Tom Holt: Djinn Rummy

“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.