Summer of Love, a Time Travel (40 page)

What
does that make the Archivists, the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications,
his skipparents, him? Virtual murderers of grandmothers? Theoretical Nazis
conducting some terrible experiment with a gas chamber?

But
it’s absurd, emotional, irrational. Scientists down the ages have toasted these
chestnuts. Whoever questioned their form, their expression? Murder your own
grandmother; it’s just a thought experiment. Is the cat alive or dead; it’s
just a metaphor.

Chi
is a shattered man. Starbright’s tears and Ruby’s anger make sense to him,
however badly he wants to rationalize their reactions away.

He
feels dizzy, disoriented. Another bout of tachyonic lag? He feels like that
song about warm San Francisco nights—which are actually quite chilly—about how
walls move and minds do, too. On the night of the riot that never happened, he
saw shadows ripple across the rooftop. He saw a skull bulge out of the solid
wall of a house. A wall moved.

His
questions of only a week ago now take on a deeply ominous tone. Starbright has
a demon double from the Other Now. Ruby does, too. And someone else in the
Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love has a demon double. Someone else has
the power to collapse the timeline. But who?

Suddenly
Chi feels confused about the object of the SOL Project. He stops at the corner
of Cole and cups his hand around the knuckletop. “K-T,” he whispers, hungry for
probabilities. The knucketop spews out alphanumerics that make no sense. Be
ready, always. Watch for Prime Probabilities. Watch for demons. Of course, of
course.

Why
does K-T’s readout leave him so uneasy?

As
the days have drifted into August, the Summer of Love parties on. Young
runaways arrive every day. The Doors, the Young Rascals, Buffalo Springfield
play the Fillmore. The Diggers have started handing out free food in the
Panhandle again after a hiatus of six months. Leo Gorgon is so busy with the
effort, he doesn’t come around the Mystic Eye anymore. Or maybe his
confrontation with Ruby on the rooftop broke apart whatever fragile
relationship they had. Chi isn’t sure, but he’s very glad Gorgon is gone.

The
hysterical gaiety of the Scene fails to enchant him. The costumes and dazed
smiles are a gaudy mask concealing a sick face. The mouse magician is insane.

Yet
he witnesses the core community fighting back. Since Shob’s murder, five
hundred people gather at sunset every night in front of the Psychedelic Shop.
They march from Haight Street to Hippie Hill, chanting, ringing bells, clanging
cymbals, tooting flutes, strumming guitars. They carry a silk-screened banner
of a scarlet phoenix rising from a bonfire. They call themselves The Flame,
dedicated to preserving the spirit of the Haight-Ashbury.

Chi followed
The Flame into Golden Gate Park and strode down John F. Kennedy Drive to the
Portals of the Past. In the twilight, he examined the marble pillar with despair
and disbelief. The glyph--that tenuous piece of evidence that’s supposed to
prove he was here. There’s no glyph. No glyph, at all.

And
there’s no peace at 555 Clayton. Starbright avoids him. She goes out to the Scene
on her own. And Ruby? Ruby has turned cold since the night of the riot that
never happened and his revelation about Schrodinger’s Cat. Chi was always the
aloof one. Now she withholds herself from him. She shoos her precious cats
upstairs to sleep with her instead of allowing them to drape themselves all over
him on the couch. He wakes shivering in the night without those furry, purry
heating pads. He’s started feeding them, refilling their water bowls, changing
their litter box, even combing them for fleas in a silent apology.

Ruby
doesn’t notice, or if she does, she doesn’t let on. He never realized how much
strength he took from her smile. How much he took her ready generosity for
granted. She doesn’t evict him from 555 Clayton but, in a thousand small ways,
she’s evicted him from her heart. One night, very late, after viewing Discs 2
and 3 again, he found himself near tears. And all his anger at how Ruby tempted
him, all his outrage at how she shattered his belief, dissolve into a desire to
appease her.

