Djinn Rummy Tom Holt

by Djinn Rummy (lit)

  ‘Pleased to be of service,’ mumbled the King.

  ‘It was the way the dragon jumped up in the air and made a little screaming noise when he saw it that put me on the right lines,’ Asaf continued. ‘And while you two were having your slanging match, it suddenly occurred to me. Why would a genie, of all things, carry a bottle around with him? Partic­ularly the sort of bottle he could never ever escape from. Shatterproof, you see. And non-biodegradable.’

  Jane waited for a moment, and then said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Simple.’ Asaf sat down and opened a roll of pepper­mints. ‘Because he wanted to be put in it. Subconsciously, I guess. I mean, that ties in with all the rest of it. The wanting to destroy the world, and that stuff. What he really wanted to destroy was himself.’

  Jane’s mental eyebrow rose sharply. This all sounded a bit too glib, too Lesson Three, Psychology For Beginners for her liking. Any minute now and he’d start talking about sublimated urges, cries for help and traumatic potty-training in early childhood. However, she held her peace.

  ‘Added to which,’ Asaf went on, ‘there’s the simple logic of the thing. All those chances he had to destroy the world, and he couldn’t actually do it. Bearing in mind what he was, that could only mean he didn’t want to do it. You do see that, don’t you?’

  Jane frowned. ‘I don’t quite ...‘

  ‘Well,’ Asaf replied through a mouth full of peppermint debris, ‘it really does stand to reason. If you’re a genie and you want to destroy the world, you don’t muck about, you just get on with it.’

  ‘Unless,’ Jane interrupted, ‘somebody stops you.’

  Asaf shook his head. ‘A genie who wanted to destroy the world wouldn’t have gone about it in a way that would have given anybody any opportunity to stop him. Isn’t that right? he asked the King, who nodded.

  ‘Fair dinkum,’ he said. ‘Five-minute job. Melt an ice-cap, release a plague virus, anything like that. All this pissing about with flowers and ants ...‘ He shook his head in sage contempt.

  ‘All self-delusion on his part,’ Asaf went on. ‘Really, it was basically just a cry for help—’

  Ah, thought Jane. Thank you.

  ‘— because, deep down, he couldn’t stand being him. Thinking about it, you can see his point.’

  ‘And when it came right down to it,’ the King joined in, ‘when the chips were down and push came to shove and he actually could have destroyed the world if he wanted to, he just—’

  ‘Lost his bottle?’

  ‘You could,’ Asaf said, frowning, ‘put it that way. If you had less taste than the average works canteen Yorkshire pudding, that is.’

  Jane drew in a deep breath and looked at the sky. It was still, she noticed with relief and approval, there. As were all the other necessary odds and ends: the ground, for exam­ple, and the hills and the sea. Whatever the hell had been going on, it had stopped. Which was probably just as well.

  ‘That’s that, then, is it?’ she said.

  ‘That’s that.'

  ‘Good.’ She turned round and beckoned to the carpet. ‘Let’s go home.'

  The shop door opened.

  ‘Justin,’ called the proprietor, ‘I’m back. Anything hap­pen while I was away?’

  ‘Not really, Uncle.’

  ‘Anybody buy anything?’

  ‘No, Uncle.’

  The proprietor glanced round. ‘Just a second,’ he said. ‘Where’s the big Isfahan that was in the corner there? You know, the one with the goats.’

  Justin swallowed. ‘A customer,’ he said, ‘sort of borrowed it.’

  ‘Borrowed it?’

  ‘On approval,’ Justin said.

  ‘I see. Leave a deposit?’

  Justin reached under the counter and produced the big, fat, heavy sack he’d discovered in his hand when he’d woken up and found himself back in the shop. As it touched down on the desk, it chinked; and there is only one substance in the whole of the periodic table that chinks. Two clues: it’s yellow, and before the development of specialist dental plastics they used to make false teeth out of it.

  ‘I guess so,’ he said.

  Think what the sea can do to a coastline in thirty million years. The shock wave from the blast had the same effect on Kiss’s body in about a fifth of a second.

