Summer of Love, a Time Travel

by Lisa Mason

  You blessed, Roi had told her. In time, Ruby came to see it.

  Ma did well at Marinship. She learned how to tell her coworkers what the boss wanted them to do. When the shipyard shut down, she was offered office work at the construction company that had run the yard. Ma took shorthand at night, learned how to use a Dictaphone, bought a black ’47 Ford, and commuted to the gleaming corporate skyscraper in the city. She bought Ruby new fashions every school year and saved up money for her college.

  Aunt Clarice and Cousin Roi moved from a modest house in Hunter’s Point to a modest apartment, to a lousy apartment, to a dive.

  Ruby grew up fast as the daughter of a working single mother in the late forties. She suffered acute shame for not having a father. Everyone had a father. Children borrowed much of who they were from their fathers. The doctor’s daughter was bossy and vain, the office clerk’s son meek and obedient. “You be you, Ruby,” Ma told her when she came home from school in tears. But, at the time, that hadn’t been good enough. “All right,” Ma said. “Your pa was a hero. You’re the daughter of a hero.”

  Graduating Tamalpais High with honors, Ruby was accepted by Mills College, a prestigious women’s school in Oakland. Ma took a lover, Mr. Ben, a bearded bohemian who lived in Berkeley and talked about a spiritual philosophy called Zen. Dig it: Ruby was blessed.

  But Cousin Roi was not blessed. Ma didn’t approve of Clarice and her dissolute ways. Years went by, and Ruby didn’t see that side of the family. Roi grew up wild and mean. When she was in her freshman year, reading James Joyce and Galaxy and listening to Mr. Ben and his hip-bop talk, Roi was out of school. Way out. Doing the junkie scene with a gangster lean.

  She was nineteen when she saw him again. A Fourth of July family picnic at Lake Merritt was a halfhearted affair, tense with unspoken accusations and stored-up grief. From the start, Ma was clucking her tongue. It shocked Ruby to see how dark Roi had become—not his skin. Anger and meanness came off him like a cold wind.

  Yet his darkness and his danger seduced her. In a blinding knife-stroke, she fell for him hard.

  They secretly rendezvoused in San Francisco, since Ma forbade her to see him. He was sardonic, with an edge of wit. He squired her into tinselly downtown bars that checked his ID, but not hers. He was cool, carved in ebony. In their first days together, he kept a leash on his habit and boasted of his control. In their next days together, he began to call horse she, talked all the time about her. Like she was a fickle woman tugging at his heart, not a life-destroying drug.

  Ruby turned twenty, a haughty and imperious age. She read Satre at school, Beat poetry and If at home, and followed news accounts of the civil rights movement in the South. She fell in with the Berkeley crowd, the North Beach crowd. She grew tired of tinselly downtown bars.

  One night, she attained an enlightenment. Cousin Roi was beyond changing, and so was she. She could never tolerate the gangster life, let alone surrender to junk. She confessed to Ma, who told her in no uncertain terms to break it off. She hadn’t really rebelled, just disagreed. She didn’t disagree anymore.

  The day Ruby broke it off, Roi was on the yen. Grim purpose chiseled in crystallized flesh. That deadpan look, already dead. Wanting her. Needing her. Do anything for her. In his room in Hunter’s Point, he got crazy. Bad-crazy. Incest never crossed Ruby’s mind. Only how much she’d once wanted him, and he’d refused to touch her, his pretty cousin. And how much she now wanted to leave his room and never come back. He was rough, but that wasn’t so bad. What she hated most was that he was too damn late.

  Ruby shuts this t-port down, slowing the recalled light and shadows to the rhythm of her heart. Slow it down, sweet Isis, shut it down.

  Roi died two days later. They found him on the third day. His death was banal. An OD in an alley with a pin of bad horse behind his knee.

  In the end, it wasn’t so bad that they were first cousins, forbidden to each other. It was bad he’d fallen to junk, but, grieving over the life he’d had to live, she found herself forgiving that, too. No, what was bad—really bad—was that she was pregnant. What was worse, it was 1953, and she went to Doc Clyde for an afternoon of rose gardening.

