“We ought,” insisted Acme Waste Disposal Services III, a small Force Two, “to have a strip-a-gram.” He scratched his head. “It’s traditional,” he added, “I think.”
The other members of the Committee shrugged and waved to the bartender for more goat’s milk. These were uncharted waters.
“What’s that?” asked Nordic Oil IX.
Awds Three frowned. “What I’ve heard is,” he said, “you hire this female mortal to come along and take her clothes off.”
“Why?”
“And then she sings a song or recites a poem or something.”
“No wealth-beyond-the-dreams or anything?” Awds Three shook his head. “Nope,” he replied. “Off with the undies, do the song, say the poem, and that’s it.”
“How very peculiar.”
“And sometimes,” Awds added, wishing he hadn’t raised the subject, “they jump out of cakes.”
“Get away!”
“So I’ve heard,” the genie mumbled. “Never seen it myself, but…”
There was a puzzled silence.
“Let’s just go over this one more time,” said a thoughtful genie by the name of Standard Conglomerates the First. “There’s this female mortal imprisoned in a cake, and…”
“Not imprisoned, exactly…”
“…and she jumps out and doesn’t grant three wishes…”
“As I understand it. Like I said, this is all strictly hearsay…”
“…festoons the floor with her dirty laundry…”
“Hey, we don’t have to do her laundry for her, do we, because I’ve got sensitive skin…”
“…sings a song and goes away again. For which,” he added, “she expects to be paid money. And this,” he concluded, “is fun.”
“Male bonding,” suggested Nordic Oil.
“I think that’s extra.”
Stan One drew a deep breath. “I think we’ll pigeonhole that one for the time being, people. Which leaves us with excessive drinking…”
“Well, that oughtn’t to be a problem, provided they skim the cream off first…”
“Excessive drinking,” Stan One continued, “singing raucous songs and being sick in people’s window-boxes in the early hours of the morning.” He paused. “It’s all a bit jejune, isn’t it?”
“What sort of cake, exactly?”
“That’s what mortals do,” Awds replied defensively. “Don’t blame me, I’m only repeating what I’ve heard.”
Stan One shrugged. “If he’s dead set on becoming a mortal, I suppose that’s what he’s got to learn to expect.” He took a long pull at his goat’s milk and spat out a tiny knob of rennet. “The sooner he starts, I guess, the sooner he’ll get used to it.” He grimaced; not entirely because of the rennet.
“Because if it’s one of those creamy ones with jam in the middle, she won’t half be sticky and yeeuk by the time she’s jumped up through the middle of it. Bits of glacé cherry in the hair, all that sort of—”
“I think,” said Imperial Unit Fund Managers IV, a big, slow genie, “that at some stage we have to tie shoes to a car.”
Awds shook his head. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “It’s horses you tie shoes to. Cars have tyres.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Damned odd, the whole thing,” mused Stan One. “Anyone know why he’s doing it?”
There was a general shaking of heads. “For charity?” suggested the Dragon King of the South-East. “One of these sponsored things?”
Impy Four shook his head. “Can’t see how it’d work,” he replied.
“Well,” replied the Dragon King, “he’s becoming a mortal, right? So he gets people to sponsor him, so much a year, to see how long he’ll live. So suppose we sponsor him, oh, five gold dirhams a year, and he lives say twenty years…”
“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”
The Dragon King shrugged. “People do weird things for charity,” he said. “I heard once where this bloke allowed himself to be chained in the stocks and have wet sponges thrown at him.”
Awds shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “I think it’s more cherchez la femme.”
“Find the lady? You mean like a card game?”
“And anyway,” interrupted a slender Force Six, “from what you say, all you have to do to find mortal females is look in the nearest Victoria sponge. There’s got to be more to it than that.”
“I think,” said Awds, “he’s in love.”
A long, difficult silence.
“Just say that again, will you?” asked Stan One, slowly.
“I think he’s in love,” Awds repeated, red to the tips of his ears. “Just a rumour, of course. No idea where I heard it.”
“With a mortal?”
Awds nodded.
“A female mortal?”
“It’s only what I’ve heard.”
Another long silence.
“Well,” said the Dragon King briskly, “if he’s doing it for charity, then I reckon I’m good for ten dirhams a year. Any takers?”
Jane frowned.
“The first one again,” she commanded, “but without the sequins.”
There was a voiceless sigh, and out of nothingness appeared a dress. It was long, white and shimmering. Twenty thousand tiny white flowers sparkled on the sleeves. So light and insubstantial was the material that a gnat sneezing in the jungles of Ecuador set the hems dancing. It hung in the air, full of some sort of nothing that accentuated its breathtakingly graceful lines. Jane thought.
“All right,” she said. “Let me see number three just one more time.”
“Sign here.”
Philly Nine took the clipboard, squiggled with the pen, and handed them back.
Sulphur, he thought. Nice, inanimate, noiseless sulphur. Ninety-nine-point-eight-nine per cent pure. Easiest thing in the world, a plague of sulphur.
“Just stack it neatly over there,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
The delivery man nodded, and started shouting directions to his colleagues. The long queue of lorries started to move.
"Scuse my asking,” went on the delivery man, “but that’s a lot of sulphur you got there.”
Philly Nine looked up from the bill of lading. “Sorry?” he said.
“That’s an awful lot of sulphur you got there, mate,” the delivery man went on. “You want to watch yourself.”
Philly Nine favoured him with an icy grin. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Believe me.”
“OK,” replied the delivery man, as the genie stalked away and broke open a crate. “So long as you realise that this stuffs highly…”
Philly Nine wasn’t listening. To distribute sulphur in plague form: first, grind it up into a fine powder. Use this to salt rain-clouds all over the Earth’s atmosphere. The sulphur will dissolve in the rain-water, forming (with the help of a little elementary chemistry) H2S04, otherwise known as sulphuric acid. He chuckled, took a long drag on the butt of his cigar and threw it aside.
There was a flash — “…inflammable.”
SEVEN
Kiss lay on his back, stared at the ceiling, and screamed. And woke up.
Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don’t usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there’s nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.
There are, however, exceptions. Kiss reached out for something to wipe his forehead with, and breathed in deeply.
He’d dreamed that he could no longer fly; that all his strength and power had deserted him and that one day, not too far in the future, he was going to die. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was going to have to spend what little time he had doing something futile, degrading and incredibly boring — the term his dream had used was a full-time job — just to earn a little money, money well within the dreams of avarice, simply to keep himself alive. And on top of that, what little time he had left over wasn’t going to be spent in the back bar of Saheed’s, playing pool, because his wife got upset if he kept going out in the evenings.
Weird dream. Talk about morbid…