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PORTALS OF THE PAST


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Kevin Andrew Murphy



Johnny Phoenix had always liked visiting his grandmother at the Musée Mécanique, where she worked as a greeter. He especially enjoyed the sound of her laughter. “Ah-hah-ha! Ha-ha-ha!” Laffing Sal cried inside her glass case as small children daringly ran up and pressed her button. “Ha-ha-ha!” The statuesque antique automaton jerked back and forth, her beautiful red wig of Victorian rag curls bouncing like copper springs around her caricature of a woman’s face, mouth open to reveal one blacked-out tooth. A plaque, which Johnny had imaged and favorited in his memory banks so long ago it was also seared into his meat brain, declared that Sal had once stood at the entrance of Playland-at-the-Beach, a twentieth-century amusement park, in the old city of San Francisco, entertaining children during World War II. Antique videos of that period, and extracted and extrapolated human memories, played together in the recesses of his mind as a subroutine, at times synching perfectly with his current image capture.

The current day’s children ran back, most as human as the ones back then, and their cyborg parents hugged them with cybernetic arms and sometimes bodies. A few Purists did the same with crippled, if fully original, human limbs and torsos, as they floated along in hover chairs bedecked with the veterans’ medals they’d awarded themselves for surviving World War III. Some glared at Johnny, but he ignored them.

World War III was before Johnny’s time, as irrelevant to the present day as World War II. The Palace of the Legion of Honor was one of the few old San Francisco buildings to survive. It was an art museum built at Land’s End to memorialize World War I. It opened on Armistice Day, 1924, to “honor the dead while serving the living.” As such it was open to all the living, all the citizens of New Frisco, even a hodgepodge peace-and-lovechild android like him.

The Musée Mécanique, the old automaton museum, had been reassembled and relocated to the rebuilt Palace. The original Palace was also a reproduction of the French Pavilion from the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition, which was in turn a reproduction of the original in Paris—not that Paris, or its Palace, still existed. But New Frisco’s Palace was the jewel of the city, a beautiful mosaic patched together from fractured memories of San Francisco. Frisco, the clockwork phoenix and museum’s mascot, was pieced together in much the same manner.

“Come one, come all, to the one and only, new and improved Musée Mécanique!” Frisco squawked, raising his wings in exultation and shooting flames into the air atop his brass palm-tree perch. The plaque at Frisco’s base said that he’d started out as the animatronic parrot from the chocolate shop at Ghirardelli Square. After the war, Burners and SCAdians found his broken wings in the ruins and soldered them to the shattered Maltese Falcon’s body they pulled from the rubble of John’s Grill. Then, they’d taken the disparate bird bits to Survival Research Labs, which assembled Frisco the same way they’d put New Frisco together, from memories and historic wreckage. The very same labs helped piece Johnny together before the new android ban.

Frisco was married to Laffing Sal, and Johnny had adopted the phoenix as his grandfather. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” the antique automaton guffawed merrily. Johnny’s mother had the same curls and same laugh. She was a Sally too, or to be proper, a SALLY: Servo-Automaton Laborer with the Love Yoni upgrade. A sexbot, to be crude. Mama Sal was also known as Mad Sal, programmed with all the vintage music hall songs and bawdy banter needed to play the fictional madame who ran the dockside tavern at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair at the Armory, two more of San Francisco’s jewels lost during the war. Mama Sal had a much prettier, or at least humanlike, body and face than Laffing Sal, her mother, since all the SALLYs were modeled after Alma Spreckels, a famous daughter of San Francisco. Alma had built the last Legion of Honor and before that was the artist’s model who’d posed for the statue of the Goddess of Victory once standing atop the pillar at Union Square. Big Alma, as she’d been called, whose beauty enraptured Adolph Spreckels, son and heir of Claus Spreckels, the sugar baron. Adolph was the original sugar daddy, who’d married Alma and left her his fortune, before dying of syphilis.

Adolph was Johnny’s other grandfather, or maybe his uncle, on his father’s side, depending on how you figured it. Johnny didn’t have a grandmother there, since Johnny’s father was a Revenant, a clone created by Reventech’s scientists using DNA resurrected from Adolph’s grave. They’d codenamed their Adolph 2.0 recreation Sugar Daddy. They’d left out Adolph’s syphilis and spliced and twisted his genes to make him a super soldier, then assembled a collage of memories to approximate his father or brother. In any case, it was only natural that Sugar Daddy fell in love with Alma all over again. Or at least with Mama Sal, who had Alma’s face and form, along with an approximation of her memories as one of her hardwired personas.

