Djinn Rummy

TWELVE

Never in the history of superhuman conflict have two Force Twelves ever tried to fight it out to the bitter end.

Generally speaking, they’ve got more sense. They know that it’s next best thing to impossible — nothing is definitively impossible in an infinite Universe, but there’s such a thing as so nearly completely impossible that even an insurance company would bet on it never happening — for either participant to kill the other, or even put him out of action for more than a minute or so. It’s a simple fact that, in this dimension at least, genies can’t be killed or injured, although they can of course do a hell of a lot of damage to anything else in the vicinity. Think of a bar-room brawl in a John Wayne Western, and you get the general idea.

They can, however, feel pain; and so they do their level best to avoid fighting each other in any meaningful sense. A direct hit from a mountain hurts, and is best avoided for that very reason.

The battle between Kiss and Philly Nine was, therefore, something rather special; and when word reached the back bar of Saheed’s, there was a sudden and undignified scramble for the exit. This was going to be something to see.

“GO ON, YOU BLOODY FAIRY, RIP HIS EARS OFF!” shouted a small Force Two, who had climbed a lamppost to get a better view.

“Which one are you cheering for?” asked a colleague.

The Force Two shrugged.

“Both of them,” he replied. “I mean, it’s bound to be a draw, so… COME ON, PUT THE BOOT IN! STOP FARTING AROUND AND BREAK SOMETHING!”

“But if neither of them’s going to win, what’s the point in cheering at all?”

The Force Two shrugged. “It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he replied. “CALL THAT A RABBIT PUNCH? MY GRANNY HITS HARDER THAN THAT.”

“As I recall,” commented the other genie, “your granny was Cyclone Mavis. Wasn’t she the one that pulled that coral island off Sumatra right up by the roots and plonked it down again fifty miles to the east?”

“So I’m being factually correct. Where’s the harm in that?”

Half an hour later, the two combatants paused for a breather.

“It’s only a small point,” panted Kiss, picking shards of splintered basalt out of his knees, “but what are we going to do about paying for the breakages?”

“Split ’em between us, I suppose,” Philly replied, lifting a small Alp off his ankle and discarding it. “That’s probably simpler than trying to keep tabs as we go along.”

“Fair enough,” Kiss replied. “Otherwise it’d be like trying to, work out the bill in a restaurant. You know, who had what, I thought it was you that ordered the extra nan bread, that sort of thing.”

“Ready for some more?”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Or do you want to phone whatsername? She’s probably wondering where you’ve got to.”

Kiss shook his head. “More important things to do,” he replied wearily. “I mean, she can’t expect me to phone her if I’m fighting for my life against overwhelmingly superior demonic forces, can she?”

Philly rubbed his nose. “I dunno,” he said. “You know her better than I do.”

Kiss thought about it. “Maybe I’d better just give her a quick call,” he said. “I mean, she may have started dinner or something.”

Philly put his head on one side and gave Kiss a thoughtful look. “That’d take priority over mortal combat with the prince of darkness, would it?”

“You haven’t had much to do with women, I can tell.”

“I suffer from that disadvantage, yes.”

“Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”

Easier said, Kiss discovered, than done. When eventually he found a public telephone (he was in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the time) he discovered that all his loose change had shaken out of his pockets during the fight, and his phonecard was bent and wouldn’t go in the slot.

Easier, he realised, given that I’m capable of travelling at the speed of light, to nip round there in person. He gathered up his component molecules and jumped — There is a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation of how genies manage to transport themselves from one side of the earth to the other apparently instantaneously; it’s something to do with trans-dimensional shift error, and it is in fact wrong. The truth is that genies have this facility simply because Mother Nature knows better than to try and argue with beings who only partially exist and who have all the malevolent persistence and susceptibility to logical argument of the average two-year-old. Let them get on with it, she says; and if they suddenly find themselves stuck in a rift between opposing realities, then ha bloody ha. — and, before the electrical impulses that made up the thought had finished trudging along his central nervous system, he had arrived. He felt in his pocket for his key.

And stopped. And sniffed. Fee-fi-fo-fum, he muttered under his breath, I smell the blood of a Near Easterner somehow connected with fish. Or rather the socks. And the armpits. Not to mention the residual whiff of haddock which is so hard to lose, all the deodorants of Arabia notwithstanding.

