Tanglewreck Read online

  ‘Where be thine end?’ he said, his boldness gone.

  ‘No end,’ said the Voice. ‘Soon enough it will happen to you, sonny. This is what happens here. You are not sucked down enough yet. But you will be by night, ha ha ha.’

  Night? How could anything be darker than this?

  ‘What be this place?’

  ‘Black Hole.’

  ‘That be its name? Black Hole?’

  ‘Did they throw you down here like the rest?’

  Gabriel told them about the shed, but the Voices knew nothing of that. They said they had been thrown down the hospital chute after the Time Transfusions.

  ‘Hospital?’ said Gabriel. ‘Bedlam Hospital?’

  ‘The hospital is called Bethlehem,’ said the Voice.

  ‘We’ve got the Time,’ said the other Voice. ‘We’ve got the Time, ha ha ha – that’s what their doctors say – but they haven’t got the Time, WE got it, and they take it off us and sell it to other people, and then they throw us down here. Half of us, anyway. We’re all twins. One twin escapes, the other gets thrown down here, sonny. Your twin has escaped, ha ha ha.’

  Gabriel was glad Silver had escaped, even if she wasn’t his twin.

  The Voices told him quickly and harshly about life in the hospital. The hospital only took twins, and for six months they treated you well, and fed you and looked after you, and made you healthy and strong, and then they started the experiments.

  So many people in the world were short of time, and that’s what the hospital took – Time. The best years were carefully removed and transfused in discrete packets of a year each, to whoever could pay for them.

  The twins aged rapidly. Forty-nine years was the maximum taken from any one body, but, by using twins, the hospital had discovered that they could take ninety-eight compatible years and sell them as a healthy screened package to families, or to companies who wanted to extend the working life of their top executives.

  Transfusions were taken at thirteen years old.

  ‘Orphans,’ said the Voice. ‘Orphans or mothers who will sell their children. You get good money for selling your children.’

  ‘What be your fate?’ asked Gabriel.

  ‘When they’ve finished the experiments, and they don’t always work, you get sick and old. A boy of thirteen looks sixty when they’ve finished, and he can’t walk. Sometimes they take too many years off him, and he dies straight away – the nurses take extra for illegal sale. You can get cut-price Time off the Time Touts, but a lot of it is no good. They don’t give you a guarantee and you can’t complain to anyone if you pay the money and the stuff is rubbish.

  ‘Well, even if they stick to the rules, and they only take what the law allows, the boy soon gets sick anyway, and the weak ones they throw down here. There’s no Time in a Black Hole, sonny, no Time at all. Time stops, and it stops because there’s so much gravity down here that it pulls everything in with it, even light. Even light can’t escape this place. No Time, no light, just what they call the Stretch.’

  ‘The stretch?’ Gabriel was nervous.

  ‘Gravity down here will stretch you like spaghetti. That’s what we are now – human spaghetti.’

  ‘Let me go,’ pleaded Gabriel.

  ‘Can’t do that, sonny. No one leaves a Black Hole because no one can travel faster than the speed of light, and that’s what you’d need to do to get out. You’ll be sucked down, and you’ll start to be spaghetti. Ha ha ha.’

  The speed of light. Gabriel didn’t know much about light, because he lived underground, and he had never heard of light having a speed. He was a good runner though.

  ‘How fast must light travel?’

  ‘300,000 kilometres a second. Beat that – ha ha ha.’

  Gabriel’s heart sank. It was as if he was already giving in to the gravity of the Black Hole and being pulled down and down.

  ‘They were bright stars once, these Black Holes,’ said the Voice. ‘Think of that.’

  ‘Why do they imprison you here?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Only one of us,’ answered the Voice. ‘The other is for the experiment. You see, if there’s no Time down here, and there isn’t, we can’t actually die. We should be crushed to death by the force of gravity, but that hasn’t happened, we just stretch and stretch and stretch. My feet are a thousand miles away, easy. While we live in limbo here, our twin can’t die either. Who knows why not? Then they use us for more of their experiments.’

