by Tom Holt
“And now you tell me,” Jane continued, “that another genie — was he one of the ones we met at that peculiar night club?”
“No.”
“Another genie is planning to destroy the human race, using overgrown carnivorous plants. And it’s not,” Jane added, after glancing at her watch, “April the first. Now then, what the hell am I meant to make of all that?”
Kiss shrugged. “The best you can,” he replied. “It’s called coping. Like I said, some people find it helps to posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. I know for a fact He does. Other people,” Kiss added, materialising a decanter and a soda siphon, “get drunk a lot. It all comes down to individual preferences in the long run.”
“Look—”
“As a matter of fact, He’s all right, and so’s the second one, Junior. It’s the Holy Ghost you’ve got to watch out for. Forever walking through walls with its head under its arm, which for someone in its position is taking light-hearted frivolity a bit too far, in my opinion. Still, there it is…”
“Kiss…”
“Not to mention,” the genie continued, “jumping out during séances and banging things on tables. And, of course, trying to exorcise it is an absolute hiding to nothing. Sorry, you were saying?”
“What is going on?”
The genie shrugged. “Can’t rightly say,” he replied. “By the looks of it, some raving nutcase or other’s decided to annihilate his own species. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get used to it. You get used to pretty well everything eventually.”
“I see.” Jane started to pick at the stitching on her shoe. “Happen a lot, does it?”
“Once every forty years, on average. Usually, though, — it’s just a war. When We get involved, it tends to get a bit heavy. Still, like I told you the other day, for every genie commissioned to destroy the world there’s another told off to save it, so things even out in the long run. Last time I looked, the planet was still here.”
Jane opened her eyes. “I think I’m beginning to see,” she said. “Sort of. Just when this other genie — Pennsylvania something?”
“Philadelphia Machine and Tool. Actually there is a genie called Pennsylvania Farmers’ Bank III — Penny Three — but he’s no bother to anyone.”
“This Philadelphia person,” Jane continued coldly, “is going to wipe out the human race, you suddenly pop up and stop him doing it. That’s why all this is happening. And I’m…”
She stopped. She felt cold. In her anxiety, she broke the heel off her shoe.
“Look.” Kiss frowned, summoning up soft, heavenly music in the far distance. “Nice try, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Things aren’t all neatly ordained and settled the way you seem to think — unless, of course, you posit the existence of a…”
“But it makes sense,” Jane protested. “Someone wants the world destroyed. I want it saved.”
Kiss clapped his hands. “Ah,” he said, “now we seem to be getting somewhere. That sounded remarkably like a Wish to me.”
“Did it?”
Kiss nodded. “I reckon so. You Wish the world to be saved. I take it,” he added, “that you do?”
“I suppose so.”
“Give me strength!” Kiss took a deep breath. “Either you do or you don’t, it’s not exactly a grey area. Toss a coin if you think it’ll help you decide.”
Jane shook her head. “Of course I want the world saved,” she said. “Or at least, I suppose I do. The last thing I can remember before all this was wishing it would all go away.”
“That’s just typical sloppy mortal thinking,” Kiss replied crossly. “This is what comes of giving your lot free will without making you send in the ten coupons from the special offer box-lids first. You mortals,” Kiss went on, with a slight nuance of self-righteousness in his voice, “think that just because you come to an end, the world comes to an end too. Well, I’m an immortal and I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. If you ask me, they should print Please Leave The World As You Would Wish To Find It in big letters on the inside of wombs and coffins, and then there’d be no excuse for all this messing about. I’m sorry,” he said, calming down, “but there are some things I feel strongly about. Well, stronglyish, anyway.”
“Sorry,” Jane said meekly. “I’m not really used to all this yet.”
“That’s all right,” the genie replied, turning the music up a very little. “Look, take it from me, you want the world saved.”
“Right.”
“Save the world,” Kiss continued, “and you get merit in Heaven.”
“If we posit its existence, of course.”
