The whirlwind enlarged a little. Tony watched in alarm as a human figure began to show pinkly through the mist which was Nasim as a whirlwind. He grew apprehensive. He called anxiously: "Clothes, Nasim!"
His cry came almost too late, but not quite. The very last of the mist which was her whirlwind form materialized about her as a Mother Hubbard wrapper of absolute shapelessness. Then she beamed at him breathlessly.
"I always forget, don"t I?"
Even in human form, Nasim was chubby. Her eyes were not the elongated animal eyes of male djinns, though, and apparently she had remembered with some care not to have her ears pointed. But Nasim, naturally, could not imagine an expression which was not intellectuallykaput.She came coyly and sat down on the bed close to Tony. The bed yielded surprisingly under her weight, which gave Tony something to think about.
"I"m going to whisper," she said archly. She bent close- Ghail, whispering in his ear on camel-back last night, had provided a very pleasant sensation; but somehow Nasim was different.
"The king wants you for a friend because of the way your nation destroys cities in war,"she whispered.
"In just a bit of a second, in flames hotter than the hottest fire."She drew back and beamed at him. "Now, isn"t that nice of me?" she demanded aloud. "Listen again!"
She bent over. Tony listened, trying to think what meaning atomic bombs could possibly have to a king of thedjinn.
"When Es-Souk is executed, it will be like that,"the coy voice whispered. "They"ll explode poor Es-Souk, and he will be just a terrible explosion hotter than the hottest flame. And I told the king that you told the slave girl your country keepsdjinnon reservations. So the king knows that your country must explodedjinnsto destroy your enemies" cities, and he"s afraid you"ll tell the people of Barkut how to do it too."
Tony"s flesh crawled. It was not altogether the discovery that when adjinnwas executed he exploded.
Any creature which could change its size from that of a grain of sand to a whirlwind . . . such a creature could not be ordinary matter. Not flesh and blood with s.e.x-hormones and mineral salts to taste. It would have to be something different. A mixture of loosely knit neutrons and electrons and positrons and so on-Tony"s knowledge of nuclear physics came from the Sunday supplements-and even that was startling enough, but not horrifying. The thing that made Tony"s flesh crawl was that everydjinnanddjinnee must be in effect an atomic bomb. Which could be set off. They"d avoid it if possible, of course. Thedjinn king was scared to death of the bare idea. But no human could feel comfortable sitting on a large bed with an atomic bomb next to him. Especially, perhaps, when the bomb was wearing nothing but a Mother Hubbard wrapper and felt romantic.
Tony got up hastily. Nasim looked reproachfully at him.
"That"s not nice!" she pouted. "I tell you nice things and you jump up! Now you sit right back down here and whisper something nice to me!"
Tony shivered. He racked his brains for a suitable thing to say which would be romantic enough and yet not commit him. He bent over.
"You know otherdjinnsare listening." he said, dry-throated. "So, of course . . ."Then he swallowed and went on: "I"m going to ask the king for Es-Souk"s life. I don"t want him to die on my account. I"-he gulped audibly-"I can fight my own battles."Against atomic bombs, too! his conscience added acidly.
Nasim looked at him in disappointment. "I suppose that"s n.o.ble of you," she said plaintively, "but it isn"t very romantic! You aren"t nice to me! You get angry when I forget about wearing clothes, and-"
"I said only last night that you were a pearl among camels, didn"t I?" demanded Tony hara.s.sedly. "After all, you don"t want to rouse the beast in me, do you?"
She giggled, and he added desperately: "-In public?"
"Well . . ." she said forgivingly, "I hadn"t thought of that. I understand now. I"ll think of something. And I guess I"ll go now."
She got up and trailed toward the door, a dumpy, rotund little figure in a wrapper that dragged lopsidedly on the floor behind her. At the door she stopped and giggled again.
"You saying something about a beast just reminded me," she said brightly. "That slave girl you brought with you sent a message. She said that if you can spare time from your beastly amus.e.m.e.nts, the Queen of Barkut wants to talk to you."
Tony tensed all over.
"How the h.e.l.l do I ring for somebody to guide me around this place?" he demanded feverishly. "She and Ghail are waiting!"