  Souvenir hunters would have been disappointed. Not even the characteristic black silhouette etched on the glazed earth; just nothing at all to show that Kiss had ever existed.

  He was disappointed. Optimist that he was, right up till the very last moment he’d somehow believed that when the smoke cleared he’d still be there; a bit singed, perhaps, and threadbare, like a character in a Loony-Tunes cartoon, but nevertheless basically in one piece. The stern reality that faced him when he came round, however, was that he was now m more pieces than the mind could possibly conceive.

  Gosh, he said to himself (or rather, selves), so these are smithereens.

  On the other hand, he reflected, it’s not use moping. It’s times like these when you just have to pull yourself together and ...

  Pull yourself together. Easier said then done.

  He considered himself, hung in suspension above the surface of the planet like one aspirin dissolved in twenty million gallons of water. Spreading yourself a bit thin these days, Kiss, old son, he reflected. On the other hand...

  Yes, he noticed; that’s interesting. He realised that every single atom of his former body still had the consciousness of the whole, so that instead of there being just one Kiss, there were now several billion. A shrewd operator, he reflected, could turn this situation to his own advantage.

  A gust of high-level wind reminded him of the down­side. True, there were billions of him, but each one on its own was about as ineffective as the average civil rights charter. It’s molecules united who can never be defeated. A solitary atom on its own, with nothing except the moral support of its fellows, is effectively dead in the water.

  And likely to stay that way. Think of all the aggravation it takes to get together a mere twenty or so people for a school reunion, and then multiply that by ten billion.

  Another aspect of the matter that he had to admit he didn’t like much was the fact that each individual con­sciousness seemed to be fading rapidly. How long since the blast — one second, maybe two — and already he was starting to sound in his mind’s ear like a cassette recorder with flat batteries.

  There was, he recalled, a technical term for all this. What was it again? Ah, yes. Death.

  Now there’s a thought. If I die, I’ll get to collect on my insurance policy.

  (For he had indeed, many years ago and when under the influence of curdled whey, taken out a life policy with the most senior underwriter of them all. He had regretted it ever since, because (a) in the normal course of things he was immortal, and (b) he had nobody to leave the proceeds to even if he collected.)

  Proviso B was still as valid as ever, but that was pretty well beside the point. So anxious was he to find a silver lining for the mushroom cloud that he was prepared to overlook the pointlessness of the exercise. Accordingly, he summoned up what energy he still had, and put a call through.

  This wasn’t, in fact, difficult; since bits of him had been dispersed to every nook and cranny of the planet, it wasn’t surprising that one stray atom had lodged in the Chief Underwriter’s ear. This made notifying the claim fairly simple.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘my name is Kiss, policy number 6590865098765. I’m dead, and I want to make—’

  YOU CAN’T

  The particle buzzed softly, confused. ‘How do you mean, I can’t?’ he demanded. ‘If you want the policy document, it’s in a tin box under a flat stone in a crater in the Sea of Tranquillity. I can draw you a map if you like.’

  YOU CAN’T CLAIM. SORRY

  ‘Well, of all the ...‘ He would have expanded on this theme, but one of the seraphim who sit on the right hand of the Chief Underwriter pointed to the burning sword lying across its knees and made a p
retty unambiguous gesture with it, implying that taking that tone with the Boss would result in extreme loss of privileges. The Kiss-particle subsided a little.

  ‘Something in the small print?’ he enquired. ‘Some sort of all-purpose cow-catching exclusion clause?’

  NOT AS SUCH, NO. THE CLAIM WOULD BE PER­FECTLY VALID. IT’S MORE A MATTER OF FEASI­BILITY REALLY

  ‘Ah.’ The batteries were very nearly flat now, and it was taking him all his strength just to stay awake. Nevertheless, he was intrigued. ‘In what way?’ he asked, as politely as he could.

  SIMPLE. THE TERMS OF THE POLICY I’M SURE YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I quite ... Oh. Oh yes, I see. Yes. Quite.’

