by Lisa Mason
“The people who were with you,” Chi shouts. “Answer me! Where are they?”
“The dealers, they cut Lady May. They cut Crinky. Then they split.” Professor Zoom’s eyes glaze with horror. “And then the bed just… .lit up! I heard her scream. Dear God, I never heard her scream before, do you understand me? I heard her scream.”
“Let’s go.”
Chi slings the fellow’s arm over his shoulders and drags him downstairs. Firemen race inside. A young man in ambulance whites takes Professor Zoom from Chi and leads him outside. Chi finds Dirty David snoring peacefully on the floor and hands him over to another ambulance attendant.
A fireman yells at him, “Sir, get out of here now!”
Chi clatters down the stairs. Police cars with their lights spinning, fire engines frantic with activity jam the street. News reporters with photographers in tow, film crews with booms and microphones jostle closer for a better view. Cops brandish billy clubs, shoving both media people and sightseers back from the house.
The usual Haight Street crowd has gathered, robed, feathered, beaded, spangled, and very stoned. Some people gape at the fire with tearful, horrified eyes. The mouse magician solemnly rings his brass bell and shakes his skull-topped wand as if his invocation will stop the conflagration. Others giggle and stare, mouths dropped open in a “Wow!” And there—a couple of greasy hoodies—and there—street spades in free box rags—snake through the crowd, hands darting into jacket pockets, seizing handbags. A hoodie seizes a woman’s woven pouch. She screams, “Stop, thief!” but no one pays her any heed. Hells Angels and Gypsy Jokers straddle growling hogs, their ladies splayed behind them.
And at the corner where the front stairs meet the sidewalk, where she promised to wait, wait no matter what, there is no one.
Starbright is gone.
Chi pushes through the crowd, panic clenching his throat. “Have you seen Starbright? I’ve got to find her, have you seen her?”
The grizzled Beatnik who owns the Blue Unicorn Café pats his shoulder, saying, “No, man, I haven’t seen her.” A guy in a white robe and a crown of thorns says, “Bugger off, I’m God.” Some people stare blankly as if they’ve never seen him before, though he’s seen their faces nearly every day during the Summer of Love. Dr. David Smith strides by in his white clinic coat, toting his doctor’s bag.
Chi knows these faces, he thinks with a pang, but he knows nothing of who these people really are. Where did they come from, where will they go? What do they believe in? Is he any closer to the truth of the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love? What special insight can he contribute to the Archives? Billions of dollars invested in the SOL Project, and he still knows nothing?
But that was never the object of the project: to understand. The object was to protect the Axis, preserve the timeline, and conserve spacetime as everyone knows it. Rage swells in his heart. Billions of dollars to preserve the timeline, and nothing more. Under Tenet Three, he’s not even allowed to save a wounded girl from a burning house.
The way you think about things shapes the way your reality is. For people like Starbright and Ruby A. Maverick, the Summer of Love has meant shaking up reality as they knew it. Rejecting conformity, prejudice, the way things are supposed to be according to someone else. Thinking for themselves. Shaping reality their way, a new and better way.
How dare the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications transmit him across five hundred years to preserve their notion of the timeline? The LISA techs, the Archivists, the smug cosmicists consider themselves the vanguard of civilization. They believe in the changes they’ve made.
But they haven’t changed enough. They haven’t even begun their personal revolution.That is the truth he’s learned from Starbright and Ruby. That is the special insight he can contribute.
The crowd thickens. Tourists gawk and aim cameras. They don’t give a damn about the burning house or the people inside.
“Why don’t you move on?” Chi shouts. “Get out of here and let the fire department do its work.”
A guy with a crew cut catcalls, “Dirty hippie,” and throws a fake punch at him.
Chi throws a real punch back, connecting with the guy’s square jaw. “I said move on, you son of a bitch.”
The crew cut’s buddies leap on Chi. Punches pummel his shoulders, his ribs. The crew cut slams payback into Chi’s jaw.
He tastes blood. He plants his knuckles in an eye, crunches a nose. It feels good! He swings wildly, all his rage and frustration finding targets at the end of his fists.
Half a dozen Hells Angels materialize in a wall of hulking denim and clanking chains.
