Djinn Rummy

by Tom Holt

  “Gaw,” mutters the man, as well he might. For the Thing scuffling across the sand below him was his idea, and it was his genius (or his fault) that turned a little yellow wildflower commonly found in the fields and hedgerows of Old England into this: Primula dinodontica, the Ninja Primrose; or, to put it another way, one of the three components of the ultimate Green Bomb.

  “Well,” says the girl, “looks like that one works OK. Let’s try the others.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure about this…”

  “Don’t be so bloody wet. Here goes.”

  From a second flask she takes another seed: flat, beanlike, about the size and shape of a small sycamore pod. Before the man can do anything, she’s let it go.

  WHUMP!

  “… serious misgivings,” the man is saying, “about the whole project. I mean, I never actually imagined for one moment—”

  The primrose stops in its tracks. The tips of its roots, as sensitive as the nose of a bat, have felt the thump of the second seed landing, the explosion as the incredible potential energy contained in its brittle husk is released, the shivering of the earth as another set of iron-hard roots is driven deep under the surface. Like you, Mother Earth has this thing about needles…

  “That,” remarks the man, rolling back the frontiers of statement of the stunningly obvious, “is disgusting.”

  A savage flashback into the racial memory — the myth of the hydra, the hundred-headed serpentine guardian of Hell’s gate — except that instead of heads, this thing has pale blue flowers. Pale blue flowers writhing and twisting on their stems, petals snapping frenziedly at the empty air. The first Devil’s Forget-Me-Not has been spawned.

  “Two down,” yells the girl cheerfully, “one to go. I’m really pleased, aren’t you?”

  The man says nothing; instead, he grabs for the third flask and hugs it to him. As the girl reaches for it, he backs away; forgetting that backing space in the basket of a balloon is strictly limited. Safe backing space, anyway.

  “AAAaaaaaaah!” he remarks.

  As he hits the ground (at which point, his troubles are definitively over) the flask is jolted out of his hand and flies wide, landing on a rock and smashing to pieces. A tiny, tiny seed, no bigger than a grain of salt, falls on to the flat stone — WHUMP! — which explodes into gravel as the third and finest achievement of Operation Urban Renewal springs into instantaneous life. Its roots plough through the compacted sand like a torpedo through water as the single grotesque pod, the like of which hasn’t been seen on earth since Hieronymus Bosch’s window-box was destroyed by the Inquisition, splits and falls away, revealing a flower — You have to call it a flower, because botany is a naïve, trusting science which never for one moment imagined that anything like this could happen. A terrible, hideous flower, with jowls and warts and fangs and a big, purple lolling tongue — which tilts backwards towards the sun, and spits.

  This is Viola Aeschrotata, the Hammerhead Pansy; proof, if any were needed, that the business of Creation is best left to the professionals. With a ghastly sucking noise, it ups roots and lurches at a terrific pace towards the other two flowers — who stop dead in their tracks, waggle their stamens and stare. A few seconds before, they had been marching grimly towards each other, with the express intention of puffing each other’s leaves off. Now they exchange frightened glances, corolla to corolla. Jesus Christ, they are saying, what the fuck is that?

  Pull yourself together, for crying out loud, empathises the Primrose. So long as we stick together, the two of us can have it for breakfast. What are you, a flower or a mouse?

  But the Forget-Me-Not is backing away, its blossoms peeping out from behind its leaves. The hell with that, it broadcasts, have you seen the hairs on that thing? You want to be a hero, chum, be my guest. I’m—

  With a lightning flurry of roots, the Pansy springs; and the Forget-Me-Not discovers, rather too late, just how incredibly quickly it can cover the ground on its enormous scaffolding of roots. There is a sickening plopping noise as, by sheer bulk, it crushes the Forget-Me-Not into the ground. The flower cranes on its stem and darts forward; the petals close; the carcase of the Forget-Me-Not shudders convulsively, and slumps.

  In the balloon, the girl nods her head in unbounded satisfaction; and then, just to be on the safe side, has a good long pull on the hot-air burner.

