The Weeping Genii was in the semi-final match against Battering Ram Bently, and I felt a curious excitement as they got ready for that bout. Battering Ram came into the ring with his manager. And then the other manager seemed to come into the ring alone. He carried several towels and a half-gallon bottle. Then, when the referee motioned the wrestlers to come to the center of the ring, the Genii's manager pulled the cork out of that bottle, and the Genii poured out of it. Sure enough, he was only about as big as a squirrel at first, and then he expanded to six-foot-nine-inches and three hundred and eighty pounds. The two wrestlers joined battle. And nobody seemed at all amazed by the unbottling trick. Well, it amazed me.
“How did they do that?” I asked a lady next to me.
“Oh, it's all a fake,” the lady said. “You know that everything in professional wrestling is a fake. Yi, yi, yi, kill him, kill him, kill him, Genii!”
“How in the world did that huge creature come out of that little bottle?” I asked the lady on the other side of me.
“Oh, they borrowed that from the Arabian Nights that we read when we were little,” the lady said. “It's all a trick, of course. You know that everything in professional wrestling is a trick. Wow, wow, wow, gouge his eyes out, Weeper! Break him in two, Battering Ram!”
The Weeping Genii wept when the Battering Ram battered him around, and it was good show to see that great hulk crying like that. And yet the Genii had the better of it, and he won the bout. He was popular. The Battering Ram was the good guy and the Genii was the villain. But he was a villain that everybody liked. And after his hand had been raised in victory, he diminished and entered into the half-gallon bottle again. And his manager corked the bottle and carried it away with him. And still nobody seemed to regard it as an extraordinary trick.
I didn't stay to see the main event. I followed the manager with his bottled Genii. I had to get an interview with them. I caught up with them in the dining room of the Fairmont Mayo downtown. The manager had a fine meal already spread out before him. And the Genii in the bottle also seemed to have a fine meal spread out before him, on a banquet table not even an inch long. The Genii had a lot of room to move about in that bottle.
“I want an interview with either or both of you,” I said. “Nobody else seemed to pay much attention to it, but yours is the slickest trick that I ever saw in my life.”
“It's a little too sophisticated for the common people,” the manager said, “but it's a good trick and I have my livelihood from it.” He took the cork out of the bottle. “I'll answer any question you want to ask, as will my associate, Ifrit the Genii. But he's a little hard to hear in his smaller state. You'd just about have to get down on his mensural level to hold conversation with him. You may as well ask me what you have on your mind first.”
“How does the Genii grow small, or how do you make him grow small?”
“It only works for persons of honest heart,” the manager said. “Persons of good heart, whether of the Genie or the human sort, have only to say four words in Arabian, 'El-hadd el-itnein el-talat el-arba, and they will grow small quickly, but not so quickly as to bewilder them.”
“You said the words and you did not grow small,” I charged.
“No, I'm a black-hearted and dishonest-hearted person. I don't know what you are. But, so that you will not find yourself marooned, let me tell you that to grow large again you must say three other Arabian words: ‘El khamis el-goma el-sabt.’ ”
“That's the damnedest spoof I ever heard of,” I said.
“Try it,” the manager told me. “If you are of brave heart as well as honest heart, try it. You have nothing to lose except your own orientation and perhaps your life. And you stand to gain a whole new way of looking at things.”
“'El-hadd el-itnein el-talat el-arba.” I spoke the words bravely. No. I didn't begin to grow smaller. Everything else in the world began to grow larger. I climbed onto the enlarging table. I hooked my fingers over the rim of the mouth of the bottle. And when I was in the bottle and had become stabilized in my smaller size, I conducted an interview with Ifrit the Genii. In this I use the form Genii for the singular and Genie for the plural. I know that's incorrect, but that's Ifrit's usage and that of the other Genie.
MYSELF:
Just what is a Genii?
IFRIT:
We are a species a little lower than the Angels. To put it bluntly, we're a species a little bit lower than almost everything. There are three races of the Genii, the Gul who are always male, the Ifrit who may be either male or female, and the Sila who are always female. I am a male Ifrit. Ifrit is not my personal name. We do not have personal names. But that is what my manager calls me for want of something better, and that is what you may call me for convenience.
MYSELF:
How in the world do the Gul who are all male or the Sila who are all female have offspring?
IFRIT:
Mostly by the natural method. Some of them have their births by section, though. And some of them give birth under hypnosis or anesthesia, much as do humans. But in the beginning it was always the natural method.
MYSELF:
This is quite luxurious here, Ifrit. This seems to be a larger place by the moment. It's a real manor house you have here. This veranda is as big as a castle by itself. How does it all come about?
IFRIT:
I carve some of the things out of little pieces of wood when I'm in my larger form. Rough carving is all that's needed. And my manager buys some of the little things in toy stores and drops them into the bottle. Then, when I come into the bottle, the things are no longer little, and they're no longer rough. They become perfectly arranged and perfectly formed. And they become incredibly detailed. New details add themselves from only shadowy hints or from none at all.
