Tanglewreck

by Jeanette Winterson

  Regalia Mason, the highest bidder of them all, was sitting quietly in her suite at the Savoy Hotel, overlooking the River Thames. Her white fur coat was on the bed. She wore her white lab coat over her white Armani dress, and she was busy tapping numbers into her computer. She too knew exactly where Silver was, because she was tracking her with GPS satellite.

  ‘A great improvement on the days of the crystal ball,’ she said, to no one in particular, and to anyone who might be listening.

  As Gabriel and Silver climbed out on to the very top of Tower Bridge, Silver was amazed to see the cars zooming underneath her in miniature, and to hear the fierce roar of the city all about her. So many people, so many lives, and the river running through them all, as it always had.

  She turned to Gabriel, and saw that he was terrified. He was too high up. There was too much light, and it was too warm for him under the lamps that lit their tower. She had never seen him afraid. Now he was afraid.

  ‘I must go down quicker than a dropped stone.’

  ‘Don’t leave me, Gabriel. Please.’

  ‘I have come too far. I must say goodbye. Take food and blankets for you.’ He dropped his bag on to the platform where they stood. Silver picked it up, or tried to. ‘It’s too heavy for me, Gabriel. You’ll have to take it back.’

  ‘Time be a cold place.’

  ‘You don’t care about the cold.’

  ‘Updwellers care to be warm.’

  ‘I’ve got my duffle coat. I’ll be all right.’

  It was nearly dark. The car lights, yellow at the front, and red at the rear, lit up the road under the bridge. Gabriel put his hands over his eyes. He was squinting.

  ‘What should I do now, Gabriel? Here on the bridge?’

  ‘Micah says you must wait.’

  ‘Please wait with me.’

  He was hesitating, his fear fighting with his love for her, for he too had been solitary and lonely and a little different from the others, and then Silver had come, and he felt he knew her.

  ‘Gabriel …’

  She put her arms round him. They stayed like that, very close and very quiet, for what seemed like no time at all, and for ever, when suddenly the whole bridge began to shake like a giant held it in both hands.

  Silver fell flat on the floor of the platform. She couldn’t get up. It was as though a weight was pressing on her body. She raised her head and looked down the river.

  The sky had gone completely black. The cars were at a standstill. There was a clap like thunder. Then the rain came, rain so wet that she was soaked in seconds, rain so sharp that it punctured her clothes and stung her skin.

  Gabriel was clinging to the ladder. She shouted to him, but he couldn’t hear her above the smashing sound of the rain.

  Silver was looking upriver, towards Big Ben. She was aware that the clock had stopped, its creamy faces bright and bland and motionless.

  She felt seasick in her stomach. She felt like she was lurching, sliding, and then she realised that the bridge underneath her was opening, and that she and Gabriel were rocking high above it.

  ‘Hold! Hold,’ yelled Gabriel, but Silver’s hands were small and soft, and the machinery that operated the bridge was heavy and blind. If she did not swing out now, she would be crushed.

  She remembered the chain-mail gloves. She put them on and clung with all her might. Underneath her, the cars that were tipping off the opening bridge should have fallen into the river, but they didn’t; they hung in Time for a moment and they disappeared. Completely disappeared.

  Soon the bridge was empty. The bridge was open.

  There! Coming towards her now, pennants flying, sails fat with a following wind, oars rising and falling from the water in time to a drumbeat, men waving from the decks, the prow high and painted, boys hanging from the rigging, and, in the crow’s nest, an old man with a trumpet.

  The ship is coming through now, surrounded by a flotilla of small rowing boats. Crowds line the banks of the river. The buildings are low, hugger-mugger, crouched in the mud, leaning over the water, some supported on tree trunks rammed into the river. Washing is strung between the houses, and a man slitting a pig’s throat runs the river red. He looks up when he hears the shouting. Yes, the ship is coming! He leaves the pig on his jetty and yells as hard as he can, slicing the air with his knife, ‘JOLLY ROGER, JOLLY ROGER.’