“Heads up, man,” the Bear says mildly. Up close, the Bear’s face is deeply sun-wrinkled. He must be pushing forty. Chi spots an Air Force patch on the Bear’s jacket. “Korea, ’52.” The Bear plucks the crew cut from Chi’s grasp and shoves him at Badger, who pins back the arms of the luckless guy. The Bear aims his fist. “Nobody hassles Starbright’s old man.”
Chi catches sight of a silver Mercedes inching down the block. “Chi!” Ruby leans out the window. “Have you lost your marbles? Where’s Starbright?”
He ducks away from the fight, buzzing with adrenaline. He sprints to Ruby’s car, tears open the door, and hops inside, panting and bloody.
“Uh-huh, lost your marbles.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe my eyes. The man from Mars, rumbling with the Angels. How’s your magic ring?”
“Oh no!” He examines the knuckletop. Blood spatters the bezel. “K-T.” A beep, and the holoid field pops into his palm. He grins sheepishly. “Guess I lost my head.”
“Guess you did.” Ruby glances at him inscrutably. “Stan the Man stopped by the Mystic Eye. I don’t know what the kid said to him, but he’s splitting town. He said it’s ‘cause of her. Me, I think Stovepipe and the Lizard have got his number.” She clucks her tongue. “Stan did one thing right, though. He told me you and Starbright went looking for her girlfriend at the Double Barrel house. I guess he didn’t have to do that.” She sighs and leans out of the window again. “So what happened? Where is she?”
“Not in the house,” he says miserably. “That’s for sure.”
“You don’t sound glad.” She peers out again. “Sweet Isis! I haven’t seen a fire like that in twenty years.” Her ferocious eyes grow alarmed. “Where is she, Chi?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“She begged me to help Penny Lane. She promised to wait for me. Wait, no matter what. But by the time I got out, she was gone.”
“I thought you told us these are the last days before the Hot Dim Spot closes.”
“Yeah.” He hangs his head. “The fire. I’m sure it’s a Prime Probability.”
“Then why the hell did you leave her?”
“I messed up, okay? It all happened so fast!”
His anger heats up another hundred degrees, along with a bad, bad feeling as if an unseen force is pushing him. He can almost feel probabilities collapsing like evil dominos, toppling in a direction he can’t control, heading into a dark destiny.
“Ruby, help me! We’ve got to find her.”
“We will.” Ruby steers the car through the crowd. “Someone must have seen her.”
The crowd grows thicker still. Fights break out here and there. Hells Angels and Satan’s Slaves push and jostle. Is a riot brewing?
Chi spots Cyn with the handsome black dude in his beret and leather jacket. “Cyn!” He motions them over. Despite the young man’s militant demeanor, Chi sees how he holds Cyn, his arm protective around her frail shoulders. Her fearful look isn’t inspired by him, but by the fire and the rowdy crowd.
“Have you seen Starbright?” Chi asks, relieved again for little Cyn.
She nods, points. “We saw her runnin’ down Haight to the park, Chi.”
Cyn’s man leans into Chi’s window. “Brother, a lady in the park at night with nothin’ but her and the hoodies? She in big trouble.”
<
br /> “She was runnin’ like crazy,” Cyn says. “Like there was somethin’ chasin’ her? Only we didn’t see nobody.”
“Anybody mess with my lady,” Cyn’s man says, “I’ll off him. Brother, you better go find her.”
Chi searches the shadows as Ruby speeds down Kezar Drive into Golden Gate Park. Stragglers from Chocolate George’s wake stalk through the twilight. Bikers joyride their choppers down every lane, hooting with drunken laughter. Trees toss in the breeze and eerie shapes ripple across the grass. Silver rain slants down through the streetlights’ glow.
The park is alive, shivering. The ground swells and lurches. Branches whip against the wind, defying it. Darkness slithers with serpentine shapes that coil, then dissolve, and coil again.
Chi is sick to his soul. He’s tried so hard. He’s stayed by her side nearly every moment this summer, even when he was unsure of her identity. He’s done his duty. His cosmicist duty. He’s gone beyond his duty. Way beyond. He’s fallen in love.
And now she’s gone. Impossibly gone like a coin in one of Ruby’s sleight-of-hand tricks.
