Summer of Love, a Time Travel Page 13

  “Ruby,” he says, less patiently. “I don’t have measles.”

  “He attacked me,” Starbright speaks up. Her voice is shrill. “With that black stone-thing. He stabbed me.” She rubs her breastbone.

  Chi starts to laugh, then stops himself. “I didn’t stab you, Starbright. The scanner’s got a small probe, that’s all. The probe is a hundred times finer than a sewing needle. You felt a little prick, that’s all. Isn’t that true?”

  “You stabbed me.” Starbright glares at him with such venom, Ruby revises her opinion of the kid. Not such a little lamb, after all.

  He turns to Ruby. “I’m complying with your house rules, aren’t I?”

  Of course he is. But her stubbornness and paranoia won’t let it go. “You sat down with those dudes. Maybe you didn’t partake, but you passed the bong. Tell me true, once and for all, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. Are you a narc? Did you come to the Haight-Ashbury to collect evidence?”

  “Oh, I did come to collect evidence.”

  “A nonparticipant witness, isn’t that what they call it?” Ruby says in her sweet-as-poison voice.

  “Actually, that’s a fair description.”

  “Damn it, Chi!”

  Starbright drops the back of the mattress, poised to flee.

  Ruby gestures to her, cool it. Call her a fool, but suddenly she’s worried about the kid. “You stay put, Starbright.”

  “I am not a narc!” Chi declares. “I have no wish to harm you! Or Starbright! I swear it! I swear it on anything you want me to swear on.”

  “Swear it on your mother’s grave, and we’ll never mention it again.”

  An unexpected look of sharp sadness crosses his face. A look that shoots right into Ruby’s heart and strikes bull’s-eye.

  “Oh, I can do that,” Chi says. “I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

  *

  They set up a makeshift bedroom in the sitting room on the third floor. At first the kid is unsure, then she joins in Ruby’s enthusiastic rearrangement of the furniture, Chi’s tasteful placement of the Persian carpets and potted plants. Soon they’ve got a cozy little nest all for Starbright with a door that closes and locks, a sloping skylight, a private bath two steps away, and sheets. Clean sheets. The kid’s face begins to shine. She shrugs out of her jacket and carefully hangs it on the hook on the the door.

  Chi beams as if he’s responsible for this minor miracle. “I’ll just go now,” he says, slipping quickly out and clattering down the first three stairs, “and let you lasses rest.”

  “Not so fast, sonny,” Ruby calls to him. “You’re packing some kind of weapon. Aren’t you. Well, aren’t you?”

  He stops and slowly climbs back up.

  “I, for one, will rest a whole lot easier when you tell us what your magic show was all about. Carving up my sidewalk with that… .thingie.”

  “This?” He pulls out the Bic pen.

  Ruby and Starbright both duck.

  “It’s just a maser,” Chi says mildly. He points to tiny graphics along one side. “Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This tool is cool. It’s got quite a range.” The maser is striped with bands of color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Each stripe is subdivided into tiny measurements like the divisions on a ruler.

  “Pretty,” Ruby says. “Is it Japanese?”

  “Yes, it is,” he says with a laugh. “You set the beam you want like this.” He slides a tiny black pointer up and down the tube’s length along the colored stripes, clicking the pointer at various divisions. “Red is good for really tiny jobs. Microorganisms, bacteria, and such. The beam destroys the target, but doesn’t affect anything else.” He points to the orange and yellow bands. “These are higher intensities. I can cut various materials, cauterize a wound, perform surgery, if I need to. Concrete is pretty soft, so I carved the sidewalk on the orange setting. The serious fire-power is here.” He points to the green and blue bands, taking care not to move the pointer. “And I’ve got a frequency that doesn’t apply normal physics—the purple beam. The purple beam is an antimatter emission similar to the energy we employ in the tachyonic shuttle.”

  Ruby is nodding, following along with the logic of his rap, but now she’s stymied. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do we, not completely,” he says darkly. “I’ve come equipped with an active purple beam only if I need to defeat antimatter. I hope I never need to use it.” He tucks the maser back in his pocket. “Under Tenet Seven of the Grandmother Principle, I’m only allowed to use the maser under strict necessity. I’m not allowed to go masering up your world with a modern tool.” That faintly ashamed look. “Guess I messed up tonight.”

