Djinn Rummy

by Tom Holt

  Mr Swindall nodded. “Oh, I am,” he said. “One hundred and twelve per cent. But face facts, you’re dead in the water this time. Won’t do yourself any favours by burying your head in the sand.” Mr Swindall rubbed his hands together. “Now then, first things first. You’d better make a will.”

  “Had I?”

  “Absolutely.” The lawyer nodded, setting his chins swinging. “After all, now that you’re going to snuff it — pretty damn soon by our standards — it’s imperative that you set your affairs in order. In fact, you’re going to need some pretty high-level tax planning advice while you’re at it, because there’ll be none of this beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice stuff once you’re one of Them.” A slight cloud of worry crossed Mr Swindall’s shiny face. “You did pay in advance, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right, then. Next you’ll be needing somewhere to live, so I’ll just give you a copy of our house buyer’s special offer package; and it’ll be some time before you get used to not being invulnerable any more, so we’ll put your name down for a couple of personal injury actions in advance. It’s a good scheme, this one; it means you can start paying for the lawyers’ fees before you have the accident. Ah, yes,” said Mr Swindall, rubbing his hands together and grinning like a hyena, “we’ll be able to provide you with a full range of legal services before you’re very much older, you mark my words.”

  “I see. Thank you very much.”

  “Don’t mention it. Oh yes, and of course there’ll be the divorce as well…”

  “The div…”

  Mr Swindall smiled sadly. “You don’t think it’ll last, do you? Be realistic, please. Ninety-nine-point-seven per cent of marriages between supernaturals and mortals don’t last out the year, so if I were you I’d put a deposit down now while you’ve still got a few bob in your pocket. Much easier that way.”

  Kiss raised his hand. “Just a minute,” he said. “Before we get completely carried away…”

  “We are also,” Mr Swindall interrupted quickly, “authorised by the Divine Law Society to conduct investment business, so if you’ll just fill in this simple questionnaire…”

  “Before,” Kiss insisted, “we get completely carried away, what’s the procedure for doing this…?”

  “The renunciation of eternal life?” Mr Swindall opened a drawer and pulled out a thick sheaf of forms. “Piece of cake. You just fill these out, in quadruplicate, and take them with the prescribed fee to the offices of the Supreme Court between 9.15 and 9.25 on the first Wednesday in any month, and six months later you’ll have to attend a short hearing in front of the District Seraph…”

  It took Mr Swindall twenty-seven minutes to describe the procedure.

  “It’s as simple as that,” he concluded. “And if you run into any problems along the way, just give me a shout and I’ll put you back on the right lines. Now, where were we? Oh, yes. For a mere thirty per cent commission, I can put you on to some very nice unit trusts which ought…”

  “The forms, please.”

  “You don’t want to hear about the breathtaking new equities portfolio we’re putting together for a select few specially favoured clients?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Mr Swindall frowned. “Oh well, sod you, then. The receptionist will give you the final bill on your way out.”

  Organising a plague of locusts, even if you’re a Force Twelve genie, is several light years away from a doddle, as anyone who’s ever organised anything will readily appreciate.

  First, catch your locusts. Actually producing nine hundred million locusts wasn’t a problem. Let there be locusts! And there were locusts.

  A plague of locusts. The phrase trips easily off the tongue. But consider this. The average locust needs a certain amount of food each day, or it dies. Nine hundred million locusts, gathered together in one spot awaiting distribution in plague form, need nine hundred million times that amount. Neglect to provide nine hundred million packed lunches, and before very long you’ll have a plague of nine hundred million dead locusts; untidy, but no real long-term threat to humanity.

  Another point to bear in mind is that locusts are in practice nothing more than the sports model of the basic production grasshopper; and grasshoppers hop. Up to six feet, when the mood takes them. Trying to keep nine hundred million of the little tinkers together long enough to organise properly structured devastation parties is, in consequence, not a job for the faint-hearted. Furthermore, they chirp. They stridulate. The sound they produce is extremely similar in pitch, frequency and tone to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Nine hundred million locusts stridulating simultaneously takes noise pollution into a whole new dimension.