  “Ah, Roi,” she whispers, guilt so sharp it still carves her heart. Twilight shadows merge with the night. “Does anyone ever really change anyone?”

  She decided she could not have Roi’s baby. Not another child without a father. Not the child of a father who was never a hero. Not the child of an incestuous rape.

  These are strange and wondrous days, Ruby sniffs. Her daughter would have been fourteen years old during the Summer of Love.

  *

  She is sitting in the dark when Chi and Starbright clatter in and flick on the lights. They are arguing about something, whether the broadcast will run tonight or sometime later, which makes no sense. The youngsters have been estranged for over a week, but now they move together with an easy grace. Peace restored, apparently. Starbright cautious, Chi eager. Their reconciliation makes Ruby feel instantly better.

  “Oh, Ruby!” Starbright cries. “Are you all right?”

  The scattered stereo equipment. The look on her face. Ruby slips the Walther in her jacket pocket.

  Starbright drops to her feet and hugs Ruby’s knees, nestling her head on Ruby’s lap.

  Ruby cherishes the gesture, but it is too charged with meaning and too confusing. Is she yearning for her lost daughter?

  Gently pushing the kid away, she comes to a decision. She doesn’t have to answer that question right now. It’s the Summer of Love. It’s all right to wonder who you are. She smiles at Starbright’s puzzled look and brushes a lock of hair behind the kid’s ear. “I’m all right. I’m fine.” She waves at the equipment on the floor. “Leo Gorgon paid us a visit. Something about liberating my stereo for the revolution. He’s gone for good.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Ruby,” Chi says. He shrugs off his jacket and sets about restoring the equipment on her shelves.

  Starbright snuggles up to Ruby’s feet again, and takes Alana and Luna in her lap. The cats purr and preen. Stubborn girl, just like Ruby used to be. All right, then. Ruby lets her stay.

  Chi finishes reconnecting everything and sits in the rocking chair, watching Ruby, the kid, and the cats. Face downcast, he heaves a great sigh. They haven’t sat here together, family-like, for some time.

  He says, “Ruby, listen.”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “I don’t want to listen to you anymore. I don’t want to hear about all the terrible mistakes we’re making.”

  The elegant lad squirms in his Beatle boots. “But, Ruby.”

  “Don’t you ‘but Ruby’ me. I don’t want to hear about how selfish we are. We’re wasteful, we’re stupid, we’re violent. I don’t think you’ve got an exclusive on how screwed up everyone and everything is in 1967.”

  “Please, listen,” Chi says. “I’m trying to make this right.”

  “No, no, you’re right to be angry at us, man from Mars. I would be, in your pretty boots. Everything poisoned. Ice ages, brown ages. I don’t blame you, Chi, really I don’t. I envy your superior point-of-view. I envy your genius. I envy that you can look at us with five hundred years of perspective and know we’re worse than we could have ever imagined.”

  “No! Don’t envy me,” Chi says. “You’re the ones who’ve shown me how little we know. We need you. I need you. I need you to believe in the future. To believe in us, the people of the future.”

  “You’re mad at us,” Starbright whispers. “You hate us.”

  “We don’t hate you. And we can claim no more genius than what you possess. Listen,” he says painfully. “We’ve made mistakes, too. We made a terrible mistake. It was called the Save Betty Project.”

  *

  It was 2466, and a robust woman of sixty-four in the prime of her youth named J. Betty Turner was deeply involved in t-port projects for the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications. She helped develop the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle. She was a
key adviser to the Chief Archivist.

  Chi sighs. “Betty was a great lass. She loved hummingbirds, funded restoration of twenty premillennium species in a habitat at New Golden Gate Preserve. I loved her. Everyone did. She had this laugh.”

  Since Betty had started on the ground floor of t-porting, she felt she had a right to try the ride out for herself. She had a right, and she had a reason. An old sorrow, a secret that haunted her.

  When Betty was a girl of fourteen—a spoiled cosmicist child, she was the first to admit—she was given a whirligig, and she’d had an accident.

  She’d been flying downtown in a proper skyway. But she was barely old enough to qualify as a pilot and giddy with her new toy. A sudden gust tilted the whirligig, she didn’t know how to stabilize the thing, and her blades struck an old devolt woman in the chest, mortally wounding her.