  “Antimatter, uh-huh.” Ruby is nonplussed. But he’s so earnest. So convincing! An awful thought strikes her: is Chi insane? Still, she saw him carve concrete with her own eyes. Suddenly her head is spinning. “The royal we again. Who’s we?”

  “He said he’s from the future,” Starbright chimes in, looking Chi up and down. “Or Mars. I can’t tell which.”

  “Guess I told everyone.” He brushes back his beautiful red hair and blushes. Charming, to see this young dude blush, his pale face as fine and chiseled as a movie actor’s. “They were too drunk and stoned to take me seriously, though, weren’t they?” His contrite look competes with a smirk of triumph. Won that competition, brother.

  “But I’m not drunk or stoned,” Ruby says. “And I recall you used a weird word for what you are.”

  “I’m a tachyporter. I’m on a t-port, and now I’ve blown the hell out of Tenet Five. I’m not supposed to reveal I’m a t-porter.” As if that explains everything. He paces around the room. “Ah, the Summer of Love. It’s getting to me, you know? I’m not allowed to get involved. But I am involved. Only ten days, and I am involved. Sometimes I give my wages to a sad little runaway.” He faces them. “Well. I’m not authorized to reveal my identity, but now you know, and it’s all true. My Now is in your future.”

  These are strange and wondrous days. These are also paranoid days when your lover turns out to be a dealer and his best friend turns out to be a narc and the best friend’s lady turns state’s evidence, and you wind up in the slam.

  “You’ve got a more interesting rap than the average head,” Ruby says. “But you can’t fool me. My ma weaned me on Superhero comics and Lord of the Rings.”

  “I’m not making this up,” Chi says.

  “Uh-huh. You say you’re from our future. What you mean is, you’re just a time traveler. Right, am I right?”

  “I’m not just a time traveler,” he says, annoyed. “I’m a t-porter. Developing tachyportation cost us a fortune. And it isn’t exactly traveling, like going from one place to another. All of spacetime is One Day. With our superluminal application, I transmit from my Now to your Now. A When to a When.”

  Chi glances around the room with such tangible anxiety that alarm needles up Ruby’s spine. She glances around, too.

  “The good news is everything hasn’t disappeared just because I’ve told you this,” Chi says, his voice thick with relief.

  Starbright’s jaw just about reaches her collarbones.

  “Cool,” Ruby says. Teach these kids a thing or two. “So. Whereabouts in the future are you from, sonny?”

  “Oh, I’m from here. San Francisco.” He still looks worried, like she might find out something she isn’t supposed to know. “Sausalito, actually.”

  “Then we’re next-door neighbors,” Ruby says. “I grew up in Marin City.”

  “Sausalito, 2467, Ruby. The When-to-When is five centuries, one hundred twenty-five days, fifty-three minutes, thirty-nine seconds, and three hundred milliseconds, minus one picosecond, which accounts for superluminal drift.”

  “Minus one picosecond,” Ruby says. “Is that B.C. or A.D. or A.C. or D.C.?”

  “You don’t believe me?” Chi says, widening his eyes.

  “Sonny, we may be psychedelicized in the Haight-Ashbury, but we’re also scienc
e-fictionalized. Ken Kesey claims his group-mind experience is Childhood’s End. Timothy Leary believes we’re mutating our genes into starseeds. There’s a house in the Haight called The Shire. This has all happened since 1962. Our lives have become a fantasy, and fantasy is becoming life.” She laughs, a little ruefully. “These are strange and wondrous days.”

  “Yeah,” Starbright says. “Look at the guy with the eyes. He said he was from Mars, too.”

  “I never said I was from Mars,” Chi says.

  “So where’s your time machine?” Starbright demands. “Like in The Time Machine. You can’t fool me, either. I saw the movie with Penny Lane when we were kids. And, oh, the time machine was the prettiest thing, like a gold and leather sleigh with a stick shift and everything.” She blushes. “I haven’t learned how to drive a stick shift.”

  “Um,” Chi says, “I haven’t got a time machine.”

  Ruby says, “Why am I not surprised.”

