Summer of Love, a Time Travel (32 page)

Damn!
Those dealers again! Chi recalls the incident in front of the Fillmore. What
did they say to her? Something about dragon’s blood? Seven grand for rat poison?
He thought it was a case of mistaken identity. Why
are
they after her?

The
seat is a sheath of vinyl barely covering wire springs. The bus has no brain. A
tough old guy with Aztec cheekbones and a toothpick tucked in his lip drives
the vehicle by hand, shifting a stick through fretful gears. Chi feels as if
his guts are bouncing up his throat. Man!

Starbright
snuggles against him like a needy child. Then, rebellious, she struggles free
of his unexpected embrace, stands, and forces him to move over so she can take
the window seat. She always insists on taking the window seat, and he always
lets her have it, even though he wouldn’t mind sitting next to the window
himself and getting a good look at this Now. To give is best, he reminds
himself. How easy to believe in cosmicist platitudes when everyone else around
you does, too.

She
peers back down the road with such alarm that he leans over her and looks, too.

Stovepipe
and the Lizard are nowhere in sight. Lost them. Who made her? Do what?

She
takes a crumpled Kleenex from her purse, dabs the spittle off her jacket, drops
the Kleenex on the floor. Then she presses her cheek against the smeary window,
in one of her sulky moods.

He
lays a hand on her shoulder, trying to pull her back. She presses harder, like
a cat moving in the opposite direction of where you want her to go.

“Don’t
do that, Starbright,” he scolds. For a twentieth-century person with basic
scientific knowledge at her disposal, she cultivates a pathetic indifference toward
the elementary rules of cleanliness. Why doesn’t she know better? It bothers
the hell out of him.

“Don’t
do what?” she demands. “You’re not my daddy, you know.”

Exasperated,
he whips out his scope. “See for yourself.” He adjusts the focus—a mere 10x
will show enough buggy scum to turn anyone’s stomach—and hands the scope to her.

She
examines it curiously, sniffs the metal, and peeks through the wrong end,
finally turning the lens toward the window glass. Her open mouth and shocked
silence are good enough for him.

“Gross,
huh?” he says, using her favorite word. “That window is filthy with bacteria.
It can make you sick.”

“
You’re
sick,” she mumbles and coughs dramatically, but he knows she’s faking. She
hands the scope back, surreptitiously brushing her cheek with the back of her
hand.

He
starts to pull out a wipe for her, then stops. That would be a violation of
Tenet Seven of the Grandmother Principle—sharing a modern technology with
someone in the past. Since he decided he better get closer to the girl, he
finds himself bumping up against the Tenets at every turn. The more deeply he
gets involved, the more difficult observing the mandate of nonintervention
becomes. It angers him. How easy to spout Tenets of the Grandmother Principle
in the comfortable boardroom of the Luxon Institute for Superluminal
Applications.

Between
the HIP Switchboard notice to Susan Bell and other runaways in the
Barb
and Starbright’s growing resemblance to the girl in the CBS News holoid, the
probabilities that she is truly the Axis have skyrocketed. They must be better
than ninety percent. Sometimes he still walks his loop through the Haight-Ashbury.
Sometimes he tries to pick up more of her fingerprints with the scanner.
Mostly, though, he stays close to her.

Because
she’s the target of a demon. That alone ought to persuade him she’s the one
capable of collapsing a Prime Probability out of the timeline except for one other
awful fact--Ruby A. Maverick is targeted by a demon, too.

His
skipfather’s theory is not only correct, but more correct than he bargained for.
Do other people for whom the data are disappearing in this Hot Dim Spot have demonic
doubles in the Other Now? Who else? They say a million people will pass through
the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Are demons targeting other people,
too?

Well.
He can’t guard Starbright and Ruby both. He consulted K-T. The knuckletop
calculated that Ruby’s ability to survive is significantly greater than the
girl’s. Besides, the Axis—the one whom the Archivists first identified as
capable of collapsing the timeline—is a longhaired girl. Starbright, it is.

