by Lisa Mason
She gets an eyeful of Marilyn’s Mill Valley thighs and, between them, Stan the Man.
As she flees down the stairs, Susan wonders if she can stop the trembling in her heart.
5
White Rabbit
Chi perches in the catbird seat for his noon-to-four-thirty shift, daydreaming of imploders, calcite crystals, the awesome dish of the chronometer. Has he really been gone only ten days? It seems like forever since he’s left his future in the past. The catbird seat, which Ruby rigged up, is a chair cushion tied on an amputated chair seat. The seat, in turn, is nailed to the top of a rickety stepladder set in the back of the Mystic Eye. Ruby is boundlessly resourceful, but the tachyonic shuttle it’s not.
Chi folds his arms in the djellaba she gave him, a scarlet-striped robe he pulls over his clothes that covers him, head to toe. He pulls the hood over his head and around his face, allowing a lock of his long red hair to fall across his brow and sunglasses. Ruby gave him the sunglasses, too. Ray-Bans, she calls them, the color candy-apple red.
Thus anonymous, swathed in red, hunching over gargoyle-style, he watches people mill around the shop. Down below, beneath his gaze, shoppers hesitate. Some touch the merchandise reverentially, glance up at him, and replace a mojo bag or a conjuring wand just so. Others can’t conceal the larcenous intent crossing their faces. A boy no more than twelve, in dirty denim and floppy hair like ten thousand other boys passing through the Haight-Ashbury, fingers a brass butterfly strung on a leather thong.
Chi lets loose a booming, “The Mystic Eye Sees All!”
The would-be knickknacker jumps, so badly startled he drops the butterfly and dashes out the door.
Two women smile up at him and whisper to each other, giggling. College students, maybe twenty, in the uniform of Beat intellectuals—black turtlenecks, jeans, and sandals, canvas shoulder bags filled with books by Alan Watts or Marshall McLuhan. The tall slim one is so prime she could compete with Bella Venus, except for her gooey black hair. He pictures her nude. Without her clothes, of course, but even more, without the wild extrusions from her scalp, her furry eyebrows, the fuzz on her forearms where she’s pushed back her sleeves. And without the trauma to her skin: her suntan. He still can’t get over how people so young look as weather-damaged as day-laborers without domes or proper Block. The sight is as disturbing to him as a peg-legged beggar would be to this vivacious girl.
Chi longs to tell her: Stay out of the sun. Even your gentle sun. Would his warning violate Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle? He sighs. He cannot affect any person in the past, except as authorized by the project directors. After the disastrous Save Betty Project, the LISA techs were more adamant than ever about observing the Tenets and the mandate of nonintervention. Still, dermatologists of this Day know all about malignant melanoma. They’re just not telling people.
But it’s tricky. Even if he could tell her, would she believe him? In the pop wisdom of this Day, a suntan is healthy. Glamorous. A suntan is cool.
“The lady looks lovely in the tie-dye scarf,” he calls out in the Voice of Doom. The shopper blushes, pretends to preen in the countertop mirror, and reluctantly unties the scarf from around her neck.
This has got to be the most mind-numbing job he, or any other poor fool, has ever held. He presses his hand over a yawn. Still, sometimes he enjoys the sacrifices of the catbird seat, like a good cosmicist enjoys a giftday.
A giftday: To give is best. Be still, and let the world rest. A giftday is the day when you rise with the sun and fast twenty-four hours, consuming nothing but a water ration. You go nowhere except by your own exertion and even wear-and-tear on shoe soles is frowned upon. You read or write on rationed, recycled paper, meditate on True Value, or work if you can, consuming no resources. Neither candles nor fires in your fireplace are allowed. Reserves in your solar cells must be conserved, along with utility credits you’ve bicycled on a Path. You may talk with friends or sing, but only if you consume no power. You may make love, but only if you don’t conceive. Then you sleep when the sun sets or sit in darkness until you tire. Cosmicists are invited to gift twelve days a year, once a month, but some cosmicists gift more. Chi and Bella Venus gifted forty-eight days between them, just last year. They had lots to do together when the sun set.
Two billion people participate in giftdays, more gifting all the time.
