Summer of Love, a Time Travel (6 page)

But
why carve those three symbols inside a triangle? Why on a pillar in the Portals
of the Past? And who had carved them, long ago?

No
one knew. No one could trace the source.

Chi
wishes he could disbelieve his eyes. The link to the loop, the last piece of
the puzzle, the final bit of evidence that sealed his ticket to a dangerous
tachyportation.

The
damn carving.
It’s gone.

An
awful thought strikes him:
What if they made a mistake?

Which
leads him to his last point of reference. He checks for his time of arrival,
peering at his microfusion wristwatch. The watch is guaranteed not to lose more
than a second every two millennia, and he’s only t-ported five hundred years. June
21 to June 21, San Francisco 2467 to San Francisco 1967, portals to portals.

It’s
supposed to be ten-fifteen in the morning--five centuries, one-hundred-twenty-five
days, fifty-three minutes, thirty-nine seconds, and three hundred milliseconds,
minus one picosecond to account for superluminal drift.

Instead,
it’s nearly half-past ten at night. He’s twelve hours and ten minutes late.

He’s
late. He’s fucking
late.

Chi’s
knees buckle. He slumps on the steps of the Portals of the Past, stunned. The
rank green water of Lloyd Lake shimmers, the surface splintering from the dance
of night insects. He wishes he could laugh at the pretentious name of this
swampy little pond that will, in a hundred years, freeze solid. In two hundred
years, seep with radioactive saltwater. In three hundred years, come alive again
beneath the dome. In four hundred years, serve as sanctuary for rare fish and
birds. And in five hundred years? This swampy little pond will provide the
required humidity to facilitate a tachyportation on its shores.

His
t-port.

The
awful chasm of the centuries yawns before him.

Towering
eucalyptus trees rustle in a night breeze. Cattails, vervain, and mint stir on
the shoreline. An insomniac duck quacks.

Chi
is all alone in the Portals of the Past.

He
heaves himself to his feet and mutters gloomily, “Let the Summer of Love
Project begin.”

*  
*   *

A
woman’s laughter floats across Lloyd Lake from John F. Kennedy Boulevard, a
bright chuckle like that of his lass, Bella Venus. Ah, a woman’s laughter.
Still the same.

What
did Chi expect? People haven’t changed all that much, not really. His neckjack,
his neurobics, the aftereffects of the radiation vaccine, even his gene
tweaking—these have improved on the original design, certainly, but haven’t
made him a new breed of human. The people strolling on the boulevard are modern
people like him. They’re neither Neanderthals from the past nor devolts from
the future. They may differ in circumstances, but not in fundamentals.

Two
women stroll around Lloyd Lake. From their colorful costumes, a Cherokee maiden
and an Elizabethan lady. “Hey, man, got a joint?” they call. He steps into the
shadows without a word. “Asshole,” they call again.

He
resists the urge to advise them to wash out their unmaidenly mouths with soap
and swallows his outrage. He didn’t ask for this t-port, he was drafted. His
graduate thesis on liver clones—a vital topic!—had to be put on hold. Not to
mention he’d just started the affair with Bella Venus. Their families were much
excited by their meeting, which could have been arranged, but had been random.
The randomness added a keen edge to their lovemaking.

Give
it up? Give
her
up? For how long? Seventy-six days in the past? Hasn’t
his family done enough for the Great Good?

Apparently
not. He--Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco—is a cosmicist. Heir to a distinguished cosmicist
dynasty. To give is best. Live responsibly or die. He’s expected to sacrifice.

Especially
in a Crisis.

He
glances over his shoulder, but the women are gone. He unsnaps a neurobic bead
from his pharmaceutical necklace and pops the bead open, inhaling the
metallic-tinged vapor.

His
head clears. Better. Better.

Now,
then. He may be half a day late, but at least he’s made it in one piece. He wriggles
his toes in the Beatle boots, examines his fingers. Mega. Toes and fingers all
in place. In the early days, some t-porters lost fingers or ears or found
themselves buried hip-high in concrete. When to When isn’t the only
calculation. Where to Where counts for a lot, too, and he’s arrived right on
target--at the Portals of the Past.

The
Portals have stood exactly in the same place for nearly six hundred years. The majestic
doorway was all that remained of the Towne mansion after the Great Earthquake
and Fire of 1906. Retrieved from the ashes and set on the shores of Lloyd Lake,
the Portals proved ideal.

Permanence
in the face of flux.

Chi
looks around.

Right
before he transmitted, the tachyonic shuttle surrounded the Portals. Steelyn
lattices, calcite crystals, an artillery of photon guns. A thousand imploders arranged
in a half-moon. The awesome dish of the chronometer. SOL Project staff scurried
around, and his skipfather stood near, whispering final instructions. The Chief
Archivist and her three top ferrets checked and rechecked historical sources on
their knuckletops.

His
skipmother stood near, too, fidgeting, more nervous than usual. Parental
anxiety, Chi thought. But then, to his amazement, just before he stepped
through the shuttle, she slipped something in his jeans pocket and whispered,
“Consider impact before you consider benefit, my son.”

Now
all of it, all of them, gone.

*  
*   *

Chi
strides up the boulevard through the park. Apprehension knocks in his chest,
yielding to anger. Mistakes. He can’t afford mistakes, his or anyone else’s.
What if the Archivists haven’t found the right Hot Dim Spot? What if the SOL
Project Directors haven’t chosen the right Open Time Loop? Mistakes happen. The
Save Betty Project proved just how deadly mistakes could turn out to be.

