Tanglewreck (25 page)

That morning the Prime Minister had agreed that Quanta would control any commercial interest in Time.

Privately, the Prime Minister did not believe that Time
could be traded like a commodity. Nor did he believe in Time travel, Time Transfusions or teleporting. His view was that Regalia Mason and her company wanted to believe that there would be some return on the billions they would have to invest. The rest was science-fiction.

Possibly the research would generate some lucrative byproducts – just as nuclear power had been a by-product of the atomic bomb, and just as the microwave had been invented when a radio operator had accidentally passed his sausage or his peanut bar or his egg or whatever it was through the waves of his radio transmitter, and discovered to his amazement that his sausage or his peanut bar or his egg had cooked itself.

Well, let Quanta have its version of the microwave. What harm could it do?

‘Shall we sign the Agreement today?’ asked Regalia Mason, gorgeous in her white Armani.

‘Tomorrow, I believe,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘The European Parliament will ratify the decision tonight – as you know there have been disturbances in France and in Russia too.’

‘Yes, I have heard,’ said Regalia Mason.

‘And there are some strange unexplained events surrounding the recent hurricanes in New Orleans and Florida. People have disappeared.’

‘People often disappear,’ said Regalia Mason, mildly.

Micah, crouching behind the fireplace, heard all of this. His
mind flew back to the dark days of Bedlam, when Abel Darkwater and Maria Prophetessa had worked through the night, night after night, on their ‘Experiments’. They had vowed to unlock Time’s secrets, and with it the power of the Universe.

Since Silver and Gabriel had gone away, there had been two more Time Tornadoes. Regalia Mason was about to get the power she wanted, and not by force. The world was going to give it to her.

Gabriel and Toby were fixing the bus. ‘Thazzit!’ shouted Toby, as the bus shuddered to life.

All the kids piled on. Gabriel and Silver ran back to get some supplies from the Caffè Ora.

Gabriel’s Mind Message from Micah had told him that he and Silver had to get to the Sands of Time today, and he had been working on the bus all night.

Toby had insisted they took all the kids with them, because he was afraid something would happen to them if they stayed round Checkpoint Zero. Hiding sixteen kids was not easy.

‘They’re like my duty, y’know, Gabriel? We can’t just leave ’em here to be Atomised or Fried or whatever.’

Silver nodded. She was deep in her own thoughts. She had a feeling that both Abel Darkwater and Regalia Mason knew exactly what she was doing, and exactly what she would do. Yet, she had to do it. Why had this strange quest fallen to her? What made her different to all the other people in the world?

Gabriel smiled at her. ‘Shall you know something about silver?’

‘About me?’

‘About the metal that is thy name.’

Silver nodded. ‘I was named after a pirate.’

‘That may be so, but the metal silver reflects nine-tenths of its own light. They fear you because you are shining,’ said Gabriel.

‘Who fears me?’ asked Silver.

‘Regalia Mason, she fears you. Abel Darkwater, he fears you.’

‘I don’t think I’m the Child with the Golden Face – I’m silver not gold.’

‘It is the shining that the prophecy means,’ said Gabriel.

Silver was silent. ‘But Gabriel – all I’m going to do is lead him to it. I can’t fight him – neither can you. Micah said so. Even if we succeed, we fail. I mean, if we find the Timekeeper, we just end up finding it for Abel Darkwater.’

‘Silver –’

‘I know I’ve got to do it. It’s just, oh, if this was a story, like
The Lord of the Rings
, I could throw the ring back into the fires of Mordor and that would be the end of it. But when I find the Timekeeper I don’t know what to do – except that Abel Darkwater will probably kill us both and then become Lord of the Universe, like Regalia Mason said.’

‘Do not trust her, Silver.’

Before Silver could answer, Toby was shouting and waving at them from the driver’s cabin of the bus.

‘Come on,’ said Silver, getting to her feet. ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll never go. But stay by me, Gabriel, whatever happens next. I can’t do this on my own.’

They climbed on to the bus, Toby turning the huge steering wheel by leaning across it with his body. Every time he changed gear there was a horrible grinding noise. But they were moving. They were travelling down the Star Road.

