by Tom Holt
The Chief Druid nodded. As he did so, he was aware that he was on the receiving end of some pretty old-fashioned looks from the rest of the Circle (particularly Mr Cruickshank, who taught Drama at the local junior school and had a Greenpeace sticker in the back window of his Citroën) but he ignored them. “Quite right,” he stuttered. “My sentiments exactly, er, Majesty.”
The Goddess nodded. “Fine,” she said. “Ordinarily, that’d be a pretty tall order, but since it’s you—”
“Excuse me.”
The Chief Druid’s head whirled round like a weathervane in a hurricane. Mr Cruickshank had raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, Goddess,” said Mr Cruickshank, his eyes nearly popping out of his head, “but, if you don’t mind me asking—”
“Yes?”
“These seven plagues…”
“Ah yes.” The Goddess dipped her head placidly. “Mr Owen will correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, dropping a smile in the Chief Druid’s direction, “but what I think he had in mind was plagues of hail, brimstone, frogs, sulphur, locusts, giant ants and burning pitch. That’s right, isn’t it?”
The Chief Druid felt his head nod.
“In any particular order, or just as it comes?”
“Oh, as it comes. Whatever’s the most convenient for you.”
“Thank you.” The Goddess considered for a moment. “In that case,” she said, “I think we’ll set the ball rolling with locusts. Is that all right with everyone?”
A flash of blue lightning rent the night sky, and six heads rapidly nodded their agreement.
“You’re sure? It’s your request, after all.”
“No, really,” gabbled the Chief Druid. “Locusts, by all means.”
“Locusts it shall be, then,” the Goddess replied. “Will Tuesday be soon enough, do you think?”
The Chief Druid shuddered. He had spent that afternoon planting out his spring cabbages. He assured the Goddess that there was no hurry.
“Oh, I think I should be able to manage Tuesday. Now then, any more for any more?”
Apparently not. A few seconds later, the Goddess was gone. As she sped through the fog and filthy air, she gave herself a little shake and turned back into the genie Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX.
A genie with a mandate.
The small yellow frog that had once been Kevin hopped slowly across the blasted heath.
Right now, he might be a small yellow frog; but not so long ago he had been an insurance broker, and we have already seen how insurance is like a pyramid — (Huge, incomprehensible, hideously expensive, completely unnecessary and specifically designed only to be of any benefit to you once you’re dead? Well, quite; but also…) — a pyramid, with tens of thousands of little people like Kevin at the bottom, and a small number of very big people indeed at the top.
If one of the little people at the bottom shouts loud enough, one of the big people at the top will hear him.
Exhausted, the little yellow frog crawled the last few agonising inches and flopped into a stagnant pond. For two minutes he lay bobbing in the brackish water, gathering his strength.
They will hear him, because there is money at stake; and money is the ultimate hearing aid.
The little yellow frog stretched his legs and kicked feebly. A small string of bubbles broke the surface of the water. Deep down, among the pondweed and the mosquito larvae, Kevin rested, took stock of his position, and reflected on what he had to do next.
First, he had to file a claim. Without the policy document to hand, he couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t something in the fine print that excluded being turned into a frog from the All Risks cover; Act of Goddess, probably. But there was no harm in trying.
Second, he had to report to his superiors.
The loss adjusters at the top of the pyramid have a refreshingly dynamic approach to their art. Instead of simply coming on the scene when the dust has settled and trying to make the best of a bad job, they prefer to think positive. The best way to adjust a loss, they feel, is retrospectively.
Not long afterwards, a small yellow head appeared above the surface of the pond, blinked, and turned its snout towards the waning moon.
“Rivet,” it said. “Rivet-rivet-rivet.”
SIX
Would you like,” Jane asked, “a cup of tea?”
Kiss nodded, unable to speak. Genies, of course, can’t stomach tea. The tannin does something drastic to the inexplicable tangle of chemical reactions that makes up their digestion. He grinned awkwardly.
“I brought you some feathers,” he mumbled, and thrust the bundle at her. She simpered.
“Gosh,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty? Let me put them in some water.”
She grabbed the feathers and fled into the kitchen, leaving Kiss to speculate as to what in hell’s name was going on.
Heatstroke? He hadn’t been anywhere hot. Malaria? Genies don’t get malaria. A recent sharp bang on the head? No. Then what…?
Eliminate the impossible — “Impossible!” he said aloud. — and whatever remains, however improbable — “No way,” he muttered. “Biological impossibility.” — must be the truth.
“Shit!” he said.
And yet. Weirder things have been known. It’s a fact that human beings (and genies count as human for this purpose) can get attached to almost anything, with the possible exception of Death and lawyers. And there was something indescribably charming about the way the corners of her mouth puckered up when she smiled.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” the genie exclaimed. And then the truth hit him. He peered down at his chest and saw, on the left side, a small round hole in his shirt. A few minutes later and it wouldn’t have been there; the holes Cupid makes in cloth heal themselves in about a quarter of an hour, on average.
The bastard, Kiss said to himself. The absolute bastard.
