by Tom Holt
“Who said anything about tobacco?”
Jane shrugged. “Please yourself.”
A second or so later she became aware of the most delicious perfume; attar of roses or something like that. Two hundred quid for a tiny bottle sort of thing. She nodded approval.
“Actually,” said the genie, “it’s woodbines. Well, this is all very pleasant. So far, anyway.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Jane replied. She pushed her hair backup out of her eyes, and put on a serious face. “I think it’s time we did a little basic ground-work, don’t you?”
The genie looked at her. “Ground-work? You mean ploughing or something?”
“I mean,” Jane replied, “I want you to tell me something about yourself. You see, I haven’t got the faintest idea what a genie is, or where they come from, anything like that. Except that they come in bottles and grant you three wishes,” she added lamely.
“I see.” Kiss scratched the bridge of his nose. “That’s a bit like saying all you know about America is Eggs Benedict and the date of Groundhog Day. Not enough, in other words.”
“That’s what I’d assumed.”
“Right, then,” the genie said. “Now, where shall I start?”
Genies (Kiss explained) are fallen angels. That is to say, in the beginning they were created out of the Mind of God, to do the things for which angels are necessary. All I can say about that is, He’s got one hell of a warped imagination.
Most genies got to be genies by backing the wrong side in the civil war between the archangel Michael and Lucifer, Son of the Morning. Not me, though; I was on the right side in that lot, albeit in the Pay Corps. As I remember, I spent the duration of the war either playing cards or wandering around with a clipboard trying to keep out of the way of the officers. Which suited me fine, by the way. Never saw a thunderbolt thrown in anger, and I play a really mean game of djinn rummy.
No, my departure from Heaven was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding about a lorry-load of black market stardust somehow going missing en route to HQ from King Solomon’s Mines. I was, of course, framed, but would they believe me? Would they hell.
Well, after that I bummed around for a bit, doing the things genies generally do — You don’t? Well, all sorts of things, really: raising storms, necromancy, digging up pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, riding the moon, changing princes into frogs, a few real estate deals, anything to pass the time and put a few dinars in your pocket. It’s a good life if you like that sort of thing, though you do tend to end up mixing with heroes and grand viziers and a lot of other lowlifes, and you’re really only ever as good as your last job. Particularly these days, with all the science and stuff. In fact, quite a few of the lads I used to hang out with have packed in the road and settled down as lift operators. No, not lift attendants, lift operators. You don’t seriously think lifts go up and down all day with just a bit of wire and a few pulleys, do you?
And the movies, of course; special effects. You’ve heard of George Lucas, I take it? Now that’s one genie who really did make the big time.
Anyway, there I was, just sort of pottering about, minding my own business; and then, wham! Lamp time. It happens to all of us sooner or later, of course, it’s genetic programming or something, like lemmings. Doesn’t stop you feeling a right idiot when the stopper goes down, though.
Well, I was out of circulation for, what, five hundred years, five and a bit, and then — Sorry? Look, do I have to, because it really is very embarrassing? All right, if you insist.
I was at this party (Kiss said, cringing slightly) and there was this djinn, right? Tall, slim, blonde, pair of fangs on her like a sabre-tooth tiger; I mean, we’re talking serious chemistry here and, besides, I may have been drinking. Alcohol has a bad effect on my metabolism, it has to be admitted. All I have to do is sniff a bottle of cough medicine and somebody has to take me home in a wheelbarrow.
Anyway, there we were and one thing led to another, and she said, “Your place or mine?” and the next thing I remember was waking up in this lamp thing with a splitting headache and the lid coming off and me being shot out like someone had just shot a hole through the cabin wall at fifty thousand feet; and there’s this magician type in a big pointy hat staring at me and saying, “Hold on a minute, you’re not the usual fiend, what’s become of Mabel?”