The children sang, then they slept, then they ate all their food, then some of them were sick, then some of them wanted to get off, then some of them cried, then some of them had a fight, then all of them were quiet at last, dreaming of home as they looked out of the windows, dreaming of other worlds.

Silver had the tight knot in her stomach again. She had worked so hard to get this far and now she just wanted to run away. Gabriel said she mustn’t trust Regalia Mason, but maybe Regalia Mason was right. Why was Silver interfering? Nothing would ever be perfect. Maybe the Quantum wasn’t such a bad thing.

‘Hey!’ shouted Toby. ‘A fairground!’

Silver was baffled. They were driving towards somewhere that looked like an ordinary seaside resort, with a beach and sea and donkeys and people strolling up and down. She pulled out the map Micah had given her and unfolded it. She leaned over to Gabriel, his long legs propped on the seat.

‘The Sands of Time on this map Micah gave me are wild and strange and stretch for miles. There are no buildings marked. This is like Disneyland or somewhere. Do you think we’re in the right place?’

Gabriel frowned and looked from the map to the scene outside the window, but Toby had stopped the bus right by the pier and he and the other kids had already roared off on to the beach.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Silver. ‘Nothing precious can be here. It’s just candyfloss and rides.’

Gabriel thought for a minute, then he said, ‘Like Bedlam hides behind Bethlehem Hospital.’

‘What?’

‘This be a painted show, a hiding place. Something lies behind what you can see.’

Silver closed her eyes. She thought about what had happened to her on the Star Road, when she had begun to dissolve. Could she dissolve the surface in front of her?

Deep underground, Micah was pouring over the map he had copied. He was sending Silver the true geography of the place.

‘See it for what it be,’ he said, over and over again, ‘See it for what it be …’

Silver opened her eyes, and the pier and the rides and the candyfloss started to bend and distort like someone was pulling them out of shape. Then everything went quiet, like someone had switched off the sound. Then everything went black, like someone had pulled the plug. When the light came back, there was no seaside, no donkeys, no trams going up and down; there was a desert stretching into the distance. A soft wind blew through the sand dunes.

‘Oh yes,’ said Abel Darkwater, looking into his crystal ball. ‘She has gone through.’

Regalia Mason read her computer screen with interest. The child had learned to shuffle realities – or at least she had learned that there is more than one reality.

She checked her own frequency. The reality she was in was vibrating quite slowly. Silver was about to enter a different reality that lay on a different wavelength. Regalia Mason prepared to re-set her own frequency, like tuning a radio, and then she too could enter another world. It was so simple; everybody knows that all the radio stations are playing at once, but we only tune in to one at a time. Why did they not understand that reality was just the same?

She made the necessary adjustments on her quantum computer. The time had come.

Silver looked back. She could see her own footsteps pad-marked across the sand, and Gabriel’s next to hers. What was this place, where the sands seemed to roll like waves? Just walking made her feel seasick.

They walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked and they walked and they walked and they walked.

Night came. Desert night, cold and pitiless. She shivered inside her coat and pushed her hands deep into the pockets. Gabriel was curled up asleep in his blue coat. How had her
parents ever got the clock here? Could they be here too? Could they be still alive? Had they been taken in a Time Tornado, the clock with them?

If she could find them, they could all go home together, and live together again. She sat up, huddling her body against the wind that never ceased.

She was very thirsty. She felt weightless in her body again, like she had on the Star Road.

What was that ahead? A light! A shape! A shape she knew! The shape of a house in the distance. It was Tanglewreck!

She scrambled up and ran as fast as she could through the shifting sand. Her shoes and her socks were gritty with sand and her nose was full of sand.

But just ahead, there was the house, and she was nearly at the drive, and although she was stumbling, and her breath was coming in gasps, and her mouth was drier than death, she would get to the house, she would go in, and her mother and father would be there, and … and … the mirage vanished.

Silver sat down and cried hot tears that stung her face, dry and sore with the sand and the wind. Gabriel, who had woken up and found her gone, came running behind her, putting his arms round her, comforting her, telling her they must go on.

