Second Atomic War were finally dropping and the radiation
vaccine had worked. In a grand ceremony, dubbed “Let the Sun Shine In,” people
took their shields down and installed picture windows.

On a
clear day, without the shields, they could see icy peaks of the Sierras from
his skipcousin’s roof deck. And it
was
a clear day. Mega and prime.

Telespace
was up and running. Guests at the party could jack in on his skipcousin’s
workstation if they felt like a recreational link or had business to attend to.
The pro linkers queued up, itching for a hit of telespace. Jack up, link in,
space out. Cool, tool. You could practically hear the hum of vast inner space
teeming with intelligence.

There
hadn’t been much to celebrate in so long. Mars terraformation was on time and
under budget. Reduction of world population statistics were encouraging. T-port
projects were going well at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications.
The LISA techs were enthusiastic. A telespace pundit christened these days the
New Renaissance.

Chi
and his family and friends were celebrating. Everyone was popping neurobics and
drinking aged wine. A feast of fresh food was laid out. Chi’s skipmother had
brought a dozen trout from the family pond. Chi’s skipcousin was showing off
the first harvest from her roof garden. There she was, as proud as a new
skipparent, with her microcorn and cherry tomatoes. And flowers. Everyone there
was a cosmicist. Her orchids sent them into ecstasies. Someone began projecting
holopoetry.

Far below,
people were strolling in and out of the Oak-Fran megalopolis through meadows
planted over ancient traffic corridors and across the Bay Bridge Mall. EM-Trans
trains hummed deep underground. The skyways were thick with jetcopters, air
shuttles, whirligigs. Ferries docked and departed and streamed across the sparkling
blue bay. From his skipcousin’s roofdeck, Chi could see the massive dome over
New Golden Gate Preserve.

Then
two things happened so fast, it seemed as if they happened at the same time:

Telespace
crashed, and

A
cloud blew in from the western horizon.

“A
crash!” someone yelled. “Telespace is down! Everything!”

The
telelinker at the workstation slumped, unconscious. The pro linkers crowded
around.
What?
Telespace is down? Unheard of! So much intelligence was linked
at any moment, a worldwide system failure was a disaster. A catastrophe! Unheard
of!

A freak
accident? Sabotage?

Or a
Prime Probability, collapsing out of the timeline.

With
all the alarm at his skipcousin’s workstation, Chi scarcely noticed the cloud.
At least, he thought it was a cloud. Suddenly a scorching wind blasted his
face. Charcoal plumes billowed up and filled the sky. An acid storm? A meteor
crashing?

Chi
didn’t know
what
to think!

The
wind began to howl. He could see that the cloud wasn’t a rain cloud at all, but
smoke. A thunderhead of thick, black smoke swirling with ashes.

Was
the sky on fire?

The
sun was a bloodred disc behind the burning cloud. Chi heard a sound in the
wind, the scrabbling, scratching noise of a billion bits of rubble blasting out
of the awful cloud.

Out
of the south, a lightning bolt cut across the sky. Then, like an afterimage,
another bolt cut from the north. Only the bolt was pure black! A jagged ebony
blade slashed heaven’s dome.

The
sky split open.

And
Chi saw the Other Now. He saw his city, and he saw his people--in another
universe.

The
megalopolis crouched beneath a yellow sky, swirling with smoke and ashes. The
city lay in ruins, with no sign of repair. Gouts of flame flared here and
there. Bridges hung slack, decks swaybacked and cracked. The bay was dead and
still, gleaming like a fly’s wing with poisonous sludge. A firestorm raged on
the very hills Chi was perched upon. A glacier had carved away huge chunks of
the waterfront, and sea water lapped against the curbs of downtown streets.
Masses of tiny vehicles slid through the water, wheels spraying toxic foam onto
the sidewalks.

Flocks
of dead birds lay decaying in the brown weeds of parks and malls. Fish rotted
amid raw sewage and tangles of plastic on the beaches. No dome protected what
would have been New Golden Gate Preserve. Where the preserve should have stood
was a naked salt plain, a radiation desert punctuated by twisted tree trunks.
The Portals of the Past stood like gaping teeth in the carcass of wasted land.

And
people. People swarmed everywhere. People stacked into crumbling buildings,
people huddled in sickness and squalor, people lying before flashing holoids in
a mass stupor. Devolts ran wild through the streets. Along a military
perimeter, tanks rolled up before a horde of ragtag troops and disgorged globes
of Melt. Inside the barbed-wire of a prison, people writhed, impaled on posts.
Bound and hooded prisoners were brought to gallows and summarily hanged.

The
great medcenters slid people into bioscan tubes. But instead of performing
medical treatment, scalpels slit open brains, eyes, stomachs. Robotic fingers
pulled the incisions wide open and inserted probes, secreted chemicals, pressed
sparking wires into human flesh.

The
holoids the people lay before flashed images of the devolts, the tanks and the troops,
the impaled and the hanged, the vivisected. Cunning images so real, the
watchers couldn’t tell the difference between what was artificial and the reality
howling at their doorstep. And in their confusion and their transfixion, the people
could not rise.

“I
saw ruin and waste and violence. Chaos and misery worse than all the suffering
humanity has endured in throughout history,” Chi says. “Then the sky closed.
And the Vision was gone.”

They
speed up the northbound highway in silence.

“But,”
Ruby says, “it was just a vision?”

“No,”
Chi says. “It was real.”

Telespace
got up and running in sixty seconds. The telelinker came to, dizzy and sick.
She lost the data she’d been working on, along with her lunch, but her telelink
remained intact. The sheer size and scale of data lost in that sixty seconds
was unknown.

The
hole in the sky collapsed, leaving charred debris and radioactive waste
kilometers wide. The debris floated for weeks over the site where the hole was
observed. They sent out jetcopters with nets to retrieve the waste. Tricky
stuff. They found antimatter embedded in the scar across the sky.

“The
Vision of the Other Now corresponded with the Crash, you see,” Chi says, his
voice thick with dread. “Corresponded with the most massive disruption of data
ever observed.  And I witnessed it with my own eyes.”

The
Archivists set to work, attempting to restore those missing sixty seconds. The
Chief Archivist ordered a complete review, especially of the Dim Spots her
ferrets were already studying as potential t-port sites.