by P. B. Kerr
“A single-engine plane,” said John.
“I hope they don’t fly into us,” said the professor.
“They won’t,” said Nimrod. “I’ll make sure of that.”
“But what if they see us?” said the professor.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Nimrod said cheerfully. “If you were a pilot, would you report sighting a flying carpet with five passengers?”
“Er, no,” said the professor. “Probably not if I wanted to hold on to my pilot’s license.”
“Exactly,” said Nimrod. “Besides, there’s a limit to what I can do to disguise us while I’m flying this thing. A carpet requires a lot more concentration than a whirlwind.”
John pointed behind the carpet. “It’s coming from behind. There. Look.”
A strange, insectlike plane emerged from the cloud immediately behind them. It had long, gray wings, rather spindly wheel struts, and a large rear-mounted propeller. Underneath the wings was an array of bombs and missiles, but under the nose was the lens of a large video camera.
“It’s a surveillance UAV,” yelled John.
“A what?” Nimrod frowned. “Speak English, boy.”
“An unmanned aerial vehicle,” explained John. “A remotely piloted drone that flies without a human crew.”
“Yes, I understood as much when you said it was unmanned,” said Nimrod.
“The propeller explains how it was able to take off at all,” said the professor. “That kind of engine can’t be damaged in the same way as a jet engine can, by sucking ash in with the air and causing it to overheat.”
“The pilots are probably sitting in front of computer screens watching us from somewhere on the ground,” added John.
Nimrod was horrified. “You mean we’re being photographed? With a camera?”
“For sure.”
“Then get rid of it,” said Nimrod.
“Get rid of it?”
“I dislike being photographed at the best of times,” said Nimrod. “But I especially dislike being photographed without my permission. There’s too much of this sort of thing going on these days. Every time you open a celebrity magazine in the barber’s chair, you find a picture of some poor actress with her hair in a mess coming out of a coffee shop with her mouth stuffed with muffin. It’s rank, bad manners to photograph people in that way.”
“I don’t think they’re doing it for a magazine,” said John. “And it’s quite possible they’re not spying on us, but on someone else, and we just happened to get in the way.”
“Well, perhaps that was true,” said Nimrod. “But it’s true no longer. If I’m not mistaken, that camera is now filming us. Besides, look at all those bombs and missiles the thing is carrying. Any minute now, whoever is watching us through that lens is going to conclude we’re dangerous and start shooting.”
“At five people sitting on a carpet?” Axel shook his head. “No, surely not. Why would anyone think we’re dangerous? None of us is armed. Therefore none of us constitutes a threat. Even the U.S. Army wouldn’t shoot at five people sitting on a carpet.”
“Don’t you believe it,” said John.
“Might I remind you that this is a flying carpet?” said Nimrod. “Without a flight number. That makes us an unidentified flying carpet.”
Axel shrugged. “So?”
“Did you ever hear of an unidentified walking object? Or an unidentified swimming object? No. Of course not. And that’s because there’s a lot less human understanding of anything when it’s flying than when it’s on the ground. Especially when it’s an object that’s not supposed to be flying at all. Like a saucer. Or a carpet. Even a commercial passenger jet that’s in the wrong place. Especially when it’s the military that is doing the understanding. Or not understanding, to be rather more accurate. ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’ is the motto of all army generals the world over.
“Then,” continued Nimrod, “there’s also the fact that the only flying carpets most people have seen are magic carpets in movies with Middle Eastern subjects like Sinbad and Aladdin. There’s a lot less understanding of all things Middle Eastern than there used to be. Philippa? Get rid of it.”
Philippa hesitated. She wasn’t the kind of djinn who destroyed things lightly. In her short life, she’d met several djinn who were of a destructive disposition and acquaintance with them had taught her more than a little self-restraint when the exercise of her own power was concerned.
“Need I remind you that we are on a mission to save the planet?” demanded Nimrod. “It’s imperative that nothing interrupts our journey to Afghanistan. So get rid of it please, John, before it gets rid of us.”
John had to admit his uncle had a point. Several points. But how to get rid of the drone? Blowing it up was not an option, not with all the missiles it was carrying.
Then, following another moment of thought, a simple but effective device presented itself to his juvenile mind and, with the aid of his special word, he focused all of his djinn power into the creation of a can of spray paint.
“ABECEDARIAN!”
No sooner was the can of paint in his hand than John had gone to the rear of the carpet, reached out, and sprayed over the fish-eye lens of the camera.
“Can’t fly if it can’t see where it’s going,” he said.
“Perfect.”
Nimrod laughed and nodding his approval he increased altitude by several hundred feet, just in case the blinded drone fired off a missile in frustration.
“Well done. That’ll teach them for spying on people.”
Of course Nimrod was quite unaware that by spying on the Somali pirates, the drone could have assisted in the rescue of Mr. Groanin. In which case, he would probably have thought very differently about it.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, in the technology-packed surveillance room on the USS Wisconsin, the two UAV operators stared at their screens and then each other with a mixture of anxiety and incomprehension.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?”