‘I can’t, Gabriel.’

‘I will hold you up.’

‘I thought I was home. I thought I was happy.’ Silver was crying so much that she couldn’t see. Gabriel wiped her eyes
with the dirty sleeve of his old blue coat, and put out both his hands to help her up.

She got up and they walked on.

She fell, and they walked on.

They walked on.

There was nothing in the world but tears and blisters and thirst and sand. She no longer knew who she was or why. And Gabriel held her as Micah had held him in the Black Hole. If he could only hold her just a little longer.

‘Help me, Micah,’ he whispered, and Micah heard, and walked with them, if they had known it, every step of the sands.

It was nearly morning when Silver fell flat on her face, tripping over something that was not a mirage.

It was a round stone sticking out of the sand.

She scraped at it with her fingers. It was big under the sand, whatever it was. Gabriel was excited and started to dig through the sand with his palms like a mole’s. He smiled at Silver, and she forgot her pain and tiredness and dug and dug alongside him, trying to use her hands as he did, palms square like a mole. He laughed at her efforts, they both laughed, and soon the sand was flying everywhere, and they had uncovered something marvellous and strange: first it was an ear, then it was an eye, then it was a head, then it was a crouched body.

It was the crouched body of a stone sphinx. In its chest was a door, and behind the door was a passage.

Down, they went, down and down, into darkness and silence.

Lit by a single flare to the entrance to a chamber was the statue of a man with the head of a falcon.

The temple of the great god Ra.

So strange, the crumbling silent walls of the sacred space, lit by low-burning cruses of oil set in niches hammered out of the rock.

So strange, the smell of dust and incense and bandages; the ceremony of the dead before the night-journey to the pyramids.

There was an altar covered in a rotting cloth. Silver touched it and it shivered like a spider’s web and turned to dust.

There was a painting on the wall, its colours faded, its lines hardly visible, but she knew what it was as soon as she saw it; it was a drawing of the Timekeeper.

‘It is the prophecy,’ said Abel Darkwater, stepping out of the shadows behind her.

Silver twisted round in panic. What she saw made her more afraid still. Abel Darkwater was in the robes of the High Priest of Ra.

‘What began in the pyramids of Egypt will be completed today.’

‘Sorcery,’ said a voice that sounded like a snake. Pope Gregory XIII was in the ante-chamber.

‘Your own Moses was a sorcerer,’ said Abel Darkwater to the Pope, and then he turned his round and orb-like stare on Silver.

‘Silver, do you know what I am?’

She thought of a crocodile, cold and cunning in the waters of the Nile.

Abel Darkwater read her thoughts and laughed.

‘Perhaps I am a Leviathan, but I am something else too; I am the last of the Arcana. The last of the alchemists. I and my kind have turned base metal into gold, but we have sought something else, of infinitely greater value. We have looked into the secrets of life itself.

‘Tempus Fugit is dedicated to knowing the mystery of time. Time Past and Time Future will be in our control. There are so few of us left now, so very few, and we have waited so long … for … the … clock.’

‘I haven’t got it!’ said Silver.

Abel Darkwater hardly seemed to hear her.

‘It was not made in Egypt, and it was not made in Israel. It was not made in the times of Romans, nor by St Augustine, though he had the drawings. The prophecy began to unfold in the year 1375 in France, when the Timekeeper was commissioned as a curiosity by Charles V, who as you will recall, had a great interest in Time.’

Silver didn’t recall.

‘In those days, the Timekeeper was a pendulum clock with a double face, showing the hours of midnight until noon, and noon until midnight. It kept time well, and it kept its other secrets well; secrets known only to myself and the sorceress Maria Prophetessa …’

Regalia Mason!
thought Silver.

‘Indeed!’ said Abel Darkwater, reading her mind again. ‘But Maria Prophetessa she was in those days, and to me she will be so always – the mysterious priestess of the Nile, the dark advisor to the Jew Moses, the whispering confidante of Joan of Arc, the mistress of Charles V of France. Oh yes, Silver, without her the Timekeeper would never have been made; it was made for her, it belonged to her, until this man smashed it into a thousand pieces.’