Summer of Love, a Time Travel (47 page)

How
dare the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications transmit him across five
hundred years to preserve
their
notion of the timeline? The LISA techs,
the Archivists, the smug cosmicists consider themselves the vanguard of civilization.
They believe in the changes they’ve made.

But
they haven’t changed enough. They haven’t even begun their personal revolution.
That
is the truth he’s learned from Starbright and Ruby.
That
is the special
insight he can contribute.

The
crowd thickens. Tourists gawk and aim cameras. They don’t give a damn about the
burning house or the people inside.

“Why
don’t you move on?” Chi shouts. “Get out of here and let the fire department do
its work.”

A
guy with a crew cut catcalls, “Dirty hippie,” and throws a fake punch at him.

Chi
throws a real punch back, connecting with the guy’s square jaw. “I said move
on, you son of a bitch.”

The
crew cut’s buddies leap on Chi. Punches pummel his shoulders, his ribs. The crew
cut slams payback into Chi’s jaw.

He
tastes blood. He plants his knuckles in an eye, crunches a nose. It feels good!
He swings wildly, all his rage and frustration finding targets at the end of
his fists.

Half
a dozen Hells Angels materialize in a wall of hulking denim and clanking
chains.

“Heads
up, man,” the Bear says mildly. Up close, the Bear’s face is deeply sun-wrinkled.
He must be pushing forty. Chi spots an Air Force patch on the Bear’s jacket.
“Korea, ’52.” The Bear plucks the crew cut from Chi’s grasp and shoves him at
Badger, who pins back the arms of the luckless guy. The Bear aims his fist. “Nobody
hassles Starbright’s old man.”

Chi
catches sight of a silver Mercedes inching down the block. “Chi!” Ruby leans
out the window. “Have you lost your marbles? Where’s Starbright?”

He
ducks away from the fight, buzzing with adrenaline. He sprints to Ruby’s car,
tears open the door, and hops inside, panting and bloody.

“Uh-huh,
lost your marbles.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe my eyes. The man from
Mars, rumbling with the Angels. How’s your magic ring?”

“Oh
no!” He examines the knuckletop. Blood spatters the bezel. “K-T.” A
beep,
and the holoid field pops into his palm. He grins sheepishly. “Guess I lost my
head.”

“Guess
you did.” Ruby glances at him inscrutably. “Stan the Man stopped by the Mystic
Eye. I don’t know what the kid said to him, but he’s splitting town. He said it’s
‘cause of her. Me, I think Stovepipe and the Lizard have got his number.” She
clucks her tongue. “Stan did one thing right, though. He told me you and
Starbright went looking for her girlfriend at the Double Barrel house. I guess
he didn’t have to do that.” She sighs and leans out of the window again. “So
what happened? Where is she?”

“Not
in the house,” he says miserably. “That’s for sure.”

“You
don’t sound glad.” She peers out again. “Sweet Isis! I haven’t seen a fire like
that in twenty years.” Her ferocious eyes grow alarmed. “Where
is
she,
Chi?”

“I
don’t know.”

“
You
don’t know?
”

“She
begged me to help Penny Lane. She promised to wait for me. Wait, no matter
what. But by the time I got out, she was gone.”

“I
thought you told us these are the last days before the Hot Dim Spot closes.”

“Yeah.”
He hangs his head. “The fire. I’m sure it’s a Prime Probability.”

“Then
why the hell did you leave her?”

“I
messed up, okay? It all happened so fast!”

His
anger heats up another hundred degrees, along with a bad, bad feeling as if an
unseen force is pushing him. He can almost
feel
probabilities collapsing
like evil dominos, toppling in a direction he can’t control, heading into a
dark destiny.

“Ruby,
help me! We’ve got to find her.”

“We
will.” Ruby steers the car through the crowd. “Someone must have seen her.”

The
crowd grows thicker still. Fights break out here and there. Hells Angels and
Satan’s Slaves push and jostle. Is a riot brewing?

Chi
spots Cyn with the handsome black dude in his beret and leather jacket. “Cyn!”
He motions them over. Despite the young man’s militant demeanor, Chi sees how
he holds Cyn, his arm protective around her frail shoulders. Her fearful look
isn’t inspired by him, but by the fire and the rowdy crowd.