But what could he do about it? Well, he could try changing himself into a woman — a piece of cake for a Force Twelve — but he had the feeling that that wouldn’t make things better in the slightest degree; in fact, it would complicate matters horrendously. The same was true of turning into a cat, an ant or a three-legged stool.
He could get hold of that bloody aggravating child and twist his head off. That would make him feel better, for a while; but he knew perfectly well that even Cupid was incapable of undoing the damage. All he could realistically hope for was that with the passage of time the wound would heal of its own accord. But how long? With mortals, he knew, the process usually took somewhere between three and sixty years, and he didn’t have that much time. Marriage, of course, was a recognised form of accelerating the process, but even so—
And why? The question flared in his mind like an explosion in a fuel dump. What possible reason could Cupid have for a stunt like this?
He could think of a reason. Cold sweat began to seep through his pores.
The door opened and Jane sidled through, holding a teacup and a large cut-glass vase full of soggy-looking phoenix feathers.
“There,” she said, “don’t they look nice?”
Kiss nodded dumbly. He had been an observer of human behaviour long enough to know perfectly well what came next; that excruciatingly embarrassing hour or so that you always get when two people realise that they’re in love, but both of them would rather be buried alive in a pit full of quicklime than raise the topic in conversation. There would also be much staring at shoelaces, averting of eyes, feelings of nausea and meaningless small talk marinaded in sublimated soppiness.
“It was really kind of you to get them for me,” Jane was saying. “It’s something I’ve always wanted, a vase full of feathers. I think I’ll put it here, where I can look at it when I’m sitting on the sofa.”
Jesus wept, Kiss thought, if only you could hear yourself! “I’m glad you like them,” he heard himself reply. “It was no bother, really.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“No, it wasn’t.�
��
First, Kiss’s subconscious was saying, we’ll take the little bastard’s rifle and wrap it round his neck and then shove it right up his…
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
There are rules, very strict rules, about when a genie may or may not read the mind of a mortal to whom he is indentured. Kiss broke them all. It was some small comfort to him to find that Jane’s innermost thoughts were along more or less the same lines as his. What on earth is going on? he noticed with approval. It can’t really be, surely, he was pleased to see. What, him? he read, with somewhat mixed feelings. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it was, he couldn’t help feeling, just a trifle too emphatic. Without realising he was doing it, he made a few subliminal alterations to his bone structure and general physique.
Look, screamed his soul, this is ludicrous. Why don’t you just tell her what’s really happened, and find some way of sorting it out?
His consciousness turned to his soul and told it to get lost.
Yes, but—
Don’t you understand plain Arabic? Bugger off. Can’t you see the lady and I don’t want to be interrupted?
“More tea?”
“Yes, please.” You idiot, can’t you see what’s happening? Are you just going to stand there and let them…? Hey, there’s no need to get violent, I was just going anyway…
“Would you like a biscuit?”
“No, no, I’m fine, thanks.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure, thanks all the same.”
“It’d be no trouble at all.”
“No, really, I’m fine.”
As he spoke, Kiss marvelled at the moral fibre of the human race. A lesser species, faced with all this mucking about as an integral part of the procreative process, would have died out thousands of years ago. Salmon baffling their way up waterfalls were quitters in comparison.
“Was it cold out?”
“Sorry?”
“I said, was it cold out? The weather.”
“No, it was fine. A bit nippy actually up the Himalayas themselves, but otherwise very, um, clement. For the time of year.”
“They must be very interesting,” Jane croaked. “The Himalayas, I mean.”
“Yes, very.”
“And you had no trouble finding the phoenix?” Jane went on. It was painfully obvious that she was suffering too, but there was nothing at all he could do about it. He was having to call upon hidden resources of superhuman power just to stop himself from standing there with his mouth open like the rear doors of a cross-Channel ferry.
“No, it was easy enough. I just looked for some rocks with lots of white splashes and bits eaten out of them.”
“Ah. Right.”
Inside his heart, the bullet began to decompose. Cupid’s bullets do that; the outer jacket, which is pressure-formed out of 99 per cent pure embarrassment, is soluble in sentiment and dissolves, leaving the bullet’s core: 185 grains of cold-swaged slush. Any minute now, Kiss knew, he’d be staring at the carpet and muttering that there was something he’d been meaning to say to her for some time.
“Jane.”
“Yes?”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for some time.”
“Me too.”
“Sorry. Fire away.”
“No, no, you first.”
Thanks a heap. “It’s like, well—”
“Yes?”
He took a deep breath and said it. While he was saying it, the small part of him that was still functioning normally, albeit on emergency back-up systems and with a chair wedged behind the door in case the build-up of pink slop outside tried to force its way in, was working feverishly on the original very-good-question, Why?
