Summer of Love, a Time Travel (33 page)

“I
can’t let you touch my tool.”

“Your
tool,” she teases.
“
Fine. You hold it, and I’ll guide your hand.”

He
cannot believe he’s doing this, but he takes out the maser. She places her hand
over his and, after a few experimental doodles, like a dancer leading the
couple in a waltz, she draws:

“Wow!”
she says when they’re done.  “You really
can
carve with this thing!”

“Put
your hand on mine,” he says, not to be outdone. She does. Now he leads. Next to
her flower, he draws:

She
shrieks with laughter. A fellow on a sailboat anchored offshore looks up from
swabbing his deck. Chi pockets the maser.

“You
make me crazy, Starbright. That’s a serious Tenet Seven violation.”

“Oh,
so what.”

“So
what?
What if I disappeared and your hair turned green after that little stunt? Hmm?”

“Is
reality that easy to change just ‘cause we carved some silly pictures on a
rock?”

In
her uncanny naïve way, she’s hit upon one of the Big Questions, like a child
asking what happens when we die. He has no answer. The LISA techs have no
answer. “Sometimes probabilities collapse into the timeline,” he says
unhappily. “Sometimes they don’t.”

She
nods, obviously skeptical, and tips her cup, swallowing a mouthful of ice
cubes. “You’re always asking me questions. What about you, Chi? Who are you,
really?”

He
shrugs. Damn the Summer of Love Project. He didn’t ask for this.

“See,
you don’t want to tell, either,” she teases some more.

For
a moment, he shakes with rage. For a moment, he wants to let her have it.
Berate her about what her people and the people after her will do to the Earth,
do to the future.

No,
Chi, he tells himself. Don’t rage at Starbright. Not her.

She
crunches her ice cubes, watching him with open curiosity. He cringes. He can
practically see her tooth enamel cracking and chipping. She doesn’t have a
resiliency tweak, let alone mouth swathe.

“I’m
just a student,” he says at last.

“Really?”

“Yep.
Just like you. Well, a little ahead of you. I was about to conduct my graduate
thesis on liver clones, with a pro-link application, before I got drafted for
the SOL Project.”

“The
SOL Project?”

“For
the Summer of Love.”

He
sighs. How distant his Day seems now. Sometimes he wonders if he’ll ever leave
the past. As of today, July 27, 1967, the probability of his successful transmission
to 2467 is no more than sixty-six percent.

“What
does that mean, ‘pro link’? Like golf, or something? You’re Arnold Palmer from
Mars?”

He
laughs. “Pro-link means I’m professionally jacked for telelink. My experiments with
liver clones are conducted in telespace, not on animals.”

“What
is
telespace, anyway?”

Telespace,
he tells her, is a four-dimensional, computer-generated reality, the aggregated
correlation of twenty billion minds worldwide. You enter telespace by jacking
in your telelink—equipment and programming installed in early childhood.

“Installed?”
she says warily.

Oh,
hell. He
resents
that she doesn’t believe him. Here goes, Chi. He sweeps
aside the long red hair implants, takes off the synskin patch at the base of
his skull, pulls down his jacket and shirt, and--in broad daylight--shows her
his neckjack.

“God,”
she whispers, staring at the aperture, the cortical wiring rippling up his
spine into his neck and diving into his skull. He knows what it looks like--a
fine webwork of excellent hardware.

“Go
ahead,” he says. “You can touch me.”

She
does. “What’s it like?”

“Telespace?
It’s prime, the mega thing. A rush of amber burning through your being. You
are
the amber. You’re real, more real than out-of-link could ever be. You can
access huge archetypal memories, if you want to. You can go Macro, and see the
whole universe. Or you can go Micro, and see the whole universe.” He laughs,
giddy. “And it happens so fast, Starbright. Man, you zoom! You work at speeds
and in ways you never thought possible. Jack up, link in, space out!”

She
squints at him, crunching her ice. “Sounds like tune in, turn on, drop out.
Sounds like LSD.”

He’s
taken aback. “That’s ridiculous.”

“No,
it really does.” She flips her hair back, surprised at his annoyance. “I’ve
tripped, you know.”

“Starbright,
I’m talking about telespace!”

“That’s
cool.” She stretches her pretty legs over the boulder, lobs a stone into the
sea. She gives him a sidelong glance. “So what else are you not telling me? Do
you have a girlfriend somewhere in the future?”

A
lass, somewhen. The very thought of Bella Venus disturbs him. “I have a
girlfriend, yes. Bella Venus. For the first star of the evening.”

“The
first star of the evening! That’s me, too! My name means the first star of the
evening.” She wraps a lock of hair around her finger, bites the split ends,
spits them out. “What’s she like?”

“Exquisite,”
is the word that leaps to his lips. A tall lass, nearly as tall as him.
Reed-slender with graceful bones, her jack on the left side of her swan neck,
her skin the color of polished white-gold. They met on a bicycle Path. Both
jacked for pro-link, they put their mega minds and prime hardware to a
delicious use.