Mabel, needless to say, was the looker with the luxury dentures, and she’d lured me back to her lamp, done a runner and left me there. I tried explaining, but it didn’t do any good. “Never mind, you’ll just have to do instead,” was all the sympathy and understanding I got out of him, the bastard.
Now here’s a word of advice, from someone who’s been there; if ever you get yourself indentured to a black magician, try to make sure it’s not a black magician who’s into the financial services stuff. It’s bad enough as it is with the hurtling backwards and forwards through time and space, I-hear-and-obey-oh-mastering twenty-four hours a day, doing evil and getting yourself thoroughly disliked all the time. When you’ve got all that, plus you have to play snakes and ladders with the international currency markets, it can get to be a serious drag. You can imagine the sort of thing I mean: go sink a few of So-and-so’s ships so I can mount a hostile takeover of his company. Oh look, the Samarkandi dirham’s risen in early trading, go and raze their walls to the ground and eat their finance minister. I mean, where’s the self-respect in that?
(At which point Jane interrupted to say it sounded awful. Kiss nodded sadly.
“It was,” he said. “And you know what the worst part of it was? All this inside information floating around and me without a dinar to my name. A few lousy coppers in the right place and I could have been taken seriously rich, you know? As it was…”
“I see,” Jane said coldly. “Do please go on.”)
Anyway (said Kiss) eventually the Securities Commission caught up and it was a case of into the sack and off to the Bosphorus for him, and bloody good riddance too. Not, however, much fun for me, because I was in the lamp at the time. And in the lamp I stayed. For five hundred years, with nothing to do except play I Spy. Something, I need hardly tell you, beginning with L.
Just when I was starting to go lamp-crazy, though, off comes the lid and there’s this bloke in a sort of fawn safari suit peering in at me and saying something about typical thirteenth-century Bokhara ware, probably indicative of developing commercial links with the Ummayads. That’s right, a blasted archaeologist. There are times when you don’t know when you’re well off.
You’ll never guess what his three wishes were. Well, if you know anything about archaeology, maybe you can. As I understand it, in order to become an archaeologist you have to spend your youth stuck in some dusty old library reading books about bits of broken pot. You don’t have time for going to parties, or girls. By the time you do have time, it’s generally too late — unless, that is, you suddenly find yourself with a virtually omnipotent spiritual assistant and three wishes.
Anyway, after that I needed a year at the bottom of a disused mine-shaft just to recover and get over the embarrassment; after which I got a job as a clerk in a shipping office. It was the least exciting thing I could think of. I was right.
And then, just when I was thinking about what I was going to do next and how much fun I could have with superhuman powers and absolutely no social conscience, I got stuck in the bottle you so kindly extracted me from. No, I’m not prepared to go into details; and if you want any co-operation at all from me in the course of what promises to be a long and interesting working relationship, you’ll respect my privacy on that one. OK?
“Superhuman powers?” Jane queried.
Kiss nodded. “Pretty superhuman,” he replied, “and I don’t have to dash into the nearest phone box and change first, either. Although,” he added, “all that stuff was a front. He didn’t need to change at all, it was just part of the act.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “You mean Superman—?”
�
�No names,” Kiss replied, “no pack drill. But it’s true, there’s more of us about than people think. We’ve sort of rehabilitated ourselves in the community, if you like to look at it that way.”
“I see.” Jane was staring out of the window. “You know,” she said, “I’m so confused about all of this that I almost believe in you. Am I going mad, do you think?”
Kiss paused before answering. “You’re still alive, aren’t you?” he said. “Seems to me that you’re that much ahead of the game, so don’t knock it. That reminds me. The suicide thing. Why?”
Jane shook her head. “We’d better respect each other’s privacy,” she said. “Fair enough?”
“Your wish, etcetera. Right,” said the genie, “what’s it to be? Shall we kick off with the wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, get that out of the way before the banks close?”
“That’s possible, is it?”
“Piece of duff.” Kiss yawned and picked a stray morsel of fluff out of his hair. It turned into a two-headed snake, burst into flames and vanished. “Swiss francs are what we usually recommend, although gold bullion has a lot going for it. Up to you, really.”
