by Lisa Mason
“This is Mary a month before she died. A farewell message. She was ninety-seven,” Chi says. “She survived three assassination attempts.” He says proudly, “President Alexander was my great-great-great-, and a couple more greats, grandmother.”
Ruby whistles.
Starbright stares at him.
Chi plucks another sliver from his cube, thrusts it in his magic ring.
The lavender field flickers. Bright red alphanumerics appear.
“Date: 08-28-1967. You may insert Disc 6 now.”
Now another woman springs into the field, so full of life Ruby finds it hard to believe she’s not real. She’s a fanciful version of President Alexander. Her waist-length hair is dyed every color of the rainbow, her costume a riot of beads, bells, flowers, and flowing silk ribbons. She sits in a lotus position in the middle of a round mattress fitted in a bed frame made of tiny strips of different colored wood. The bed is poised on a gigantic carved tree branch. The quilt is stitched and pieced to resemble the leaves and twigs and bits of down inside a bird’s nest.
“Everybody needs a nest, don’t you think so, babies?” she says. “Hi! I’m Pearl Alexander, and this here is a gen-u-ine one-of-a-kind handmade sculpture-bed crafted by me and twenty-five other folks in my company, Back to the Hands. See, we’re committed to a return of True Value in the arts and crafts. We reject the mass production thing. We reject the travesties of so-called modern art like that so-called artist cranking out a thousand paintings with dead butterflies glued all over ‘em.”
“Dead butterflies?” Starbright exclaims. “I threw out my butterfly collecting kit when Granma died!”
“People say we’re living in a postindustrial society,” Pearl Alexander continues, “but we’re not. We’re living in a hyperindustrial society that devalues individual talent and skill. My colleagues and I reject the products of the hyperindustrial technopolistic plutocracy. We want craft back, even if craft costs a bit more ‘cause a talented human being actually made it. We believe craft connects you to the Cosmic Mind, to your fellow human beings, and to beauty. Dig it, babies.”
Pearl Alexander vanishes.
“She’s hip!” Ruby says.
“Oh, I wish I could meet her,” Starbright says. “I wish I could show her my drawings.”
Chi laughs. “Pearl was the artist of the family, that’s for sure. It’s like having M.C. Escher as your uncle. Pearl was gene-tweaked, so she lived well past a hundred. She devoted her whole life to arts and crafts.”
Now a series of tall, slim men stride through the lavender field.
“Let’s party,” Ruby mutters.
“That’s Jason Behrens, a geneticist whose combined therapy techniques pioneered the radiation vaccine,” Chi says, pointing. “That’s Thomas Alexander, a mathematician who predicted a global population of fifteen billion years before the census-takers could prove it.
“That’s Mars Herbert, who married Calliope Alexander in 2246.” A lovely, strawberry-haired woman materializes in the field hand-in-hand with a tall, slim man. “Mars was a world-modeler who co-invented telespace. He and Calliope started the practice of giftdays.”
And as the night drifts into dawn, Chi shows Ruby and Starbright wonders of the future, great and small. The domes shielding people during the worst of the radiation. The glittering megalopolises. The EM-Trans, magnetic trains traveling through tunnels at a thousand miles an hour. Gene-tweaking. The medcenters. Telespace. Tachyportation. Terraformation of Mars. Bicycle Paths that generate electricity from a bicyclist’s physical exercise and beam utility credits to her private account.
Many, many wonders.
And things people decided not to do. When damage to the atmosphere was the worst they’d seen, some scientists wanted to blast the sky with lasers or pump toxic chemicals into the air with the hope that the chemicals would recombine with radioactive molecules and neutralize them. Guided by cosmicism, people decided to do nothing. They hid beneath their domes and invented Block while the Earth healed.
“Sky-seeding does work,” Chi says. “The radiation vaccine does work. Telespace does work. T-portation does work.”
“Most of the time,” Ruby says.
Chi gives her a wry grin. “Most of the time. In ways great and small, the future does work. We’ve survived.”
Birds begin their early morning ecstasies. Ruby’s cats stir, wander to the kitchen, and gather around the fridge, singing for their breakfast. Starbright snores against Chi’s shoulder.