"Anybody"ll show you," said Nasim. "Just ask your servants."
"I haven"t any servants," said Tony agitatedly. "Only those guards outside."
"Oh, yes, you"ve got servants," Nasim insisted. "The king told them not to intrude on you but to be on hand if you wanted them. I"m sure he appointed a friend of mine to be your valet. Abdul! Abdul! Where are you?"
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw an infinitesimal stirring up near the ceiling. He spun to face it. A c.o.c.kroach-quite a large c.o.c.kroach-appeared on top of the drapes by a window. It waggled its feelers at them.
"h.e.l.lo, Abdul!" said Nasim. "The great prince who is the king"s guest wants to see the Queen of Barkut in her dungeon. Will you take him there?"
A sudden, geyserlike stream of water spouted out from where the c.o.c.kroach stood. Hard and powerful, like a three-inch jet from a fire hose. It arched across the room, hit the farther side and splashed loudly, ran down the wall to the floor, and there suddenly jetted upward again in a waterspout which, in turn, solidified into a swaggering short stoutdjinnwith a purple turban.
He bowed to the ground before Tony.
"This way, lord," he said profoundly, "to the Queen of Barkut."
Gla.s.sy-eyed, Tony followed him out of the door.
Chapter 11.
He followed thedjinnAbdul out the door. Then he stared. There had been a vast anteroom before his suite. He had gone through the motions of inspecting his guard of honor in it. Now there was an enormous swimming pool in its place, with beyond it a luxuriant jungle of hot-house trees. Tony examined it with startled attention.
"It seems to me that this was a little bit different, last night," he observed.
"Aye, lord," said thedjinnsolemnly.
He led the way along the swimming pool"s rim. Tony followed. He was worried about the message from Ghail, of course. The night he had just spent had been even aggressively innocent, but somehow he felt that Ghail was not likely to believe it. Her request for him to come to the Queen was not phrased in a way to indicate great confidence in him. But there was not much that he could do about it.
"Interior decoration among thedjinn,"said Tony, frowning, "is evidently not static art. Things change over-night, eh?"
"Aye, lord. And oftener," said Abdul solemnly. "Wedjinnhave much trouble with boredom. We are the most powerful of created things. There is nothing that we can desire that we cannot have. So we suffer from tedium. Someone grew bored with the anteroom and changed the design."
Tony raised his eyebrows. "I have a gla.s.s phial in my pocket," he observed. "Can you change the design of that?"
"It is a human object, lord," said Abdul with an air of contempt.
Tony grinned. During the night-during his sleep-his conscience had reached some highly moral conclusions which he was inclined to accept. One was thatdjinnwere different in kind from humans, but they were not for that reason akin to the angels. Tony went right along with this decision, recalling the floor show of the night before. More, they were but matter, said his conscience firmly-unstable matter, perhaps, with probably some Uranium 235 somewhere in their const.i.tutions, and in the United States the Atomic Energy Commission would take action against them on the ground of national security. But they were not spirits.
They were material. Grossly material. They knew only what they saw, felt, smelled, and heard. They were limited to the senses humans had. Tony had referred to the gla.s.s phials in his pocket. Abdul plainly knew nothing about them and could not mystically determine their contents, or he would have been scared to death. They containedlasf.So it was not impossible to keep a secret from adjinn.It was not impossible to fool them. It might not be impossible to bluff them.
These were encouraging thoughts.Djinnswere creatures, and therefore had limitations. They changed ma.s.sive architectural features of thedjinnking"s palace overnight, but they could not-it was a reasonable inference-change the form of a human artifact. Therefore it was probable that the things they could change were of the same kind of matter as themselves Tony"s guide opened a door. It should have given upon a pa.s.sageway of snowy white. Its walls should have been of ivory, perhaps mastodon tusks, most intricately carved in not very original designs. Instead, beyond the door Tony found a corridor which was an unusually lavish aquarium. It had walls of crystal with unlikely tropical fish swimming behind them. The fish wore golden collars and were equipped with pearl-studded underwater castles to suffer ennui in.
