Summer of Love, a Time Travel (50 page)

Many,
many wonders.

And
things people decided
not
to do. When damage to the atmosphere was the
worst they’d seen, some scientists wanted to blast the sky with lasers or pump toxic
chemicals into the air with the hope that the chemicals would recombine with
radioactive molecules and neutralize them. Guided by cosmicism, people decided
to do nothing. They hid beneath their domes and invented Block while the Earth
healed.

“Sky-seeding
does
work,” Chi says. “The radiation vaccine
does
work. Telespace
does
work. T-portation
does
work.”

“Most
of the time,” Ruby says.

Chi
gives her a wry grin. “Most of the time. In ways great and small, the future
does
work. We’ve survived.”

Birds
begin their early morning ecstasies. Ruby’s cats stir, wander to the kitchen,
and gather around the fridge, singing for their breakfast. Starbright snores against
Chi’s shoulder.

He whispers
to his magic ring, “Katie, off.” The lavender field shrinks to a pinpoint and
vanishes.

Ruby
yawns and stretches. “That was your family album. Right, am I right?”

He
glances at her with bleary eyes. “Parts of it.” The elegant lad looks the worse
for wear after his rumble alongside Hells Angels, not to mention his rumble
with the demons.

“Cool.”
As Ruby watches, the scratches on his cheek heal. The bruises on his forehead
and jaw fade. His split lip mends. Gene-tweaking, uh-huh. “What an amazing
family. So talented and brilliant and fortunate.”

“We’ve
suffered, too. We’ve all suffered to save the Earth.”

“But
you’re not a devolt or a day-laborer on the street.”

“No,
I’m not. I probably wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“So
this future you’ve shown us is selective, isn’t it?”

“Everything
is selective.” He laughs dryly. “You’re a tough nut, Ruby A. Maverick. Mary
Alexander would like you.”

Ruby
laughs, pleased in spite of herself. “You showed us all that because you wanted
to give us hope. You wanted to give the kid hope.”

Starbright’s
sleeping face is stained with tears of grief.

“Did
I?”

“I
hope so,” Ruby says.

“And
you?”

“Man
from Mars, I abandoned hope a thousand lifetimes ago.”

“I
don’t believe you.”

She
shrugs. Not enough of a cheerleader for him? Oh, well.

He
gently rearranges Starbright on the couch, then abruptly stands. He strides to
the kitchen, pulls out his maser, and aims at the cats, all her beautiful
beloved hungry cats gathered around the fridge. He fires before she can stop
him or scream.

Red
light strikes them, bathing the kitchen in a scarlet glow.

Now
Ruby screams. “
What
are you
doing?”

Starbright
flinches in her sleep, crying out, “Nance? Nance?”

“These
damn fleas are driving me crazy.” Chi scratches his ankle. “Don’t worry, it’s
only the micro beam. Oh, I’ll catch hell for using a modern technology to
affect the past. But you know what? I don’t give a damn.” He aims the maser at
his ankles, shoots the red beam all over his socks.

“You
little shit!” Ruby yells.

Alana
flops on her butt and scratches her chin. Black specks fly out of her plumy
white fur. Luna does her calisthenics, a clawed hind paw deftly raised to her
shoulder. She scratches, and fleas fall out dead.

Ruby
roars with laughter, waking up the neighborhood.

Chi
looks around. “Guess I didn’t blow up all of spacetime this time, either.” He
pockets the maser. “Dig it, Ruby. The future
will
liberate Schrodinger’s
Cat!”

September
4, 1967

A New Moon in Virgo

19

Hello Goodbye

Susan
wakes to rain pattering on the roof. The skylight is as gray as her mood. Chi
told her last night, as they cuddled on Ruby’s couch, that the Hot Dim Spot
will close for good at midnight tonight. He doesn’t come out and say so, but
she knows what that means. His blue eyes got bluer. It means he’s got to leave.
Leave her.

She’s
got to leave, too. Ninth grade starts next week. But how can she go? How can
she leave the Haight-Ashbury and return to her square parents and her horrid
school?

Why
oh why does the Summer of Love have to end?

She
shivers. It’s cold inside her little room. Cold outside in the rainy morning.
And even colder in her heart.

In
another two months, Shaker Heights will be freezing.

She
twirls a lock of her hair, bites the split ends, and spits them out, a bad
habit she hasn’t indulged in for two whole months. Twirl, bite, spit. She
thinks of Cyn’s ragged fingernails. What used to be Cyn’s ragged fingernails.

Three
days ago, Cyn married the handsome young black man, who turns out to be the son
of a prosperous saloonkeeper in Oakland. Eli’s father told Eli to lose the Black
Panther crap and put on a bartender’s apron, if he’s got a child on the way.
Eli does. Cyn is pregnant and all grown up at sixteen. She’s grown out her
fingernails, long and strong, and polished them pink. That was the first thing
Susan noticed when she admired Cyn’s wedding ring as they sat on the grass of the
Panhandle for the last time.

“Dr.
Smith over at the clinic?” Cyn said. “He gave me some pills,
good
pills,
supposed to help me with my moods? I feel better all ready.”

Susan
twists another lock of her hair. She’s got to go back to high school. Twirl,
bite, spit.

The
private investigator tracked her down at 555 Clayton Street the day after Nance
died. He questioned her for nearly an hour. The PI turns out to be the dude in
the military cap. Susan promised him she’d contact her parents herself if he
didn’t turn her over to the police.

“Groovy,”
the PI said. “I always thought you were a foxy lady.”

