Djinn Rummy

TEN

Jane looked around her, and clicked her tongue. She was bored.

Not just bored in the nothing-to-do sense; she was bored to the marrow, half-past-four-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-in-Wales bored. And nothing much, as far as she could see, to be done about it.

Bloody genie! What the hell was the point of being able to have anything you want if all you have to do in order to get it is want it?

Still, she consoled herself while moving a small china ornament two inches to the right, once we’re married there won’t be any more of that. No more of this supernatural nonsense. We can just be ordinary people…

Ordinary people…

Yes, well. At least ordinary people can go shopping. When you’re the proprietress of a Force Twelve genie, one thing you can’t do is shop. No sooner have you written down something on your list than it’s there, delivered in a fraction of a second, very best quality, from Harrods. But what’s the point of having things if you can’t shop for them first?

Jane steeled herself. She was a free woman, with an inalienable right to shop. And shop she would.

She glanced down at her feet and noticed that on the patch of floor directly below her, approximately five feet by seven, there was no rug. Everywhere else there were rugs; the very finest rugs ever, whisked here by arcane forces and precisely, down to the last fibre, what she’d wanted. Well, it would have to stop somewhere, and here was as good a place as any. She would go out, and buy a rug.

The resolution once made, she softened slightly. All the other rugs in the place — all the furniture and fittings, come to that — were her choice, and she knew for a fact that Kiss didn’t really like them much. A bit thin on the barbaric splendour, he considered, while maybe slightly overstressing the cosy and colour-coordinated.

There, now. Two birds with one stone. She would buy a rug, in (she almost hugged herself with pleasure at the thought) a shop, and it would be the sort of rug Kiss would like. Persian or something. She could stand a coffee-table on it so that she wouldn’t have to see it, but he would still know it was there.

Problem; although all Oriental carpets looked exactly the same to her, she was sure she remembered something about each one being unique, and some sorts being wonderfully marvellous works of art, and others being the sort of thing that’s left unsold after a church bazaar. Obviously, it was incumbent upon her to buy one of the approved models.

Why is life so complicated?

The thought had scarcely crossed her mind when she caught sight of a book on the arm of the sofa. It was big and fat, and on the cover it had a photograph of a Persian rug. She picked it up.

It was written in Arabic.

That aside, it was promising; it was full of pictures of rugs, all of which looked pretty well identical to her, but it stood to reason that nobody, not even an Arab in the grips of vanity-publishing mania, would go to the trouble of producing a chunky great tome full of pictures of just one rug. Even if he was desperately attached to it, he’d probably just have its portrait painted and let it go at that.

Therefore, she argued, this must be a book, belonging to Kiss, on the subject of rugs; approved rugs, presumably. All she had to do was go to an emporium, find a rug which looked tolerably similar to the pictures in the book, and buy it. Problem solved. She dumped the book in her bag and went out.

Arguably, a more perceptive person might have noticed the wires coming out of the spine, and wondered what business a book had with sockets and electrodes.

The young man (his name was Justin) was tall and thin. L.S. Lowry would have hired him as a model without a moment’s hesitation. He was wearing a hairy tweed jacket whose sleeves appeared to have eaten his hands right down to the middle joints of the fingers. He seemed nervous.

But not as nervous as the other man (his name was Max). If Justin resembled a golf club, Max was a dead ringer for the ball.

“Now you’ve got the number?” Max said.

“Yes, Uncle.”

“And you’ll phone me if there’s any problems? Any problems at all?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“And you know where everything is?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

Max chewed his lip. “The key to the safe is in the coffee tin on the top shelf of the stockroom, just under the—”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“And you’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

There’s only so much you can do, thought Max; and I’ll only be gone two hours, and there’s never any customers on a Thursday afternoon, and all the prices are clearly marked, and I’ve told him nineteen times not to let anybody haggle…”

“Justin.”

“Yes, Uncle?”

“Remember, don’t let anybody haggle. The prices as marked are non-negotiable. You’ve got that?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

…Twenty times, so what could possibly go wrong? no, don’t even think that. Just keep everything crossed, and hurry back as soon as possible.

“Oh, and Justin.”

“Yes, Uncle?”

“Don’t buy anything.”

“No, Uncle.”

It’s impossible, Max reassured himself, completely out of the question, that the boy could be as dozy as his mother. For a start, he seems able to remember to breathe regularly without anybody having to remind him. The shop will be in safe hands. Everything’s going to be all right.