Why should Philly Nine go to all the trouble and expense of hiring the ultimate hit-man, breaking all the rules in the Genies’ Code of Conduct (it was cold comfort, but as soon as the Committee got to hear of this, Philly Nine was going to be spending a very long time in a confined space looking at green, curved, opaque walls) just to get his own back? Genies don’t…
…Feelings that are, well, stronger than just ordinary friendship and, well, I guess that what Pm trying to say is…)
Genies don’t conduct their feuds like that; they hit each other with solid objects, sometimes even mountains and small asteroids, and pelt each other with lightning and divert major rivers down the backs of each others’ necks, but at least they’re open about it. And, once the air had been cleared and the damage to the Earth’s surface has been made good and the mountains put back in their proper place, they forget all about it and carry on, as if nothing had happened. This sort of thing—
(…and I was sort of hoping that if you somehow might find you feel sort of the same way about me then we might sort of…)
And then the penny dropped. The shock was so great that for a few moments Kiss was suddenly taken stone-cold sober, and he stopped in mid-sentence and stared.
“The bastard!” he said. “The complete and utter bastard!”
Jane looked up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry.” The tide of slush, temporarily checked, started to flow again. “I was miles away. As I was saying…”
Let’s do everyone a favour and fade out on Kiss for the moment
(…Make me the happiest man, well, genie, in the whole wide world…)
And just consider the situation, calmly and without getting carried away. Ready? Good.
What do you get if you cross a genie with a human being? Answer, you don’t, because you can’t. It’s a simple matter of chemistry; or physics; or, when you come right down to it, mythology.
Genies do not, of course, exist. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. There are, as should be now be only too obvious, rather more of them than the universe can comfortably accommodate. Any cosmos that contains fragile, breakable things, such as planets, is better off with a ratio of as near to zero genies per cubic kilometre as possible.
Genies exist at a tangent to reality. They intrude into the continuum we inhabit, in much the same way as an iceberg intrudes into a major shipping lane. Only a tiny proportion of the huge complex of forces that go to make up a genie is ever present on this side of the thin blue line at any given time. Of the genie known as Kiss, for example, 87 per cent is sprawled across the Past and the Future like a cat sitting on the Sunday paper.
Let your imagination do its worst, and then you will agree that any sort of lasting relationship between a genie and a human being is out of the question. And if that wasn’t bad enough, please also bear in mind that regardless of the physical shape it chooses to adopt, a genie always weighs a minimum of 72 tons and has a normal skin temperature of 700 degrees Celsius. It takes as much effort for a genie just to shake hands with a human without crushing him to pulp or shrivelling him up into ash as it would have to expend on juggling with the Pyrenees while standing on one leg on the head of a pin. And relationships are hard enough as it is without any added complications.
There is, however, an escape clause. It’s totally irreversible and unbearably romantic, and its consequences to the genie are so horrendous that it has never been used; but it does exist.
A genie can become a human.
Think about it. Never to be able to fly again; never to uproot mountains or conjure up storms, change shape, travel through time, work magic. To forswear eternal life, and accept the inevitably of old age and death. To throw away divinity and embrace mortality, and all for love.
A hiding to nothing, in fact.
But the option exists; and it’s a basic rule of life in an infinite universe that if something is possible, no matter how dangerous, unpleasant or downright idiotic it might be, sooner or later some fool will do it. Because it’s there.
Or because they have no choice.
While we’re on the subject of genies, consider this. Given that genies are by temperament cruel, arbitrary, uncaring, destructive and deeply interested in wealth beyon
d the dreams of avarice, isn’t it inevitable that at least some of them should end up in the legal profession?
The offices of Messrs Fretten and Swindall are on the fifth floor of a large Chianti bottle with a hole drilled in the side and a bulb stuck in the neck, somewhere in the fashionable suburbs of Baghdad. This is no dog-and-stick operation over a chemist’s shop in the High Street; even the receptionist is a Force Nine genie, with the power to harness the winds, raise the dead from their graves and convince callers that Mr Fretten really is on the other line and will call them back as soon as he’s free.
(A staggering achievement, considering that Mr Fretten has been imprisoned in an empty gin bottle on a back shelf of the golf-club bar ever since Jesus Christ was a teenager; but there it is. There are at least two callers who have been holding for six hundred years.)
Hoping very much that wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice meant just that, Kiss made an appointment and took a strong easterly trade wind to Baghdad. Having given his coat to the receptionist, handed over a bottomless purse by way of a payment on account and read the March 1453 edition of the National Geographic from cover to cover, he was ushered into Mr Swindall’s office and permitted to sit down.
“It’s like this,” he said. He explained.
“You’re stuffed,” said Mr Swindall, a big, fat bald Force Twelve with six chins. “Completely shafted. He’s got you on the sharp end of a very long pointy stick and there’s bog all you can do about it. Forty thousand years in a Tizer bottle will seem like paradise compared to what you’re about to go through.”
“Oh.”
Mr Swindall grinned. “As neat a piece of buggeration as I’ve ever been privileged to hear about,” he went on. “You’ve got to hand it to this friend of yours, he really knows how to insert the red-hot poker. If he came in here tomorrow I’d offer him a job like a shot.”
“I see.” Kiss frowned. “I thought you’re supposed to be on my side,” he said.
