“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 micro circuitry, 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 heglugluglug…”
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.