The Devil shook his head. “That’s a new one on me,” he admitted. “But—” He frowned. “You’re sure? No second thoughts? You want to waive your mandatory fourteen-day right of cancellation?”
“Aye. Dae it the noo.” Davy nodded vigorously.
“It’s done.” The Devil smiled faintly.
“Whit?” Davy stared.
“There’s not much to it. A rock about the size of this pub, traveling on a cometary orbit—it’ll take an hour or so to fold, but I already took care of that.” The Devil’s smile widened. “You used your wish.”
“Ah dinnae believe ye,” said Davy, hopping down from his barstool. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Tam dodging through the blackout curtain and the doorway, tipping him the wink. This had gone on long enough. “Ye’ll have tae prove it. Show me.”
“What?” The Devil looked puzzled. “But I told you, it’ll take about an hour.”
“So ye say. An’ whit then?”
“Well, the parasol collapses, so the amount of sunlight goes up. It gets brighter. The snow melts.”
“Is that right?” Davy grinned. “So how many wishes dae Ah get this time?”
“How many—” The Devil froze. “What makes you think you get any more?” He snarled, his face contorting.
“Like ye said, Ah gave ye a loan, didn’t Ah?” Davy’s grin widened. He gestured toward the door. “After ye?”
“You—” The Devil paused. “You don’t mean . . .” He swallowed, then continued, quietly. “That wasn’t deliberate, was it?”
“Oh. Aye.” Davy could see it in his mind’s eye: the wilting crops and blazing forests, droughts and heatstroke and mass extinction, the despairing millions across America and Africa, exotic places he’d never seen, never been allowed to go—roasting like pieces of a turkey on a spit, roasting in revenge for twenty years frozen in outer darkness. Hell on Earth. “Four billion fuckers, isnae that enough for another?”
“Son of a bitch!” The Devil reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an antique calculator, began punching buttons. “Forty-eight—no, forty-nine. Shit, this has never happened before! You bastard, don’t you have a conscience?”
Davy thought for a second. “Naw.”
“Fuck!”
It was now or never. “Ah’ll take a note.”
“A credit—shit, okay then. Here.” The Devil handed over his mobile. It was small and very black and shiny, and it buzzed like a swarm of flies. “Listen, I’ve got to go right now, I need to escalate this to senior management. Call head office tomorrow, if I’m not there, one of my staff will talk you through the state of your claim.”
“Haw! Ah’ll be sure tae dae that.”
The Devil stalked toward the curtain and stepped through into the darkness beyond, and was gone. Davy pulled out his moby and speed-dialed a number. “He’s a’ yours noo,” he muttered into the handset, then hung up and turned back to his beer. A couple of minutes later, someone came in and sat down next to him. Davy raised a hand and waved vaguely at Katie. “A Deuchars for Tam here.”
Katie nodded nonchalantly—she seemed to have cheered up since the Devil had stepped out—and picked up a glass.
Tam dropped a couple of small brass horns on the bar top next to Davy. Davy stared at them for a moment then glanced up admiringly. “Neat,” he admitted. “Get anythin’ else aff him?”
“Nah, the cunt wis crap. He didnae even have a moby. Just these.” Tam looked disgusted for a moment. “Ah pulled ma chib an’ waved it aroon’, an’ he totally legged it. Think anybody’ll come lookin’ for us?”
“Nae chance.” Davy raised his glass, then tapped the pocket with the Devil’s mobile phone in it smugly. “Nae a snowball’s chance in hell . . .”
Trunk and Disorderly
IN WHICH LAURA DEPARTS AND FIONA MAKES A REQUEST
“I want you to know, darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex robot—and she’s twice the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind her.
Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d missed this time. “Laura—”
She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. “I’m leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying my maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your moods!”
The hell of it is, she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have to walk out right this instant—”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching for the door handle. “You’ve been ignoring me for months, darling: I’m sick of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you’d try not to be so distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and froze the pose for a moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. “You didn’t mean it. I’m sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me, you’d face up to the fact that you’re an obsessive-compulsive, and get your wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then, I’m out of here!”
The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel and swept out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.
“Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a low blow to strike a cove right before he tries to drill a hole in the desert at Mach 25, what? But you can’t take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.
I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless tension. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to the simulator and practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric reentry, a searing blowtorch flare of hot plasma roaring past bare centimeters beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there’s something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.
