Summer of Love, a Time Travel (34 page)

Women!
Do they ever change? I want you to want me, but I’m not sure if I want you. He
longs to tell her not to worry about him. She has her whole life ahead of her.
A life without him.

What
will her life be like? He has some idea.

Last
night he searched through the contraband holoids, testing for access over and
over, while he raged at his skipmother and wondered why she decided to torture
him like this. He tested the crystal slivers until after midnight when the tiny
red message he’d been searching for popped up in the lavender field:

“07-27-1967.
You may insert Disc 4 now.”

He
reaches over and strokes Starbright’s hair, recalling what he witnessed.

You
have lovely hair, Starbright. But if you truly are the Axis and you survive the
Summer of Love, one day you’ll trim your long, soft curls. Over many, many days
you’ll change in ways you cannot know now, but your gentle heart and your tears
will stay with you. After the child you’re carrying now is born, you will win
the National Merit Scholarship Award and, at long last, the Archives will
contain another, older image of you. You will discover an affinity for science.
After your years at university and medical school, you will still draw romantic
pictures of goddesses. After a first marriage and a difficult divorce, a
challenging second marriage and another daughter and a son, you will cry at the
sight of someone suffering or a kitten playing with a string. If you’re the
Axis, they’ll think you’re eccentric when you lobby against the use of animals
in medical experiments. You will not return to San Francisco except to visit
your first daughter, who will attend a university there. After twenty years of watching
people suffer and die, you will cry at age fifty-five when your life’s work,
the DNA mutation experiment, fails. Seven years later, when your first daughter
wins the Nobel Prize for a cancer cure, and she thanks you, up there on the
podium in front of all those people, for the inspiration you always gave her,
you will cry to a standing ovation.

If
you’re the Axis, Starbright. If you’re truly the Axis.

Gulls
wheel and cry in the sky above.

That’s
what Chi longs to tell her. You have lovely hair and a pretty young body and a
fine intelligence. And beautiful big brown eyes. But never lose your gentle
heart, Starbright. That’s your most precious gift.

But
he can’t say any of this. If Starbright is just another longhaired girl who ran
away to the Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, the life of Axis will mean
nothing to her.

He
strokes her hair. He’s never felt such a profound ache in his heart. And then,
in a flash, he realizes that if Starbright
is
the Axis, he doesn’t need
to tell her anything. She will fulfill her destiny as surely as the sun rises.

She
will fulfill her destiny, that is, if she and the daughter she carries survive
this Hot Dim Spot.

He
is struck with overwhelming tenderness for this lush, pouting girl with tears
in her eyes. This girl who will play such an important role in history one day.
He takes her hand, kisses her fingertips. She looks up, startled. Another tear
spills. He kisses that, too, and wraps his arms around her. He catches his
breath for a moment, then slowly takes in the furry scent of her hair, the sweet
saltiness of her body. He relaxes and allows the scent of her, the feel of her
to drift into him.

She
is as elusive as the gulls wheeling above, as dreams or whispered words or the
half-remembered memories of childhood.

12

A Whiter Shade of
Pale

Ruby
is ready for the riot before nightfall. She packs most of the Mystic Eye’s
inventory in three dozen cardboard boxes. She and Morgana lug the boxes out
back and stack them in the garage. Ruby wrenches the doors shut and padlocks
them. Come eight-thirty, as clouds blow in from the ocean and dusk spreads out
from the east, the two women sit on the stoop, sipping apple juice and fanning
themselves, soaked in sweat and paranoia.

“‘To
smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.’ James Baldwin wrote that in
Notes
of a Native Son.
He was talking about the Harlem riot in August ’43,” Ruby
says. “I was greener than a flower child then.”

“The
Haight-Ashbury isn’t a ghetto,” Morgana says.

“Sure,
it is. The Hashberry is the Love Ghetto.”

They
laugh, but the sound rings hollow.

A
flatbed truck rolls by, packed with Persian carpets, brass water pipes, black
lights the size of baseball bats. The grim driver waves. Some hip merchants are
moving their best goods out of the neighborhood entirely until the rumors blow
over or the riot has run its course, whichever comes first. The Print Mint has
sent out the word that anyone who has no place to sleep can get off the street
tonight and crash in the shop. Maybe a horde of sleeping kids will amount to
fire insurance, Ruby thinks. Or maybe not.

A
haystack of plywood planks lies at her feet. She intends to board up her front
windows before darkness falls. The windows would cost her five hundred bucks
apiece to replace, not to mention the damage if people break in and trash the
place. All her beautiful handcrafted shelves and counters. Five years’ worth of
work.

H.
Rap Brown says violence is as American as cherry pie. What if they start fires,
like in Watts in ’65? Or Detroit last week? That’s not cherry pie. That’s burnt
crust, inedible and ruined.

She
doesn’t want to think about it. Just take care of business. She’s got her
bankbooks and business records, her favorite photograph albums and psychedelic
posters, the jewelry her mother left her, and the cats’ five pet carriers
waiting by the kitchen door. What else can she take in the Mercedes if they set
555 Clayton on fire? Not much. Take only the most important things.