  ‘What are their experiments? Tell me,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Can’t tell you, sonny. Know about the Time Transfusions, don’t know about the rest – teleporting, they say, but why you need twins for that, I don’t know. Just know that here we are without light, without Time, slowly stretching through this dark dead star.’ The Voice fell silent.

  Gabriel felt the wind tugging at him, and the sensation of being pulled outwards and downwards. He couldn’t hold on with his strong hands, because there was nothing around him but blackness.

  He tried to hold on with his mind. He would send Silver a Mind Message. She wasn’t very good at reading them, but if he could only reach her as he had when they were both spinning through the Time Tornado. He had felt a cord connecting them then, and he had only ever felt that with his own kind.

  He concentrated. ‘Silver, Silver …’ But he sensed a cloudiness, a vagueness, not her bright smile or her clear eyes. He tried to imagine her, but it was like looking at a photograph that is fading. ‘Silver, Silver.’ He closed his eyes, even though it was so dark, and he made his picture of her stronger. Now she was coming into outline a little bit. He realised with fear that she too must be in danger.

  ‘Never know,’ said the Voice. ‘Never know where she is now, sonny.’

  ‘I shall know!’ he shouted, above the wind that was increasing.

  ‘Too late, you’re slipping already. Can’t you feel it?’

  He could feel it. He could feel his sturdy compact body moving away from itself. He was being broken up by the huge force of gravity in the Black Hole. Well, all right. If this was the end, he would use all his last will and strength to hold on to Silver. He would be like Goliath and dig his legs firm and make his muscles work for him one last time. He would wake Silver from her sleep. He would shape her again and she would remember who she was.

  The wind was on his body. The Voices had gone. He was alone.

  Deep under the earth, in London, on the Thames, the Throwbacks were sitting in a circle holding hands.

  ‘Steady him,’ said Micah. ‘He is in Hell. Steady him.’

  No one spoke. A wind began to rise in the Chamber. The wind whipped up the pots and pans and blew them against the walls. The ponies whinnied and shivered, and Goliath could be heard roaring in his tunnel.

  ‘Hold against the wind,’ shouted Micah. ‘It is the wind at the End of Time, it is the wind of the Dead, it is the wind of Nothingness and Void, hold hold!’

  With all their might they grasped each other and remained seated as they were, using every ounce of their power to hold Gabriel in their sights.

  And Gabriel in his turn held Silver in his sights. He did not think of himself at all, he thought of her only, and he drew a silver line round her body and when it wavered he strengthened it, and when she faded he blew his own breath through the raging wind, as though he were breathing life back into her.

  His mind was going dark. He dared not move at all for fear of slipping down the soft scree into the windy formless emptiness below.

  He had one chance perhaps to hold on for longer. Fiddling in his pockets he took out the wire and clips he had scavenged from the scrap heaps, and he bound his feet to his waist, and then wrapped his arms round his chest. If he could make himself as compact as possible, he would be harder to break up.

  ‘Help me, Micah,’ he said. ‘Help us both.’

  On the Star Road, the little girl lay in a heap. No one took any notice of her or tried to help her as they passed up and down. She was another of the outcas
ts. It was common for refugees to die by the road. The Van would come and take her body away tonight or tomorrow.

  It was cold on the road. The child was numb and quiet, like a sleeping thing in the snow. Then, faintly, so faintly, like a piano heard in the distance, the child’s spreading and dissolving mind heard a note it recognised from another place, another life.

  ‘Hold,’ said the note.

  The note came again, stronger, the same, distinct this time.

  ‘Hold.’

  Or was it just the wind in the trees?

  International Rescue

  Something warm and furry was licking her face.

  She dreamed she was at Tanglewreck and her parents were alive, and the whole world was safe.

  What was this warm and furry thing? She didn’t want to open her eyes. Still it persisted, licking her like she was a pat of butter. She felt like butter. Melted butter, except to be that she would have to be warm, and she wasn’t warm; she was freezing. Freezing melted butter. Stupid!