You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand, Laura’s walkout had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I’m never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but tonight was the predrop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks all around, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.
“Ralph? Ralphie? Are you alright?”
I didn’t need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.
“You don’t sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.
“Laura just walked out on me again, and I’ve got a drop coming up tomorrow,” I moaned.
“Oh, Ralphie, stop angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run the script. Y
ou worry too much about her; she can look after herself. I was calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to a party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly and my herpetologist is having another sex change, so I was just hoping you’d be able to look after Jeremy for me while I’m gone, just for a couple of days or maybe a week or two—”
Jeremy was Fiona’s pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high bundle of hairy malice. Last time I looked after Jeremy, he puked in my bed—under the comforter—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the fleshpits of Venus. Then there’s the time Jeremy got at the port, then went on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn’s favorite skirt when we took him to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we’d locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can’t take him anywhere—he’s a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.
“
Must I?” I asked.
“Don’t whine!” Fi said brightly. “Nobody will ever take you seriously if you whine, Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If I hadn’t covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s yacht out for a spin around the moon without checking the antimatter reserve in the starboard gravity polarizer . . .”
“Yes, Fi,” I said wearily, when she finally let me get a word in edgewise. “I surrender. I’ll take Jeremy. But I don’t promise I’ll be able to look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it’s under mortal-jeopardy rules? And I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect him from Laura if she shows up again running that bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry installed on her when she was high on pink noise that time—”
“That’s enough about Larry,” Fi said in a voice like liquid helium. “You know I’m not walking out with him anymore. You’ll look after Jeremy for two weeks, and that’s enough for me. He’s been a little sulky lately, but I’m sure you’d know all about that. I’ll make sure he’s backed up first, then I’ll drop him off on my way to Sao Paolo skyport, right?”
“What ho,” I said dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I snapped my fingers for a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands for a while. My sister was making a backup of her mammoth’s twisted little psyche to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless she wouldn’t forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U, they’re equally annoying. The chair whimpered unhappily as it massaged my tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no escaping the fact that I was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly going to be one of those days: and I hadn’t even scheduled the traditional predrop drink with the boys yet . . .
THE NEW BUTLER CALLS
I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool in the conservatory at the back of Chateau Pookie, breathing alcohol-infused air through a hose and feeling sorry for myself, when the new butler found me. At least, I think that’s what I was doing. I was pretty far gone, conflicted between the need to practice my hypersonic p-waggling before the drop and the urge to drink Laura’s absence out of my system. All I remember is a vague rippling blue curtain of sunlight on scrolled ironwork—the ceiling—then a huge stark shadow looming over me, talking in the voice of polite authority.
“Good afternoon, sir. According to the diary, Sir is supposed to be receiving his sister’s mammoth in the front parlor in approximately twenty minutes. Would Sir care to be sober for the occasion? And what suit should Sir like to wear?”
This was about four more sirs than I could take lying down. “Nnngk gurgle,” I said, sitting up unsteadily. The breather tube wasn’t designed for speech. Choking, I spat it out. “M’gosh and please excuse me, but who the hell are you?”
“Alison Feng.” She bowed stiffly, from the waist. “The agency sent me, to replace your last, ah, man.” She was dressed in the stark black and white of a butler, and she did indeed have the voice—some very expensive training, not to mention top-notch laryngeal engineering, went into producing that accent of polite condescension, the steering graces that could direct even the richest and most uncontrollable employer in directions less conducive to their social embarrassment. But—
“You’re my new butler?” I managed to choke out.
“I believe so.” One chiseled eyebrow signaled her skepticism.
“Oh, oh jolly good, then, that squishie.” A thought, marinating in my sozzled subconscious, floated to the surface. “You, um, do you know why my last butler quit?”
“No, sir.” Her expression didn’t change. “In my experience it is best to approach one’s prospective employers with an open mind.”
“It was my sister’s mammoth’s fault,” I managed to say before a fit of coughing overcame me. “Listen, just take the bloody thing and lock it in the number two guest suite’s dungeon, the one that’s fitted out for clankie doms. It can try’n destroy anything it bally likes in there, it won’t get very far, an’ we can fix it later.
Hic. Glue the door shut, or weld it or something—one of her boyfriends trained the thing to pick locks with its trunk. Got a sober-up?”
