Djinn Rummy

THREE

There was a queue.

You can tell of rationing. You can pontificate about the first day of the January sales. You can boast of your experiences in the line for day-of-performance tickets for Phantom of the Opera. But this was a queue to end all queues; so long that it projected sideways into several quite recherché dimensions, so crammed with repressed potential energy that it hovered on the brink of forming a black hole. It was, of course, an auditions queue; and nearly every genie in the Universe was in it.

When you have a queue comprising something in excess of 1046 supernatural beings who can flit through time and space with the reckless abandon of a Porsche with diplomatic plates hurrying to a meeting through the Rome rush-hour, queue-jumping ceases to be bad manners and becomes a challenge to the fundamental laws of physics. The Past became a frenzied jumble of genies bashing each other over the head and locking each other in cupboards so as to preclude their presence on the day in question; while a gigantic troll stood with folded arms in the doorway of the Future to keep back the stream of genies who reckoned they’d avoid the crush by fast-forwarding through Time. The Present was under the control of an only slightly less formidable young woman with glasses and a clipboard.

“Next,” she said.

At the back of the queue there was a hard core of genies who hadn’t the faintest idea what the audition was for, but who felt sure that they were right for the part. The general opinion was that God was staging Aladdin, with a strong minority faction holding to the view that Springsteen had been taken ill on the eve of the big open-air concert in Central Park, and a stand-in capable of imitating him down to the last chromosome was urgently required. Both versions, although speciously attractive, were wrong.

The door to the small office where the auditions were taking place opened, and a dejected genie slumped out. A voice from inside called out, “Don’t call us, we’ll—” as the door closed again.

Next in line was the Dragon King of the South-East. As the girl with the clipboard took his name and nodded him towards the door, he straightened his hair, shot his cuffs, and took a deep breath.

The Big Time beckoned. He strode through the doorway.

“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this…” he said. The three men behind the desk gave him a look.

“He’s too tall,” said the bald man wearily. “Next.”

Dragon Kings are nothing if not adaptable. In the time it took for his vast brain to formulate the wish, he had reduced himself by twenty per cent.

“Too short,” muttered the skinny man with the glasses. “Goddamn time-wasters.”

The Dragon King cleared his throat. "Scuse me,” he said, “but stature’s not a problem with me. You give me the measurements, I’ll come across with the body.”

“Voice too squeaky,” sniffed the freckled man with the cigar. “OK, Cynthia, let’s see the—”

“The voice needn’t be a problem either,” the Dragon King interrupted, in a pitch that made the foundations of the building quiver. “Just give me a hint, and I can—”

The freckled man looked up for the first time. “Can he dance?” he asked the universe in general.

“Doesn’t look like he can,” replied the bald man, raising his voice over the machine-gun cracking of the King’s heels on the parquet. “Two left feet.”

The King, by now rather flustered, took this for a specification, made the necessary modifications, lost his footing and fell over.

“Next,” said the skinny man. The Dragon King got up and silently left the room.

“Hey, Cynthia,” the bald man called out, “are there many more of these deadbeats out there?”

“Quite a few, Mr Fomaldarsen,” the girl with the clipboard replied.

“Any of them look any good to you?”

“No, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

“OK, send ’em home.” The bald man glanced down. “Except,” he added quickly, “for this one. Recommendation from Zip Kortright.” He checked the name. “Guy by the name of — goddamn stupid names these jerks have — Philadelphia Machinery and Tool Corporation the Ninth. Is he out there?”

“I’ll just check for you, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

The door closed. After a moment, the three men looked at each other.

“Waste of time,” said the freckled man. “Told you it would be.”

“We’ll see this Philadelphia guy,” replied the skinny man. “You never know your luck. Never known Kortright send up a complete turkey.”

The door opened — to be precise, it was virtually blown open by the noise of 1046 genies all protesting at once — and a tall, slim figure walked in, sat in the chair and crossed her legs.

There was silence.

“Hey,” said the bald man, “it’s a girl.”

“Correct,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX. “You see? Putting your lenses in this morning has already paid dividends.”

“What’s Korty thinking of, sending us a girl?” snarled the skinny man. “We don’t need a girl, we need a guy.”

The girl parted her lips and smiled.

