by Lisa Mason
“That’s right,” Ruby says.
“The Summer of Love is gonna change all that. Ruby, everyone’s talkin’ on the street. We’re gonna get a legal action committee together an’ go after the heat. That mouthpiece over on Franklin Street says he wants the gig. Me an’ Cowboy made the scene right after you left. We saw the blood, an’ we heard the story, but the dog was gone. Everyone was freakin’ out, an’ nobody saw who took the corpse. The dog’s owner got arrested for incitin’ to riot. They cuffed him an’ took him away in a paddy wagon. So we want you fresh as the morning dew. Don’t hassle with me on this one, Ruby. No statements to the Man until we get our act together, all right?”
She nods.
“Let’s split town for the night. Even you, Bub.” Gorgon’s vicious look again, but Chi nods. “People say they’re sweepin’ the streets for all of us. Pigs are claimin’ me an’ Cowboy set up that scene.”
“Did you set up that scene?” Ruby says.
“No way,” he says. She meets Gorgon’s eyes and sees, for a rare moment, sorrow in him. “That was some mighty bad theater.” For all his shucks and disingenuous ways, she believes him. “Can you take three riders in that kraut car of yours?” he says. “My truck’s got a flat.” Sure enough, Gorgon’s rickety flatbed, parked down the block, tilts toward the curb.
“You bet,” Ruby says. “I gassed her up this morning.”
“Let’s get outta here.”
The summer sun sinks into the treetops, one of those gusty amber twilights that seems to take forever. The new moon buds into an arc as slim as a cat’s claw. They walk cautiously through the shadowy alley back to the garage. Chi and Gorgon pull the garage doors open.
“You stay here,” Ruby tells the men. “Starbright, come with me. We’ll collect some provisions and be right back.”
“Bring me a pint of Jim Beam, if you’ve got it,” Gorgon calls to her.
She and the kid go to the back gate, find it swinging open.
“Sweet Isis,” Ruby groans. “Now what?”
Heart knocking, she climbs the back stairs, the kid trailing after. But the kitchen door is locked up tight. They go inside. Nothing amiss. Upstairs on her bed, the Siamese cats are curled up in a mound of gray and brown fur. The white cats perch on the windowsill, enjoying the stirring dusk. Ruby rechecks all the windows and doors, leaves plenty of fresh water and cat kibbles. No Jim Beam, but she’s got a fifth of Wild Turkey in the pantry.
Her stomach is rumbling. None of them has had dinner. She packs a picnic basket with sourdough bread, sharp cheddar, apples, a couple of carob bars. She thinks again, packs a bottle of Napa burgundy, plus a jar of Salvatore Espresso, the only instant coffee worthy of human consumption and drinkable black. Paper cups, paper napkins, plastic utensils, a Swiss Army knife with a corkscrew, and that should do it. She goes to the half-bath, retrieves blankets and pillows, a canvas bag. She finds an Irish sweater in the coat closet for her, a hand-loomed shawl for Starbright.
Ah, Starbright.
What a tangled, bittersweet surprise, her sudden feelings toward the kid. What is this fierce rush of tenderness? What do you do when someone tells you she loves you and hugs you?
It’s the Summer of Love. You hug her back.
Starbright bustles about in the kitchen, packing bedding and clothes in the canvas bag. Suddenly she notices something. “Ruby, look at this!” She stoops, picks up a scrap of paper from the floor, pushed under the door apparently, and hands it to her.
A crude scrawl:
SHUCKING THE REVOLUTION WE WILL NOT TOLERATE
PEOPLE (HIP OR STRAIGHT) TRANSFORMING OUR TRIP INTO CASH
BE ADVISED
Ruby exhales sharply. “Some revolution.”
“You’re not hurting anyone, Ruby,” Starbright cries. “You’re offering things and ideas people can’t find anywhere else. The Mystic Eye is wonderful. I love the Mystic Eye. Who would do this?”
“Kid, there are crazy tribes in the Haight-Ashbury these days. You’ve seen that for yourself. The Diggers, the dealers, the acid mystics, the cultists, the musicians, the politicos, the Panthers, the Krishna devotees, the anarchists, the speed freaks, the hip elite, the hoodies, the bikers, even the flower children. They’ve all got their own agenda. No wonder the Man can get away with beating us up on the street. Or maybe this is from the Man. Who knows.”
