Djinn Rummy

by Tom Holt

  “And you just sat there,” Jane continued, “while that great oaf tried to hit me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you call yourself a genie!”

  “I tend to exaggerate.”

  “Aren’t you going after him?”

  “No.”

  “You mean you’re afraid.”

  “Naturally. I do also have a nuclear missile to see to, but that’s only a flimsy excuse. Really it’s because I’m a coward.”

  “You haven’t heard the last of this.”

  “I should think not. Excuse me. “Bye.”

  “I haven’t finished with you yet!” Jane called after him, as he dwindled away into a tiny dot on the horizon. “Honestly!” she summarised.

  Beside her, Asaf made a vague oh-well-never-mind noise. “Any how,” he said, “that’s sorted that out. Can we go home now, please?”

  Jane looked around and noticed, as if for the first time, that she was sitting between the wings of a dragon thousands of feet above the surface of the earth. “Gosh, yes,” she said. “Let’s do that right away.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Well, go on, then. It’s your stupid dragon.”

  “Sorry, yes. Now then, I wish—”

  As he said the words, he chanced to look up; and the terms of his wish changed slightly. In its amended form, which he didn’t actually vocalise, it consisted of, I wish the other genie, the one who got hit by the electric shock and jumped up miles into the air, wasn’t coming back.

  Unfortunately, as the Dragon King hastened to point out to him, that one was asking a bit too much.

  “Here, bomb,” Kiss called. “Here, nice bomb. Bommybommybommybommy.”

  No reply. And no sign of the poxy thing, as far as the eye (even his) could see. How do you attract bombs, exactly? Bomb-nip? Raffle an empty uranium canister?

  “Oo vewwy naughty bomb,” He experimented. “Oo come here this minute, or else no…”

  He paused. What do bombs like best?

  He squirmed. No prizes for guessing what bombs like best.

  “If you don’t come here this very minute,” he essayed, “the nasty Peace Movement will get you.”

  Of course, he rationalised as he swung low over San Francisco, it might just be that he was looking in the wrong place. But he didn’t think so, somehow; he could smell bomb — a strong, not very pleasant smell drifting back from the possible future — and it was definitely coming from this direction.

  “Come out with your fins up,” he shouted (but it turned into a whimper somewhere between his larynx and the atmosphere). “I have this planet surrounded.”

  He heard a click. It was a tiny sound, no louder than, say, a safety-catch being thumbed forward or a life-support machine being switched off. But he heard it, because it was the sound he’d been listening for.

  “Now then,” he wailed, “there’s no need to take that attitude.”

  Think, you fool, think. Somewhere out there is a bomb, armed and dangerous — a small, functional intelligence, probably scared and confused, trying to know what’s the right thing to do.

  Get real, Kiss told himself, this is a fucking bomb we’re talking about here. Bombs aren’t like that. When was the last time you heard of a three-hundred-megaton warhead being talked down off a twelfth-storey parapet by highly trained social workers?

  There it was, a little high-pitched whining of artificial brainwaves, like a gnat in a sandstorm. And what was it saying?

  It was saying, No thing personal.

  Swearing under his breath, Kiss did a back somersault that would have ripped the wings off even the latest generation of jet fighter and doubled back, head, down, in the direction of Oakland.

  Thirty seconds, and counting.

  “You’re too late,” Jane said, arms folded, face a study in defiant satisfaction. “He’s gone to catch the bomb, and he’ll defuse it. You’ve—”

  “Did you just hear something?” Philly interrupted.

  “No. What?”

  “Sounded to me like a faint click.”

  “That’ll be Kiss,” said Jane, smugly, “defusing the bomb.”

  Nine seconds, and counting.

  Mortals, who tend to think of their lives as the shortest distance between the two points Birth and Death, have a bad attitude towards Time. They accuse it of being inflexible, doctrinaire, officious. In the collective imagination of the human race, Time wears a peaked cap and carries a thick wad of parking tickets.