“On the other hand,” mumbled the bald man, “have we actually thought this through? I mean, now I think of it I can see where, if we were to make the hero a girl…”

“It’d beef up the middle,” agreed the freckled man. “There’s that goddamn flat spot between the fight with the chainsaws and the bit where he blows up the Golden Gate Bridge. If we made him a girl, we could put in a bit with her and her kids, you know, mom stuff…”

“Like Cagney and Lacey,” agreed the skinny man.

“Excuse me,” said the girl.

The three men looked at her.

“Could one of you gentlemen possibly tell me what the film’s about?”

“Hey,” objected the bald man, “what’s that got to do with you?”

“Well, now,” the girl said, flicking a few microns of cigar ash off her knee, “if I don’t know what the film’s about, how do I know whether I want to be in it?”

There was stunned silence; and the genie, who could after all read minds, watched with amused pleasure as the idea began to take shape in all three brains simultaneously.

She wants to know if it’s the sort of film she’d like to be in.

If we want her, she might not accept.

She must be good.

The bald man cleared his throat. “OK,” he said, “it’s like this. There’s this guy—”

“Or girl,” interrupted the skinny man.

“Or girl, yeah, and she’s got this brother who was killed in Vietnam—”

“Big flashback sequence,” explained the freckled man. “All the footage they couldn’t use in Full Metal Jacket.”

“Only,” the bald man went on, “really he wasn’t, OK, it was just a dream, and in fact he’s hiding out from the Mob—”

“Columbian drug barons.”

“Whatever, and then it turns out that in fact his girl—”

“Her guy—”

“Is working for the CIA, and is actually responsible for a string of serial killings—”

“He turns out,” elucidated the skinny man, “to be a robot, but that’s much later.”

“And then there’s this big fight with chainsaws with this psychotic rogue cop—”

“He’s a robot, too.”

“And then we have the big chase sequence and that’s basically it. That’s it, isn’t it, guys?”

The other two nodded. “Except for the bit where she spends three years working with disadvantaged Puerto Rican kids in the barrios of LA, of course,” the skinny man added. “But that’s really still at the concept stage right now. We’re working on that.”

The girl frowned slightly. “That’s it, is it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” replied the bald man. “Plus, of course, she gets killed in the first ten minutes, so all this is her coming back as a ghost.”

“We’ve already got Connery for God,” added the freckled man. “Him or Streisand. Or both.”

“Both,” interjected the skinny man, “and why not Newman as well? Goddammit, the guy’s meant to be a trinity, why not really go for it?”

The girl considered, and stood up. “No, thank you,” she said. “Good afternoon.”

Kiss winced, and assumed painting position: flat on his back, hovering eighteen inches from the ceiling. Overhead, the greatest artistic masterpiece ever, the fresco God Creating Adam And Eve glowed in a scintillating melange of colour. He soaked a rag in white spirit, and dissolved God.

“Fine,” he snarled. “Why don’t I just wipe the whole damned lot and do the ceiling over in woodchip and white emulsion?”

“I’m the one who’s got to live with it,” Jane replied evenly. “All I said was, would you help me with decorating the new flat. You were the one who thought it’d look nice with paintings…”

“Or perhaps,” Kiss went on, “you’d prefer cuddly rabbits and kittens and adorable little puppy-dogs with ribbons round their necks. If so, just say the word. I mean, your wish is my—”

“If you say that just once more,” Jane told him, “I shall scream.”

Offended, Kiss painted in silence for a while. Under his brush, the splodgy void which had once shown a fierce, jealous, enigmatic God piercing the veil of shadows to lob in the lightning-bolt of Life took form again to reveal the loving, all-compassionate Father of Mankind. Not bad, Kiss had to concede, but the first one was better.

“That’s more like it,” Jane called up. “Much more friendly. The other effort gave me the creeps.”

Gave you the creeps? You silly mare, that was God, it was meant to give you the creeps. I should know, remember. “Oh, good,” Kiss mumbled through the brush gripped between his teeth. “Your last chance for a few pink rabbits,” he added. “Then I’m going to slap on the varnish.”

“No, that’ll do fine.” Jane yawned. “And as soon as you’ve done that, we can choose the carpets.”

“Carpets.” Carpets weren’t what he’d had in mind. What he’d had in mind was eight hundred tons of mirror-polished Carrara marble, whirlpools of dancing white figures that would make you think you were walking on clouds. “Anything you say,” he grunted. Women, he thought.