“Have
you seen Starbright?” Chi asks, relieved again for little Cyn.

She
nods, points. “We saw her runnin’ down Haight to the park, Chi.”

Cyn’s
man leans into Chi’s window. “Brother, a lady in the park at night with nothin’
but her and the hoodies? She in big trouble.”

“She
was runnin’ like crazy,” Cyn says. “Like there was somethin’ chasin’ her? Only
we didn’t see nobody.”

“Anybody
mess with my lady,” Cyn’s man says, “I’ll off him. Brother, you better go find
her.”

Chi
searches the shadows as Ruby speeds down Kezar Drive into Golden Gate Park. Stragglers
from Chocolate George’s wake stalk through the twilight. Bikers joyride their
choppers down every lane, hooting with drunken laughter. Trees toss in the
breeze and eerie shapes ripple across the grass. Silver rain slants down through
the streetlights’ glow.

The
park is alive, shivering. The ground swells and lurches. Branches whip against
the wind, defying it. Darkness slithers with serpentine shapes that coil, then
dissolve, and coil again.

Chi
is sick to his soul. He’s tried so hard. He’s stayed by her side nearly every
moment this summer, even when he was unsure of her identity. He’s done his
duty. His cosmicist duty. He’s gone beyond his duty. Way beyond. He’s fallen in
love.

And
now she’s gone. Impossibly gone like a coin in one of Ruby’s sleight-of-hand
tricks.

Ruby
brakes the Mercedes, tires squealing, and pulls over to the curb. “Get out!
We’ll never find her this way.”

Ruby
brandishes her Walther.

Chi
grips his maser.

They
leap out of the car and dart down a path twisting into the park. They confront
a fork in the path, take the left turnoff, and run. Lindley Meadow, the Sharon
Building, the Carousel. Five miles of parkland stretches from here to Ocean
Beach, a maze of trails sprawling in every direction.

“Damn
it!” Sweat pours down Chi’s face, though he’s shivering from the cold. “We
won’t find her this way, either.”

Ruby
stops and bends over at the waist, heaving for breath. “No foolin’. I’m no
athlete, sonny. We better go to the fuzz, get some help.”

“You
go. I’ll keep looking. I’m the one who blew it.”

Ruby
takes his shoulders. “Listen to me, Chi. This is no time for your guilt trip,
all right? You can’t search the whole park all by yourself. We need the
police.”

“You
think they’ll help us?”

“We’ve
got to try! It’s the best we can do. Get an APB out on her or something. She once
told me her pa is a dentist. We’ll tell them she’s the daughter of some bigwig
back East.”

“I
heard her parents hired a private investigator. That might help, too.”

“Cool.
I can deal with the heat if you can. We can’t find her alone.” She sweeps her
arms at the vast trees, the dark lawns, the maze of trails. “It’s just too
big!”

They
jog back toward Kezar Drive, take the fork toward Alvord Lake Bridge. They
stride through a stonework tunnel built to look like a cave with rough rock
walls, stalactites hanging from the roof, stalagmites jutting from the
cobblestone path.

Then
there they are, at the end of the tunnel.

Six
hoodies. Not Hells Angels or Gypsy Jokers. Just cheap hoodies, puny and anonymous,
ticked off at the world and raring to pick on someone not their size.

Her.

Starbright
crouches at the center of their circle, her eyes and mouth dark pools of
terror. A hoodie has torn down the neckline of her dress. Her bare shoulder
gleams in the lamplight.

Without
hesitation or a word of warning, Ruby lifts the Walther and fires. Her bullet
ricochets off the boot toes of the hoodie swinging a switchblade at the girl. He
yelps, flings his blade into the duck pond at the end of the tunnel, and lopes
away.

“Hey,
Ruby!” Chi shouts, drawing his maser. He shoots a green beam, showering sparks
across the cobblestones. “I thought you believed in peace and love. Shouldn’t
you wait until you can see the whites of their eyes?”

“If
I can see his face, sonny,” she yells, “I can shoot him between the eyes!”