MYSELF:
But that's beyond all reason and nature. That's magic.
IFRIT:
Oh sure. Magic on a small scale is always freely given, and we make use of it by going on a small scale ourselves. That grand piano there, it's of concert quality. And yet the original of it was only a penny piece of plastic out of a crackerjack box. But, as we say, there's really nothing magic about magic. It is the natural ambient of us Genie.
MYSELF:
Are you the slave of your manager? Is he your master?
IFRIT:
Oh, I suppose so. The arrangement is a pretty good one. A Genii can only have one manager at a time, and if he has a good master, he's safe from falling under the dominion of a bad one. Mine is a pretty good master, and I have a good life. In two-thirds of the towns on the circuit I'm visited by others of my kind. We have our own methods of getting together. And I have my books and my records here, more than ten thousand of each. I have my flute and my violin and my piano. I have all the best to eat and drink. I have my correspondence. We have our own bottle-to-bottle instant mail service. The phrase ‘A message found in a bottle’ has more meaning than you'd believe. And I have several hundred human friends who have mastered their fear and who visit me on my estate here. Even my gladiatorial combats are rather fun. It is to play the ‘Giant of the First Kind’ in a miming form of comic drama when I do the wrestling. There are also times when I become a ‘Giant of the Second Kind’, a giant who is more than a mile tall. Oh, we're a prodigious people! And when I look up from my estate here, it is the humans who are the giants. Sometimes a bunch of them look like a skyful of giants to me. We Genie may always have masters because we belong to an inferior race.
MYSELF:
But what about the Genie who are slaves to bad masters?
IFRIT:
Oh, they have a bad time of it. There's a breaking point, but it's so final a breaking point that it's never been used yet. If you ever get a Genii completely in your power, Henry, don't push him to the limit. Every Genii knows a word he can say that will bring the world to its end. It's a dangerous and fearful situation.
MYSELF:
What is the word, Ifrit?
IFRIT:
MYSELF:
Why are you billed as the ‘Weeping Genii’? Why do you weep?
IFRIT:
I've always been a very emotional person, and tears come easy to me. And it's a miming role that I enjoy. I used to be billed as the ‘Weeping Axe-Man’ when I was a gladiator at Rome.
MYSELF:
How old are you, Ifrit?
IFRIT:
I'm a little over eleven thousand years old. My master, that giant in the sky above us, above this bottle, has fallen asleep over his wine. You had better lam now or he may decide to hold you for ransom. All he has to do is put the cork in the bottle and you're trapped. He does tricks like that. Up the ladder quickly now! That's fine. Now the three words!
MYSELF:
El-khamis el-goma el-sabt.
Then I was out of the bottle and was my own size again. I found myself rather awkwardly standing on a table in the dining room of the Fairmont Mayo, but I jumped down quietly and left the room as nonchalantly as I could.
Ifrit and his manager left town quite early the next morning. Ifrit had a wrestling date that night in Muskogee, and then he had them on successive nights in Fort Smith, Little Rock, Texarkana, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Port Arthur, and Beaumont. I followed along after them and had further interviews with Ifrit in each of those eight towns. In five of them, he was also visited by friends, either human or Genie, in his estate-in-the-bottle. Ifrit and I became the best friends in the world. He was a person of deep-rooted culture; and he also had a strong and endearing streak of goofiness in him. He may even have been a tall-story teller. He told me that he had a wife, that she was currently living in a three-liter gin bottle in the Netherlands, that she was carrying a child of his, but that the birth would be not at all soon. The gestation period of Genie, Ifrit said, was a hundred and eighty-seven years, and only half of that time had passed with his wife. But another Genii, also of the Ifrit race, told me that my friend Ifrit had been spoofing me, that the gestation period of Genie is only ninety-four years, and that the wife of Ifrit would come to her time within thirty years. Which one to believe?
All things that are worn or carried by a person when he enters a bottle are miniaturized along with him. But it is not really the case of the person or his things being miniaturized at all, but of his being put into a different juxtaposition with all things else in the world so that there is greater variance of apparent size. And for this reason also, the space inside a bottle may sometimes seem much more vast than at other times. And it is generally the case that as a person develops his estate-in-a-bottle he is given more space in which to develop it.
All in all, my friendship with Ifrit was among the most rewarding of my life. When I left the wrestling circuit after eight days with Ifrit on the road, I felt a terrible loss.
“But after all, I will be wrestling through this part of the country again in three months time,” Ifrit reassured me.
He had heard through their own networks that about a thousand humans in the United States alone had now set up plush estates-in-bottles. This had become the most exclusive of all the in movements. You had to be pretty well in even to have heard of it. But some of those thousand humans, Ifrit gave the opinion, didn't really have the temperament to handle bottled estates.
This was on the night that Ifrit had defeated the Alligator Man in a bout in Beaumont, and had then fulfilled his vaunt to cut enough out of the Alligator Man's hide to have made for himself a pair of alligator shoes. And Ifrit did cut the pieces out of the hide of his defeated opponent right there in the ring with a big knife. It was all a hoax, though. That was not the real hide of the Alligator Man. He actually had an ordinary skin like that of yourself or myself, and the alligator hide was only part of his costume.