“I saw it, sailor. But I don’t want to say what we saw. It doesn’t make sense. And I’m not even tired.”
“A bunch of people on a flying carpet is what it looked like,” said the first operator. “One of them was wearing a black mask, like a Harlequin. He must have been the evil boss.”
“But two of them were kids. And one of them was holding a duck. A mallard, I think.”
“And the other kid had a can of spray paint in his hand. The little punk painted over my lens.”
“That’s sure what it looked like. You’re right, sailor. The question is what do we do about it? If we report it like that, they’ll bust us. They’ll think we’re a pair of crazy loons and then they’ll bust us.”
“They’ll think we’re crazy and they’ll throw us out of the navy.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I dunno. We’re blind now since that kid sprayed over the lens. There’s not much we can do. Not even land the bird.”
“Push the joystick down, fly the drone straight into the sea, and report the thing missing. Let the people who designed the UAV figure out what happened.” The second operator shrugged. “It’s the only thing we can do apart from hit the self-destruct button.”
“Agreed.”
“Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and the drone will hit the pirate ship.”
Ten minutes later, the UAV crashed into the Arabian Sea a long way from the Shebelle, and NATO’s plans for the destruction of the Somali pirates and the kidnapping of the almost legendary Sheikh Dubeluemmdhi — otherwise known as Mr. Groanin — were themselves destroyed.
The pirates sailed on, still quite oblivious of the airborne peril they had so narrowly avoided.
CHAPTER 18
A LITTLE LIGHT READING
Bored of sitting on the carpet, Philippa flicked through some of the books Nimrod had brought out from the Rakshasas Library. While these told her a great deal about the secret secret history of the Mongols and
Dunbelchin the camel, they told her nothing about what she was really interested in, which was what Nimrod had said on Vesuvius — about the destiny of the Marid. And, after a while, she asked her uncle if he would mind her going inside the lamp and looking for a book of her own to read. She did not, however, mention her interest in discovering something more about his own words.
“No, of course I don’t mind,” said Nimrod. “I never mind when a child wants to go into a library. It’s refreshing to hear it. Most children these days seem to think books are objects that furnish a room, not things to be read.”
Philippa nodded patiently as her uncle continued speaking at her.
“You’ve been in there before as I recall, so you know about Liskeard, the bottle imp. And, more important, he’ll remember you. Bottle imps can be dangerous to those who they don’t know.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
There are the creatures of Beelzebub. There are mocking imps, and there are petty fiends. There are flibbertigibbets, which were once wont to hang about a place of execution, and there are imps that were once children. There are little demons and evil spirits, and there are bottle imps that some djinn employ to guard the lamps and bottles in which they occasionally live. Bottle imps are sometimes regarded as venomous but, strictly speaking — and there is no better way to speak to a bottle imp — this was not true of Liskeard Karswell du Crowleigh. It wasn’t that he was venomous so much that his mouth was just dangerous, because of his unpleasant taste for rotting animal flesh, which meant that his teeth and gums were covered in lethal bacteria.
“I could hardly forget him,” she said. “He’s kind of unfortunate, to say the least.”
“After Mr. Rakshasas died, I offered Liskeard three wishes as a reward for his long and faithful service,” said Nimrod. “But he declined them on the grounds that having any kind of wish would have implied a strong longing for a specific thing he did not already have, and since his life was the library and nothing but the library, he could not conceive of an alternative to that.”
“It’s a point of view,” said Philippa.
“Of course, I am, as you know, quite unable to change Liskeard’s hideous appearance,” continued Nimrod. “Many years ago, he made the mistake of trying to steal the synopados, the soul mirror, of a wicked djinn. The mirror was armed with a very powerful binding that turned him into the hideous-looking imp you’ve seen before. Since a binding made by another djinn is irreversible and since I have no idea whose mirror it was that he tried to steal, I fear he will be like that forever. Which is perhaps why he thinks it better that he remains as the bottle imp, where his frankly abhorrent appearance is an affront to no one.”
“Not just his appearance,” said Philippa. “His breath, too. Especially his breath.”
“Yes,” said Nimrod. “That’s quite right. I have hesitated to bring it up. But you might get away with this, being young. You might just mention his breath. That it smells terribly. That it could turn milk to yogurt. Or butter into cheese. Yes, why not? Offer him a toothbrush, perhaps. Some floss. Some toothpicks. Some mouthwash.”
“You want me to tell him to clean his teeth?”
“If you would, Philippa. But only if you think the moment right. It’s never easy telling someone that their breath smells like a cheesy sock. Especially when their teeth are as sharp as Liskeard’s.”
“No kidding.”
“It would make it so much more pleasant to go in there,” said Nimrod. “And to have a conversation with him, if his breath could be tolerated.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything. It’s one thing telling John he’s got bad breath. Which he does because he’s too lazy to brush his teeth. It’s something else telling a really terrifying monster that he’s got bad breath. Even if he is a librarian.”
