by Tom Holt
Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven. Thirty-six. This time, by virtue of quite unprecedented effort, Akram actually manages to raise the little finger of his left hand some thirty thousandths of an inch. By the time he’s managed that, and then slumped exhaustedly back to rest, Yasmin and Ali have boiled twenty thieves and are going back into the house for more hot water, having achieved more for the peace of Baghdad in ten minutes than the Earp boys managed after five long years in Tombstone.
Now, Akram muttered to himself. Come on, baby, just this once. Just for me. He clears his throat. It would have been easier to sneeze a camel out of one nostril. He speaks.
‘Here, boy,’ he croaks.
Yusuf, Ali Baba’s pet monkey, drops out of the mimosa tree. Here, boy means food, and Yusuf has a hunger that’d make a black hole look like Gandhi with indigestion. He snuffles around, searching -
Come on, you red-arsed clown. Time is running out. Please…
- And stops. He’s found something. A pretty, shiny round thing catches the moonlight and sparkles appealingly. Through the airhole in the jar, Akram can see him scratch his head, reach out and pick up the thing. Yes! Well, stage one, anyway. Allah, Akram reflects bitterly, my fate depends on my interpretation of the instinctive actions of a semi-domesticated pet monkey. It’s almost as bad as being in the army.
King Solomon’s Ring, that legendary piece of magical kit, allows the wearer to talk with the animals and birds. Conversely, if the wearer is an animal, it can talk to humans. Provided, of course, that it wants to, and can think of anything to say.
Please, baby, Akram prays. All I need is one break, one crack in the story. If I’m right, and there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that I am but what the hell, then if the story goes just a smidgen haywire, I might conceivably have a chance.
He can’t cross his fingers, not without slipping a disc, but he can pray, and he can hope. He does so.
The door opens: here comes the trolley, depressingly punctual. Now or never.
‘Hello,’ says the monkey - for some reason known only to the ring and King Solomon’s ghost, it has a thick Liverpool accent. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
Glorious, glorious. The phrase is one the monkey gets to hear quite often - when burgling the date store, for example, or when apprehended in the middle of a substantial peanut heist - so it was on the cards it’d come out with it at this supremely crucial moment. It is, of course, the very best thing it could have said. Ali and Yasmin freeze; Oh God, they think, one of them’s got out. They quickly abandon the trolley, dart back into the house and slam the bolts.
Go!
Come on, body. You and I go back a long way. When you were hungry, I fed you. When you were tired, I laid you down and covered you with rugs. When you fell over things in the dark and cut your knee, I was there for you with clean towels and ointment. You owe me. One little thing is all I ask. It’s at times like this you find out who your real friends are.
For the first ten trillionth of a second, nothing happens. The knees don’t spasm into explosive movement. The back fails to unbend like a coiled spring. The arms refuse to lift and shove the oil-jar lid clear. Not unreasonably, Akram begins to get angry.
I won’t tell you again.
When Akram speaks, particularly in that low, quiet voice of his, people do what he tells them to. It’s something to do with innate authority and natural leadership, augmented just a touch by a storywide reputation for instinctive violence and unspeakable cruelty. When Akram speaks to himself in an equivalent tone, tendons listen, muscles jump to it.
Go! Go! Go!
The flesh is willing but the spirit is bolshy. Hold on, it screams, you can’t do this, against the rules, more than my job’s worth. If they catch us doing this -
Well? What can they possibly do to you that I can’t, earlier and more sadistically?
The spirit doesn’t answer. It’s in two minds. On the one hand, the very thought of Authority has always filled it with an unreasoning terror. On the other hand; Authority is far away, up there somewhere between the sun and the underside of the clouds, whereas Akram is very much closer and only marginally, if at all, less terrifying. It’s the old, old question; who would you rather offend, a policeman across the street or a spouse sitting a mere lunge away from your throat?