  Half an hour into the plague, Philly Nine was beginning to wish he’d gone with the flow and specified a plague of frogs instead.

  The final straw was the huge flock of ibises which suddenly appeared, hovering in the air just out of genie stone-throwing range and darting in whenever Philly’s back was turned to gorge themselves on the biggest free lunch in ibis history. The few who overdid it to such an extent that they were unable to get off the ground again met with appropriate retribution; but there were plenty more where they came from.

  Three hours into the plague, with nothing achieved except a massive feed bill, a net loss from starvation, desertion and enemy action of about seventeen million locusts and a lot of very happy ibises, Philly Nine sat down, put his head in his hands and began to whimper.

  The locusts, who had finished off the latest consignment of rice (sacks included) and were beginning to feel peckish again, ate his shoes.

  “Excuse me.”

  Philly Nine looked up. Hovering above his head was a helicopter, out of whose window hung a man with a clipboard and a megaphone.

  “Excuse me,” the man yelled above the roar of the engine and the chirping of the locusts, “but are these insects yours?”

  Philly nodded. By now they’d finished off his socks and were working their way up his trousers.

  “Then I’m very sorry,” the man went on, “but I’m going to have to ask you to move them. They’re causing an environmental hazard, you see, and we can’t have that. There’s regulations about this sort of thing.”

  Philly Nine laughed bitterly. “Move them,” he said. “Right. Where would you suggest I move them to?”

  “Not my problem,” the man replied. “But while we’re on the subject, I take it you do have a permit for livestock transportation?”

  “What?”

  “A permit,” the man said. “Transportation of livestock without a permit is a very serious offence.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Philly growled. “What precisely are you going to do about it?”

  The man shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if you haven’t got a permit, then I can’t allow you to move these insects. They aren’t going anywhere until I see a Form 95, properly endorsed by the Department of Transport…”

  “But you told me yourself to get them shifted.”

  “Agreed,” the man said, nodding. “But not without a permit.”

  “All right,” Philly snarled, just managing to stay calm. “So what do you suggest I do?”

  “Not my problem. You could try getting a permit.”

  “How do I do that?”

  The man sighed. “You can’t,” he said. “Sorry. In order to apply for a permit, you have to give twenty-eight days’ notice in writing to the Inspector of Livestock Transportation, and like I just said, you haven’t got twenty-eight days because you’ve got to remove them immediately on environmental grounds. Bit of a grey area in the regulations, I’m afraid. Oh, and by the way—”

  “Yes?”

  The man pointed with his clipboard towards the ibises, which had settled down en bloc in the middle of the swarm and were munching a broad swathe through it with impressive speed. “You’re not allowed to do that, I’m afraid.”

  “Do what?”

  “Do or permit to b
e done anything which tends to prejudice the well-being of an endangered or protected species. If any of those ibises dies from over-feeding, I’m afraid it’ll be your head on the block.”

  “I see.”

  “So I suggest you move them on. Although,” the man continued, “disturbing the habitat of an endangered or protected species is also forbidden, and the expression habitat does include any well-established feeding-ground—”

  Philly slowly got to his feet. “All right,” he said, “it’s a fair cop. Looks like you’re going to have to impound my locusts.” He grinned. “No hard feelings,” he added. “I know you guys have a job to do. OK, they’re all yours.”

  The man in the helicopter shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but we can’t do that. Regulations state that we can’t accept surrender of property from members of the public without an authorisation from the Secretary of State, and to get an authorisation we’d need to give twenty-eight days’ notice…”

  “Fine.” Philly’s mental computer fixed on the helicopter, estimating its airspeed and mass, and calculating the necessary trajectory a good gob and spit would need to follow in order to hit the man square in the eye. “So what are you going to do?”

