Djinn Rummy (32 page)

Philly frowned and lashed out with the club. What with residual particles of self-doubt and guilt, combined with extreme irritation at not being able to make much impression on Kiss's head with one of the nastiest blunt instruments in the cosmos, he had just about reached the stopper of his bottle (genies don't have tethers), with the result that his sense of chivalry was down there with the Polly Peck shares. Fortunately, the King's nose came between Jane and the plank.

‘Missed,' Jane called out. ‘You want to saw that thing in half.'

‘Do I? Why's that?'

‘Then you'd have two short planks. Company for you.'

‘Very droll.' He tried the reverse sweep, but this time the
King ducked and suffered no more than a slight scratch to his right ear from one of the nails. With a sigh, Philly swept round on his heel and belted Kiss again, knocking him back off his feet.

‘Missed again,' said Jane smugly.

‘Third time lucky.' Philly swung the plank, feinting high and then changing tack in mid-blow. The resulting impact missed Asaf's head by a few thousandths of an inch and found its mark on the King's back.

‘Fair go, mate,' the King squealed. ‘What harm have I ever done you?'

‘Call it pre-emptive revenge,' Philly replied. ‘In the meantime, could you try and hold still? It's harder than it looks, swatting something that small.'

Jane bristled and turned to Asaf, giving him what used to be known as an old-fashioned look.

‘Well?' she said. ‘Don't just sit there. Do something.'

 

The bomb was confused.

It was dizzy, sick, miles and miles off-course and beginning to see spots in front if its eyes. Furthermore, it had the feeling that running away from an amorous carpet wasn't really the sort of thing self-respecting atomic bombs are supposed to do.

It slowed down and activated its rear-view sensors. The carpet was nowhere to be seen.

Bombs are nothing if not logical. This goes with the territory. A fat lot of good an emotional, sensitive, caring bomb would be to anybody. Probably cry all over its own fuse.

The logical argument was this:

‘What,' Asaf asked, ‘did you have in mind?'

By way of reply, Jane just looked at him.

‘Right,' he said, ‘fine. Just leave it to me.'

Kiss, meanwhile, had dragged himself back up to cloud level, having collected on the way a massive charge of static electricity which someone had left lying about in the bottom of a cloud he'd passed through. Observing that Philly was preoccupied with trying to brain the Dragon King with his oversize telegraph pole, he took the opportunity to connect his new plaything up to the inside of Philly's knee.

The results were quite entertaining.

Doctors, he recalled, as he watched Philly soar steadily upwards, use a similar technique to test their patients' reflexes. Nothing wrong with Philly's reflexes, as far as he could make out.

He waited where he was for a moment or so, on the offchance that gravity might have something to say about Philly's movements. He counted to twelve. Probably safe to assume that gravity knew when to leave well alone.

‘Hello,' he said.

‘Where the hell were you?' Jane replied.

‘I -' He checked himself. Oh woman, he murmured to himself, in our hours of ease uncertain, coy and hard to please; when pain and anguish rack the brow, an even greater nuisance thou. ‘Sorry,' he said.

‘And you just sat there,' Jane continued, ‘while that great oaf tried to hit me.'

‘Yes.'

‘And you call yourself a genie!'

‘I tend to exaggerate.'

‘Aren't you going after him?'

‘No.'

‘You mean you're afraid.'

‘Naturally. I do also have a nuclear missile to see to, but that's only a flimsy excuse. Really it's because I'm a coward.'

‘You haven't heard the last of this.'

‘I should think not. Excuse me. 'Bye.'

‘I haven't finished with you yet!' Jane called after him, as he dwindled away into a tiny dot on the horizon. ‘Honestly!' she summarised.

Beside her, Asaf made a vague oh-well-never-mind noise. ‘Any how,' he said, ‘that's sorted that out. Can we go home now, please?'

Jane looked around and noticed, as if for the first time, that she was sitting between the wings of a dragon thousands of feet above the surface of the earth. ‘Gosh, yes,' she said. ‘Let's do that right away.'

‘I was hoping you'd say that.'

‘Well, go on, then. It's your stupid dragon.'

‘Sorry, yes. Now then, I wish -'

As he said the words, he chanced to look up; and the terms of his wish changed slightly. In its amended form, which he didn't actually vocalise, it consisted of,
I wish the other genie, the one who got hit by the electric shock and jumped up miles into the air, wasn't coming back
.

Unfortunately, as the Dragon King hastened to point out to him, that one was asking a bit too much.

 

‘Here, bomb,' Kiss called. ‘Here, nice bomb. Bommy bommybommybommy.'

No reply. And no sign of the poxy thing, as far as the eye (even his) could see. How do you attract bombs, exactly? Bomb-nip? Rattle an empty uranium canister?

‘Oo vewwy naughty bomb,' He experimented. ‘Oo come here
this minute
, or else no . . .'

He paused. What do bombs like best?

He squirmed. No prizes for guessing what bombs like best.

‘If you don't come here
this very minute
,' he essayed, ‘the nasty Peace Movement will get you.'

Of course, he rationalised as he swung low over San Francisco, it might just be that he was looking in the wrong place. But he didn't think so, somehow; he could smell bomb - a strong, not very pleasant smell drifting back from the possible future - and it was definitely coming from this direction.

‘Come out with your fins up,' he shouted (but it turned into a whimper somewhere between his larynx and the atmosphere). ‘I have this planet surrounded.'