Free-link.

“Bella
Venus was the one who discovered we could tinker with our neckjacks and connect
directly. Forget access codes and monitors and surveillance. We discovered the
private side of link.” He chuckles. “Free-link. It’s illegal.”

Starbright
frowns, but Chi’s so caught up in the recollection of free-linking with Bella
Venus that he pays her little attention.

“Can
you get busted doing that?” she says.

“Oh,
yeah. Using unauthorized private telespace outside of the system? That’s
first-degree link abuse.”

“Then
why do you do it?”

“Because
it’s so exquisite! We could have connected with just about anything, but we
went straight to lovemaking. Link to link, Starbright. Mind to mind. Fantasy to
fantasy. I know exactly when and where she wants me to touch her, and she loops
her pleasure directly into mine. We can overlay illusions or, even better,
surrender physical reality to pure simulation. She can become anything for me,
and I for her.”

Starbright
blushes scarlet. “Why would you want to surrender physical reality to simulation?”

“For
the ecstasy!” He smiles at her blush and pats her hand. “Maybe one day you’ll
understand.”

“No,
I understand right now. I’m not a virgin, you know.”

“I
know,” he says. Careful, Chi. Their relationship is fragile enough.

“What
color is her hair?” Starbright persists. As if this is really important to her.

“Um.
She has no hair.”

“
What?
”

“She’s
bald, like me.”

“You’re
not bald!”

“Yes.
Yes, I am.”

In
2446--the year of his birth, Chi says--fifteen million children died in
California alone of the dreadful collection of symptoms known as radiation
syndrome. Not just among devolts, exdomers, day laborers, the poor, and the
middle classes. Upper-class children attending schools and camps under public domes
fell ill, too. And children of the rich who lived under private domes, who had
always been protected, who ate vegetables grown in private gardens and fish
raised in private ponds and drank filtered water?
They
fell ill. No one
could shield their babies from the aftermath of the Atomic Wars. Certain toxins
combined with radiation caused massive cellular breakdown, leading to
inevitable excruciating death.

“The
technopolistic plutocracy ignored the problem for decades,” Chi says. “Everyone
was caught up in the world population crisis. But the plutocracy couldn’t ignore
the problem when
their
children died.”

She
nods, somberly crunching her ice.

“Look,
we were pushing hard for negative growth,” Chi says. “But, even so, the next
generation had to live. I remember how my skipmother monitored everything I ate
or drank or touched or was exposed to. And I remember when the rad-vacc was
announced. I was five years old. Anyone could get the vaccine, free.”

Chi
unbuttons his cuff, rolls up his shirtsleeve. He pulls the leg of his jeans up
over the ankle of his Beatle boot. He shows her his arm, his leg. She runs her
fingertips over his smooth, hairless skin. He remembers Ruby’s astonished look.
Starbright’s face is hard to read.

“This
was the side effect, you see,” he says. “Especially in children under ten. The
dose had to be stronger, more intensive at skin-level. Well, we all went bald,
top to bottom.”

“I’m
sorry,” Starbright whispers.

He
pulls down his jeans leg, rolls down his shirt cuff. “Don’t be. It was a
miracle. The rad-vacc saved billions of lives. And freed us from the domes.”

“Then
what’s this?” She touches his long, red hair.

“Implants.
Oh, we could get implants. Just like you and your friends in the Haight-Ashbury
could get haircuts. We choose not to, just like you choose not to cut your
hair. Me and my friends, we’re the cool tools who go nude. Dig it, Starbright,
bald is beautiful.”

She
stares at him, openmouthed, disbelieving.

“Bald
is mega,” he declares. “When
we
think something is cool? We say, ‘It’s
nude.’ There’s nothing like pure skin to make you pay attention to every
muscle, every curve, every pore.”

“Then
you. . . .walk around naked?”

“No,
no. We like hats and scarves and jewelry. Head-painting was prime just before I
left. Bella Venus paints her entire skull, works the designs down her forehead,
all around her eyes and cheeks, to her neck. You should see her chrysanthemum
design. It’s amazing.”

He’s
struck another nerve, unwittingly. Starbright frowns again.

“Would
Bella Venus like my drawings?” she says shyly.

“Sure
she would.”

“Do
you?”

He
hesitates. “Your drawings are very good, Starbright. But, sometimes, well,
they’re a bit disproportional.”

“That’s
just what my mother says!”

He
grits his teeth. Not the right answer. “Your drawings are full of imagination.
That’s the most important thing. As for the rest, you can learn techniques. And
human anatomy. You could go to art school.”

“You
like bald women,” she whispers. Then, “You don’t mind my hair?”

“I’m
getting used to it.”

Not
the right answer, at all. She snuffles, wiping her nose under the guise of
pushing back a stray curl.

“What
I mean is,” he says, struggling to find the right words. “What I mean is, your
hair is fine, Starbright.”

Still
not the right answer. She turns her back to him.