Ruby
wipes her brow with a handkerchief, flings down the sopping cloth. She hates
this! She picks up a slim volume she chose from her inventory, Anna Riva’s
Secrets
of Magical Seals.
She pores through the pages, searching for some practical
magic. The book depicts all manner of symbols, Solomon’s Seals, signs of the
Goetia, and voodoo veves.

She
finds something promising. Veves are decorative designs that incorporate shapes
and images symbolizing supernatural forces. Voodooists draw these designs to
call up those supernatural forces and put them to work. Far out. Ruby finds the
veve for Legba, the protector of doorways, a guardian against thieves. Yes! She
takes a scarlet chalk Starbright left behind and draws the veve on the sidewalk
in front of the Mystic Eye:

Is
that any good? Where the hell is Starbright? She needs an artist.

“We’re
doing an invocation at the house tonight,” Morgana says. “We’re calling up
Bune. He’s one of the Goetia who protects doorways and property. We considered
sacrificing a dove, but everyone voted against it. We decided we shouldn’t kill
an innocent being to invoke power. I’m going to stab my finger, instead.” She
says this as matter-of-factly as if she’s told Ruby they’re baking banana bread
tonight.

Morgana
is a formidable woman with a mane of inky curls and a moonish Celtic face. She’s
a witch, of course. She lives in the House of Magick, a women’s commune on
Baker Street. Strange things go on there, that’s the rumor. Everyone loves a
good rumor, preferably with sex. So many rumors are floating around these days,
the weirder, the better.

But
the women at the House of Magick don’t seem so strange to Ruby. Morgana works
the drawer some afternoons at the Mystic Eye. So does Bettina. Maria-Fortuna
reads the tarot in the back of the shop on Thursdays. Ishbette casts astrological
charts on Fridays. They buy candles and incense, exotic jewelry, Indian saris
in saffron and teal. They are all scrupulously honest. Ruby gives them a huge
discount.

Ruby
doesn’t care what they do in the privacy of the House of Magick. It’s uncool to
indulge in rumors.

Just
take one look at her. How’s that for a lifestyle, taking in a foreign young dude
and a teenage runaway?

What
about her unexpected tender feelings toward Starbright? The kid is like a
kitten climbing up on her lap for a scratch under the chin, but it’s more than
that. Ruby looks in the mirror and asks herself why. She’s usually in touch
with her feelings, but now she’s got no easy answer.

“Bune,
Bune. Which seal is that?” Ruby consults Anna Riva again. Seals are employed in
magical ceremonies to summon the Goetia, spirits of the infernal realms. Ruby
studies the seal and reads aloud, “Bune is the twenty-sixth Spirit who appears,
when summoned, in the form of a Dragon with three heads, that of a Dog, a Gryphon,
and a Man.”

“That’s
the one,” says Morgana. “We figure if we can appease Bune, he’ll stop the
riot.”

“Worth
a try.”

The
seal is mighty strange:

Ruby
sighs. She’s too tired to draw that. “Thanks, Morgana. You’ve done enough.
Better go home and lock your doors.”

“I
will,” Morgana says and squeezes her shoulder. “Listen, Ruby, I feel everything
will be all right. Venus is in Virgo. That’s a peaceful place to be.”

“Yes,
but the moon is in Aries,” Ruby snaps. “That means violence in the subconscious
mind of the world.”

“Maybe
so.” Morgana hurries away before Ruby can apologize for being so blunt.

She
lays down
Secrets of Magical Seals
and hauls herself to her feet. She
bends her aching back to the haystack of plywood planks, reaches for her
hammer. She bites on a couple of nails, picks up a plank. Damn, she’s tired.
Forget it, Ruby, get that hammer pounding.

Violence
isn’t in the moon. Violence is
here,
in only too human form, on the
streets of San Francisco during the Summer of Love.

Chi’s
bizarre logic resonates in her memory. Danger summons Devolved Entities
Manifested from the Other Now, opens a hole in reality through which they can
invade. Will demons also stalk the streets tonight?

Where
is Starbright? Ruby is worried sick.

*  
*   *

Leo
Gorgon pulls his ragtag truck into the driveway, hops out. Chi hops out the
other side and offers his hand to the kid to help her down. Like a gentleman
should, Ruby sniffs. But the kid indignantly waves him away and climbs down on
her own, spurning his gallantry. She shoots him a belligerent look. She’s
flushed with sunburn. And something else?

“Look
who I picked up hitchhikin’ on Market Street,” Gorgon says.

“We
were not hitchhiking,” Starbright says.

“We
were waiting for the bus,” Chi says.

“And
where did we go today?” Ruby says.

“Sausalito,”
they say in unison. But the kid glares at Chi. What’s that about?

“Uh-huh.”
Ruby pounds the last nail in the last plank. “You’re just in time for dinner.”

“Nice
work, Ruby.” Gorgon juts his chin at the boarded-up windows. “Say, I got me a
hole that needs fixin’. Why don’t you swing my way?”

“I’ll
swing your way,” Ruby says and swipes the hammer at his head, only half in
jest. Since Morning Star Ranch, Gorgon doesn’t come around like he used to.
When he does stop by for an afternoon in bed, his harangues against hip
merchants have gotten nastier. He’s actually started calling her a whore—and he
doesn’t mean because she’s balling him.