by Tom Holt
Sweat was pouring down the Chair’s cheeks like condensation down an office window. “It’s them or us,” she gasped. “People or plants. We’re talking about the future of the planet. You do see that, don’t you?”
The genie frowned thoughtfully. “I see that you’re a bunch of raving lunatics,” he said calmly, “but so what?” He beamed. “That makes you my kind of people. Glad to be on the team.”
Number Two tried to stand up, ineffectually. “Of course,” he said, “the whole project is still subject to review. We aren’t actually committed to anything yet…”
“You are now.”
For a fraction of a second, a very small fraction indeed, Number Two had a vision of what it would be like. For some reason, the city he visualised was Oslo. He vomited.
“These,” the genie went on, holding up a cloth bag the size of a large onion, “are the seeds of the flowers you so thoughtfully made possible. Anything possible, I’m allowed to do.” The image shimmered and glowed, like the heart of the fire. “Thanks,” he said, and turned his eyes on the Chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t quite catch your name.”
“Fuselli,” croaked the Chair. “Mary Fuselli.”
The genie grew, filling the room. “Apt,” he said, as the glass in the windows began to creak with the pressure. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” The windows exploded and the Chair, Number Two and Number Three blacked out. Two seconds later, the pressure inside the room squashed them as flat as paper.
Philly Nine smiled, wiped human off his sleeve, and soared away into the upper air.
Faster than a thought he flew, breaching the Earth’s atmosphere in a shower of sparks and soaring in a wide, lazy orbit around the Equator. As he went he amused himself by catching satellites and crumpling them in his fist like foil jam-tart cups. The further away from the planet’s gravitational field he flew, the larger he became. A tail of fire flickered behind him, and dry ice knotted his hair.
From this altitude, the planet was mostly white and blue. The genie considered it impassively. It had, he felt, a sort of glazed, ceramic look, like a spun-glass Christmas tree ornament.
Or a very old bottle.
And, like all his kind, he had this problem with bottles. Bottles, in his opinion, were there to be broken.
And if one blue bottle should accidentally fall…
Kiss, genie-handling a huge roll of beige Wilton across the enormous expanse of the living-room floor, hesitated and glanced up through the window.
He swore.
Jane looked up. “Problem?” she asked.
“Yes.” Kiss nodded. “At least, there might be. Look,” he said, “sorry to run out on you in the middle of the job, but could you see your way to managing without me for half an hour? There’s something I’ve got to see to.”
“Can’t it wait?”
Kiss shook his head. With a crack the roll of carpet snapped open, flattened itself, hung for a moment six inches above floor level, and started to rise.
“I promise I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can,” Kiss shouted. “Sorry about this,” he added and vaulted into the middle of the carpet which bucked like an unbroken horse, pawed at the windows with its front corners, smashed the glass and shot out into the air with Kiss sitting cross-legged on its back.
Philly Nine tutted. He was having trouble with the fiddly little knot the seed-sack was tied up with.
“Hey,” said a voice directly below him. He glanced down, and saw a flat brown rectangle. The slight quivering of its outer seams reminded him of a stingray floating in clear water. He frowned.
“Is that you, Kiss?” he queried.
“Philly!” replied the voice. “Long time no see! And how’s the world been treating you?”
The carpet closed in, drawing level with the hovering figure of Philly Nine, standing in the empty blackness trying to bite through a single strand of cord with teeth the size of office blocks.
“Not so bad,” Philly replied. “What brings you here, my old mate?”
Kiss shrugged. “Thought I’d catch a few spacewinds on my new rug. Like her?”
“Not bad,” Philly replied. “Not bad at all. Like the stabilisers. You any good at knots?”
“I have my moments. Bung it over, whatever it is, and let me have a go.”
Philly Nine hefted the bag, and then checked himself. Coincidence, he thought; there are only seven Force Twelve genies in the whole Universe, and at this crucial moment here’s two of them sharing one small, remote postage-stamp of empty space. “It’s OK,” he replied. “I think I can probably manage. So,” he added nonchalantly, “where’ve you been hiding yourself lately?”
