Djinn Rummy (25 page)

Not, she added quickly, that she didn't worship the ground he stood on (or, to be accurate, more usually hovered about six inches over); but that was either here nor there. Being absolutely adorable and gorgeous is no excuse for rank carelessness. She'd have a word or two to say to him when he finally condescended to show up.

Yes, and where in blazes was he, anyway? Genies, she felt sure, were capable of moving from A to B at the speed of light; and here she had been, for what seemed like hours and hours, stuck on top of a fast-moving flying tapestry over a desert. She'd have expected prompter service from the electricity board.

‘Grrng,' said Justin.

It was, as far as she could remember, the most sensible thing he'd said since she'd met him. She turned round, smiled, and said, ‘It's all right.'

Justin blinked and lifted his head. ‘The shop,' he said. ‘Uncle.'

‘Everything's under control,' Jane said, as reassuringly as she could. ‘One of your carpets took off, with us on it, and I think we're over a desert somewhere, but my genie'll be along in a minute and he'll take us home. So long as you don't look down . . .'

Justin, of course, looked down.

‘AAAAAAAAAGH!' he observed.

‘Well, quite,' Jane said, ‘my sentiments exactly, but there's no need to worry, honestly. You see, it's a magic carpet.'

‘A ma -'

‘Or at least,' Jane amended, ‘it is now. I put a book on it, you see.' She turned up the smile a notch or so. ‘I expect we'll all have a jolly good laugh about this as soon as we get back home again.'

‘Your
genie
?'

‘That's right,' Jane replied. ‘No, don't back away, you'll fall off the edge.' The carpet wobbled vertiginously as Justin converted his shuffle backwards into a lunge forward. ‘There now, you just lie still and everything will be -'

‘Put me down,' Justin said, with a degree of urgency in his voice. ‘Put me down put me down put me
down
!'

The carpet juddered slightly.

‘Your wish is my command, O Master.'

Suddenly the world was at thirty degrees to itself, and Jane felt herself slide forward. The book, also; it flopped over and was just about to plummet over the side when Jane, stretching full length, managed to catch it. She wasn't sure she understood any of this at all, but it seemed reasonable to assume that if the book fell off the carpet would lose its supernatural capacity and turn back into an ordinary domestic floor covering. And ordinary domestic floor coverings as a rule don't fly.

‘Ah,' said Jane. ‘You again.'

‘Mistress.'

‘Look, I know we got off on rather the wrong foot back there in the shop,' said Jane, ‘but I think it might be a good idea if we made friends and started again, don't you? Before we fly into a cliff or something.'

‘There are no cliffs on our projected route, Mistress.'

‘Look . . . Look, forget about cliffs. Just don't take any orders from him, all right? He's not quite . . .'

‘Mistress?'

Justin was staring at her, wondering perhaps why she was talking to the carpet. Could he even hear the bloody thing, she wondered. ‘All right,' she whispered, ‘you do it your way. Only for pity's sake, do look where you're going.'

‘Our fully automated guidance systems,' replied the carpet huffily, ‘are computer-aligned to ensure a comfortable, incident-free itinerary. State-of-the-art LCD displays let you know at a glance -'

‘LOOK OUT!'

The carpet swerved viciously, just in time to avoid the ground. Jane opened her eyes again, to see the carpet apparently on top of her. And then, after a heart-stopping roll, underneath her again.

‘Sorry. I mean, systems error.'

‘Shut up and fly.'

‘To hear is to -'

There was an uncomfortable twentieth of a second.

‘Don't,' Jane hissed, ‘even consider it.'

‘But you said -'

‘I'm warning you.'

‘Your express wish,' said the carpet, flustered, ‘was that I ignore anything you tell me to do. Your wish is my command. Oh,
sugar
!'

The carpet hurtled groundwards. Jane shrieked.

‘Mistress?'

‘Don't worry about it,' Jane said quickly. ‘When I said look out, you ignored me. Very sensibly, however, and quite independently of anything I may have coincidentally said, you decided not to crash and took appropriate action. Got that?'

