Summer of Love, a Time Travel Page 16

  But where did the Axis spend the summer? The Archives contained no clue. No incidents of note took place in Shaker Heights that summer. The Axis made no mark. Minors didn’t carry scannable IDs, have retinal links to a family database, get fitted with telelinks. Minors her age didn’t carry a driver’s license since they weren’t allowed to drive until the age of sixteen. Minors didn’t possess their own credits in 1967. The Axis didn’t acquire her own Visa card until 1978.

  When it comes to the Axis, the Summer of Love is a classic Dim Spot. Chi sighs. How Hot? Impossible to say. When the Archivists finally targeted her, too much data had disappeared.

  After all the frustration, Chi has discovered one prime piece of evidence that compels him to watch and protect Starbright, whoever she turns out to be. He got an excellent scan as they sat on the sidewalk in front of the Mystic Eye. The one time he got close enough to press the scanner against Starbright’s chest, he obtained a full probe. She’s got a sound heart, good lungs, other functions fine. And that distinctive double blip echoing out of her womb. Starbright is pregnant.

  When Chi analyzed the results later that night, he almost shouted for joy. Yes!

  For if spacetime is to be preserved, the timeline to be conserved, and the future survives the Summer of Love, the Axis will be pregnant when she registers for the ninth grade. Her parents will be compelled to submit this fact to the school administration. In the spring of 1968, the Axis will deliver a healthy, six-pound, five-ounce, brown-eyed daughter. The Axis will name her Jessica.

  If Starbright is the Axis, then Starbright must be well and truly pregnant when Chi transmits from September 4, 1967 to September 4, 2467.

  And she is, Chi rejoices. She is.

  *

  Chi clatters back down the stairs to the garden, seizes the shovel, and thrusts the blade in the rocky soil. Physical toil works off some of his frustration. Cabbages go here, carrots there, lettuce and onions in alternate rows. Chi has always found gardening a fine meditation, though he’s only worked his family’s gardens and orchards beneath their private dome. Not under the open sky. Not like this. It’s taken some getting used to.

  A pair of butterflies called painted ladies flutter around a purple thistle. These people consider thistles weeds but, in his Now, thistles are prized medicinal plants.

  “You’re not cultivating the yard?” he chastised Ruby.

  “Don’t get back-to-the-land with me, sonny,” Ruby huffed. “I’m running my store. I haven’t got time.”

  “What a resource,” he persisted. “What a waste.”

  When he woke the next morning, Chi found a long-handled shovel, a bag of live earth, and seed packets on the floor beside the couch. Ruby has all sorts of ways of expressing herself.

  Now he flings away rocky soil. Cucumbers will work, tomatoes, too. He’s not sure what trouble Ruby will have with slugs and rabbits, but she won’t have to worry about deer in the middle of San Francisco, 1967. Deer wandered here a century ago, and deer will wander here centuries from now, but not this summer. In two decades, what people believed would become the greenhouse age will begin with a scorching summer. But in three decades, the world will experience the coldest weather in seventy-five years. The technopolistic plutocracy will manipulate the law based on faulty science and outright fraud. Golden Gate Park will wither in a prolonged killing cold spell. The Haight-Ashbury and the Avenues will burn to the ground in the catastrophic fire of 2129 because water mains fail, badly outdated after the bankrupt government can’t finance retrofitting. In three centuries, one of the first cosmicist domes will be erected over this entire area. Cosmicists will privately fund the dome and refuse public admission to New Golden Gate Preserve.

  One day, after the brown ages have passed, trees will bud in this yard again. Flowers will bloom and birds will cheer. Raccoons and rabbits will wander fearlessly because no one except cosmicist caretakers will be allowed inside the dome. Painted ladies will flutter around purple thistles. White-tailed deer will nibble at grass along the curbs of a long-vanished Haight Street and around the pillars of the Portals of the Past.

  That’s when deer will come to this yard again. Only then.

  Chi leans on the shovel, his head spinning.

  How does he know all this? After a frustrating week of testing the contraband holoids, Chi finally found another crystal sliver he could access. Bright red alphanumerics popped into the lavender field:

  “Date: 07-07-1967. You may insert Disc 2 now.”