And the Shoemaker from the “Great Colossal Imperial Alligator Shoe Factory of Tampa Florida” was faking it all when he went for the world's record (nineteen seconds) for making a pair of alligator shoes right there in the ring. Nevertheless, the Shoemaker seemed to be making the shoes, while drum rolls marked off the seconds, and while the Alligator Man still lay on his belly and writhed, and screamed at the holes that were cut in his hide. And the shoes, size eighteen very wide, did fit Ifrit's big bare feet perfectly, though really they had been bought previously and only seemed to be made by the Shoemaker in the ring. The loudspeakers announced though that the new world's record for making a pair of alligator shoes had been set, and that it was eighteen-point-nine-nine-two seconds.
This was all fun. It was part of the folk fakery of professional wrestling. Yet I realized at my heart-wrenching leave-taking that night that there was one thing in professional wrestling that was not a fake. Ifrit the Genii was not a fake. He was the most genuine person I had ever met.
The last words he said to me that night at our parting were, “Why don't you get a bottle of your own, Henry?” And he added, “Beware of the Pride of Lions in the Sky. That is the only threat to you that I see.”
I smiled. We have very few lions in the skies in my part of the country.
No, there is not any twist to this account, no flashy ending. I will not hoke it up in any way. There is nothing here except the plain observed facts about a patient creature who was born into slavery, a valiant member of a vanishing species that is something of an anomaly in the modern world, a good person, an admirable person, a friendly person. No great deeds attach to him, no exciting actions, and none will be invented for him. I write only, “He is a good person,” and if that is not exciting, then we will do without excitement this day.
I did, as Ifrit had suggested, get a bottle of my own, an empty gallon bottle that had once held Red Rosa wine. I put it in a fence corner off an alley behind St. Louis Street, about four feet above the concrete, where two of the fence braces joined. No one would notice it there or bother it there. I put just enough water in it to make a large lake, and enough dirt and pebbles to supply spacious and rolling meadows and sudden mountains. I seeded other things in there with microscopic tokens of themselves. I came and went into my bottle, into my own estate or universe there. I felt like Superman entering that little bottle that contained a great estate and world. And my estate thrived quickly, as I explained at the beginning of this account. In my estate-in-a-bottle I had beautiful friends, a beautiful manor house, a beautiful lake, and beautiful mountains. Listen, did you ever course and race fine horses for mile after mile on the inside of a gallon bottle that had once contained Red Rosa wine? Were your evenings-at-home ever the most cultural in town, the most boozy, the most In-Groupy? Did you ever feel that your bottle was so full that it was running over?
Then disaster struck! Oh, it struck only five minutes ago. It was so sudden that I am not yet able to appreciate the magnitude of it. My seven best friends, including my fiancée, went up the ladder to the mouth of the bottle just at dawn after the happiest night we had ever experienced together. Then I looked up to watch them going, and I saw the Lions in the Sky, and I froze with fear and horror. And my friends, as they emerged from the throat of the bottle and began to say the three enlarging words, were slapped to their deaths. It was a mother cat there, and she slapped each of my friends (including my fiancée) to one of her seven kittens to eat like bugs.
This, since the striking of that disaster, has been the longest five minutes of my life.
Oh, I see too late that I am one of those humans who lacks the temperament to run an estate-in-a-bottle. And I failed to heed the warning of Ifrit about the dreaded Lions in the Sky. And now I fear that there is no way that I can escape gory death.
Still and all, I was the hottest host in town for a while, and to the Innest Group. And it
may have been worth it.
The biggest of the Lions in the Sky, the mother cat, has her paw over the mouth of the bottle, and she is wobbling the bottle. By the flick of her giant tail in the sky I can tell that she is calculating everything minutely.
She will tip the bottle. It will fall four feet to the concrete and it will shatter.
How fast can I say three enlarging words after I stand free from the shattered bottle? How fast can the mother cat and those seven kittens pounce on what they believe is a tasty bug?
I'll race you for it, Lions in the Sky!
Buckets Full of Brains
CHARACTERS: SEVEN, An Artificial Intelligence FIVE , " " "
THREE, " " "
ONE , " " "
SIX , " " "
FOUR , " " "
TWO , " " "
AN AMBIGUOUS HUMAN of the upper-echelon technical class.
They are on a pleasant, regular, and artificial landscape. They begin, as always, with a bit of ritual, and then they merge into brainy speculation.
SEVEN: “In the beginning was the mathematics. There could have been any number of systems of mathematics, but one in particular was imposed exclusively. How it was imposed we can not know for it was mathematics in a void, as any reasonable mathematics must be. After the mathematics, there were the creations, and these were tested against the mathematics. Each of the creations failed to conform to the mathematical system and so they were expunged completely. Seven such systems failed so completely to measure up that we cannot arrive at the details of them at all. We live in the eighth creation.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 295