Nance’s
body was so badly burned that the coroner had to match her dental records at
twelve years old—her stepfather hadn’t sent her to the dentist for two years—to
the jawbone left in the charred corpse. Susan heard that the stepfather
declined to collect the remains of his stepdaughter. She also heard that Nance’s
mom took Nance’s brother Dave and moved in with her aunt.

Professor
Zoom walked out of the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General, never to be
seen or heard from again. Stan the Man split town the night of the fire,
destination unknown. The Double Barrel Boogie Band failed to return to the
wreckage of their house when authorities discovered a fake name had been signed
on the lease and the rent was six months overdue.

Papa
Al was identified in the
Berkeley Barb
as a speed pusher recruiting
young dealers at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Oh,
that’s
how he paid
his rent. Teddy Bear split to Mexico. Dr. David Smith struggles on at the
clinic, with more patients than ever and a lot less money.

Leo
Gorgon returned to New York City, along with his heroin habit. Hairy Harry and
the Hells Angels took their hogs out for a spin to Florida. Stovepipe was found
in Richmond behind the Pony Saloon, his wrists and ankles bound and four
bullets in the back of his head. Susan sees the Lizard’s ugly mug on the Wanted
bulletin board at the post office.

The
mouse magician parades forlornly down Haight Street, ringing his bell and
waving his skull-topped wand. But only on Saturdays.

The
woman Susan knew only as Lady May could not be identified at all. The burned
remains of whoever Lady May was were placed in a box and filed in the public morgue
under the name Jane Doe.

Susan
packs her overnight bag, wondering how on earth she’s going to get home. She’s
got exactly two dollars and forty-six cents left.

Late
morning slips into lunchtime. Susan wanders down to the kitchen. Chi lounges at
the table while Ruby prepares food at her cutting board. He doesn’t have to
pack. He came with nothing but the clothes on his back, which look and smell as
fresh as the day she first met him.

“I’m
becoming a grup,” Susan complains, sliding into a kitchen chair.

“A
grup?” Ruby says.

“Yeah.
Like in ‘Miri,’ on
Star Trek.
All the flower children who came to the
Haight-Ashbury, we’re like the three-hundred-year-old children living on Miri’s
planet. Now that we’ve got to go home, it’s like losing our childhood. Losing
the innocence of the Haight-Ashbury.”

“Innocence.”
Ruby dices scallions, zucchini, and Roma tomatoes fresh from the garden. “I can
think of a lot of words for the Haight-Ashbury, kid, but innocence isn’t one of
them.”

“But
it is, Ruby. And when we return to the soulless suburbs, we’re all going to turn
into grups and contract some terrible disease that will rot us into madness and
death, just exactly like the children who come of age on Miri’s planet.”

“Starbright,”
Ruby says, “life is not one big
Star Trek
metaphor.”

“Yes,
it is,” Susan says gloomily. “It is to me.”

Ruby
is more cheerful than usual. Is she glad they’re finally going to leave her in
peace? She drizzles olive oil in her iron skillet, tosses in the vegetables,
and heaps on garlic and herbs.

“I
don’t think Starbright is becoming a grup quite yet, do you, Chi?”

Chi
gives her a wink and a marvelous smile, but he’s preoccupied, fiddling with his
magic ring.

“Madness
and death,” Susan says. “Madness and death.”

Chi
projects the lavender field into the palm of his hand, whispering Katie this
and Katie that. Seen this small, the holoid field strikes Susan as ordinary as
an old boot. He looks troubled, though everything seems to be as stupidly right
as it should be.

“You
talk to that thing more than you talk to me.”

“When
are you going to call your parents?” he says.

“God.”

“You
promised.”

“I
know, but—“

“But
nothing.”

“I’m.
. . .I’m scared! I don’t know what to say!”

“Try
‘hi,’” Ruby says, spooning sautéed vegetables over angel hair noodles.

“You
don’t know my father.”

“That’s
right, I don’t.” Ruby slides steaming bowls across the table to her and Chi and
sits down with a bowl of her own. “But you do, kid. And you’re lucky you do.”

“Lucky!
How am I lucky?”

“You’ve
got
a father,” Ruby says, sipping red wine. “You
know
him. You’ll
probably know him many more years to come.” At Susan’s puzzled look, Ruby adds,
“My pa died at Pearl Harbor. A war hero, huh. He was my daddy, and nobody else could
compare. I was nine when he died. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about
things. Ma working so hard at Marinship. Getting the cancer. Me and my shop.
What I’ve made of my life.”

She
glances out the window and shrugs, and Susan sees for the first time how that particular
movement of Ruby’s shoulder is like rolling off a weight that keeps rolling
back on.

“I’ve
missed my pa my whole life. So you call your father,” she says, blinking back the
slickness in her eyes, “and be glad you’ve got him, no matter what a pain in
the ass you think he is at this point in your life. Right, am I right, Chi? You
going home to your pa?”

“No,”
he says curtly. “I never knew my father, at all. Or my mother.”

Susan
and Ruby stare at him, openmouthed.

“You’re
an orphan, Chi?” Susan says. “You never told me that.”

“Oh,
I’ve got skipparents. Abraxis and Ariel Herbert.”

“But.
. . .you must know who your parents were!”

“Of
course I do. Mars Herbert and Calliope Alexander. She of the strawberry hair.”
He tosses back his own strawberry hair and laughs in his mirthless way.
“Calliope chose my name. How she loved fanciful, mythological things.”