  “Go, K-T,” Chi said and, in the dead of night while everyone slept, he boggled his mind over the future of this neighborhood. At midnight, in the sidebar, the alphanumerics flashed again:

  “Date: 07-08-1967. You may insert Disc 3 now.”

  He got a good look at history, and not the usual drill. Oh, every child knew the world’s history for the past two and half millennia. Prehistory, the ancient civilizations, the rise of Christianity, European exploration, and so on. The rise of the United States of America, the military-industrial complex. The precipitous rise of the technopolistic plutocracy. The emergence of devolts—an entire mutant population descended from drug addicts. The First Atomic War, the Second Atomic War. The brown ages, the world population crisis. A telelinker could jack into telespace and crunch humanity’s history in thirty minutes.

  But Chi’s never seen the files on Discs 2 and 3. He’s never witnessed the far changes that flow from the Haight-Ashbury in such intimate detail. He’s never seen the human faces.

  Why did Chi’s skipmother slip him the contraband discs?

  At first Chi was grateful, intrigued. But his gratitude turned sour when he realized she’d prioritized and date-coded the holoids, dribbling access to him like a game of hide-and-seek. What does his skipmother know? What secret is she keeping from everyone? Including him? Especially him?

  Chi’s sourness turned to anger after he viewed Discs 2 and 3. The scheming cosmicist. “Consider impact before you consider benefit, my son,” she said. The cosmicist mandate of nonintervention resonates with new meaning. After viewing the holoids, Chi is struck by powerful feelings: rage, despair, sorrow. No one ever showed him their faces.

  And loneliness. How he longs to share his awful knowledge with someone. He can’t even talk to K-T.

  Who’s the ghost? These people who will die centuries before he was born? Or him?

  He jabs at the rocky soil with the shovel. He’s got one consolation, anyway. Two consolations. Sort of.

  First, spacetime didn’t blow up in his face after he violated several Tenets of the Grandmother Principle. The LISA techs never did say, exactly, what happened when you violated a Tenet.

  And second, Ruby and Starbright don’t believe him. Strangely, their disbelief bothers the hell out of him. It offends his pride, challenges his self-worth. Back off, Chi. Don’t be an idiot like he was, showing off his maser. But there it is and won’t go away. He resents them for not believing him.

  “Say, brother.” The voice intrudes, jolting Chi just as he’s tamping down a seed in a fresh patch of live earth. “Workin’ on Ruby’s farm?”

  Chi knows that hateful voice only too well. He stands and blots his sweaty forehead on the back of his forearm. “What do you want, Leo?”

  “I want to destroy this inhuman, parasitical capitalist system, brother.”

  Leo Gorgon leans up against the fence, grinning. He watches Chi with interest. As usual, Gorgon’s interest is calculating and sly. Chi has watched Gorgon with interest, too. Gorgon is one of those people during the Summer of Love who is more alert, intelligent, and streetwise—not to mention fifteen years older—than the kids mobbing the Haight-Ashbury. He and his posse are stage-trained actors. He performs decent sleight-of-hand. Gorgon turns his edge to his advantage, turns it like you sharpen a blade.

  Gorgon has his rap. The ideology of failure, he calls it. Money is dead. It’s free because it’s yours. Chi has seen destitute teenage runaways gathering around Gorgon, listening raptly to his rap.


  “So,” Gorgon says, “workin’ for the bitch-goddess of love?”

  “Working for the joy of it.”

  “She payin’ ya?”

  “Work is its own reward. To give is best.”

  Gorgon laughs. “You’re a Digger, brother.”

  “I’d like to be.”

  “At least till you tire of the adventure of poverty an’ run back home to your rich daddy’s house, eh?”

  Chi thrusts the shovel.

  “Where’s Miss Ruby?”

  “Upstairs, watching Star Trek with Starbright.”

  “Is she, now.” Gorgon taps out a cigarette, plays it through his fingers. “Say listen, Bub.”

  “My name is Chiron, Leo.” Chi leans on the shovel.

