Jack and the Giants

by Piers Anthony

  “Discuss it in the morning, in my office.”

  “This can’t wait. We—we have come to pay off your debt.”

  “Your ten billion dollar debt,” Harriet said.

  His expression didn’t change, but I fancied I could see a sea change in the mind behind it. “You have funds or credit?”

  “We have gold.”

  “How much?”

  “Pounds of it.”

  Now something did flicker across his face, but it looked oddly like contempt. “Come be seated and we’ll discuss this. Emma, fetch these folk a drink.”

  Soon we were comfortably seated with drinks in hand, plus some chickenfeed for Henrietta. Joe was a good host. Or an efficient dreamer.

  “Let me do a bit of math for you,” Joe said. “Gold is presently worth about thirteen hundred dollars an ounce. Never mind that its troy weight ounces are not the same as grocery store ounces; we’ll use the latter for your benefit.” Indeed, I could hear the written out figure, rather than numeric; he was talking our language. He was good at his kind of persuasion, practicing the nuances. “Sixteen ounces would make a pound, which would be about twenty thousand, eight hundred dollars. To make ten billion dollars would require approximately four thousand tons of gold. Do you have that much?”

  I looked at Harriet and Henrietta with dismay. Of course we didn’t have that much! And if we could get it, how would we deliver it? We’d need a forklift. That would be awkward, on the beanstalk. We had been terminally naïve.

  Joe nodded, needing no verbal answer. “Now let’s start over, shall we? What is your real purpose here?”

  “You may find it hard to believe.”

  “Try me.”

  I decided to spell it out directly. “We are in a dream, all of us here. We need you to help us engineer a regime change in a realm we call the Cloud, where giants live and magic is real.”

  Joe nodded. “I do find that hard to believe. Persuade me.” He seemed to be taking us seriously, though that was surely deceptive; the man’s stock in trade was convincing people of his own seriousness. Maybe he was simply stalling until the police he thought he had signaled got here, not knowing that they would not be coming. At any rate, he was politely telling us to put up or shut up.

  I rose to the occasion. “First maybe we should prove what we say about magic. Henrietta here is the hen who lays the golden eggs. Only that’s too slow, and she can transmute other things. That’s the source of our gold. Bring us something you don’t value, and we’ll demonstrate.”

  Joe turned to his trophy wife. “Emma?”

  Emma rose and walked to an old fashioned lamp. “This is fake antique, almost worthless.” They were calling our bluff, they thought.

  I turned to the hen. “Henrietta?”

  The hen went to the lamp and touched it with her wing. It changed color, becoming a deep yellow.

  Emma went to pick it up. “Ooof!” she exclaimed. “It’s heavy!”

  “Gold is heavy,” I agreed.

  She braced herself and heaved it up. “This really is gold!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Every part of it! Even the wick.”

  “My wife knows gold,” Joe said. “I call her my gold digger.”

  “Not to my face,” Emma gasped, setting down the lamp before him.

  Joe inspected it. “That’s gold, all right. So this may be a dream or a delusion. Show me it’s a dream.”

  I drew a brief blank. How can one person prove to another they are dreaming, when he couldn’t prove it to himself?

  Harriet rescued me. “Let’s go to your bedroom, folks, where you’re sleeping.”

  We went there. There were Joe and Emma in bed, holding hands, sound asleep. They must have made love and drifted off. When Sydelle put Joe into the dream, Emma was brought along too, because she was in contact.

  That’s correct, Sydelle thought, her words appearing through time and space and everything in-between. She was an accident.

  The two animate ones exchanged a startled glance. Then Joe recovered his mental footing. “This is persuasive. But if we are only dreaming of a gold lamp, how can we transfer it to our waking realm?”

  Now I needed Sydelle’s input. Tell Emma to hold the lamp, then wake herself. She will wake holding it.

  I relayed that message. Emma clasped the lamp and went to touch her sleeping self.

  “Oh, one other thing,” I said, and Emma paused. “Time is different in the two realms. One hour of real time is a week of Cloud time.”