Ruby brakes the Mercedes, tires squealing, and pulls over to the curb. “Get out! We’ll never find her this way.”
Ruby brandishes her Walther.
Chi grips his maser.
They leap out of the car and dart down a path twisting into the park. They confront a fork in the path, take the left turnoff, and run. Lindley Meadow, the Sharon Building, the Carousel. Five miles of parkland stretches from here to Ocean Beach, a maze of trails sprawling in every direction.
“Damn it!” Sweat pours down Chi’s face, though he’s shivering from the cold. “We won’t find her this way, either.”
Ruby stops and bends over at the waist, heaving for breath. “No foolin’. I’m no athlete, sonny. We better go to the fuzz, get some help.”
“You go. I’ll keep looking. I’m the one who blew it.”
Ruby takes his shoulders. “Listen to me, Chi. This is no time for your guilt trip, all right? You can’t search the whole park all by yourself. We need the police.”
“You think they’ll help us?”
“We’ve got to try! It’s the best we can do. Get an APB out on her or something. She once told me her pa is a dentist. We’ll tell them she’s the daughter of some bigwig back East.”
“I heard her parents hired a private investigator. That might help, too.”
“Cool. I can deal with the heat if you can. We can’t find her alone.” She sweeps her arms at the vast trees, the dark lawns, the maze of trails. “It’s just too big!”
They jog back toward Kezar Drive, take the fork toward Alvord Lake Bridge. They stride through a stonework tunnel built to look like a cave with rough rock walls, stalactites hanging from the roof, stalagmites jutting from the cobblestone path.
Then there they are, at the end of the tunnel.
Six hoodies. Not Hells Angels or Gypsy Jokers. Just cheap hoodies, puny and anonymous, ticked off at the world and raring to pick on someone not their size.
Her.
Starbright crouches at the center of their circle, her eyes and mouth dark pools of terror. A hoodie has torn down the neckline of her dress. Her bare shoulder gleams in the lamplight.
Without hesitation or a word of warning, Ruby lifts the Walther and fires. Her bullet ricochets off the boot toes of the hoodie swinging a switchblade at the girl. He yelps, flings his blade into the duck pond at the end of the tunnel, and lopes away.
“Hey, Ruby!” Chi shouts, drawing his maser. He shoots a green beam, showering sparks across the cobblestones. “I thought you believed in peace and love. Shouldn’t you wait until you can see the whites of their eyes?”
“If I can see his face, sonny,” she yells, “I can shoot him between the eyes!”
The other hoodies scatter. Two sprint toward Haight Street. Three charge at Chi and Ruby, staring wild-eyed at his maser and her gun, and sprint past them into the dark, bootheels echoing.
Chi leaps to Starbright’s side. “You promised to wait for me.” He flings his arms around her, crushing her to his chest. “I’m not going to lose you again!”
Ruby joins them. She pulls up Starbright’s torn bodice, then tucks the Walther in her shoulder bag. “Let’s get out of here.”
They start up the hill toward Stanyan Street.
But the tunnel walls rumble and sway. A sound swells like the long, low roar of a night tide. The stalactites quiver. Bits of rock break loose and crash. The roar grows louder. The ground shakes like the start of an earthquake. Fissures shoot through the tunnel walls. The walls crack apart and collapse in heaps of rubble. Overhead, the eucalyptus trees sway and groan, raining leaves and broken branches all around them.
The girl in the black cape stands before Chi, her staff planted before her in both hands. For a moment, she looks exactly like Starbright in her long black dress, the smooth young face of a pretty girl with dark eyes and long, tawny hair. Then a hole yawns open in the middle of her forehead and a net of cracks fans out. The face shatters, flesh bursting apart as if she’s exploded from within. A bloody skull stares at him, exposed eyeballs held in bony sockets by spiderwebs crawling with black widows.
“Get behind me!” Chi shouts at Starbright.
Now the gray beggar woman stands before Starbright, her ‘fro and features a ghastly caricature of Ruby. Her hair slithers, snakes hissing at the end of each curl. The beggar stinks of decay. Wind peels her rags away until she’s naked, a mass of raw sores and exposed bones. The demon howls. Strange internal organs pulse beneath her ribs, a throbbing heart tinged green like rotten meat. A skeleton dripping with putrefaction looms before Starbright.
