The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories

by Mahvesh Murad

  Fahima made her way to the bridge and stood where she imagined the pilots might, looking out towards their destination. A shuttle blinked overhead. Fahima watched as it moved away from the port, growing steadily smaller until it vanished.

  It was widely acknowledged that Mars was infested with jinn. Allah might have made the red planet specifically for them; they loved its dust, its volcanic landscape and boundless plains. Earth had become too crowded. What was left of the rolling sands, the desert caves that cooled with the lowering sun? The jinn have been squeezed out, she thought. Chased from one world to the next by an insatiable human race; little wonder that they, too, have turned their gaze to Ganymede.

  Or perhaps they have been here all along. Perhaps this territory rightfully belongs to them, and can only be taken through war. Perhaps they have ambitions to reach beyond this system, to inhabit other, more isolated planets, places that could never be conquered by the physical realm.

  Humans misunderstood jinn; they regarded them as childish and chaotic because the consequences of their actions could be childish and chaotic. In reality, the jinn had a design to their work. The choice of this ship was intentional.

  Fahima remembered the swirl of desert sand, the lustrous music of the wind as it sang through her hair. She remembered Aamir Ridha Ajam, and the words she had whispered in his ear. Then she banished the thought of him altogether.

  HOW EASY TO slip through the seams, unnoticed, and if you are noticed, to quickly revert. Easy to hide when you are slim as smoke. As fast as light. As slippery as – aaaah. There goes one of the earthbound. Thud, thud, heavy as mud. Heavy, even when they creep. We are no weight upon the earth. We dash and dart, we flip and fly! We are the voice in your head, the holes in the wiring. We are the unseen, the invisible, the invincible.

  FAHIMA LET THE lemur clamber from her shoulder and down her leg. He crouched on the floor, orange eyes alert, striped tail flicking back and forth.

  “Go,” she said.

  The lemur ran. She closed her eyes and entered his.

  Through the lemur she saw the obsolete cryopods, disconnected and sealed shut prior to replacement. She saw the crew’s lockers, emptied of possessions, and the rows of spacesuits, with one conspicuous gap. She saw the bunks inside the cabins, sheets tucked in at the corners as though they had never been used, never been slept upon. She saw the prayer room where the imam had kneeled and faced east. She saw the office where Bukhari had paced, day and night, night and day. She saw the decontamination chamber. She felt the shiver that raised the lemur’s fur, could feel the terrible death that had happened there. Was the physicist’s soul trapped on board, or had she journeyed on?

  She saw the lemur freeze, and his ears went back.

  SLIP, SLIDE, SNICK, snack, here we are in the dark and back. Oh, she’s watching. Yes, she’s watching. Why has she come, my dears? Why can’t she leave us alone? Why won’t she? It’s so selfish. This is such a nice cave.

  WHEN THE LEMUR returned, Fahima sat on the floor of the bridge, her legs lotused, her hands resting palm-up in surrender. She shut her eyes and let her breath flow freely. Some minutes passed before she felt it; a gathering of the air, a tightness in her lungs as though the oxygen content of the room had suddenly dropped. Fear gripped her. They were here. Left to their devices, they had grown, gained in strength. They had tasted autonomy, and found it to their liking.

  She forced herself to absorb the fear, to ride the wings of her terror. If they sensed weakness, they would defy her. She felt herself unfolding, reaching out into the corners of the room, and beyond its walls, expanding along corridors, through doors and shutters and hatches and into berths where the traces of dreams still lingered upon pillows. Now she occupied the ship in its entirety.

  Come, she said. Come, my children.

  They began to move.

  She knew them, every one.

  She had come back for them.

  Something distracted her. A niggling, small but insistent, and close, very close indeed. She opened her eyes. Flash of shadow, quick as light. A mouse shot out across the floor and froze. She felt pressure against her shoulder – the kick of hind paws – saw a blur of black and white. The lemur had pinned it.

  She extended her hand.

  “Bring it here.”

