“There,” she said, “don’t they look nice?”

Kiss nodded dumbly. He had been an observer of human behaviour long enough to know perfectly well what came next; that excruciatingly embarrassing hour or so that you always get when two people realise that they’re in love, but both of them would rather be buried alive in a pit full of quicklime than raise the topic in conversation. There would also be much staring at shoelaces, averting of eyes, feelings of nausea and meaningless small talk marinaded in sublimated soppiness.

“It was really kind of you to get them for me,” Jane was saying. “It’s something I’ve always wanted, a vase full of feathers. I think I’ll put it here, where I can look at it when I’m sitting on the sofa.”

Jesus wept, Kiss thought, if only you could hear yourself! “I’m glad you like them,” he heard himself reply. “It was no bother, really.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

First, Kiss’s subconscious was saying, we’ll take the little bastard’s rifle and wrap it round his neck and then shove it right up his…

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

There are rules, very strict rules, about when a genie may or may not read the mind of a mortal to whom he is indentured. Kiss broke them all. It was some small comfort to him to find that Jane’s innermost thoughts were along more or less the same lines as his. What on earth is going on? he noticed with approval. It can’t really be, surely, he was pleased to see. What, him? he read, with somewhat mixed feelings. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it was, he couldn’t help feeling, just a trifle too emphatic. Without realising he was doing it, he made a few subliminal alterations to his bone structure and general physique.

Look, screamed his soul, this is ludicrous. Why don’t you just tell her what’s really happened, and find some way of sorting it out?

His consciousness turned to his soul and told it to get lost.

Yes, but—

Don’t you understand plain Arabic? Bugger off. Can’t you see the lady and I don’t want to be interrupted?

“More tea?”

“Yes, please.” You idiot, can’t you see what’s happening? Are you just going to stand there and let them…? Hey, there’s no need to get violent, I was just going anyway…

“Would you like a biscuit?”

“No, no, I’m fine, thanks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure, thanks all the same.”

“It’d be no trouble at all.”

“No, really, I’m fine.”

As he spoke, Kiss marvelled at the moral fibre of the human race. A lesser species, faced with all this mucking about as an integral part of the procreative process, would have died out thousands of years ago. Salmon baffling their way up waterfalls were quitters in comparison.

“Was it cold out?”

“Sorry?”

“I said, was it cold out? The weather.”

“No, it was fine. A bit nippy actually up the Himalayas themselves, but otherwise very, um, clement. For the time of year.”

“They must be very interesting,” Jane croaked. “The Himalayas, I mean.”

“Yes, very.”

“And you had no trouble finding the phoenix?” Jane went on. It was painfully obvious that she was suffering too, but there was nothing at all he could do about it. He was having to call upon hidden resources of superhuman power just to stop himself from standing there with his mouth open like the rear doors of a cross-Channel ferry.

“No, it was easy enough. I just looked for some rocks with lots of white splashes and bits eaten out of them.”

“Ah. Right.”

Inside his heart, the bullet began to decompose. Cupid’s bullets do that; the outer jacket, which is pressure-formed out of 99 per cent pure embarrassment, is soluble in sentiment and dissolves, leaving the bullet’s core: 185 grains of cold-swaged slush. Any minute now, Kiss knew, he’d be staring at the carpet and muttering that there was something he’d been meaning to say to her for some time.

“Jane.”

“Yes?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for some time.”

“Me too.”

“Sorry. Fire away.”

“No, no, you first.”

Thanks a heap. “It’s like, well—”

“Yes?”

He took a deep breath and said it. While he was saying it, the small part of him that was still functioning normally, albeit on emergency back-up systems and with a chair wedged behind the door in case the build-up of pink slop outside tried to force its way in, was working feverishly on the original very-good-question, Why?

Why should Philly Nine go to all the trouble and expense of hiring the ultimate hit-man, breaking all the rules in the Genies’ Code of Conduct (it was cold comfort, but as soon as the Committee got to hear of this, Philly Nine was going to be spending a very long time in a confined space looking at green, curved, opaque walls) just to get his own back? Genies don’t…

…Feelings that are, well, stronger than just ordinary friendship and, well, I guess that what Pm trying to say is…)

Genies don’t conduct their feuds like that; they hit each other with solid objects, sometimes even mountains and small asteroids, and pelt each other with lightning and divert major rivers down the backs of each others’ necks, but at least they’re open about it. And, once the air had been cleared and the damage to the Earth’s surface has been made good and the mountains put back in their proper place, they forget all about it and carry on, as if nothing had happened. This sort of thing—

(…and I was sort of hoping that if you somehow might find you feel sort of the same way about me then we might sort of…)

And then the penny dropped. The shock was so great that for a few moments Kiss was suddenly taken stone-cold sober, and he stopped in mid-sentence and stared.

“The bastard!” he said. “The complete and utter bastard!”

Jane looked up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry.” The tide of slush, temporarily checked, started to flow again. “I was miles away. As I was saying…”

Let’s do everyone a favour and fade out on Kiss for the moment

(…Make me the happiest man, well, genie, in the whole wide world…)

And just consider the situation, calmly and without getting carried away. Ready? Good.

What do you get if you cross a genie with a human being? Answer, you don’t, because you can’t. It’s a simple matter of chemistry; or physics; or, when you come right down to it, mythology.

Genies do not, of course, exist. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. There are, as should be now be only too obvious, rather more of them than the universe can comfortably accommodate. Any cosmos that contains fragile, breakable things, such as planets, is better off with a ratio of as near to zero genies per cubic kilometre as possible.

Genies exist at a tangent to reality. They intrude into the continuum we inhabit, in much the same way as an iceberg intrudes into a major shipping lane. Only a tiny proportion of the huge complex of forces that go to make up a genie is ever present on this side of the thin blue line at any given time. Of the genie known as Kiss, for example, 87 per cent is sprawled across the Past and the Future like a cat sitting on the Sunday paper.

Let your imagination do its worst, and then you will agree that any sort of lasting relationship between a genie and a human being is out of the question. And if that wasn’t bad enough, please also bear in mind that regardless of the physical shape it chooses to adopt, a genie always weighs a minimum of 72 tons and has a normal skin temperature of 700 degrees Celsius. It takes as much effort for a genie just to shake hands with a human without crushing him to pulp or shrivelling him up into ash as it would have to expend on juggling with the Pyrenees while standing on one leg on the head of a pin. And relationships are hard enough as it is without any added complications.

There is, however, an escape clause. It’s totally irreversible and unbearably romantic, and its consequences to the genie are so horrendous that it has never been used; but it does exist.