Summer of Love, a Time Travel (37 page)

“You
offered me a choice on the roof. I could have picked up one of Gorgon’s Molotov
cocktails and flung it to the street with my own hand.”

“But
you didn’t.”

“But
I could have.”

“But
you didn’t and, as of the moment you didn’t, you never could have. Don’t you
see? That probability collapsed into the timeline, not out. Our spacetime is
conserved.”

“Wait,
wait. What you’re saying is you t-porters allow that the past may not be what
you thought it was? That the timeline you keep talking about is some kind of
process? A set of probabilities?”

Starbright’s
mouth falls open.

Ruby
astounds even herself. “Right, am I right?”

Chi
smiles, but his eyes are icy. “We could never have developed tachyonic transmission
without allowing for
some
continuous cocreatorship between humanity and
the Cosmic Mind. Bits of probability are
always
collapsing into the
timeline. Cosmicist philosophy embraces that notion.”

“I
don’t
believe
it!” Ruby cries and claps her hands. The cats look up,
blink, then return to their cat-naps. She lowers her voice. “I can’t do
this,
no, no, no, I can’t do
that.
The Grandmother Principle is gonna getcha.”

“The
mandate of nonintervention and the Tenets have a sound purpose,” Chi says
quickly. “If a probability collapses
out
of the timeline, we’re all in
big trouble. That’s why the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications
invested so much research and money into the Summer of Love Project. To
conserve the timeline during this Hot Dim Spot.”

“I still
don’t get it,” Starbright says. “How can reality be probable?”

“Well,
in quantum physics,” Chi says, “reality is
always
a set of
probabilities. The theory goes back to Schrodinger’s Cat.”

“You
mentioned that once before,” Ruby says, stroking Luna’s silky blue-gray fur.
The bluepoint purrs and gazes up with liquid sapphire eyes. “Whose cat was
that?”

“Schrodinger’s.
Twentieth-century physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is from your
Now, not mine. The notion is that at every moment reality is manifesting, it
also branches off into probabilities. We as observers participate in the
process. That’s why it’s so hard for the Archivists to reduce Hot Dim Spots to
a single narrative.”

“But
what does that have to do with a kitty-cat?” Starbright says, scratching Ara’s
chin. Ara yawns prettily.

“Um,
it was an experiment. A
thought
experiment.” Chi gulps wine. “See, a cat
is placed in a box. A device inside the box releases a lethal gas that will
kill the cat. No one knows if the gas has been released or not, or if the cat
is dead or not, until they open the box. Until someone looks, the cat is alive
and dead at the same time.”

Ruby
sits bolt upright. Starbright pulls Ara and Rama into her lap.

“
What?
”
Ruby says in her sweet-as-poison voice.

“I
didn’t make it up!” The cats stare at Chi, blue and gold eyes blazing. “A physicist,
Edwin Schrodinger, proposed the thought experiment in 1935.”

“Nineteen
thirty-five, uh-huh. And what nationality was Edwin Schrodinger?”

Chi
rubs his forehead. “He was Austrian.”

“
Achtung!
Sehr gut,
Beelzebub!”

“It’s
horrible, I know,” Chi says miserably. “I never thought much about the way
thought experiments were expressed until I met the two of you. All
Schrodinger’s Cat does is demonstrate how spacetime exists as a set of
probabilities that can be mutually exclusive until we observe a probability collapsing
into the timeline. That’s all.”

“No,
you’re talking about a gas chamber,” Ruby says. “A real experiment some Nazi scientist
designed making a gas chamber. Right, am I right, Herr Chiron?”

“It’s
just a metaphor. I always thought it was just a metaphor. Our techs use it to
this Day.”

“A
metaphor,” Starbright says. “Well, according to Professor Zoom, I’m a pussy.
Put
me
in the box. Let’s wait for the gas. Am I alive? Am I dead? What a
groovy thought experiment to demonstrate the probable nature of reality.”

“I’m
sorry,” Chi whispers.

“You
bet your ass you and all your kind in the future are sorry.” Ruby stands,
scattering the cats. “If you remember one thing to tell your people, you
remember I told you this, Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco. I told you before and I’ll
tell you again. Dig it: the way you think about things shapes the way your
reality is.”

“I
will
remember,” he declares, eyes flashing.

“Liberate
Schrodinger’s Cat!” Starbright cries and raises her fist.

Chi
raises his fist, too. “Liberate Schrodinger’s Cat!”

The
tiny Angora with golden eyes and plumy white fur arches her back and mews.
Alana is hungry again.

*  
*   *

Ruby
goes down to the shop, checks her locks, peers out the peephole. Still nothing
but Papa Al and Teddy Bear and a posse of longhaired boys. Everyone’s toking and
drinking and whooping it up. It’s good to see laughing people out there. Let
them whoop. For the first time in her life, Ruby shivers when she thinks about
the future.

So
peaceful and quiet. When was the last time the street was so quiet at midnight?
She hates this, being barricaded in her own place. She finds the hammer, pulls
out the nails, takes down the plywood planks. She unlocks her door and steps
outside. The air is fresh, tinged with sage incense.

Then
suddenly it’s happening.

A
flatbed truck careens around the corner of Clayton and Haight, a gang of twenty
crammed in back. A truckful of shouting people!

Sweet
Isis! Do they have shopping bags filled with knives? Machine guns?

They
shout at her, “Peace and love! Peace and love, sister!”

They’re
throwing things off the truck.

Bricks,
stones, Molotov cocktails?

They’re
throwing flowers onto the street. A long-stemmed carnation lands at Ruby’s
feet.

