Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  “You can’t die, Starbright! I can’t let you die!”

  Who else possesses the power to collapse the Prime Probability?

  Him. He does.

  “What can we do?”

  “You said the touch of my demon can kill me,” Starbright says. “But I touched Ruby’s demon. I touched your demon. And their touch didn’t kill me! Chi, listen! They didn’t kill me!”

  “Then join hands!” Chi commands. “Starbright, take Ruby’s hand. Ruby, give me yours.”

  The three of them stand back-to-back, each gripping the other’s hand, facing the demons and the Other Now.

  “Let’s touch them,” Starbright shouts. “Let’s touch them together!”

  The Chi demon snaps at him like a rabid beast. Chi can hear the demon’s teeth click, sending shivers of nausea through him.

  The Starbright demon beats him with her staff, raining blows on his head. Wetness pours down his forehead.

  The Ruby demon rakes her fingernails across his face. Razor edges cut deep in his cheek.

  Together, he and Starbright and Ruby hold out their entwined fingers. No demon can touch only the one for which it is the killing double.

  They are intermingled.

  Mixed and blended.

  They stand united.

  “Let’s sing!” Starbright says in a quavering voice. In a thin soprano, she yodels, “All you need is love.”

  Ruby wails, “All you need is love.”

  Chi bellows, “All you need is love.”

  18

  With a Little Help from My Friends

  With her hand gripped in Chi’s, Ruby thrusts their clenched hands in the bloody skull’s gaping maw. Touch the Starbright demon? Hell, no! If she’s about to die, she’s taking the demon out with her. She punches a force field, burning and freezing at the same time. She screams and shuts her eyes, unwilling to watch her hand burn into a blackened stump.

  The demon howls, staggers back.

  Now she and Starbright thrust their clenched hands in the Chi demon’s nose, shattering the composite of tiny faces. The demon bursts into a million winged pieces that fly all around them, snapping and biting.

  Behind her, Chi and the kid punch their clenched hands at her own demon, smashing the throbbing green heart, splattering putrefaction.

  “Don’t stop,” Chi yells.

  “Keep singing,” Starbright shouts.

  Ruby punches with all her strength and sings till her throat aches.

  The bloodstained sky turns black, the ghastly howling dies, and Ruby stands back-to-back and hand-in-hand with Chi and the kid beneath Alford Lake Bridge, wailing “All You Need Is Love” like her life depends on it. Moths flap around the fake stalactites.

  A buzzing feeling chases over Ruby’s skin as if she’s just strolled through a wall of electricity. She shivers, reluctant to look down at herself for fear her flesh will split and fall from her bones, piece by bloody piece. Her mouth tastes metallic. Her stomach turns somersaults. Only the knuckle-crunching grip of the youngsters’ hands in hers gives her a clue that this is real.

  She’s alive. She’s here.

  How long did they stand on that needle of rock, gazing down at the Other Now? Five hundred years? Or only a moment?

  “Sweet Isis,” she moans. She shakes her hands loose from theirs and leans up against the tunnel wall. “Not even when I drank peyote-button tea have I ever seen what I just saw.” She sneezes. “You know what? I’m too old for this.”

  “Cosmic Mind,” Chi mutters. “Was that a secret loop?”

  “What secret loop?” Ruby gasps. “Now what, man from Mars?”

  Starbright kneels on the cobblestones, clasping her stomach.

  “A secret loop no one could have foreseen,” Chi says. “That I was lured here by the demons. To this moment. To this Prime Probability. To the three of us standing here, on this day.”

  “But why, Chi?” Starbright says.

  “To trick me into using the purple beam and collapsing the Prime Probability out of the timeline. To destroy our spacetime, instead of conserving it. My sweet Starbright, bless your gentle heart, you were right.” He groans and grips his forehead. Then he goes to her, lifts her to her feet. “You were so right.”

  “Good thing someone’s got a head on her shoulders,” Ruby says.

  Hells Angels amble down from Stanyan Street. Their boots tramp on the pavement. Their chains clank. They trade talk in low growls. The stink of male sweat and booze and pot smoke surrounds them.