Which was a clue. It occurred to Tony that he had not yet seen one trace of a civilization which could be termeddjinnian,as opposed to human. Everything he had seen was merely an elaboration, a magnification, an over-lavish complication, of the designs and possessions of men. Humans wore clothes, so thedjinn wore garments made after human patterns only more lavish and improbable. Humans had palaces, so the djinnking had a palace which out-palaced anything mere humans could contrive. But the riches of thedjinn were unstable, their lavishness had no meaning, and they had no originality at all. In his home world, Tony reflected,djinnswould only really fit in Hollywood.
He cheered up enormously. In his pocket he had three phials oflasf.If his opinion was correct, the palace was constructed of the same material as the dragon in the narrow pa.s.s, the two colossi before that, and the row of giants on the final lap to the palace gateway. If he uncorked one of the phials, it was probable that the walls about him would begin to sneeze and flee away in the form of whirlwinds-one whirlwind for each unit of the edifice. Thedjinnpalace had an exact a.n.a.logy in the living structures of the army ants of Central America, which cling together to form a shelter and a palace-complete with roof, walls, floors, and pa.s.sageways-for the army-ant queen whenever she feels in the mood to lay some eggs. But thedjinnwere not s.e.xless like the army ants. Nasim"s romantic impulses seemed proof enough of that.
And besides-well-thedjinneeswho had danced for him last night had displayed an enthusiasm which simply wasn"t all synthetic. They had something more than a theoretic knowledge of what it was all about.
What they had lacked was art.
It was with an increasing feeling of competence, then, that Tony strode off to answer Ghail"s summons.
He began to antic.i.p.ate his audience with the king of thedjinnwith less aversion. And somehow, the atomic-bomb aspect of thedjinntended to fade away. Ghail had never mentioned anything of the kind.
Humans, apparently, did not know thatdjinnwere fissionable. So it was unlikely that they could be set off by accident. But it was still hard to imagine getting romantic with an atomic bomb, even if it wasn"t fused.
More doorways. They pa.s.sed through parts of the palace with which Tony was naturally unfamiliar, and whose features as of today he could not compare with yesterday"s. Then they reached a quite small, quite inconspicuous doorway, and thedjinnAbdul stopped before it and bowed low again.
"The residence of the Queen of Barkut, lord," he said blandly.
Tony stepped out-of-doors, onto a sort of dry meadow with patches of parched gra.s.s here and there.
The sun shone brightly. He heard a bird singing rather monotonously, and he a.s.sured himself that nodjinn was making that noise! A hundred-odd yards away there was a clump of trees and among the trees a small group of mud-walled houses which were plainly human buildings, not too expertly made, with completely human implements about them.
Tony advanced. Someone waved to him, and he felt his heart pound ridiculously faster. But as he drew nearer yet, he saw that it wasn"t Ghail. It was a stout, motherly woman with her gown tucked up to reveal st.u.r.dy, sun-browned calves. She seemed to have been working in a garden. He saw a neatly hoed patch of melons, and a field of onions and other vegetables. The woman beamed at Tony and said: "The Queen is in there. You are the Lord Toni?"
Tony nodded. Abdul looked oddly uncomfortable.
"When you go back to Barkut," said the woman, "do try to get them to send us some sweets! We haven"t had any sweets for months!" Then she said tolerantly to Abdul: "Not that you don"t try, of course."
Abdul wriggled unhappily. "I will wait here, lord," he said sadly. "It is not fitting for adjinn,of the most powerful of created beings, to be made mock of by a mere human. Perhaps I will go back and wait by the door."
Ghail came out of the largest building-it would have no more than two or three rooms, and was of a single story-and regarded Tony with a deliberately icy air. She said: "Greetings, lord."
Just then the motherly woman said comfortingly to the short stoutdjinn: "Oh, don"t go away, Abdul! I"ll watch your magic tricks for a while-if they"re good ones."
Abdul wavered. Tony grinned at Ghail. He said critically: "Of the two of us, you look most like you had a hang-over. Have you been crying?"
"With my Queen," said Ghail with dignity, "over the sadness of her captivity."