Kiss sighed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” he grumbled. “Look—”
“Save ten worlds and you get a free alarm clock radio—”
“That,” snapped the genie, “will do. It’s quite simple, as far as I’m concerned. The human race is the measure of everything that’s prosaic and mundane. If there weren’t any humans, there’d be no point being a genie, because there wouldn’t be anyone to be bigger and stronger and cleverer than. So, as a favour to me, I suggest you Wish the human race saved. OK?”
Jane squinted into the middle distance, trying to see what the world would look like if she wasn’t there. She couldn’t.
“Put like that,” she said, “how can I refuse? But hang on,” she added. “I thought you said all the nasty plant seeds had got burned up. Doesn’t that mean—”
Kiss grinned unpleasantly. “It means,” he said, “that my old mate Philly Nine has failed. If he’d succeeded, the human race would have been annihilated. Since he’s failed, with all the loss of face that entails…” The genie laughed without humour. “That means,” he went on, “he’s honour bound to get even. Which means,” he concluded, materialising a paint roller and a five-gallon tin of pink emulsion, “you lot really are in trouble. Are you absolutely dead set on having pink, by the way? It’ll make the whole room look as if it’s been whitewashed with taramasalata.”
Jane considered for a moment and then nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Definitely pink.”
According to the ancient proverb, the worst words a general can ever utter are, “I never expected that.”
In consequence, the military pride themselves on having anticipated every possible contingency. There are huge underground bunkers beneath the floor of the Arizona Desert staffed by teams of dedicated men and women whose sole purpose in life is to dream up the Weirdest Possible scenario, and make plans to meet it.
Some of these scenarii are very weird indeed.
Witness, to name but a few, the elite Special Boot Squadron (the task-force poised to counter an attempt by a hostile power to subvert democracy by gluing the soles of everybody’s shoes to the floor while they sleep); the Royal Cleanjackets (the crack special force permanently on yellow alert for the day when alien commandos infiltrate all the major dry-cleaning chains across the Free World); not to mention Operation Dessert Storm (the fast response unit designed to deal out instantaneous retribution in the event of low-level bombing of non-military targets with custard).
The heavy burden of co-ordinating these various forces lay, at the time in question, on the broad shoulders of Major-General Vivian Kowalski: officer commanding, Camp Nemo. When the day arrived that was to be remembered ever after as the Pearl Harbor of weirdness, Kowalski had just returned from a tour of inspection of the Heliotrope Berets (the hair-trigger-trained haute couture force whose centre of operations is a tastefully decorated concrete bunker directly under the Givenchy salon, Paris). As a result he was feeling rather jaded.
It was good, he decided, to be back.
Returning to his spartan quarters, he removed the HB uniform he had worn for the tour (sage cotton jacquard battledress by Saint Laurent, worn over Dior raspberry silk chemise with matching culottes), lay down on his bunk and covered his face with his hands. It had been a long, hard day.
The telephone rang. The red telephone.
In an instant Kowalski was on
his feet, dragging on his discarded uniform and gunbelt. Twenty minutes later, his helicopter landed on the White House lawn.
“Hi there, Kowalski,” the President greeted him, yelling to make himself heard over the roar of the chopper engines. “Excuse my asking, but why are you wearing a dress?”
In clipped, concise military language Kowalski explained, and they went inside. In the relative peace of the Oval Office, the President explained. He didn’t mince his words.
When he’d finished, Kowalski read back his notes and chewed his lip.
“Gee, Mr President,” he said. “We never expected anything like that. Who do you think’s responsible?”
The President shrugged. “No idea,” he replied. “Does it matter? The important thing is, what do we do? I assume you guys have something up your sleeves out there in the desert that’ll zap these mothers into the middle of…”
He tailed off. Kowalski was shaking his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess we overlooked that possibility. You gotta admit,” he went on, countering the implied criticism in the Chiefs eyes, “giant self-propelled carnivorous wildflowers terrorising Florida has got to be one of the longest shots of all. Besides,” he went on, “since you saw fit to trim the budget…”
“OK.” The President made a small gesture with his hands, guillotining the recriminations stage of the conference. “So tell me, Viv. What have we got?”
