Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  As it turned out, the key could also—at a probability of just over fifty percent—refer to him, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. The fanciful, mythological name he was born with twenty-one years ago. Calliope had chosen it. How Calliope loved fanciful, mythological things. In myths, Chiron was the centaur, half-man, half-horse. Chiron’s symbol was the key.

  You are the key, Chi’s skipfather told him.

  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.

  Down to business. Evidence supports Chi’s probable presence in this Hot Dim Spot. His skipfather traced the Open Time Loop himself.

  Oh, fine. What is this evidence? Three pieces of evidence, no more and no less.

  First, there’s the carving on the pillar in the Portals of the Past. The key, a reference to Chiron. But the carving is gone. Mega. There goes Chi’s fifty-one percent probability.

  Second? There’s an advertisement. A local newspaper at the time called the Berkeley Barb ran personal ads. And there, among guys looking for swinging chicks and chicks looking for swinging times, was an ad placed during the summer of 1967 by someone looking for a guy with long red hair. And, yes, Chi is a guy with long red hair.

  At least, he would be a guy with red hair if he hadn’t taken the radiation vaccine and suffered the aftereffects like everyone else his age. He has red hair now—very long red hair—thanks to implants, an unpleasant business to which he submitted most reluctantly. Bella Venus had been understanding, if a bit distant. On reflection, he realizes the red hair is a self-fulfilling time loop. A small time loop, but a loop just the same. Not good.

  And third? The third piece of evidence is the CBS News footage that caused such excitement among the Archivists. The footage shows a tall, slim, red-haired person standing in the background of a scene shot on Haight Street sometime during the summer of 1967. The original footage, when discovered, was reconstructed into a holoid.

  That’s it. That’s the evidence, all three pieces. Whoop-dee-doo.

  His skipfather had said, “You’re the one, Chi.” He had tears in his eyes, but he was sure. His skipmother must not have been so sure. Why else had she slipped contraband in his jeans pocket at the very last moment?

  The noise, the stench, the giddy energy, the sheer weirdness of it all overwhelms him. Chi decides to avoid the main drag. Hungry, but he decides against swallowing a nutribead from his nutritional necklace. Drowsy, but he decides against another neurobic bead from his pharma necklace. His supplies are limited. He’s got to make everything last seventy-six days.

  Find a place to rest, that’s what he’ll do. He can sleep anywhere quiet, anywhere private. His t-port training included camping on the ground.

  He sets out down Oak Street, but people crowd the back alleys, too. Man oh man! He keeps to the shadows, avoids people. The shrewd inspection by the boy in the bush hat unnerved him.

  Does he look okay? Does he fit in?

  Or does he arouse suspicion. There’s plenty of suspicion in this Day.

  His costume was designed by Archival specialists with—so they claimed—scrupulous attention to detail. Beatle boots with absurd pointed toes. Straight-leg Levi’s that have been styled much the same since 1849 to Chi’s day. The pharmaceutical necklace and nutritional necklace will easily pass for love beads. His French flight jacket in a tough brown synthy looks, feels, and smells like real goatskin.

  Everything is bacteria-resistant, waterproofed, and dust-proofed. The payload on a t-port has got to be light, so he’ll have to wear the costume for seventy-six days. The Archivists assured him no one will think this unusual. Runaways to the Haight-Ashbury often brought nothing but their ideals and the shirts on their backs.

  His jacket pockets are well supplied: Block, a maser, a scanner, a scope, filters, wipes, and a good supply of prophylaks. It’s imperative he avoid the bacteria, pollutants, and viruses of this Day.

  His knuckletop is the largest payload and was the object of the fiercest contention. It looks just like a man’s ring of carved silver with a raised bezel. The power in there—wow. No t-porter before Chi had been allowed to take such a modern tool. The temptation to violate Tenet Seven of the Grandmother Principle—which forbids the use of modern technologies in the past—was just too great.

  His skipmother insisted over the objections of several directors. My skipson takes the knuckletop, she said, or he doesn’t go.

  Now Chi pats his jeans pocket. The moment he touches it, he knows what his skipmother slipped him. He fishes out the stash cube. What’s inside? Tiny crystal slivers he can insert in the knuckletop. Holoid discs.

>   What’s on the discs? He can’t wait to view them.

  Chi breaks into a jog. Where to? Just keep moving. He dodges through the crowd, seeking someplace quiet, someplace private. He sprints down Page, crosses over to Clayton Street.

  Suddenly he sees something that stops him in his tracks in the middle of the street. A flatbed truck jammed with kids screeches to a halt. The driver yells and flips him the finger.

  Chi doesn’t care. Excitement squeezes his chest as he sprints down the block. There, at the corner, is a three-story Victorian commercial building. The address, 555 Clayton Street. Above a door on the ground floor is the sight that has sent him sprinting. There’s a sign above a shop:

  Wow! Like the carving that’s supposed to be on the Portals of the Past!

  But not the same. He calms down. The two other symbols are missing. Not the same, at all.

  Still, the resemblance is striking. The resemblance is good enough for him.

  Chi raises the knuckletop to his lips. “K-T,” he whispers and cups his hand behind the ring. A little field of lavender light pops up halfway between his hand and his face.

  He whispers a description of the shop sign.

  The knuckletop analyzes his description against the Archival files in its memory and calculates how meaningful the information may be. Bright red alphanumerics flash. Not that meaningful, it turns out, but there is some probability edging up to forty percent.

  Some probability is also good enough for him. It’s a sign, a portent, a good omen.

  Chi slides a prophylak out of his jacket pocket, shakes it free of its folds. With a gesture he’s practiced hundreds of times, he sweeps the fine PermaPlast over his hand. The prophylak adheres to his palm and fingers, forming a shield against the toxins of the past.