Summer of Love, a Time Travel (49 page)

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 impact. 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.”

“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
hyper
industrial 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.