Summer of Love, a Time Travel (42 page)

Ruby
remembers waiting for Ma to finish her shift late one Saturday afternoon. You
couldn’t call it playing. She huddled outside the door of a ship’s engine room with
a Superman comic book and a teddy bear and tried to understand the ache in her
heart. Why Pa wasn’t ever coming home. Why Ma sat up with a whiskey bottle when
she
did
come home, her face slack, her eyes blurred.

Ruby
remembers that engine room as clear as day. She peeked through a window in that
door. And it was snowing in the room! Like in
Nanook of the North
or
The
Gold Rush.
There stood her mother and her coworkers, four women of color,
trim and purposeful in their white overalls, bandanas wrapped around their hair,
their lipsticked mouths like ripe fruit. They were haughty toward other
Marinship workers. Asbestos installation was a plum job compared to welding or
riveting, clean and easy on the bones. Her mother and her coworkers were quick
and efficient, deft with their hands. They pushed the slabs of asbestos up,
panting with exertion, mouths open while they worked, catching white flakes on
their tongues like children gobbling a fresh snowfall.

Roi’s
mother took her brother’s death as hard as Ma, maybe harder. When the notice
came he was gone, Aunt Clarice took to steady drink. She spiraled down a well
of despair and never came back up. Clarice and Roi lived in Hunter’s Point,
another black ghetto like Marin City spawned by the war and its temporary
industries, its greed for cheap labor. Marin City was nothing like Hunter’s Point,
though, another of Ruby’s advantages Cousin Roi came to hold against her. Worse
than the Fillmore or East Oakland, Hunter’s Point fell idle at the end of the
war. If you could, you got out. If you couldn’t, you got down.

You
blessed, Roi had told her. In time, Ruby came to see it.

Ma
did well at Marinship. She learned how to tell her coworkers what the boss
wanted them to do. When the shipyard shut down, she was offered office work at
the construction company that had run the yard. Ma took shorthand at night,
learned how to use a Dictaphone, bought a black ’47 Ford, and commuted to the
gleaming corporate skyscraper in the city. She bought Ruby new fashions every
school year and saved up money for her college.

Aunt
Clarice and Cousin Roi moved from a modest house in Hunter’s Point to a modest
apartment, to a lousy apartment, to a dive.

Ruby
grew up fast as the daughter of a working single mother in the late forties.
She suffered acute shame for not having a father. Everyone had a father.
Children borrowed much of who they were from their fathers. The doctor’s
daughter was bossy and vain, the office clerk’s son meek and obedient. “You be
you, Ruby,” Ma told her when she came home from school in tears. But, at the
time, that hadn’t been good enough. “All right,” Ma said. “Your pa was a hero.
You’re the daughter of a hero.”

Graduating
Tamalpais High with honors, Ruby was accepted by Mills College, a prestigious
women’s school in Oakland. Ma took a lover, Mr. Ben, a bearded bohemian who
lived in Berkeley and talked about a spiritual philosophy called Zen. Dig it:
Ruby was blessed.

But
Cousin Roi was not blessed. Ma didn’t approve of Clarice and her dissolute
ways. Years went by, and Ruby didn’t see that side of the family. Roi grew up
wild and mean. When she was in her freshman year, reading James Joyce and
Galaxy
and listening to Mr. Ben and his hip-bop talk, Roi was out of school. Way out.
Doing the junkie scene with a gangster lean.

She
was nineteen when she saw him again. A Fourth of July family picnic at Lake
Merritt was a halfhearted affair, tense with unspoken accusations and stored-up
grief. From the start, Ma was clucking her tongue. It shocked Ruby to see how
dark Roi had become—not his skin. Anger and meanness came off him like a cold
wind.

Yet
his darkness and his danger seduced her. In a blinding knife-stroke, she fell
for him hard.

They
secretly rendezvoused in San Francisco, since Ma forbade her to see him. He was
sardonic, with an edge of wit. He squired her into tinselly downtown bars that
checked his ID, but not hers. He was cool, carved in ebony. In their first days
together, he kept a leash on his habit and boasted of his control. In their
next days together, he began to call horse
she,
talked all the time about
her.
Like
she
was a fickle woman tugging at his heart, not a life-destroying
drug.