  Their bleary eyes gleam as they approach Ruby, Starbright, and Chi in the dimly lit tunnel. They grin, five gap-toothed leers guaranteed to make anyone’s heart beat faster.

  Ruby draws her Walther. She’s had quite enough gunfire for one night, but she lifts her weapon anyway.

  Chi whips the maser from his jacket pocket, clicks the beam to green.

  “Hairy Harry,” the kid calls out in a high, clear voice. “Hey, it’s me. It’s Starbright.”

  “Cool it,” Hairy Harry growls to his comrades, eyeing Ruby’s pistol and holding up his hands.

  “We don’t want any hassle, Hairy Harry,” Ruby says, aiming for his gut.

  “We don’t neither,” he says. “We ain’t hasslin’ the chick who drew Chocolate. We just wanna take a piss in the woods.”

  The Angels ramble on, a herd of clanking, shuffling, growling beasts.

  Grandmother Says: Ta Ch’u (Integrity)

  The Image: Heaven within the mountain. The dragon hides in his glen. An accumulation of pebbles results in a mountain. But the treasures within are the most precious.

  The Oracle: Even great and difficult undertakings succeed when one approaches them with integrity. The study of great deeds and principles of the past strengthens and elevates character. One should strive to apply the great principles of the past to the future.

  Hexagram 26, The I Ching or Book of Changes

  They find Ruby’s Mercedes on Kezar Drive, pile in, and head back to Haight Street. The crowd has thinned, but the stench of burnt things thickens the air. Ruby cups her hand to her nose and mouth. Man! What a smell. Water inky with ashes pools on the sidewalk and on the street.

  An ambulance parks in front of the smoldering ruins of the Double Barrel house. The doors are open, and a harsh light illuminates the back of it. Ruby can see two bodies covered head to toe with sheets lying on stretchers. Ambulance attendants swarm all over the place, but they’re in no hurry to take the bodies away.

  Professor Zoom leans against the doors, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

  Starbright leaps out of the car. “Professor Zoom!”

  Ruby sets the parking brake, opens her door, and steps out, leaning over the car roof. She’s had quite enough of Harold.

  Starbright takes Professor Zoom’s hands, but he stares at her, limp and uncomprehending. “Is Penny Lane okay? Crinky, Professor Zoom?” She shouts in his face as if he’s deaf, which he does a fair job of miming. “Is Crinky okay?”

  Chi jumps out after her as Professor Zoom slowly shakes his head. “Crinky has gone to God, Starbright.” He glares at Chi. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  The kid screams, drops his hands, and peers in the ambulance. Her face twists with horror. She turns to Chi, purple with fury. “You didn’t even try!” She pounces on him, punching and slapping. “Oh, I hate you! I hate you!”

  “My love, I did try,” Chi protests, shielding his face from her blows. He catches one flailing wrist, then the other.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “All right. I can’t lie to you, Starbright. I thought about Tenet Three. Yes, I thought about it. I have to.”

  “Tenet Three,” she says, disgusted. “You’re worse than my father who treated her like she was bad. Worse than her stepfather who raped her. You let her die!”

  Professor Zoom pats her shoulder. “No, no, Starbright. He did try. He ran up the stairs. He ran into the room. But he was too late. The room was gone. She was gone. Truly, verily, sh
e was already gone.”

  Starbright shakes her head, unconvinced.

  “I was there,” Professor Zoom says. “I saw. I could have pulled Crinky out of that room.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You know,” he says with a perplexed look, “I just didn’t think of it.”

  The kid jumps into the car and buries her face in her hands. Chi climbs in after her and wraps his arms around her, cradling her, whispering to her.

  “Harold,” Ruby says, studying him over the car roof. “Get out of the Haight-Ashbury. This place is no good for you anymore. Go back to Harvard. Finish your damn philosophy degree.”

  “You know what, Ruby?” He chuckles like the pull of a saw through bone. “I never did go to Harvard. I dropped out of high school, man. The closest I ever got to Harvard was hitchhiking through Boston, trying to score some dope.”