  At the ship’s wheel, dressed in furs and pearls, is the bearded man that Silver knows so well from portraits and from dreams. Roger Rover is sailing up the River Thames, his ship sunk to its portholes with treasure.

  As the ship passes directly under the bridge, the very top of the topmost sail is glowing gold. The gold light spills down the sail, like dye, and then the sail is all gold, and then the gold floods across the deck and over the ship, and as the ship sails through, she begins to waver and shimmer.

  The shimmering golden ship is spreading like a wave. It is hard to say now exactly where the ship is, or where the ship isn’t, because the ship seems to be everywhere and nowhere. The gold light is intense.

  Silver looks at herself. Is she dissolving? She looks at Gabriel, holding his blue coat over his head with one square hand to keep away from the light.

  She looks down at the ship, or what is left of it, and one thing she sees: Roger Rover’s eyes fixed on her.

  Then she does something she never meant to do. She lets go, simple as that. She lets go into the stream of golden light.

  ‘SILVER!’ It is Gabriel’s voice, far away. ‘SILVER!’

  But now she is definitely dissolving. She has a vague sense of her arms and legs, but not in their usual place. She thinks, I’ll collect them later. She laughs. Ridiculous. Arms are arms and legs are legs. But not here, in this spinning dissolving place. It should be painful, but it isn’t, not painful at all. It’s like drifting off to sleep except that she is wide awake.

  ‘SILVER!’ Gabriel’s voice again, loud and high. She tries to answer but she doesn’t know where her mouth is and so no words come out.

  The Throwbacks can mind-read, I’ll send him a Mind Message, like Micah said. This thought comes to her as though someone has posted it through a slot in her head. Yes, a Mind Message. ‘Here I am, Gabriel. HERE I AM.’

  A stout pair of arms wraps round her, like she’s being rescued at sea. Suddenly she can feel her own arms and legs again. She can feel the edges of her body. She’s not dissolving, she’s Silver, and she’s four feet ten inches tall and she weighs forty kilos, and Gabriel is carrying her and their belongings to what looks like a checkpoint on an empty road. There are guards and barriers and coming towards them is a man in a Security Suit toting a gun and walking a doubleheaded dog.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Silver.

  ‘I know not,’ said Gabriel. ‘You leapt into the air and you hung there like a bird hovers, like a bird of prey, like a falcon over a field, and I called you, and you turned to me, and I could not leave you alone, so I leapt too, into the swirling air full of voices.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any voices,’ said Silver.

  ‘You called to me and I found you.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t come with me!’

  ‘I am with you.’

  Abel Darkwater was packing a small leather bag. He was wearing his old tweed suit as usual, but over the top of the suit, he fastened a fur-lined dark wool cloak. He had some tools, a crystal ball, his Detector, a spherical glass jar called an alembic, a Primus stove, and a sharp knife.

  He consulted his gold pocket watch. Yes, it was time to go.

  Regalia Mason’s GPS satellite link had jammed the second the Time Tornado struck Tower Bridge. She had closed her computer, stepped out on to her balcony over the river and put on her long-distance surveillance glasses; something her firm had developed for the Pentagon.

  She could see Tower Bridge clearly, and she could see Silver and Gabriel on the bar above it. How predictable everyone was! Predictable that the child and her idiot friend would imagine Time as an adventure th
ey could win. Predictable Abel Darkwater, setting out to look for a clock. She could have told you all this would happen without a crystal ball. She laughed. Science had done away with so much magic and mumbo-jumbo. Abel Darkwater invented his quaint devices, like the Age-Gauge, but a carbon-reader could have told him the age of a tree or a slice of limestone. Biometric data meant that anyone, anywhere, could be tracked by using a silicon chip, a satellite and a computer. There was no need for Detectors and Searchers, and the rest of Darkwater’s toybox.

  In the old days she too had passed her hands over the crystal ball and stuck pins into poppets, and sweated over a cauldron to cause a bronze head to speak. All unnecessary now. She was the most powerful woman in the world, and not by magic. She was a scientist.