Then a pleasant slender sun-browned woman came out beside Ghail and nodded in a friendly fashion to Tony. He gaped at her. She had the comfortable air of an unmarried woman who is quite content to be unmarried. Which is not in the least like a queen. The palace of thedjinnking loomed up on all sides, but here in the center things were different. These houses did not look like a dungeon, to be sure. Here was a meadow half a mile this way by half a mile that, with these buildings and gardens in the center so that it looked like a small farm. The contrast between these structures and the magnificence of the palace was odd enough. The atmosphere of reasonably complete contentment was stranger still. The Queen looked as if she were having a perfectly comfortable time here, and was as well-satisfied as anybody ought to be.
"This," said Ghail stiltedly, "is the Lord Toni."
Chapter 12.
The Queen smiled. There was flour on her hands, as if she had been cooking something.
"Have you breakfasted, Lord Toni?" she asked.
"Well-no," admitted Tony.
"Then come in," said the Queen, "and we will talk while you do."
They entered a small room, an almost bare room, a peasant"s general-purpose room which had the shining neatness of a house with no man in it to mess it up. But this had not the fussy preciosity of too many possessions. There was a small fire burning on a raised hearth, giving off a distinctly acrid smell which yet was not unpleasant.
"You will have coffee," said the Queen, "and whatever else we can find. We are a little straitened for food today, because so much went for your meal last night."
Tony had been dazed, but this was a jolt which showed in his expression. The Queen laughed.
"Thedjinnshave their own foods," she explained. "But no human being can eat of their dainties. When I was first made prisoner the king used to raid caravans to get food for me, but it was very tedious! So now I have my own garden, and someone-I think it was Abdul-stole chickens for me. When you came as a guest they asked me for food for you, and I gave it. Of course. You probably did not notice, but no matter what you pointed to in all the dishes they paraded before you, you actually got-" she chuckled-"no more than flesh of chicken, and eggs, and cheese and dates and salad! That was all I had for you."
Tony said: "Majesty, I think I ought to make some appropriate speech. But I don"t know what to say!"
She busied herself at the fireplace, and Ghail went quickly to help. The two of them gave Tony his coffee, and a melon, and eggs. It went very well.
"You are going to defeat thedjinns,Ghail tells me," the Queen said practically. "She a.s.sures me you will destroy them to the last smalldjinnling.I hope not."
Tony goggled at her. "But-"
"Oh, I know!" said the Queen. "I am their prisoner, and so on. But in their way they"re rather cute." Tony stared.
"I"ve lived among them four years," the Queen said briskly. "I"ve had them around all the time. They"re a little bit like men, and a good deal more like children, and quite a lot like kittens. I suppose you"d say that I"ve made pets of them. Of course they won"t let me go home, but it isn"t bad."
Tony chewed and swallowed, and then said carefully: "I"m afraid I don"t quite understand."
The Queen shrugged. "They"re terribly vain, like men. If possible, more so. You can do anything with a djinnif you flatter him. They"re terrible show-offs, like children. My maid outside can wind Abdul around her little finger any time. He loves to show off his transformations, and she watches him. The otherdjinns won"t. And they"re like kittens because they"re so completely selfish. But that"s very much like men and children, too."
Tony said in astonishment: "But they"re a menace to Barkut-"
"Of course!" the Queen conceded impatiently. "They"re dangerous to Barkut in the same way that a troop of-say-wild apes would be dangerous to a village near where they lived. They steal, and they destroy, and they probably kill people now and then. But it"s because they can"t understand people and people can"t understand them."
"There"s a war-" began Tony.
"Oh, the war!" The Queen dismissed it scornfully. "That"s what all wars are about! Misunderstandings!
Marriages are too, probably. Men are so absurd! That"s why I have to stay a prisoner."
Ghail said warningly: "Majesty!"
The Queen regarded Ghail with impatience.
"My dear, you cannot deny that I am patriotic! I have no children, so I can be patriotic! But for the same reason I haven"t any particular prejudice against thedjinns.Do you remember how I used to adore horses? I"ve come to like thedjinnsas well, that"s all. I admit that it seems terribly silly to me that I have to stay here because thedjinnking"s vanity is involved in holding me prisoner! If I were to escape and go back to Barkut, he"d feel that he had to attack it furiously to recapture me. So I can"t go home until he"s conquered. So I simply want the Lord Toni to realize that as far as I am concerned-"
Ghail said again: "Majesty!"