He heard a click. It was a tiny sound, no louder than, say, a safety-catch being thumbed forward or a life-support machine being switched off. But he heard it, because it was the sound he'd been listening for.

‘Now then,' he wailed, ‘there's no need to take that attitude. '

Think, you fool, think. Somewhere out there is a bomb, armed and dangerous - a small, functional intelligence, probably scared and confused, trying to know what's the right thing to do.

Get real, Kiss told himself, this is a fucking
bomb
we're talking about here. Bombs aren't like that. When was the last time you heard of a three-hundred-megaton warhead being talked down off a twelfth-storey parapet by highly trained social workers?

There it was
, a little high-pitched whining of artificial brainwaves, like a gnat in a sandstorm. And what was it saying?

It was saying,
Nothing personal
.

Swearing under his breath, Kiss did a back somersault that would have ripped the wings off even the latest generation of jet fighter and doubled back, head, down, in the direction of Oakland.

Thirty seconds, and counting.

 

‘You're too late,' Jane said, arms folded, face a study in defiant satisfaciton. ‘He's gone to catch the bomb, and he'll defuse it. You've -

‘Did you just hear something?' Philly interrupted.

‘No. What?'

‘Sounded to me like a faint click.'

‘That'll be Kiss,' said Jane, smugly, ‘defusing the bomb.'

 

Nine seconds, and counting.

Mortals, who tend to think of their lives as the shortest distance between the two points Birth and Death, have a bad attitude towards Time. They accuse it of being inflexible, doctrinaire, officious. In the collective imagination of the human race, Time wears a peaked cap and carries a thick wad of parking tickets.

This is unfair. Time does, in fact, have a considerable degree of discretion. True, it rarely exercises it in favour of mortals (because of their bad attitude), but even so, most of us will have experienced moments when Time has seemed to slow down or stop altogether. The tragedy is that in those moments we're usually sailing through the air, staring at an oncoming car on our side of the road, or realising with a feeling of sick horror that the sound of key in
lock means that our spouse has come home earlier than anticipated. We therefore lack the leisure and the objectivity to give Time its due.

Nine seconds and counting. Kiss, being a genie (and having done Time an enormous favour years ago in a rather shabby incident involving yogurt, rubber tubing and a goat) kept his head and called in, so to speak, his marker.

Sniff, sniff, sniff. The smell of bomb was overpowering, but still he couldn't see the bloody . . .

Gotcha!
Big steel tube, leaning nonchalantly against a row of other steel tubes, which Kiss identified as liquid nitrogen canisters propped up against the wall of some factory or other. He braked sharply, leaving pale grey skidmarks on the sky, and swooped down.

The bomb saw him and flinched.

‘There, there,' he said, ‘it's all right, I'm not going to hurt you.'

That
, replied the bomb,
must be the stupidest remark I've ever heard
.

Kiss blinked, and then realised that what he was hearing was his own brain's instantaneous translation of the subtext of the bomb's computer intelligence's extraneous drive-chatter; the equivalent of the dead-cat-dragged-over-velvet noise you get when you switch on the tape deck to full volume with a blank tape in it. Gosh, he said to himself, I'm so much cleverer than I ever realised.

‘OK,' he replied, ‘point taken, let's approach this from a different angle. What harm have we ever done you?'

I'm sorry?

‘Us. Sentient life forms. What harm have we ever . . .?'

Let me see. You made me, for a start; that involved being hacked out of the living rock and run through heavy rollers and then heated in a blast furnace until I melted and then poured
into a mould like I was jelly or something and then shoved through more rollers and then punched full of sodding great rivets and drilled full of holes with a drill that makes your dentists' drills seem like feather dusters and then packed full of horrible ticklish uranium and shoved down a long, dark tube in a submarine hundreds of feet under the sea and then shot out again, which feels like being farted out of God's arse, let me add, and a fat lot you care about my vertigo and then
. . .

This, Kiss realised, is starting to get a bit counter-productive. ‘Fine,' he said, ‘you've got real grievances, I admit, but is this really the best way to settle them? I mean, really?'

The bomb's sensors treated him to a withering stare.
I'm a bomb, for fuck's sake, this is what I'm supposed to do. Why don't you creeps make up your damn minds?

‘Ah,' Kiss replied quickly. ‘The I-was-only-obeying-orders defence. That won't wash, you know.'

Eight seconds and counting. More like seven and four-fifths. Fortunately, Kiss's pores didn't have enough time to start sweating, or he'd have been drenched.

‘How would you feel,' he asked, ‘about bribery?'

There was a tiny flicker of interest in the readout patterns.
How do you mean, bribery?

‘We pay you, anything you like, if you don't blow up. How does that grab you?'

Kiss turned up the gain in his brain. ‘I'm sure we could think of something,' he said. ‘Anything you like, anything at all. A velvet-lined silo. Raspberry-flavoured
rocket fuel. A nice little land-mine to cuddle up to in the evenings?'

‘You see?' Kiss shouted, waving his arms. ‘A whole Universe packed with scintillatingly thrilling sensations, and you haven't experienced any of them. You haven't
lived
. But think how different it could all be, if you'd only -'

‘We can fit you with new sensors, of course,' Kiss replied. ‘Audio, visual, sensory, you name it. Just think of it. Ice cream, music, the scent of primroses after a heavy shower, the sunset over the Loire valley . . .'

‘No problem. And that's just the start of it. If you'd just use your imagination, there's no end to what we could show you.'

Kiss blinked. ‘What?' he said.

‘Too late?'

‘But -'