“Well, I don’t,” Jane said. “Apart from the immediate things, I mean, like not having to clean the kitchen floor or go to work. Grand ambitions really aren’t my style.”
“They don’t have to be all that grand,” Kiss suggested. “In fact, something modest but time-consuming would suit me down to the ground. A complete collection of Bing Crosby records, for example; or better still, a determination on your part to have lunch in all the wine-bars in the Southern Hemisphere. I could handle that, if you could.”
Jane removed the straw from a fruit-juice carton and chewed it thoughtfully. “Really,” she said, “I suppose I ought to make the world a better place. Eliminate nuclear weapons, irrigate the deserts of Northern Africa, that sort of—”
“Oh dear, not again,” Kiss sighed. “Sorry, but if I see one more North African desert, I shall probably be sick.”
“Oh.” Jane looked startled. “You mean you already…?”
“We all have,” Kiss sighed, “at one time or another. One of humanity’s more predictable requests, I’m afraid. Exactly as predictable, in fact, as causing famine, pestilence and floods, which is Mankind’s other great preoccupation. That’s why we have the Concurrency Agreement. It was worked out by the Union, what, three thousand years ago, and just as well, in my opinion.”
Jane demanded footnotes.
“Simple,” Kiss explained. “Suppose you have, say, fifty genies. You can bet your life that at any one time twenty-five of them are going to be indentured to do-gooders, let-the-deserts-bloom types; and the other twenty-five will be working for psychotic maniacs. We just set off one against the other, and things remain exactly as they are. Saves a lot of aggravation in the long run, and of course it gives your lot something to do into the bargain. Flag days, jumble sales, fighting wars, that sort of thing.”
“I see. How very depressing.”
“It is, rather. So, if you want me to convert the Nullarbor plain into a swaying forest of Brussels sprouts, just say the word, but you mustn’t count on them staying there for more than a fiftieth of a second, if that. The rules are very strict.”
“Fine. I think I’d like to go home now, please.”
“Your wish is my—”
“Do you have to keep saying that?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
TWO
A hot-air balloon bobbing uncertainly over a desert landscape.
Inside the balloon, a man and a girl, surveying the view with binoculars. There’s nothing to be seen except sand and, in the far distance, huge rocky outcrops. No signs of life whatsoever. That suits the man and the girl perfectly.
The girl stoops down and picks up a metal cylinder, like a steel thermos flask. She opens it and rolls into the palm of her hand a single seed, no bigger than a grape pip. It sits, heavy for its size, in the soft skin of her hand. It looks, if anything that small and inert can manage such a feat, smug.
“Well?” asks the man. He has to shout because of the roaring of the wind, but his shout is so full of awe that it sounds like an extremely loud whisper; as if he was talking to a very deaf person in a cathedral.
“Here’s as good a place as any,” replies the girl. “Let’s go for it.”
She leans over the side and reels for a second at the sight of so much nothing between her and the ground; then she deliberately opens her palm and lets the seed fall.
The seed falls…
And hits the ground.
WHUMP!
Was it a seed, or was it a bomb? Difficult to tell; there’s a mushroom-shaped cloud standing up from the desert floor…
But that’s not smoke or dust, that’s foliage; a huge, thick stem supporting a giant bud — which bursts into a hot-flame-yellow flower with a raging red centre. The flower lifts towards the sun — you expect it to roar and shake its head like a lion — and the plant raises its two broad, leathery leaves like wings; and even up in the balloon, a thousand feet overhead, that’s a threatening sight.
“Christ,” shouts the man, “look at that thing grow!”
Look indeed; the plant is twenty feet high and still growing. Fissures run along the desert floor, marking the swift passage of the roots underground like lighting forking across a black sky.
“That,” the girl agreed, “is one hell of a primrose.”
“Sorry?”
“I said that’s one hell of a—”
“Speak up, I can’t quite hear what you’re—”
“I SAID, THAT’S ONE HELL OF A PRIMROSE.”
“Yes.”
No longer growing; instead, consolidating. The stem swells, to support the weight of the flower. The petals fan out, snatching photons out of the air like a spider’s web. Hot chlorophyll pumps through the swelling veins. The roots tear into the dead ground like miners” drills. And stop.
“Hey up,” says the man, “I think it’s on its way.”
The primrose is rocking and bouncing up and down, for all the world as if it’s on a trampoline. Now it’s swaying backwards and forwards, using all the leverage of its already phenomenal bulk to rip its roots free. In this particular part of the desert, nothing has stirred the ground since the seas evaporated and the wind ground down the rock and stamped it flat as a car park and hard as tarmac; fifty million years or thereabouts of patient landscaping, contouring, making good. A few more millennia, God might be saying, and we’ll have a decent tennis court. Unless, of course, some bugger of a psychotic giant primula comes along and starts carving it up…
With a crack like bones breaking and much spraying of sand into the air, the roots come free; and for a few seconds they grope frantically in empty air until they touch ground, and — like a monster spider with wings and a huge yellow wind-up gramophone on its back, the plant begins to shuffle, on tip-root, sideways across the sand towards the distant shade of the outcrops.
“Gaw,” mutters the man, as well he might. For the Thing scuffling across the sand below him was his idea, and it was his genius (or his fault) that turned a little yellow wildflower commonly found in the fields and hedgerows of Old England into this: Primula dinodontica, the Ninja Primrose; or, to put it another way, one of the three components of the ultimate Green Bomb.
“Well,” says the girl, “looks like that one works OK. Let’s try the others.”
“I’m not absolutely sure about this…”
“Don’t be so bloody wet. Here goes.”
From a second flask she takes another seed: flat, beanlike, about the size and shape of a small sycamore pod. Before the man can do anything, she’s let it go.
WHUMP!
“… serious misgivings,” the man is saying, “about the whole project. I mean, I never actually imagined for one moment—”
The primrose stops in its tracks. The tips of its roots, as sensitive as the nose of a bat, have felt the thump of the second seed landing, the explosion as the incredible potential energy contained in its brittle husk is released, the shivering of the earth as another set of iron-hard roots is driven deep under the surface. Like you, Mother Earth has this thing about needles…
“That,” remarks the man, rolling back the frontiers of statement of the stunningly obvious, “is disgusting.”
A savage flashback into the racial memory — the myth of the hydra, the hundred-headed serpentine guardian of Hell’s gate — except that instead of heads, this thing has pale blue flowers. Pale blue flowers writhing and twisting on their stems, petals snapping frenziedly at the empty air. The first Devil’s Forget-Me-Not has been spawned.
“Two down,” yells the girl cheerfully, “one to go. I’m really pleased, aren’t you?”
The man says nothing; instead, he grabs for the third flask and hugs it to him. As the girl reaches for it, he backs away; forgetting that backing space in the basket of a balloon is strictly limited. Safe backing space, anyway.