by Lisa Mason
And then another random pool of couples throughout the world were chosen to skip a generation.
“The goal was to reduce our numbers to six billion, which was the last time people had a reasonable quality of life,” Chi says, with another sigh.
“So Calliope and Mars were chosen?” Susan says. “Your mom and dad had to skip?”
“Oh, no,” Chi tells her. “They were good cosmicists. They volunteered. You know,” he says, “sometimes I feel like I know them from the holoids they left me. And don’t get me wrong, I love my skipparents, and they love me. But sometimes I feel this sadness. Like I’ve lost something I can never get back.”
“You never met your parents at all?” Susan says.
“They died,” Chi says, “a hundred years before I was born.”
“Hi,” Susan says into the telephone. Silence, a sputter of static. Her hand shakes so hard, the mouthpiece bumps against her teeth. “It’s me.”
A long deep sigh. A snuffle. Noises knocking around in the background. Her mother’s voice. Then the clatter of someone picking up the phone in the den. A second breath, a second breathlessness.
“Hi, it’s you,” her father says. “Do you have any idea what you have put us through, young lady?”
God! Her heart pounds in her throat. She braces herself.
“Where are you now?” her mother asks shrilly.
A nervous giggle spills from Susan’s mouth. “I’m, ah, well, I’m in San Francisco. It’s really far out, you should see it, ha ha ha.”
“Any idea at all?”
“Are you all right, dear?”
“I’m okay, Mom. I know you’re pissed at me, but—”
“Pissed. Pissed. Pissed is not the word, young lady.”
“Susan, don’t you use that kind of language with your father.”
“Gloria, I think you better—”
“Or when you’re talking—”
“Get off the phone, Gloria, and let me handle—”
“Just because she’s calling doesn’t mean… .Susan, just because you’re calling doesn’t mean—”
“Let me handle this, goddamn it, Gloria!”
Susan almost laughs out loud at her parents’ tangling voices. Then she’s infuriated. She hasn’t seen them or spoken to them in over two months.
“This is so typical. You haven’t changed one bit, but I have. I’ve changed, and I can’t stand the way you hassle over every stupid thing. That’s the reason I left. Why can’t you just talk to me?”
Shocked silence.
She hears a click. Her mother has hung up the phone.
“If you can’t talk to me, Dad, I’m going to hang up, okay?”
Her father sighs. “Don’t hang up, Susan.”
“Then stop it!”
He sighs again, a bone-weary sigh. “You’re starting school next week. I want you back here right now.”
“Sorry, I ran out of money. I can’t afford a plane ticket. Guess I’ll have to hitchhike.”
“I’ll buy the ticket. It’ll be waiting for you at the airport.”
“What if I don’t want to come back?”
“You don’t want to come home?”
“I don’t know. Why should I?”
A pause, another snuffle. It suddenly occurs to her that her father is crying. “Because we love you, Susan.”
“You do?”
Now she is crying, and this makes her mad, because she swore she wouldn’t, no matter what. She wipes her cheek on the back of her hand. Ruby looks up from across the kitchen table and tosses her a paper napkin.
“Of course we do. You know we do.”
“Maybe I don’t know. Dad, Nance died. She burned to death.”
“We know. We heard from her mother.” More silence, muffled sighs. “So I’m not Daddy anymore?”
“I’m not a little girl anymore.”
He thinks that over. “Tell you what,” her father says. “Your mother and I are going to get on a plane and meet you in San Francisco tonight.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes. Yes, I think we do. We can talk on the flight home.”
He takes down Ruby’s number, hangs up, and calls Susan back. They’re flying out on Pan Am flight 524, to arrive thirty minutes after midnight. He wants to pick her up wherever she’s staying, but Susan chickens out on that. She asks Ruby if she’ll drive her to airport. Ruby nods.
“We saw you on TV,” her father says. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Oh, everyone here thinks ‘The Hippie Temptation’ was a shuck. Harry Reasoner doesn’t know the first thing about the Haight-Ashbury.”