Kowalski scowled and scratched his head. “Assuming,” he said, “that saturation bombing with all known weedkillers — you’ve tried that, yes, of course.” He grinned. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to let us work on that one for a while,” he said.
“But you do have a solution?”
“No,” Kowalski admitted, “but I know somebody who might.”
The main reason why the world is still here is that genies have little or no initiative.
Command them to do something and they obey. It’s not unknown for them sometimes to interpret their instructions with a degree of latitude — for example, if their instructions can be interpreted, however loosely, as a mandate to destroy the human race, and they happen to be psychotic Force Twelves with a personal grudge against mankind in general. Under such circumstances, they spring into action with all the vigour and energy of a supercharged volcano.
But without some tiny speck of mortal authority around which to build their pearls of malevolence, even the nastiest genies can do nothing. And, fortunately enough, mortals unhinged enough to give them that authority, are few and far between.
In the most secret bunker of all, half a mile under the bleakest spot in all New Mexico, there is a door.
A big, thick steel door with a combination lock. For the unimaginative there is also a notice, in huge red letters, saying “DO NOT ENTER”.
Open the door and you find a flight of steps, going down. Just when exhaustion and the disorienting effect of the darkness and the smell of must and stagnant water is about to get too much for you, the steps end and there is another door. It, too, is big, thick and made of steel. There is a notice, in big red letters, saying “AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY”.
Open that door and you find yourself in a small room, the size of the average hotel fitted wardrobe. The room is empty, apart from a chunky steel safe.
Inside the safe is a bottle.
WHOOSH!
Kowalski reared back, banged his head on the door and sat down hard. Suddenly the room was full of genie.
“Hello,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX, grinning unpleasantly. “Your wish is my command. What’s it to be?”
Slowly, his eyes not leaving the apparition that surrounded him, Kowalski levered himself up off the floor with all the agility of a dropped fried egg climbing back into a frying pan. “Hi,” he replied. “Are you the genie?”
Philly Nine gave him a look.
“Yeah,” Kowalski said, “I guess you must be. I’m—”
“I know who you are,” Philly Nine replied. “What can I do for you? To hear,” he added, with a chuckle that belonged to some private joke Kowalski didn’t even want even to understand, “is to obey. Shoot.”
The soldier explained; and as he did so the genie nodded sympathetically. The expression in his fiery red eyes didn’t for one instant betray the savage triumph pumping through his heart.
Had it ever occurred to Kowalski to wonder, he asked himself, why a genie should have volunteered to be indentured to a bottle? Why, when all other genies in the history of Creation would do anything — anything at all — to avoid it, Philly Nine (a Force Twelve, no less) had deliberately and at his own request allowed himself to be bound to serve whoever removed the lid of this nasty, smelly glass container? Did the words ulterior motive have no place at all in this man’s vocabulary?
“I see,” he said, when Kowalski had finished speaking. “Nasty business. I take it,” he went on, choosing his words with the skill of a lawyer on a fraud charge, “you want me to do something about it?”
Kowalski nodded. “Positive,” he said.
“And may I take it,” the genie purred, “that I have a certain degree of discretion in how I go about this? So long as I get the job done, of course?”
“Naturally,” the soldier said. “This thing has sure got us licked. Anything you can do—”
“Oh, I can think of a few ideas,” the genie said. Being a Force Twelve, one of the seven most powerful non-divine beings ever to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere, he was just about able to keep a straight face. “A few tricks up my sleeve, that sort of thing. When would you like me to start?”
“Immediately,” Kowalski replied. “If that’s OK with you.”