The
other hoodies scatter. Two sprint toward Haight Street. Three charge at Chi and
Ruby, staring wild-eyed at his maser and her gun, and sprint past them into the
dark, bootheels echoing.

Chi
leaps to Starbright’s side. “You promised to wait for me.” He flings his arms
around her, crushing her to his chest. “I’m not going to lose you again!”

Ruby
joins them. She pulls up Starbright’s torn bodice, then tucks the Walther in
her shoulder bag. “Let’s get out of here.”

They
start up the hill toward Stanyan Street.

But
the tunnel walls rumble and sway. A sound swells like the long, low roar of a
night tide. The stalactites quiver. Bits of rock break loose and crash. The
roar grows louder. The ground shakes like the start of an earthquake. Fissures
shoot through the tunnel walls. The walls crack apart and collapse in heaps of
rubble. Overhead, the eucalyptus trees sway and groan, raining leaves and
broken branches all around them.

The
girl in the black cape stands before Chi, her staff planted before her in both
hands. For a moment, she looks exactly like Starbright in her long black dress,
the smooth young face of a pretty girl with dark eyes and long, tawny hair.
Then a hole yawns open in the middle of her forehead and a net of cracks fans
out. The face shatters, flesh bursting apart as if she’s exploded from within.
A bloody skull stares at him, exposed eyeballs held in bony sockets by spiderwebs
crawling with black widows.

“Get
behind me!” Chi shouts at Starbright.

Now
the gray beggar woman stands before Starbright, her ‘fro and features a ghastly
caricature of Ruby. Her hair slithers, snakes hissing at the end of each curl.
The beggar stinks of decay. Wind peels her rags away until she’s naked, a mass
of raw sores and exposed bones. The demon howls. Strange internal organs pulse
beneath her ribs, a throbbing heart tinged green like rotten meat. A skeleton
dripping with putrefaction looms before Starbright.

Chi
thumbs the maser to purple, the antimatter beam.

“Leave
us!” he shouts and aims.

But
he can’t shoot. A paralysis grips him.

Now
an entity appears before Ruby. An entity Chi has never seen before: a tall,
slim man with long red hair and dead-white skin, sapphire flames leaping from
his eyes.

Him!

The
question that’s haunted him all summer strikes him like a blow. Who else in the
Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love disappeared into the Hot Dim Spot?

Him.
He
is here. He has
always
been here.

The
demon grins. Each of his teeth is a tiny face like Chi’s, and each face grins,
revealing more teeth, more faces. Faces form in his cheeks and forehead, in the
swinging raw ropes of his hair. No rotting limbs, no putrid entrails. Just him,
Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, over and over and over. He’s never really
seen
himself. His awful face. His awful power.

Chi
feels wasted, plucked out of himself, flung across an abyss.

The
dark park disappears, and a wind sucks him and Starbright and Ruby through a
yawning aperture. Gleaming panels surround them like the hull of a machine.
Black sparks spit and crackle.

The
machine flings them out onto a gray plain.

Ashen
clouds roil around them. A storm thunders and lightning flashes, but the sun
burns above, a sickly yellow. A stench fills Chi’s nose and mouth, the fetor of
sulfur, rotting flesh, forest fires.

Chi staggers
in the storm’s blast and seizes Starbright with one hand, Ruby with the other.
The wind whips Starbright off her feet, levitating her above him. Ruby drops
below him as if the ground can’t hold her. He’s nearly ripped in two between
them, but he holds on. He holds on!
He
is the Axis, the center refusing
to let go.

Red
seeps from the horizon until the sky boils with blood.

Black
lightning knifes the sky, and Chi perches atop a needle of rock, gripping
Starbright and Ruby.

A dreadful
valley burns far below them. A man writhes on a plate while hyenas tear out his
stomach, devouring him alive. Chimeras lope after ragged children. Gargoyles
ravage a screaming woman. Vultures touch down on gut-strewn fields, flesh
dangling from dripping beaks. A masked robot operates a guillotine, hacking off
the heads of handcuffed prisoners, the stained blade rising and falling every
twenty seconds exactly.