by Tom Holt
The wildflowers weren’t hard to find; they were, by now, the tallest things in Florida. Spread out in a loose column, they were lurching at an alarming speed along the deserted tarmac of a ten-lane expressway. Huge lumps of asphalt came away each time their roots moved. Behind them the earth was a glistening muddy brown.
Philly Nine skirted round them in a wide circle, easily evading the outstretched tendrils of the forget-me-nots. As he flew, he hugged himself with joy. This was going to be fun!
He was, however, still in two minds. His original plan had been an unquenchable wave of fire that would shrivel up the flowers and then sweep irresistibly onwards, north-east, until the entire continent was reduced to ash. On mature reflection, however, he couldn’t help feeling that that was a waste of the opportunity of an eternal lifetime. America is, after all, only one continent, surrounded on all sides by oceans. As he studied the column of marauding flora weaving its grim course, he couldn’t help reflecting that this lot would probably be more than capable of having the same net effect if left to their own devices. What he wanted was something a bit more universal in its application; something that wouldn’t grind to a jarring halt as soon as it hit the beaches Philly Nine stopped dead in mid-air and slapped his forehead melodramatically with the heel of his hand. Of course! He’d been looking at this entirely the wrong way round.
He accelerated, heading due north. In a quarter of an hour he was over Alaska; at which point he slowed down, rubbed his hands together to get the circulation going and looked around for something to work with.
At the North Pole he alighted, materialised a roll of extra-strong mints, popped the whole tube into his mouth and chewed hard. Then he took a deep breath, and exhaled.
The ice began to melt.
A word, at this stage, about Insurance.
There are your big insurance companies: the ones who own pretty well everything, who take your money and then make you run round in small, frantic circles whenever you want to claim for burst pipes or a small dent in your offside front wing. Small fry.
There is Lloyds of London: the truly professional outfit who will insure pretty well any risk you choose to name so long as you’re prepared to spend three times the value of whatever it is you’re insuring on premiums. As is well known, Lloyd’s is merely a syndicate of rich individuals who underwrite the risks with their own massive private fortunes. Slightly larger fry, but still pretty microscopic.
What about the real risks; the ones that have to be insured (because the consequences of something going wrong would be so drastic), but which are so colossal that no individual or corporation could possibly provide anything like the resources needed to underwrite them?
(Such risks as the sun failing to rise, summer being cancelled at short notice, gravity going on the blink again, the earth falling off its axis; or, indeed, severe melting of the ice-caps, leading to global flooding?)
To cover these risks there exists a syndicate of individuals who possess not mere wealth, but wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice? Sounds familiar? Suffice it to say that the registered office of this syndicate is a small, verdigrised copper lamp, presently located at the bottom of a locked trunk in an attic somewhere in the suburbs of Aleppo.
For the record, nobody has yet been able to work out exactly what Avarice dreams about, on the rare occasions when it sleeps. It all depends, the experts say, on how late it stayed up the night before, how comfortable the mattress is, and whether it ate a substantial amount of cheese immediately before going to bed.
One of the many advantages that genies have over mere mortals is that they need no sleep. This is one of the few things that makes it possible for a genie to wait on a human being hand, foot and finger without something inside its head snapping. Eventually the mortal will go to sleep, giving the genie eight or so clear hours in which to recuperate and catch up on its social life.
Kiss had got into the habit of spending these few precious hours each day down at the gym, working out. When genies work out, by the way, they don’t bother with weights, rowing machines and permanently stationary bicycles. What they exercise is their true potential.
When his bleeper went, therefore, Kiss was in the middle of a simulated battle with thirty thousand blood-crazed snow-dragons. To make it interesting, and spin the exercise out for more than six minutes, he had both arms and one leg tied behind his back, and he was blindfolded and chained to the wall. This made it difficult for him to reach the telephone.
“Yes,” he snapped into the receiver, deflecting a ravening hologram with his toes as he did so. “What is it now?”
“I think you should get back here as quick as you can,” said Jane’s voice at the end of the line. “Something rather serious has cropped up.”
“Really?” Kiss tried to keep the weary scorn out of his voice, but not very hard. “Let me guess. Your eyebrow pencil’s broken and you want me to sharpen it. There’s a very small spider in the bath. You can’t find the top of the ketchup bottle…”
“The ice-caps have melted and nine-tenths of the Earth’s surface is under water. Can you spare a few minutes, or shall I try to find an emergency plumber?”
“I’m on — get off me, you stupid bird — no, not you. I’m on my way.”
Grunting something under his breath about one damn thing after another, he shook himself free of his adamantine chains, swatted the remaining six thousand dragons with the back of his hand and pulled on his trousers over his leotards.
“Don’t switch anything off,” he called out to the attendant. “This won’t take a minute.”
I don’t know, he muttered as he raced across the night sky.
Never a moment’s peace, he complained, as he grabbed a mop and a bucket out of the empty air.
It’s not much to ask, an hour or so at the end of the day just to unwind a bit and relax, he said to himself, as he stopped off at the South Pole to fill the bucket with ice. But no, apparently not. A genie’s work is never done.
He sighed, shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a handful of small hairs from the back of his neck.