Philippa left Moby with Axel, retrieved Mr. Rakshasas’s djinn lamp from her uncle’s Louis Choppsouis bag, and, having become a thick cloud of transubstantiated smoke, entered the lamp. The interior of every djinn lamp is much bigger on the inside than on the outside. And this one was no exception. The Rakshasas Library was enormous. But it was also a library with no discernible organization, and for anyone who had never visited the place it would have been hard to believe that it was cared for by a devoted librarian who had curated the Rakshasas Library for fifty years.
It was several minutes before Liskeard appeared in the great Reading Room. He bowed gravely to Philippa and hissed a polite greeting to a person he recognized was his new lord and master’s beloved niece.
“Good day to you, young missss,” he hissed, for, despite his neat gray suit and vaguely human ways, Liskeard Karswell du Crowleigh most resembled a monitor lizard. “I’m sorry I did not come more quickly but I was in the lower library stacks.”
“How are you, Liskeard?” asked Philippa, covering her own nose and mouth with the palm of her hand for his breath was much worse than she remembered. It was almost chemical. The little, red, forked tongue that flickered out of his mouth from time to time ought, she thought, to have been a little red flag, warning of the danger of getting near enough to Liskeard to get a whiff of his horrible, hair-raising halitosis.
“Very well, missss.”
He smiled a hideous, malodorous smile.
“Were you looking for a particular book, young missss? Do please bear in mind that this is a wishing library. In this particular library, you only have to wish for a book and it will bring itself to you. Which is why we don’t bother organizing the books in any alphabetical or subject or author order. I just return them to their proper place when your uncle has finished using them.” He glanced at a pile of books that lay on the table. “Eventually.”
“My uncle was here earlier on,” said Philippa.
“That is correct, missss.”
She pointed at the books on the huge library table. “Are those the books he was looking at?”
“Yes. Although it isn’t my place to solicit or to receive explanations, why do you ask?”
Philippa shrugged. “Those are the ones I want to read.”
“Very well, missss.” He bowed again. “Then, since you have everything you need, I will leave you to read in peace.”
“Um, Liskeard. Before you go. I was wondering if there was anything I can do for you. Out of respect for the memory of Mr. Rakshasas.”
“I’m not quite sure I understand you, missss.”
Philippa bit her lip. It’s never easy telling someone with bad breath that they have bad breath.
“Have you ever heard of the ring of confidence, Liskeard? ”
“Is that a book, missss?”
“Er, no, it’s — well, sometimes you learn the most from books you aren’t supposed to read, and er … words you aren’t supposed to hear.”
“So I’m led to believe, missss.”
“And scientific research shows that there is a direct connection between germs in your mouth and er … unpleasant breath.”
“And this is in reference to … what, exactly?”
Philippa smiled. “Nothing. I’ll just get on with these books.”
“Very well, missss.”
Liskeard shuffled away, leaving Philippa alone in the huge, cavernous library with half of her wishing she’d thought to ask John along; it was true that he was often infuriating when she was trying to concentrate on something, nevertheless he was also comforting to have around in a place as spooky as the Rakshasas Library.
She sat down and noticed first that Nimrod had left his gold fountain pen on the table. Philippa knew it was his because it bore his initials and contained a special shade of maroon ink that sometimes her uncle joked was blood. Of course, it was always possible that the ink might have been real blood and that he wasn’t joking at all. Anything was possible where Nimrod was concerned.
She glanced down the titles on the spines of the five books on the table that Nimrod had already perused and saw that they were all about twins. Anything on the subject of twins
was always certain to stimulate her interest and she picked up the first book, Dualistic Cosmology and the Power of the Twin, by Professor Benito Malpensa, and, opening it, found that her uncle had already underlined the one passage that was of interest to him:
Almost every ancient society contains important myths about the power of twins. Castor and Pollux, collectively known as the Dioscouri, are perhaps the most famous. In this Greek myth, Pollux was immortal but Castor was not and when Castor died, Pollux asked Zeus to allow him to share his immortality with his brother in order that they could stay together. Zeus agreed and they were transformed into the Gemini constellation of stars.
There are many similar stories in Celtic, Hebrew, and Indian mythology.
But even now, there are still many human societies too numerous to list, in which twin children are treated as something special, as “children of the sky” and are held to possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the wind. It was often believed that they could summon any wind by motions of their hands, or by their breath, and that they could make fair or foul weather and could cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds. Some North American Indian tribes believed that they could cause rain by pulling down on the ends of spruce branches. Moreover, it was supposed that the wishes of certain twin children were always fulfilled; hence, they were often feared, because they might harm people who they hated. It is the author’s opinion that this is mere superstition, though the extent of these powers is uncertain.
Another book, Amphion and Zethus: The Twin in Semiotics by Gilberto Echo, was also underlined:
Twins can, it is believed, call the salmon and trout to do their bidding. Some young human twins even have the power to turn themselves into salmon; hence, in some stories they must avoid water lest they should be turned into fish. For the same reason, some twins are forbidden to catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish. No less intriguing are the stories in which young human twins develop the ability to become grizzly bears. Indeed, they are sometimes called young grizzly bears. According to these stories, twins remain throughout life endowed with supernatural powers.