  She opened her eyes. There was a ginger cat about an inch away from her face.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘Who are you?’ said a voice that didn’t belong to the cat.

  ‘I’m …’ and she stopped because she didn’t know. There was Tanglewreck, her beloved house, but …

  ‘Memory malfunction, maybe?’ said a woman’s voice.

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s dissolved into her wave function. We have to pinpoint her back in the here and now. Come on, come on, little sister. We’re watching you, we’re talking to you. You are here with us.’

  Two women were bending over her.

  ‘We want to get you inside. Will you come with us?’

  The child nodded and staggered up using their arms to help her. The cat rubbed against her jeans.

  ‘We want to get you away before the Van comes. Hurry up if you can. Just over there to the Caffè Ora.’

  The child knew that name. She furrowed her brow.

  They hurried across the road. A round man in a woollen cloak was watching from the shadows. No one noticed him.

  The Caffè Ora was closed and the blinds were tight across the windows, but inside the tables were packed with people sitting and talking.

  The child blinked against the light and felt faint.

  ‘Sit down,’ said one of the women. ‘My name is Ora, I run the cafe.’ She put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder and smiled. ‘This is Serena. Everyone here is a friend. Now, come on, concentrate on something you know really well. What is it?

  A house, a moat, a room in the attic, a long ragged drive …

  ‘Tanglewreck,’ shouted the child.

  ‘That’s where I live.’

  ‘Is that a planet or city?’ said Ora.

  ‘It’s my house. My own house, well, apart from Mrs …’ But she couldn’t remember the name.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Ora approvingly. ‘Everyone here wants to help you. We’re all looking at you, and we all want to know your name.’

  The people at the tables started clapping and cheering. The child felt shy. She wished … HE were here … what was his name? His name, his name …

  ‘Where’s Gabriel?’ said the child wildly. ‘He’s my friend. He’s small but strong, he wears a blue coat, and he has a pale face and jet-black hair. We came here in a Time Tornado and Regalia Mason found me and left me on the Star Road. I have to find my friend Gabriel, and the …’

  She stopped. Were these really friends or enemies? What was happening? Why had she forgotten her own name?

  ‘My name is Silver,’ she said.

  Ora sighed with relief. ‘You nearly died out there. If the Van had found you, you would be dead by now.’

  ‘What’s the van?’

  ‘The Van takes left-over people to be used up elsewhere.’

  ‘What happened to me?’

  ‘You were dissolving into all of your possibilities – that’s what a wave function is. At a sub-atomic level, your particles are spread throughout Space and Time. You’re everywhere and nowhere. At the crude level of ordinary life, you need to be someone to exist, or you need to exist to be someone, whatever you prefer.’

  Silver nodded.

  ‘It happens a lot on the Star Road. It’s easy to forget who you are. That’s what was happening to you. You were drifting through all your possible states of existence. When we came, we took a measurement –’

  ‘You measured me?’ asked Silver, really confused.

  ‘In a way. But not with a tape measure. By observing you, we determined your position in the Universe. We brought you back from everywhere to somewhere.’

  ‘Give the girl some pasta!’ said one of the men at the table.

  ‘John’s right,’ said Serena. ‘She needs food before she gets the science!’

  Ora brought her a steaming plate of pasta and Silver wolfed it down. Between mouthfuls she said, ‘I was here just before, in your cafe. This afternoon, I think. Regalia Mason brought me here.’

  Nobody knew the name or the description, so Silver carried on talking. ‘She’s got a company called Quanta, but I think it’s called the Quantum here.’

  ‘What do you know about the Quantum?’ said Ora.

  ‘Where I come from, in London, in the twenty-first century, something is going wrong with Time. There are demonstrations in the streets, and the Government doesn’t know what to do. Regalia Mason owns a company called Quanta. They’re in America, and only they can fix Time, which is why nobody in the future is allowed to interfere with the past. If they do, she says there will be no future and no past. Time will implode and everything will disappear.’