Jane shook her head. “Later,” she said. “Let’s just have a look at this book and see what it has to say.”
She opened the manual.
1.1 Getting To Know Your Genie
“Gosh,” Jane said.
“You’re probably way ahead of me,” Kiss was saying, “but just in case you were tempted to, don’t look down. Or at least, not straight down. Vertigo is one of the things I can’t do anything about, oddly enough.”
Below them, on Nevsky Prospekt, the traffic roared; so far below them that all Jane could see was one continuous stream of white light and another of red. Further away, the absurd spire of the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul loomed up into the night sky, like a spear aimed at the moon…
“For God’s sake look where you’re going. We nearly flew straight into that pointy thing.”
“Sorry,” Kiss replied. “I’m a touch out of practice at flying two up. It’s a bit like riding a motorbike with a sidecar, really, you have to remember to compensate—”
“Look,” Jane interrupted, as they flashed past the Admiralty Tower with at least six thousandths of an inch to spare, “where the hell are we?”
“St Petersburg.”
“St Petersburg?”
Kiss shrugged — under the circumstances, an act of carelessness verging on criminal recklessness. “You said take me somewhere foreign,” he said, as Jane hauled herself back up between the base of his wings. “St Petersburg’s foreign. Can’t get much more foreign than St Petersburg, if you ask me. That down there, by the way, is the Prospekt Stachek, and that impressive-looking thing with the crinkly walls is in fact a processed meat plant, would you believe. Designed by Rubanchik and Barutchev in 1929—”
“Put me down.”
“As you wish. Anywhere in particular?”
“Yes. The ground. Quickly!”
The ground selected by Kiss for a landing strip turned out to be a pelican crossing on the Ulitsa Zodchevo Rossi, much to the chagrin of the driver of a lorry-load of Brussels sprouts who was just about to drive over it. For the record, the lightning-fast swerve by which he managed to avoid running Jane and her invisible companion over was witnessed by no less a person than the acting secretary of the local bus-driver’s co-operative, who offered him a job as soon as he was released from hospital.
“No offence,” Kiss said, as they crossed the road, “but you’re a lousy passenger. You may think that screaming Oh God, we’re going to die! and grabbing hold of my left wing just when I’m doing the tricky part of the landing process is being helpful, but in actual fact…”
Jane sat down on the steps of a building and closed her eyes. “I think,” she said, “I’ll take the train back, if it’s all the same to you.”
Kiss was offended. “I’d just like to remind you,” he said, “that if you’d had your way, you’d have killed yourself by now. When it comes to a total disregard for the value of human life, I think you’re the one who’s into melanistic kettle spotting.”
Jane looked up at him angrily. “To recap,” she said. “Any wish I like, so long as it’s physically possible?”
“That’s right. OUCH!”
“Thank you.”
“There was no call,” Kiss said, rubbing the place on the side of his head where he had just thumped himself very hard, “for that. If you’re not happy about something, all you have to do is say. Remember that, and we’ll get on just fine.”
Jane got to her feet. “Now then,” she said. “Yes, I’m convinced. You are a genie, and you exist. I think I’d like to go home. Slowly.”
“Your wish is my—”
“And peacefully. Straight and level. You think you can manage that?”
“I’ll give it,” Kiss replied, “my best shot.”
“Is that it?”
Kiss made no reply; he just took off his pinny, folded it neatly and put it back behind the door. Then he started the washing-up.
“And these little bits of grey grisly stuff,” Jane went on. “You’re sure they’re really necessary?”
“Quails” guts Marengo,” Kiss replied. “Where I come from, that’s about as haut as cuisine can get. Fried in butter, or served as a crudité with a simple green salad…”
Jane put down her fork and folded her arms. “No thanks,” she said. “Just take it away and bring me a boiled egg. A hen’s egg,” she added quickly; but not quickly enough.