  For the Primrose, the desert is suddenly a very big, very open, very lonely place. The Pansy rises to the tips of its roots, swaying slightly; there is sap all round the bell of its flower.

  OK.

  There is an infinity of magnificently pointless bravado in the vibes thrown out by the Primrose, as it rocks back on its roots and crouches, in a floral version of the classic knife-fighter’s stance. Come on, weed, make my day.

  No responding vibes from the Pansy; nothing at all. It emanates a vast negative aura, like a lawn-mower or a watering-canful of DDT. Every hair on the Primrose’s leaves is standing on end.

  Look. We can talk about this. The world’s big enough for the two of us.

  We’re on the same side, you and me. Wildflowers united can never be uprooted.

  Ilfaut cultiver notrejardin.

  But from the Pansy, nothing. And now it has begun to move; slowly, rootlet by rootlet, dragging up vast moraines of sand and dust as it comes…

  Sod you, then, the Primrose snarls, as its leaves pucker in horror. Go climb a trellis.

  Ten or twelve seconds later, when it’s all over, the Pansy swivels its flower and looks around, until it is satisfied that there’s nothing else alive within the range of its senses. That, as far as it is concerned, is how things ought to be. It ups roots and begins to crawl.

  Five hours later, the girl in the balloon watches its dehydrated form wilt into a heap, thrash a last moribund tendril, and die. This, after all, is the Mojave Desert; even the roots of the Hammerhead Pansy can’t dig deep enough here to strike water. Deserts have this aggravating knack of always having the last word.

  Sow a few of those little white seeds somewhere where there’s water, however — in the middle of New York, say, or Moscow or Paris or London, where water either runs in rivers through the middle or swooshes about a few feet under the surface in easy-to-find ceramic arteries — and it would be a very different story. The term “flower power” would take on a whole new nexus of unpleasant meanings.

  The girl smiles. The ultimate Green Bomb was now a reality. (And with friends like her, does the earth really need any enemies?) As the balloon drifts on its lazy course back home, she reflects contentedly on the progress of Operation Urban Renewal…

  …Our environment is in deadly peril. The relentless spread of urbanisation threatens to poison and smother every last wild flower and blade of grass on the surface of the planet. Every pollutant, every waste product, every man-made toxin in the world originates in the Cities. The Cities, therefore, have got to go.

  Blasting them off the face of the earth by conventional means, however, would create as many problems as it solves. It has been calculated that a bomb powerful enough to take out, say, Lisbon, would generate enough toxic matter to poison eighty-seven per cent of the lichens and ribbon-form seaweeds in the Iberian peninsula.

  How can we solve this dilemma, brothers and sisters of the Green Dawn? How can we cauterise the cancer of urban civilisation without killing the patient in the process?

  We believe that we have found a way…

  It was regrettable, the girl mused, that the prototypes of the other two flowers should have been destroyed; not just because it would have been useful to be able to observe their progress but because it’s always a tragedy, on general principles, when a living plant perishes. Would it be excessively animist and sentimental, she wondered, if she returned to the spot a little later and held some sort of brief, modest funeral?

  No humans, by request.

  The back bar of Saheed’s was heaving. It was Karaoke Night.

  Genies are, when the chips are down, simple creature
s, as refined as the effluent from the Torrey Canyon, but with a strong instinctive sense of rhythm. There is nothing they enjoy more, after six or eight gallons of chilled goat’s milk with rennet chasers, than grabbing a microphone in a crowded room and miming to Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel. Since turning himself into a carbon copy of Elvis, correct down to the last detail of the DNA pattern, is child’s play to a genie, the effect can be confusing to an uninformed bystander.

  If this be offence, Kiss was a hardened recidivist, and on ninety-nine Karaoke Nights out of a hundred you could earn good money betting that he’d be up there, informing the Universe at large that ever since his baby left him he’d found a new place to dwell, if he had to jump queues and break bones to do it. Not, however, tonight.

  Instead, Kiss was huddled in a corner with a half-empty plastic jerrycan of Capricorn Old Pasteurised on the surface of which icicles were forming, and a guest.

  Of all the bars, he was thinking, in all the world, why did she have to come into mine?