Kiss twitched his features into a rueful grin. “In an aspirin bottle,” he replied, “of all places. And me, of all people. Well, you know how brown glass gives me a headache.”
“Been out long?”
“Not very. And you?”
Philly Nine shrugged. “I’ve been hanging out,” he replied.
“You know, ducking and diving, puffing a few scams. Made a film, would you believe. Boy, that was some experience.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Spooky stuff to be around, film. You hold it up to the light and you’re ready to swear blind there’s guys trapped inside the stuff.”
Kiss shook his head. “I think it’s just science, Philly,” he said. “You know, mortal stuff.”
“I suppose so.” Philly Nine folded his hands over the cloth bag. “Well,” he said, “nice to see you again, don’t let me keep you.”
The carpet continued to hover. “What’ve you got in the bag there, Philly?”
“Wildflower seeds,” Philly Nine replied. “I’m doing my bit for the Green movement. Nothing to interest you.”
“Wildflowers?”
“That’s right.”
Kiss raised an eyebrow. “That’s not like you, Philly,” he observed quietly. “You were always, how can I put this, an evil genie.”
“It’s very kind of you to say so, Kiss, my old chum.”
“My pleasure.” There was a moment of silence, disturbed only by the faint sighing of the interstellar winds. “So why the change of direction?”
“Nah,” Philly answered. “Me, I’m consistent, always have been. And if I were you, I’d go and fly your doormat someplace else.”
“Think I’ll just hang around here for a minute, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Suit yourself.” Philly Nine stuffed the cloth bag ostentatiously up one sleeve, and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m in no hurry. All as broad as it’s long, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good waves, up here,” Kiss said; and, by way of illustration, he let the carpet slip on the spacewinds. A long, slow ripple snaked its way down the length of the carpet. Kiss began to hum:
“If everybody had a carpet
Across the galaxy
Then everybody would be floatin”
Like Ursa Minor B…”
“Cut it out,” Philly urged. “You know as well as I do you never did like carpeting. Made you space-sick just going out on the ionosphere. What exactly are you doing here, Kiss?”
Kiss smiled. “Stopping you,” he replied. “Gosh, from here you can see the big pimple on Orion’s nose. Fancy a peppermint?”
“I see.” Inside his sleeves, Philly’s fists clenched. “And why would you want to stop me, Kiss? I never did you any harm.”
“Never said you did, Philly. Always the best of pals, you and me.”
“Quite.”
“What have you got in the bag, Philly?”
Philly Nine smiled; and white lightning snapped out of his eyes, slamming into Kiss with traumatic force and sending him and his carpet spiralling away into emptiness. Philly grinned and took out the bag. A tiny pinch of his fingernails and the knot loosened easily.
He turned the bag over, let go of the neck and shook it… and found himself inside a bubble, bobbing jauntily with the starbre
eze. Above him, Kiss looped his Wilton, waved, and ducked behind the Moon.
“Bastard!” Philly yelled. On the floor of the bubble, seeds had landed. He rolled his left fist into a ball and smashed it into the wall of the bubble
…which stretched.
Philly Nine noticed with some misgivings the rapidly thickening carpet of flowers round his ankles. They had already stripped the shoes off his feet (and Philly’s shoes were rather special, even by genie standards; hand-stitched gryphonhide uppers, phoenixdown insocks and monomolecular polysteel soles; the gussets arc-welded in the hottest part of a supernova; the heel reinforced with the enamel from the teeth of a fully-grown snowdragon, the third hardest material in Creation. Imelda Marcos in her wildest dreams never imagined shoes like these…)
“Hey,” he yelled, “let me out of here!”
“You’ll have to grant me three wishes first.”
Philly began to get impatient. “Kiss,” he shouted. “If you don’t quit horsing around and let met out of this contraption, I’ll kick your arse from here to Jupiter.”