“Revolution. That’s the second time I’ve heard that word today.”
“Uh-huh. You know what we used to say in the old days? We used to say the revolution is in your mind. First and foremost, above everything else, you’ve got to open your mind in new ways. The personal revolution, that’s what we called it. And it had nothing to do with threatening other people or telling them what to do.”
“Are they trying to scare us?”
“You scared?”
“Yeah!”
“Then their love letter worked, didn’t it. Let’s you and me not be scared anymore. Come on.”
Ruby carefully relocks the kitchen door, and they climb down the stairs. In the twilight, Ruby can see that someone has uprooted part of Chi’’s garden, two rows of his careful plantings ravaged like an open grave. Who would do this? She recalls the strange intruder in her yard weeks ago. The gray beggar woman? Was it her, then? Is it her, now?
Ruby shudders. She closes and locks the gate.
Her bitter nostalgia about the way things used to be, her paranoia about the Man, her resentment at being excluded from the Council for a Summer of Love—all of it, all of it boils up in her like an herbal brew. A strange brew with a sting of nettle. Boils up and clarifies till she can extract an essence of where she stands today.
A New Explanation, yes. There is a New Explanation, somewhere. In the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love? She never thought so. But these are strange and wondrous days and they’ve become a catalyst. The New Explanation still hovers, a half-glimpsed mirage above a street stained with blood.
The two men wait silently beside the dark garage.
“Where to, Leo?” Ruby says.
“How ‘bout Morning Star Ranch?” Gorgon says. “I could use some fresh country air. I know people there. We can hide out for the night.”
“We’re gone,” Ruby says.
*
Gorgon knocks back two fingers of Wild Turkey before they’ve crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and slumps in the front seat, snoring. Starbright huddles against Chi in the back seat. He circles his arm around her shoulders, takes her hand.
Ruby speeds through the dark, northbound. She knows the way. She drove to Morning Star Ranch in May to see a sculptor friend who’d retreated there to finish his latest masterpiece: a man of car-chrome with a red garden hose dangling between his shiny legs, clutching a woman of hammered steel. The drive takes a good hour.
After the first volley of Gorgon’s snores, she says, “Tell me true, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. What were those women? You used another one of your words that doesn’t quite mean what I think it means.” She shivers. “You called them demons.”
Silence, and the thrumming of the wheels. At last Chi says, “Yes, it’s an acronym. Devolved Entities Manifested from the Other Now. We call them demons.”
“Devolved entities, uh-huh. You want to tell us about it?”
And the elegant lad tells his strange tale.
*
One day last spring, Chi says, he and his skipparents were visiting his skipcousin’s new penthouse condominium at Cloud View Maze. She was throwing a housewarming party. Cloud View Maze was a self-sufficient mega-complex perched high atop the Oakland hills—a breathtaking minicity of residences, business and commercial spaces, swimming pools, tennis courts, clubs, and restaurants with its own security force, fire department, recycling enforcers, sex police, fishponds, vegetable gardens, fruit arbors, and a bicycle Path.
Sky-seeding was kicking in. Atmospheric thickening had abated, allowing the sun’s warming rays to heat our precious blue planet away from the brink of another ice age. R
adiation levels from the Second Atomic War were finally dropping and the radiation vaccine had worked. In a grand ceremony, dubbed “Let the Sun Shine In,” people took their shields down and installed picture windows.
On a clear day, without the shields, they could see icy peaks of the Sierras from his skipcousin’s roof deck. And it was a clear day. Mega and prime.
Telespace was up and running. Guests at the party could jack in on his skipcousin’s workstation if they felt like a recreational link or had business to attend to. The pro linkers queued up, itching for a hit of telespace. Jack up, link in, space out. Cool, tool. You could practically hear the hum of vast inner space teeming with intelligence.
There hadn’t been much to celebrate in so long. Mars terraformation was on time and under budget. Reduction of world population statistics were encouraging. T-port projects were going well at the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. The LISA techs were enthusiastic. A telespace pundit christened these days the New Renaissance.