  This is unfair. Time does, in fact, have a considerable degree of discretion. True, it rarely exercises it in favour of mortals (because of their bad attitude), but even so, most of us will have experienced moments when Time has seemed to slow down or stop altogether. The tragedy is that in those moments we’re usually sailing through the air, staring at an oncoming car on our side of the road, or realising with a feeling of sick horror that the sound of key in lock means that our spouse has come home earlier than anticipated. We therefore lack the leisure and the objectivity to give Time its due.

  Nine seconds and counting. Kiss, being a genie (and having done Time an enormous favour years ago in a rather shabby incident involving yogurt, rubber tubing and a goat) kept his head and called in, so to speak, his marker.

  Sniff, sniff, sniff. The smell of bomb was overpowering, but still he couldn’t see the bloody…

  Gotcha! Big steel tube, leaning nonchalantly against a row of other steel tubes, which Kiss identified as liquid nitrogen canisters propped up against the wall of some factory or other. He braked sharply, leaving pale grey skidmarks on the sky, and swooped down.

  The bomb saw him and flinched.

  “There, there,” he said, “it’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  That, replied the bomb, must be the stupidest remark I’ve ever heard.

  Kiss blinked, and then realised that what he was hearing was his own brain’s instantaneous translation of the subtext of the bomb’s computer intelligence’s extraneous drive-chatter; the equivalent of the dead-cat-dragged-over-velvet noise you get when you switch on the tape deck to full volume with a blank tape in it. Gosh, he said to himself, I’m so much cleverer than I ever realised.

  “OK,” he replied, “point taken, let’s approach this from a different angle. What harm have we ever done you?”

  I’m sorry?

  “Us. Sentient life forms. What harm have we ever—”

  Let me see. You made me, for a start; that involved being hacked out of the living rock and run through heavy rollers and then heated in a blast furnace until I melted and then poured into a mould like I was jelly or something and then shoved through more rollers and then punched full of sodding great rivets and drilled full of holes with a drill that makes your dentists” drills seem like feather dusters and then packed full of horrible ticklish uranium and shoved down a long, dark tube in a submarine hundreds of feet under the sea and then shot out again, which feels like being farted out of God’s arse, let me add, and a fat lot you care about my vertigo and then…

  This, Kiss realised, is starting to get a bit counterproductive. “Fine,” he said, “you’ve got real grievances, I admit, but is this really the best way to settle them? I mean, really?”

  The bomb’s sensors treated him to a withering stare. I’m a bomb, for fuck’s sake, this is what I’m supposed to do. Why don’t you creeps make up your damn minds?

  “Ah,” Kiss replied quickly. “The I-was-only-obeying-orders defence. That won’t wash, you know.”

  So what? I’m about to be blown into my constituent atoms, right? And you’re suggesting that something bad might happen to me afterwards? Grow up.

  Eight seconds and counting. More like seven and four-fifths. Fortunately, Kiss’s pores didn’t have enough time to start sweating, or he’d have been drenched.

  “How would you feel,” he asked, “about bribery?”

  There was a tiny flicker of interest in the readout patterns. How do you mean, bribery?
<
br />   “We pay you, anything you like, if you don’t blow up. How does that grab you?”

  Like I said, I’m a bomb. What the hell is there that I could possibly want?

  Kiss turned up the gain in his brain. “I’m sure we could think of something,” he said. “Anything you like, anything at all. A velvet-lined silo. Raspberry-flavoured rocket fuel. A nice little land-mine to cuddle up to in the evenings?”

  What’s raspberry?

  “You see?” Kiss shouted, waving his arms. “A whole Universe packed with scintillatingly thrilling sensations, and you haven’t experienced any of them. You haven’t lived. But think how different it could all be, if you’d only—”

  Of course I haven’t lived, I’m a bomb. And how the blazes am I supposed to experience all these wonderful sensations of yours? All I’m built to do is fly and go bang.

