Tanglewreck (23 page)

‘Help me, Micah,’ he whispered. ‘This be Bedlam and I am fearful.’

In the Chamber Micah heard him. ‘Bedlam …’ he said to himself. ‘Not gone, still with us.’ In his mind he pictured the way that Gabriel must find. How well he knew it!

Gabriel breathed deeply to try and ease the pain in his shoulder. He had never been comfortable above ground, but since his time in the Black Hole, fresh air and light seemed sweet to him.

He stood in front of the hospital, but he did not see a place to heal the sick, he saw the place he remembered: massive, brutal, barred.

The way in … He closed his eyes and Micah’s picture cleared in his mind. If he walked to the side of the fashionable main drive where the ladies came to marvel at the
madmen, he would find the grille opened by Micah on the night of his escape in 1774. He would find the tunnel dug with wooden spoons and bleeding fingers, and he would squirm through its crumbling depths until he forced his body up into a narrow cell for the Confinement of Raving Lunaticks.

His heart was beating fast. What if they were waiting for him at the other end? The White Lead Man with his poisonous stare and filthy ointments? Abel Darkwater himself, leather truncheon and straightjacket?

Micah had not hesitated. He must not hesitate.

He lifted the grille and plunged down into the mire.

Silver knew that she had to move away from the cylinder before Regalia Mason opened her eyes. She had to move now, this passing moment, this ticking second, this final click of the clock.

Why then did she stand staring into that face?

Down went Gabriel, bending with difficulty in the tunnel. It must have collapsed. He had to crawl. He had to wriggle. The air was foul. Pestilence and rot. He found a food tin with the inmate’s name scratched on it – Beulah. He used it to catch some green water trickling down the side of the tunnel. He was thirsty. They were always thirsty. The water was only piped into the hospital for two hours a day and the wells outside were kept locked.

He was coming to some rough-made steps. Not far now.
Silver couldn’t make her body move. She felt as though her body belonged to someone else. She tried to lift her arm. She tried to move her foot. She willed them to move and nothing happened. She could not even turn her head away from that face. She could not even close her eyes …

Gabriel was through. Yes, here was the way into the room. He swung up. The room was lit by a single flare, and in the corner shadows he could just make out a hunched and desperate shape, its arms and legs shackled.

‘Who art thou?’ he whispered.

‘King of England,’ said the man.

Gabriel looked down at the poor fellow, lost and wretched. He took out a tool from his pocket and undid the shackles. The King of England rubbed his ankles and wrists. He smiled. Gabriel gave him two chocolate bars, and he tore at them with his long teeth, a bar in each hand.

‘Go down there,’ said Gabriel, ‘and leave this place.’

Gabriel went to the heavy door and opened it with a quick turn of one of his delicate metal jemmies that Micah had made for him. He locked it behind him again to avoid any suspicion, and crept on through the gloomy halls of Bedlam.

Regalia Mason opened her eyes and smiled at Silver.

She pressed certain buttons in the cylinder, and the heartbeat noise began to die away. Then the monitor screens went blank and the cylinder lid slid open. Shaking her head,
Regalia Mason sat up and swung sideways, her long legs and bare feet lightly hitting the floor, and then she walked and stretched, and glanced briefly into the second cylinder.

‘You’re a murderer!’ said Silver.

‘You have a vivid imagination,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘and a very clear idea of right and wrong. So did I at your age, many many years ago, but things change. Besides, the girl isn’t dead.’

‘What have you done to her?’ said Silver, who still couldn’t move.

‘You could say I am living on borrowed time.’

‘Let me go! I can’t move!’

Regalia Mason went over to a switch and pulled it. ‘I am not Abel Darkwater,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t put a spell on you.’ Silver moved again.

‘You were standing on a magnet,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘This is science, not magic, just like the twins. Now come with me.’

The two of them walked out of the Zone and into what looked like an ordinary kitchen in an ordinary world. There was a big table and white plates, and a fat loaf of bread next to a round creamy cheese. Regalia Mason cut some cheese, stuffed it in her mouth, and started making scrambled eggs.

