“Never said you did, Philly. Always the best of pals, you and me.”

“Quite.”

“What have you got in the bag, Philly?”

Philly Nine smiled; and white lightning snapped out of his eyes, slamming into Kiss with traumatic force and sending him and his carpet spiralling away into emptiness. Philly grinned and took out the bag. A tiny pinch of his fingernails and the knot loosened easily.

He turned the bag over, let go of the neck and shook it… and found himself inside a bubble, bobbing jauntily with the starbreeze. Above him, Kiss looped his Wilton, waved, and ducked behind the Moon.

“Bastard!” Philly yelled. On the floor of the bubble, seeds had landed. He rolled his left fist into a ball and smashed it into the wall of the bubble

…which stretched.

Philly Nine noticed with some misgivings the rapidly thickening carpet of flowers round his ankles. They had already stripped the shoes off his feet (and Philly’s shoes were rather special, even by genie standards; hand-stitched gryphonhide uppers, phoenixdown insocks and monomolecular polysteel soles; the gussets arc-welded in the hottest part of a supernova; the heel reinforced with the enamel from the teeth of a fully-grown snowdragon, the third hardest material in Creation. Imelda Marcos in her wildest dreams never imagined shoes like these…)

“Hey,” he yelled, “let me out of here!”

“You’ll have to grant me three wishes first.”

Philly began to get impatient. “Kiss,” he shouted. “If you don’t quit horsing around and let met out of this contraption, I’ll kick your arse from here to Jupiter.”

“Three wishes, Philly. You know the score.”

Petals like steel traps were slowly ripping his socks to shreds. Hand-woven from the fibres of firebird feathers (the second hardest material in the Universe) they had been custom-built to withstand the phenomenally corrosive properties of genies’ sweaty feet. “No dice, scumbag,” Philly roared. “Get me out of here and I might just let you live. Otherwise—”

The last scrap of sock was digested, and Philly Nine suddenly became acutely aware that the hardest material in the Universe is the petal of a psychotic flower. “All right,” he screamed. “One wish. But I’m warning you, you’re going to regret—”

The bubble popped; and Philly Nine was falling, helplessly entwined in roots and leaves, towards the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The wish is,” came Kiss’s voice from far away, “that in future…”

Philly hit the atmosphere like a fly hitting a windscreen. For a fraction of a second the pain of impact paralysed him; and then he was through. Scrabbling frantically he managed to pull himself up on a handy thermal, and floated agonisingly in the upper air.

He glanced down and breathed a long, slow sigh. All the wildflowers had burnt up on re-entry — as had his shorts, his underpants and his impossibly expensive designer Hawaii shirt.

“…In future,” sighed the winds around his head, “if you’re going to be evil, make a mess of it. Have a nice day.”

Thirty-six hours later, the hole Philly had made in the ionosphere was still there. It was closing, but there was still a gap large enough for, say, a few wildflower seeds to drift through.

These days, nobody can seriously doubt that plants have the power to communicate; and the more self-aware the plant, the greater the power.

Ready? asked the Primrose.

Ready, replied the Forget-Me-Not. Let’s go.

What about him?

Who?

Him.

Oh, you mean the—

Yes.

You ask him.

GRAAAOOAARR!!!

I think it’s safe to assume he’s ready too. OK, chaps, here goes.

They dropped in.

Jane looked up.

“Where,” she asked, “have you been?”

“Saving the world,” Kiss replied, materialising just in time to take the weight of the picture Jane was trying to hang straight. “Bit more left, I think.”

Jane stood back, nodded and made the adjustment. “What from?”

“Annihilation by overgrown carnivorous plants, if you must know. Has it occurred to you that this one would look much better over there by the alcove?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Over there,” Kiss repeated, pointing. “And then you could have the one of the three fluffy kittens playing with the ball of wool over there, where nobody would be able to see it, and that’d be verging on the ideal—”

“No,” Jane replied, frowning, “before that.”

“Overgrown carnivorous plants?”

“Mphm. You are just kidding, aren’t you? Only I never seem to know…”

Kiss looked offended. “I am not kidding,” he replied grumpily. “I was just looking out of the window when I saw a disturbing fluctuation in the infra-red, which turned out on closer examination to be an old mate of mine heading into orbit with a small cloth bag stuffed up his shirt…”

“You must have remarkably good eyesight.”

“I have, yes. Anyway, when I caught up with him it turned out the bag was full of nightmare carnivorous plant seeds, and he was just working out where to sow them. Fortunately, the silly sod hadn’t realised that if you try and drop something through the Earth’s atmosphere, it burns up, so as it turns out I needn’t have bothered. All right?”

Jane stared. “Are you serious?” she demanded.

“No,” Kiss said, pointedly not looking at the picture of the three kittens. “Most of the time I’m aggravatingly frivolous. If you mean am I telling the truth, the answer is yes.”

“A friend of yours was trying to destroy the planet?”

“Well, sort of.” Kiss yawned, and stretched. “Actually, he’s just this bloke I’ve known for, oh, donkey’s years; and he wasn’t planning on destroying the Earth, just all non-vegetable life forms. Or at least I assume that was what he had in mind. My split-second spectroscopic analysis of the plant seeds leads me to believe that that would have been the inevitable result. Bloody great primroses,” he added with a grin. “With teeth.”

“Hadn’t you better tell me what’s going on?”

Kiss shook his head. “Tricky,” he said. “You remember what I told you about being limited to the possible? However; to start with the primary question, Is there a God? we really have to address the…”

Jane asked him to be more specific.

“Guesswork, largely,” Kiss replied, materialising an apple and peeling it with his claws. “My guess is that somebody hired my old chum to destroy the human race. Somebody a bit funny in the head, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“This chum of yours—”

“A genie,” Kiss explained. “A Force Twelve, like me. That’s pretty hot stuff, actually, though normally I wouldn’t dream of saying so. We rank equal and above the Nine Dragon Kings, just below the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. We get fuel allowance but no pension.”

“And this particular…”

“He goes by the name,” Kiss said, straight-faced by sheer effort of will, “of Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation the Ninth, or Philly Nine for short. Remarkable chiefly for how little time he’s had to spend in bottles. He’s a shrewd cookie, Philly Nine, always was. Mad as a hatter, too, of course.”

“I see.” Jane sat down on a desperately fragile Tang-dynasty vase, the molecular structure of which Kiss was able to beef up just in the nick of time. “So he’s dangerous.”

“You might say that,” Kiss responded, spitting out apple pips, “if you were prone to ludicrous understatements. If midwinter at the South Pole is a bit nippy and the Third Reich was, on balance, not a terribly good idea, then yes, Philly Nine is dangerous. Apart from that, a more charming fellow you couldn’t hope to meet. Plays the harpsichord.”

Jane blinked twice in rapid succession. “Oh God,” she said.

“Ah yes,” Kiss replied, “I was just coming on to that. If we posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being—”

“Will you shut up!” Jane looked around for something solid and reassuring in which she could put her trust. Unfortunately, everything she could see had the disadvantage, as far as she was concerned, of having been materialised or otherwise supplied by a genie. Eventually she found her left shoe, which she had brought with her from the life she’d been leading before all this started to happen. She hugged it to her.