“Your mother thinks you’ve gotten too thin.”
“She would.”
He clears his throat. “Susan, you didn’t… .you wouldn’t… .did you, um. Did you take that LSD drug they’re talking about?”
That LSD drug? Which LSD drug? Owsley white lightning or purple double barrels or dragon’s blood? She doesn’t know which LSD drug he means.
“No,” Susan implies, not lying. Her father’s sigh of relief makes the implication worthwhile. “Listen, Dad. Don’t ever call me stupid again.”
“I know you’re not stupid, Susan. You’re in the ninety-eighth percentile. You’re one of the smartest kids in your school.”
“Because the Summer of Love hasn’t been stupid, Dad,” she persists. “This has been the most amazing summer I’ve ever had in my life.”
*
Susan hangs up the phone to find Chi staring at her, his troubled look darker. He takes the oblong stone-thing from his jacket pocket and gingerly lays it on the kitchen table. He gazes into her eyes so intently, she fidgets with the last of her lunch. Ruby whisks the bowls away.
“Starbright,” he says, “Katie tells me I need to verify your identity. Will you please place the fingers of your right hand on my scanner?”
“Okay.” She does. Thumb, too.
“Left hand?”
She does the same.
“Starbright,” he says, his voice husky. “Will you please tell me your true and legal name?”
“I’m Susan Bell.”
“How old are you, Susan?”
“I’m… .going on fifteen.” She blushes at Ruby’s look of surprise. “I’m fourteen, okay?”
“Mega.” Chi heaves a sigh. “That’s prime. Now, one last thing. I’m going to press the scanner on your chest, right here. You’ll feel a little prick like before, okay?”
He tenderly presses the stone to her breastbone. She feels that prick again, like the poke of a tiny needle.
“Oh, no!” Chi leaps to his feet, knocking over the kitchen chair.
Susan screams.
The cats scatter.
Ruby drops the bowls.
“No, no, no!” He shakes the scanner, rereading it again and again. “This can’t be!”
He lunges for her. She ducks behind the table. He lunges again. He seizes her, pressing the scanner to her chest.
Ruby tears him away from her. “Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco! Have you gone off your rocker?”
He collapses in a chair. He stares at Susan with haunted eyes. “You’re not pregnant.”
Susan and Ruby trade glances, astonished and wary.
“Well, of course I’m not pregnant,” she says indignantly. “Why should I be?”
“But you were. You were in July, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”
Susan burns scarlet. “Y-yes, but it was Stan the Man’s. I couldn’t have it. I didn’t want it and I couldn’t have it, and that’s that!”
“It?” he says. “It?”
“This is none of your business, man from Mars,” Ruby snaps.
“It is my business. Susan, tell me what happened.”
“I—I—I got an abortion.”
“Dig it, Chi,” Ruby says. “It’s very simple. She’s fourteen years old. It’s not likely the drug-dealing SOB who statutorily raped her would have given a damn. She was less than two weeks pregn
ant. She didn’t want to identify herself and anyway the new law is crap. So I took her to a doctor who does D and Cs, all right? We talked it over first, so she was sure she was making the right decision, and why the hell do you care?”
“She can’t have had an abortion!”
Susan watches, confused, as Ruby seizes Chi by his shirt collar.
“Yes—she—can,” Ruby says. “She can, and she did. I thought you just got through telling us your sex police enforce birth limits in the future.”
“They do, but—”
“But nothing, sonny. Let me tell you what happened in the old days when a woman couldn’t go to a competent doctor. She went and had an abortion, anyway. I’m not saying it was right or easy or even moral, but she went and did it, if she thought she had to. And if something went wrong, if she got a problem called puerperal sepsis, if she got infected and went into shock, she could die. And if she didn’t die, if she was so lucky as not to die, she could never have children again. Not even when she wanted to. Not even when she was ready to. Because puerperal sepsis makes you sterile.”