‘Protein is essential after a Time Transfusion,’ she said, talking with her mouth full. Silver had the wild thought that no one would ever believe that this beautiful barefooted blonde woman, eating bread and cheese and cooking eggs, was the most powerful being in the Universe. No one was ever going to believe her. Regalia Mason would never be caught.

‘Caught by whom?’ she said, reading Silver’s mind. ‘Just who do you think is going to make a better job of it? Abel Darkwater and his friend the Pope? Would you like them to be in charge of a whole Universe?’

‘No,’ said Silver.

‘Or your friend Mrs Rokabye?’

This was such a ridiculous idea that Silver laughed, even though this was no laughing moment. Imagine Mrs Rokabye and Bigamist ruling the Universe! Regalia Mason laughed too, and tossed Silver a piece of bread and butter. For a second – not even that, a nano-second – Regalia Mason felt something like sadness and something like happiness, and then she was herself again.

‘Let me tell you now, Silver, that where you live, on Earth, in the twenty-first century, Time Transfusions will be successful, thanks to billions of dollars of Quanta research. Wasted Time will be a thing of the past. Parents will have more Time to spend with their children, children will live longer happier lives. There will be no need to rush and race. There will be enough Time.’

‘But you make people die.’

‘Quanta has been instrumental in reducing the world’s surplus population.’

Silver tried to keep her mind clear. Whenever she was with Regalia Mason, she found it hard to think clearly. She concentrated.

‘And you tried to kill Gabriel. You broke your promise to me.’

‘I promised you I would not have him Deported. I promised you I would not kill him. Is he dead?’

‘No! I saved him.’

‘Exactly, and that was remarkable. Science says that nothing can escape a Black Hole – but one of the pleasures of being a scientist is to prove science wrong.’

‘And you left me to die on the Star Road.’

‘I left you to find your own way – it was a little test.’

That sounded like school to Silver, and in the days before Mrs Rokabye, when she still went to school, she had never been any good at tests. She had to concentrate. She felt Micah’s medallion in her pocket.

Gabriel was approaching the great room at Bedlam. That room, where the gallery ran around the upper part for observation, and where the Warders walked, truncheons in hand, one from the North Wing, one from the South Wing, meeting midway, bowing briefly and walking on.

Two fireplaces lit the room but never warmed it. Men and women, half-stripped, shivering, huddled as near to the fire as they could, and clutched each other for warmth and comfort. Twice a day many of the inmates were taken to a freezing cold tank of water, thrown in, and dragged out with a pole, like drowning dogs, and left to drip dry as best they could before being crammed into icy unchanged beds.

The room had a few pieces of furniture – benches and rickety chairs and tiny milking stools. Straw was scattered across the floor. Some preferred to sleep here than to mix
with the bodies and the lice of the dormitories.

All manner of madness was loose in Bedlam. There were more kings here than there had ever been countries to rule over, and more Popes than sinners. The deluded, the counterfeit, the broken-hearted, the broken-winged, the savage, the pitiful, the chatterers, the silent, the violent and the cowed were all here in this mighty madhouse, this warning to the wise never to surrender their wits to the ways of fools.

And there were others too – ones like Gabriel and his clan and his kind, whose minds were free and whose bodies were shackled. These were the ones chained around the edges of the room, some trying to read scraps of books by the dismal light of dripping tallow candles.

Some of these men and women had been cruelly decorated with painted wooden wings that flapped uselessly on their shoulders.

Gabriel was angry, and wherever he could, he used his tools to unlock the cuffs and manacles, and to gently lift off the wings. These he broke up and threw on to the fires, so that at least for tonight the room would be warm.

He passed on, not knowing where he was going.

‘Twins can be doubly useful in Time Transfusions,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘but they are particularly useful for teleporting – you know what that is?’

‘Like
Star Trek
?’ said Silver. ‘You disappear in one place and arrive somewhere else?’

‘Right,’ said Regalia Mason, ‘but at present it is very
difficult unless you have a pair of twins to help you.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Silver.