Chi sighs. These hairy, hungry, noisy, greedy, heedless people of 1967 are just plain crazy. But—and this is a Big But—are his conscientious, hairless, rigorous, self-sacrificing people of 2467 a little crazy, too? It’s an outrageous question that keeps him awake at night. A question he would never have thought to ask until he t-ported to the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love.
Ruby sets the brass butterfly back on the countertop and gives him the thumbs-up. She loves being in the vanguard. She and Chi have started a trend among hip merchants. All the shops that can afford to are installing watchmen on stepladders.
“Achtung, Beelzebub,” Leo Gorgon says. He clicks his heels and extends his arm in a ramrod salute as he lounges behind the counter with Ruby.
Chi refuses to take the bait. From his vantage point, he can see Gorgon’s hands, too. He’s also seen the autobiographical novel Gorgon will publish in 1973, which the Archives preserve. By his own admission, Gorgon is a thief, stealing goods and food from the community for the Diggers’ Free Store and his own use. Chi frowns. The Free Thieves were a radical cosmicist faction during the desperate depths of the brown ages. The faction claimed that taking property when needed was mandated by the law of necessity. After a long and ugly debate, the cosmicist majority declared that the Free Thieves were not working toward the Great Good and suppressed them.
Good riddance, Chi thinks, to thieves.
Gorgon never loses a chance to express his contempt for Chi. A contempt earned, it seems, because Ruby has befriended Chi, given him shelter and a decent job. And because Chi is helping Ruby turn a profit at the Mystic Eye.
The contempt is mutual.
“Forget him,” Ruby says and winks. “You’re cool, Bub.” She glares at Gorgon, who never sees the sharp looks she aims at the back of his neck. Still, she’s started sleeping with Gorgon, which Chi cannot understand. But Ruby’s affairs are not his business. What women have to go through in these primitive times is not his concern. He can’t get involved.
“You’re the boss, Ruby,” he says for Gorgon’s benefit.
Gorgon dubbed him Beelzebub as an insult, but the kids take to the name and call Chi that or The Bub when he’s perched on the catbird seat. It’s a kick, he has to admit, becoming a minor celebrity on the Scene.
The job also gives him an unexpected benefit. He watches the crowd inside the shop and the crowd out on the street, which he gets an eyeful of through the wide shop windows. He can watch for the Axis.
One day a longhaired girl sat below his feet, glancing up at him from time to time. He paid her no attention though she lingered, attracted by his minor celebrity. He was half-awake at the time, thick-headed with tachyonic lag, when it suddenly occurred to him:
Is she the Axis?
Excitement seized his chest. “Need a break,” he called to Ruby and scrambled down the ladder. But the girl lost her nerve before he could untangle his legs from the hem of the djellaba. She fled, darting out the door and onto the street, disappearing in the crowd, her long hair flying. He cursed his hesitation. He never got a good look at her.
Was she the Axis?
Who knows, Chi thinks with a leaden heart. When the tourists, day-trippers, military personnel on leave from nearby bases, transient criminals, local teenagers, and college students are added to the runaways, pilgrims, immigrants, parents searching for their runaways, law enforcement personnel, and local residents, a million people will pass through the Haight-Ashbury this summer. Ten thousand newcomers on any given day, some who stay, some who leave as quickly as they came.
How is Chi ever going to find her?
Perched high i
n the catbird seat, he raises the knuckletop to his lips. “K-T,” he whispers and cups the holoid field beneath his palm. The djellaba’s generous cuff conceals the field of lavender light. Chi tucks a crystal sliver in the slot beneath the bezel of the ring. This particular sliver is the first of the contraband holoids his skipmother smuggled into the stash cube.
Bright red alphanumerics appear in the lavender light:
“Date: 07-01-1967. You may insert Disc 1 now.”
“Go, K-T,” he whispers.
A miniature 3D scene pops up in the palm of his hand:
A sandy-haired man in a suit and tie steps off the curb at the corner of Haight Steet and Ashbury. He’s surrounded by teenagers. Over the man’s shoulder, in the upper left corner beneath the street signs, stands a longhaired girl in a high-collared shirt. She is speaking with a tall slim red-haired person. The red-haired person’s face is blurred, little more than pale skin and a long, smooth jaw. The sandy-haired man and the teens walk across the intersection. Their footsteps scuff on the pavement, their bells and necklaces jingle.