Funny, he thought.

He opened the door and strolled in; to find Jane, his betrothed, apparently joined at the lips with a skinny dark-haired bloke in a salt-stained reefer jacket and grubby trainers.

It’s at times like this that instinct takes over. An instinct is, by its very nature, impulsive. Instinct doesn’t stand on one foot in the doorway thinking, “Hey, this really lets me off the hook, you know?” before discreetly tiptoeing away to see if it’s too late to get the deposit back on the wedding cake. Instinct jumps in, boot raised.

Three seconds or so later, therefore, Asaf was lying in a confused huddle in the corner of the room wondering how he had got there and why his ribs hurt so much. Jane was standing up, gesticulating eloquently with her right hand while trying to do her blouse up with her left; and Kiss was leaning on the arm of the sofa, listening to what Jane had to say and thinking, Shit, I think I’ve broken a bone in my toe.

And just what precisely, Jane was asking, did he think he was playing at? And what made him think he had the right-?

“Hold on,” Kiss interrupted. “That bloke there. Are you trying to tell me he was supposed to be doing that?”

It wasn’t a way of putting it that Jane had foreseen, and for a moment it checked the eloquence of her reproaches. “Yes,” she said. “And—”

“This, not to put too fine a point on it, mortal—”

“Here,” broke in Asaf, “who are you calling a mortal?”

“You.”

Asaf fingered his ribs tentatively. “Fair enough,” he said. “Hey, are you another one?”

“Another what?”

“Another bloody genie. Because if you are…”

WHOOSH!

“G’day,” said the Dragon King, materialising next to the standard lamp and knocking over a coffee table. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea if I explained…”

Somebody threw a glass decanter at him. Who it actually was we shall probably never know, but there were three obvious suspects. He ducked, looked round to see where the decanter had met the wall, and winced at the sight of good whisky gone to waste.

“Not you again,” Asaf said. “Not on top of everything else. Haven’t you people got anything better to do?”

Kiss froze. “That reminds me,” he mumbled.

“Shut up!”

Asaf, Kiss and the Dragon King all stopped talking at the same moment. “Thank you,” said Jane. “Now listen.”

They listened.

“First,” she went on, “you with the scales and the beer-belly. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing in my front room, but if you leave now and never come back I might just be generous and pretend you were never here in the first place.”

“Well, cheerio then,” said the King; and vanished.

“Next,” Jane continued, turning to Kiss, “you. I have had enough of you. First you clutter up my flat with lethal gadgets that fly people half-way across the world; then, when I send for you to come and rescue me, you’re nowhere to be seen; and finally you come bursting in here like the bloody Customs and Excise and beat up my friends. This is your idea of hearing and obeying, is it?”

“But he was—”

“In fact,” Jane ground on, “I’m beginning to get just a little bit sick of the sight of you. In fact, I wish you were back in your damned bottle, where you bel—”

WHOOSH.

“Excuse me,” said Asaf nervously, extracting himself painfully from the corner of the room, “but what the hell happened to him?”

“Who cares?” Jane replied. “Left in a huff, I expect. Now, where were we?”

HELP!

HELP!

HELP! LET ME OUT, YOU IDIOTS, I’VE GOT TO SAVE THE SODDING PLANET!

In an aspirin bottle, no one can hear you scream.

This business with bottles. It has perplexed some of the finest minds in the Universe, almost as much as the perennial enigma of why the cue ball sometimes screws back off the pack for no good reason and goes straight down the centre left-hand pocket.

Some say that bottles are the gateways to other universes (generally small, cramped universes with convex sides, smelling of stale retsina), and that a genie imprisoned in a bottle has stepped sideways into an alternative reality. It’s all, they say, part and parcel of the wish syndrome, whereby each wish calls into being an alternative reality where the wish comes true, however improbable this may be.

Another school of thought holds that a genie embottled is only a tiny part of the totality of that genie. Genies exist simultaneously in innumerable different dimensions, and by bottling one all you do is shove most of him out of this dimension and into the others, leaving only a token presence behind.

The French say that bottling genies is something that should be done at the château of origin, or not at all.