Chi and his family and friends were celebrating. Everyone was popping neurobics and drinking aged wine. A feast of fresh food was laid out. Chi’s skipmother had brought a dozen trout from the family pond. Chi’s skipcousin was showing off the first harvest from her roof garden. There she was, as proud as a new skipparent, with her microcorn and cherry tomatoes. And flowers. Everyone there was a cosmicist. Her orchids sent them into ecstasies. Someone began projecting holopoetry.
Far below, people were strolling in and out of the Oak-Fran megalopolis through meadows planted over ancient traffic corridors and across the Bay Bridge Mall. EM-Trans trains hummed deep underground. The skyways were thick with jetcopters, air shuttles, whirligigs. Ferries docked and departed and streamed across the sparkling blue bay. From his skipcousin’s roofdeck, Chi could see the massive dome over New Golden Gate Preserve.
Then two things happened so fast, it seemed as if they happened at the same time:
Telespace crashed, and
A cloud blew in from the western horizon.
“A crash!” someone yelled. “Telespace is down! Everything!”
The telelinker at the workstation slumped, unconscious. The pro linkers crowded around. What? Telespace is down? Unheard of! So much intelligence was linked at any moment, a worldwide system failure was a disaster. A catastrophe! Unheard of!
A freak accident? Sabotage?
Or a Prime Probability, collapsing out of the timeline.
With all the alarm at his skipcousin’s workstation, Chi scarcely noticed the cloud. At least, he thought it was a cloud. Suddenly a scorching wind blasted his face. Charcoal plumes billowed up and filled the sky. An acid storm? A meteor crashing?
Chi didn’t know what to think!
The wind began to howl. He could see that the cloud wasn’t a rain cloud at all, but smoke. A thunderhead of thick, black smoke swirling with ashes.
Was the sky on fire?
The sun was a bloodred disc behind the burning cloud. Chi heard a sound in the wind, the scrabbling, scratching noise of a billion bits of rubble blasting out of the awful cloud.
Out of the south, a lightning bolt cut across the sky. Then, like an afterimage, another bolt cut from the north. Only the bolt was pure black! A jagged ebony blade slashed heaven’s dome.
The sky split open.
And Chi saw the Other Now. He saw his city, and he saw his people—in another universe.
The megalopolis crouched beneath a yellow sky, swirling with smoke and ashes. The city lay in ruins, with no sign of repair. Gouts of flame flared here and there. Bridges hung slack, decks swaybacked and cracked. The bay was dead and still, gleaming like a fly’s wing with poisonous sludge. A firestorm raged on the very hills Chi was perched upon. A glacier had carved away huge chunks of the waterfront, and sea water lapped against the curbs of downtown streets. Masses of tiny vehicles slid through the water, wheels spraying toxic foam onto the sidewalks.
Flocks of dead birds lay decaying in the brown weeds of parks and malls. Fish rotted amid raw sewage and tangles of plastic on the beaches. No dome protected what would have been New Golden Gate Preserve. Where the preserve should have stood was a naked salt plain, a radiation desert punctuated by twisted tree trunks. The Portals of the Past stood like gaping teeth in the carcass of wasted land.
And people. People swarmed everywhere. People stacked into crumbling buildings, people huddled in sickness and squalor, people lying before flashing holoids in a mass stupor. Devolts ran wild through the streets. Along a military perimeter, tanks rolled up before a horde of ragtag troops and disgorged globes of Melt. Inside the barbed-wire of a prison, people writhed, impaled on posts. Bound and hooded prisoners were brought to gallows and summarily hanged.
The great medcenters slid people into bioscan tubes. But instead of performing medical treatment, scalpels slit open brains, eyes, stomachs. Robotic fingers pulled the incisions wide open and inserted probes, secreted chemicals, pressed sparking wires into human flesh.
The holoids the people lay before flashed images of the devolts, the tanks and the troops, the impaled and the hanged, the vivisected. Cunning images so real, the watchers couldn’t tell the difference between what was artificial and the reality howling at their doorstep. And in their confusion and their transfixion, the people could not rise.
“I saw ruin and waste and violence. Chaos and misery worse than all the suffering humanity has endured in throughout history,” Chi says. “Then the sky closed. And the Vision was gone.”