He’s
gone everywhere with her. He took her back to the Fillmore and to the Avalon
Ballroom, too. They go to concerts: the Butterfield Blues Band, Country Joe and
the Fish, the Yardbirds. The music is deafening. He likes to stand at the foot
of the stage, tapping his toe, while Starbright happily dances by herself. Her
dancing is dramatic, all gesticulating arms, undulating hips, bobbing head. He
can just see Bella Venus’s eyes widen.
You
went to the Fillmore and the
Avalon Ballroom? It’s like saying you attended the first Surrealists’ Ball in
Paris, 1925.

Ruby
calls the knuckletop his magic ring but, to Chi,
this
is magic. Data
that disappeared exist again! Because
he
is here to observe, remember,
enter names and faces and events in the Archives again. A shiver needled up his
spine.
He
is preserving reality!

The
SOL Project—never less than vital—takes on whole new levels of meaning.
Consider
impact before you consider benefit, my son,
his skipmother told him. What
is his impact? He makes an impact merely by
being
here. His impact
is.

For
instance:

Two
days ago he took Starbright downtown to the “Joint Show,” an opening for
psychedelic poster artists at the Moore Gallery. Everyone who was anyone was
there: Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin. Pacific Heights
socialites showed up in their diamonds and paisley satin bellbottoms.
Starbright showed up with her drawing pad filled with pastel sketches. She told
Chi she wanted to show her work to Rick Griffin, her favorite artist, and ask
if he had any pointers. But she couldn’t get even close. A photographer stepped
up just was she was opening her drawing pad and said, “Clear the chicks out of
here.” He commenced snapping photos of the men.

She
cried on the way back to Clayton Street.

Chi
hadn’t been happy about it, either. “Did you see any women artists at that
show? How about women journalists writing for the
Barb
or the
Oracle?
Any women shop owners besides Ruby? Have you noticed how special she is? How
the other hip merchants are always putting her down, even though she’s got the
most successful shop on the block? What about women lawyers or women doctors?
Where are the women political leaders? You know, the hip rhetoric talks all
about equality of the brothers, but I don’t see much equality for the sisters.
Oh, I see women’s pretty bodies and pretty faces. I see hipsters and hoodies
and bikers hassling you and Cyn. But I don’t see women’s minds. I don’t see
women’s works.”

Was
he violating Tenet Three, which prohibits a t-porter from affecting any person
in the past except as authorized by the project directors? He’s supposed to
protect her, not raise her consciousness. At the time, though, he didn’t give a
damn about Tenet Three.

“But
you can change all that, Starbright,” he told her. “It’s going to take someone
like you.”

He
didn’t know if he’d comforted her or not, but she stopped crying and brooded
the rest of the way home.

Now
they ride the bus to the end of the line, leaving Stovepipe and the Lizard far
behind. At least for now. The sun burns off the morning fog and, with the
sunlight, she’s suddenly in a better mood.

“Penny
Lane, Chi! I found her! I finally found her!”

He
can’t help but smile. As much as she annoys him at times, she surprises him,
too. Starbright has her charms. Look at how she makes him smile. How long has
it been since he’s smiled after t-porting to this Now?

“Is
Penny Lane from Ohio, too?” he asks casually.

She
frowns and ignores his question. Not a good move, but always worth a try even
if it is a sticking point between them. She is
Starbright.
She is
Here.
She is
Now.
Why does he need to know anything more? If she’s surprised
by his tricky questions, she never once slips up. She allows no chance remark
to betray her.

There
is, of course, a probability that her frown means Starbright isn’t the Axis,
after all. Chi doesn’t want to think about that.

“She’s
balling Stan the Man, don’t you think?” she rattles on. “Doesn’t it seem like
it? I’m not jealous or anything, but I don’t like that. Penny Lane is smart,
but she might not know about him, what he’s really like.
I
didn’t know
what he was really like. Do you think I should tell her? I feel weird about it,
but I love her. I don’t want to see her get hurt.”