  “Yeah. ‘To give is best,’ Bub. Why, I call that a moral imperative. Y’know, Bub, I got me a truck out front, an’ she’s got a flat tire.” He glances up at the deck. He’s subtle, but not subtle enough. “I happen to know Miss Ruby has got herself a jack in that storeroom in her garage. Yeah. You wanna go fetch it for me, Bub?”

  Chi flings down the shovel, strolls over to the fence. He pointedly follows Gorgon’s glance up to the deck and the unlocked kitchen door. An easy mark. From upstairs with the TV on, Ruby would never hear someone letting himself in. She would never hear someone rummaging through her apartment for things to knickknack.

  “Why don’t you ring the front bell and ask her if you can borrow it?”

  Gorgon gets it. He laughs and slaps his knee. “I’m shuckin’ you, man. Just shuckin’ you. Ain’t no flat tire. Oh, but I got me a truck out front. She’s parked at the curb, just waitin’ for a strappin’ young dude like you to take her out for a spin. Pick up some chick, do your thing. Why should you work on this beautiful day?”

  “Someone’s got to work.”

  “Nah. No, you don’t, brother.”

  “If I don’t,” Chi says, “who will?”

  “Man, this is the Great Society,” Gorgon says. “This society is rollin’ in the dough. It’s a Society of Surplus. If you don’t want to work, you shouldn’t have to. Especially not for a capitalist like Ruby Maverick. Whaddaya say?”

  He dangles the ignition key.

  Chi takes the key. “I say the Society of Surplus is a shuck. A shuck now, and a shuck later.”

  “What tha’ hell?”

  “You’ll watch the Society of Surplus vanish before your very eyes.” Chi palms the key, plucks Gorgon’s unlit cigarette from his lip, and palms that, too. “In three decades, people will wonder how anyone could have ever talked about a Society of Surplus. And the worst of it is, the rich will get much richer, the poor much poorer. Oh, in centuries society will have plenty again. In centuries, people who call themselves cosmicists because they believe in the Cosmic Mind will finally be wise enough to know that a surplus is not a surplus, but a hard-earned gift not to be squandered.”

  Gorgon turns scarlet. “Gimme my key, you lyin’ punk.”

  Chi produces the key from Gorgon’s left ear, the cigarette from his right.

  “Asshole!” Gorgon stomps down the driveway to his truck.

  Chi picks up the shovel again, thrusts the blade. Clang. He unearths a rock the size of his boot. He’s not working for free. He’s receiving Ruby’s charity, good will, and the benefits of her bounty from her hard work.

  No, Chi never thought much of the Free-Thieves. He doesn’t think much of Leo Gorgon. And the t-port has been no adventure in poverty, but a harrowing nightmare from which he cannot wake.

  Yes, Chi is the heir to a cosmicist dynasty and a domed estate in Sausalito. He has never been poor. And he knows from the Archives that Leo Gorgon was, and is, and will be. In seven years, Gorgon will die in a New York City subway from a heroin overdose.

  And there is nothing Chi can do.

  The painted ladies rise from the thistle and flutter away.

  *

  Chi lets himself in the kitchen, locks the door behind him, and stalks into the living room. Leo Gorgon always sets his teeth on edge. He still hears them murmuring upstairs. The third floor is their domain, their little queendom. He starts to climb the stairs, then stops. He hears them laughing. Throwing things? Then murmurs as thick as jasmine incense.

  Women. What are they all about?

  Strategy, Chi. He needs a better strategy.

  He wishes he could take Starbright away and lock her up somewhere. Someplace safe. A cabin in Mendocino, say. Lock her up for two months and escort her to the airport on September 4. That would keep her out of trouble and protect her and her fetus from disease, the strange drugs and stranger people lurking around the Haight-Ashbury. Protect her and her fetus from demons.

  It would make things so simple, so neat. He could return to the Scene and keep looking for a closer match. If Starbright turns out not to be the Axis, all he’d have is an angry pregnant teenager and a kidnapping rap he can step across five centuries to beat.

  Ah, temptation.

  But no, that won’t work, and forget about Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle. He can’t do it because then Starbright could not possibly be the transcendent smiling girl in the CBS News holoid, now could she?

  All right. He can’t lock her up. But he can’t let her roam free.