  The man frowned. “I hate to have to do this,” he said, “but if you won’t co-operate, you leave us no choice. All right, Wayne, over to you.”

  Wayne? Who’s Wayne? Philly Nine looked sharply round, just in time to see a tall figure in overalls standing over him with an empty milk-bottle in his hand. He tried to dodge, but he slipped on a wedge of squashed locusts, lost his footing and staggered backwards into the bottle. A cork appeared, blotting out the light from what had suddenly become a very small, cramped universe.

  “Twenty-eight days,” said a small voice, very far away. “For contempt. When you get out, we’ll also be filing a civil suit for public nuisance and forty-six breaches of the planning regulations. Sorry.”

  Nine hours later, the locusts ceased to be a problem. Starvation, ibises and a freak virus which spread like wildfire had accounted for them all; all except the one which had hopped into the milk bottle just before the cork was inserted. Twenty-eight days turned out to be a very long time.

  Genies can do, and have done, pretty well everything; but one field of endeavour in which they have little experience, for obvious reasons, is organising stag nights.

  Call to mind the old adage about not being able to organise a highly convivial party in a brewery. Focus on that thought.

  “We ought,” insisted Acme Waste Disposal Services III, a small Force Two, “to have a strip-a-gram.” He scratched his head. “It’s traditional,” he added, “I think.”

  The other members of the Committee shrugged and waved to the bartender for more goat’s milk. These were uncharted waters.

  “What’s that?” asked Nordic Oil IX.

  Awds Three frowned. “What I’ve heard is,” he said, “you hire this female mortal to come along and take her clothes off.”

  “Why?”

  “And then she sings a song or recites a poem or something.”

  “No wealth-beyond-the-dreams or anything?” Awds Three shook his head. “Nope,” he replied. “Off with the undies, do the song, say the poem, and that’s it.”

  “How very peculiar.”

  “And sometimes,” Awds added, wishing he hadn’t raised the subject, “they jump out of cakes.”

  “Get away!”

  “So I’ve heard,” the genie mumbled. “Never seen it myself, but…”

  There was a puzzled silence.

  “Let’s just go over this one more time,” said a thoughtful genie by the name of Standard Conglomerates the First. “There’s this female mortal imprisoned in a cake, and…”

  “Not imprisoned, exactly…”

  “…and she jumps out and doesn’t grant three wishes…”

  “As I understand it. Like I said, this is all strictly hearsay…”

  “…festoons the floor with her dirty laundry…”

  “Hey, we don’t have to do her laundry for her, do we, because I’ve got sensitive skin…”

  “…sings a song and goes away again. For which,” he added, “she expects to be paid money. And this,” he concluded, “is fun.”

  “Male bonding,” suggested Nordic Oil.

  “I think that’s extra.”

  Stan One drew a deep breath. “I think we’ll pigeonhole that one for the time being, people. Which leaves us with excessive drinking…”

  “Well, that oughtn’t to be a problem, provided they skim the cream off first…”

  “Excessive drinking,” Stan One continued, “singing raucous songs and being sick in people’s window-boxes in the early hours of the morning.” He paused. “It’s all a bit jejune, isn’t it?”

  “What sort of cake, exactly?”

  “That’s what mortals do,” Awds replied defensively. “Don’t blame me, I’m only repeating what I’ve heard.”

  Stan One shrugged. “If he’s dead set on becoming a mortal, I suppose that’s what he’s got to learn to expect.” He took a long pull at his goat’s milk and spat out a tiny knob of rennet. “The sooner he starts, I guess, the sooner he’ll get used to it.” He grimaced; not entirely because of the rennet.

  “Because if it’s one of those creamy ones with jam in the middle, she won’t half be sticky and yeeuk by the time she’s jumped up through the middle of it. Bits of glacé cherry in the hair, all that sort of—”

  “I think,” said Imperial Unit Fund Managers IV, a big, slow genie, “that at some stage we have to tie shoes to a car.”