Ruby releases him, staggers to the kitchen sink, and turns her back. In a low trembling voice, she says, “Did me.”
*
Susan presses her face against Ruby’s back between her shoulders and wraps her arms around Ruby’s waist.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, kid,” Ruby says. “I’ve had time to deal with what happened fourteen years ago. It’s old news in 1967. You know what? I should have had the child.”
Susan always thought of Ruby as so powerful, so strong. Pressed against her back, she can hear Ruby’s breath, feel her beating heart. For the first time, Susan realizes how fragile Ruby is. Vulnerable and mortal.
“God, Ruby.”
“Hey, don’t cry.” Ruby turns around and hugs her. “It’s been an amazing summer for me, too. I’ve learned something from the Summer of Love. Or maybe I’ve just remembered something I forgot. We’ve all got choices in this life. Like President Alexander said, we’ve got to make those choices responsibly in a cocreatorship with God or the Cosmic Mind or Isis or however you wish to refer to the Universal Intelligence. If we do that, it’s going to be all right. It’s got to be all right because we’ve got to carry on.”
But Chi looks drained. He shakes his head at the scanner, reading and rereading the data. “Listen to me,” he says.
“No, we’re not going to listen to you, sonny,” Ruby snaps. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
He shakes his head at Susan, pale and drawn. “Susan Bell has to be pregnant before I transmit to 2467. If she isn’t, I’ve failed. The SOL Project has failed. And I don’t know what will happen to our spacetime. After all we’ve gone through battling the demons, maybe this is the secret loop that destroys everything.” He mopes out to the living room, slumps on the couch.
“Oh, Chi.” Susan runs to his side and kneels and takes his hands. “I’ll get pregnant when I’m older. I’ll get pregnant with a man who loves me. Why must I be pregnant now?”
“Because Susan Bell will give birth to a child in the spring of 1968.”
“Oh!” she cries and all her fantasies of motherhood rush back. “I would want a little girl.”
“You will have a little girl.”
“I would name her Jessica.”
His eyes widen. “You will name her Jessica.”
“I would want her to have brown eyes and pretty hair. Oh, a little girl!”
He stares.
Ruby sits next to him. “Chi, are you telling us you know what Susan Bell’s probable future is supposed to be?”
He stands and takes down the Rick Griffin posters again. He projects the lavender field as big as the wall. Bright red alphanumerics say:
“Date: 09-04-1967. You may insert Disc 7 now.”
He shoves a crystal sliver in his magic ring.
“My skipmother smuggled these holoid discs into my pocket just before I transmitted to this Now,” he says. “It was subversive, what she did. The holoids contain amazing data. Oh, some data I already knew about. Some I’d never seen before. And some data I wasn’t supposed to know about until the time came. Ariel prioritized and date-coded everything. Man, was I ticked.”
The lavender field dissolves and the street signs at the corner of Haight and Ashbury pop up. In the background, a slim girl in a high-collared shirt talks with a tall, pale redhead. The girl darts across the street, gaining her place behind the shoulder of a sandy-haired man. The girl’s hair stirs in the wind, and she brushes it away from her face. Then she smiles. A radiant smile. An enigmatic smile. The sandy-haired man says, “I’m Harry Reasoner.”
Susan screams. She stares at the girl with her face smiling back at her. “Wow! Wow! Is that me?”
Ruby laughs. “That’s you, kid.”
“What other holoids do you have of me?” Susan says to Chi.
“Just this,” he says quietly.
A young woman materializes in the lavender field. She is self-possessed and very serious. Her hair frames her face in a curly bob. A toddler sits on her lap.
Susan stares. An eerie feeling shivers through her.
The holoid disappears too soon.
“Susan, I don’t have any other holoids of you, but my skipmother did include your complete genealogy on Disc 7,” Chi says. “Know this. You have children. Your children have children. And those children have children.
Now another mother and a child appear. The mother stands in profile, watching a dusky-haired girl dance ballet with consummate grace.