And
win Starbright back. He can’t go on if he can’t win Starbright’s heart again.
He misses her trusting eyes, her wise innocence, her teasing, her hair. Yes,
her beautiful long hair.

How
can he prove he’s not some monster from the future with a jack in his neck? How
can he prove his sincerity? Prove all of cosmicism’s sincerity? His violation
of the Tenets pale next to this moral imperative: Starbright and Ruby have to
believe in the future he’s transmitted across five centuries to conserve. They
have to.

How
can he make things right?

Chi
jogs east down Oak Street along the south side of the Panhandle. Across from
the corner of Clayton, little Cyn sits on the grass under the eucalyptus trees
with yet another young black dude. Chi’s never seen him before, handsome in his
beret and leather jacket. To Chi’s relief, he tenderly holds Cyn’s hand and
gazes, rapt, at her angelic face.

“We
saw her crossin’ the Panhandle an hour ago,” Cyn tells Chi.

Damn!
She’s making him crazy. He can’t go on like this, searching for her through the
throng just when he’s finally found her. He slows his pace as he approaches the
corner of Ashbury.

And
there! Crossing the block from the Panhandle, a flash of golden-brown hair in
the wind. Her bobbing head, the way she’s started striding down the street with
such confidence. He would know her walk anywhere.

He
sprints after her. She spots him and takes off, heading south on Ashbury,
flying down the block, her boot soles flipping up behind her knees. The speed
of her flight shocks him. She sprints across Page Street without looking.

He
chases after her, his breath tearing in his chest. He dodges oncoming traffic,
nearly colliding with a flower-spattered van. The driver leans on his horn,
flips him the bird.

He
catches up with her at the corner of Haight and Ashbury where the Tuesday
afternoon crowd slows them both down. He seizes her wrist.

“Damn
it, Starbright,” he says, panting. “This isn’t a game!”

“Yes,
it is,” she says. “You’re nothing but games, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. I don’t
know what the demons want. I don’t know what
you
want. Except that
you’re
all
using me for some game.”

“No!
I don’t believe in using anyone, least of all you. Cosmicists don’t believe--”

“Oh,
you and your cosmicists! You and your awful thought experiments! You’re using
me. You’re using Ruby. You tell me I’m important and everything depends on me.
And then you treat me like I’m. . . .just some
girl.
”

He
takes her shoulders, she tries to twist away, but he won’t let her go. “
I’m
the one who’s being used in a game, Starbright. You and Ruby, you’ve taught me
things I didn’t want to know. But. . . .” He searches for the right words. The
right words are so important to her. “I’m glad I know what I’ve learned from
you and Ruby. It
does
make a difference.
We
do make a difference.
In your Now. And in mine.”

She
looks away, frowning.

“You
are
important. That’s true, it’s not a game. And I swear I won’t let any
harm come to you.”

“Because
you’d look bad in front of your cosmicist friends.”

“Because
I love you.”

She’s
trembling, but she doesn’t try to dart away.

He
takes out a wipe, blots sweat from her forehead, smoothes her hair around her
face with his fingers. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
That’s you, and only you. The first star of the evening. Starbright.”

She
tosses her head and squints up at him. “You are
so
full of it, Chi.” But
she’s grinning.

He
could shout for joy. How long since he’s seen her smile?

The
crowd jostles all around them, but he doesn’t notice. Someone bumps into him, a
very tall, very slim, mannish woman with strawberry-blond hair and ivory skin.
That famous Irish fashion model? She taps Starbright on the shoulder and says
in a broque, “I say, love. Could you show me where the Psychedelic Shop is at?”

“Down
the block,” Starbright says, turning to point. Suddenly, she sees something
over her shoulder. She whirls. “Look! Look!”

She
darts across the intersection. The Irish lass follows, striding with her to the
other side of the street.

Chi
jogs after both of them.
Damn it, Starbright,
he starts to shout,
can’t
you stand still for one minute?
But the words stall in his throat.

