Djinn Rummy by Tom Holt Read Free Book Online

the range of its senses. That, as far as it is concerned, is how things ought to be. It ups roots and begins to crawl.
    Five hours later, the girl in the balloon watches its dehydrated form wilt into a heap, thrash a last moribund tendril, and die. This, after all, is the Mojave Desert; even the roots of the Hammerhead Pansy can’t dig deep enough here to strike water. Deserts have this aggravating knack of always having the last word.
    Sow a few of those little white seeds somewhere where there’s water, however - in the middle of New York, say, or Moscow or Paris or London, where water either runs in rivers through the middle or swooshes about a few feet under the surface in easy-to-find ceramic arteries - and it would be a very different story. The term ‘flower power’ would take on a whole new nexus of unpleasant meanings.
    The girl smiles. The ultimate Green Bomb was now a reality. (And with friends like her, does the earth really need any enemies?) As the balloon drifts on its lazy course back home, she reflects contentedly on the progress of Operation Urban Renewal . . .
    (. . . Our environment is in deadly peril. The relentless spread of urbanisation threatens to poison and smother every last wild flower and blade of grass on the surface of the planet. Every pollutant, every waste product, every man-made toxin in the world originates in the Cities. The Cities, therefore, have got to go.
    Blasting them off the face of the earth by conventional means, however, would create as many problems as it solves. It has been calculated that a bomb powerful enough to take out, say, Lisbon, would generate enough toxic matter to poison eighty-seven per cent of the lichens and ribbon-form seaweeds in the Iberian peninsula.

    How can we solve this dilemma, brothers and sisters of the Green Dawn? How can we cauterise the cancer of urban civilisation without killing the patient in the process?
    We believe that we have found a way . . .)
    It was regrettable, the girl mused, that the prototypes of the other two flowers should have been destroyed; not just because it would have been useful to be able to observe their progress but because it’s always a tragedy, on general principles, when a living plant perishes. Would it be excessively animist and sentimental, she wondered, if she returned to the spot a little later and held some sort of brief, modest funeral?
    No humans, by request.
    Â 
    The back bar of Saheed’s was heaving. It was Karaoke Night.
    Genies are, when the chips are down, simple creatures, as refined as the effluent from the Torrey Canyon , but with a strong instinctive sense of rhythm. There is nothing they enjoy more, after six or eight gallons of chilled goat’s milk with rennet chasers, than grabbing a microphone in a crowded room and miming to Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel . Since turning himself into a carbon copy of Elvis, correct down to the last detail of the DNA pattern, is child’s play to a genie, the effect can be confusing to an uninformed bystander.
    If this be offence, Kiss was a hardened recidivist, and on ninety-nine Karaoke Nights out of a hundred you could earn good money betting that he’d be up there, informing the Universe at large that ever since his baby left him he’d found a new place to dwell, if he had to jump queues and break bones to do it. Not, however, tonight.

    Instead, Kiss was huddled in a corner with a half-empty plastic jerrycan of Capricorn Old Pasteurised on the surface of which icicles were forming, and a guest.
    Of all the bars, he was thinking, in all the world, why did she have to come into mine?
    â€˜That one over there,’ Jane was saying, ‘looks exactly like Elvis Presley. Or was he a . . .?’
    Kiss shook his head. Although there was no house rule prohibiting mortals, no genie had ever, in the long and illustrious history of the establishment, brought his employer there. The only reason there wasn’t a rule against it