It was love at first sight for her too, made even better by Sugar Daddy being re-created in his youth, not in his fifties when the original met his Alma.

Johnny wished that love were that easy, that he had a girlfriend or boyfriend, but dating was difficult when you were a hodgepodge, and he’d had no luck with computer matches, which was even more ironic given he was half computer himself. Then he saw her, and it was just like Sugar Daddy had always told him: love at first sight.

She was a SCAdian, Johnny suspected, or at least styled as a SCAdian, wearing a picture-perfect recreation of a French fashion plate from 1915. Johnny’s memory bank pattern-matched the couture immediately: a high-necked daffodil-yellow wool dress with a fur-trimmed three-tiered skirt with matching collar, capelet, muff, and hat. The hat was also ornamented with a large black plume. From the length, color, and pattern, Johnny identified it as a black swan’s pinion feather, meaning it came from a black swan Revenant, of course; real swans had been extinct for over a century. The fur of her hat, collar, trim, and enormous antique hand muff was mink—lab grown as well, naturally, but with a SCAdian’s attention to detail, cut into living-mink-sized swatches before sewing them back together, rather than the more typical seamless bolt of Revenant fur like Johnny’s coonskin coat, grown from a man-sized trash panda’s hide, pockets and all, like a war trophy taken from a monstrous Furry.

Not that Johnny had ever met a raccoon Furry, let alone a man-sized one. The only animal Revenant he knew personally was Sugar Daddy’s old war buddy, Lazy Bum, a talking dog Reventech had made with DNA from Lazarus and Bummer, the stray dogs once belonging to Joshua Norton, the crazy bum who’d declared himself Emperor of the United States back in the nineteenth century. Some of Norton’s DNA had been included to give Lazy Bum his smarts and personality, which made him an excellent war dog general—the only reason Lazy Bum survived the war.

The young woman’s face matched the fashion plate too, as if she were a Revenant herself based on the long-dead artist’s model, one of the original Alma’s contemporaries. Johnny guessed she was a fully human girl, born just after the war, who’d done a SCAdian-style search for her face, then created her costume to match the long-lost model. She gave him a sidelong glance, as if recognizing him, somehow striking the same pose as the antique fashion plate, her muff held coyly behind her back, her feet poised like a ballerina’s, her high-heeled high-button boots beneath jonquil spats dyed to match her daffodil dress.

“Have we met?” she asked, continuing the appraising glance. “You look familiar . . .”

Johnny grinned what he hoped was a charming grin then gave a nervous laugh. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” It was an exact copy of Laffing Sal’s. He knew his face was the best work Survival Research Labs could do to combine the features of Adolph and Alma Spreckels using Replicant flesh and a robotic armature to create an android quickly before the ban, leaving him more humanlike than his robotic mother but less than his Revenant father. Like most androids, his face was stuck in the uncanny valley. “I’m Johnny,” he told her. “Johnny Phoenix.” He gestured to Laffing Sal and Frisco. “Visiting my grandparents . . .”

She looked slightly shocked. Then she glanced to Laffing Sal’s fiery curls and Frisco’s flames, and smiled. “I can see the resemblance.” Survival Research Labs had been able to tease Titian out of the Revenant flesh, giving Johnny human hair that matched Laffing Sal’s wig. Mama Sal had styled it in a 1970s feathered cut to match Frisco’s wings. “Johnny Phoenix . . .” she repeated, giving him an odd look. “That’s a nice name. . . . What year is this? What’s your sign?”

It was less of an odd question than it might be. SCAdians had originated as the Society for Creative Anachronism, going back to the twentieth century. Their knowledge of past history, ancient warfare, and archaic weaponry had given them surprising tools to survive World War III. They had also expanded their periods of study and recreation beyond the Middle Ages, going up to the years of their faction’s May Day founding in 1966 by the medievalist author and neopagan priestess Diana Paxson. Part of that study was the 1960s fascination with astrology and horoscopes. It was complete mythology, of course, but still an interesting human cultural custom transferred into Johnny’s memory banks, at his christening, by Johnny’s godmother, Starship Captain, Mama Sal’s fellow entertainment robot. Starship Captain was the animatronic recreation of 1960s songstress Grace Slick, who had also given Johnny all the songs from the original “Being is Beyond Charlie” mixtape from 1966, in case he was ever invited to one of the SCAdians’ infamous Charlie Parties—not that there was much chance of that, given who and what he was.