  *

  Ruby’s cats climb all over Starbright as she sits sobbing, cross-legged on the couch. Alana rests her paws on Starbright’s chest and licks tears off her cheeks. Luna purrs and preens her soft snout on Starbright’s knee. Sita settles herself beside Starbright’s knee, while Rama and Ara perch somberly on the back of the couch, two sapphire-eyed sentinels.

  Ruby doesn’t know what to say. No, wrong. There are a thousand and one things she could say, and none of them seem right. How she felt when they told her about Pa at Pearl Harbor. The day they found Roi in an alley. When Ma told her she had lung cancer, though she’d never smoked. Ma died at age fifty—fifteen short years from how old Ruby is now—and her death drove Ruby all the way to a lawyer’s office and to the library, where she discovered a University of Michigan study, which came to the disturbing conclusion that breathing asbestos particles could give you lung cancer.

  Yet after the grave was dug and the settlement check deposited in her bank account, Ruby couldn’t shake the feeling of unfinished business. Unrighted wrongs.

  That engine room, as clear as day. Maybe that was the worst part of losing her mother. That Ruby should have told Ma to get out of that engine room.

  Chi sits beside Starbright. He takes her hand. Ruby cannot read his stricken face.

  “It’s all my fault,” the kid says between sobs. “If only I wasn’t so selfish, I could have done something for Penny Lane. I could have saved her.”

  “Now you listen to me, Starbright,” Ruby says. The kid told her all about what went down at the Blue Unicorn. “You got nothing to do with what happened tonight. You were kids and you loved each other once. But that little girl you loved was lost to you a long time ago.”

  The kid shakes her head. “I want to die, too.”

  “You’re not going to die, Starbright,” Chi says, “not for a long time.” He raises his hand to his lips and whispers, “Katie.” A beep, and he fiddles with his magic ring, whispering dates and times. The field of lavender light pops up between his face and his palm, like it always does. The sight of him in his perfect jeans and beads and Beatle boots with a piece of light dancing in his hand is damn near as strange as anything Ruby has ever seen.

  And then it doesn’t seem so strange, after all. It seems like old times.

  Chi smiles. “It’s over. K-T has computed there are no more Prime Probabilities, at least not tonight. We’re in the clear.”

  “Why should I care?” Starbright sniffs.

  Chi’s eyes widen. He sighs and shakes his head. “Starbright,” he says gently. “I tried to rescue Penny Lane. I did try. Her death is a terrible thing, I know. But her death—how can I say this?—her death doesn’t affect the timeline.”

  “Yes, it does.” Starbright wipes tears from her cheeks. Her face hardens with anger. “Her death affects the timeline because her death affects me.”

  Chi aims a look of appeal at Ruby.

  She shrugs. “Kid’s got a point.”

  “Why should I care about your spacetime?” Starbright says. “Because I’m important somehow? Why? Just because I survive the Summer of Love preserves your whole future?”

  “My love, it’s your future, too,” he says.

  “So you say,” Ruby says.

  Chi studies them both with an inscrutable look. Then he stands. “All right. Consider impact before you consider benefit? Maybe this will make an impact for the good.”

  He carefully takes down Ruby’s prized Rick Griffin posters, exposing her white stucco living room wall.

  “Now what’s he up to?” Ruby mutters to the kid, taking Chi’s place beside her and wrapping her arm around the kid’s shoulders.

  “This,” Chi says, aiming his magic ring at the wall, “is a holoid field.”

  The field of lavender light, which has always been the size of a pulp magazine every time Ruby glimpses it, appears in the middle of the room. It’s as big as the whole wall! A bright red message pops into the field:

  “Date: 08-28-1967. You may insert Disc 5 now.”

  “Sweet Isis.” Ruby gets to her feet, walks in front of the holoid field, next to it, behind it. The field is three feet in depth and floats a foot off the floor. She walks through the space between the field and the wall and her distorted shadow ripples through the light like on a movie screen when someone walks in front of the projector. The letters and numbers are three-dimensional, as bright as rubies, and as large as her leg from her knee to her ankle. She can see every angle, every glowing edge.

  “And this,” Chi says, “is a holoid.”

  He takes a tiny cube from his pocket, opens the lid, and plucks out a crystal sliver. He tucks the sliver in a slot in the bezel of his ring. “Let me show you a bit of the future. Our future. Yours and mine.”