August
8, 1967

Inquest

for the

Ungrateful Dead

13

Are You Experienced?

Susan
sees the headlines all along Hayes Street as she hurries to meet Nance at the
Blue Unicorn Café. You can’t miss them, in every newspaper box:

HIPPIE DRUG MURDERS

SYNDICATE MOVES IN

But
when she slides into the seat across from them, she finds that Nance and
Professor Zoom are unimpressed.

“If
you’ve ever lived in the Village,” Professor Zoom says, studying cream swirling
in his coffee, “you’re just seeing the Village all over again. It’s the same
old shit. I, for one, am vastly displeased. I mean, I split New York to
eighty-six all that.”

“I
thought you went to Harvard,” Susan says. “Isn’t that in Massachusetts?”

“Massachusetts,
New York,” he says with a withering glance. “It’s all the same old shit.” He
actually looks at her for the first time since she sat down. He moves and
speaks as if he’s in slow motion, suspended in some remote inner place, even more
self-absorbed than he used to be. Three-quarters comatose, instead of half.
Before she can wrest a glimmer of reaction, his eyes flick back to his coffee
cup, staring as though the chipped ceramic is an artifact of fantastic
complexity, the swirls of cream spelling out some oracle.

Susan
knows what the headlines are about. Five days ago, John Kent Carter, also known
as Jacob King or Shob Carter, was found in an apartment furnished with nothing
but a mattress on the floor. The mewing of a cat trapped inside brought a
neighbor. The apartment’s walls were splattered with psychedelic rainbows and
his blood. Shob had been stabbed twelve times. His right arm was gone, cleanly
severed above the elbow. Shob had been known to handcuff the briefcase in which
he kept his cash to his right wrist. Earlier that week, his girlfriend had
helped him count out three thousand dollars in small bills. The police found no
briefcase in the apartment. Shob called himself an unemployed flutist, but
everyone knew he dealt LSD.

Two
days ago, William Edward Thomas, also known as Superspade, was found zipped
into a sleeping bag snagged on the cliff below Point Reyes Lighthouse. He had
been shot in the back of the head. The corpse was three days old. Superspade
had been known to carry fifty thousand dollars in cash. Some said Superspade
dealt acid, some said he only dealt grass. Some said Superspade and Shob had
made a deal. Everyone says each had been approached by the Syndicate and ordered
to get organized or get dead.

“Starbright’s
never lived in the Village,” Nance says, inhaling her third Kool as though she
desperately requires mentholated smoke for proper respiration. “Have you,
sweetheart?”

“No,
I haven’t, Penny Lane,” Susan says. “And neither have you.”

“Starbright
has never even been to New York, or anywhere, really.”

“I
have so been to New York. On the way to France for Christmas.”

“On
the way to France for Christmas.” Nance widens her eyes, drops her jaw. “You
mean Daddy finally took you along?”

Susan
studies her coffee cup.

“Daddy
jetting you around doesn’t count,” Nance proclaims. “You’ve never been anywhere
on your
own,
sweetheart.”

This
is one of Nance’s new affectations, calling everyone sweetheart with her
strange pronunciation
shweethaut.
She speaks in a phony accent,
accompanied by a cunning wink. She’s bleached her shocking crew cut ivory-white.
She gesticulates, fluttering her hands. She looks as if she’s been dipped in
lacquer and turned hard and shiny.

Susan
sighs. What did she expect? That they could be best friends again? Take things
up the way they were before Susan’s father forced their separation? Or, if not
exactly the same, then a new friendship, more daring and fun now that they’re both
so much older and on their own.

She’s
chased after Nance for nearly two weeks, never finding her at the Double Barrel
house or, if there, too spaced out to come to the phone. Yes, she’s had
expectations. She expected the old spark, the excitement of their first meeting
on the Panhandle. Or at least a warm nostalgia, like looking at family
photographs together.

Abandon
expectations, oh ye who run away to the Haight-Ashbury. Nothing is real,
reality is nothing.

She
hadn’t expected to see Professor Zoom with Nance this morning, either. Nor had
she expected
his
bleached white hair, kohl-lined eyes, and pancake
makeup. He and Nance look
weird,
even by Haight-Ashbury standards. Like
vampires. Or ghouls. Professor Zoom’s ice-cold aloofness adds another
undercurrent of tension between her and Nance.

She
hates this. Everything is wrong. She doesn’t want things between her and Nance
to be wrong anymore. Try, Susan. “Wow,” she says, “it’s scary about Shob and
Superspade, huh?”

Nance
shrugs, squeezes her lips in a sardonic little smile, and raises her eyebrows
at Professor Zoom, excluding Susan. Nance, the drama queen. With fingers as fragile
as fish bones, she offers him her Kool. “Starbright scares easily. Don’t you,
Starbright?” she says in that awful phony voice.

The
big news this morning, and the reason for the lurid headlines, is that Eddy
Morris, also known as Shank, was arrested outside Sebastopol. Shank is a
well-known Haightian with a predilection for speed and acid. The police pulled
him over as he exceeded the speed limit on his way to Morning Star Ranch in a
black ’62 Volkswagen bug belonging to Shob. The police discovered a right arm
wrapped in a bloody pillowcase in the bug’s back seat. In a fit of
squeamishness, the newspapers don’t want to say the arm belonged to Shob. Shank
didn’t want to say, either. He told the arresting officer, “I’m very, very hazy
about that arm.”

“Shank
was involved in a burn,” Professor Zoom says, taking the Kool and studying the
smoke eddying from its tip. “That’s the way it is, sweet pretty pussies. When a
burn comes down, shit comes down.”