All right, have it your own way. But don’t say I didn’t warn -
With a rattle and a crunch of splintering terracotta, the lid rolls clear and hits the ground. Like a genie out of a lamp (except that he’s a little smaller, and genies, though sabre-toothed and fiery-eyed, are rather more reassuring to meet on a dark night) Akram erupts out of the jar, lands heavily on one knee and one elbow, curses fluently, rolls and starts to run. He clears the courtyard wall in one enormous bound - perhaps you can visualise this better if you imagine swiftly moving numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of your mind’s screen - comes down beautifully poised on the balls of his feet, swiftly glances both ways to make sure he’s clear, and runs. Fourteen seconds later he’s in the Lamp-Maker’s quarter, disguised as a wandering fakir and negotiating keenly for a second-hand camel, long MOT, new saddle, good runner.
By the time Yasmin and Ali have saved up enough courage to peek out, see nobody there, and wheel the trolley back out again, he’s galloping through the western gate of the city. By the time the fortieth jar proves to be empty, giving Ali Baba a nasty turn of the same order of magnitude as a cat might experience on arriving at the Pearly Gates to find them guarded by fifteen-foot-high mice, he’s a very long way away indeed. So far away, in fact, that henceforth he will be extremely hard to find in this dimension… But that, as they say, is Another Story.
‘You sure?’ Ali Baba asks.
Yasmin nods. ‘We did counting at houri school,’ she adds, rather unnecessarily. ‘I got a B. We got thirty-nine bedraggled footpads and one empty jar.’ She shrugs. ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Thirty-nine out of forty’s not so bad.’
Ali Baba frowns. ‘Quite,’ he replies. ‘It’s almost as consoling as knowing you’re only going to have to face the Death of the One Cut. And who let that dratted monkey out?’
‘Nobody,’ retorts the dratted monkey, remembering too late that it isn’t supposed to be able to. ‘I mean nya-ha-ha-ha eek eek.’
‘Yusuf. Come here!’
Ah, the hell with it, mutters the monkey to itself; for the last time, because Ali Baba relieves it of the ring, muttering, ‘What the devil is this, I wonder?’ and henceforth when the monkey soliloquises, it’s back on familiar ground with Yek and Eepeepeep. A tiny part of its brain remembers that for a short while things were somehow different, but not for very long.
‘How very aggravating,’ says Ali Baba. ‘Oh well, never mind. Goes to show the danger of counting your thieves before they’re boiled. And afterwards, too,’ he adds uncertainly. ‘Come on, let’s have a nice cup of tea before we take this lot to the tip.’
The story has changed.
Yes; up to a point. The sea changes when you throw a rock into it; a hole appears where a moment ago there was water. It doesn’t stay that way for very long, however. A very large quantity of water has an unsettling knack of usually having the last word, and stories aren’t much better about admitting defeat.
About this time, in Ali Baba’s courtyard, there should be twelve-foot-high invisible letters spelling out THE END, followed by the names of the assistant producer, cameraman and chief lighting engineer. Instead, there are smaller letters, and they say:
Temporary interference; please do not adjust your set
while the severed tendrils of plot lash out wildly, as the continuity spiders throw out gossamer lines to make it fast to the nearest convenient anchoring-point. A loose story is a deadly thing; all sorts of flies that usually wouldn’t have to worry about it are suddenly at risk.
And there’s worse.
The story is angry.
CHAPTER THREE
Whatever prompted her to put on Aunt Fatty’s ring, it w
asn’t vanity. It encircled her finger like the tab from a Coke can, and was marginally less comfortable. It kept hitting the keyboard as she typed, bringing strange symbols up out of the depths of the WP; peculiar sigils and runes, the sort of thing that even software writers generally only see in their sleep, after a midnight snack of Canadian cheddar. To make matters worse, they proved singularly hard to delete. One of them, a weird little design that looked uncommonly like two very amorous snakes, had to be chased all round the screen with the cursor, and when Michelle finally backed it into a corner between two windows, it took three point-blank bursts from the delete key to finish it off. Even then, she had the unpleasant feeling that it was still there, hiding in the lost files and watching her.