  The lemur was reluctant to part with his prize. The primates were not hunters, but he had taken on something of her nature. She held the mouse between cupped hands, feeling the vibrations of its tiny body against her palms.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will do.”

  THE JINN HUNTER exited the ship carrying a small plastic box. Bukhari could see something quivering inside.

  “Are you done?” he asked.

  She lifted the box.

  “Yes. I got what I needed.”

  She had used a mouse, she said. Trapped the jinn inside its body. Bukhari didn’t want to examine the mouse closely, in case it looked at him like that diabolical monkey in the cryopod. He transferred the agreed sum and bid her a hasty farewell.

  As soon as the jinn hunter had departed, the ship felt lighter. He touched his fingers to his forehead. They came away dry. They’re gone, he thought. He boarded the ship and made his way tentatively to the bridge. For the first time in months, it felt empty. A sob ran through him; he collapsed to the floor. They were gone. They were finally gone. He lay there for a moment, allowing himself to enjoy the sensation of peace. To be completely still. Then he prostrated himself, and said his thanks to God.

  After a while he sat up. They were gone. He would find his crew in the local mosque or one of the portside bars. At last they could return to the ship, restore their belongings, and set a departure date for Ganymede.

  AS BUKHARI MADE his way back through the port, he spotted one of his junior officers weaving towards him, accompanied by an elderly man in a white thoub.

  “Sir! I was looking for you everywhere. Allow me to introduce Aamir Ridha Ajam. He’s just come off the Earth flight.”

  Ajam smiled and bowed. “Peace be upon you.”

  In his confusion, Bukhari failed to return the greeting.

  “But your apprentice has already left, she’s cleansed the ship –”

  The old man peered at him curiously.

  “You must be mistaken, Captain. I have no apprentices. I work alone, I always have.”

  “Then who...?”

  There was an itchiness at Bukhari’s scalp. He raised his fingers. They came back wet.

  He felt his chest constrict. Ignoring the protests of his officer, he began to push through the crowds, searching for the unmistakable figure of the young woman and her lemur. But the flight from Earth was disembarking. The port was at its busiest, full of people rushing to greet one another, chattering excitedly after months or years of separation, and the jinn hunter’s apprentice was nowhere in sight.

  Message in a Bottle

  K.J. Parker

  ONCE UPON A time, there lived a scholar in the city of Perimadeia. Opinions are divided on this man. Some say he was the most evil man who ever lived. Others maintain that he was a saint, a visionary and the father of modern science. There’s an abundance of sound evidence and convincing arguments on both sides. I’ve been studying his work all my adult life, and I have to say I’m undecided. I’m almost inclined to add that it doesn’t really matter, to me; I study the work, not the man, and the work is brilliant. The truth, after all, is neither good nor bad; like a billet of steel or a length of wood, it’s raw material. And Antigono Scaevola had a gift for nosing out the truth, no doubt about that. They say he kept a demon in a bottle, who told him everything he wanted to know, but that’s just ignorance and superstition. Would it were that easy.

  THE GOLDEN SCALES monastery is not my favourite institute of learning. They collect manuscripts, preserve priceless documents that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago, and what do they do with them? They lock them up, not allowing anyone to see them – because, they say, these papers contain dangerou
s learning, facts and data inherently pernicious; ‘guilty wisdom’ is the term they use, bless them. Their argument seems to be that some information – some manifestations of the truth – is so negatively charged that it can’t be allowed out. They can’t bring themselves to kill it, by tearing, burning or composting, so they lock it up in prison, indefinitely, in solitary confinement. This is their mission, and they’re fanatical about it. And one of their prisoners is Scaevola’s Concerning the Plague.

  The Abbot led me down six flights of narrow, winding stairs – I’m not good with stairs, I get vertigo, and there wasn’t even a handrail. There wouldn’t be; the stairs and passages in the Golden Scales were built to be defended, in case someone came along with an army, to steal the weapons-grade learning by force. At the foot of the stairs was a long, narrow gallery, with iron gates every five yards; at each gate, a fully-armoured porter with a crossbow. Directly overhead was the River Auno; if an attacking army got beyond a certain point, the plug would be pulled and four miles of underground passages would be flooded in a minute. The books, of course, are up four flights from the end of the passages, so they’d escape the deluge. That’s Golden Scales thinking for you. You can see why I’m not keen.