“Is there anything,” he said, taking a deep breath, “you want to ask before I go?”

“No, Uncle.”

Max shut his eyes, broadcast a prayer to any passing gods and smiled wretchedly.

“Right,” he said, winding his scarf round his neck, “it’s all yours.”

He took three steps towards the door, stopped and looked round. Of course he would see it all again, and when he came back everything would be all right. But there was no harm in taking one last, long look, just to be on the safe side.

"Bye, Uncle.”

“See you, Justin.”

The bell on the door clanged and Justin was alone with the shop, the till, the books and seventy square miles of the choicest, rarest, most valuable Oriental carpets in the whole of the United Kingdom.

He sneezed.

Carpets attract dust, and dust played hell with Justin’s sinuses. The next two hours, he just knew, were going to be very, very long.

He sat down behind the desk and found his place in his book, trying his best to breathe in through his mouth only. He hadn’t read more than five or six pages when the bell tinkled. He looked up.

“Can I help?” he asked, and froze.

During the previous night, when he’d been lying awake fretting about having to mind the shop on his own the next day, he had finally managed to reconcile himself to the thought that there might be customers. He had squared up to that one, looked the impostor Fear straight in the eye and stared him down. It hadn’t occurred to him, however, that there might be female customers. Young female customers. If the thought had crossed his mind, come to that, he wouldn’t be here now.

“I expect so,” Jane replied, looking round. “I want to buy a rug.”

“Gosh.”

“Looks like I’ve come to the right place.”

“Crumbs.”

“I mean,” Jane went on, with that awful feeling you get when you know you’ve got to keep talking because the silence that’ll follow when you stop will be too embarrassing to contemplate, “you look like you’ve got a very wide selection.”

“Have we? Yes.”

Jane subsided. What she really wanted to do now was leave the shop and never come back; but it looked like there was a sporting chance that the implied rejection would drive the young man behind the desk to slash his wrists, if he didn’t break his thumbnail getting the big blade out first. She was stuck.

“Gosh,” she said, selecting a carpet at random, “what have we here?”

The young man said nothing. His expression seemed to suggest that as far as he was concerned, all carpets were too ghastly for words and he wanted nothing to do with them, ever, not in this world or the next.

“No,” Jane muttered, “maybe not. Or rather,” she added quickly, in case the negative vibes might just be the final shove that would send him over the edge, “it’s a really nice carpet, but not quite in keeping with… Yes, this one’s even nicer. Don’t you think?”

The young man lifted his head and gazed at the example she’d put her hand on. “Do you want to, er, buy…?”

His tone of voice suggested that Jane was trying to seduce him into committing some luridly unnatural act. “Well,” she mumbled, “I do quite like…”

“I’ll look,” said the young man, “in the book.”

He ducked under the counter, and for on awful moment Jane wondered if he was ever going to reappear. Just when she was steeling herself to go and see what he’d done to himself under there, he bobbed back up again with a shoebox full of tatty notebooks.

“It’ll be inhere somewhere,” the young man said hopelessly.

Oh Christ, Jane thought, I’m going to be here for the rest of my life. Kiss, where the devil are you when I need you? Beam me up quick.

“Look, if it’s any trouble…”

The young man favoured her with a look that wouldn’t have been out of place on the face of a sheep in an abattoir. “I’m quite capable of looking it up, thank you very much,” he said, with a sort of hideous mangled dignity that made Jane wish very much that her father had never met her mother. “I’ll try not to keep you.”

“I’ll buy it anyway,” Jane whimpered, “if that’s all right with you, I mean.”

The young man didn’t reply. He was nose-deep in the box. It looked very much as if he was going to be there for some considerable time.

Eventually, just as Jane was wondering whether she could surreptitiously roll herself up in the carpet like Cleopatra, wait till he’d gone and then make good her escape, the young man lifted his head and coughed nervously.

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

“Can you see a ticket on it anywhere? It should say 2354/A67/74Y”

“Ah.” Jane examined the carpet. “Doesn’t seem to be.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Oh.” The young man winced, as if the book in his hand was red-hot. “I’d better just look, I suppose,” he muttered, and crossed the floor towards her. “Maybe it’s on the back of something. There should be one somewhere,” he added poignantly.

They were both standing on the carpet. “Can I help?” Jane asked.

“It’s all right, really, I can manage.”

“What does it say in the book?”

“It’s a…” The young man squinted. “Sorry, I can’t quite pronounce it. Bokhara something or other.”

“And that’s what you think this is?”