He whispers to his magic ring, “Katie, off.” The lavender field shrinks to a pinpoint and vanishes.
Ruby yawns and stretches. “That was your family album. Right, am I right?”
He glances at her with bleary eyes. “Parts of it.” The elegant lad looks the worse for wear after his rumble alongside Hells Angels, not to mention his rumble with the demons.
“Cool.” As Ruby watches, the scratches on his cheek heal. The bruises on his forehead and jaw fade. His split lip mends. Gene-tweaking, uh-huh. “What an amazing family. So talented and brilliant and fortunate.”
“We’ve suffered, too. We’ve all suffered to save the Earth.”
“But you’re not a devolt or a day-laborer on the street.”
“No, I’m not. I probably wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“So this future you’ve shown us is selective, isn’t it?”
“Everything is selective.” He laughs dryly. “You’re a tough nut, Ruby A. Maverick. Mary Alexander would like you.”
Ruby laughs, pleased in spite of herself. “You showed us all that because you wanted to give us hope. You wanted to give the kid hope.”
Starbright’s sleeping face is stained with tears of grief.
“Did I?”
“I hope so,” Ruby says.
“And you?”
“Man from Mars, I abandoned hope a thousand lifetimes ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She shrugs. Not enough of a cheerleader for him? Oh, well.
He gently rearranges Starbright on the couch, then abruptly stands. He strides to the kitchen, pulls out his maser, and aims at the cats, all her beautiful beloved hungry cats gathered around the fridge. He fires before she can stop him or scream.
Red light strikes them, bathing the kitchen in a scarlet glow.
Now Ruby screams. “What are you doing?”
Starbright flinches in her sleep, crying out, “Nance? Nance?”
“These damn fleas are driving me crazy.” Chi scratches his ankle. “Don’t worry, it’s only the micro beam. Oh, I’ll catch hell for using a modern technology to affect the past. But you know what? I don’t give a damn.” He aims the maser at his ankles, shoots the red beam all over his socks.
“You little shit!” Ruby yells.
Alana flops on her butt and scratches her chin. Black specks fly out of her plumy white fur. Luna does her calisthenics, a clawed hind paw deftly raised to her shoulder. She scratches, and fleas fall out dead.
Ruby roars with laughter, waking up the neighborhood.
Chi looks around. “Guess I didn’t blow up all of spacetime this time, either.” He pockets the maser. “Dig it, Ruby. The future will liberate Schrodinger’s Cat!”
September 4, 1967
A New Moon in Virgo
19
Hello Goodbye
Susan wakes to rain pattering on the roof. The skylight is as gray as her mood. Chi told her last night, as they cuddled on Ruby’s couch, that the Hot Dim Spot will close for good at midnight tonight. He doesn’t come out and say so, but she knows what that means. His blue eyes got bluer. It means he’s got to leave. Leave her.
She’s got to leave, too. Ninth grade starts next week. But how can she go? How can she leave the Haight-Ashbury and return to her square parents and her horrid school?
Why oh why does the Summer of Love have to end?
She shivers. It’s cold inside her little room. Cold outside in the rainy morning. And even colder in her heart.
<
br /> In another two months, Shaker Heights will be freezing.
She twirls a lock of her hair, bites the split ends, and spits them out, a bad habit she hasn’t indulged in for two whole months. Twirl, bite, spit. She thinks of Cyn’s ragged fingernails. What used to be Cyn’s ragged fingernails.
Three days ago, Cyn married the handsome young black man, who turns out to be the son of a prosperous saloonkeeper in Oakland. Eli’s father told Eli to lose the Black Panther crap and put on a bartender’s apron, if he’s got a child on the way. Eli does. Cyn is pregnant and all grown up at sixteen. She’s grown out her fingernails, long and strong, and polished them pink. That was the first thing Susan noticed when she admired Cyn’s wedding ring as they sat on the grass of the Panhandle for the last time.
“Dr. Smith over at the clinic?” Cyn said. “He gave me some pills, good pills, supposed to help me with my moods? I feel better all ready.”