  Ora nodded. ‘I’ll tell you something, Silver. Many of us here in this room tonight have risked our lives, and those who are not here have lost their lives, trying to travel back in Time to change what was happening then, so we can change what is happening now. We have all failed. Where you are, in London, in the twenty-first century, is the time and place where the future is set for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to come. You have no idea of the importance of the time you are living in.’

  Silver thought back to the meeting of the Committee at Greenwich, and how Regalia Mason had told all those clever scientists and important people in the British Government that her company would be the one to control the new research into Time.

  ‘But what is the Quantum?’ she asked.

  The people in the room were silent, looking at each other.

  Ora spoke.

  ‘At the highest level – no one knows. There are ministers, officials, functionaries, police, soldiers, offices, TV stations, everything you can think of, but no one knows who, or what, is at the centre.’

  I do, thought Silver, and she was afraid.

  ‘Here, on the Einstein Line, there’s a Resistance Movement. We try and help people who are victims of the Quantum, and we infiltrate Quantum organisations with our spies. People arrive on the Einstein Line from all times and all parts of the Universe. We give them shelter, and in return, they give us information. If we help you to get back to your own time, will you take a message for us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Silver, ‘but I need to find my friend before I go back, and …’

  She was about to say that she needed to find the Timekeeper too, but something warned her that these people would not understand.

  ‘We will help you to find your friend. If the Time Police deport you, they will re-circuit your brain neurons, and you won’t be able to remember anything about where you have been. If we arrange your travel, you will remember all of this, and you will be able to take a message to one of our workers in London.’

  Silver had thought of something. ‘If this is the future and you know what happened in the twenty-first century, why don’t you know who controls the Quantum? It must be in the history books about Regalia Mason, and her company Quanta, and the Time Tornadoes.’

  ‘History is unreliable,’ said Ora simply. ‘The Quantum has re-w
ritten history. The rest has been erased.’

  Silver thought to herself, That’s why they don’t know anything about Regalia Mason. She doesn’t want them to know anything. She wants to be invisible.

  And Silver realised that even she was somehow keeping Regalia Mason’s secret. There was so much that could not be said. Anyway, why would they believe her?

  Ora took Silver into a little back room and started to make up a bed for her. The room was mainly a storeroom for the cafe, but Ora said that the Resistance often tried to help out travellers who had nowhere to stay.

  ‘It’s dangerous to sleep on the roadside – the Van comes along and picks you up, and then you wind up in the hospital for tests. And then – well, who knows?’ She said this in the voice of someone who knows too well.

  There was a cat box in the room. It said CAT BOX on it, but when Silver lifted the lid and looked inside, she saw that the ginger cat was dead. She called to Ora, and hung back, a little bit frightened by the stiff dead body of the warm furry cat that had licked her awake.

  Ora laughed. ‘That’s just Dinger. The most famous animal experiment in history. He’s got his own website and fanclub, like Bambi or Shere Khan, or Dumbo, except he’s a real cat and not a cartoon.’

  ‘But he’s dead!’ said Silver. ‘And he was alive!’

  ‘He’s dead now, he’ll be alive again later.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He exists in the sum of all possible states. It’s his wave function.’

  ‘How can a cat be dead and alive at the same time?’

  Ora sighed. ‘It’s like this. The wave function of the cat exists in all possible states – dead, alive, eating, sleeping, running, washing. You see, atoms and other small particles, the basic stuff that we are made of, well, that basic stuff can simultaneously exist in more than one state at once – just like when you were dissolving on the Star Road.

  ‘Only when an observation is made – call it a measurement, or an observation, whatever you like – well, only then do these tiny bits of you and the cat definitely enter one state or another. The cat used to be shut in a closed box and threatened with a vial of poison that would be triggered by the atomic decay of a radioactive substance. Until the box was opened, no one could know whether Dinger was alive or dead – and as the single atom that triggered the poison could be both decayed and not decayed at the same time, so too could the cat be dead and not dead at the same time. You can’t know till you open the box.’