  If only she’d pulled up in time. If only she’d flown in a different skyway. If only the woman had stepped back from the curb by half a stride at that precise moment, Betty wouldn’t have killed her.

  But none of those probabilities happened. She killed a woman. The accident haunted and depressed her for fifty years.

  Betty asked to t-port to the day of the accident. At last, she’d have a chance to make things right. If changing one small sad moment didn’t affect the timeline, why couldn’t Betty go and save the woman’s life? Pull her back from the curb, out of harm’s way?

  The Archivists set to work. The accident had occurred only fifty years before, but the Archives were surprisingly dim. So many devolts had wandered around downtown those days and died of disease or exposure. The woman had carried no identification. Police had whisked her body off to the morgue as one of many Jane Does. No one claimed her, no one mourned her, no one sued Betty’s family for wrongful death.

  Nothing of any consequence had happened, except to Betty’s heart and soul. If she couldn’t dispel the guilt of fifty years, then at least she could find peace of mind for her next seventy.

  Betty wanted to do it. She needed to do it. So the LISA techs set up a tachyonic shuttle at Ghirardelli Square, and Betty transmitted. The t-port was to last only seven hours in the past. Plenty of time for Betty to hike downtown, pull the devolt away from her youthful blades, and hike back to the t-shuttle. She took nutribeads, full identification, prophylaks, and wipes.

  Seven hours later, the LISA techs waited for J. Betty Turner at Ghirardelli Square. The Chief Archivist and her ferrets stood with their knuckletops around the photon guns, the half-moon of imploders. The awesome dish of the chronometer hummed softly. They stood, whispering and waiting, delighted they’d done the right thing. They’d used a powerful new technology for a harmless purpose. A humane and beautiful purpose.

  But Betty did not step back.

  “We perceive time as a forward-moving experience,” Chi says. “A successful t-port works because it’s an OTL. An Open Time Loop.”

  He whispers “Katie” to his magic ring. The field of lavender light pops up in the palm of his hand. This time, instead of concealing the field, Chi turns his hand so Ruby and the kid can see the light plainly.

  A drawing made of glowing red lines floats in the light:

  “An OTL,” Chi says, “works with the timeline because the t-porter keeps moving forward, according to normal perception.”

  “What about memory?” Ruby asks.

  “Memory preserves information so you can move forward.”

  “What about a transcendental moment? Cosmic consciousness? What Aldous Huxley describes in Doors of Perception?”

  “That’s not normal consciousness. If you only perceived time with cosmic consciousness, you’d see your whole life all at once, you couldn’t function, and reality wouldn’t matter.”

  “Reality is nothing,” Starbright says, nodding.

  Ruby slaps her shoulder. “Since when?”

  “That’s what Professor Zoom says.”

  Chi whispers to the ring again. “Because we normally perceive time as a forward-moving experience, the great danger, the terrible danger, for a t-porter is death in the past.”

  Now the glowing red lines rearrange themselves:

  “This,” Chi whispers, “is a CTL. A Closed Time Loop. When a t-porter is caught in a CTL, she is born in her personal Now, transmits to the past, dies, is born in her personal Now, transmits to the past, dies.” Chi rubs his forehead. “And so on and so on. Forever.”

  The LISA techs realized Betty had been caught in a CTL the moment she failed to step through the t-shuttle. The Chief Archivist was horrified. She fired her number one ferret, promoted number two, and sent him and a staff of fifty to recheck the data.

  They discovered that the day of the accident had been violent. Several armed robberies with aggravated assault were reported along Montgomery Street that afternoon. The old woman who young Betty thought was a devolt could have been anyone.

  A t-porter, for instance, roughed up and stripped of her identification. Disoriented, maybe. Disfigured from a beating.

  Her.

  “She was caught, you see, in the worst kind of CTL. A CTL within her personal past,” Chi says. “This is what Betty went through.”

  “Katie, off,” he whispers and snaps his hand shut. The lavender field disappears.

  “So she killed herself,” Ruby whispers, “and she had to keep killing herself, living out the guilt, and going back to die, over and over.”