“If I said,” he suggested, floating back to ground level and dunking his brushes in a jam-jar of turps, “that what you’re forcing me to do violates my artistic integrity so much that even looking at it makes me feel like I was walking barefooted over red-hot coals, would it make any difference?”

“No.”

“Fair enough. Now, when you say carpet, obviously what you have in mind is a collection of masterpieces from the golden age of Persian carpet-weaving, featuring works by such immortal masters as—”

“Beige,” Jane interrupted, “so as not to show spilt tea. And it’s got to be hard-wearing, because I don’t want little bits of fluff getting everywhere. Ready?”

Let there be carpet, said Kiss. And there was carpet.

“That’s fine,” Jane said, as the rolls of beige Wilton unfurled of their own accord and slid smoothly into position. “Just what I wanted.” Carpet tacks materialised in a bee-like swarm, buzzed angrily for a moment, and flew with devastating velocity to bury themselves in the floor. “I know it’s not what you’d have liked…” she added, with a hint of remorse.

Kiss looked up from air-traffic-controlling the tacks. “Actually,” he said, “if it was my place we were doing up, it’d be lino. But you said you wanted it to look nice, and I do try to be conscientious. I have trouble, though, with conflicting signals.”

“Nice,” Jane replied, “as in what I think is nice. Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear.”

“Got you,” Kiss muttered. “You may not know much about art but you know what you like. That sort of thing?”

“That’s the general idea.”

Kiss nodded despondently and, out of residual malice, materialised pink curtains, a pile of lacy cushions and a four-foot teddy bear.

“Yes,” Jane said, nodding. “Yes, I like that.”

“Fine. I think I was better off inside the bottle.”

“Maybe you were. Let’s have some lunch, shall we?”

Kiss nodded, and instantaneously there was a table. It was covered with cloth of gold and laden with dishes of honeydew and jugs of milk of paradise. “Or would you,” he asked, “prefer scrambled eggs?”

“No, this looks fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I like yogurt.”

Conversation was slow over lunch; there was still a thin, oil-like smear of resentment over the surface of Kiss’s mind, and Jane had her head buried in a furniture catalogue. This didn’t do much to improve Kiss’s temper (Formica — anything you like, dear God, but not formica) and, being dutiful, he resolved to snap himself out of it by being affable.

“Funny bit of gossip going the rounds at the moment,” he said. “Apparently, there’s been some bloke going round trying to recruit genies for some job or other.”

“Oh yes?”

Kiss nodded. “Offering good money, apparently. Which shows how much whoever it is knows about genies, if you stop to think.”

“Really.”

“If you think about it, I mean,” Kiss went on, trying hard to maintain the affability level. “I mean, trying to bribe a genie with promises of wealth beyond dreams of avarice is like offering a fish a drink. Still, there’s been a lot of interest.”

“Is that so?” Jane said, her face still obscured by the catalogue. “Well I never.”

Kiss ground his teeth silently. Small-talk, said the training manual, is the mortar that cements together the foundations of the ideal genie/mortal relationship. Talk to your mortal and you will find that empathy inevitably follows. Something told Kiss that whoever wrote that hadn’t been on active service for several thousand years.

“Oh yes,” he ploughed on, “ever such a lot of interest. I’d probably have put in for it myself if I’d been at a loose end. Whatever it is,” he added lamely.

Jane closed the catalogue. “Now then,” she said briskly. “Kitchen worktops.”

The door opened.

Nobody walked through it, and nobody stood in the door-frame. After a moment, it closed itself again. The three people sitting at the table looked at each other.

“Good afternoon.” There was a brief flash of blue light and the genie Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX materialised in the air, hovering precisely one metre over the table-top. “Sorry if I’m late, but I had a press conference.”

Better known to millions of cinema-goers as the star of A Thousand And One Dalmatians II under the name of Spot (and the corporeal trappings of the cuddliest, most adorable puppy ever) Philly Nine floated gently down and folded his arms. Each of the three members of the interview panel got the impression that he was face to face with the apparition; which wasn’t the most comfortable illusion in the universe, not by some way.

“Um,” said the Chair at last. “Thank you for, er, making the time.”

“No worries,” the genie replied. “The job sounds interesting.”