  “We can fit you with new sensors, of course,” Kiss replied. “Audio, visual, sensory, you name it. Just think of it. Ice cream, music, the scent of primroses after a heavy shower, the sunset over the Loire valley…”

  I could experience all that?

  “No problem. And that’s just the start of it. If you’d just use your imagination, there’s no end to what we could show you.”

  Fuck.

  Kiss blinked. “What?” he said.

  I said fuck. It’d have been really nice, I bet. Too late now, of course.

  “Too late?”

  Use your common sense. I’m armed and about to blow. You don’t think there’s anything I can do to stop it, do you?

  “But—”

  You honestly believe I can switch myself oft? Get real. As far as bombs are concerned, free will is a lawyer’s marketing gimmick. God, I wish you hadn’t said all that stuff about what I could have had. You’ve really upset me now.

  Five seconds and counting. Time was doing its best, but there are limits. At the back of his cosmic awareness, Kiss could feel the world tapping its foot and saying, Come on, do something.

  Do what?

  Anything. Anything is better than nothing. Nothing. Generally defined as an absence of anything, nothing is usually produced by some catastrophically traumatic event; an atomic bomb, — say, going off in a confined space. Such as a galaxy.

  Kiss thought, and something came. If he’d been a cartoon, a bubble with a light bulb in it would have appeared above his head.

  Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what supernatural beings are made of. Among other things; including a pretty substantial amount of pure, crude energy. Kiss had never bothered to learn the physics (he’d spent physics lessons practising simple levitation on the underwear of the girl sitting next to him) but he had an idea that what he was mostly made of was raw power. Which accounted for his being able to fly and materialise physical objects, not to mention the chronic indigestion.

  And to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; which he had only been able to understand in terms of a very fast car hitting a very solid lamp-post.

  Indeed.

  The trouble was, if he used himself as the lamp-post, he was likely to get seriously bent.

  Omelettes and eggs. Three seconds and counting. Yes, he screamed in his mind, the complaint of every poor fool since time began who’d suddenly found out he’s been cast to play the hero, but why me? And the inevitable answer: because you’re here, and there’s nobody else. Because we didn’t think you’d mind. You don’t mind, do you?

  Kiss moved.

  Here, protested the bomb, what the devil do you think you’re playing at? It was bad enough with that goddamn nymphomaniac carpet…

  “Shut up,” Kiss replied. He wrapped his arms tight around the bomb, and closed his eyes.

  No seconds, and counting.

  FOURTEEN

  “I expect you’re right,” said Philly Nine wearily. “No doubt he’s disarmed the bomb in the very nick of time, and all my hours of hard work gone straight down the pan. Which only leaves me,” he added, taking one step forward, “the consoling thought of what I’m now going to do to you.”

  Jane’s eyebrows shot up like Wall Street after a Republican landslide. “Me?” she snapped. “What on earth have I got to do with it?”

  “A whole lot,” Philly replied, flexing his fingers purposefully. “If it hadn’t been for you, he’d never have thought to interfere. All this is your fault.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Your fault,” Philly repeated, pale with anger. “Your goddamned meddling can’t-mind-your-own-business fault. Well, you can take it from me, it’s the last time you’ll—”

  “Excuse me,” said Asaf.

  The shock stopped Philly Nine dead in his tracks. The feeling was hard to describe, but it was something along the lines of the way you’d feel if you were sitting in, say, the roughest dockside bar in San Francisco and a four-foot-six eighty-year-old missionary tottered in on a zimmer frame and offered to fight any man in the place.

  “What?”

  “Please,” said Asaf, standing up, “don’t talk to the lady like that. You’ll upset her.”

  “You what?”

  “And if you upset her,” Asaf continued, “you’ll upset me. So please, cut it out. OK?”

  The Dragon King, who had been trying to look unobtrusive to the point of virtual translucence, suddenly snapped out of existence. He rematerialised as a vague presence at the back of Asaf’s mind, hammering on the door of the Instincts Section, Self-Preservation department, which appeared to be locked.

  Cripes, mate, are you out of your tiny mind? This bastard’ll have you for flamin’ breakfast.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Asaf replied. “You go away and leave this to me.”