  Chi nods. “The Save Betty Project won instant support. Everyone agreed—Betty herself would have agreed—that they couldn’t change the fact of her death. What they could change was when. They could save Betty from the CTL by bringing her through the shuttle to die in her personal Now.”

  “And then it would be over?” Starbright says.

  “It would be over. Oh, the LISA techs were careful.” Chi stands and paces across the living room. “They sent a t-porter to the day of the accident. He stole her body from the ambulance, carried her back to Ghirardelli Square, and transmitted her before she died. She looked like an old devolt by then. But she died in her Now. She died in peace, never to return to that awful past. The Chief Archivist cried for weeks.”

  He falls silent.

  “Then you did the righteous thing,” Ruby says gently. “How was that a mistake?”

  Chi takes a breath. “No one knows how a CTL forms. A CTL has no beginning and no end and lasts forever. It pollutes the timeline. Theoretically, there is no escape. But we helped Betty escape. We broke the CTL. And the moment we broke it, the Prime Probability of when Betty died collapsed out of the timeline. The Archivists traced the Crisis to that Event—when Betty died. We tore a hole in spacetime.”

  “Tore a hole,” Ruby says, appalled.

  “We brought the Crisis on ourselves,” Chi says miserably. “And we brought the Crisis on you. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. We didn’t mean to.”

  Ruby ought to feel vindicated, but she doesn’t. She ought to say “I told you so,” but she doesn’t. She stands and gives Chi a great big hug. Starbright throws her arms around them both.

  “I forgive you, man from Mars,” Ruby says. “And I forgive you future people, but on one condition.”

  “What’s that?” His look of relief clouds.

  “You’ve got to forgive us, too. It’s a two-way street, this reality game, isn’t that what you’ve said? We perceive time as forward-moving, but that is an illusion. Not the true nature of reality. Right, am I right?”

  “Yes,” he says warily. “Now is always Now. The One Day always Is.”

  “The One Day, uh-huh. Then when you transmit back to your Now, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, you tell everyone over there we need their forgiveness as much as you need ours.”

  He nods gravely, and he and Starbright exchange a look. A longing look, filled with uncertainty.

  Ruby doesn’t know what to make of that, but she laughs. “Well, don’t look so blue, you two. This is beautiful. Today is Cosmic Mind Day! Let’s celebrate. Kid, go get us our favorit
e sherry.”

  Starbright dashes to the kitchen, but pops in again much too soon, her eyes wide and frightened.

  Two shadows follow her. Ruby sits up, Chi does, too, and she sees the gleam of the switchblade before she sees their ugly mugs.

  “Kitchen door,” Starbright whispers. “Jimmied open.”

  Stovepipe flicks his gaze around Ruby’s living room. “Some pad. So this is how you blew our seven grand.”

  A quick dart, and the Lizard wraps his arm around Starbright’s waist, dangling the switchblade in front of her face. “You got lots of friends on the scene, Ruby Maverick. They know where you live.”

  “Maser’s in my pocket,” Chi says casually to Ruby. His jacket lies crumpled across the room by the stereo shelves where he left it.

  “You shut up,” the Lizard says to Chi.

  “Starbright is not a dealer,” Ruby says. “We are not dealers.”

  “When he says shut up, shut up,” Stovepipe snaps.

  “She was just a runner,” Chi says to Stovepipe. “She had nothing to do with the deal.”

  Ruby stares at Chi, astonished, then at Starbright, horrified. “You did pass dope to these morons?”

  The kid nods, terrified but resolute. “Stan used me,” she tells Stovepipe. “He ripped me off for bread, too.”

  “That’s right,” Chi says. Sweat pops out of his brow. “Stan’s the one you want, man. I’ve been after him for weeks. You think you’re ticked off.”

  Stovepipe trades looks with the Lizard. The Lizard jerks the edge of the switchblade against the kid’s throat. She whimpers.

  Pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

  “That’s right, Stan the Man is the one you want,” Ruby says coolly. She slowly gets to her feet, calculating how long it will take Chi to retrieve his jacket. “Don’t you know who Stan is? He’s the manager of the Double Barrel Boogie Band. You know their house? Stan’s always got plenty of dope and cash around there. You want your money and your revenge, you go on over to the Double Barrel house.”