“Yes.” The Chair tried to keep the hesitation out of her voice. “The pay,” she went on, “is excellent. I expect you want to hear about the money first.”

“Not really,” the genie replied, making his body translucent just to be aggravating. “Let’s see, now, I had one per cent of the gross for making this film I’ve just done, which at last count came to seventy million dollars, but so what? All I have to do to make seventy million dollars — silver dollars, if I want — is whistle. Like me to show you?”

“Yes,” said the Chair, quickly. “I mean,” she added, “if that’s all right with you, of course…”

Suddenly it was snowing banknotes. Thousand-dollar bills. Great big coarse sheets of money, drifting and floating in the air, settling in drifts, skittering in the draught from under the door. You didn’t need to look to know they were genuine. For a while, the three committee members were a blur of fast-moving arms.

The money vanished.

“Easy come,” sneered the genie, “easy go. And you reckoned you were going to pay me.”

“All right,” panted the Chair, catching her breath. “Point taken. You are interested in the job, aren’t you?”

The genie nodded, like a will-o’-the-wisp dangling from the rear-view mirror of Satan’s Cortina. “It sounds like it might be fun,” he said. “From what I’ve heard, that is. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

The second member of the committee took a deep breath. His right hand was tightly closed around a thousand-dollar bill that had somehow failed to dematerialise, and he wanted to divert the genie’s attention. “Our organisation,” he said, “is a radical group devoted to the cause of ecology. The way we see it, saving the planet is up to us, because nobody else is fit to be trusted with it. OK so far?”

The genie dipped his head.

“As part of our programme,” Number Two went on, “we intend to destroy all cities with a population in excess of one hundred thousand. The reasons…”

With a slight crease of the lips, the genie waved the reasons aside. Number Two swallowed hard, and went on.

“In order to do this in an ecologically friendly way,” he said, finding the words strangely hard to expel from his throat, “we have developed several new strains of… of—”

“Wildflowers,” interrupted the Chair. “Pansies, forget-me-nots, that sort of thing.”

The genie grinned. “I know,” he said. “I’ll admit, I was impressed. For puny, stunted, pig-ignorant mortals, not bad.”

“Well.” The Chair, too, found that her throat was suddenly dry. “We need someone to sow the seeds. From the air.”

“Over all the cities simultaneously,” added Number Three, “so as to create the maximum effect. If all targets are engaged at the same time, they can’t come to each other’s assistance.”

The genie nodded; a token of respect, the gesture implied, from one thoroughly nasty piece of work to another.

All three committee members suddenly began to wish they were somewhere else.

“And you want me,” drawled the genie, “to do this little job for you, is that it?”

The Chair nodded. She had a splitting headache, and she felt sick. “If you’d like to, of course.”

“I’d love to.”

“Ah.”

“It would mean,” the genie went on, “the deaths of countless millions of innocent people. Deaths by the most bizarrely hideous means imaginable. Wanton, barbaric genocide.” The genie smiled pleasantly. “Sounds like a bit of all right to me.”

Number Two cleared his throat. “A certain inevitable level of casualties…” he began, and found that he couldn’t continue. The genie’s eyes seemed to push him back into his chair.

“Smashed into pulp by the petals of a giant primrose,” he said, slowly, with relish. “Horrific, bizarre, and with that ultimately humiliating soupçon of frivolity that marks the true evil genius. I like it.”

Sweat was pouring down the Chair’s cheeks like condensation down an office window. “It’s them or us,” she gasped. “People or plants. We’re talking about the future of the planet. You do see that, don’t you?”

The genie frowned thoughtfully. “I see that you’re a bunch of raving lunatics,” he said calmly, “but so what?” He beamed. “That makes you my kind of people. Glad to be on the team.”

Number Two tried to stand up, ineffectually. “Of course,” he said, “the whole project is still subject to review. We aren’t actually committed to anything yet…”

“You are now.”

For a fraction of a second, a very small fraction indeed, Number Two had a vision of what it would be like. For some reason, the city he visualised was Oslo. He vomited.

“These,” the genie went on, holding up a cloth bag the size of a large onion, “are the seeds of the flowers you so thoughtfully made possible. Anything possible, I’m allowed to do.” The image shimmered and glowed, like the heart of the fire. “Thanks,” he said, and turned his eyes on the Chair. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t quite catch your name.”

“Fuselli,” croaked the Chair. “Mary Fuselli.”