“Of course, sir.” She snapped her fingers, and blow me if there wasn’t one of those devilish red capsules balanced between her white-gloved digits.
“Ugh.” I took it and dry-swallowed, then hiccuped. “Fiona’s animal tamer’ll probably drop the monster off in the porch, but I’d better get up’n’case Sis shows.” I hiccuped again, acid indigestion clenching my stomach. “Urgh. Wossa invitation list for tonight?”
“Everything is perfectly under control,” my new butler said, a trifle patronizingly. “Now if Sir would care to step inside the dryer while I lay out his suit—”
I surrendered to the inevitable. After all, I thought, once you’ve accepted delivery of a dwarf mammoth on behalf of your sister, nothing worse can happen to you all day, can it?
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Fiona’s chauffeuse did indeed deposit Jeremy, but on a schedule of her own choosing. She must have already been on the way while Fi was nattering on the blower. While Miss Feng was introducing herself, she was sneakily decanting the putrid proboscidean into the ornamental porch via her limousine’s airlock. She accomplished this with stealth and panache, and made a successful retreat, but not before she completed my sister’s act of domestic sabotage by removing the frilly pink restraining rope that was all that kept Jeremy from venting his spleen on everything within reach. Which he commenced to do all over Great-Uncle Arnold’s snooker table, which I was only looking after while he was out-system on business. It was his triumphant squeaking that informed me that we had problems—normally Jeremy sneaks up on one in preternatural silence when he’s got mischief in what passes for his mind—as I headed toward the stairs to my dressing room.
“Help me,” I said, gesturing at the porch, from which a duet for Hell’s piccolo and bull in a china shop was emanating.
The new butler immediately rose in my estimation by producing a bola. “Would this serve?” she asked.
“Yes. Only she’s a bit short for a mammoth—”
Too late. Miss Feng’s throw was targeted perfectly, and it would have succeeded if Jeremy had been built to the scale of a typical pachyderm. Alas, the whirling balls flew across the room and tangled in the chandelier while Jeremy, trumpeting and honking angrily, raised his tusks and charged at my kneecaps. “Oh dear,” said the new butler.
I blinked and began to move. I was too slow, the sober-up still fighting the residual effects of the alcohol in my blood. Jeremy veered toward me, tusks raised menacingly to threaten the old family jewels. I began to turn, and was just raising my arms to fend off the monster (who appeared dead set on editing the family tree to the benefit of Fiona’s line) when M
iss Feng leaned sideways and in one elegant gesture ripped the ancient lace curtains right off the rail and swiped them across my assailant’s tusks.
The next minute remains, mercifully, a confused blur. Somehow my butler and I mammoth-handled the kicking and struggling—not to mention squealing and secreting—Jeremy up the rear staircase and into the second-best guest suite’s dungeon. Miss Feng braced herself against the door while I rushed dizzily to the parlor and returned with a tube of InstaSteel Bulkhead Bond, with which we reinforced the stout oak partition. Finally, my stomach rebelled, quite outraged by the combination of sober-up and adrenaline, at which point Miss Feng diffidently suggested I proceed to the master bathroom and freshen up while she dealt with the porch, the pachyderm, and my suit in descending order of priorities.
By the time I’d cleaned up, Miss Feng had laid a freshly manufactured suit for me on the dresser. “I took the liberty of arranging for a limousine to your club, sir,” she said, almost apologetically. “It is approaching eighteen o’clock: one wouldn’t want to be late.”
“Eighteen—” I blinked. “Oh dear, that’s dashed awkward.”
“Indeed.” She watched me cautiously. “Ah, about the agency—”
I waved my hand dismissively. “If you can handle Jeremy, I see no reason why you couldn’t also handle Great-Uncle Arnold when he gets back from Proxima Tau Herpes or wherever he’s gone. Not to mention the Dread Aunts, bless ’em. Assuming, that is, you want the job—”
Miss Feng inclined her head. “Certainly one is prepared to assume the role for the duration of the probationary period.” Sotto voce she added, almost too quietly for me to catch, “Although continuing thereafter presupposes that one or both of us survives the experience . . .”
“Well, I’m glad that’s sorted.” I sniffed. “I’d better trot! If you could see the snooker table goes for repair and look to the curtains, I’ll be off, what-what?”
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