by Tom Holt
“Next,” she said.
At the back of the queue there was a hard core of genies who hadn’t the faintest idea what the audition was for, but who felt sure that they were right for the part. The general opinion was that God was staging Aladdin, with a strong minority faction holding to the view that Springsteen had been taken ill on the eve of the big open-air concert in Central Park, and a stand-in capable of imitating him down to the last chromosome was urgently required. Both versions, although speciously attractive, were wrong.
The door to the small office where the auditions were taking place opened, and a dejected genie slumped out. A voice from inside called out, “Don’t call us, we’ll—” as the door closed again.
Next in line was the Dragon King of the South-East. As the girl with the clipboard took his name and nodded him towards the door, he straightened his hair, shot his cuffs, and took a deep breath.
The Big Time beckoned. He strode through the doorway.
“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this…” he said. The three men behind the desk gave him a look.
“He’s too tall,” said the bald man wearily. “Next.”
Dragon Kings are nothing if not adaptable. In the time it took for his vast brain to formulate the wish, he had reduced himself by twenty per cent.
“Too short,” muttered the skinny man with the glasses. “Goddamn time-wasters.”
The Dragon King cleared his throat. "Scuse me,” he said, “but stature’s not a problem with me. You give me the measurements, I’ll come across with the body.”
“Voice too squeaky,” sniffed the freckled man with the cigar. “OK, Cynthia, let’s see the—”
“The voice needn’t be a problem either,” the Dragon King interrupted, in a pitch that made the foundations of the building quiver. “Just give me a hint, and I can—”
The freckled man looked up for the first time. “Can he dance?” he asked the universe in general.
“Doesn’t look like he can,” replied the bald man, raising his voice over the machine-gun cracking of the King’s heels on the parquet. “Two left feet.”
The King, by now rather flustered, took this for a specification, made the necessary modifications, lost his footing and fell over.
“Next,” said the skinny man. The Dragon King got up and silently left the room.
“Hey, Cynthia,” the bald man called out, “are there many more of these deadbeats out there?”
“Quite a few, Mr Fomaldarsen,” the girl with the clipboard replied.
“Any of them look any good to you?”
“No, Mr Fornaldarsen.”
“OK, send ’em home.” The bald man glanced down. “Except,” he added quickly, “for this one. Recommendation from Zip Kortright.” He checked the name. “Guy by the name of — goddamn stupid names these jerks have — Philadelphia Machinery and Tool Corporation the Ninth. Is he out there?”
“I’ll just check for you, Mr Fornaldarsen.”
The door closed. After a moment, the three men looked at each other.
“Waste of time,” said the freckled man. “Told you it would be.”
“We’ll see this Philadelphia guy,” replied the skinny man. “You never know your luck. Never known Kortright send up a complete turkey.”
The door opened — to be precise, it was virtually blown open by the noise of 1046 genies all protesting at once — and a tall, slim figure walked in, sat in the chair and crossed her legs.
There was silence.
“Hey,” said the bald man, “it’s a girl.”
“Correct,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX. “You see? Putting your lenses in this morning has already paid dividends.”
“What’s Korty thinking of, sending us a girl?” snarled the skinny man. “We don’t need a girl, we need a guy.”
The girl parted her lips and smiled.
“On the other hand,” mumbled the bald man, “have we actually thought this through? I mean, now I think of it I can see where, if we were to make the hero a girl…”
“It’d beef up the middle,” agreed the freckled man. “There’s that goddamn flat spot between the fight with the chainsaws and the bit where he blows up the Golden Gate Bridge. If we made him a girl, we could put in a bit with her and her kids, you know, mom stuff…”
“Like Cagney and Lacey,” agreed the skinny man.
“Excuse me,” said the girl.
The three men looked at her.
“Could one of you gentlemen possibly tell me what the film’s about?”
“Hey,” objected the bald man, “what’s that got to do with you?”
“Well, now,” the girl said, flicking a few microns of cigar ash off her knee, “if I don’t know what the film’s about, how do I know whether I want to be in it?”
There was stunned silence; and the genie, who could after all read minds, watched with amused pleasure as the idea began to take shape in all three brains simultaneously.
She wants to know if it’s the sort of film she’d like to be in.
If we want her, she might not accept.
She must be good.
The bald man cleared his throat. “OK,” he said, “it’s like this. There’s this guy—”
“Or girl,” interrupted the skinny man.
“Or girl, yeah, and she’s got this brother who was killed in Vietnam—”
“Big flashback sequence,” explained the freckled man. “All the footage they couldn’t use in Full Metal Jacket.”
“Only,” the bald man went on, “really he wasn’t, OK, it was just a dream, and in fact he’s hiding out from the Mob—”
“Columbian drug barons.”
“Whatever, and then it turns out that in fact his girl—”
“Her guy—”
“Is working for the CIA, and is actually responsible for a string of serial killings—”
“He turns out,” elucidated the skinny man, “to be a robot, but that’s much later.”
“And then there’s this big fight with chainsaws with this psychotic rogue cop—”
“He’s a robot, too.”