  These thoughts were like clouds floating across her mind as she watched the bridge. No doubt the Time Tornado would sweep the child Silver away, and Abel Darkwater would go after her, and torment her and threaten her, and then all that was left was for she, Regalia Mason, to make sure that the Timekeeper was never found. She had a right to lose it. After all, it had belonged to her once …

  She smiled.

  ‘For though we cannot make our sun

  Stand still, yet we can make him run.’

  Then suddenly she saw the child Silver leap of her own free will from the bridge and into the light ripples.

  Regalia Mason was filled with fury. The child must not be allowed to take control. By leaping into Time, the wretched child had already begun to control it. Now she would arrive at the Checkpoint. Well, she must not get any further.

  Regalia Mason went into her room and opened her quantum computer. It was the only one in existence. Quantum computing was still decades away, and teleporting was just a science-fiction-movie dream, but Regalia Mason had already gone further than that.

  On the screen was the sad face of a woman.

  ‘Send your twin Castor to me at once,’ said Regalia Mason.

  Very soon there was a knock at the door of her room, and a beautiful young man entered, identical in face to his sister on the computer screen.

  He was trembling, his head down.

  ‘Kiss me,’ said Regalia Mason.

  The young man Castor kissed her, and Regalia Mason vanished, to appear on the other side of the Universe as an exact copy of herself.

  Meanwhile Silver and Gabriel had found themselves somewhere very odd indeed. A very tall policeman with a double-headed dog was walking angrily towards them. Above them, in the sky, were three moons.

  ‘I don’t think we’re in London any more,’ said Silver.

  The Einstein Line

  Silver and Gabriel were sitting in a long low hut surrounded by a lot of angry shouting people.

  ‘I’ve got my visa, I can travel!’

  ‘Can’t you see that I’m on business here?’

  ‘My husband has already gone – we’re just joining him.’

  ‘This is simply not acceptable in the modern world.’

  The problem was simple. Everyone in the hut wanted to travel back in Time, but the Time Police wouldn’t let them. Time travel was forbidden. Well, almost forbidden.

  Which meant that Silver and Gabriel had broken the rules.

  The policeman with the double-headed dog asked them all kinds of questions about where they had come from, and Silver tried to explain about the Time Tornado blowing them off the bridge.

  ‘Blow-ins, are you?’ he said. ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘Is this the future – where we are now, I mean?’ asked Silver.

  ‘Not as far as I’m concerned,’ said the policeman. ‘This is Now – 2:45 p.m. precisely – and I am on duty for another six hours. If it was the future, I would already be at home.’

  ‘But is it the future for me?’

  ‘Not exactly, because you have no future. You will be deported back to your own Time, once all the paperwork has been done, and if the paperwork can’t be done, you will be Atomised.’

  ‘Atomised? What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you will be No More.’

  ‘You can’t kill us. We’re children, and we haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘That’s what they all say. Now you come along with me.’

  Gabriel and Silver followed the policeman to the long low hut on the inside of the checkpoint. The hut and the checkpoint were ugly, but the sky was deep black and shining with big stars. In the East were three crescent moons.

  ‘Are we still on Planet Earth?’ asked Silver.

  The policeman shook his head. ‘This is Philippi, on the other side of the Milky Way to Earth, but connected by the Star Road. You travelled along the Star Road, through Time, and landed here. Everyone always does.’

  ‘Everyone?’

  ‘Even the Pope.’

  Silver knew all about Popes because her own family had been Catholics for hundreds of years, though her father never went to church. She wondered why the Popes wanted to go Time travelling.

  ‘When they die they come here,’ said the policeman. ‘Nobody knows why. Millions of people die every year and we never see them again, but for some reason the Popes somersault down the Star Road and end up here. Eventually we built this for them.’

  He pulled back a curtain and showed Silver and Gabriel a full-size replica of the Vatican in Rome. The Popes were busy going up and down blessing people.