‘It’s called Entanglement,’ said Regalia Mason, now eating fried eggs. ‘Take a pair of particles – you know, bits of atoms – put them miles away, even light years apart, and they still share information. Entangled particles act as though they are a single object; what happens to one of the pair automatically affects the other. Remember Silver, that you, me, everything in the Universe came from a single explosion, so the atoms in our bodies are linked with every atom in Space and Time. The Universe is not local and isolated, it is a cosmic web. Have you heard of a scientist called Einstein?’

‘Einstein said that e = MC
²
,’ said Silver.

‘Very good, that’s right, but although Einstein discovered what we call Relativity – and most important of all, that Time itself is relative – Einstein hated the idea of a cosmic web. He called these links, these connections, this Entanglement, “spooky action at a distance” because he was never comfortable with the implications of quantum mechanics.’

‘Umm, what are the implications?’ said Silver.

‘One of them is teleporting human beings.’

‘I don’t want to be teleported,’ said Silver.

‘What I tried to show you on the Star Road is that while you think of yourself as a particular person living in a particular time and inside a particular body, that is only a part of the story. What you are is information, Silver. Coded information. DNA is coded information. Every cell of your body is
coded information and that information can move and change.’

‘I know I’ll grow up,’ said Silver.

‘Yes, and nobody has to teach your cells to grow – they know they have to do that, it is in their code – but some of the cells that were you yesterday are already dead, and some are brand new. The You that is You is not constant, it is always changing.’

Silver’s head was spinning. She rubbed the medallion and concentrated.

‘But why do you need twins?’ she said doggedly.

Regalia Mason sighed. ‘It has been known since the twentieth century that if you separate a pair of twins at birth, they will often grow up and do the same things at the same time, even though they have never met. The coding they share makes this happen.

‘Teleportation needs three things – me, the person who wants to be teleported, and a pair of twins who are entangled. Bring me Sally and I scan all of my information into her, and she will instantly relay it to Kelly on the other side of the Universe. Kelly becomes an exact copy of me.’

‘But –’

‘Of course, you need a quantum computer, but I have one. I had the first one ever developed – top secret. We made it for the Pentagon.’

‘But –’

‘Here’s what we do with the twins. We separate them and we station them where people – that is, certain people –
might need to travel. There are depots of twins all over the galaxy. When I was in London and I wanted to come here, I used one of our London twins paired with his Philippi twin. Instantly, I was here – information, you see, is the one thing that can travel faster than the speed of light.’

‘And love,’ said Silver.

‘What?’

‘Love can travel faster than the speed of light.’

Regalia Mason was silent.

Gabriel had seen Abel Darkwater walking ahead of him down the passage. Then Darkwater vanished, leaving his faint outline shimmering in the air. Gabriel put out his hand and touched the hated shape. It tingled slightly, but it was nothing. Empty space and points of light.

He ran on towards the big barred doors ahead.

‘What happens to you and Sally and Kelly?’

‘My original is destroyed,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘As yet we cannot be in two places at one time, at least not in our physical bodies. I pass through Sally and into Kelly. The particle mass that was Kelly becomes me.’

‘And what happens to Sally and Kelly?’

‘They no longer exist as they once did.’

‘You kill them.’

‘For such a lively child you are obsessed with death! There is no such thing as death as you describe it. Our states alter, that is all.’

‘You’re like a crocodile, you just gobble everything up. If I get eaten by a crocodile I become part of the crocodile but I’m not me any more.’

‘Then you have understood an important lesson – it is better to eat than to be eaten.’

Regalia Mason finished her sixth fried egg and mopped up her plate.

‘In fact, I am not the crocodile in your story. That is your friend Abel Darkwater. Crocodiles don’t die until something kills them. They have a very low body temperature, and, strictly speaking, they do not grow old as we grow old, they just go on growing. Abel Darkwater has lived a long time, but by very different methods to my own. What a strange place the world is, eh, Silver?’

At that moment the hospital alarms started blaring through the kitchen and the corridors. Running feet. Shouting.

Regalia Mason flipped open the lid of her computer.

‘Gabriel, the Throwback, has arrived. He has set off the alarms because he came in through the back door.’