Chi thumbs the maser to purple, the antimatter beam.
“Leave us!” he shouts and aims.
But he can’t shoot. A paralysis grips him.
Now an entity appears before Ruby. An entity Chi has never seen before: a tall, slim man with long red hair and dead-white skin, sapphire flames leaping from his eyes.
Him!
The question that’s haunted him all summer strikes him like a blow. Who else in the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love disappeared into the Hot Dim Spot?
Him. He is here. He has always been here.
The demon grins. Each of his teeth is a tiny face like Chi’s, and each face grins, revealing more teeth, more faces. Faces form in his cheeks and forehead, in the swinging raw ropes of his hair. No rotting limbs, no putrid entrails. Just him, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, over and over and over. He’s never really seen himself. His awful face. His awful power.
Chi feels wasted, plucked out of himself, flung across an abyss.
The dark park disappears, and a wind sucks him and Starbright and Ruby through a yawning aperture. Gleaming panels surround them like the hull of a machine. Black sparks spit and crackle.
The machine flings them out onto a gray plain.
Ashen clouds roil around them. A storm thunders and lightning flashes, but the sun burns above, a sickly yellow. A stench fills Chi’s nose and mouth, the fetor of sulfur, rotting flesh, forest fires.
Chi staggers in the storm’s blast and seizes Starbright with one hand, Ruby with the other. The wind whips Starbright off her feet, levitating her above him. Ruby drops below him as if the ground can’t hold her. He’s nearly ripped in two between them, but he holds on. He holds on! He is the Axis, the center refusing to let go.
Red seeps from the horizon until the sky boils with blood.
Black lightning knifes the sky, and Chi perches atop a needle of rock, gripping Starbright and Ruby.
A dreadful valley burns far below them. A man writhes on a plate while hyenas tear out his stomach, devouring him alive. Chimeras lope after ragged children. Gargoyles ravage a screaming woman. Vultures touch down on gut-strewn fields, flesh dangling from dripping beaks. A masked robot operates a guillotine, hacking off the heads of handcuffed prisoners, the stained blade rising and falling every twenty seconds exactly.
; The three demons surround them, snarling and hissing.
The Starbright demon swings her staff at Chi. He ducks, punches the demon’s staff away. He raises the maser, the pointer on purple.
But Starbright seizes his wrist.
“No!” she cries. “Chi, don’t!”
The needle of rock begins to shake, pitching crazily back and forth.
He tries to aim, but Starbright wrestles with him. With sudden strength, she turns the maser toward her stomach.
“Stop it!” he shouts, bewildered. “This is the only way! This is what I was sent here for!”
“Don’t do it, Chi!”
Ruby seizes his other wrist and, for a terrifying moment, he’s convinced they are demons, and everything, everything has been a monstrous hoax.
“Why are you stopping me?” he yells, anguished.
“You told us your people don’t really know what the purple beam does,” Starbright shouts in his ear.
“It counteracts antimatter. We’re surrounded by antimatter! It’s the only way we can get out of here!”
“But do you know for sure? You’ve told me over and over you don’t know exactly what’ll happen if you use the purple beam.”
She’s right. They’re not just in contact with the Other Now. They’re trapped inside the Other Now.
“It’s all we’ve got to defend ourselves with!”
“But, Chi, what if you destroy everything?”
They shake and tilt, struggling for a foothold on the needle of rock.
“Listen to her, Chi,” Ruby shouts. “Scientists thought there was a chance they could have set the sky on fire when they dropped the atomic bomb. A chance they could have destroyed the whole world along with Hiroshima.”
“But they dropped the bomb, anyway,” Chi says. “They took that chance.”
“Yeah, and the world was real lucky,” Ruby persists. “Are you going to take that chance now with a weapon a billion times more powerful?”
The Starbright demon strikes his kneecaps with her staff. Chi reels.
“Don’t do it, Chi,” Starbright pleads. “Look at your cosmicists. They thought they were doing the right thing by saving Betty. But they didn’t. They didn’t.” Tears stream down her face. “Don’t use the purple beam, Chi. I’ll die if I have to.”