Kiss, save the world. Kiss, thwart the diabolical plans of that crazed megalomaniac wizard over there. Kiss, empty the ashtrays and do the washing-up. I dunno. Women!
He rolled the hairs between his palms, spat on them and threw them up into the air. For a moment they hung between the earth and the stars; then they fell and, as they did so, changed into so many full-sized replicas of himself, each with a mop and a bucket of ice. Each replica pulled out a handful of its own hair and repeated the process.
“Ready?” asked the original Kiss. The replicas nodded.
“What did your last servant die of?” they chorused. “That’s enough out of you lot. Get to it!”
In the Oval Office, Kowalski and the President faced each other over the big desk.
“To begin with, Viv,” said the President, “I was worried. For a moment there, I was beginning to think you’d maybe overreacted.”
Kowalski squirmed slightly, but not enough for the President to notice. “You did say—” he began.
“Sure.” The President smiled. “I should have had more faith in you and your guys. But next time—”
“I surely hope there won’t be a next time,” Kowalski said, with conviction.
“Me too,” agreed the President. “Still, it won’t have done the polls any harm. Nothing the voters like more, when the chips are down, than a little display of All-American true grit. And the way your guys handled the evacuations was first class.”
Kowalski nodded. What the President didn’t know, and with luck would never find out, was that the really big emergencies were the easy ones. For a really big emergency, like evacuating America, all he had to do was phone the insurance people and let them handle it. Which they had done.
“And the, uh, mopping-up operations afterwards,” the President continued. “I guess I take my hat off to you there, Viv.”
>
Kowalski’s eyes narrowed. “You aren’t wearing a hat, Mr President.”
“I was speaking figuratively, Viv.”
“Ah.” Kowalski left the semi-smug expression on his face, but inside he was still confused. The insurance people hadn’t said anything about mopping up the floods. Leave it, they’d said, it’ll go down of its own accord in a year or two. If it’s still bad in eighteen months, send out a dove.
So who had done the business with the mops and the dry ice? He wished he knew.
Of course! How could he have been so stupid? The genie, of course, Philly whatever-his-name-was. Who else could it have been?
“No problem,” he said. “We’ve got guys on the payroll for every contingency, Mr President, like I keep saying.”
“That’s good to know, Viv.” The President smiled. “Just like magic, huh?”
“There you go again,” replied Kowalski uncomfortably. “You and your figurative speaking.”
Philly Nine sat on the peak of Everest and counted up to ten.
Don’t get mad, he told himself, get even.
You bastards are going to pay for this.
As for the details — well, they’d look after themselves. They always did. Sooner or later some other idiot of a human being would give him an opening, and he’d be back. What was forty years or so to an immortal?
Provided, of course, that no interfering little toe rag of a Force Twelve saw fit to stick his oar in, saving the planet with a twitch of his little finger before zooming away into the sunset. Some people, he reflected bitterly, don’t know the meaning of the word solidarity.
Yes, indeed. He broke off the summit of the mountain, brushed it clear of flags and ate it. Kiss would have to go, or he might as well stay in bed.
But how? Force Twelves can’t just be brushed lightly aside. Or even heavily aside, or aside with overwhelming force. It would be like trying to knock down a pterodactyl with a fly-swatter.
There are, however, ways and means. And of all the ways of killing a cat, Philly Nine reflected, drowning it in cream sure takes some beating.
There is a child.
His father was a brutal, sadistic bully; his mother a nymphomaniac married to a man (not the child’s father) many years older than herself, and crippled into the bargain.
Left to his own devices for most of his formative years, the child developed serious personality disorders at a very early age. By the time he turned thirteen, he was effectively past hope of cure.
Partly it was heredity, partly it was environment; partly, it was the child’s own basically vicious and perverted nature, which nobody ever took the slightest trouble to correct.
By the time he turned thirteen, the boy had developed a morbid fixation with shooting people. Because of his unusually privileged position, he’s able to indulge this ghastly obsession with total impunity.
Look at him. Fourteen years old, dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, with a Stallonesque headband and pimples. He’s lying on his bed reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, and beside him on the duvet lies a state-of-the-art Macmillan sniper’s rifle, with a Bausch & Lomb 21X scope and integral flash suppressor. When he gets bored with doing nothing, he’ll go out into the street and start using it.
There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all.
Despite the fact that this murderous infant ruins the lives of countless innocent people every day of the week, the authorities are powerless to act. They simply accept the situation and look the other way.
Because the child is a Force Thirteen genie — the only one — and his name is Cupid.
FIVE
High up in the Himalaya mountains, the very roof of the world, Kiss crouched low on a ledge a mere inch or so wide, held his breath, and waited.
“It’s vitally important to us genies,” he could hear himself saying to Jane in an unguarded moment, “that we retain our unique cultural heritage and ancient folkloric traditions and way of life.”
Jane had nodded sympathetically, gone away and read up the subject of what genies traditionally did. Accordingly, he had nobody to blame but himself.
“Come on, you goddamn treacherous sonofabitch,” he muttered under his breath. The mutterings froze in the subzero air and fell away, tinkling, down the sheer side of the rock-face. Fortunately, the wind drowned the noise.