  “A week is 168 hours,” Joe said, evidently good at mental math, as maybe a con man had to be. “So a minute is a scant three hours. Time will seem to crawl for us.”

  “So should I wake?” Emma asked.

  “In a moment, dear.” He turned to me. “That chicken can make more gold?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She can transmute anything you have here. But it won’t come to four thousand tons.”

  “It doesn’t need to.” He turned back to his wife. “Dear, wake, and if the gold is real, get up and contact my CFO. Tell him that we have a venture capitalist investor who is marketing solid gold artifacts, who will use the gold to buy into our operation. Give him the lamp. Then return for more gold, which the chicken will be transmuting.” He glanced at me. “She can return to sleep to reload?”

  “Yes,” I agreed as Sydelle prompted me. “When she touches you she will sleep again. As long as you remain asleep.”

  “But what about you, dear?” Emma asked Joe.

  “If the gold is real, just let me sleep. In minutes there will be a pile of gold beside me. The CFO will know what to do with it. In a few hours I will wake, my business with these people completed.”

  She nodded. “This could save us some mischief.” Evidently she knew the nature of his operation, and the trouble they were in.

  “It could bail us out,” he agreed. “If it transfers.”

  “I love you, dear.”

  “And I love you.” They kissed. Then Emma held the lamp in one arm, and reached down to pinch her sleeping self’s arm. “Wake, trophy girl!”

  The sleeping woman’s eyelids slowly fluttered. The dream Emma vanished.

  We stood and watched for ten minutes as the woman slowly opened her eyes, saw the gold lamp, and opened her mouth. Three seconds, her time. In another ten minutes she had verified the reality of the gold.

  Meanwhile we talked. “What’s a CFO?” Harriet asked.

  “Chief Financial Officer. Invaluable to my operation.”

  “What is venture capitalists?” I asked.

  “Folk who invest good money in chancy new ventures in the hope that they will pan out and return many times their original investment.”

  “But we can’t deliver four thousands ton of gold to this suite,” I said. “It would crush the building below.”

  “A few hundred pounds will suffice to make the initial buy-in. Leverage will do the rest. You don’t need to pay off the whole operation; just provide a sufficient continuing investment to enable it to function. It’s like gaining a superior line of credit.”

  “Uh, sure,” I said uncertainly. This was over my head.

  By the time Joe was satisfied that the gold transfer was real, we were satisfied that he knew what he was doing financially. We were financial amateurs, never having had any extra money to play with, but he was a pro. The gold would shore up his operation, creditors would get paid, and he would not be arrested. That would take months to play out on the Cloud. Plenty of time for Joe to tackle our problem.

  Henrietta converted several more household items to gold, to give Emma West plenty to work on without our needing to be present.

  It was time to take him up the beanstalk.

  Chapter 14:

  Leader

  “I’m not going,” he said. “This is a risk that even I’m not willing to take.”

  “But you agreed—”

  “I made no such agreement. I simply asked for you to show me proof, and now your bird has done so. I think I wi
ll wake up now. Off with you, go on. And thank you for all the gold.”

  “You know,” said Harriet, stepping forward. “I didn’t think I would like you...now I know I don’t like you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Joe. “Join the club. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I plan on waking myself up, and staying awake for the next 48 hours or so. That would be 48 weeks in your Cloud land, no? Yes, I think so. Long enough for you to either figure out your own problems, or, well, I guess we’ll see. By then I should be home clear, and on to my next venture.”

  “You mean your next scam,” I said.

  “It’s all a scam, Jack. Open your eyes.”

  “They are open, and I’m seeing a sleazeball standing in front of me.”

  “Ouch. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be waking myself up.”

  He went to step around us, except Harriet was having none of it. She raised her hands and a zigzagging blast of electricity appeared from seemingly the center of her palms. Harriet directed the light at Joe’s feet, and might have missed a little. A true hot foot. He yelped and grabbed his smoking feet. He hopped on one foot. His little toe, I saw, was nearly black.