The man says, “CBS News, without any flowers in its hair, is in San Francisco because this city has gained the reputation of being the hippie capital of the world.”
From the left background, the girl catches up with the man, darts behind his shoulder, and falls into the rhythm of his step. She looks straight at the camera and nods, as if acknowledging the whole world is watching her. The wind whips her long, pretty hair. She brushes hair away from her face and smiles. A radiant smile. An enigmatic smile, as if she knows the secret to everything.
In the background, someone yells, “Beautiful!”
The sandy-haired man says, “I’m Harry Reasoner.”
The scene disappears. The lavender field hovers in the palm of Chi’s hand. “K-T, off,” he whispers and lowers his hand. Back to work. Ruby gazes up at him, curiosity written all over her face.
Chi can’t get over the way the girl smiles.
“Axis,” he whispers, “where are you?”
They believe she was televised. Televised! The Archivists know when the clip was aired, but when was the footage shot? That data has long since disappeared.
Is the red-haired person him? Chi never thought so. He’s never felt the shock of recognition other t-porters claim after witnessing evidence of their probable presence in the past. The Chief Archivist herself assured him his lack of reaction was only because the human mind perceives time as a forward-moving experience and he, Chi, hasn’t yet experienced this moment in his personal Now.
Chi was never convinced. That the Archivists, especially his skipfather, believed the red-haired person was him annoyed him no end.
No, Chi concludes, the girl who sat at his feet was too short, too brunette, too insecure. She couldn’t possibly be that confident, smiling girl in the CBS News holoid.
She cannot be the Axis.
As for the girl in the holoid, her hair color is hard to tell. Not light, not dark. Long, but not extremely long. She’s taller than most girls, but not towering. Slim, but not emaciated. Lovely, but not exotic. In hip clothing, but not outrageously costumed. Her eyes are two dark ovals in the sun’s glare. Even at the highest magnification, the Archivists never could determine the color of her eyes.
It frustrates Chi beyond bearing. The SOL Project is impossible!
And it gets worse.
The Archivists believe they know what her legal name was, but they also believe the Axis will use a street name in the Haight-Ashbury. Maybe more than one, as so many kids did. Who tracked the thousands of street names these transients used? Who correlated street names to legal names? CBS News never identified the girl or the teens or, for that matter, the red-haired person in the background. Of all the names, street or legal, used by people flocking to the Summer of Love, the Archives contain only a handful.
Worse and worse. The Axis will change her appearance. About this, the Archivists are certain. Well. Sort of certain, up to a seventy-two percent probability. It seems that everyone who journeyed to the Haight-Ashbury this summer changed themselves, however briefly. Self-transformation was a tradition originating in the Summer of Love and echoing down the centuries in the bohemian colonies of spacetime. A tradition emulated by the Vivas, the Hindi Hipsters, the Handcrafters, the Bon Tons.
Chi himself changed his appearance to journey here.
And the Axis—Chi reminds himself—is fourteen years old. An age when a young woman’s looks change under any circumstances.
His first object of the SOL project, then, is to find the girl in the CBS News holoid as soon as possible and verify her legal identity. That’s the only way to establish that the girl in the holoid is who they believe she is.
But, worst of all, even if Chi can find her and can identify her, there’s a probability the girl in the holoid is not the Axis.
The probability the girl in the CBS News holoid is not the Axis was so high that certain staff at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications disagreed with the project directors that the t-port should target the Summer of Love. “You must remember, it’s a Dim Spot,” his skipfather had argued. “Yes. A Hot Dim Spot,” his skipmother had countered. She was one of the dissenters. “What data remain are unreliable.” His skipfather had to agree, distress tugging at the corners of his mouth.
A million people. And one may be a fourteen-year-old girl. A girl who holds the conservation of all spacetime in her hands.
*
Chi’s relief dashes in the door for the four-thirty-to-nine shift. Howie loves the djellaba. He smooths back his hair, pulls the hood around his face, and pulls out a lock of hair to flop across his brow, Bub-style. Chi lets Howie borrow the candy-apple-red Ray-Bans, too. Chi doesn’t need sunglasses out-of-doors; his corneal shields protect his eyes from ultraviolet radiation a hundred times more brutal than what beams down from this gentle sky.