  Think strategy, Chi. Try some tenderness? Try to be nice? His surveillance approach has gotten him exactly nowhere. She doesn’t even tell him when she’s going out. Should he make a pass? Try to woo her? He thinks of Bella Venus. Her glistening skull, her perfect nude skin. Bella Venus smells so fresh and sweet, Chi gets hard just thinking about her.

  He could woo Starbright, but it wouldn’t be anything real. He wouldn’t seduce her. He certainly wouldn’t pretend to love her. Nothing like that. It would be a strategy, just a strategy to lure the girl a little closer so she’ll be easier to protect. He’s sure he can do it. All the lasses at college adore him.

  After all, it’s the Summer of Love. Everyone’s in love.

  Chi strides to the half-bath off the kitchen and surveys himself in the mirror with new eyes. The nutribeads supply him with his required calories but he’s grown bone-thin on nothing but nutribeads and a hit of neurobics when he can’t stand the empty throbbing in his gut. His cheeks look gaunt, his stomach sunken between prominent ribs. Rock ‘n’ roll bones. Mega. But he could tweak it up a bit.

  He’s sweaty from the yard work. That’s no way to woo a girl. He wraps a filter over the water faucet and fills the washbasin. He sets the maser on red, runs the beam through the filtered water. Now he takes out his scope, scoops a sample in the palm of his hand, and peers. Not too bad. No too many wriggling tails, anyway. He rubs a cleanser tab in his hands and works up a lather. He washes his face and hands and arms, rinses, and shakes himself dry like a dog shaking off water. Then he presses a new patch of Block on his chest.

  That weird familiar tingling scurries over his skin like a million ants as the Block reactivates the microderm. He makes a decent part down his scalp and combs the hair implants with a bit more care. He takes the toothbrush Ruby left him and combs the eyebrow implants. Better. He takes a vial of East Indian musk from the bathroom cabinet, dabs essence oil on his wrists. Live dangerously.

  Chi strides out to the living room and paces, waiting for them to come downstairs. Still murmuring upstairs. Chi plunks his butt on the couch and riffles through the books and magazines and newspapers Ruby’s strewn all over her coffee table, including the latest edition of the Berkeley Barb.

  On one of the days before Starbright came to stay, Chi took a stack of Berkeley Barbs to sell around the city. How extraordinary to hold the fresh paper, smell the ink. He was as thrilled as if he held a roll of papyrus with hieroglyphs proclaiming daily news about King Tut. He hopped aboard a cable car and took a jaw-jolting ride down to the wharf. A longhaired gnomish guy with silver rings on every finger struck up a wistful conversation in a flat, brassy accent. By the end of the ride, the gnomish guy—who said his name was “Hawwass”—was calling
Chi “hansum” and blinking up at him with dazed, dark eyes.

  Now he takes out a prophylak, punches his fingers into it, and picks up the Barb. Mega. If the payload could take the mass, he’d love to transmit a Barb with him back to the future. A gift for his skipfather.

  Chi leafs through the inky pages and spies an item he’s never seen before. Data that didn’t survive, information lost to the Archives. A box in the lower left corner reads:

  PLEASE CALL—NO STRINGS: The parents of the following have contacted the HIP Switchboard instead of going to the police. If you want to pick up on vibrations from your parents, we have more information. We will not contact your parents unless you give the OK:

  Joan Gallagher, Shelly Ballinger, Beatrice Clare, Vicky Martin, Sally May Kearney, Louise Thompson, Cathie McKerrick, Patty Lee Corbin, Ann Thrift, Donna Wells, Joni Dawson, Terry Miller, Susan Bell, Carlos Piera, Timmy Meyers, Allen Weisberg.

  Susan Bell.

  Chi tears through the rest of the Barb. And there—there!—in the middle of the Classified Ads, he finds what he’s looking for:

  GUY WITH LONG RED HAIR who was selling BARBS and rode Powell St. cable car. Contact Harris, 14 Charles St., N.Y.C. I love you, handsome.

  Shock ripples up his spine.

  The Axis really is here.

  And then, So am I.

  *

  He clatters up the stairs to the sitting room, knocks on the door, and barges in before they can answer.