  A particle can’t grin, but the bit of Kiss in question came very close to succeeding. The Chief Underwriter’s ear began to itch.

  ‘It’s just as well you reminded me of that,’ he chirruped. ‘Left to myself, I’d never have seen it that way.’

  SHIT

  An insurer’s nightmare.

  There’s a strong argument for saying that paying out any money to anybody under any circumstances whatsoever produces the same effect on your average insurer that two pounds of mature Cheddar eaten as a bedtime snack has on other people. But by any standards, the problem facing the Chief Underwriter as the bits of Kiss embarked on their final decay into oblivion was a honey.

  The policy promised to pay Kiss, on his demise, the sum often thousand celestial dollars.

  (There was a lot of other guff about with profit and provisions in the event of surrender prior to the contractual maturity date, but we can skip all that. Not germane to the issue in hand.)

  Let’s just pass that concept round the room and see what we come up with.

  When Kiss dies, he gets ten grand. It can also be construed as saying that each time Kiss dies, he gets ten grand. Nothing at all in the small print about this being a one-off payment.

  As noted above, there are currently tens of thousands of millions of Kisses (each one with the same consciousness, the same self-awareness, the memory, the persona, however you like to put it; at this point the vocabulary tends to get a bit fancy, but the idea is clear enough), all of them scheduled to die at precisely the same moment. Each one entitled to claim under the terms of the policy.

  Now that’s an awful lot of lettuce.

  Which is not to say that the Chief Underwriter can’t afford it. Somewhere buried in a cave in Galilee, or deep in some unexcavated catacomb in Rome, or maybe stashed away in a secret chamber under a Crusader castle some­where, there’s a tablet of stone in a cedarwood box that says, This guy’s cheque will not bounce.

  There is, however, more to it than that. In a word, inflation. More precisely, a desperately overheated money supply, leading to an inevitable devaluation, with knock-on effects on the divine economy which would throw countless angels on the dole and spell ruin for all those saints that from their labours rest who have to make ends meet on a celestial pension. Put it another way, things could hardly be worse if God suddenly fell off his yacht and drowned.

  As the Chief Underwriter realised, a fraction of a second before his unwonted lapse into vulgarity, there’s only one thing that can save Heaven at this point.

  A miracle.

  HAVE A SEAT, said the Chief Underwriter. AND A

  CIGAR. I THINK WE CAN COME TO SOME SORT OF

  AN AGREEMENT

  Wherever it was that Philly Nine actually went to, when he got there he found a table and a plastic bucket.

  Inside the bucket were hundreds and hundreds of brightly coloured little plastic bricks.

  Philly stood for a long time, staring at the bricks and thinking ‘What the .. .?‘ Probably his mind wandered during this time, because the next thing he knew was that he had taken two bricks out and slotted them together. Each brick had little knobs on the top and little holes on the bottom that the knobs fitted into; and some of them were square and some of them were rectangular, and there were a lot of other excitingly different shapes and sizes.

  Without really thinking what he was doing, he pulled the bucket towards him, sat down on the floor and began to build.

  And in the evening, he looked upon everything that he had built, and saw that it was good.

  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  ‘Thanks,’ Kiss called out as he ran down the steps.

  DON’T MENTION IT ANY TIME.

  A satisfactory outcome, all told. The simple task which all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had so con­spicuously failed to do for Humpty-Dumpty had taken The Chief Underwriter’s staff about seven minutes. And there had been time to suggest a few subtle design improvements along the way.

  True, Kiss reflected as he strolled back down the sky, he’d had to agree to forgo a quite bewilderingly large sum of money to which he was, strictly speaking, contractually entitled; but he wasn’t too bothered about that: It wasn’t, he decided, that you couldn’t take it with you, because you could. It was just that there wasn’t exactly a superfluity of things you could spend it on once you’d got there.

  Right. What shall I do now?

  Well, I could pop into Saheed’s for a milk sour and a game of pool. Or I could put a girdle around the earth in twenty minutes. Or I could check out the thermals. Heaps of things I could do. The rest of Time’s my own.