  Awds shook his head. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “It’s horses you tie shoes to. Cars have tyres.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Damned odd, the whole thing,” mused Stan One. “Anyone know why he’s doing it?”

  There was a general shaking of heads. “For charity?” suggested the Dragon King of the South-East. “One of these sponsored things?”

  Impy Four shook his head. “Can’t see how it’d work,” he replied.

  “Well,” replied the Dragon King, “he’s becoming a mortal, right? So he gets people to sponsor him, so much a year, to see how long he’ll live. So suppose we sponsor him, oh, five gold dirhams a year, and he lives say twenty years…”

  “That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

  The Dragon King shrugged. “People do weird things for charity,” he said. “I heard once where this bloke allowed himself to be chained in the stocks and have wet sponges thrown at him.”

  Awds shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “I think it’s more cherchez la femme.”

  “Find the lady? You mean like a card game?”

  “And anyway,” interrupted a slender Force Six, “from what you say, all you have to do to find mortal females is look in the nearest Victoria sponge. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  “I think,” said Awds, “he’s in love.”

  A long, difficult silence.

  “Just say that again, will you?” asked Stan One, slowly.

  “I think he’s in love,” Awds repeated, red to the tips of his ears. “Just a rumour, of course. No idea where I heard it.”

  “With a mortal?”

  Awds nodded.

  “A female mortal?”

  “It’s only what I’ve heard.”

  Another long silence.

  “Well,” said the Dragon King briskly, “if he’s doing it for charity, then I reckon I’m good for ten dirhams a year. Any takers?”

  Jane frowned.

  “The first one again,” she commanded, “but without the sequins.”

  There was a voiceless sigh, and out of nothingness appeared a dress. It was long, white and shimmering. Twenty thousand tiny white flowers sparkled on the sleeves. So light and insubstantial was the material that a gnat sneezing in the jungles of Ecuador set the hems dancing. It hung in the air, full of some sort of nothing that accentuated its breathtakingly grace
ful lines. Jane thought.

  “All right,” she said. “Let me see number three just one more time.”

  “Sign here.”

  Philly Nine took the clipboard, squiggled with the pen, and handed them back.

  Sulphur, he thought. Nice, inanimate, noiseless sulphur. Ninety-nine-point-eight-nine per cent pure. Easiest thing in the world, a plague of sulphur.

  “Just stack it neatly over there,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  The delivery man nodded, and started shouting directions to his colleagues. The long queue of lorries started to move.

  "Scuse my asking,” went on the delivery man, “but that’s a lot of sulphur you got there.”

  Philly Nine looked up from the bill of lading. “Sorry?” he said.

  “That’s an awful lot of sulphur you got there, mate,” the delivery man went on. “You want to watch yourself.”

  Philly Nine favoured him with an icy grin. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Believe me.”

  “OK,” replied the delivery man, as the genie stalked away and broke open a crate. “So long as you realise that this stuffs highly…”

  Philly Nine wasn’t listening. To distribute sulphur in plague form: first, grind it up into a fine powder. Use this to salt rain-clouds all over the Earth’s atmosphere. The sulphur will dissolve in the rain-water, forming (with the help of a little elementary chemistry) H2S04, otherwise known as sulphuric acid. He chuckled, took a long drag on the butt of his cigar and threw it aside.

  There was a flash — “…inflammable.”

  SEVEN

  Kiss lay on his back, stared at the ceiling, and screamed. And woke up.

  Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don’t usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there’s nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.

  There are, however, exceptions. Kiss reached out for something to wipe his forehead with, and breathed in deeply.

  He’d dreamed that he could no longer fly; that all his strength and power had deserted him and that one day, not too far in the future, he was going to die. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was going to have to spend what little time he had doing something futile, degrading and incredibly boring — the term his dream had used was a full-time job — just to earn a little money, money well within the dreams of avarice, simply to keep himself alive. And on top of that, what little time he had left over wasn’t going to be spent in the back bar of Saheed’s, playing pool, because his wife got upset if he kept going out in the evenings.