Ruby
turned twenty, a haughty and imperious age. She read Satre at school, Beat
poetry and
If
at home, and followed news accounts of the civil rights
movement in the South. She fell in with the Berkeley crowd, the North Beach crowd.
She grew tired of tinselly downtown bars.

One
night, she attained an enlightenment. Cousin Roi was beyond changing, and so
was she. She could never tolerate the gangster life, let alone surrender to
junk. She confessed to Ma, who told her in no uncertain terms to break it off.
She hadn’t really rebelled, just disagreed. She didn’t disagree anymore.

The
day Ruby broke it off, Roi was on the yen. Grim purpose chiseled in
crystallized flesh. That deadpan look, already dead. Wanting
her
.
Needing
her.
Do anything for
her.
In his room in Hunter’s Point,
he got crazy. Bad-crazy. Incest never crossed Ruby’s mind. Only how much she’d
once wanted him, and he’d refused to touch her, his pretty cousin. And how much
she now wanted to leave his room and never come back. He was rough, but that
wasn’t so bad. What she hated most was that he was too damn late.

Ruby
shuts this t-port down, slowing the recalled light and shadows to the rhythm of
her heart. Slow it down, sweet Isis, shut it down.

Roi
died two days later. They found him on the third day. His death was banal. An
OD in an alley with a pin of bad horse behind his knee.

In
the end, it wasn’t so bad that they were first cousins, forbidden to each
other. It was bad he’d fallen to junk, but, grieving over the life he’d had to
live, she found herself forgiving that, too. No, what was bad—
really
bad—was that she was pregnant. What was worse, it was 1953, and she went to Doc
Clyde for an afternoon of rose gardening.

“Ah,
Roi,” she whispers, guilt so sharp it still carves her heart. Twilight shadows
merge with the night. “Does anyone ever really change anyone?”

She decided
she could not have Roi’s baby. Not another child without a father. Not the
child of a father who was never a hero. Not the child of an incestuous rape.

These
are strange and wondrous days, Ruby sniffs. Her daughter would have been
fourteen years old during the Summer of Love.

*  
*   *

She
is sitting in the dark when Chi and Starbright clatter in and flick on the
lights. They are arguing about something, whether the broadcast will run
tonight or sometime later, which makes no sense. The youngsters have been
estranged for over a week, but now they move together with an easy grace. Peace
restored, apparently. Starbright cautious, Chi eager. Their reconciliation
makes Ruby feel instantly better.

“Oh,
Ruby!” Starbright cries. “Are you all right?”

The
scattered stereo equipment. The look on her face. Ruby slips the Walther in her
jacket pocket.

Starbright
drops to her feet and hugs Ruby’s knees, nestling her head on Ruby’s lap.

Ruby
cherishes the gesture, but it is too charged with meaning and too confusing. Is
she yearning for her lost daughter?

Gently
pushing the kid away, she comes to a decision. She doesn’t have to answer that
question right now. It’s the Summer of Love. It’s all right to wonder who you
are. She smiles at Starbright’s puzzled look and brushes a lock of hair behind
the kid’s ear. “I’m all right. I’m fine.” She waves at the equipment on the
floor. “Leo Gorgon paid us a visit. Something about liberating my stereo for
the revolution. He’s gone for good.”

“I’ll
take care of it, Ruby,” Chi says. He shrugs off his jacket and sets about
restoring the equipment on her shelves.

Starbright
snuggles up to Ruby’s feet again, and takes Alana and Luna in her lap. The cats
purr and preen. Stubborn girl, just like Ruby used to be. All right, then. Ruby
lets her stay.

Chi
finishes reconnecting everything and sits in the rocking chair, watching Ruby,
the kid, and the cats. Face downcast, he heaves a great sigh. They haven’t sat
here together, family-like, for some time.

He
says, “Ruby, listen.”

“Oh,
no,” she says. “I don’t want to listen to
you
anymore. I don’t want to
hear about all the terrible mistakes we’re making.”

The
elegant lad squirms in his Beatle boots. “But, Ruby.”