‘Yes, Mistress,' said the carpet gratefully. ‘Although strictly speaking I should ignore that too.'

‘You just try it.'

‘Sorry?' said the carpet. ‘Did you just say something?'

The carpet levelled, and Jane patted a hem. ‘That's the spirit,' she said.

‘Excuse me.'

Jane looked round and saw Justin, clinging with both hands, his face buried in the pile. ‘Yes?'

‘I don't want to be a nuisance,' Justin mumbled through the fabric, ‘but do you think we can go home soon? Uncle will be . . .'

Jane wasn't listening. She was looking, unbelievably, down.

‘Gosh,' she said.

Underneath the carpet was the sea - a huge, flat blue spread, extending from horizon to horizon. Jane considered for a moment.

‘If we jump,' she said aloud, ‘we'll land in the sea.'

‘I can't swim.'

‘I can. And you've got to learn sometime.'

‘Why?'

‘Because . . .' Jane searched her mind for a reason. ‘Because it'd be very handy if, for instance, you were sitting on a carpet miles above the surface of the sea and somebody were to push you off.'

‘Who'd do a thing like ?'

‘That depends,' Jane said firmly, ‘on how co-operative you were being at the time.'

 

You would think, reflected Asaf bitterly, that after escaping from a small glass bottle, escaping from a ship ought to be a piece of cake. Not a bit of it.

Wearily, he lifted the cask of nails above his head and tried once again to use it to smash through the battened
hatch. By dint of ferocious effort he managed to deal a featherweight biff to the objective before his arms crumpled and the cask fell heavily onto the deck at his feet, narrowly missing his toes.

For one thing, his thoughts continued, although I didn't know it at the time, I probably had help getting out of the bottle - well, I definitely got help - whereas they want to keep me on the ship. Also, he couldn't help reflecting, the bottle hadn't been surrounded by deep, cold water; and the ship was.

That is, he parenthesised, always supposing I actually
am
on a ship and this isn't all some sort of tiresome metaphysical illusion, the sort of thing Captain Kirk and the crew of the
Enterprise
seem to spend most of their working hours in. The bottle now, that probably was an illusion. Bloody small illusion; and they might have had the decency to illude the ink out first. Then again, he was beginning to feel that whoever was doing all this to him had a fairly limited imagination.

Sinbad the Sailor, for crying out loud. Whatever next. Puss in Boots?

Now then. Be practical. This is a ship. I am a fisherman, I'm at home on ships. Ships hold no terrors for me . . .

Not strictly accurate. During his fishing career the only ship he'd ever been on was his father's vessel, and that wasn't a ship, it was a boat. Definitely a boat. And as between that boat and this ship, there were many significant differences. There wasn't any water coming up through the floor, for example; likewise, you could scratch your ear on board this thing without the risk of hitting someone in the eye with your elbow.

However, he rationalised, all sea-going craft have certain things in common. Not that he could think of anything
offhand that might be of use to him; but he felt sure he was somewhere on the right lines, pursuing this . . .

The ship moved.

More than that; it seemed to jump up in the air. Leaping about is, of course, something that ships as a rule simply don't do (ask any fisherman); but since this was probably an illusion anyway, Asaf wasn't prepared to be dogmatic about anything. Right now, he'd have settled for an illusion that wasn't showering articles of displaced cargo on his head.

He was just struggling out from under a crate of some description which had fallen on him, soliloquising eloquently as he did so, when he noticed the light. A lovely great shaft of sunlight, slanting in through a now open hatch.

Told you, he muttered to himself. Told you it'd be a piece of cake.

 

‘Now then,' Jane said, treading water, ‘the first thing I'd like you to do is kick with your feet.'

‘Aaaaaaagh!'

‘It's all right, I've got hold of your neck, you can't - oh, bother.' She kicked hard and managed to get Justin's chin clear of the water. ‘Now if you'd have done what I told you -'

‘Help!' Justin screamed. ‘Help help help heblublublublub . . .'