Howie is sixteen, from Kansas City. His parents never fixed his buck teeth. He could never have landed a groovy gig like this—he doesn’t have to cut his hair or anything—if it weren’t for the HIP Job Co-op. Howie is grateful for the dollar an hour Ruby pays him. He pays the crash pad where he’s staying five bucks a month for a spot to lay out his sleeping bag, toilet privileges, and all the brown rice he can eat. Working ten afternoons a month, Howie is rich on four-and-a-half dollars a day.
Chi goes to the cash drawer to collect his. Ruby insists he take the money, even though he said he’d work for free.
“Wages of sin,” Gorgon says, leaning the back of his chair against the wall.
“Sinful why? Because he prevents knickknackers from ripping off my shop?” Ruby says.
“Because you’re payin’ him less than minimum wage.”
“It pays off.”
“For you or for him?”
Chi sighs. How much longer can they last?
“For us both,” Ruby says. “I deduct his wages, he pays no income tax. That’s the best kind of game. We both benefit.”
“Typical capitalist,” Gorgon says. “Scorin’ a profit from the love-shuck boom.”
“I’ve been running my shop since this street was a sleepy little ghetto. When did you blow into town, Leo?”
“Seniority don’t make priority.”
“Sure it does. Anyway, I’m not Standard Oil.”
“A capitalist is a capitalist. Begrudgin’ knickknackers who need a buck more than you.”
“I donate to the Free Clinic. Not to knickknackers.”
“Typical capitalist, hirin’ desperate flower children.”
“Who couldn’t find work otherwise. Who would starve on the street or hook themselves. Listen. I didn’t ask these kids to come here.”
That stops Gorgon for maybe half a minute.
“But you’re scorin’ all this bread!”
Ruby smiles. “You bet your ass. My ma taught me. She said, “Daughter, you do for yourself.”
Chi takes his four dollar bills and two quarters. “Thanks, Ruby.”
Gorgon bangs the chair down on all fours, goes over and stands behind Ruby, wrapping his hands around her shoulders. He always changes his tactics, Chi observes, when he can’t bully her with his political agenda. “Since you’re passing out all this bread, lay a fiver on me.”
“Why should I?” Ruby shoots him one of her looks. “You’re an able-bodied man. Why don’t you work for it?”
“I’ll be glad to work for it.” He kneads the nape of her neck, nuzzles her ear. “Want to know how?”
Ruby flutters her eyes, flexing her neck against his hands. “Tell me.”
“First, I’ll score a bottle of that wine you dig,” he says. “And then. This is how I work.” He whispers in her ear.
She chuckles and smiles her bedroom smile. Damn if she doesn’t hand him a five-dollar bill.
Gorgon winks at Chi.
Chi shakes his head. In his autobiographical novel, Leo Gorgon will assassinate the character of an exotic hip merchant. He will cast her as an evil, manipulating, stupid, greedy whore. Chi feels his face heat up.
Gorgon laughs, taking his reaction the wrong way.
There are so many things Chi wishes he could tell Ruby. Ah, but Tenet Three, Tenet Three. And what about Tenet Six? He cannot reveal Ruby’s future to her. How the exotic hip merchant will sue Leo Gorgon for implying she prostituted herself, and she’ll win in court. But by then Gorgon will have a heroin habit in him, and he’ll be judgment-proof.
It’s too depressing. Chi tucks the money in his jeans pocket and strides out of the Mystic Eye.
All he can say—all he’s allowed to say—is, “See you later, Ruby.”
*
“Whatever you do, son,” his skipfather said, “don’t get busted by the Man.”
“The Man?” Chi said.
That was Brax, showing off. During Chi’s training for the t-port, his skipparents learned sixties’ slang with a childlike glee and practiced on him every chance they got.
“They’ll try to roll you. They’ll be looking for your shit.” Tears misted Brax’s eyes. He knew very well he might never see Chi again after they t-ported his skipson over five centuries. The realization had made him emotional. Chi privately wondered if Brax was having a midlife crisis. He was pushing ninety-six. “They’ll freak out over your neckjack. If they throw you in the laughing academy, there’s nothing we can do on this side.”