The major petro-chemicals manufacturers say that putting genies in bottles is fine by them, but wouldn’t it make more sense to use plastic non-returnable bottles with screw tops, which means you can keep them longer before they go flat?

Genies take the view that getting put in bottles is just one of those things that happens to a guy at some stage in his life, and if it wasn’t that it’d be something else, and there are probably worse small, confined spaces to pass the odd millennium in, for instance coffins, so why worry? This goes some way to explain why genies have never ruled the Universe.

Force Twelve genies, however, are a cut above the general production-line standard, and therefore can’t afford to be quite so laid back all the time. Some of them have responsibilities — planets to save, and so forth. This means that from time to time they find it hard to be philosophical about the cork going back in. Some Force Twelves, indeed the elite few who have more moral fibre than a square yard of coconut matting, even resent it.

“Women!” said Kiss aloud. The word echoed round inside the bottle and died away.

Never mind. If it’s any consolation, when the planet gets blown up in a few minutes I expect the force of the blast will shatter the bottle and you’ll be away clear. It’s an odd thing, but in any significant explosion, glass is usually one of the first things to go.

Kiss looked up, and then down, and then from side to side. “Do I know you?” he asked.

I’m the duty GA. I’m having a busy shift, actually, because I was talking to another guy in more or less the same fix as you not that long ago.

“Go away.”

Beg pardon?

“I said go away. I’ve got enough to put up with as it is.”

There was a pause.

Why is everybody so blasted hostile? I’m only doing my job.

“Take the day off. Go and spend some quality time with the family.”

It’s a pity you feel you have to adopt that attitude, you know, because the GA service really does have a great deal to offer to people in your position. If you weren’t so cramped in there, I could give you some leaflets which—

“No leaflets. Piss off.”

It’s this crisis of confidence which is bringing the profession to its knees. Me, I blame franchising. Under the old system—

“I said—”

Under the old system, you see, I could have brought gentle subliminal influences to bear on that mouse…

“Piss… What mouse?”

The mouse presently scampering along the mantelpiece on which your fragile glass bottle is resting, three feet above a tiled fireplace. Like I was saying, I could have subtly suggested to that mouse that it might find it a good idea to run along this mantelpiece terribly fast, regardless of the risk of accidentally brushing up against your bottle and dislodging it. Whereupon the bottle would have fallen to the floor and smashed, and…

“Yes, thanks,” Kiss said. “I think I was there way before you. Now, about this mouse…”

Small for its species, sort of greyish-brown, whiskers, answers to the name of Keek. Unusually gullible, too, even for a mouse. The faintest suggestion that there’s a small crumb of mozzarella just to the side of your bottle, and all your problems would have been over. Pity, really.

“Gosh.”

Yes. As it is, the voice continued sadly, all I can do is offer moral support and axioms of an uplifting nature designed to help you to come to terms with the harsh reality of your situation without too much culture shock. For instance, “It’s a long road that has no turning.” “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Actually, that’s not quite true, because generally speaking just before dawn you get that rather attractive pastel-pink light just above the horizon, which always puts me in mind…

“Excuse me…”

…of a strawberry milk-shake. Sorry, did you say something?

“The mouse. Now where is it?”

About eight inches to your immediate left. It seems to be eating a microscopic crumb of some sort, probably toasted crumpet.

“I wonder if you might possibly…”

No, it’s gone again. Something must have disturbed it. That’s a real shame, in my opinion. A good mouse is hard to find, I always think.

“Gone?”

“Fraid so, yes. Now then, where were we? Had I got on to “If at first you don’t succeed” yet?

Kiss slumped against the side of the bottle. True, in even the most spacious bottle slumping room is generally at a premium, but he managed quite nicely under the circumstances.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Any minute now, the air is going to be blue with fucking great big nuclear bombs. Unless I do something about it, these bombs are going to blow up the planet. Now, can you do anything to help?”

That does put rather a different complexion on it, the voice admitted.

“I rather thought it might.”

Quite so. In that case, I think either, “You can’t make omelettes”, or “It’s no use crying over spilt milk” would be rather more appropriate. Or possibly even, “It is better to have loved and lost than…”

This, Kiss reflected, is what comes of getting involved. If I was back in the bar right now, along with the rest of the lads, none of this would matter. True the planet would go pop, but so what, there’s plenty of planets. Let’s have another cup of coffee and another piece of pie. But as it is…

“I think I’ll pass on all of those, thank you. So unless you’ve got anything actually positive to suggest…”

Try singing.