“I think so. Mind you, I’m really not an expert. If you wouldn’t mind waiting till Uncle gets back, I’m sure he’d be able to…”

Oh no, thought Jane, I wasn’t born yesterday. This is one of those traps, like the Flying Dutchman or the Lorelei. You promise to wait ten minutes, and five hundred years later you’re still there, and everybody you ever knew on the outside has died. “Here,” Jane said, press-ganging the first words ill-advised enough to come near her, “I’ve got a book here, let’s see if there’s a picture we can identify it from.” She opened Kiss’s book, and as she was rather preoccupied she failed to notice the slight hum, or the pale blue glow from the endpapers.

God, she thought. I wish I was out of here.

The voice was inside her, tiny, clear and sharp. She was sure she’d heard it. Oh wonderful, now I’m going potty. If ever I get out of this alive, it’s going to be wall-to-wall limo for ever and ever.

I wish, she added in mental parenthesis, Kiss was here.

“Did you say…”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

Definitely, Jane said to herself, I want to be out of here. Immediately.

WHOOSH!

“Good on yer, mate,” said the Dragon King of the SouthEast, emerging from behind a pile of coiled-up rope.

“Look…”

“Like a rat,” the Dragon King continued, “up a drain. No worries. Like they say out Paramatta way: you can take the bloke out of the bottle, but you can’t take the bottle out of the bloke.”

This remark was so puzzling that Asaf dismissed his daydream of making the King swallow his own tail, and he sat down on a barrel. “Where the hell am I?” he asked.

“On the high seas, me old mate,” the King replied. “On your way to seek fame, fortune, and the sheila with the big—”

“Please be more specific.”

The King smiled; that is to say, the corners of his jaws lifted, and his bright, small blue eyes sparkled even more than usual. “We’re on a ship,” he said.

“I had in fact come to that conclusion already. What bloody ship, and why?”

The King chuckled. “Because,” he replied, “you’d get pretty flamin’ wet trying to cross the old surf without one. Eh?”

Asaf sighed. It wasn’t, he said to himself, fair; not on him, and not on everybody else. Why should the rest of the world be deprived of their ration of idiots just so that he could have an embarrassing profusion?

“Where,” he asked, “are we going?”

“Pommieland,” the King said. “The old country. Gee, you’ll love it there, mate. It’s really beaut, trust me.”

“England?”

“That’s the ticket.”

Asaf frowned. “But that’s crazy.”

“That’s where she lives, chum. The jam tart with the…”

“Fine.” Asaf drew in a deep breath and counted up to ten. “And this ship…”

“Hitched a lift with an old cobber of mine, actually,” said the King. “A really bonzer old bastard, do anything for you. Knows these seas like the back of his hand.”

Something horrible seemed to slide down the back of Asaf’s neck, only on the inside. “Please,” he said, raising a hand feebly, “reassure me. Tell me we haven’t hitched a lift with Sinbad the Sailor.”

“You know Simbo?”

“Heard of him,” Asaf muttered. “But—”

“Simbo and me,” the King went on, “we go way back. Me and old Simbo…”

Asaf lay back on the deck and covered his face with the edge of a redundant sail. “I think I’d like to go to sleep now,” he said. “And if I don’t wake up, never mind.”

“But—”

“Look!” Asaf sat bolt upright, and stabbed the King in the left pectoral with his forefinger. The scales, he noticed in passing, were harder than his fingernail. “This time last week,” he said, “I was content. Not happy, but content. I had a sleazy little hovel with a hole in the roof, my own poxy little business that wasn’t going anywhere, fish three times a day, some grubby old clothes, several people I hadn’t borrowed money off yet. I was content. And then you turn up, with your bloody three wishes—”

“Steady on, mate…”

“I will not steady on!” Asaf shouted. “Take me home again, now. And that’s a wish.”

The King sighed, filling the hold with damp green steam. “I know what it is,” he said, “you’re hungry. A bit of good honest tucker inside you and you’ll be as right as—”

“NOW!”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“No can do,” replied the King awkwardly. “It’s a bit late for all that now, mate. You should have thought about it before you came.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Asaf growled. “You got me here, you get me out. And while we’re on the subject, what the fuck was all that stuff with that damn bottle?”

“How about,” said the King — he was disappearing, fading into the pale sunlight that streaked down into the hold through an unfastened hatch — “a nice egg and tomato sarny? Or I can do you pilchards.”