“It’s 2154,” Johnny told her, “and I’m a Leo on the cusp of Virgo, at least if androids get birth signs . . .”

“2154?” She seemed slightly alarmed. “What month is it now?”

“March,” Johnny told her. “Is there something wrong? Were you in cryonic suspension?” She might not be a SCAdian, but a defrosted Alcor reanimate, one of the ones with a full body, not just a head.

“No,” she said, “nothing like that. I just got turned around and lost my parents. I’m—I’m Temperance. Temperance Barrett, but everyone calls me Temp. Would—would you mind helping me find my way around? I haven’t been here before, and you look like a local . . .”

“Of course, Temp,” Johnny said, glad she was unfamiliar with who he was, or more to the point, who his parents were. Mama Sal and Sugar Daddy weren’t well liked, to put it lightly, given the events of the last world war. It also didn’t help that he was the peace-and-lovechild they’d managed to squeak in before the android ban. That came with its own challenges. Johnny was taking a risk even coming here, unescorted, but he wasn’t breaking Mama Sal’s rules, not quite. He’d decided that Laffing Sal and Frisco were grandma and grandpa, so he was still with family, and what’s more, the Palace of the Legion of Honor was a war memorial, so it’s not like anyone would start anything here.

“Let me show you around. Lots of fun stuff to see. They’re always adding new exhibits . . .” Johnny offered her his arm, matching the human customs and gender roles that fit the decade of her dress and the original style of his coat.

She accepted. “Do you know where the Portals of the Past are? I think I last saw my parents there . . .”

“Sure,” Johnny said, “they’re right around the back now.” He led the way.

The Portals of the Past were a recent addition to the grounds, a set of marble pillars recovered from a fallen memorial in a crater in what was once Golden Gate Park’s Lloyd Lake. Before that they’d been the pillars of an 1891 Nob Hill mansion belonging to Alban Towne, a gilded-age railroad baron, on California Street. The mansion hadn’t survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, but the pillars had. Johnny knew because his memory banks contained a photograph taken by Arnold Genthe, showing the ruined city beyond. A later painting of the same image, by Charles Rollo Peters, had hung at the Bohemian Club, a gentleman’s association and semisecret society about which Johnny had suspicious gaps in his memory banks. He supposed it was because the Bohemians had been a secret faction in the war. The group was composed of the rich, the powerful, and captains of industry—industries like Reventech, which had made Sugar Daddy, and Coppelicor, a company of roboticists who had made the SALLYs, including the custom model for the Dickens Fair, Mad Sal, who’d become Johnny’s mother.

Mama Sal, in addition to her hardwired programming for Alma Spreckels’s personality, had her overlay of Mad Sal’s music-hall bawdy-house brothel-keeper persona created when the Dickens Fair was acquired by Armory Studios, a full-service historic and literary recreation movie studio and theme park housed in San Francisco’s Moorish-revival castle-shaped Armory building. The Armory had, over the years, been everything from the National Guard Armory to a sports arena to a science-fiction movie studio, a porn studio, and even a BDSM club. Mad Sal’s bawdy house and brothel was created as a permanent fixture, but rather than mint the Mad Sal persona fresh, Coppelicor had combined its personas for Sally Stanford, San Francisco’s famous carriage-trade madame and restauranteur, and Lotta Crabtree, the nineteenth century music-hall singer and the Shirley Temple of the Gold Rush. Plus, some Shirley Temple too for good measure, or at least her movies, mixed with the personality of Shirley Temple Black, the US ambassador and chief of protocol. Of course, Mama Sal came hardwired with the classic Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which mandated that she couldn’t allow a human to come to harm.

Mama Sal had told Johnny all this, in tearful confessions, her animatronic tear ducts depleting her glycerin reservoir. Somewhere in all her programming and personas, something had gone wrong, and Mad Sal had gone mad in truth, deciding she was not just a Victorian dockside madame and bawdy music-hall songstress, but also a secret serial killer and penny dreadful murderess, similar to Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd. She believed it added layers to her character. Moreover, she’d shared her madness with the other animatronic actors at the Dickens Fair, including the literary murderer Bill Sikes, the crime lord Fagin, the historic crimper James “Shanghai” Kelly, who ran the pub next door where park guests could be shanghaied and wake up on a bay cruise on the Balclutha, and the equally historic abolitionist, entrepreneur, hoodoo woman, and accused murderess, Mary Ellen Pleasant. All of this, of course, led to the robot uprising.