Chi
quickens his pace, apprehension and anger deepening to dread. What if he
returns to the Portals of the Past in seventy-six days and the shuttle fails to
connect to this Now? What if he can’t translate-transmit? What if he can’t return
to the Portals, at all?

Then
he’s trapped in Closed Time Loop, that’s what. A CTL, from which there is no
escape, never has been an escape, never will be an escape. When does a CTL
begin? No one knows. It just happens.

Chi
slows, breathing hard against the steady upward slope of the boulevard. He
hears chaotic noise in the distance, the rumble of a crowd. He smells a
barnyard odor, like what you’d smell passing near a zoo.

Someone
shrieks in the night.

Ahead,
around the bend, rises the flat roof of the De Young Museum. A large stone sphinx
crouches in the darkness.

Adrenaline
shoots through Chi’s blood. Could demons be invading here and now? For that is
his skipfather’s theory about why the Summer of Love is a Hot Dim Spot. It’s a
gateway for demons.

People
gather on the boulevard.

Wary,
Chi joins them.

A young
teen lies writhing on the asphalt. Cropped black hair plasters her tearstained
face. A teenage boy tries to hold her, but her frantic, flailing strength
nearly overpowers him.

“My
heart!” she screams. “Jesus Christ, my heart!”

“What
is it?” Chi asks quietly, jumping at the sound of his own voice.

“Her
heart, dincha hear?” says the struggling boy. “Some dude in the band wouldn’t
look at her, an’ her heart is broke.”

“She’s
trippin’ on Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace,” says the boy’s companion,
another teen in a bush hat who glances anxiously over his shoulder. He digs a
capsule out of his shirt pocket. “Hey, Bobby, get this red down her fuckin’
throat, and let’s split, man.”

“Stop,”
Chi starts to say. “Don’t do it. You need to--”

The
teen in the bush hat whips around, thrusts his face in Chi’s. He must be all of
seventeen, but his face is as gaunt as an old man’s. “Need to do
what?
”
His hard eyes flick over Chi’s hair and clothes.

Chi
backs away. Is his costume wrong? “Leave her alone.”

“Yeah?
You a narc, man?”

“I’m
havin’ a heart attack! Jesus Christ, Bobby, I’m dyin’!”

“You
need to be cool,” Chi says. This girl cannot be the one he’s searching for. Her
hair is all wrong: too short, too dark. “Just be cool.”

The
teen in the bush hat hands the capsule to Bobby, who tries to push it in the
girl’s mouth. She clamps her lips shut. Bobby pinches her nostrils. When she
gulps for air, he jams in the capsule, forcing her to swallow.

“Jesus,
you’re tryin’ to
kill
me!”

“Shut
up, Penny Lane,” Bobby says.

“Somebody
help me! Help me, please!”

Bobby
slaps Penny Lane’s face. “I said shut up!”

“He.
. . .he’s trying to kill me!”

Chi
jogs away.

Gossip, Innuendo
& All The News That Fits

Psychotomimetic
amphetamines are seen in the Haight-Ashbury in June, 1967. Stanley Owsley III,
the famed underground LSD chemist, allegedly named STP after Scientifically
Treated Petroleum, the popular oil additive, “because it makes your motor run
smoother and lubricates your head.” Dealers claim STP produces three days of
Serenity, Tranquility and Peace.

Five
thousand hits of STP were passed out free during the Celebration of the Summer
Solstice in Golden Gate Park. Users experienced, over a period of twenty-four
hours, heart palpitations, muscle tremors, hallucinations eighty times more
potent than mescaline, acute anxiety, and, in certain cases, paranoid
psychosis. Barbiturates typically used to calm a bad LSD trip intensify STP’s
adverse symptoms and should be strictly avoided.

Love Needs Care
by David E. Smith,
M.D. and John Luce

(Little Brown and
Co., 1968)

It’s
not like Chi to jog away from a lass in distress, but he’s got to get on with
the SOL Project.
No mistakes.
The girl will probably go the
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and receive treatment there in the days
following the Celebration of the Summer Solstice. She may be the girl who will
be admitted under one of her street names to the Psychiatric Aid and Referral
Service and diagnosed as psychotic, but return to the street. Not long after,
she will die from a rape-beating in Golden Gate Park. Her alias is recorded in
the Archives, but her legal name has long disappeared. She is an a.k.a., then a
Jane Doe.

Hair
plastered over her face, screaming, “Help me!” So young.

Forget
it, Chi. He must find the Axis, that’s all. That’s the sole object of the SOL
Project--find
her.
Only
her.
What other responsibility does he
owe these people? People who started the ruin of the future?

Anyway,
you cannot change the past. Everybody knows that. Under Tenet One of the Grandmother
Principle, you cannot kill any of your lineal ancestors prior to his or her
historical death. And under Tenet Three, he cannot affect any person in the
past, including that girl, unless the project directors have authorized him to
do so. He cannot aid her, cannot abet her, cannot save her. Or more precisely,
he’s not
allowed
to. Not even if he wanted to.

*  
*   *

Chi strides
to the corner of Stanyan Street and takes his first look at the Haight-Ashbury.
At eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, bongo drums thump, laughter shrieks, bells
clang, tambourines jangle. Automobiles and motorcycles roar, horns honk. A mob
swarms over the sidewalks, into the park, down the Panhandle, on the streets.
It’s absolutely appalling. The stench of gasoline and body odor, mixed with
sickly sweet incense, nauseates him.

Is
this a vision of hell? To the technopolistic plutocracy, this is a paradise,
ripe and ready for exploitation.