“But…”

The King had gone, leaving behind him a few airborne sparkles and a memory of the word “sarny”. Overhead, the unsecured hatch slammed shut, and Asaf heard the sound of bolts shooting home. He sat for a moment, speechless with rage and confusion. Then he shrugged, folded the corner of sail into a pillow and lay down.

“I hate pilchards!” he shouted, and closed his eyes.

And here’s the latest, warbled the television, on the nuclear tests story. And we’re taking you live to our man on Pineapple Atoll. Danny, can you hear me?

Philly Nine grinned, propped his feet on the footstool and used the handset to turn up the volume.

Loud and clear, Bob, chirruped the reporter, who had replaced the studio set on the screen. Behind him there was a view of blue skies and coconut palms. And the latest seems to be that we now have confirmation of the existence of the giant ants. The giant ants have, in fact, been sighted. By me. I saw them.

The reporter seized up and stood, gazing into the camera lens. After a gentle prompt from the studio, he continued.

So far, he said, we’ve sighted sixteen of the giant ants. They’re big, like twenty fret tall at the shoulder, and they’re making a real mess of the landscape, I can tell you. Also, attempts to deal with them by way of aerial dusting with ant powder and dive-bomb attacks with kettles of boiling water have proved basically futile. A spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund who chained himself to the leg of one ant in protest against these culling attempts has been eaten, but otherwise there are no reports of casualties.

It was the studio’s turn to say something, but nothing was said. The reporter, by now smiling disconcertingly, continued.

More importantly, the diplomatic exchanges over how these ants came to mutate so drastically is really beginning to hot up. I think all the superpowers are now in agreement that the mutation was caused by clandestine nuclear weapons tests, although I should add that there haven’t been any seismic readings to confirm this theory. Where everyone seems to disagree is over who actually did the test. In fact, everybody is accusing everybody else, and the situation really is beginning to get a bit fraught. In fact, we could be looking at the end of the multilateral disarmament initiative here, so for anybody out there with a redundant coal-cellar, the message is, start taking bookings now, because…

As the screen hurriedly reverted to the studio set, Philly Nine lay back in his chair, closed his eyes and smiled.

I did that, he told himself smugly, with my little hatchet.

WHOOOOOOSH!

The carpet streaked across the sky like a flat, embroidered meteor, skimming off satellite dishes and the older pattern of weather-vane as it went by sheer force of air displacement. The wonderful aerial view available over its side was wasted on Jane, who was lying flat on her face clinging on to two clenched handfuls of carpet. Justin had blacked out.

“Where to, lady?”

Jane looked up, received an eyeful of fast-moving air and ducked down again. However, she saw enough in the fraction of a second’s viewing time she had before the air-blast sandpapered her eyeballs to confirm to herself that there was nobody else on the damn rug but herself and the wimp. The voice was, therefore, entirely her imagination.

“No, I’m not. I’m your automatic pilot for what I hope will prove to be a relaxing and pleasurable flight to the destination of your choice.”

“Bugger off.”

“Pardon me?”

“I said bugger off,” Jane barked over the howling of the turbulence. “I know you’re just a hallucination inside my head, and I’m not standing for it. Go on, hop it, before I set my subconscious on to you.”

There was a pause. If it’s possible for a pause to sound hurt, it did.

“You’re the boss,” said the voice (and for some reason, it didn’t have to shout; it was as clear as a bell over the background noise). “However, I feel I should point out that I’m not in any way a figment of your imagination. If it helps you to relate better, you can call me George.”

Jane set her jaw firmly. She refused absolutely to be drawn into conversation with her own unbalanced mind sitting on a flying rug doing close on Mach One at just above rooftop level over Croydon. Especially a part of her own unbalanced mind called George. Never lower your standards for anyone, as her mother used to say.

“To explain,” George continued. “The rectangular object you took to be a book is in fact a state-of-the-art carpet navigation system, compatible with all leading designs of magic floor coverings. Once installed on the carpet of your choice, the system automatically activates the carpet’s propulsion and guidance systems, and receives directional input direct from your brainwave patterns by telepathic interfacing, made possible by our revolutionary fifth-generation textile chip technology. You said get me out of here fast, so…”

“I did?”

“You thought it,” George corrected itself. “And that’s good enough for me. Your wish is my—”

“NO!” Jane howled. “Not another one!”

“Pardon me?”

“Look.” In her wrath, Jane knelt upright, oblivious to the enormous volume of nothing directly below. “I have had it up to here with bloody genies, all right? My wish is not your bloody command. To hear is not to obey, O mistress. Got that?”