“Right, that does it,” Kiss snarled. “Unless you’re out of my head in a five seconds flat, I’m going to bash my brains out against the side of the bottle. One-Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three-Mississippi.”

He paused and listened. Nothing. Good.

Won’t be long now. Time, ladies and gentlemen, please. Haven’t you got afterlives to go to?

He waited.

Try singing. Try singing, for God’s sake. Yes, of course! Now why the hell hadn’t he thought of that for himself?

The bomb had fallen asleep.

Just, grumbled the carpet to itself, my bloody rotten luck. First time I’ve been on a promise in God knows how long, and she goes and falls asleep on me. Marvellous.

The carpet flew on regardless. It was, after all, a gentle carpet. Take her back to the shop, let her sleep it off there.

As if things weren’t bad enough, it noticed as it flew, she snores. Or rather, she ticks loudly in her sleep. Amounts to the same thing, in the long run.

Question. Since it’s such a painfully obvious solution, why hasn’t anybody thought of doing it before?

Answer. Because genies are generally too bone-idle and pig-ignorant to try anything. Put a genie in a bottle and he’ll stay there till somebody lets him out. After all, they have all the time in the world.

Kiss cleared his throat, swallowed, and sang.

“Do-rey-mi-fah-so-la-tee-do!”

Nothing. He tried again, an octave higher. Then an octave higher still. That was enough to make his eyes water and his teeth ache.

Excelsior.

“Do-rey-mi-fah-so-la — tee-DO!”

He paused to massage his throat and jaw. Come on, Kiss, if some fat lady in a blond wig and a hat with horns on can do it, so can you. Higher still.

“DO-REY-MI-FAH-SO-LA-TEE-DO!”

He broke off, coughing like a terminal tuberculosis case, and wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Reckon I’m just not cut out for this sort of work, he told himself.

Indeed. Very apt.

“DO-REY-MI-FAH…”

Success; and just in time, too. Another note higher and he’d have been in no fit state to save green shield stamps, let alone the world.

Subjected to a harmonic stress equivalent to seven fat elephants jumping up and down on it, the bottle flew into pieces. Kiss tumbled out, cutting himself to the bone on broken glass as he did so, hit the tiled floor of the fireplace, swore horribly and scrambled to his feet; all in one nice, fluid movement. All around him windows were falling out, decanters were splitting, light bulbs were popping. The mouse was curled up in a ball in the coal-scuffle, its paws jammed in its ears. Only the picture of Abraham Lincoln seemed not to mind, probably because its mind was on other things.

“Now then,” Kiss said aloud, as he aimed himself at the window. “That was the easy bit.”

He jumped.

The sky, when he got there, was a bit like the Rome rush-hour. Nose to tail intercontinental ballistic missiles, all hopelessly snarled up, their proximity-actuated guidance systems completely up the pictures, all at a complete standstill; honking, swearing, waggling their fins in unconcealed fury, trying to nudge past on the inside, ignoring the traffic-light beacons helpfully shot up into orbit by Side A’s mission control centre, and generally not improving the situation. Kiss crossed from Europe to Asia by walking across the backs of bottleneck bombs.

There is no need, Kiss realised, to save the world. Just sit back and let old Captain Balls-Up do it for you.

Nevertheless he was here now, he might as well make himself useful.

He rolled up his sleeves, materialised a whistle and a pair of white gloves, took his stand on a small wisp of cloud a few feet over the seething mass of bombs, and started to direct the traffic out of orbit in the general direction of Ursa Major. It took him about half an hour, during the course of which his ankles were lightly singed by overheating rocket motors and a Class 93 ran over his foot. Apart from that, it was a doddle.

That left just the one bomb, presently sleeping it off on a mattress improvised out of priceless Turkestan rugs in Justin’s uncle’s shop. Kiss didn’t know about that one, of course. Nobody can know everything.

Right, he said to himself, done that. That was more of the easy bit. It was time he got on with the job in hand.

“So there you are,” said Philly Nine, whooshing into existence a foot or so above his head. “Pretty long phone call, if you ask me.”