  “That one over there,” Jane was saying, “looks exactly like Elvis Presley. Or was he a—”

  Kiss shook his head. Although there was no house rule prohibiting mortals, no genie had ever, in the long and illustrious history of the establishment, brought his employer there. The only reason there wasn’t a rule against it was that in Saheed’s there are no rules whatsoever.

  Jane, however, had wanted to come. More than that; she had Wished to come, and accordingly here they were.

  The agony had started, as far as Kiss was concerned, when Jane walked up to the bar, grabbed the menu and without looking at it ordered a bacon sandwich.

  The barman had stared at her. “A what?” he demanded incredulously.

  “A bacon sandwich,” Jane had replied. “Don’t you know about bacon sandwiches? Well, it’s very easy, you take two rashers of bacon—”

  “Bacon,” replied the barman icily, “is mortals’ food. We don’t serve…”

  Without saying a word, Jane had turned to Kiss and smiled; a smile which could only have one meaning. I see and obey, oh mistress, your whim is my command. Oh fuck.

  He loomed over the bar. He was good at looming. At Genie School you could do violin lessons or you could do looming. If you did the violin, you had to practise three hours a day in your spare time. Kiss had done looming.

  “The lady,” he snarled, “wants a bacon sandwich. You got a problem with that?”

  “Yes,” the barman said, looming back, so that the two of them together reminded Jane of Tower Bridge a few seconds after a tall ship has passed through. “We don’t do mortals’ food here. Capisce?”

  “You do now.”

  And the barman, who was only a Force Three genie with a maximum internal service pressure of a mere nineteen tons to the square inch, suddenly found himself cuffing off rind and shovelling sliced bread into the toaster. As he brought the finished sandwich over to the table, Kiss could sense a certain degree of hostility in his manner.

  After that, things had not improved. Jane’s request, expressed in a loud, clear voice, that he introduce her to some of his friends, instantaneously made him the most unpopular person in the house, and genies whom he had known since Belshazzar was in nappies suddenly found it difficult to remember who he was, or even see him. So unnerved was he by this that he allowed Jane to beat him in two consecutive games of pool; the third he only just managed to win, on the black, by conjuring up invisible spirits to stand in the pockets whenever it was Jane’s go.

  “It is usually as busy as this?” she was asking.

  Kiss nodded. “Why are you doing this to me, by the way?” he continued. “Was it something I said, or what?”

  Jane raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I just thought it would be nice to see where you went on your night off. Part of getting to know each other better, that sort of thing.”

  “I see. Well, thanks to you I’ve been banned for life, so from that point of view you’ve been wasting your time. This is what I used to do on my night off, and therefore of historical interest only.”

  “Ah, well,” Jane replied, “it all helps to build up a general picture.”

  Muttering something under his breath, Kiss returned to his goat’s milk, while Jane looked around her. Something about her general deportment suggested to Kiss that any minute now she’d be asking when the interesting people were going to arrive.

  “Hi, doll,” said a voice seven feet or so above her head. “Want to dance?”

  There is, of course, one in every bar: a nerd vain enough to believe that, contrary to all the teachings of experience, there is a woman somewhere who will one day say “Yes”; realistic enough to focus his search for such a paragon upon the crippled, half-witted and partially-sighted. Or, in this context, even mortals. Kiss knew him well; a harmless enough genie in other respects, a trifling Force Two, cursed for ever to dance attendance on a small jar used for taking samples from suspected drunk drivers. Wearily he rose to his feet and clenched his fists…

  “How nice of you to ask,” Jane said. “I’d be delighted.”

  The genie, whose name was Acme Better Mousetraps IV blinked twice. “You would?”

  Jane nodded and smiled.

  “Straight up?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I can only do the valeta and the military two-step.”

  “That’s all right, we can learn together.”

  She stood up. Acme Better Mousetraps IV leaned forward, picked her up awkwardly by one arm, and placed her on the palm of his hand.