“And then we have the big chase sequence and that’s basically it. That’s it, isn’t it, guys?”
The other two nodded. “Except for the bit where she spends three years working with disadvantaged Puerto Rican kids in the barrios of LA, of course,” the skinny man added. “But that’s really still at the concept stage right now. We’re working on that.”
The girl frowned slightly. “That’s it, is it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” replied the bald man. “Plus, of course, she gets killed in the first ten minutes, so all this is her coming back as a ghost.”
“We’ve already got Connery for God,” added the freckled man. “Him or Streisand. Or both.”
“Both,” interjected the skinny man, “and why not Newman as well? Goddammit, the guy’s meant to be a trinity, why not really go for it?”
The girl considered, and stood up. “No, thank you,” she said. “Good afternoon.”
Kiss winced, and assumed painting position: flat on his back, hovering eighteen inches from the ceiling. Overhead, the greatest artistic masterpiece ever, the fresco God Creating Adam And Eve glowed in a scintillating melange of colour. He soaked a rag in white spirit, and dissolved God.
“Fine,” he snarled. “Why don’t I just wipe the whole damned lot and do the ceiling over in woodchip and white emulsion?”
“I’m the one who’s got to live with it,” Jane replied evenly. “All I said was, would you help me with decorating the new flat. You were the one who thought it’d look nice with paintings…”
“Or perhaps,” Kiss went on, “you’d prefer cuddly rabbits and kittens and adorable little puppy-dogs with ribbons round their necks. If so, just say the word. I mean, your wish is my—”
“If you say that just once more,” Jane told him, “I shall scream.”
Offended, Kiss painted in silence for a whil
e. Under his brush, the splodgy void which had once shown a fierce, jealous, enigmatic God piercing the veil of shadows to lob in the lightning-bolt of Life took form again to reveal the loving, all-compassionate Father of Mankind. Not bad, Kiss had to concede, but the first one was better.
“That’s more like it,” Jane called up. “Much more friendly. The other effort gave me the creeps.”
Gave you the creeps? You silly mare, that was God, it was meant to give you the creeps. I should know, remember. “Oh, good,” Kiss mumbled through the brush gripped between his teeth. “Your last chance for a few pink rabbits,” he added. “Then I’m going to slap on the varnish.”
“No, that’ll do fine.” Jane yawned. “And as soon as you’ve done that, we can choose the carpets.”
“Carpets.” Carpets weren’t what he’d had in mind. What he’d had in mind was eight hundred tons of mirror-polished Carrara marble, whirlpools of dancing white figures that would make you think you were walking on clouds. “Anything you say,” he grunted. Women, he thought.
“If I said,” he suggested, floating back to ground level and dunking his brushes in a jam-jar of turps, “that what you’re forcing me to do violates my artistic integrity so much that even looking at it makes me feel like I was walking barefooted over red-hot coals, would it make any difference?”
“No.”
“Fair enough. Now, when you say carpet, obviously what you have in mind is a collection of masterpieces from the golden age of Persian carpet-weaving, featuring works by such immortal masters as—”
“Beige,” Jane interrupted, “so as not to show spilt tea. And it’s got to be hard-wearing, because I don’t want little bits of fluff getting everywhere. Ready?”
Let there be carpet, said Kiss. And there was carpet.
“That’s fine,” Jane said, as the rolls of beige Wilton unfurled of their own accord and slid smoothly into position. “Just what I wanted.” Carpet tacks materialised in a bee-like swarm, buzzed angrily for a moment, and flew with devastating velocity to bury themselves in the floor. “I know it’s not what you’d have liked…” she added, with a hint of remorse.
Kiss looked up from air-traffic-controlling the tacks. “Actually,” he said, “if it was my place we were doing up, it’d be lino. But you said you wanted it to look nice, and I do try to be conscientious. I have trouble, though, with conflicting signals.”
“Nice,” Jane replied, “as in what I think is nice. Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear.”
“Got you,” Kiss muttered. “You may not know much about art but you know what you like. That sort of thing?”
“That’s the general idea.”
Kiss nodded despondently and, out of residual malice, materialised pink curtains, a pile of lacy cushions and a four-foot teddy bear.
“Yes,” Jane said, nodding. “Yes, I like that.”
“Fine. I think I was better off inside the bottle.”
“Maybe you were. Let’s have some lunch, shall we?”
Kiss nodded, and instantaneously there was a table. It was covered with cloth of gold and laden with dishes of honeydew and jugs of milk of paradise. “Or would you,” he asked, “prefer scrambled eggs?”
“No, this looks fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I like yogurt.”
Conversation was slow over lunch; there was still a thin, oil-like smear of resentment over the surface of Kiss’s mind, and Jane had her head buried in a furniture catalogue. This didn’t do much to improve Kiss’s temper (Formica — anything you like, dear God, but not formica) and, being dutiful, he resolved to snap himself out of it by being affable.
“Funny bit of gossip going the rounds at the moment,” he said. “Apparently, there’s been some bloke going round trying to recruit genies for some job or other.”
“Oh yes?”