  “The tachyonic shuttle doesn’t work that way,” he says hastily. “The shuttle exists only in my Now, not in yours. We install the shuttle at a site that’s been stable for a long time.”

  “And then what happens?” Ruby says with a wink at Starbright, playing along.

  “I step through the shuttle and arrive in your Now. On a certain day in your Now, I’ll step back and arrive in my Now. When the shuttle engages this spacetime, I’ll transmit. It’s not easy—it’s hellish, actually—but now that I’ve done it once, I’m confident I can do it again.” He grimaces. “Fairly confident.”

  “Uh-huh.” An eerie feeling creeps over Ruby as she sits in the half-lit room, jiving with this strange young beautiful man. But she doesn’t want to surrender to the feeling, doesn’t want to let her mind spin off in some half-comprehended revelation. She’s got work to do! She’s got a pregnant runaway under her roof, plus a… .t-porter? She doesn’t want her whole life changed just this minute. “Why aren’t you supposed to reveal your identity? I mean, aside from getting your butt thrown in the laughing academy?”

  “Laughing academy?”

  “That’s tired old Beat talk for the nuthouse.” When he still furrows his brow, she adds, “A lunatic asylum.”

  “Ah.” Chi nods as if he’s just learned something he’s always wanted to learn. “I’m not supposed to reveal my identity because the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle all turn around the mandate of nonintervention to preserve the timeline and conserve spacetime.”

  “Oh! Well, of course. Silly me,” Ruby says.

  Starbright speaks up in a trembling voice. “What is this Grandmother Principle?”

  “That’s the fundamental principle of t-porting,” Chi says. “Under Tenet One, for example, you can’t murder your own grandmother. If you could, you wouldn’t exist in the first place to go do the deed.”

  “I can dig it,” Ruby says. “If you allowed for that kind of anarchy, reality would be mighty strange. The world as we know it could all disappear. Right, am I right?”

  Chi looks around the room with that sharp apprehension.

  Ruby’s skin crawls.

  “But why would anyone go and murder her granma?” Starbright says.

  Ruby turns to find the kid is crying.

  “Well, you wouldn’t,” Chi tells her gently. “It’s just a Tenet developed for t-port projects, that’s all. A thought experiment, you see? It’s just a way of thinking.”

  “I think it’s a terrible way of thinking,” Starbright sniffs. “My granma was the only one who ever loved me. I could never go and kill my granma. Never. Not for anything.”

  “The kid’s got a point,” Ruby says. “The way you think about things shapes the way your reality is. All this talk about killing someone’s grandmother. It’s not very cool, man from Mars.”

  Chi stares at her and Starbright, aghast. “I don’t want to kill anyone! I don’t want to hurt a flea,” he says, scratching his ankle.

  Uh-huh. And they all say goodnight.

  The Haight-Ashbury is mobbed with Navajo chiefs, Merlin’s magicians, Egyptian pharaohs, guys with four eyes, men from Mars.

  And time travelers. The Summer of Love has got plenty of time travelers.

  July 9, 1967

  A

  Dog Day

  7

  There is a Mountain

  Life is sacred; Susan’s life is sacred. Children are the godhead manifest; she is the godhead manifest. Freedom means nothing left to lose? At fourteen, she’s got plenty to lose, and she’s got to get free.

  That doesn’t mean—no thanks to Ruby—she feels good about it.

  “I’m eighteen,” Susan lies to the law clerk in the waiting room outside the hip lawyer’s office. The lie comes no easier. The lie has not helped Susan one bit. She’s not even sure why she keeps telling it, except that she scored a fake ID saying she’s eighteen, though the photo doesn’t look much like her. She’s so paranoid about coming to the hip lawyer’s office—despite the fact he is, by definition, cool—she doesn’t want to show the fake ID to the law clerk. He doesn’t ask to see it.

  The law clerk, a rabbinical guy with a ragged beard and sleepy eyes, peers at her through steel-rim spectacles. He aims a long-suffering look at Ruby.

  Ruby shrugs and stares out the window at the fog-shrouded morning. Her face is set in stone. She crosses her arms over her chest, taps her toe.