He
sees a knot of teenagers crossing the intersection. He sees the backs of their
heads, all that sun-spangled hair blowing in the wind. He sees the cameramen
walking ahead of the crowd, the producer gesturing, the sound boom and a
microphone: CBS News.

Chi
darts across the street, pursuing the teens. There, in the center of it all,
walks a sandy-haired man, his distinguished profile clean-shaven. Starbright
squeezes into the crowd behind the man’s shoulder. Her hair lifts in the
breeze. They march across the intersection, posing beneath the street signs of
Haight and Ashbury.

As
Chi catches up, he sees the man glance at the teens walking behind him and say,
“. . . .the hippie capital of the world.”

Chi
cannot see Starbright’s face, only a sliver of her profile. She stands behind
the sandy-haired man, tall and slim and cocky in her high-collared shirt. She
nods at the camera, a quick bob, that’s all. Chi can see only a corner of her
haunting smile. The cameraman beams at her, the producer nods back. The sound
man is having a bit of trouble with the microphone.

It
all looks so different from behind the scenes!

Chi
is so ecstatic—one hundred percent! one hundred percent! one hundred
percent!—that he exclaims in a voice thick with wonder and joy, “Beautiful!”

The
sandy-haired man says, “I’m Harry Reasoner.”

Transcendence:

When
space and time slow and hover, a convergence of light and consciousness. When
the One Day shows its face behind the veil of illusion.

And
you knew it. You knew it!

But
then the moment flees, and you have only the memory.

Because
you never did know. We only know time as a forward-moving experience.

You
only know after time has passed.

She
is jumping up and down, shouting, “Wow! Wow! Am I going to be on TV?”

Chi
grins. “You’re going to be on TV, my love.”

“Wow!
Did I look all right? Did my hair look all right?”

“You
look beautiful. Your hair is beautiful.”

She
prances down the street, laughing, skipping, jumping.

No,
Chi never was the tall, pale, red-haired person in the background. But he did
say—he has
always
said—“Beautiful!”

He
has always run after her.

He
has always taken her hand.

15

Over Under Sideways
Down

When
Ruby goes downtown to the San Francisco Gun Exchange to buy herself a pistol,
she sees four Haightians she knows there. Why is she not surprised? The hippie
drug murders--all those sordid details! in her morning newspaper!--not to mention
all the break-ins and burglaries in the neighborhood have freaked out everyone
awake enough to pay attention and take matters into their own hands.

The
gun exchange boggles her mind. Weapons on racks are stockpiled from the floor to
the twenty-foot ceiling. There are semiautomatics of every description and
combat automatics, too. Hunting knives in leather cases, aristocratic fencing
swords, curved sabers fit for barbarian marauders. A hard-bitten clientele
slouches at the counters like regulars at a local bar, chatting, smoking
Chesterfields, checking it out.

A
pock-faced white dude hands her a vest-pocket Walther, watches her turn the
pistol around in her hands, and says, with a gap-toothed leer, “You one a’ them
Black Panther broads? Whaddaya want this piece for?”

She
aims her best glare at him. “Gonna off me some stool pigeons, what do you
think?”

She
hefts the pistol. James Bond carries a Beretta. Stan the Man always fancied
himself a hip James Bond. He took her to see
Goldfinger
three times, but
maybe that was on account of Pussy Galore. Ruby cannot tolerate James Bond, who
is more of a bumbling idiot than the publicity machine would have you believe.
Well, what do you expect of a booze-soaked womanizer?

A
Beretta may be good enough for James Bond, but a Walther is better for Ruby A.
Maverick. The pistol is heavy, a dead weight. The high-polish blue finish and
checkered grip look kind of classy. Almost makes her feel all right about
buying a gun.

She
goes to cashier, and damn if she doesn’t see Luther and his latest lady, Peter,
and Jerry lined up in the queue. She doesn’t know Luther’s lady, a voluptuous
girl with runaway eyes who gawks at the wares as if a rifle is about to hop
down and blast her all by itself. The three dudes Ruby knows only too well.