“I got held up,” Kiss admitted, “but I’m back now.”

“Good. Shall we get on with it, then?”

“Only too pleased. Oh, by the way, I got rid of all those missiles.”

Philly looked at him. “Oh,” he said. “You did, did you?”

Kiss nodded. “They were cluttering the place up a bit,” he said, “so I shooed them away. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Plenty more where those came from, I expect,” Philly replied. “Production lines probably working double time right this very minute. Honestly, Kiss old thing, you are naive.”

In his time, which was roughly coeval with the Universe, Kiss had been called a wide selection of things, but this was a new one. “You think so?” he said.

Philly nodded. “You honestly think you can save the world by getting rid of a few bombs? Dream on, chum, dream on. All they’ll do is build some more. Idiots they may be, but what they lack in basic survival instinct they make up for in dogged persistence. And of course,” he added, “I shall be there to offer whatever assistance they require.”

“Will you now?”

“I confidently predict that I will be.”

“We’ll see about that.”

Leonardo da Vinci, had he been there, would have wept.

So would Shakespeare, and Goethe, and Tolstoy. And Beethoven and Mozart and Jelly Roll Morton, and Sophocles and Flaubert and Rubens and Molière and Wordsworth and Brahms and Petrarch and Diaghilev and Jane Austen and Tintoretto and probably Virgil, Buddy Holly and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

All these people laboured, in their separate ways, to entertain and amuse the human race. But what the human race really wants to watch, in the final analysis, is a good, dirty fight.

Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, would have loved it. Sir Thomas Malory would have been taking notes. Homer would have been sitting somewhere on a balcony wearing a straw hat and saying, “Ah yes, but you should have seen Hercules back in ’86, he had a copybook cover drive off the back foot that would have put these young whippersnappers to shame.” Chaucer would have missed the fight itself, since he’d have been tearing round the deserted streets trying to find an open betting shop.

It was a good fight, by any standards. Most fighters are inhibited by the fear that, unless they exercise at least some degree of circumspection, they may end up getting permanently damaged. Since Kiss and Philly Nine had no such worries, they were able to give their full attention to trying to beat the crap out of the opposing party.

Genies, for whom poetry inevitably begins with the words “There was a young lady of…” and in whose world-view painting is something involving scaffolding, long brushes, ladders and being indentured to someone whose windowsills need doing, are connoisseurs of the fight beautiful, and as far as they’re concerned the Marquess of Queensberry is a pub in Camden Passage. For the first time ever, Saheed’s was deserted, except for a small knot of spectators peering out through the skylight.

“Strewth,” observed the Dragon King of the South-East. “I never thought that was even possible.”

“Well, now you know,” replied a Force Six who had money invested. “Wouldn’t like to try it myself, mind.”

“You could do yourself an injury,” agreed a Force Three, who had the binoculars.

“Anybody know,” asked a small Force Two, whose view was obstructed by about ten larger genies and a few cardboard boxes, “what the fight is about, exactly?”

There was a thoughtful silence.

“Good and evil?” suggested the Six.

“All violence is a symptom of the underlying malaise in carbon-based society,” said the Three.

“They do that,” agreed the Two. “They lurk in among the rubber trees and jump out on people with big curly knives.”

“You what?”

“And in Sumatra and parts of Burma, too. I think it’s something to do with the heat.”

A large chunk of rock, part of a mountain that had been pressed into service as a knuckleduster, hurtled down from the sky. The genies ducked.

“It’s all right,” said the Three, looking up. “Landed on Daras. Are they allowed to use weapons? I thought this was strictly a bare-knuckle job.”

“You want to go up there and remind them, be my guest.”

“Fight fair, yer rotten bludger!” shouted the Dragon King. The others looked at him.

“Yes, well,” he said, shamefaced. “I mean, fair crack of the whip, lads. One of them is trying to save the world.”

“So?”

“Would you mind moving your bloody great elbow? You’re blocking my view.”

“I think,” said a tall, thin Force Eight, “it’s something to do with a girl.”

“What is?”

“The fight. I think it’s about some girl or other.”

“Surely not?”

“It’s as good a reason as any. I mean, the fight’s got to be about something. All fights are about something.”

“Oh.”