  A tall, slim woman materializes in the middle of the lavender light. She’s clad in elegant, precise clothes. Her hair falls in dusky waves to her shoulders. Her distinctive face is grave. Her hands gesture gracefully, sending sparkles from the gemstone rings on her fingers. She appears to be Ruby’s age, but her bearing and demeanor seem far older. Her eyes search the foreground, glinting with the force of her personality.

  Ruby leans back into the couch. Starbright huddles against her.

  The woman hovers a foot off the floor in the middle of Ruby’s living room, gazing straight at them.

  “Hello,” Ruby whispers, just in case she can hear them.

  Chi sits beside Starbright and circles his arm around her shoulders, gazing raptly at the holoid.

  “My fellow Americans,” the woman says in a thrilling contralto. “As we celebrate the close of the first century of the twenty-first millennium, and embark upon the third century of our great nation, we face more difficult challenges than we have ever faced before. We must meet those challenges with solutions. Not easy solutions, but difficult ones. Solutions aimed toward relieving our present suffering, surely, but also aimed toward our heirs and the destiny of our precious blue planet. Not merely the shortsighted quick fixes of previous administrations who sought power and personal aggrandizement at the expense of the future and abused the power of the media to propagandize their faulty policies. We need long-term solutions. Solutions that will work for us now and for tomorrow.

  “We must accept the responsibility of the cocreatorship of our world with the Cosmic Mind, the Universal Intelligence that has graced us with this small blue globe. I believe in the Great Good of the Cosmic Mind, my friends, my neighbors, and my colleagues. I believe we must devote our lives and our work, each and every one of us, during each and every day, to the furtherance of the Great Good.

  “I can’t define for you what the Great Good is. But I can tell you what I believe. I believe the Great Good is love. Kindness, joy, and creativity. A celebration of people’s self-worth and of society’s worth. Of inventiveness, ingenuity, and industriousness. The Great Good must serve our fellow Americans and serve our great country, this unique bastion of liberty in all the world and in all of history.

  “But we must consider our impact on the world, my worthy opponent says. My fellow Americans, we have considered our im
pact. No country in all of history has extended generosity to the world the way we have. What do we do when the whole planet suffers? When misguided science serving political zealots and secretly cynical self-interests have brought about this unexpected climate change? When the lust for power and domination and the failure to sanction rogue regimes have brought about the First Atomic War? What can we do? We fight back.

  “During the rebellion that formed our great nation, when our ancestors fought against government tyranny, a colony—later our sister state of New Hampshire—had a motto. A rallying cry. That cry was ‘Live Free or Die.’ As we plunge into the fourth century of the millennium, we must rally to a new cry. I propose that we must ‘Live Responsibly or Die.’”

  Applause fills the living room, and the woman vanishes.

  “It’s a campaign speech!” Starbright whispers.

  “You’re right,” Ruby whispers back. “Who is she?” she asks Chi.

  “That’s Mary Alexander, the second woman president of the United States. She won the election in 2092,” he says in a tone matching his rapt gaze. “President Alexander is generally credited as the founder of cosmicism. She was the first person to gain enormous political power who articulated cosmicist fundamentals. From these fundamentals stemmed a massive shift in values, especially during the 2200s during the brown ages. People broke away from consumer passivity to awareness of impact in their daily lives. To give is best, that’s what we say.”

  “Not these days, sonny,” Ruby says.

  “Well. It took nearly three hundred years after President Alexander gave her speech for cosmicist philosophy to catch on.” Chi shrugs. “That’s how long a shift in humanity’s values usually takes. Took that long for Christianity to break away from the brutality of early paganism.”

  “So she never saw people practice cosmicism in her Day?” Ruby says.

  “Only in a limited way.”

  “How sad!” Starbright says.

  Now Mary Alexander appears in the holoid again, flickering briefly. Her careworn face is deeply lined. Her silver hair falls in waves to her shoulders, but her shoulders stoop. “I have had great joys in my life and great disappointments, too, my children.” Her voice quavers. “I am still fearful for our great nation and fearful for our Earth. You must carry on the Good in all ways, great and small. Be new. Always come forth into Being.”