The genie grew, filling the room. “Apt,” he said, as the glass in the windows began to creak with the pressure. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” The windows exploded and the Chair, Number Two and Number Three blacked out. Two seconds later, the pressure inside the room squashed them as flat as paper.

Philly Nine smiled, wiped human off his sleeve, and soared away into the upper air.

Faster than a thought he flew, breaching the Earth’s atmosphere in a shower of sparks and soaring in a wide, lazy orbit around the Equator. As he went he amused himself by catching satellites and crumpling them in his fist like foil jam-tart cups. The further away from the planet’s gravitational field he flew, the larger he became. A tail of fire flickered behind him, and dry ice knotted his hair.

From this altitude, the planet was mostly white and blue. The genie considered it impassively. It had, he felt, a sort of glazed, ceramic look, like a spun-glass Christmas tree ornament.

Or a very old bottle.

And, like all his kind, he had this problem with bottles. Bottles, in his opinion, were there to be broken.

And if one blue bottle should accidentally fall…

Kiss, genie-handling a huge roll of beige Wilton across the enormous expanse of the living-room floor, hesitated and glanced up through the window.

He swore.

Jane looked up. “Problem?” she asked.

“Yes.” Kiss nodded. “At least, there might be. Look,” he said, “sorry to run out on you in the middle of the job, but could you see your way to managing without me for half an hour? There’s something I’ve got to see to.”

“Can’t it wait?”

Kiss shook his head. With a crack the roll of carpet snapped open, flattened itself, hung for a moment six inches above floor level, and started to rise.

“I promise I’ll be back as soon as I possibly can,” Kiss shouted. “Sorry about this,” he added and vaulted into the middle of the carpet which bucked like an unbroken horse, pawed at the windows with its front corners, smashed the glass and shot out into the air with Kiss sitting cross-legged on its back.

Philly Nine tutted. He was having trouble with the fiddly little knot the seed-sack was tied up with.

“Hey,” said a voice directly below him. He glanced down, and saw a flat brown rectangle. The slight quivering of its outer seams reminded him of a stingray floating in clear water. He frowned.

“Is that you, Kiss?” he queried.

“Philly!” replied the voice. “Long time no see! And how’s the world been treating you?”

The carpet closed in, drawing level with the hovering figure of Philly Nine, standing in the empty blackness trying to bite through a single strand of cord with teeth the size of office blocks.

“Not so bad,” Philly replied. “What brings you here, my old mate?”

Kiss shrugged. “Thought I’d catch a few spacewinds on my new rug. Like her?”

“Not bad,” Philly replied. “Not bad at all. Like the stabilisers. You any good at knots?”

“I have my moments. Bung it over, whatever it is, and let me have a go.”

Philly Nine hefted the bag, and then checked himself. Coincidence, he thought; there are only seven Force Twelve genies in the whole Universe, and at this crucial moment here’s two of them sharing one small, remote postage-stamp of empty space. “It’s OK,” he replied. “I think I can probably manage. So,” he added nonchalantly, “where’ve you been hiding yourself lately?”

Kiss twitched his features into a rueful grin. “In an aspirin bottle,” he replied, “of all places. And me, of all people. Well, you know how brown glass gives me a headache.”

“Been out long?”

“Not very. And you?”

Philly Nine shrugged. “I’ve been hanging out,” he replied.

“You know, ducking and diving, puffing a few scams. Made a film, would you believe. Boy, that was some experience.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Spooky stuff to be around, film. You hold it up to the light and you’re ready to swear blind there’s guys trapped inside the stuff.”

Kiss shook his head. “I think it’s just science, Philly,” he said. “You know, mortal stuff.”

“I suppose so.” Philly Nine folded his hands over the cloth bag. “Well,” he said, “nice to see you again, don’t let me keep you.”

The carpet continued to hover. “What’ve you got in the bag there, Philly?”

“Wildflower seeds,” Philly Nine replied. “I’m doing my bit for the Green movement. Nothing to interest you.”

“Wildflowers?”

“That’s right.”

Kiss raised an eyebrow. “That’s not like you, Philly,” he observed quietly. “You were always, how can I put this, an evil genie.”

“It’s very kind of you to say so, Kiss, my old chum.”