A wide, slow smile crept like the first spill of lava from the cracks of Vesuvius across Philly Nine’s large, handsome face. “No problem,” he said. “You just leave everything to me, and we’ll see what can be done.”
Kowalski permitted himself a sigh of relief. Just for a moment back there, he’d been worried. “That’s fine,” he said, “If there’s anything you need…”
Philly hesitated. A few atomic bombs might, he felt, come in handy, particularly when it came to apportioning the blame afterwards. On the other hand, he had just been given carte blanche by a mortal — not just any mortal, he added with infinite smugness, but a duly accredited representative of the government of the United States of America — and asking for a fistful of nukes might just lead to awkward questions being asked and tiresome restrictions placed on his mandate. After his carelessness in wiping out the mortals who had given him his original opportunity, which he had then squandered (to his infinite shame), he had managed against all probability to get a chance at getting his own back. Best not to risk blowing it just for a handful of fireworks.
“Thanks for the offer,” he said therefore, “but I should be able to manage. Have a nice day, now.”
He vanished.
Tinkerbell, Grand Khan of the Hammerhead Pansies, lifted its flower and roared.
The echoes died away. Then, from every corner of the Everglades, came answering roars, howls, shrieks and trumpetings. To the east it could make out the long, shrill howl of the primroses, under the command of Feldkommandant Trixie. From the north came the dull thunder of the forget-me-nots, and the laboured snorting of their High Admiral, Zog.
Where the bloody hell, Zog was asking, are we?
Tinkerbell twiddled its stamens in contempt. The forget-me-nots were, after all, an inferior species; and as soon as the job in hand was over, there was a place reserved for them somewhere near the bottom of the compost-heap of Creation. In the meantime, they might still conceivably be useful, if only as green mulch.
High overhead the F-ills continued their futile buzzing like so many demented mayflies; and, for those of them ill-advised enough to fly too low, with approximately the same life expectancy.
With a high wave of its right leaf, Tinkerbell motioned its column to proceed, and the mud churned around their thrashing roots. I
n the far distance, a reverberating splat! indicated that Zog had just tripped over its own tendrils.
Of all the seeds in Philly Nine’s bag, only thirty-one primroses, twenty-six forget-me-nots and nineteen pansies had made it through the hole in the atmosphere safely to the ground; and at first Tinkerbell had wondered whether the forces at its disposal were going to be sufficient. As time passed, however, and each individual flower had started to grow and put forth flowers, it realised that its fears were unfounded. The three varieties had been designed to take root in the dry, barren dust of the cities. The rich, wet mud of the swamps was a thousand times more nutritious, and the plants had grown accordingly. Mud, however, is all very well, but for high-intensity carnivores it lacks a certain something. They were feeling, to put it mildly, decidedly peckish.
It was, therefore, fortuitous that the United States Third Armored Division should have chosen that moment to attack.
Ah! Seventy-six telepathic vegetable intelligences simultaneously registered a giant surge of relief. Lunch!
The army’s battle plan was simple. Lay down an artillery barrage guaranteed to extinguish every trace of life in a thirty-square-mile area. Then another one. Then one more for luck. Then send in the tanks.
For the next ten hours it was noisy in that part of Florida, and visibility was poor because of the smoke. When the noise had subsided into a deadly silence, and the breeze had cleared away most of the smoke and fumes, there was nothing to be seen except desolation — and seventy-six enormous flowers towering over a nightmare scrapyard of twisted metal.
Better? asked the primroses.
A bit, replied the forget-me-nots, spreading well-fed roots among the debris that had once been a complete armoured division and burping. But you know how it is. You quickly get tired of all this tinned food.
With a sonic boom that shattered windows and played merry hell with television reception all over the state, Philly Nine flew over Miami, heading for the pall of smoke.
Swooping low, he turned a jaunty victory roll over the straggling column of refugees that clogged the interstate highway in both directions for as far as the eye could see. A ragged cheer broke out at ground level. The poor fools! If only they knew.