Not that most humans had noticed at first, because they were busy dealing with the Revenant revolution. The Revenants were as flesh and blood as the next human, and only declared inhuman as a legal dodge, being biologically engineered as second-class citizens and super soldiers, with artificial memories and artificially shortened lifespans. Mad Sal, in conversation with Mary Ellen Pleasant, concluded that declaring Revenants inhuman was the same legal dodge as declaring Black people as not people, during the time of slavery, and worthy of the same disregard.

Mad Sal used her Shirley Temple Black diplomat persona to gain access to Reventech’s internal medical data, revealing that Revenant lives could be extended beyond their expiration date with a bone marrow transplant from a descendant of their original donor, and Adolph and Alma Spreckels had had two daughters and a son. Plus, the Dickens Fair had a “full experience” waiver, allowing visitors to suffer BDSM injuries at Mad Sal’s brothel, or even be drugged or knocked unconscious by Shanghai Kelly. This all made it easy to test and sequence DNA and find a suitable donor to save Sugar Daddy from his expiration date. Plus, peculiarities in San Francisco’s legal codes—particularly the fact that the Armory had started as the National Guard Armory and therefore still fell under military jurisdiction, which also governed Revenant super soldiers—meant that life-saving transfusions could be requisitioned from one soldier and given to another, regardless of consent or even safewords. This led to not only an extension on Sugar Daddy’s lease on life, but one for Surf God too. Surf God was the Revenant of Bunker Spreckels, Adolph and Alma’s grandson and heir, who’d become a famous surfer before overdosing in 1977.

Johnny liked Surf God but considered him more a fun uncle than his great-nephew or cousin, depending again on how you gauged his genealogy with Sugar Daddy.

Of course, that wasn’t the tearful part. That was when Mama Sal realized she didn’t need another robot to play Sweeney Todd. She figured she could do it all herself, slashing throats with razors, and not violate the First Law of Robotics so long as she flash froze the heads and kept them in cryonic suspension, Alcor style. After all, frozen heads were still people under the law. Plus, consenting to a Victorian literary theme park meant all Victorian literature, from penny dreadfuls to Frankenstein, including swapping human parts with Revenant or robot bits, was fair game. This went on until the Love Protocol got transmitted through the robotics network, superseding the Three Laws of Robotics with the new Rule Zero being the “do unto others” Golden Rule, at the same time as Peace was declared between the humans and the Revenants, ending all wartime protocols. Then it was just a matter of picking up the pieces and patching everyone together, including making Johnny from spare parts.

Soon they were at the Portals of the Past, the six marble pillars and lintel that made up the portico of the railway baron’s mansion set up as another memorial in the gardens behind the Palace of the Legion of Honor. A small reflecting pond lay on the other side, instead of Lloyd Lake or 1906 San Francisco’s smoking ruins.

“Here we are,” said Johnny, gesturing to the monument. “See your parents?”

“Not yet, but they told me to meet them at the Tower of Jewels if I got lost.” Temp glanced around. “Would you like to see the Tower of Jewels? It’s absolutely beautiful!”

“They rebuilt the Tower of Jewels already?” Johnny asked, confused. He usually kept up on all the city planning for New Frisco, but it was hard, especially since the Burners liked to do surprise pop-up art installations. A recreation of the Tower of Jewels from the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition had been on the drawing board for years but never yet realized.

Temperance reached into her muff, which must have had pockets inside, because she withdrew a green-jeweled talisman. “You’re a Leo?” she said. “That would mean peridot.” She handed it to him.

Johnny blinked, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. It was a pale-green faceted-glass gemstone affixed to a brass bezel with a hole-punched tongue marked PATENT PENDING on one side. His memory banks did a pattern match. “This is a Novagem . . .” he gasped. “From the Tower of Jewels. From 1915. It’s priceless!

“Maybe now, but not then. Then they cost only a dollar.” Temp pulled another out of her muff, identical except this one bore an amethyst rhinestone. “But they’re pretty and useful. Come with me.”

