Entangled (45 page)

She crawled across the floor of the raft to where Brindle lay, still unconscious, and rested the palm of her hand on his chest. His eyes were closed, his breathing was steady, and he did not seem to be in discomfort or pain. She confirmed again that the axe wound to his head, though bloody, had not penetrated his skull.

‘He going to be OK,’ Grondin pulsed. ‘He sleep deep now. We heal at Secret Place.’

Since she too was very tired, and there was nothing more to be done on the bucking craft as it shot along with the river, Ria stretched herself out on the deck next to Brindle. Almost at once Sulpa’s image came into her mind, his lean body drenched in blood, pointing at her.

She reached down inside her leggings and touched her right thigh where his little dart had struck.

The hard lump under her skin throbbed and radiated heat.

‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Leoni protested. Her mind was reeling. ‘How can we make any difference to something so long ago in the past? Whatever happened happened and there’s nothing we can do about it …’

The Angel smiled: ‘That’s not quite how time works.’ She made some adjustments to the controls of her laptop device. ‘But once again you’re just going to have to take my word for it.’

‘Take your word for what?’ Leoni asked.

‘That we may influence events at any point in Earth’s history or prehistory providing the results we want to achieve aren’t ruled out by existing evidence and observations.’

The Angel had spoken formally, almost as though she were quoting from a legal document, but now she reverted to her normal tone: ‘In the case of the Neanderthals, history only has evidence they became extinct twenty-four thousand years ago, and this happened in Spain. But history does not tell us how or why they died out. We’re therefore free to attempt to influence not the extinction itself – which is an observed historical event – but how and why it happened …’

‘Yeah,’ said Leoni. ‘If we have a time machine.’

‘But we do.’ The screen of the Angel’s laptop had sprung into life again, displaying its vortex of menacing colours. ‘Surely you guessed when I sent you to see Sulpa I was sending you back in time?’

‘Not at first, no. It didn’t even occur to me. Matt suggested it later when I drew pictures of the weapons Sulpa’s people were carrying. But it doesn’t make any sense to me.’

‘How do you think time works?’ the Angel asked. She pointed to the screen: ‘Draw it for me with your finger.’

Leoni reached out and traced a glowing green horizontal line from left to right across the middle of the screen. She scrawled PAST above the extreme left side of the line, PRESENT at the centre, and FUTURE at the extreme right.

‘Ah,’ said the Angel. ‘Time’s arrow. For one event to cause another it must precede it.’

‘Well, obviously – duuh …’

‘Or perhaps not so obvious. Perhaps, for example, time is more like this.’

The Angel waved her hand, erasing Leoni’s line, and touched the screen with her own index finger. Though continuous, the line she drew was not straight but looped and twisted and sprawled across all parts of the screen, making multiple meandering curves and turns, often winding back and recrossing its own path, here forming a spiral, there a cat’s cradle, and there coiled into a tangled knot.

‘Different things happen at different points along the line,’ the Angel explained, ‘and there are multiple causal interconnections running in all directions, so it’s not, strictly speaking, inevitable that one thing must occur before another in order to influence it. That’s how it seems to humans – almost all of you agree on it – because you’re so deeply immersed in matter. But leave the body, step outside the flow of earthly time, and you see that everything is continuously unfolding at every point along the line …’

‘And once you’ve stepped out you can step in again at any point you choose?’

‘Or you can be sent in, as I sent you in,’ said the Angel, and she touched a tangled point on the line with the tip of her finger.

‘But out of body, right? Like I was in the middle of all that Sulpa madness? It’s not like the land where everything is known, or Don Apolinar’s dungeon?’

‘You have no physical avatar when I send you into the past this way’ – the Angel touched the laptop again. ‘You are pure, non-physical consciousness. You are spirit.’

Leoni felt her eyes drawn back to the meandering line on the screen – a brilliant luminous green trail, standing out against the background of deeper, darker, swirling colours. ‘Wherever time recurves, and passes close to its own course, such as here’ – the Angel pointed to a place where two sections of the line ran in parallel for a short distance and appeared to touch. ‘Or where time crosses over itself, such as here’ – she pointed to one of the many loops she had drawn. ‘And particularly where it becomes intricately ravelled and intertwined such as here’ – she indicated one of the most densely knotted areas of the line – ‘then
special possibilities emerge both for good and for evil.’ The Angel turned her intense gaze on Leoni: ‘Connections form between the different epochs thus superimposed, and the lives and fates of certain individuals can become entangled …’

Leoni was staring into the screen again. The swirling colours had vanished. It was now as though she was looking down at the Earth through a trapdoor in the sky. What she saw was a group of little rafts, launching from an island in the midst of a wide fast-flowing river, surrounded by a crowd of swimmers.

She zoomed in. The people on the rafts were fighting the swimmers, hacking their way through them with axes. With a final mighty effort they broke free and the rafts were carried off by the current.

Leoni zoomed in again and found herself on one of the rafts. Most of the people on board were cut and bleeding. Some, with no necks, big chunky bodies and crude ungainly features, resembled the figure of the Neanderthal the Angel had shown her earlier. Others were humans like Leoni and, with a jolt of excitement, she recognised the mysterious girl she had warned about the tree-birds – the girl with nut-brown skin and chestnut hair who’d come to her in a dream and taken her hand and told her that together they could find their way out of a terrifying forest. She lay on the floor of the raft beside a club-footed Neanderthal with a head injury. She was injured, too. Her lean hard body was soaked from the river, and blood seeped from multiple flesh wounds. Her face was a mass of bruises but her eyes shone with the same bright intelligence Leoni remembered. There was no mistaking her.