“Don’t
you ‘but Ruby’ me. I don’t want to hear about how selfish we are. We’re
wasteful, we’re stupid, we’re violent. I don’t think you’ve got an exclusive on
how screwed up everyone and everything is in 1967.”

“Please,
listen,” Chi says. “I’m trying to make this right.”

“No,
no, you’re right to be angry at us, man from Mars. I would be, in your pretty
boots. Everything poisoned. Ice ages, brown ages. I don’t blame you, Chi,
really I don’t. I envy your superior point-of-view. I envy your genius. I envy
that you can look at us with five hundred years of perspective and know we’re
worse than we could have ever imagined.”

“No!
Don’t envy me,” Chi says. “You’re the ones who’ve shown me how little
we
know. We need
you.
I
need you. I need you to believe in the
future. To believe in
us,
the people of the future.”

“You’re
mad at us,” Starbright whispers. “You hate us.”

“We
don’t hate you. And we can claim no more genius than what you possess. Listen,”
he says painfully. “We’ve made mistakes, too. We made a terrible mistake. It
was called the Save Betty Project.”

*  
*   *

It
was 2466, and a robust woman of sixty-four in the prime of her youth named J.
Betty Turner was deeply involved in t-port projects for the Luxon Institute for
Superluminal Applications. She helped develop the Tenets of the Grandmother
Principle. She was a key adviser to the Chief Archivist.

Chi
sighs. “Betty was a great lass. She loved hummingbirds, funded restoration of
twenty premillennium species in a habitat at New Golden Gate Preserve. I loved
her. Everyone did. She had this laugh.”

Since
Betty had started on the ground floor of t-porting, she felt she had a right to
try the ride out for herself. She had a right, and she had a reason. An old
sorrow, a secret that haunted her.

When
Betty was a girl of fourteen—a spoiled cosmicist child, she was the first to
admit—she was given a whirligig, and she’d had an accident.

She’d
been flying downtown in a proper skyway. But she was barely old enough to
qualify as a pilot and giddy with her new toy. A sudden gust tilted the
whirligig, she didn’t know how to stabilize the thing, and her blades struck an
old devolt woman in the chest, mortally wounding her.

If
only she’d pulled up in time. If only she’d flown in a different skyway. If
only the woman had stepped back from the curb by half a stride at that precise
moment, Betty wouldn’t have killed her.

But
none of those probabilities happened. She killed a woman. The accident haunted
and depressed her for fifty years.

Betty
asked to t-port to the day of the accident. At last, she’d have a chance to
make things right. If changing one small sad moment didn’t affect the timeline,
why couldn’t Betty go and save the woman’s life? Pull her back from the curb,
out of harm’s way?

The
Archivists set to work. The accident had occurred only fifty years before, but
the Archives were surprisingly dim. So many devolts had wandered around downtown
those days and died of disease or exposure. The woman had carried no
identification. Police had whisked her body off to the morgue as one of many
Jane Does. No one claimed her, no one mourned her, no one sued Betty’s family
for wrongful death.

Nothing
of any consequence had happened, except to Betty’s heart and soul. If she
couldn’t dispel the guilt of fifty years, then at least she could find peace of
mind for her next seventy.

Betty
wanted to do it. She
needed
to do it. So the LISA techs set up a
tachyonic shuttle at Ghirardelli Square, and Betty transmitted. The t-port was
to last only seven hours in the past. Plenty of time for Betty to hike
downtown, pull the devolt away from her youthful blades, and hike back to the
t-shuttle. She took nutribeads, full identification, prophylaks, and wipes.

Seven
hours later, the LISA techs waited for J. Betty Turner at Ghirardelli Square.
The Chief Archivist and her ferrets stood with their knuckletops around the
photon guns, the half-moon of imploders. The awesome dish of the chronometer
hummed softly. They stood, whispering and waiting, delighted they’d done the
right thing. They’d used a powerful new technology for a harmless purpose. A
humane and beautiful purpose.

But
Betty did not step back.

“We
perceive time as a forward-moving experience,” Chi says. “A successful t-port
works because it’s an OTL. An Open Time Loop.”