Susan twists another lock of her hair. She’s got to go back to high school. Twirl, bite, spit.
The private investigator tracked her down at 555 Clayton Street the day after Nance died. He questioned her for nearly an hour. The PI turns out to be the dude in the military cap. Susan promised him she’d contact her parents herself if he didn’t turn her over to the police.
“Groovy,” the PI said. “I always thought you were a foxy lady.”
Nance’s body was so badly burned that the coroner had to match her dental records at twelve years old—her stepfather hadn’t sent her to the dentist for two years—to the jawbone left in the charred corpse. Susan heard that the stepfather declined to collect the remains of his stepdaughter. She also heard that Nance’s mom took Nance’s brother Dave and moved in with her aunt.
Professor Zoom walked out of the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General, never to be seen or heard from again. Stan the Man split town the night of the fire, destination unknown. The Double Barrel Boogie Band failed to return to the wreckage of their house when authorities discovered a fake name had been signed on the lease and the rent was six months overdue.
Papa Al was identified in the Berkeley Barb as a speed pusher recruiting young dealers at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Oh, that’s how he paid his rent. Teddy Bear split to Mexico. Dr. David Smith struggles on at the clinic, with more patients than ever and a lot less money.
Leo Gorgon returned to New York City, along with his heroin habit. Hairy Harry and the Hells Angels took their hogs out for a spin to Florida. Stovepipe was found in Richmond behind the Pony Saloon, his wrists and ankles bound and four bullets in the back of his head. Susan sees the Lizard’s ugly mug on the Wanted bulletin board at the post office.
The mouse magician parades forlornly down Haight Street, ringing his bell and waving his skull-topped wand. But only on Saturdays.
The woman Susan knew only as Lady May could not be identified at all. The burned remains of whoever Lady May was were placed in a box and filed in the public morgue under the name Jane Doe.
Susan packs her overnight bag, wondering how on earth she’s going to get home. She’s got exactly two dollars and forty-six cents left.
Late morning slips into lunchtime. Susan wanders down to the kitchen. Chi lounges at the table while Ruby prepares food at her cutting board. He doesn’t have to pack. He came with nothing but the clothes on his back, which look and smell as fresh as the day she first met him.
“I’m becoming a grup,” Susan complains, sliding into a kitchen chair.
“A grup?” Ruby says.
“Yeah. Like in ‘Miri,’ on Star Trek. All the flower children who came to the Haight-Ashbury, we’re like the three-hundred-year-old children living on Miri’s planet. Now that we’ve got to go home, it’s like losing our childhood. Losing the innocence of the Haight-Ashbury.”
“Innocence.” Ruby dices scallions, zucchini, and Roma tomatoes fresh from the garden. “I can think of a lot of words for the Haight-Ashbury, kid, but innocence isn’t one of them.”
“But it is, Ruby. And when we return to the soulless suburbs, we’re all going to turn into grups and contract some terrible disease that will rot us into madness and death, just exactly like the children who come of age on Miri’s planet.”
“Starbright,” Ruby says, “life is not one big Star Trek metaphor.”
“Yes, it is,” Susan says gloomily. “It is to me.”
Ruby is more cheerful than usual. Is she glad they’re finally going to leave her in peace? She drizzles olive oil in her iron skillet, tosses in the vegetables, and heaps on garlic and herbs.
“I don’t think Starbright is becoming a grup quite yet, do you, Chi?”
Chi gives her a wink and a marvelous smile, but he’s preoccupied, fiddling with his magic ring.
“Madness and death,” Susan says. “Madness and death.”
Chi projects the lavender field into the palm of his hand, whispering Katie this and Katie that. Seen this small, the holoid field strikes Susan as ordinary as an old boot. He looks troubled, though everything seems to be as stupidly right as it should be.
“You talk to that thing more than you talk to me.”
“When are you going to call your parents?” he says.
“God.”
“You promised.”
“I know, but—“
“But nothing.”
“I’m… .I’m scared! I don’t know what to say!”
“Try ‘hi,’” Ruby says, spooning sautéed vegetables over angel hair noodles.
“You don’t know my father.”