On the blind side of the jagged outcrop of rock to which Kiss was clinging perched a bird. Not just any bird; the rarest, most fabulous, most acutely perceptive, biggest and worst-tempered bird in existence. Its plumage was a scintillating shower of jewelled colour, sparkling and shimmering in the clear, sharp light. It had a wing-span of fifty feet and claws that could disembowel an elephant as easily as undoing a zip.
“Cone on, my son,” Kiss whispered. Although he couldn’t see the bird, he could hear the soft click as its heavily bejewelled, scalpel-sharp beak pecked at the trail of peanuts he had carefully laid the previous afternoon. Fortunately the phoenix, although rare, magical and incredibly dangerous, is not particularly intelligent. When it suddenly finds a trail of dry roasted peanuts extending along a ledge towards the mouth of a cave thirty thousand feet above sea level, it doesn’t stop to ask how on earth they got there. Yum, it thinks, lunch.
This, together with the incalculable value of their tail-feathers, is probably the real reason why phoenixes are so rare.
There are easier ways of obtaining phoenix feathers, however, than snaring them with peanuts and pitfall traps. The inhabitants of the Himalayas hit on a much more efficient method not long after the discovery of gunpowder. Genies, however, have obtained phoenix plumage the hard way since time immemorial, and so, regretfully, Kiss had left behind the Mannlicher-Schoenauer.600 Nitro Express rifle that common sense suggested was the best way of going about the job, and had instead packed peanuts, string and a folding shovel.
Peck, peck, peck. Aaaaargh! Crunch. About time too, Kiss sighed, and shuffled quickly along the ledge and round the corner, to peer down into the pit he had spent six hours digging the previous evening.
A baleful red eye glared up at him out of the darkness.
“All right,” croaked a hoarse voice. “It’s a fair cop, guy, I’ll come quietly. I don’t think,” it added.
Kiss frowned. “Be reasonable,” he said. “A couple of feathers and you can be on your way. There’s no way you can get out of there otherwise.”
From the pit, the sound of unfriendly cackling. “You want feathers, chum, you come down here and get them. It’s quite cosy in here out of the wind, I’m in no hurry.”
The genie rubbed his chin, nonplussed, and drew his collar tighter around his numb ears. His plan, although admirably simple and flawlessly executed, had only extended as far as getting the phoenix into the trap. Once he’d reached that stage, he had assumed, the rest of it would somehow take care of itself.
“Don’t be stupid,” he growled. “You’re just being a bad loser. You make with the feathers, I’ll make with the plank of wood. Agreed?”
“Up yours.”
“I can starve you out.”
“I carry six months supply of nutritional material around with me in the form of subcutaneous fat,” replied the bird smugly. “If that’s your game, you’d better have brought plenty of sandwiches.”
Kiss pursed his lips. The full extent of his preparations consisted of a thermos flask of, by now, lukewarm tea and the remainder of the peanuts. True, he could fly back to Katmandu, stock up on chocolate and be back in thirty seconds, but he had an idea that by the time he returned the phoenix would be out of there and circling overhead with its bowels puckered ready for pinpoint-accuracy bombing. Phoenix guano is the third most corrosive substance in the entire cosmos.
“I’ll roll a rock on top of you,” he ventured. “See how you like that.”
“You’d crush the feathers,” the bird replied. “A right prat you’d look going back to the princess or whoever it is you’re doing this for holding something looking like
a second-hand pipe cleaner.”
“All right,” Kiss conceded. “So it’s a stalemate. Let’s negotiate.”
“Bugger off.”
Tiny silver bells started ringing in Kiss’s brain. “Fair enough,” he said, “if that’s the way you want to play it, don’t say I didn’t give you every chance.”
The red eye blinked. “Bluff,” it snarled. “Look, you sling your hook and we’ll say no more about it. Can’t say fairer than—”
Kiss began to sing.
When they choose to do so, genies can sing well; heartbreakingly, soul-meltingly well. A genie can, if he sets his mind to it, sing solo duets; even barbershop.
Alternatively, they can sing badly. Very badly indeed. By dint of stuffing its pinion feathers into its ears and banging its head sharply against the side of the pit, the phoenix managed to hold out for an amazing seventeen minutes, during the course of which Kiss sang Sweet Adeline, Way Down Upon The Swanee River, Mammy, Alexander’s Ragtime Band and three complete renditions of Seventy-Six Trombones Followed The Big Parade. Indeed, it was only when he took a deep breath and announced that there were fifty-seven thousand green bottles hanging on a wall that the phoenix screeched like a Mack truck braking on black ice and started throwing feathers.
“Thank you very much,” Kiss called out, stuffing feathers into a sack. “Do you want a receipt?”
“Shut up and go away, please.”
“And no sneakily crawling out and coming after me, you hear?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. Not unless I saw an affidavit certifying you’d had your larynx removed first.”
Kiss slid the plank down into the pit, waved cheerfully, said goodbye and stepped off the ledge.
As he floated to the ground he entirely failed to notice the small figure huddled in the lee of the rocks, snapping furiously at him through a telephoto lens.