  “Right,” he said, as the genie on the stage informed nobody in particular that they weren’t nothin’ but a hound dog. “And one-two-three-one-two-three…”

  Kiss shrugged, lolled back in his chair and drained the last few drops of milk into his glass. There was an outside chance that the two of them would discover how much they had in common, form a mature and lasting relationship and leave him in peace, but he doubted it. In the meantime, he resolved, he would just sit here quietly and hope nobody noticed him.

  “Kiss, my man, what’s the big idea?”

  Kiss turned his head. “She insisted on coming,” he replied, as Amalgamated Caribbean Breweries IX sat down beside him and filled two glasses with milk. “Then, when Ambi asked her to dance, she accepted. I accept no responsibility whatsoever for anything that has ever happened ever. Is that clear?”

  “Sure.” Acba sipped his milk and wiped his moustache. “You got yourself one crazy mistress there, man. Rather you than me.”

  “Can’t fathom her out at all,” Kiss replied. “So far, all I’ve done is domestic chores and a little light transportation. She hasn’t breathed a word about wealth beyond the dreams of avarice yet.”

  “No?” Acba raised an eyebrow. “Hey, that’s weird. Kind of spooky, you know?”

  “Don’t I just. The only thing I can think of is, her mind’s on something else.”

  “What?”

  Kiss shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “Or cares, come to that? Let’s change the subject, shall we.”

  “Why not?” Acba grinned. “Hey, it’s too bad you being tied up right now. There’s something really heavy going down, and you won’t get to have a piece of it.”

  “Is that so?”

  Acba nodded. “The word’s out,” he whispered, “for Force Nines and above, excellent package including benefits for hard-working, committed candidate with a total disregard for the value of human life. I’m gonna try and get me a slice of that, no question.”

  Kiss sighed. “Sounds like it could be fun,” he agreed. “Any idea what it’s about?”

  Acba shook his head. “Whatever it is, it’s serious men running it,” he said. “That’s all I know. Oh, and it’s something to do with the Environment.”

  “Oh,” said Kiss. “That. In that case, it’s probably just cleaning something. You’re welcome to that. Let me know how it pans out.”

  Acba nodded and stood up. “Stay loose,
” he said.

  “Chance’d be a fine thing.”

  During this time Abmi and Jane had danced two waltzes, one quick-step and a tango, all to the accompaniment of Blue Suede Shoes. For his part, Abmi was beginning to have serious misgivings about infringing the rule against impossibles.

  “Well, thanks,” he said, lowering Jane gingerly to floor level. “That was an experience, you know?”

  “Oh. Have we finished dancing, then?”

  Abmi smiled wanly. The tendons of his left arm were throbbing like wrenched harpstrings, and there were calluses all over his palm where Jane’s heels had galled him. “Hey,” he said, “have you any idea what the guys will do to me, monopolising the foxiest chick in the joint? No way,” he added, with perhaps a scruple more vehemence than the context could accommodate. “Ciao, baby, I gotta fly.” Which he did. In fact, for the record, he put a girdle round the earth in twenty-seven minutes thirteen seconds and hid inside a wardrobe until he was sure Jane hadn’t followed him.

  Jane returned to Kiss’s table and sat down.

  “I have enjoyed myself,” she said. “We must come here again.”

  THREE

  There was a queue.

  You can tell of rationing. You can pontificate about the first day of the January sales. You can boast of your experiences in the line for day-of-performance tickets for Phantom of the Opera. But this was a queue to end all queues; so long that it projected sideways into several quite recherché dimensions, so crammed with repressed potential energy that it hovered on the brink of forming a black hole. It was, of course, an auditions queue; and nearly every genie in the Universe was in it.

  When you have a queue comprising something in excess of 1046 supernatural beings who can flit through time and space with the reckless abandon of a Porsche with diplomatic plates hurrying to a meeting through the Rome rush-hour, queue-jumping ceases to be bad manners and becomes a challenge to the fundamental laws of physics. The Past became a frenzied jumble of genies bashing each other over the head and locking each other in cupboards so as to preclude their presence on the day in question; while a gigantic troll stood with folded arms in the doorway of the Future to keep back the stream of genies who reckoned they’d avoid the crush by fast-forwarding through Time. The Present was under the control of an only slightly less formidable young woman with glasses and a clipboard.