“That’s right, I don’t.” Ruby slides steaming bowls across the table to her and Chi and sits down with a bowl of her own. “But you do, kid. And you’re lucky you do.”
“Lucky! How am I lucky?”
“You’ve got a father,” Ruby says, sipping red wine. “You know him. You’ll probably know him many more years to come.” At Susan’s puzzled look, Ruby adds, “My pa died at Pearl Harbor. A war hero, huh. He was my daddy, and nobody else could compare. I was nine when he died. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about things. Ma working so hard at Marinship. Getting the cancer. Me and my shop. What I’ve made of my life.”
She glances out the window and shrugs, and Susan sees for the first time how that particular movement of Ruby’s shoulder is like rolling off a weight that keeps rolling back on.
“I’ve missed my pa my whole life. So you call your father,” she says, blinking back the slickness in her eyes, “and be glad you’ve got him, no matter what a pain in the ass you think he is at this point in your life. Right, am I right, Chi? You going home to your pa?”
“No,” he says curtly. “I never knew my father, at all. Or my mother.”
Susan and Ruby stare at him, openmouthed.
“You’re an orphan, Chi?” Susan says. “You never told me that.”
“Oh, I’ve got skipparents. Abraxis and Ariel Herbert.”
“But… .you must know who your parents were!”
“Of course I do. Mars Herbert and Calliope Alexander. She of the strawberry hair.” He tosses back his own strawberry hair and laughs in his mirthless way. “Calliope chose my name. How she loved fanciful, mythological things.”
“But”—Susan recollects the holoids he showed her and Ruby—“wasn’t Mars one of the inventors of telespace? Didn’t you say he and Calliope married in 2246?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re from 2467! You’re only twenty-one!”
And he gives her such a haunted, sorrowful look, Susan pushes her bowl of food away and folds her hands, listening.
*
The world population had reached twelve billion, Chi says. In spite of unexpected global changes and the First and Second Atomic Wars, in spite of radiation sickness and pandemics, fifteen billion people inhabited the Earth. Even the wealthy hiding beneath their private domes couldn’t escape the impact of fifteen billion people on our small blue planet.
The strain was evident everywhere: water shortages, food shortages, energy s
hortages. Five thousand wars, if you added gang wars and local revolutions to international disputes. Pollution and diseases resistant to medicine when medicine could be had. People had been talking about a population crisis for centuries. Back in the 2100s, Mary Alexander expressed her concern and founded the World Birth Limits Organization. But birth limits movements back then were voluntary. No nation in the world, except Communist China, enforced a population limits policy.
That was then.
“I believe in the infinite holiness of life,” Ruby says.
Which makes Susan squirm. Ruby knows very well what she did this summer.
“So do we,” Chi says and sighs. “See, population growth is exponential. It’s like the pond with its lily pads that double their numbers each time they grow. By the time the pond is half covered, it’s too late.”
“Because when the pond is half covered, and the lily pads double again, then the pond is completely covered?” Susan says.
“That’s right, my Starbright,” Chi says.
“Smart girl,” Ruby says.
Among practicing cosmicists, Chi continues, voluntary childlessness was the right choice. But when, in 2250, Calliope Alexander-Herbert proposed mandating childlessness before the World Birth Limits Organization, she met with outraged resistance, even among cosmicists.
“Who wanted to forfeit the right to pass on their genes to another generation?” Chi says. “Who wanted to forfeit the possibility of producing another genius or a saint? Who wanted to be left without an heir?”
When the world population exceeded fifteen billion, enforced childlessness became the only way. But everyone had to compromise on the heirs issue.
“The World Birth Limits Organization convened an international meeting,” Chi continues. “After three terrorist attacks and two assassination attempts, the WBLO passed the Generation-Skipping Law. The plan was this. Randomly chosen couples from all over the world would have their genetic material—sperm and eggs—harvested and frozen by cryopreservation, a technique well mastered by that time. From their harvest, the couple could choose and create their child. Skipparents would be arranged for the child, typically from future family members. After a statutory period passed, the child would be birthed in a lab or by implantation in the skipmother’s womb.”