  “My toe! Look what you did to my toe! You bitch!”

  “Oops,” she said, and then re-directed her energy to form what appeared to be a shimmering, pulsating battering ram. And ram it did, pushing the con man back through the fancy suite, and all the way over to the far window, where the beanstalk awaited.

  “I suggest you climb,” I said, grinning. His toe, I noted, was already healing. Not completely, but definitely four times as fast. “I think she just might shove you out the window if you don’t.”

  Joe West looked at me, then at Harriet, then at the hen, who had flown up into my hands. Finally he looked out the window and at the giant beanstalk. He was about to protest, when Harriet gave him one last blast that sent him stumbling through the window, where he just managed to grab hold of one of the thick branches.

  “Start climbing, Mister,” she said.

  And he did, bad toe and all.

  * * *

  The con man proved quite the climber. Of course, he had Harriet just beneath him, who zapped him every time he paused. I think she was enjoying his discomfort far too much.

  My grandmother was taken advantage of by someone like him, she thought, as I hadn’t bothered shielding my thoughts. We were now high above the highest skyscraper. The view from here was seemingly limitless. She lost everything.

  I’m sorry, I thought, and now understood her deep animosity toward Joe West. Henrietta was perched on my shoulder as I climbed. She clucked in my ear and flapped her wings every now and then. I just prayed she didn’t turn me into a golden statue!

  Soon we found ourselves in the clouds high above, where we climbed blindly. I could barely see the branch above me, let alone Harriet or Joe high above. Shortly after that, my reaching hand didn’t find the next branch, but rather the edge of a wooden opening. Perhaps less gracefully than I had hoped, I spilled from the stalk and onto Sydelle’s wooden floor, where the others were already on their feet.

  Joe West dusted himself off. “I demand to be returned at—” Except he didn’t finish his sentence when he got an eyeful of the giant sorceress. In fact, he stood there motionless, mouth open, seemingly frozen.

  While the conman gawked, Sydelle led us to another section of the house, and another opening in the floor. This time our assignment was a little easier. We fetched an ex-NFL star who had fallen on hard times. His name was Carl Cruise, and he had been a star running back from the New York Giants nearly a decade ago.

  Bored and nearly destitute, he was more than game for a little adventure. Once we returned with Carl, the five us—myself, Harriet, Henrietta, Joe and Carl—found ourselves standing before the giant sorceress, who looked pleased.

  “There,” she said, “this should do it.”

  “Just the five of us?” asked Joe. He had an unpleasant way of sneering when he spoke. He reminded me of a classic villain in, say, a Disney movie. Except he was supposedly on our side, and we supposedly needed his brain.

  “Five is plenty,” said Sydelle. “Each of you possess qualities necessary to achieve the task at hand.”

  “To overthrow the present king?” said Carl. He was a big, black man with a deep voice and an easy smile—and the biggest hands I’d ever seen in my life. He seemed right at home here on the Cloud.

  “Yes, exactly,” said Sydelle. She grew somber and looked at us each in turn. “There is no guarantee that any of us will survive this.”

  “But this is just a dream, right?” asked Joe West. The sneer in his voice was gone, replaced by something high-pitched and scared.

  “Yes and no. You have heard of people who have died in their sleep, correct?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Death here will mean death in your sleep, usually in the form of a massive heart attack.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Carl grinned and clapped Joe’s shoulder. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “In bed with my wife.”

  Carl laughed, and as he did so, one thing became apparent to me. All the others had obvious traits that could help overthrow a kingdom: strength, beauty, wealth and cunning. None of which I added to.

  Not true, thought Sydelle, directing her thoughts only to me.

  What do you mean? I asked, guarding my thoughts from the others, as she had done.

  They need a leader.

  But I’m not—

  No buts, Jack from New York. You are their leader.

  Harriet gave me a quizzical look. I returned it with a weak smile. I knew in my heart that I was no leader. Sure, I might be headstrong...but all that did was make me unemployable.

  Carl clapped those big hands together and said, “So what’s the plan?”