  Or I could go and see if Jane...

  He stopped dead in his tracks, and swore. It’s a basic ground rule of genie life that you don’t allow yourself to get involved with mortals, and he should by now know that better than anyone. And if there was one mortal in particular who merited complete avoidance ...

  Because of her, he reflected, I’ve been humiliated, threatened with imminent loss of divine status, involved in a series of horrible fights with a fellow Force Twelve and finally blown to bits. By any standards, that’s taking the old wish/command nexus to its absolute limits.

  The sequence of thoughts reminded him of something, and he closed his eyes and listened. Nothing. He knew without having to enquire further that as far as this dimension was concerned, Philly Nine no longer existed. The threat to the world was over. Another tick on the list of Things To Do.

  Well, that milk sour surely does sound inviting. I think I might just as well ...

  He looked down. He had arrived, doubtless through sheer force of habit, a few feet above the block of flats where Jane lived. That bloody woman. Hah!

  There could be no doubt whatsoever, he reflected as he walked in through the front door of the building and summoned the lift, that as far as his indentures were concerned, he was free and clear. She’d had far and away more than her bottle-top’s worth out of him. Under no obligation whatsoever.

  Nevertheless, he rationalised as he rang the doorbell, it’d be a shame to part on bad terms, and their previous parting hadn’t exactly been cordial. Besides, he never had given her the obligatory bottomless purse, and he felt conscientious about that. Like the little silver inkstand-cum-paperweight you get given when you’re knocked out of a TV game show after the very first round, the bottomless purse wasn’t optional. It came with the territory.

  Rather to his surprise, the door was opened by the Dragon King of the South-East.

  ‘G’day, mate,’ said the King. ‘I was just leaving. Done me stint on this job.’

  ‘Me too.’

  The King shook his head. ‘Right bunch of wowsers if you ask me,’ he muttered, ‘the lot of ‘em. Glad to be through with ‘em at last.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘That bloody sheila...’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Well.’ The King hesitated for a moment, as if consider­ing whether some gesture of solidarity — a slapped back, perhaps, or a matey hand on the shoulder — would be more likely to result in the offer of a cool one down at Saheed’s or an instinctive left hook to the jaw. He must have been a pessimist at- heart because he smiled, shook his head and trotted off down the stairs. In
human form this time, naturally. Eventually, even Dragon Kings learn by their mistakes.

  Kiss stood for a few minutes, a hand on the half-open door. I don’t really need to say goodbye, he told himself.

  The more usual form of ending a mortal/genie relationship was a string of vulgar abuse and a puff of evil-smelling green smoke. Nevertheless. Trends are there to be bucked, and fashions led. He pushed the door open and walked in.

  About fifteen seconds later he came out again, moving fast and a sort of deep scarlet colour from the hairline to the collar-bone.

  It only goes to show, he muttered to his immortal soul as he bolted down the stairs, humans and genies are on different wavelengths altogether, and probably for the best. As a genie, he hadn’t thought twice about strolling in unannounced on two mortals of different sexes who were just embarking on the traditional living happily together ever after. Exactly what went on under such circumstances was, he realised, not something he’d ever given much thought to, in the same way that the bricklayers don’t generally hang around to see what colour carpets eventually go into the house they’ve just built. By the time the happy ending was properly under way, he was usually long gone and starting on another job.

  Well, now he knew; and, from what he’d seen, he was well out of it. For one thing, it looked so damn undignified. Not to mention uncomfortable. Cramp would be the least of your problems.

  Each to their own idea of a good time. Compared to, say, a good game of pool, however, he was amazed that it had lasted as long as it had.

  A good game of pool. And a quart or two of natural yoghurt with the lads, a really hot curry and so to bed. What could, in all honesty, be better?

  Jane stirred, brushed aside the heavy residue of sleep and reached out towards the pillow beside her.

  Nothing.

  Or rather, a note. With a frown like gathering thunder­clouds, she picked it up.

  BACK ABOUT SIX-THIRTY