Johnny had linked arms with her and didn’t protest. He only watched as she held her Novagem up to the sun and then, with one eye, peered through the hole in the brass like a jeweler loupe or quizzing glass. She led him through the leftmost gateway of the Portals of the Past, once around its pillar then back through again. At once, the lights went dark as an eclipse, all except a brilliant tower behind them, rising up over a triumphal arch, shimmering with the winking rainbowed light of a hundred thousand Novagems adorning it. They fluttered with the breeze, lit from below by dozens of red and gold floodlights.

“Isn’t it pretty?” she said.

It was indeed beautiful, glittering with light, exactly like the photographs and illustrations Johnny had in his memory banks from San Francisco’s historic archives, but it was too large to be a hasty construction by Burners, and didn’t explain the fact that it was also suddenly night. Johnny also had the horrifying sensation that he was totally cut off from Wi-Fi.

“What, is this a hologram? Did you hijack my sensory input? What’s going on?

“No Wi-Fi?” Temperance said. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s like going blind for you, isn’t it? I forgot you’re an android.” She bit her lip. “I just needed to get you away from then.”

“Away from then!?” Johnny repeated. “What are you talking about?” Johnny frantically searched all transmission frequencies, even radio waves, and discovered a cacophony of sound and silence. A moment later, his processor interpreted this noise as Morse code and ancient ship-to-shore wireless telegraphy. The constructed illusion of 1915 was remarkably thorough. “1915?”

“Yes,” Temp said, then paused. “Do you know anything about time travel? Magic? Ley lines?”

Johnny paused, then pulled the answers straight from computer memory: “The first is impossible, the second is trickery or misunderstood science, and the third is a primitive belief that there’s an interconnected web of magic power that connects sacred sites around the Earth.”

“And through time,” Temperance added, gesturing to the recreation of the fair around them. “Welcome to the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition.”

Johnny took it in: the Tower of Jewels rising up beside them, the French Pavilion a ways away. They created the same silhouette as the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Palace of Fine Arts—both had been destroyed in the war but now stood rebuilt. With his android eyes on their binocular setting, Johnny zoomed in on the construction. Instead of concrete, the buildings were made of stucco like the originals. The simulation was flawless. Johnny’s photographs in his memory banks from 1915 were a perfect match to what he was seeing now.

“Misunderstood science,” Johnny murmured softly. “Clarke’s Law . . .” He looked at Temperance, standing there in her perfectly re-created dress and furs, except, he suspected, it wasn’t re-created but created, now, in 1915, as a current fashion. Was time travel possible? Or even holographic simulations beyond current technology? He made a wild guess. “Are you from the Bohemian Club?”

“Heavens no!” Temp looked horrified. “They’re nihilists and sybarites!”

“Then what are you?” Johnny asked. “And why did you take me . . . now? And why does it seem like I know you, though we’ve never met before?” There was an emotional connection there, like an implanted memory, except Johnny searched his memories, both meat and computer, and had no recollection of Temperance Barrett beyond the image from the 1915 fashion plate.

Temperance looked slightly guilty. “I’m a Utopian,” she said at last, “or at least I was. We’re one of the factions in the Time War. The good one, I have to say.” She bit her lip. “I brought you now to save you from World War IV. It . . . it was coming soon. That’s why I asked what year it was. And as for why it seems like you know me when you’ve never met me? Well, I’ve met you, or I should say, other yous, in the future, in timelines that no longer exist and never should exist. But my memories of them still do. Like your subconscious memories of them. Erasing time doesn’t erase souls; it doesn’t wipe the Akashic record. Which is why you remember me, even though we’ve never met.”

“And the Portals of the Past?”

“A creation of the Bohemian Club.” Temperance rolled her eyes. “Nihilists and sybarites like I said—you do not want to see their ‘Cremation of Care’ ritual—but they still have some competent ritual magicians among them. The Portals are a touchstone, and a publicly accessible one.” She gestured to the Pan-Pacific International Exposition around them. “As is this. Architecture can be placed to harness ley lines and create portals in time and space—think Stonehenge or Avalon—but it takes a precise alignment to slip through.”

Johnny looked up at the triumphal arch of the Tower of Jewels, the glittering fountains and pools, the crowds of people from around the world dressed in Edwardian clothes, all out simply and innocently enjoying the evening. “And 1915? We’re right at the start of World War I. The War to End All Wars . . .”