  Scaevola was in a cell on his own, with an iron door an inch thick. The guards are lay brethren, traditionally No Vei, fearless, incorruptible and certified illiterate. They have orders to shoot on sight anybody who appears before their outer gate who isn’t accompanied by a senior member of Chapter.

  From all this you don’t need to be Saloninus to figure out which side the Golden Scales is on in the Scaevola debate. Personally, if I have an opinion, I incline marginally towards the opposite view. I wasn’t about to say so in this company, however.

  WHEN YOU ACTUALLY get in there, the Scaevola archive is disappointingly small. It consists of one book – the autograph manuscript of Concerning the Plague, the only copy in existence – and a bottle.

  The book is interesting. Scaevola didn’t write on a parchment roll, like you or I would do. No, he had a proper codex book made up and bound, its pages pumiced smooth and blank, for him to write on. Clearly he was confident that he wouldn’t have to make many corrections or alterations. By the same token, he was confident that his work would merit preservation, and would be consulted regularly. His handwriting is classic Archaic cursive miniature, supremely elegant, beautifully clear and neat, with wide margins, the words precisely and amply spaced, every letter the same height. He did his own illumination; only the capitals, in an austere but attractive abstract style, using reds, blues and the very occasional blush of gold leaf. When you look at a page of his work as an object, an artefact, it conveys a sense of great calm, detachment, a beautiful mind, an almost inhuman timelessness. You’d expect a god to write like that, causing the words to appear on the parchment without the involvement of pen or brush. Let it be written, he commanded; and it was so.

  The bottle, by contrast, was just a bottle. Three inches high, cylindrical, of dark green glass, stoppered with a circular glass plug and sealed with pine-pitch. My father used to dig up bottles like that all the time, when he was a gardener at the Conservatory. In terms of style and fabric it was exactly right for Scaevola; two hundred years old, unmistakably Mezentine. They made millions of bottles like that, and sold them right across the world, sometimes empty, more usually containing perfume, arrow-poison or fermented fish sauce. The glass is so opaque that you can’t see what’s inside, but there’s a little scrap of a label, glued on with rabbit-fur gum. It reads For the Plague.

  I’D BEEN GREETED at the water-gate by the Abbot himself. He was a big, burly man with a neck like an ox, massive broad hands (like my father’s); hard to imagine those fingers turning pages or cradling a pen. He had a high, sharp voice and exquisite vowels. I don’t think he approved of me. It was raining, and his hair was plastered to his head.

  “Under normal circumstances –” It was the fifth or sixth time he’d said that. “Under normal circumstances, we would never entertain such an application, not even with lives at risk. There have been outbreaks of plague before; undoubtedly there will be again. That is not our fault.”

  We were walking across a quadrangle so fast that I had to trot to keep up. I knew I was expected to say something at this point, but I had no idea what. So I said, “Absolutely.”

  “An explicit request from the Chancellor, however –” He shrugged, without slowing down. “And I grant you, the situation is exceptionally grave, unprecedented. Accordingly, I felt I had no alternative but to put my own reservations to one side and agree to this –” He frowned, unable to come up with a category that my visit fell into, or a word to describe it. “You may have full access, subject to supervision. I trust that will be acceptable.”

  He made me feel as though I’d got his daughter pregnant and then asked the size of the dowry. “Thank you,” I said. Let the record show, by the way, that nobody had thanked me for anything, at any point in the proceedings; none of my superiors at the Studium, nobody in the civil government, certainly none of the Golden Scales mob. I, of course, was the poor sod who was going to save the City. Or wipe out the human race. One or the other, anyhow.