“We copy.”

“Good. Now get me down off this bloody contraption, fast as you like.”

George said nothing. The carpet continued flying straight and level, only appreciably faster. Had Jane been in the mood, she could have glanced down and seen an Alp, real close.

“Are you deaf or something?”

“On the contrary,” replied George affably. “All our products have new enhanced sensor capability uprated to provide for instantaneous spoken inputting. This feature alone—”

“Then do as you’re told and put me down!”

“Sorry.”

For a count of maybe three Jane was, literally, speechless; partly because she was so angry she couldn’t speak, partly because something small and airborne flew into her open mouth, and the momentum of the collision nearly knocked her over the side. She struggled to her knees again and thumped the carpet with her fist.

“What d’you mean, sorry? I told you—”

“You told me,” George interrupted, “that your wish was not my command, and that when I heard I shouldn’t obey. You got it?”

“But look, I didn’t mean…”

“Sorry. But you’re the sentient being, I’m only a computerised guidance system. Policy formulation’s down to you.” George paused, as if for effect. “You guys are supposed to be good at that.”

“But…”

“Further clarification,” George continued, as they missed one snow-capped peak by a few thousandths of an inch, “would, however, be appreciated. For example, when you say something, do you want me to ignore it completely or do the exact opposite?”

Jane blinked twice. “Do the opposite,” she said quickly. “Don’t put me down. Fly faster.”

“Thanks.”

The carpet flew on: same course, same momentum, Jane screamed and clouted it with the heel of her shoe.

“Just checking,” said George. “You told me to do the exact opposite, I’m programmed to disobey all orders, therefore I ignore you. That right?”

“No. Yes. Both.”

“Thank you.”

The carpet flew on.

Kiss sat bolt upright. He felt as if a truck had just ploughed into the back of his neck.

Someone was calling him — someone frightened, in danger, in need of protection. No prizes for guessing who.

Bloody woman!

Moon of his delight, entrancing vision of sublime loveliness who gave a purpose to his existence, yes; but bloody woman nevertheless. What, he asked himself bitterly as he searched for his left shoe, has she gone and done now? Locked herself out of her car? Forgotten which level of the multi-storey she’d parked on? Something, he felt sure, like that.

Without dawdling, but without unduly frantic haste either, he dressed and put on his curly-toed shoes. As if, he muttered, he didn’t have enough to do. Clean handkerchief. Where in buggery are the clean handkerchiefs?

Let there be clean handkerchiefs. Problem solved.

Not, he added, that we’ll be able to do that for much longer. Oh no. And who’ll come whizzing along across the tops of the clouds then whenever she’s at the station and wondering whether she’s left the gas on?

Pausing only to collect the milk off the doorstep, he somersaulted up into the sky, looped the loop and traipsed away through the empyrean.

Jane looked up.

On a scale of one to ten of Sensible Things To Do, that was maybe a Two; above putting your hand in a moving circular saw or enrolling in law school, but definitely below, say, investing in gilt-edged stock or leaving a burning oil refinery. She regretted it almost immediately.

Before the regret set in, however, making her stomach turn over like a well-tossed pancake and tightening her intestines into a small knot, she saw a broad, gently undulating expanse of sand. It might have been a beach somewhere, except that beaches tend to have blue edges, and this lot didn’t. In fact, it didn’t seem to have any edges whatsoever.

The desert.

Which desert, Jane neither knew nor cared. All that registered with her as relevant information was that she was probably a very long way from Haywards Heath.

“Help,” she said.

Said rather than screamed; she was, at heart, a reasonably practical person, and there was nobody who could help her as far as the eye could see. That was assuming that Justin, who was beginning to come round, wasn’t likely to be much use. On the basis of her experience of him so far, that seemed a pretty safe assumption.

Now then, she reassured herself, don’t let’s go all to pieces. Kiss’ll be along in a moment, he’ll switch this blasted thing off and we can all go home. My wish is his command, after all. And, she remembered, it was his bloody gadget that got her into this mess in the first place.

Having nothing better to do, she reflected for a while on that. Of all the stupid, careless things to do, she mused, leaving something like that lying about. She looked at the device, which was sitting smugly on the top edge of the carpet. Perfectly reasonable to assume that it was a book. It looked exactly like a book: pages, spine, covers, the works. What sort of an idiot leaves something like that lying around, just begging innocent passers-by to pick it up and leave it on carpets?

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 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.

“Well?”

“That,” Jane said, “will be just fine.”