  Next to NAME, the law clerk scribbles, “Starbrite.” Next to AGE, he scribbles, “TEEN.” “Even if that’s so,” he says, shifting the clipboard to his other knee, “and frankly, I find that hard to believe, miss, but even if that’s so, you’re still a minor at eighteen. So even if you meet the other requirements under Section 25951, it’s likely you’ll need your parents’ consent to get a legal abortion.”

  At fourteen, Susan has read Rilke auf deutsch and mastered intermediate algebra. She can identify the bones in the human ear and would have won her debate against the Vietnam War if the Poli Sci teacher hadn’t been a hawk. So this scene in the hip lawyer’s office is too weird. This is her body. Doesn’t her body belong to her? If she hasn’t got a right to say what happens to her body, who does? Isn’t she supposed to be free in the United States of America? Why does Section 25951 say she’s not free?

  “Kid,” Ruby whispers urgently. “You don’t have to do this. Your folks will help you out. I’m sure they will.”

  “No.” Susan is very sure about that. Mom and Daddy won’t help her out. They never have.

  “You’re talking about a human life,” Ruby persists.

  “Right,” Susan says. Her life.

  God, her head is fuzzy. Her stomach lurches. She recalls the butter-making demonstration when she was in third grade. The teacher sloshed the milk around inside a milk churn until greasy gobs floated up. She feels just like that milk churn. She takes out a Tums and crunches it in her teeth. Every morning she goes through a whole roll. Sometimes two.

  Ruby agreed to sneak out of the house and take her to the hip lawyer’s office so as not to disturb Chi, asleep on the living room couch. Ruby is cool. She knows Susan doesn’t want Chi to know she got knocked up. It’s too embarrassing.

  “Have you gone to Planned Parenthood?” the law clerk asks, cupping his hand over a yawn.

  “Yeah, they gave me the test.” As if there was any doubt in Susan’s mind.

  Three Gypsy Jokers are whooping it up with the hip lawyer in his office. “So I sez to him I’ll get mine up, officer, if you get yours up. Haw haw haw.” The trio is here for legal advice about a midnight bust. Another groovy Saturday night, apparently. The Gypsy Jokers are accompanied by Dirty David, a member of the Double Barrel Boogie Band entourage. Dirty David is a small, gaunt man with a headful of curls he preens obsessively. When Susan first walked in, Dirty David ignored her as if he’d never seen her before.

  Now Susan catches him giving her the up-and-down—what’re you doing here?—written all over his face.

  “What does Section 25951 say if she claims rape?” Ruby asks the law cl
erk.

  “She’ll need to swear out an affidavit attesting to the facts of the alleged rape, and the D.A. um would need to find probable cause that the man she names is the perpetrator and that a rape occurred. If the D.A. doesn’t find probable cause, the committee can’t approve the abortion.”

  “Wait, wait,” Ruby says. “You mean she hasn’t pressed criminal charges, but she has to prove this probable cause business according to a criminal standard in order to get medical treatment?”

  Susan smiles. She loves seeing Ruby go at it.

  The law clerk is unimpressed. “An unapproved abortion is not medical treatment, ma’am. An unapproved abortion is a crime in California.”

  “Look here, sonny,” Ruby says. “I revere life. I happen to believe that Starbright should have the baby, even after what happened to her, and put the child up for adoption. I also happen to believe that abortion is a moral decision, not a criminal action.”

  “That’s the law, ma’am.”

  “What will they do if I get an illegal abortion?” Susan asks. “Throw me in jail?”

  The law clerk ignores her. “Now, even if the D.A. finds probable cause, it’s been our experience—and I admit, we don’t have much experience—that the committee may still require parental consent before an abortion is approved for a minor.”

  “The committee,” Susan says. “What is the committee?”

  The law clerk takes off his spectacles and rubs his eyes. “The committee consists of three licensed physicians on the medical staff of an accredited hospital. They must agree unanimously. The committee must find either a substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or um mental health of the mother or that the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. We’ve um been through the rape angle. I don’t suppose,” the law clerk says gloomily, “there’s an incest angle?”

  “No incest angle,” Susan whispers.

  She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to claim rape. She doesn’t want to face Stan the Man—whom she hasn’t seen since the afternoon after the Festival of Growing Things—and accuse him of rape. She just doesn’t want to have his baby. She just wants this nightmare to be over.