“My pleasure.” There was a moment of silence, disturbed only by the faint sighing of the interstellar winds. “So why the change of direction?”

“Nah,” Philly answered. “Me, I’m consistent, always have been. And if I were you, I’d go and fly your doormat someplace else.”

“Think I’ll just hang around here for a minute, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Suit yourself.” Philly Nine stuffed the cloth bag ostentatiously up one sleeve, and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m in no hurry. All as broad as it’s long, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Good waves, up here,” Kiss said; and, by way of illustration, he let the carpet slip on the spacewinds. A long, slow ripple snaked its way down the length of the carpet. Kiss began to hum:

“Cut it out,” Philly urged. “You know as well as I do you never did like carpeting. Made you space-sick just going out on the ionosphere. What exactly are you doing here, Kiss?”

Kiss smiled. “Stopping you,” he replied. “Gosh, from here you can see the big pimple on Orion’s nose. Fancy a peppermint?”

“I see.” Inside his sleeves, Philly’s fists clenched. “And why would you want to stop me, Kiss? I never did you any harm.”

“Never said you did, Philly. Always the best of pals, you and me.”

“Quite.”

“What have you got in the bag, Philly?”

Philly Nine smiled; and white lightning snapped out of his eyes, slamming into Kiss with traumatic force and sending him and his carpet spiralling away into emptiness. Philly grinned and took out the bag. A tiny pinch of his fingernails and the knot loosened easily.

He turned the bag over, let go of the neck and shook it… and found himself inside a bubble, bobbing jauntily with the starbreeze. Above him, Kiss looped his Wilton, waved, and ducked behind the Moon.

“Bastard!” Philly yelled. On the floor of the bubble, seeds had landed. He rolled his left fist into a ball and smashed it into the wall of the bubble

…which stretched.

Philly Nine noticed with some misgivings the rapidly thickening carpet of flowers round his ankles. They had already stripped the shoes off his feet (and Philly’s shoes were rather special, even by genie standards; hand-stitched gryphonhide uppers, phoenixdown insocks and monomolecular polysteel soles; the gussets arc-welded in the hottest part of a supernova; the heel reinforced with the enamel from the teeth of a fully-grown snowdragon, the third hardest material in Creation. Imelda Marcos in her wildest dreams never imagined shoes like these…)

“Hey,” he yelled, “let me out of here!”

“You’ll have to grant me three wishes first.”

Philly began to get impatient. “Kiss,” he shouted. “If you don’t quit horsing around and let met out of this contraption, I’ll kick your arse from here to Jupiter.”

“Three wishes, Philly. You know the score.”

Petals like steel traps were slowly ripping his socks to shreds. Hand-woven from the fibres of firebird feathers (the second hardest material in the Universe) they had been custom-built to withstand the phenomenally corrosive properties of genies’ sweaty feet. “No dice, scumbag,” Philly roared. “Get me out of here and I might just let you live. Otherwise—”

The last scrap of sock was digested, and Philly Nine suddenly became acutely aware that the hardest material in the Universe is the petal of a psychotic flower. “All right,” he screamed. “One wish. But I’m warning you, you’re going to regret—”

The bubble popped; and Philly Nine was falling, helplessly entwined in roots and leaves, towards the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The wish is,” came Kiss’s voice from far away, “that in future…”

Philly hit the atmosphere like a fly hitting a windscreen. For a fraction of a second the pain of impact paralysed him; and then he was through. Scrabbling frantically he managed to pull himself up on a handy thermal, and floated agonisingly in the upper air.

He glanced down and breathed a long, slow sigh. All the wildflowers had burnt up on re-entry — as had his shorts, his underpants and his impossibly expensive designer Hawaii shirt.

“…In future,” sighed the winds around his head, “if you’re going to be evil, make a mess of it. Have a nice day.”

Thirty-six hours later, the hole Philly had made in the ionosphere was still there. It was closing, but there was still a gap large enough for, say, a few wildflower seeds to drift through.

These days, nobody can seriously doubt that plants have the power to communicate; and the more self-aware the plant, the greater the power.

Ready? asked the Primrose.

Ready, replied the Forget-Me-Not. Let’s go.

What about him?

Who?

Him.

Oh, you mean the—

Yes.

You ask him.

GRAAAOOAARR!!!

I think it’s safe to assume he’s ready too. OK, chaps, here goes.

They dropped in.