Djinn Rummy (33 page)

Five seconds and counting. Time was doing its best, but there are limits. At the back of his cosmic awareness,
Kiss could feel the world tapping its foot and saying, Come on,
do
something.

Do what?

Anything. Anything is better than nothing.

Nothing. Generally defined as an absence of anything, nothing is usually produced by some catastrophically traumatic event; an atomic bomb, say, going off in a confined space. Such as a galaxy.

Kiss thought, and something came. If he'd been a cartoon, a bubble with a light bulb in it would have appeared above his head.

Sugar and spice and all things nice, that's what supernatural beings are made of. Among other things; including a pretty substantial amount of pure, crude energy. Kiss had never bothered to learn the physics (he'd spent physics lessons practising simple levitation on the underwear of the girl sitting next to him) but he had an idea that what he was mostly made of was raw power. Which accounted for his being able to fly and materialise physical objects, not to mention the chronic indigestion.

And to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; which he had only been able to understand in terms of a very fast car hitting a very solid lamp-post.

Indeed.

The trouble was, if he used himself as the lamp-post, he was likely to get seriously bent.

Omelettes and eggs. Three seconds and counting. Yes, he screamed in his mind, the complaint of every poor fool since time began who'd suddenly found out he's been cast to play the hero, but why me? And the inevitable answer: because you're here, and there's nobody else. Because we didn't think you'd mind. You don't mind, do you?

Kiss moved.

Here
, protested the bomb,
what the devil do you think you're playing at? It was bad enough with that goddamn nymphomaniac carpet
. . .

‘Shut up,' Kiss replied. He wrapped his arms tight around the bomb, and closed his eyes.

No seconds, and counting.

 

 

 

 

I
expect you're right,' said Philly Nine wearily. ‘No doubt he's disarmed the bomb in the very nick of time, and all my hours of hard work gone straight down the pan. Which only leaves me,' he added, taking one step forward, ‘the consoling thought of what I'm now going to do to you.'

Jane's eyebrows shot up like Wall Street after a Republican landslide. ‘Me?' she snapped. ‘What on earth have I got to do with it?'

‘A whole lot,' Philly replied, flexing his fingers purposefully. ‘If it hadn't been for you, he'd never have thought to interfere. All this is your fault.'

‘Rubbish.'

‘Your fault,' Philly repeated, pale with anger. ‘Your god-damned meddling can't-mind-your-own-business fault. Well, you can take it from me, it's the last time you'll -'

‘Excuse me,' said Asaf.

The shock stopped Philly Nine dead in his tracks. The feeling was hard to describe, but it was something along the lines of the way you'd feel if you were sitting in, say, the roughest dockside bar in San Francisco and a four-foot-six
eighty-year-old missionary tottered in on a zimmer frame and offered to fight any man in the place.

‘What?'

‘Please,' said Asaf, standing up, ‘don't talk to the lady like that. You'll upset her.'

‘You
what
?'

‘And if you upset her,' Asaf continued, ‘you'll upset me. So please, cut it out. OK?'

The Dragon King, who had been trying to look unobtrusive to the point of virtual translucence, suddenly snapped out of existence. He rematerialised as a vague presence at the back of Asaf's mind, hammering on the door of the Instincts Section, Self-Preservation department, which appeared to be locked.

‘I know what I'm doing,' Asaf replied. ‘You go away and leave this to me.'

Philly Nine narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you serious?' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘
You
are threatening
me
?'

‘If you choose to look at it that way, I suppose I am.'

It had been a long day, and Philly had had enough. ‘You're dead,' he said softly. ‘Dead and buried. Now then . . .'

And then he stopped. In fairness, he tried to back away and run for it, but somehow he couldn't. Rabbits who go foraging for food in the middle lane of a motorway often experience the same effect.

‘Please . . .' he said, and then his tongue packed up, immobilised like the rest of him.

‘I really don't want to do this,' Asaf said, ‘but you leave me no choice.'

He was holding a bottle. To be precise, it was one of those small screw-top plastic botdes they sell fizzy drinks in nowadays. Slowly, his body language broadcasting determination and regret in equal proportions, he advanced.

Philly's tongue came back on line just before the neck of the bottle touched him. ‘You can't make me get in there,' he hissed. ‘Absolutely no way. There is literally no power on . . .'

‘In you get.'

‘I steadfastly and categorically refuse to -'

‘In.'

Wildly, Philly stepped backwards and groped behind him for something to cling on to. Try as he might, he couldn't take his eyes off the neck of the bottle; it seemed to summon him.

‘As you can see,' Asaf said gently, ‘this is no ordinary bottle.'

‘You're lying. It's just a bog standard pop bottle, and I'll be damned if I -'

Asaf's face creased in a smile that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. He levelled the bottle as if it were a gun, and beckoned.

COME

‘
Shan't!
'

COME.

‘Good Lord,' Philly gibbered, both arms linked round a granite outcrop, ‘you didn't honestly think I was serious about destroying the world, did you? It was just a joke, honest. I mean, why on earth would I possibly want -'

WHOOSH.

 

Asaf shook his head sadly, screwed on the cap and held the bottle up to the light. It was transparent plastic; but there
was nothing to be seen inside the bottle except the usual few beads of condensation clinging to the sides. And they had been there before.

‘Gosh,' said Jane.

With a sigh, Asaf swung his arm back and threw the bottle up into the air. There was a sudden terrifying clap of thunder, a streak of lightning that made Jane think the sky had finally come unzipped, and then nothing.

‘A pity,' Asaf said. ‘But there it is.'

There was a flutter of air and the Dragon King hove back into existence, hovering a few feet above the ground. He was shaking slightly, and his wings were creased.

‘Stone the flaming crows,' he said. ‘I never seen the like in all my . . .'