“Three wishes, Philly. You know the score.”
Petals like steel traps were slowly ripping his socks to shreds. Hand-woven from the fibres of firebird feathers (the second hardest material in the Universe) they had been custom-built to withstand the phenomenally corrosive properties of genies’ sweaty feet. “No dice, scumbag,” Philly roared. “Get me out of here and I might just let you live. Otherwise—”
The last scrap of sock was digested, and Philly Nine suddenly became acutely aware that the hardest material in the Universe is the petal of a psychotic flower. “All right,” he screamed. “One wish. But I’m warning you, you’re going to regret—”
The bubble popped; and Philly Nine was falling, helplessly entwined in roots and leaves, towards the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The wish is,” came Kiss’s voice from far away, “that in future…”
Philly hit the atmosphere like a fly hitting a windscreen. For a fraction of a second the pain of impact paralysed him; and then he was through. Scrabbling frantically he managed to pull himself up on a handy thermal, and floated agonisingly in the upper air.
He glanced down and breathed a long, slow sigh. All the wildflowers had burnt up on re-entry — as had his shorts, his underpants and his impossibly expensive designer Hawaii shirt.
“…In future,” sighed the winds around his head, “if you’re going to be evil, make a mess of it. Have a nice day.”
Thirty-six hours later, the hole Philly had made in the ionosphere was still there. It was closing, but there was still a gap large enough for, say, a few wildflower seeds to drift through.
These days, nobody can seriously doubt that plants have the power to communicate; and the more self-aware the plant, the greater the power.
Ready? asked the Primrose.
Ready, replied the Forget-Me-Not. Let’s go.
What about him?
Who?
Him.
Oh, you mean the—
Yes.
You ask him.
GRAAAOOAARR!!!
I think it’s safe to assume he’s ready too. OK, chaps, here goes.
They dropped in.
FOUR
Jane looked up.
“Where,” she asked, “have you been?”
“Saving the world,” Kiss replied, materialising just in time to take the weight of the picture Jane was trying to hang straight. “Bit more left, I think.”
Jane stood back, nodded and made the adjustment. “What from?”
“Annihilation by overgrown carnivorous plants, if you must know. Has it occurred to you that this one would look much better over there by the alcove?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Over there,” Kiss repeated, pointing. “And then you could have the one of the three fluffy kittens playing with the ball of wool over there, where nobody would be able to see it, and that’d be verging on the ideal—”
“No,” Jane replied, frowning, “before that.”
“Overgrown carnivorous plants?”
“Mphm. You are just kidding, aren’t you? Only I never seem to know…”
Kiss looked offended. “I am not kidding,” he replied grumpily. “I was just looking out of the window when I saw a disturbing fluctuation in the infra-red, which turned out on closer examination to be an old mate of mine heading into orbit with a small cloth bag stuffed up his shirt…”
“You must have remarkably good eyesight.”
“I have, yes. Anyway, when I caught up with him it turned out the bag was full of nightmare carnivorous plant seeds, and he was just working out where to sow them. Fortunately, the silly sod hadn’t realised that if you try and drop something through the Earth’s atmosphere, it burns up, so as it turns out I needn’t have bothered. All right?”
Jane stared. “Are you serious?” she demanded.
“No,” Kiss said, pointedly not looking at the picture of the three kittens. “Most of the time I’m aggravatingly frivolous. If you mean am I telling the truth, the answer is yes.”
“A friend of yours was trying to destroy the planet?”
“Well, sort of.” Kiss yawned, and stretched. “Actually, he’s just this bloke I’ve known for, oh, donkey’s years; and he wasn’t planning on destroying the Earth, just all non-vegetable life forms. Or at least I assume that was what he had in mind. My split-second spectroscopic analysis of the plant seeds leads me to believe that that would have been the inevitable result. Bloody great primroses,” he added with a grin. “With teeth.”