Chi
shrugs. He can’t think about Penny Lane. “Starbright, how do those dealers know
you?”

She
sighs. “Stan made me deliver a shipment of acid. Well, he said it was acid.
Those dealers, they were the connection. They didn’t even know who he was. God,
I was really stupid.” Her face falls.

“You
weren’t stupid. He manipulated you.”

“He
did! He really did! Plus, he stole a hundred dollars from me to make the deal.”
She looks away. “I mean, I lent it to him. He’s supposed to pay me back.” Her
lip trembles.

Guilt
needles him. Is
he
manipulating Starbright, too? She’s tough about some
things, but otherwise she’s so open, so eager to please. What a gap between a teenage
girl and a twenty-one-year-old man. Yet Chi and his peers consider themselves
infants at twenty-one. They’ve got a hundred years ahead of them, maybe more.
They try not to get too old too fast. Yet as fast as this girl wants to grow
up, she’s still so young and vulnerable.

He
takes the Communication Company mimeograph from his jacket pocket and reads:

The
riot may last as long as a week. Your problems during this state of war in the
streets include not getting killed or stomped, having enough food, getting
somewhere else alive if your house burns down, and not getting arrested by the
pigs.

This
riot may be a rumor, but the riots in Detroit are front-page news.

Chi
doesn’t like it. Black hoodies assaulting defenseless little Cyn? Big-time
dealers who believe Starbright is part of a burn? And a race riot in the
Haight-Ashbury? Violence is contrary to everything hip people like Ruby believe
in.

He
doesn’t need to calculate those probabilities.

“Let’s
not go back to the Scene if those dealers are hanging around the Haight today,”
he says. “Okay?”

“Okay!”

Chi
takes Starbright’s hand, and they catch the next bus across the Golden Gate Bridge
to Sausalito.

*  
*   *

The
Sausalito shoreline astonishes Chi. Bridgeway is a tiny overland avenue with
ground traffic, not the gondola-filled canal protected by a breakwall on one
side, luxury piers and clubs and casinos on the other. Blue–gray water laps low
on chaotic chunks of slate. Greenish-red rock crabs crawl along the waterfront
as thickly as the tourists. The wind is sweet and salty. The sky, azure. No domes
dot the hillside.

He
and Starbright sit together on a flat gray boulder at the waterfront and gaze
at the city skyline across the Bay.

He
searches the hills behind him, sees only a few cottages, pink and blue and
yellow. The hillside high above Bridgeway where the domes of his family’s
estate will stand one day is a patch of windswept sage. Victorian mansions once
stood on these hills at the turn of the twentieth century. Domed estates will
stand here centuries later. But in 1967, Sausalito is like a young girl with
flowers in her hair.

He
catches her studying him. “I’ve never known anyone named Chiron Cat’s Eye in
Draco,” she says, sipping her paper cup of Coke. “Is that your street name or
do you have a real name?”

He
laughs at her sly mockery of the questions he’s always asking her. “That’s my
real name.”

“Does
it mean something?”

“It
does. Chiron is a huge asteroid orbiting between Saturn and Uranus way, way out
there. May be a terraforming project some century. The asteroid is named for a
centaur, a half-man, half-horse, in ancient Greek myths. Chiron the centaur was
a teacher, and his symbol was a key.”

“A
key?” She eyes him suspiciously.

He
thinks over his sixties slang for a minute. “Not a kilo of grass. Like this.”
He takes out his house key to 555 Clayton and scratches a line on the boulder.

“Oh,
that
kind of key.” She takes out her house key, too, and scratches one
of her strange eyes with a star for a pupil. “Hey, let me borrow your maser.”

“Nope.”

“Please?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Bet
I can carve with it. Please, please, please?”

“Can’t
do it, Starbright. It’s against the Tenets.”

“You
and your Tenets. I saw you carve a heart in the sidewalk in front of everybody.
Let me carve this rock. Only you and I will see.”