  ‘It’s a bit of a tourist attraction,’ said the policeman, ‘and when we get crowded out with people here – and if you think this is busy, you should see it in the summer – well, when we get really busy, the Popes help out. They do Mass and blessings and things.’

  ‘How many Popes have you got?’ asked Silver.

  ‘All of them. The last Pope died in 2333, but we’ve got a full set. Three of them are women.’

  ‘Are the Popes dead or alive?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the policeman, ‘that’s what you don’t understand because you live in the past. Dead and alive are to do with Time, aren’t they? The Popes die, yes they do, and they think they’ve gone to Heaven, because they always expected Heaven to be like one big Vatican City, and they always expected it to be full of other Popes, even the wicked ones. So here they all are, and because they have travelled the Star Road they are outside of Time now. There is no Time here.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘None at all. We have clocks so that we can divide the day, and we even have day and night, but this is the Einstein Line. Time is steady here, not future, not past, just the present. Stay here and you won’t get any older, ever. That’s why people come – it’s not just for the Time travel, it’s a bit of a health spa.’

  ‘It doesn’t look much like a nice place for a holiday.’

  ‘Not right here, stupid! This is a military zone, but a bit further on, behind St Peter’s, it’s very nice indeed.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t come here,’ said Silver. ‘I like the seaside for a holiday.’

  ‘Plenty of seaside here. We’ve got the Sands of Time here.’

  ‘Where?’ said Silver, pricking up her ears.

  ‘Just a star’s throw away. Now stop asking questions.’

  ‘I’m only asking questions because you are answering them,’ said Silver.

  ‘Well, now I’m going to ask you some questions. What year have you come from?’

  ‘2009,’ said Silver, making up a date.

  ‘District?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘And what about him, your pal, the funny-looking one?’

  ‘Do you laugh at me?’ said Gabriel, and there was something in his voice that made even an eight-foot-tall policeman pause.

  ‘Gabriel is a Throwback,’ said Silver, ‘and I am a Pirate.’

  ‘A Throwback and a Pirate, eh? You’d better go straight to Quarantine, without passing Go or collecting a thousand Astros.’

  ‘Do you still play Monopoly?’ asked Silver.

  ‘Course we do!’ said the policeman. ‘Everyone plays Monopoly,
even the Popes. Now come on.’

  Silver and Gabriel got up to follow the policeman when a beautiful woman swept into the room wearing a white fox fur. The officers stood to attention.

  Regalia Mason whispered in the ear of the senior officer with the double-headed dog, and he laughed, and nodded and gestured towards a back room. Suddenly Silver and Gabriel were picked up bodily, and taken into the back room like a pair of parcels.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ said Regalia Mason.

  (Oh yes, we do, thought Silver, but she didn’t say anything and she tried practising her Mind Messages to tell Gabriel to keep quiet.)

  Regalia Mason was smiling. ‘I am here to help you. I am going to accompany you back to your own time. You see, you were caught in the Time Tornado, and it must be upsetting for you. Never mind. Although Time travel is strictly forbidden, some of us are less bound by the rules than others.’

  She laughed like icicles breaking.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Silver.

  ‘You are on the Einstein Line.’

  ‘That’s what the policeman said, but I didn’t believe him.’

  ‘The police sometimes tell the truth,’ said Regalia Mason.

  Then Regalia Mason explained that the Einstein Line was a Time boundary; no matter what part of the future you lived in, this line was as far back in Time as anyone could travel.

  ‘There are people here who want to go back to the 1960s, or the 1560s, and that is not allowed. You may have noticed that in your world there are no visitors from the future. Some scientists take that to mean that Time travel hasn’t happened – but of course it has happened, it’s just that we don’t let it happen before it was invented.’

  ‘What?’ said Silver, completely confused.

  Regalia Mason sighed. ‘Time travel has been a scientific possibility since Einstein discovered some interesting things about curved space and the speed of light, at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not until the twenty-fourth century did Time travel become a reality. So if you live in the twenty-seventh century, for example, you are allowed to go back as far as Time travel allows – to the twenty-fourth century – but no further back. It is strictly forbidden.’