“Hadn’t you better tell me what’s going on?”
Kiss shook his head. “Tricky,” he said. “You remember what I told you about being limited to the possible? However; to start with the primary question, Is there a God? we really have to address the…”
Jane asked him to be more specific.
“Guesswork, largely,” Kiss replied, materialising an apple and peeling it with his claws. “My guess is that somebody hired my old chum to destroy the human race. Somebody a bit funny in the head, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“This chum of yours—”
“A genie,” Kiss explained. “A Force Twelve, like me. That’s pretty hot stuff, actually, though normally I wouldn’t dream of saying so. We rank equal and above the Nine Dragon Kings, just below the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. We get fuel allowance but no pension.”
“And this particular…”
“He goes by the name,” Kiss said, straight-faced by sheer effort of will, “of Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation the Ninth, or Philly Nine for short. Remarkable chiefly for how little time he’s had to spend in bottles. He’s a shrewd cookie, Philly Nine, always was. Mad as a hatter, too, of course.”
“I see.” Jane sat down on a desperately fragile Tang-dynasty vase, the molecular structure of which Kiss was able to beef up just in the nick of time. “So he’s dangerous.”
“You might say that,” Kiss responded, spitting out apple pips, “if you were prone to ludicrous understatements. If midwinter at the South Pole is a bit nippy and the Third Reich was, on balance, not a terribly good idea, then yes, Philly Nine is dangerous. Apart from that, a more charming fellow you couldn’t hope to meet. Plays the harpsichord.”
Jane blinked twice in rapid succession. “Oh God,” she said.
“Ah yes,” Kiss replied, “I was just coming on to that. If we posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being—”
“Will you shut up!” Jane looked around for something solid and reassuring in which she could put her trust. Unfortunately, everything she could see had the disadvantage, as far as she was concerned, of having been materialised or otherwise supplied by a genie. Eventually she found her left shoe, which she had brought with her from the life she’d been leading before all this started to happen. She hugged it to her.
“Sorry, I’m sure. Do you want me to make a start on the conservatory?”
“All this,” Jane mumbled
“It is real, isn’t it? I mean…”
Kiss clicked his tongue. “Try banging your head on it if you’re in any doubt. I have to say, I find all this ever so slightly wounding. I mean, I do my level best to make things nice for you, and the first thing I know you’re questioning its very existence. Gift horses’ teeth, in other words.”
“I thought I told you to be quiet.”
“You asked me a question.”
“Did I? Sorry.” Jane closed her eyes and tried to clarify her mind. “Will you help me with this?” she asked.
“Depends,” Kiss replied huffily, “on whether I’m allowed to talk.”
“Oh, stop being aggravating.” Jane took a deep breath. “There I was,” she said, “an ordinary person—”
Kiss cleared his throat. “Jane Wellesley,” he recited. “Age, twenty-eight. Height, five feet one inch. Weight—”
“Thank you, yes. Following a distressing scene with someone I had thought really cared about me—”
“Vince. Vincent Martin Pockle. Age, thirty-one. Height, six feet two inches. Eyes a sort of—”
“Either help,” Jane snapped, “or go and empty the dustbins. Following a distressing scene, I resolved — stupidly, I admit — to kill myself. When I opened the aspirin bottle, out jumped a genie.”
“At your service.”
“Or so it seemed. At any rate, at the time I accepted you at face value, and I’ve been doing so ever since.”
“So I should damned well—”
“Ever since,” Jane went on, “I’ve been ordering you to do seemingly impossible things, and you’ve apparently been doing them. The things you bring appear to be real.”
“You and I are going to fall out in a minute if you carry on with all this seems-to-be stuff,” Kiss growled. “The last person to call me a liar to my face, namely the erstwhile Grand Vizier of Trebizond, spends most of his time these days sitting on a lily-pad going rivet-rivet-rivet and wondering why people don’t bring him things to sign any more. I invite you to think on.”