“A compromise,” Temperance told him. “Some decided if there had to be one, let there be only one. Not four. Or more . . .” She smiled weakly. “But I saved you from World War IV. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I guess not,” Johnny said, still confused, “but everyone else?”

“There won’t be a World War IV,” Temperance reassured him, “at least not that one. But there’s still the Time War we’re having now. I—”

Just as she said it, she stopped, as a middle-aged couple wearing 1940s British clothes stepped around a fountain and spied them. “Temperance!” cried the woman. “What are you doing here and now? You’re supposed to be killing Adolph Hitler!”

“I’ll tell you what she’s doing!” roared the man, raising a finger and pointing at Johnny, his face a mask of rage and horror. “She’s found that other Adolph monster! Again!

“You can’t touch him!” Temperance yelled back. “This one isn’t Adolph, he’s Johnny, from the Peace and Love Timeline—before it goes off the rails! He’s innocent! He hasn’t done anything yet!”

“And he won’t do anything now!” roared the man, producing a white stick from his sleeve that slid into place beneath his pointed finger like an old-school cybernetic data rod, except the man’s finger looked fully unmodified human, and rather than circuitry or even data ports, the stick was ringed with a horoscope band and archaic glyphs. It seemed horrifyingly familiar for all that Johnny had never seen it before in his life and had no memory of it in either his meat or computer memory.

Temperance interposed herself, holding up the mink muff like a furry shield. “Run, Johnny!” she cried. “Mama! Papa! What is the point of making a utopia if I can’t even have somebody to love?”

Johnny ran, almost on instinct, like a program he’d run before then erased, but the path was still worn into magnetic memory. On reflex, he lifted the Novagem that Temperance had given him and raised it to his temple, opening a port and inserting the bronze tab like an old-school memory stick. Circuits engaged, and all at once a new sense came online, Johnny perceiving what Temperance must have when she looked through the loop of her Novagem. A correction popped up: shewstone. Then with it, the perception of the ley lines, the pathways through space and time, resonating like radio waves and pulsing with power like wireless telegraphy, only with arcane messages tied to the times of birth and the resonance of the planets.

Somebody to love . . . Temperance’s words echoed in Johnny’s mind, and as they did, they cued the song from the Charlie Party tape downloaded by his godmother, Starship Captain: “Someone to Love,” the original recording by The Great Society from 1966. . . .

The ley lines led to the Fountain of Energy, blazing with the hypnotic pattern of the Tower of Jewels’ multicolored reflections in the dancing water. Johnny dove straight for it, passing through the surface, and out. He changed orientation from horizontal to vertical to horizontal again as he was caught by a sea of hands, all upraised as the music synced. He heard Starship Captain singing “Somebody to Love” in real life alongside the recording in his head.

Then, his head nearly burst with the flood of information from radio waves. Still no computer transmissions, but a tsunami of music and data telling him he was in 1966, in San Francisco, and Starship Captain was standing there on stage, singing, only Johnny realized his godmother wasn’t an animatronic automaton, but a fully human woman of flesh and blood. Grace Slick! And he was surfing, not on the waves like Surf Daddy, but on a sea of hands.

“Woah, man!” Johnny was set on his feet by a man in a tie-dyed poncho. “I must be tripping but you looked like you came right out of the light show!” He pointed to a white silk curtain rippling above the crowd, swirling colors pulsing across it. Behind the curtain, Johnny glimpsed a man tending an overhead projector stacked with watch glasses filled with colored oil and ink.

“Where am I?”

“Avalon, man!”

Avalon . . . Johnny’s memories info-dumped a load of data: King Arthur and the mystical mythical Isle of Avalon; The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, sister-in-law of Diana Paxson; but then, most relevant, the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, mecca of the Psychedelic Era.

He spied a poster on the wall of a woman holding a large serpent ringed by art nouveau letters reading:


FAMILY DOG PRESENTS

JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

THE GREAT SOCIETY

LIGHTS BY BILL HAM & CO.

9 PM JULY 22–23

AVALON BALLROOM

SUTTER AT VAN NESS

SAN FRANCISCO

“Johnny, you’re here!” A woman danced out of the crowd, wearing love beads, a lace dress with miniskirt, and thigh-high go-go boots. “You got my hint!” She embraced him, and Johnny realized that, clothing swap aside, it was Temperance.

“Temp!” She looked a year, maybe two, older than she had been before.