  A LITTLE CONTEXT. There are, of course, two main varieties of plague; the Red Death, which kills one in five, spreads at roughly walking pace, and burns itself out within a month; and the White Death, which travels faster than a greyhound can run, kills one in three, and can last for over a year. The outbreak reported in the City was almost certainly the Red Death; the milder form, but still no laughing matter in a city crowded to bursting with refugees and liable to be besieged at any moment. Quite apart from the humanitarian considerations, a twenty per cent mortality rate would reduce the garrison to the point where the City couldn’t be effectively defended. Without the City, the source of nearly a third of its revenue, the Council simply couldn’t afford to continue the war.

  Hence the urgency.

  Opinions, you see, are divided. Some authorities, reputable and credible, believe that Scaevola found a cure for the Red Death, but died before it could be tested during a major outbreak. The opposite view – the most-evil-man-that-ever-lived tendency – maintain that Scaevola studied the Red Death all his life with a view, not to curing it, but to improving it; and that the fruit of his labours was the White Death, which occurred for the first time in the same year that he died. A subsection of that party goes further and asserts that the White Death was merely a prototype, and that Scaevola died, ironically of his own plague, after he had perfected but before he released the final version. My job was to examine the evidence and decide – before the outbreak took hold, and before the Duke’s army reached the City – whether the famous bottle stored in the vaults of the Golden Scales and helpfully labelled For the Plague contained the cure or the hundred-per-cent effective Mark II.

  No pressure.

  ANTIGONO SCAEVOLA: BORN in an obscure village in Aelia, uncertain when; took his vows at the White Bone monastery (at that time a lowly provincial priory) in the year that Gaiseric died; moved from the White Bone to the Arrowhead at some unknown point in his career; recorded as precentor of the Arrowhead in AUC 667, though the reference may just possibly be to his cousin, Antipholo Scaevola, also a monk in the same order; died at some point after AUC 682, probably. All his life he studied the plague, drawing on the extensive medical library of the Arrowhead and his own field work among the peasants of the Hugin valley during the devastating outbreaks of the ’sixties and ’seventies. Along the way, he invented what we now call the ‘scientific method’ – hypothesis, enquiry, experiment, proof, review; laid the foundations of modern medical alchemy; identified the seat of the choleric and sanguine humours; from his notes are drawn the cures for such now-extinct monsters as marsh fever and Aelian dropsy, though he lacked either the time or the inclination to bring the cures to usable form himself. There are hundreds of thousands of people alive today who’d be dead if it wasn’t for Scaevola, and large parts of Moesia
and Blemmya would be uninhabitable.

  His own writings fall into two parts. The scientific works – Origins of Diseases, Investigations and Concerning the Plague – are sober, scientific and impersonal; bare records of facts and data, accounts of experiments, cautious drawing of guarded conclusions. His other writings, the Melancholia, are in a rather different vein, ranging from biting satires on worldly manners, institutions and conventions to what you can really only call passionate love-songs to Truth, Purity and what he chose to call the Quintessence. I have to say, the satirical bits are much more entertaining than the soppy stuff, which is mostly unreadable or unintelligible; though you have to bear in mind that he lived during the heyday of the Mannerists, and tastes change. Suffice it to say, you wouldn’t read the Melancholia for pleasure, though some of the invectives against lust and debauchery enjoy a certain popularity with first-year Philosophy students. He’s not a comfortable personality to spend time with, as I know all too well. The conclusion you come away with is that he doesn’t think much of the human race as it stands. What’s less certain is whether he believes it can be fixed by medicine – physical or spiritual – or whether it’d be better in the long run to throw it away and get a new one.

  SO THERE I was, in a cell (both meanings of the word apply), as close as I’d ever got to my lifelong companion, Antigono Scaevola; my only other companion a water-clock, to remind me that time was very much of the essence. The decision was mine; to uncork the bottle, or not. Nobody was sufficiently qualified to help or advise me. All the tools and materials that might possibly inform my decision were in front of me on the table, or in the notebook I’d brought with me, or in my head. For a man whose most momentous decision up till them had been which shoes to wear to Chapter, it was all a bit much.