Having killed it as best she could, she leaned back in her exquisitely uncomfortable health-and-safety-approved ergonomic WP operator’s chair (they use a similar model, virtually identical except for added electrodes, in some of the more conservative American states) and stared out of the window. In the tiny crack between the two neighbouring office blocks, she could see a flat blue thing which an as yet unsuppressed sliver of memory told her was the Sky. Hello sky, she thought.
‘Christ,’ she muttered to herself. ‘What am I doing here?’
Bleep. Bleep-bleep. The red light which served as the machine’s answer to the cartoonist’s thought-bubble with an axe in a log of wood in it flashed twice. Bleep.
‘What you should be doing,’ said the machine, ‘is getting on with inputting the East Midlands averages.’
Michelle blinked. Someone had spoken; someone, furthermore, who was either a Dalek {Legal & Equitable Life pic is an equal opportunities employer with a policy of positive discrimination in favour of minority ethnic and cultural minorities; L&E press release, 15/5/97), a heavy smoker or being silly. She looked round. At the next work-station, Sharon was locked in symbiotic communion with her machine. On the other side of her, Claire’s chair was empty; a sure sign the fleet was in. Claire seemed to catch things off transatlantic container ships; most spectacularly Johannes, a six-foot-four Dutchman with the biggest ears Michelle had ever seen on a two-legged life form.
Curious. Maybe they’d fitted voice-boxes to the machines without telling anybody; unlikely, since such gadgets cost money, and L&E, like most insurance companies, objected to parting with money under any circumstances whatsoever. Still, Michelle reasoned, if they ever did splash out on modems for the screens, it’s sure as eggs they wouldn’t tell us till a fortnight afterwards, whereupon a snotty memo would come round demanding to know why no one was using the expensive new technology. She decided to experiment.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ replied the machine, ‘it is alive after all, I was beginning to wonder. Was it anything I did, or are you just extremely badly brought up?’
Michelle frowned. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘It’s rude,’ replied the machine, ‘to ignore people. Ignoring them and prodding them in the keyboard at the same time is downright offensive.’
‘Sorry.’ Michelle’s eyebrows crowded together, like sheep harassed by a dog. ‘I expect you’re Japanese,’ she said.
‘Korean,’ replied the screen. ‘You bigoted or something?’
‘No, not at all,’ Michelle replied. People were looking at her. ‘I think you’re really clever, the things you come up with. You must be one of these artificial intelligences, then.’
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.’
‘Fair enough. Can you switch off the voice thing, please? I think I’ll stick to using the keyboard till we get proper training.’
‘Same to you with brass knobs on,’ the machine said huffily. The same words then appeared in a window on the screen, and vanished. The telephone rang.
‘Legal and Equitable Assurance, Michelle speaking, can I help you?’
‘You’d better apologise to the computer,’ said the phone, ‘otherwise it’ll sulk. And guess who’ll get the thick end of it if it does? Me.’
‘Who is this, please?’
‘If you don’t believe me, ask the franking machine. Trouble is, if the computer sulks, the whole bloody office has a moody. On account of progress,’ added the phone bitterly, ‘and the new technology.’
Quick glance at the calendar; no, not April the First. ‘Look …’ Michelle said.
‘The computer gets all uptight and upsets the fax machine, the fax machine takes it out on the switchboard, the switchboard picks a fight with the thermal binder, the thermal binder quarrels with the photocopier and breaks off the engagement - that engagement’s been broken more times than the Fifth Commandment, I think they must get some sort of buzz out of tearing bits off each other - and the next thing you know, they’ve overloaded the wiring and the lights go out all over Hampshire. So before you say anything tactless to the machinery, think on.’
‘Hey,’ said Michelle briskly. ‘Shut up.’
‘You see?’ complained the telephone. ‘Silly mare doesn’t listen to a word I say. Not that I care, I mean, one thing you can’t be if you’re a phone is at all thin-skinned, you’d be in the funny farm inside a week if you took any notice. But if you were to go saying things like that to the cistern, next day half of Southampton’d be going to work by boat.’
‘Shut up!’
The telephone shut up; there was a click, followed by the dialling tone. Dear God, muttered Michelle to herself as she replaced the receiver, there’s some right nutters work in this place. As you’d expect, come to think of it. Like it says on the tea-room wall, you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it surely does help.