“To hear is to obey,” Kiss explained smugly. “Come on, eat it up before it hatches.”
Jane shook her head; and a moment later there as a faint tapping sound, like Ginger Rogers trapped inside a fireproof vault. A hairline crack appeared in the side of the egg.
“People think,” Kiss said, removing the plate, “that these little chaps became extinct because of severe climactic changes at the close of the Cretaceous period. Truth is, nothing stupid enough to taste that good in an omelette deserves to survive. Oh look, here he comes. Whoosa pretty boy, then?”
A small, scaly head with three tiny bumps on its skull poked out through the shell and blinked moistly. Kiss clicked his tongue at it fondly a few times, and then vanished. When he reappeared, he was carrying a plastic tray and a styrofoam cup with a straw.
“More your style,” he said contemptuously. “Still, it’s early days yet. Next week we’ll start you on ammonite cocktails and honey-roast mammoth.”
“Want to bet?”
“Your wish is my—”
“Oh, shut up.”
1.2 Setting Up Basic Routines
“For pity’s sake,” Jane croaked, rolling over and peering at her clock. “It’s half past three in the morning.”
Over the end of the bed, a cloud of photons glistened cheerfully. “Up bright and early, you said,” Kiss replied. “Here, catch hold.”
To her disgust, Jane received a tray with a plate on it. On the plate was a hedgehog, curled up in a nest of dry leaves. There were cubes of cheese and pineapple impaled on its spikes. It was, Jane noted with relief, asleep rather than dead.
“You did say you wanted your breakfast still in its bed,” Kiss explained, “so I didn’t wake it up. Besides, hedgehogs are usually flambéed at the table, so if you’ll pass me that box of matches…”
“Are you being stupid on purpose, or are you just—?”
“There’s no need to be rude.”
1.3 Margins
“Right,” Jane said. “Today we’re going to set the world to rights.”
Kiss looked up from the sink. “Fine,” he said. “Is that before or after I do the washing-up?”
Jane blinked. “I was being facetious,” she replied. “Were you?”
“No,” the genie answered, squeezing the entire contents of the washing-up liquid bottle into the sink and turning both taps to full power. “I’m never facetious where wishes are concerned, it’s part of being a
pro. You want the world set to rights, I’m your sprite.”
“I see.” Jane sat down and drank some tea. It was quite unlike any other tea she had ever tasted, while at the same time being unmistakably tea. She found out later that this was because Kiss made tea by uprooting a tea plant and dumping it in the pressure cooker for half an hour. “And how do you propose going about it?”
“Easy.” The words easy, no worries, piece of cake had come to ring loud warning bells in Jane’s mind; it usually meant that the genie was contemplating doing something so extreme as to boil the brain. “The way I see it, all the misery and unhappiness in the world today is caused by governments, people like that. Just give me five minutes to get this baked-on grease off this grill-pan and I’ll nip out and deal with them.”
“Deal with?”
Kiss made an unambiguous gesture with his forefinger and his throat. “They’ve got it coming,” he said cheerfully. “It’ll be a pleasure.”
Jane spilt her tea. “One,” she said, “you’ll do no such thing.”
“Oh, come on…”
“Two,” she continued, “I thought there were rules about that sort of thing. I mean, what you can and can’t do.”
Kiss shook his head. “There are,” he replied. “But topping a few politicians is entirely legitimate. It’s only impossible things that I’m not supposed to do; you know, things that’d bend the nature of physics. There’s nothing in the book of rules about criminal irresponsibility.”
“An.”
“I take it you’re not keen on the idea?”
“I have to admit,” Jane replied, “I’d prefer a more organic approach.”
The genie’s massive brow wrinkled over. “What, you mean bury them alive? Can do, just say the—”
“No.”
“All right, then, how about bury them alive in compost? You can’t get more organic than compost.”
“I meant,” Jane said firmly, “something a bit more constructive. Something that doesn’t involve lots of people getting killed.”
