It’s at times like this that instinct takes over. An instinct is, by its very nature, impulsive. Instinct doesn’t stand on one foot in the doorway thinking, “Hey, this really lets me off the hook, you know?” before discreetly tiptoeing away to see if it’s too late to get the deposit back on the wedding cake. Instinct jumps in, boot raised.
Three seconds or so later, therefore, Asaf was lying in a confused huddle in the corner of the room wondering how he had got there and why his ribs hurt so much. Jane was standing up, gesticulating eloquently with her right hand while trying to do her blouse up with her left; and Kiss was leaning on the arm of the sofa, listening to what Jane had to say and thinking, Shit, I think I’ve broken a bone in my toe.
And just what precisely, Jane was asking, did he think he was playing at? And what made him think he had the right-?
“Hold on,” Kiss interrupted. “That bloke there. Are you trying to tell me he was supposed to be doing that?”
It wasn’t a way of putting it that Jane had foreseen, and for a moment it checked the eloquence of her reproaches. “Yes,” she said. “And—”
“This, not to put too fine a point on it, mortal—”
“Here,” broke in Asaf, “who are you calling a mortal?”
“You.”
Asaf fingered his ribs tentatively. “Fair enough,” he said. “Hey, are you another one?”
“Another what?”
“Another bloody genie. Because if you are…”
WHOOSH!
“G’day,” said the Dragon King, materialising next to the standard lamp and knocking over a coffee table. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea if I explained…”
Somebody threw a glass decanter at him. Who it actually was we shall probably never know, but there were three obvious suspects. He ducked, looked round to see where the decanter had met the wall, and winced at the sight of good whisky gone to waste.
“Not you again,” Asaf said. “Not on top of everything else. Haven’t you people got anything better to do?”
Kiss froze. “That reminds me,” he mumbled.
“Shut up!”
Asaf, Kiss and the Dragon King all stopped talking at the same moment. “Thank you,” said Jane. “Now listen.”
They listened.
“First,” she went on, “you with the scales and the beer-belly. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing in my front room, but if you leave now and never come back I might just be generous and pretend you were never here in the first place.”
“Well, cheerio then,” said the King; and vanished.
“Next,” Jane continued, turning to Kiss, “you. I have had enough of you. First you clutter up my flat with lethal gadgets that fly people half-way across the world; then, when I send for you to come and rescue me, you’re nowhere to be seen; and finally you come bursting in here like the bloody Customs and Excise and beat up my friends. This is your idea of hearing and obeying, is it?”
“But he was—”
“In fact,” Jane ground on, “I’m beginning to get just a little bit sick of the sight of you. In fact, I wish you were back in your damned bottle, where you bel—”
WHOOSH.
“Excuse me,” said Asaf nervously, extracting himself painfully from the corner of the room, “but what the hell happened to him?”
“Who cares?” Jane replied. “Left in a huff, I expect. Now, where were we?”
HELP!
HELP!
HELP! LET ME OUT, YOU IDIOTS, I’VE GOT TO SAVE THE SODDING PLANET!
In an aspirin bottle, no one can hear you scream.
This business with bottles. It has perplexed some of the finest minds in the Universe, almost as much as the perennial enigma of why the cue ball sometimes screws back off the pack for no good reason and goes straight down the centre left-hand pocket.
Some say that bottles are the gateways to other universes (generally small, cramped universes with convex sides, smelling of stale retsina), and that a genie imprisoned in a bottle has stepped sideways into an alternative reality. It’s all, they say, part and parcel of the wish syndrome, whereby each wish calls into being an alternative reality where the wish comes true, however improbable this may be.
Another school of thought holds that a genie embottled is only a tiny part of the totality of that genie. Genies exist simultaneously in innumerable different dimensions, and by bottling one all you do is shove most of him out of this dimension and into the others, leaving only a token presence behind.
The French say that bottling genies is something that should be done at the château of origin, or not at all.
The major petro-chemicals manufacturers say that putting genies in bottles is fine by them, but wouldn’t it make more sense to use plastic non-returnable bottles with screw tops, which means you can keep them longer before they go flat?
Genies take the view that getting put in bottles is just one of those things that happens to a guy at some stage in his life, and if it wasn’t that it’d be something else, and there are probably worse small, confined spaces to pass the odd millennium in, for instance coffins, so why worry? This goes some way to explain why genies have never ruled the Universe.
Force Twelve genies, however, are a cut above the general production-line standard, and therefore can’t afford to be quite so laid back all the time. Some of them have responsibilities — planets to save, and so forth. This means that from time to time they find it hard to be philosophical about the cork going back in. Some Force Twelves, indeed the elite few who have more moral fibre than a square yard of coconut matting, even resent it.
“Women!” said Kiss aloud. The word echoed round inside the bottle and died away.
Never mind. If it’s any consolation, when the planet gets blown up in a few minutes I expect the force of the blast will shatter the bottle and you’ll be away clear. It’s an odd thing, but in any significant explosion, glass is usually one of the first things to go.
Kiss looked up, and then down, and then from side to side. “Do I know you?” he asked.
I’m the duty GA. I’m having a busy shift, actually, because I was talking to another guy in more or less the same fix as you not that long ago.
“Go away.”
Beg pardon?
“I said go away. I’ve got enough to put up with as it is.”
There was a pause.
Why is everybody so blasted hostile? I’m only doing my job.
“Take the day off. Go and spend some quality time with the family.”
It’s a pity you feel you have to adopt that attitude, you know, because the GA service really does have a great deal to offer to people in your position. If you weren’t so cramped in there, I could give you some leaflets which—
“No leaflets. Piss off.”
It’s this crisis of confidence which is bringing the profession to its knees. Me, I blame franchising. Under the old system—
“I said—”
Under the old system, you see, I could have brought gentle subliminal influences to bear on that mouse…
“Piss… What mouse?”
The mouse presently scampering along the mantelpiece on which your fragile glass bottle is resting, three feet above a tiled fireplace. Like I was saying, I could have subtly suggested to that mouse that it might find it a good idea to run along this mantelpiece terribly fast, regardless of the risk of accidentally brushing up against your bottle and dislodging it. Whereupon the bottle would have fallen to the floor and smashed, and…
“Yes, thanks,” Kiss said. “I think I was there way before you. Now, about this mouse…”
Small for its species, sort of greyish-brown, whiskers, answers to the name of Keek. Unusually gullible, too, even for a mouse. The faintest suggestion that there’s a small crumb of mozzarella just to the side of your bottle, and all your problems would have been over. Pity, really.
“Gosh.”
Yes. As it is, the voice continued sadly, all I can do is offer moral support and axioms of an uplifting nature designed to help you to come to terms with the harsh reality of your situation without too much culture shock. For instance, “It’s a long road that has no turning.” “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Actually, that’s not quite true, because generally speaking just before dawn you get that rather attractive pastel-pink light just above the horizon, which always puts me in mind…