The computer had switched itself off. Gee, Michelle growled to herself, thanks. You’re not the only ones who can sulk, you know. We carbon-based life-forms are pretty good at it, too. She leaned forward and hit the switch. Nothing happened.
‘Not,’ said the machine, ‘until you apologise.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not too much to ask, surely,’ the machine whined.
Michelle looked round to see what everybody else was making of this performance, but nobody seemed interested. Maybe they were having similar problems of their own; but apparently not. All round the huge inputting-pen, screens were glowing, fingers were rattling on keyboards, faces were glazed over with that unmistakable Jesus-is-it-still-only-half-eleven look you only seem to get in big offices.
‘Please,’ Michelle said. ‘Stop it.’
‘Look who’s talking,’ the machine went on. ‘Look, it’s high time we got this sorted out. I mean, God only knows I’m not the sort to bear a grudge, but you still haven’t said you’re sorry for that time you spilt hot chocolate all over my keys. Have you any idea how sordid that makes you feel, being all sticky and gummy in your works? I’ve still got bits of fluff stuck to my return springs, it’s so degrading…’
Michelle stared. Yes, it was the machine talking; she was certain of that. Obviously there was some bizarre experiment going on, probably the brainchild of some psychotic systems analyst, and she was the victim.
‘This,’ she said aloud, ‘is no longer amusing. Please stop, or I’ll pull your plug out.’
‘Like that, is it? Violence? Threats? You really think that’ll solve anything?’
‘Good point,’ Michelle replied. ‘I could try hitting you with the heel of my shoe. It made the shredder work, that time it ate Bill Potter’s tie.’
‘I must warn you,’ said the machine icily. ‘You lay one finger on me and that’ll be our whole working relationship up the spout, for good. And that goes for the printer, too.’
‘She’s right,’ said the printer. ‘You big bully.’
‘That does it,’ said Michelle, and pulled the plug. The screen cut off in mid-bleep, and the green dot faded into a pinprick. Michelle sighed and leaned back in her chair.
‘You haven’t heard the last of this.’
‘ What!’ Michelle jerked upright; the bloody thing was off at the mains, how could it… ?
‘And you can get off me, while you’re at it,’ added the chair. ‘Pick on someone your own size, you fascist.’ Michelle stood up and began to back away. ‘Christine,’ she called out, trying to keep her voice calm and even, ‘could you come and look at my machine, please? I think there’s something wrong with it.’
‘Sticks and stones,’ muttered the computer.
‘Pots and kettles, more like,’ replied the telephone.
‘I never did like her,’ added the stapler. ‘Never trust anybody who comes to work in green suede slingbacks.’
‘Christine!’
‘Now what?’ There’s one in every office; unflappable, competent, overworked, smug as a dying bishop. ‘What have you gone and done to it now?’
‘Nothing. It just won’t…’ Oh God, Michelle thought, does it happen this quickly? I thought you started off with mild depression, then bad dreams, then a couple of months of acting strangely, and only then do you start hearing the Angel Gabriel commanding you to drive the English out of Gascony. Apparently not. Oh bugger.
‘Won’t what?’
‘Won’t work,’ Michelle said feebly, moving aside as Christine sat down on the chair. ‘It’s sort of, well, playing up.’
Christine looked round. ‘It helps if you plug it in,’ she said. ‘Next time, give that a try before calling me, okay?’
Take off the ring. ‘But I only unplugged it because …’
‘You shouldn’t unplug it, ever,’ Christine was saying. ‘I knew you weren’t listening when we did training. If you’ve broken it I’m going to have to tell Mr Gilchrist.’
Aunt Fatty and the alarm clock. Talking to things. Take off the ring. ‘Could you just try it, Chris? Please? I’m sure you can make it work.’ As she spoke, Michelle found the ring and started to tug. It wouldn’t budge. I might have guessed it runs in families, she told herself. After all, I’ve got Mum’s nose, so it’s reasonable enough that if there’s pottiness on her side of the family…