Kiss nodded. “Offering good money, apparently. Which shows how much whoever it is knows about genies, if you stop to think.”
“Really.”
“If you think about it, I mean,” Kiss went on, trying hard to maintain the affability level. “I mean, trying to bribe a genie with promises of wealth beyond dreams of avarice is like offering a fish a drink. Still, there’s been a lot of interest.”
“Is that so?” Jane said, her face still obscured by the catalogue. “Well I never.”
Kiss ground his teeth silently. Small-talk, said the training manual, is the mortar that cements together the foundations of the ideal genie/mortal relationship. Talk to your mortal and you will find that empathy inevitably follows. Something told Kiss that whoever wrote that hadn’t been on active service for several thousand years.
“Oh yes,” he ploughed on, “ever such a lot of interest. I’d probably have put in for it myself if I’d been at a loose end. Whatever it is,” he added lamely.
Jane closed the catalogue. “Now then,” she said briskly. “Kitchen worktops.”
The door opened.
Nobody walked through it, and nobody stood in the door-frame. After a moment, it closed itself again. The three people sitting at the table looked at each other.
“Good afternoon.” There was a brief flash of blue light and the genie Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX materialised in the air, hovering precisely one metre over the table-top. “Sorry if I’m late, but I had a press conference.”
Better known to millions of cinema-goers as the star of A Thousand And One Dalmatians II under the name of Spot (and the corporeal trappings of the cuddliest, most adorable puppy ever) Philly Nine floated gently down and folded his arms. Each of the three members of the interview panel got the impression that he was face to face with the apparition; which wasn’t the most comfortable illusion in the universe, not by some way.
“Um,” said the Chair at last. “Thank you for, er, making the time.”
“No worries,” the genie replied. “The job sounds interesting.”
“Yes.” The Chair tried to keep the hesitation out of her voice. “The pay,” she went on, “is excellent. I expect you want to hear about the money first.”
“Not really,” the genie replied, making his body translucent just to be aggravating. “Let’s see, now, I had one per cent of the gross for making this film I’ve just done, which at last count came to seventy million dollars, but so what? All I have to do to make seventy million dollars — silver dollars, if I want — is whistle. Like me to show you?”
“Yes,” said the Chair, quickly. “I mean,” she added, “if that’s all right with you, of course…”
Suddenly it was snowing banknotes. Thousand-dollar bills. Great big coarse sheets of money, drifting and floating in the air, settling in drifts, skittering in the draught from under the door. You didn’t need to look to know they were genuine. For a while, the three committee members were a blur of fast-moving arms.
The money vanished.
“Easy come,” sneered the genie, “easy go. And you reckoned you were going to pay me.”
“All right,” panted the Chair, catching her breath. “Point taken. You are interested in the job, aren’t you?”
The genie nodded, like a will-o’-the-wisp dangling from the rear-view mirror of Satan’s Cortina. “It sounds like it might be fun,” he said. “From what I’ve heard, that is. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”
The second member of the committee took a deep breath. His right hand was tightly closed around a thousand-dollar bill that had somehow failed to dematerialise, and he wanted to divert the genie’s attention. “Our organisation,” he said, “is a radical group devoted to the cause of ecology. The way we see it, saving the planet is up to us, because nobody else is fit to be trusted with it. OK so far?”
The genie dipped his head.
“As part of our programme,” Number Two went on, “we intend to destroy all cities with a population in excess of one hundred thousand. The reasons…”
With a slight crease of the lips, the genie waved the reasons aside. Number Two
swallowed hard, and went on.
“In order to do this in an ecologically friendly way,” he said, finding the words strangely hard to expel from his throat, “we have developed several new strains of… of—”
“Wildflowers,” interrupted the Chair. “Pansies, forget-me-nots, that sort of thing.”
The genie grinned. “I know,” he said. “I’ll admit, I was impressed. For puny, stunted, pig-ignorant mortals, not bad.”
“Well.” The Chair, too, found that her throat was suddenly dry. “We need someone to sow the seeds. From the air.”
“Over all the cities simultaneously,” added Number Three, “so as to create the maximum effect. If all targets are engaged at the same time, they can’t come to each other’s assistance.”
The genie nodded; a token of respect, the gesture implied, from one thoroughly nasty piece of work to another.
All three committee members suddenly began to wish they were somewhere else.
“And you want me,” drawled the genie, “to do this little job for you, is that it?”
The Chair nodded. She had a splitting headache, and she felt sick. “If you’d like to, of course.”
“I’d love to.”
“Ah.”
“It would mean,” the genie went on, “the deaths of countless millions of innocent people. Deaths by the most bizarrely hideous means imaginable. Wanton, barbaric genocide.” The genie smiled pleasantly. “Sounds like a bit of all right to me.”
Number Two cleared his throat. “A certain inevitable level of casualties…” he began, and found that he couldn’t continue. The genie’s eyes seemed to push him back into his chair.
“Smashed into pulp by the petals of a giant primrose,” he said, slowly, with relish. “Horrific, bizarre, and with that ultimately humiliating soupçon of frivolity that marks the true evil genius. I like it.”