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Philly Nine narrowed his eyes. “Are you serious?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You are threatening me?”

  “If you choose to look at it that way, I suppose I am.”

  It had been a long day, and Philly had had enough. “You’re dead,” he said softly. “Dead and buried. Now then…”

  And then he stopped. In fairness, he tried to back away and run for it, but somehow he couldn’t. Rabbits who go foraging for food in the middle lane of a motorway often experience the same effect.

  “Please…” he said, and then his tongue packed up, immobilised like the rest of him.

  “I really don’t want to do this,” Asaf said, “but you leave me no choice.”

  He was holding a bottle. To be precise, it was one of those small screw-top plastic bottles they sell fizzy drinks in nowadays. Slowly, his body language broadcasting determination and regret in equal proportions, he advanced.

  Philly’s tongue came back on line just before the neck of the bottle touched him. “You can’t make me get in there,” he hissed. “Absolutely no way. There is literally no power on earth…”

  “In you get.”

  “I steadfastly and categorically refuse to—”

  “In.”

  Wildly, Philly stepped backwards and groped behind him for something to cling on to. Try as he might, he couldn’t take his eyes off the neck of the bottle; it seemed to summon him.

  “As you can see,” Asaf said gently, “this is no ordinary bottle.”

  “You’re lying. It’s just a bog standard pop bottle, and I’ll be damned if I—”

  Asaf’s face creased in a smile that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. He levelled the bottle as if it were a gun, and beckoned.

  COME.

  “Shan’t!”

  COME.

  “Good Lord,” Philly gibbered, both arms linked round a granite outcrop, “you didn’t honestly think I was serious about destroying the world, did you? It was just a joke, honest. I mean, why on earth would I possibly want—”

  WHOOSH.

  Asaf shook his head sadly, screwed on the cap and held the bottle up to the light. It was transparent plastic; but there was nothing to be seen inside the bottle except the usual few b
eads of condensation clinging to the sides. And they had been there before.

  “Gosh,” said Jane.

  With a sigh, Asaf swung his arm back and threw the bottle up into the air. There was a sudden terrifying clap of thunder, a streak of lightning that made Jane think the sky had finally come unzipped, and then nothing.

  “A pity,” Asaf said. “But there it is.”

  There was a flutter of air and the Dragon King hove back into existence, hovering a few feet above the ground. He was shaking slightly, and his wings were creased.

  “Stone the flaming crows,” he said. “I never seen the like in all my…”

  Asaf nodded to him. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome, mate, no worries. Any time.”

  Jane looked from one to the other, and made a sort of feeble questioning gesture with her left hand. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “It was his bottle, you see,” Asaf said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “I guess he must have been carrying it around for years. Boy, how he must have hated himself.”

  “His bottle…”

  Asaf nodded. “Fell out of his pocket or his scrip or whatever genies have, when that other genie hit him with the thunderbolt. I guessed it might come in handy, so I picked it up. It was the dragon who drew my attention to it.”

  “Pleased to be of service,” mumbled the King.

  “It was the way the dragon jumped up in the air and made a little screaming noise when he saw it that put me on the right lines,” Asaf continued. “And while you two were having your slanging match, it suddenly occurred to me. Why would a genie, of all things, carry a bottle around with him? Particularly the sort of bottle he could never ever escape from. Shatterproof, you see. And non-biodegradable.”

  Jane waited for a moment, and then said, “Well?”

  “Simple.” Asaf sat down and opened a roll of peppermints. “Because he wanted to be put in it. Subconsciously, I guess. I mean, that ties in with all the rest of it. The wanting to destroy the world, and that stuff. What he really wanted to destroy was himself.”

  Jane’s mental eyebrow rose sharply. This all sounded a bit too glib, too Lesson Three, Psychology For Beginners for her liking. Any minute now and he’d start talking about sublimated urges, cries for help and traumatic potty-training in early childhood. However, she held her peace.