They speed up the northbound highway in silence.
“But,” Ruby says, “it was just a vision?”
“No,” Chi says. “It was real.”
Telespace got up and running in sixty seconds. The telelinker came to, dizzy and sick. She lost the data she’d been working on, along with her lunch, but her telelink remained intact. The sheer size and scale of data lost in that sixty seconds was unknown.
The hole in the sky collapsed, leaving charred debris and radioactive waste kilometers wide. The debris floated for weeks over the site where the hole was observed. They sent out jetcopters with nets to retrieve the waste. Tricky stuff. They found antimatter embedded in the scar across the sky.
“The Vision of the Other Now corresponded with the Crash, you see,” Chi says, his voice thick with dread. “Corresponded with the most massive disruption of data ever observed. And I witnessed it with my own eyes.”
The Archivists set to work, attempting to restore those missing sixty seconds. The Chief Archivist ordered a complete review, especially of the Dim Spots her ferrets were already studying as potential t-port sites.
That’s when they identified Hot Dim Spots. When they discovered that the data was disappearing. And reality? Did that mean reality was disappearing, too?
The Chief Archivist declared a Crisis. She declared that some Event had torn a hole in spacetime, allowing the Other Now to invade.
But what? What was the Event?
Strange coincidences began to occur. Telelinkers who’d been jacked in during the Crash fell suddenly ill or suffered freak accidents. The linker who’d used Chi’s skipcousin’s workstation plunged in front of an EM-Trans train two days later and was killed instantly. A hundred witnesses saw a mysterious ripple at her side. Tunnel cameras recorded a shadow, standing suddenly on the track, before the linker was sucked to her death.
“Demons?” Ruby says. She swings the Mercedes west onto Gravenstein Highway, heading for Sebastopol. “Devolved Entities Manifested from the Other Now? You’re telling us another reality is trying to invade this one?”
“Yes. A terrible reality,” Chi says. “A Hell. Starbright, in front of the Psychedelic Shop, you said, ‘It’s the girl with my face.’ Have you seen the demon before?”
“Yes,” she whispers. “On Twin Peaks, the morning I arrived in San Francisco. I almost fell down a cliff.”
“And I nearly fell down my back stairs the night I saw the intruder in my backyard,” Ruby says.
Chi nod
s bleakly. “Then my skipfather’s theory is correct. Demons can invade whenever a Prime Probability could collapse out of this timeline.”
“Tell it to me straight without your weird words, man from Mars,” Ruby says. “What does that mean?”
“When there’s a chance something will happen that could change all of reality as we know it, the Other Now can invade our timeline.” Chi rubs his eyes. “I can’t say when that will be.”
“But we’ve got nothing to do with the Other Now,” Ruby protests. Fear needles up her spine. “We’ve got nothing to do with your telespace or the Archives or your medcenters.”
“But all those things are in your future,” Chi says with grim satisfaction. “Demons can especially invade a Hot Dim Spot. And that’s what the Summer of Love is: a Hot Dim Spot.”
“But what do the demons want with us?” Starbright says.
Chi says, “They want to destroy you.”
*
Chi says a lot of things before Leo Gorgon wakes and Ruby takes the turnoff to Morning Star Ranch. His tone is bitter, contemptuous.
“You people,” Chi says. “Live for today. Don’t give a damn about tomorrow. So many simple things you people take for granted will be gone.”
Even if Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco is a pathological liar, Ruby thinks, sweet Isis, even if he is, there is some kind of truth in his monstrous lies. She is stunned to her core.
As though awakened by the quiet, Gorgon stretches and belches. “Hey.” He reaches over and kneads her neck. “What’s happenin’, baby?”
Ruby pulls onto the gravel drive. “We’re here.”
Grandmother Says: K’an (The Abyss)
The Image: A river flows through a deep ravine. The river does not shrink from passing through places of danger, through canyons or over waterfalls.
The Oracle: Confronting danger brings success, provided one views the situation with clarity and sincerity.
In the time of danger and difficulty, one must not tarry, but proceed forward with awareness and courage. Danger must be analyzed objectively, so that one does not become confused or act foolishly. Caution: the swimmer who attempts to rescue the drowning person may also drown.