‘You're not trying, are you?' Jane said wearily. ‘Look, it's really very simple, any child can do it. You just paddle with your feet, and let your body sort of float . . .'

Jane suddenly realised that she was in shadow, and glanced upwards. There, directly over her head, was the carpet.

‘Your wish,' it said politely, ‘is my command.'

Jane scowled. ‘I thought I'd told you to clear off,' she said.

‘I wasn't,' the carpet replied, ‘talking to you.'

‘What? Oh. Oh you mean him.'

‘
Help!
'

‘Yes,' said the carpet. ‘His wish, my command. So if you'd just shift over a bit, I can -'

‘What about me?'

‘What about you?'

Jane spluttered as a wave flipped a cupful of salt water into her open mouth. ‘You've changed your tune a bit, haven't you?' she observed. ‘Not long ago it was all “Our state-of-the-art microcircuitry, designed to make life easy for you”.'

‘That was different,' the carpet replied severely. ‘I was in user-friendly mode then. Now I can please myself.'

‘Charming.'

‘You're welcome. Now, are you going to shift so that I can rescue my client, or are we going to hang about here all day chatting?'

‘You're just going to ignore me, then?'

The carpet shrugged; that is to say, it undulated from its front hem backwards. ‘That's what you told me to do, remember? Do you people understand the concept of consistency? '

‘Help help
he
glugluglug . . .'

Jane bit her tongue. ‘Tell you what I'll do,' she said. ‘I'll let you rescue him if you agree to rescue me too. Now you can't say fairer than that, can you?'

The carpet hovered for a moment, thinking.

‘I also,' Jane added, as casually as she could, ‘happen to know a Force Twelve genie, and I was thinking, if he got
hold of one of those carpet-beater things, you know, the ones shaped like a tennis racket . . .'

‘All right then, all aboard that's coming aboard. I can take you as far as the ship.'

‘Ship? What ship?' Then Jane remembered. ‘Oh,' she said. ‘That ship.'

That ship. The quaint old-fashioned one with the big square sails which they ought by rights to have crashed straight down on top of, if it hadn't somehow moved a hundred yards sideways at the very last moment. She'd forgotten all about it.

‘Well?'

‘That,' Jane said, ‘will be just fine.'

 

 

 

 

T
he reason why Kiss hadn't shown up yet was that he'd bumped into an old friend.

‘Why the hell,' said Philly Nine, picking himself up off a bank of low cloud, ‘don't you look where you're damn well . . . oh, it's you.'

‘Hello there,' Kiss replied. ‘How's you?'

‘Oh, mustn't grumble. And you?'

‘Persevering. Keeping busy?'

‘Mooching about, you know. Nothing terribly exciting, but enough to keep me off the streets.'

‘Ah, well. Is that a war I can see starting away down there?'

Philly turned and peered over his shoulder through the thin layer of cumulo-nimbus. ‘Where?' he asked.

‘Sort of south-east. Look, you see that mountain range to your immediate right? Well, follow that down till you meet the river, and . . .'

‘Got it,' Philly said. ‘Gosh, yes, it does look a bit like a war, doesn't it? Tanks and planes and things.'

Kiss gave him a long, hard look. ‘One of yours, Philly?' he asked quietly.

‘Gosh, what is it today, Thursday . . . Oh,
that
war. Yes. well, I may have had something to do with it.'

‘You and your obsessive modesty.'

Philly shrugged. Far below, in the vast deserts of Mesopotamia, fleets of armoured personnel carriers speeding across the dunes threw up clouds of dust that blotted out the sun. ‘It's only a little war,' Philly said.

‘Small but perfectly formed?'

‘One likes to keep one's hand in.'

Kiss frowned. ‘Like I said, Philly, you're too modest. Why do you do it exactly?'

‘Why do I do what?'

‘Start wars. I mean, is there some sort of annual award for the best war, like the Oscars or whatever? First of all I'd like to thank my megalomaniac fascist dictator, that sort of thing?'

Philly smiled, a little sadly. ‘It's what I do,' he replied.

‘You're very good at it. Have they started shooting yet?'