“Your first daughter has a daughter. One of her great-great-great grandchildren is named Mary. Mary marries a famous sculptor named Thomas Alexander.”
Susan is suddenly aware her heart is pounding.
“Then Susan Bell,” Ruby says slowly, “is the great-great-great grandmother of the second woman president of the United States.”
“Yes,” Chi says.
He whispers to his magic ring. The holoids and the lavender field disappear.
The living room darkens as the late summer sun flees into the west. A chill hinting of autumn settles in. Ruby rises and stacks wood in the fireplace.
Susan’s heart pounds harder.
“Then Susan Bell,” Ruby says more slowly still and strikes a fireplace match, “is the great-great-great, and a couple more greats, grandmother of you.”
20
Brown-Eyed Girl
With her pop eyes and slack jaw, the girl Chi knew as Starbright stares at him like an R. Crumb character out of Zap Comix. He can practically see sweat splotches and exclamation points leaping from her brow. He can’t tell if she’s furious or just plain horrified. But he recognizes the feeling of pure shock because it’s rushing through him, too.
“Why didn’t you tell me before I fell in love with you?” she demands.
He stares at his boot toes, speechless.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He feels like a dupe. What a chump! Consider impact before you consider benefit? Right. Ariel Herbert’s secret. A woman’s secret. A skipmother’s secret.
“I swear to you on all I hold sacred, I didn’t know,” he finally manages to protest. “I never traced my genealogy earlier than Mary Alexander. I had no reason to!”
All of spacetime will collapse if Susan Bell dies during the Summer of Love. And all of spacetime will collapse if Susan Bell isn’t pregnant as of 11:59 P.M. on September 4, 1967 when Chi is supposed to transmit back to September 4, 2467. Will he arrive on time? Or twelve hours and ten minutes late? Who gives a damn?
“Why did you make me love you?” Susan demands. “If you’re my… my… .”
“Grandson,” Ruby says in her sweet-as-poison voice.
“I didn’t know, I swear I really didn’t know!” he says. “I mean, I don’t look anything like you, do I? After so many generations and five hundred years and gene-tweaking?”
“Dig it, man from Mars,” Ruby says, laughing. “The kid’s in love with you.”
He glares at Ruby. “What’s so damn funny? I’m in love with her, too.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve!” Susan leaps to her feet and stomps around the living room. “You played with me!”
“At first, I—.” He stops right there. At first he what? Played with her? “At first, I protected you, Susan. I needed to protect you, you know that. Then it became something more.”
“Simmer down, Susan,” Ruby says. “I wouldn’t mind listening to you rant and rave at him for at least another hour. And Chi, I’d love to watch you cringe and grovel and beg her forgiveness for at least that long. But if what you say is true,” she points to the spot where he projected the holoids, “and preserving all of spacetime depends on Susan Bell fulfilling her destiny, then tell me this. What are you going to do about it?”
“Me?”
“Well, who else, sonny? Unless you want to run down to the street and collar some fine dude to knock her up.”
“Knock me up!” Susan cries. “This is so gross, I can’t believe it!” She darts up the stairs to the sitting room and slams the door.
Chi waits for the lock to click.
It clicks.
Then unclicks.
“You better hurry, man from Mars.” Ruby saunters to the front window and peers out into the evening. “Only I don’t see anyone, let alone a man our Starbright would want to father her child. Why, I haven’t seen the streets this empty since the night there was supposed to be a riot.”
Chi looks out, too, and Ruby’s right. The corner of Clayton and Haight is deserted.
Ruby lights a jasmine candle and hands it to him with a wicked smile. “Listen up, Chi. You say your skipmother did this subversive thing. She was on to a secret loop or two, hmm? She didn’t want to freak you out about all that too soon. But she knows you’re a good cosmicist. You would never ever violate the Tenets unless there was a really good reason. Right, am I right? So go do your duty, sonny. Or should I say,” she says, sweet as poison, “grandsonny.”