‘Her name is Ria,’ said the Angel. ‘She lives in the Stone Age, in what is now the northern part of Spain, by the banks of a glacial river that dried up millennia before you were born. She’s a member of a tribe of Cro-Magnons who call themselves the Clan.’

‘And the other people with her?’

‘Some are survivors of the Clan like herself. The rest are Neanderthals. Usually you would not see them join forces, but in Sulpa they face a common enemy.’

Abruptly the river vanished from the screen and the meandering green line was back. The Angel pointed to a densely coiled and knotted section. ‘Though separated by twenty-four thousand years of linear time, your epoch intersects with Ria’s epoch here’ – her finger touched one of the points where the line crossed over itself
and there was a flash of green. ‘Your life is in the twenty-first century, Ria’s is in the Stone Age. But because there really is no present and no past everything in these two intersecting timelines actually unfolds simultaneously.’

‘So what you just showed me, the rafts and the river, this Ria girl – it was all happening twenty-four thousand years ago but also, in a weird way, right now?’

‘In a weird way, yes.’

The screen display changed again. The green line was gone and Leoni found herself looking down on the brutish naked ranks of Sulpa’s pale-skinned bloodstained army.

‘They belong to a Cro-Magnon tribe of eastern Europe who call themselves the Illimani,’ said the Angel. ‘Sulpa has possessed the body of one of their young warriors, killed their former king, shaped them into this instrument of evil, and led them on a mass migration across Europe, ending up in northern Spain. He has come there to torture and kill the last Neanderthals on Earth. But all the Cro-Magnon tribes who cross his path are also being annihilated, including Ria’s people.’

‘She looked like she’d been in a fight …’

‘She had been. A fight for her life. Barely an hour ago in her timeline the Clan were attacked. The adults were massacred – only a few dozen escaped, Ria amongst them. Hundreds of children were sacrificed to feed Sulpa’s thirst for innocent blood.’

‘Why? What’s the matter with this guy?’

‘It is as I told you – the more pure the innocence he destroys, the more horror and pain he can inflict in the process, the more his own power grows.’

‘That’s why he sacrifices children?’

‘He drinks not only their blood but also their souls … He snuffs out their consciousness for ever so they may never again take shape in new forms. He takes everything they were and are and could be and feeds it to the evil within him. It is the same hunger for pure souls, magnified a thousandfold, that draws him to the Neanderthals. Never before, across the whole of reality, has such goodness and innocence as theirs come into existence.’

A flicker caught Leoni’s eye and she glanced down at the screen.

The green timeline was back.

The Angel once again pointed to the place where the twenty-first
century intersected with the Stone Age. ‘You will note,’ she said, ‘that the knot here is very dense and this intersection is also surrounded by other superimposed epochs …’

Leoni looked. She could see many points that would have been widely separated if the Angel had simply drawn a straight line across the screen, but that lay close together and frequently overlapped in this intertwined and knotted line.

‘To grasp the danger,’ the Angel continued, ‘you must know something of what Sulpa is attempting to do.’

‘Didn’t you say he wants to make himself more powerful by murdering good people?’

‘That is simply a means to his larger objective.’ The Angel’s beautiful voice had fallen almost to a whisper: ‘The goodness of the Neanderthals presents him with a special opportunity. If he succeeds in destroying them, as he intends, the psychic charge he draws from their life force will allow him to jump the ages and manifest in physical form in the twenty-first century as well.’

‘He already has!’ Leoni objected. ‘Manifested physically, I mean. Isn’t Jack just the name Sulpa goes by today?’

‘It is. But Jack is not a fully formed physical being. Sulpa used the entanglement of the two timelines to send him forward into the age of technology as a dark and corrupting influence, something without solidity, intangible, more like an intelligent cloud than a man. But, with each new sacrifice he performs in the age of stone, his shadow in the twenty-first century grows stronger and more physical, and followers flock to him. All that remains is the mass murder of the last Neanderthals and Jack will become a fully materialised avatar. Then Sulpa will stand astride the intersecting timelines and begin to weave the doom of all that is good.’

The Angel’s finger touched the screen again: ‘Because time is so densely entangled in this region, many other epochs lie closely superimposed. Very soon he will be able to spread his tentacles through all of them. The balance of the Totality itself stands at risk.’

‘But if we stop him massacring the Neanderthals none of this happens, right?’

‘None of it. Only in this way can he gain sufficient power for the full materialisation of Jack.’

‘I don’t ever want to see that day come,’ whispered Leoni.

‘Then will you help me prevent the massacre? This is the adventure I have chosen you for.’

‘Yes,’ said Leoni with passion. ‘Yes, with all my heart. But how will we do it? You said you can’t intervene physically. You said I’m just spirit when I go into the past.’

‘Ria stands between Sulpa and the Neanderthals and I have entangled your life with hers,’ said the Angel. ‘You are sisters in time now. Together you will find the way.’

Leoni looked down at the screen. The swirling colours were back. They seemed to draw her in and she began to fall.