Asaf nodded to him. ‘Thanks,' he said.

‘You're welcome, mate, no worries. Any time.'

Jane looked from one to the other, and made a sort of feeble questioning gesture with her left hand. She couldn't think of anything to say.

‘It was his bottle, you see,' Asaf said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. ‘I guess he must have been carrying it around for years. Boy, how he must have hated himself.'

‘
His
bottle . . .'

Asaf nodded. ‘Fell out of his pocket or his scrip or whatever genies have, when that other genie hit him with the thunderbolt. I guessed it might come in handy, so I picked it up. It was the dragon who drew my attention to it.'

‘Pleased to be of service,' mumbled the King.

‘It was the way the dragon jumped up in the air and made a little screaming noise when he saw it that put me on the right lines,' Asaf continued. ‘And while you two were having your slanging match, it suddenly occurred to me. Why would a genie, of all things, carry a
bottle
around
with him? Particularly the sort of bottle he could never ever escape from. Shatterproof, you see. And non-biodegradable. '

Jane waited for a moment, and then said, ‘Well?'

‘Simple.' Asaf sat down and opened a roll of pepper-mints. ‘Because he wanted to be put in it. Subconsciously, I guess. I mean, that ties in with all the rest of it. The wanting to destroy the world, and that stuff. What he really wanted to destroy was himself.'

Jane's mental eyebrow rose sharply. This all sounded a bit too glib, too Lesson Three, Psychology For Beginners for her liking. Any minute now and he'd start talking about sublimated urges, cries for help and traumatic potty-training in early childhood. However, she held her peace.

‘Added to which,' Asaf went on, ‘there's the simple logic of the thing. All those chances he had to destroy the world, and he couldn't actually do it. Bearing in mind what he was, that could only mean he didn't want to do it. You do see that, don't you?'

Jane frowned. ‘I don't quite . . .'

‘Well,' Asaf replied through a mouth full of peppermint debris, ‘it really does stand to reason. If you're a genie and you want to destroy the world, you don't muck about, you just get on with it.'

‘Unless,' Jane interrupted, ‘somebody stops you.'

Asaf shook his head. ‘A genie who wanted to destroy the world wouldn't have gone about it in a way that would have given anybody any opportunity to stop him. Isn't that right?' he asked the King, who nodded.

‘Fair dinkum,' he said. ‘Five-minute job. Melt an ice-cap, release a plague virus, anything like that. All this pissing about with flowers and ants . . .' He shook his head in sage contempt.

‘All self-delusion on his part,' Asaf went on. ‘Really, it was basically just a cry for help -'

Ah, thought Jane. Thank you.

‘- because, deep down, he couldn't stand being him. Thinking about it, you can see his point.'

‘And when it came right down to it,' the King joined in, ‘when the chips were down and push came to shove and he actually could have destroyed the world if he wanted to, he just -'

‘Lost his bottle?'

‘You could,' Asaf said, frowning, ‘put it that way. If you had less taste than the average works canteen Yorkshire pudding, that is.'

Jane drew in a deep breath and looked at the sky. It was still, she noticed with relief and approval, there. As were all the other necessary odds and ends: the ground, for example, and the hills and the sea. Whatever the hell had been going on, it had stopped. Which was probably just as well.

‘That's that, then, is it?' she said.

‘That's that.'

‘Good.' She turned round and beckoned to the carpet. ‘Let's go home.'

 

The shop door opened.

‘Justin,' called the proprietor, ‘I'm back. Anything happen while I was away?'

‘Not really, Uncle.'

‘Anybody buy anything?'

‘No, Uncle.'

The proprietor glanced round. ‘Just a second,' he said. ‘Where's the big Isfahan that was in the corner there? You know, the one with the goats.'

Justin swallowed. ‘A customer,' he said, ‘sort of borrowed it.'

‘Borrowed it?'

‘On approval,' Justin said.

‘I see. Leave a deposit?'

Justin reached under the counter and produced the big, fat, heavy sack he'd discovered in his hand when he'd woken up and found himself back in the shop. As it touched down on the desk, it chinked; and there is only one substance in the whole of the periodic table that chinks. Two clues: it's yellow, and before the development of specialist dental plastics they used to make false teeth out of it.

‘I guess so,' he said.

 

Think what the sea can do to a coastline in thirty million years. The shock wave from the blast had the same effect on Kiss's body in about a fifth of a second.

Souvenir hunters would have been disappointed. Not even the characteristic black silhouette etched on the glazed earth; just nothing at all to show that Kiss had ever existed.

He was disappointed. Optimist that he was, right up till the very last moment he'd somehow believed that when the smoke cleared he'd still be there; a bit singed, perhaps, and threadbare, like a character in a Loony-Tunes cartoon, but nevertheless basically in one piece. The stern reality that faced him when he came round, however, was that he was now in more pieces than the mind could possibly conceive.

Gosh, he said to himself (or rather, selves), so these are smithereens.

On the other hand, he reflected, it's not use moping. It's
times like these when you just have to pull yourself together and . . .

Pull yourself together. Easier said then done.

He considered himself, hung in suspension above the surface of the planet like one aspirin dissolved in twenty million gallons of water. Spreading yourself a bit thin these days, Kiss, old son, he reflected. On the other hand . . .

Yes, he noticed, that's interesting. He realised that every single atom of his former body still had the consciousness of the whole, so that instead of there being just one Kiss, there were now several billion. A shrewd operator, he reflected, could turn this situation to his own advantage.

A gust of high-level wind reminded him of the downside. True, there were billions of him, but each one on its own was about as ineffective as the average civil rights charter. It's molecules united who can never be defeated. A solitary atom on its own, with nothing except the moral support of its fellows, is effectively dead in the water.