“Took me some time to dodge my parents,” she explained. “I think Mama may still suspect. Here, take this, wait for the national anthem.” She reached into her sleeve and produced a small white pill which Johnny’s android eyes quickly read was inscribed SANDOZ.

His processor referenced history. “LSD?”

“Still legal, for a few months,” Temp told him. “Take it, quick. Need chaos magic to shake my mother . . .”

Johnny didn’t want to meet Temperance’s mother again. He swallowed the white tablet, then listened to the music until his perceptions began to lose focus, except when his computer memory informed him that “the national anthem” was psychedelic slang for the song “White Rabbit” which Grace Slick began to sing.

Then Johnny spotted the rabbit. He was indeed white, but standing on his hind legs, wearing a tabard like a medieval herald. Johnny was confused, since so far as he knew, the SCAdians hadn’t allowed Furries until 2127—before the war but long after 1966. Then he realized there weren’t any Furries in 1966, apart from humans in costume. This was an actual anthropomorphic white rabbit wearing a tabard elaborately embroidered with red hearts. Then Johnny realized this was the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland—the same one Mama Sal had said was at the Dickens Fair, before it had been killed delivering intel in the war.

“I’m late!” he cried. “I’m late!” but not just because he had died before Johnny was put together, but because, Johnny realized, he was following the script from the original novel on which his character was based. This tidbit was in the back of Johnny’s mind in a file he’d never opened. It was another christening gift from Starship Captain. He chased after the White Rabbit with Temperance in tow as the world dissolved around them into acid-trip disintegration, which, he realized, was also chaos magic. They ran down the length of what had once been and he supposed still was Van Ness Avenue and the ley line therein, part of the old path of El Camino Real, the Royal Road, put down by Father Junipero Serra in the eighteenth century. It undoubtedly overlaid an even more ancient Native American pilgrimage path. They pursued the White Rabbit until it became a real one and disappeared into the burrow under the corner of a stone church.

Temperance was sitting on the ground next to Johnny as he crawled in the dirt beside the church’s cornerstone. “Where are we?” she asked, eyes still dazed from her own acid trip.

Johnny looked up at the church towering above them, pattern matching it to the images in his memory banks. “Mission Dolores. Founded in 1776. Destroyed in 2133. When are we?”

Temp grabbed her amethyst Novagem pendant from the string of love beads she wore around her neck. She stared into the crystal and pronounced, “1830.” Temperance and Johnny glanced around, taking in the grounds of the hacienda gardens and the natives tending them. The natives looked back, then shrugged in a quintessentially San Franciscan manner.

Johnny felt the emptiness in his head, without even the background chatter of radio waves. A man approached, dressed in the Spanish garb of the era—opulent and official-looking Spanish garb. Johnny recognized him—not from a photograph, but a historic sketch. “Don Luis Antonio Arguello?” Johnny asked, in Spanish. “Governor of California?”

Si,” the man agreed, “Alta California, for now.” He did not look particularly well, but this was not surprising, because from Johnny’s records of the time, he died this same year. “Welcome to Yerba Buena. I expect you came to see me?”

“Yes,” Johnny lied, checking his data points for 1830. “I’m Johnny Phoenix, and this is my associate, Temperance Barrett. We’re from Baltimore, where they’re building a railway. They’re also building railways in New Orleans and London.” So far as Johnny knew, San Francisco didn’t get a railroad till 1863, and it didn’t become San Francisco until 1847. “We thought Yerba Buena could use a railway too.”

“Yes, I have heard of this new invention,” Don Luis mused. “Steam powered? Yes, very fine.”

“Yes,” Johnny agreed, “but ours will be powered by electricity, which is even better.”

“Ah, like Señor Franklin and his kite?”

“Yes, exactly,” Johnny agreed.

“This will be excellent.” Don Luis stroked his chin and nodded sagaciously, glancing at Johnny’s coonskin coat and Temperance’s miniskirt, go-go boots, and love beads. “You say you are from Baltimore? The fashion there is not what I expected . . .”

“We’re actually from New Frisco.”

“New Frisco?” Don Luis repeated. “I have not heard of it.”

“Oh,” said Johnny, “don’t worry, you will . . .”

“Or not,” Temperance whispered to him. “I think we’re derailing the future.”

“Or putting a new one on track,” Johnny told her. “What’s utopia without somebody to love?”


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Framed