  For some reason, everyone looked at me.

  Show time.

  Chapter 15:

  Movement

  I had no plan, no idea, no nothing. Yet I had to come up with something.

  Then I thought of a way to finesse it, at least for a while. “We can’t act until we know what we have,” I said. “So let’s take stock. We’re dealing with giants, any one of which could pick us up and throw us away. Some of them would rather eat us than look at us. We’re all on the same Cloud in that respect.” I glanced at Joe, hoping he got the message. “Force is not on our side. Sydelle summoned us here because we each have one or more special magical talents. We will need to fit them into a cohesive campaign strategy. I, for example, am pyrotechnic: I can make fires at a distance. Harriet is electric; she can build up a charge and zap things or levitate them with static repulsion. Henrietta can transmute base materials into gold, and also has retrocognition: she can see past events. Sometimes we can’t really understand a situation until we know how it came about. Joe—”

  “I don’t have any magic,” Joe West said quickly. “I don’t even believe in it. This is just a dream.”

  “You have it,” I said.

  “Yeah? What is it, wise guy?”

  “Shape changing. Your other form is a dragon.”

  “You should get a job as a stand-up comedian, joker.”

  “I suppose we had better verify it,” I said. “Let’s go out on the patio, in case we need more space.”

  “This way,” Sydelle said. She led us out to an open section beyond the house.

  Joe West might have protested, but he was too distracted watching Sydelle walk. Her legs under her skirt were well formed, but it was evidently their size that got to him: quadruple the ordinary, and a lot was visible from our knee-high vantage. It was like looking at a regular woman from low down and inches away, maybe with an upskirt camera. He was clearly a lady’s man, his taste not limited to his trophy wife, and the size of a woman’s parts impressed him. When she walked by him I saw him get a glimpse well up inside her thighs. I knew the power of that glimpse. He was transfixed.

  Harriet caught my eye. She didn’t mind
seeing someone else stunned, as long as it wasn’t me. That was a relief.

  “Now let’s find out just what kind of a dragon you are,” I told Joe. “Large, small, medium. Ground-borne, flying, breathing fire, steam, smoke. It’s bound to make a difference.”

  “I’m no kind of dragon at all,” he snapped. Sydelle was no longer walking, so he was back to his usual snotty self.

  “Focus,” I said. “Try to shape change.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!”

  Sydelle squatted low before him, leaning forward. That put her head a little above his, and her bosom slightly below his face level. She cleared her long hair back out of the way. He had a bird’s-eye view of the Grand Canyon. “Please,” she murmured throatily. “Try.” She took a deep breath.

  I thought Joe was going to faint. He wavered, and almost fell into the Canyon before catching himself. “I will try,” he agreed dazedly.

  “Thank you. That’s all we ask.” She shifted her squatting position slightly, and her skirt hiked up over her knees. Now that I was no longer the target I saw that nothing she showed was accidental. She was playing him, having caught on to his weakness. More power to her!

  Joe focused, and something happened. His height and girth increased, stretching his clothing. He was changing!

  “Let’s not ruin your outfit,” Sydelle said as Joe’s effort abated and he shrank back to normal size. She reached out and helped him remove his jacket, shirt, and then his trousers. His eyes remained fixed on her torso, and he did not resist. In moments he stood in his underwear.

  “Now try again,” Sydelle said, breathing deeply.

  What could the poor man do? He focused.

  This time the change was faster. He grew rapidly into a scaly ten foot long winged dragon. He snorted, and a wisp of fire came out.

  “Fly!” I called.

  He spread his wings, ran along the pavement, and leaped into the air. He pumped, and was airborne. In moments he was high in the sky.

  Oops—would we see him again? But where would he go? He was locked into the dream.

  Sure enough, he soon looped back and glided to a landing on the patio. He bumped and skidded to a halt, as yet inexpert, but that would improve with practice. He changed back to manform, flushed. “It’s true! In this dream I am a dragon!” Then he realized he was naked and tried to cover himself with his hands. His underwear had been shredded during the prior change.