Genie for Hire

2 - Gym Rats

"Mr. Andromeda! Mr. Andromeda!"

Biff opened his eyes and looked around him. He was slumped against an Australian pine, with Sveta hovering beside him. He took a deep breath, which turned into a coughing fit, and then he blew his nose loudly into a linen handkerchief embroidered with his initials. As his strength returned he stood, towering over Sveta, who was at least a foot shorter than he was.

"You will be all right?" Sveta asked, putting a dainty hand on his lower arm.

"I'll be fine. Just a little hiccup."

He resisted her efforts to walk him back to his office, and trudged back around to the front of the center and to his office door by himself, touching his fingertip to the painting of the eye there as he entered. To customers it represented the "private eye," of his title; to him it meant the mystical third eye of dharmic meditative traditions, which he used as part of his investigative techniques. It was a sort of touchstone to him, in the way that religious Jews pressed their fingertips to the mezzuzot they placed at the entries to their homes.

He was still shaky when he entered the office, so he sat in the visitor chair and picked up the ornate oil lamp from his desk, the one Sveta had nearly knocked over.

It had been made of hand-forged brass over a thousand years before, by a metalsmith in Constantinople who had a touch of magic in his fingers. It was about twelve inches long, with an ornate, half-moon shaped handle and a long narrow spout. The brass lid had been engraved with an image of the Hagia Sophia cathedral, which added to its mystical power.

He wrapped his hands around it. The brass was always warm to the touch, and as he rubbed the lamp he felt power and energy move from its reservoir into him.

No genie emerged from the lamp as he rubbed it; he always thought that was a foolish myth. How could such a small container hold the power of a full-blown genie? The lamp was a reservoir for centuries of energy, power, and yes, even magic. It always rejuvenated him to touch it.

He had to be very careful in the exercise of his powers in this time and place. Centuries before, in the courts of the Ottoman emperors, there had been a greater acceptance of magic and a tolerance for the inexplicable. Even then, though, Biff had been forced into careful habits. Any vizier or minor noble could attempt to trap him and force him into granting favors, or seek to punish him for granting a wish to an enemy.

Those had been exciting days, living with Farishta, dabbling in court intrigue, the two of them merging their powers to create phenomena neither could have done alone. As science came to dominate faith, Biff and the other genies faded into the background. A cardinal rule of his kind was that a genie could not use his or her magic for personal service. So he couldn't create a mansion for himself with a bank account to accompany it. The code allowed him to lie to humans, trick them, or steal from them, all while pretending to be in their service, but Biff preferred to perform honest tasks in exchange for the currency of whatever culture he found himself in.

His powers were limited by the source of his energy: the earth itself. With the touch of a hand, he could heal minor illnesses and nurture plants and animals. He could marshal the dust in the air to allow him to transform into a faint cloud and slip past any lock, and he could connect mentally with most kinds of mechanisms.

But he could not fly, he could not teleport, and he could not transform himself into any other creature. He could replicate simple objects – for example, generating a handkerchief to give to a sobbing woman. He could manipulate a human's view of reality within limits but he couldn't change someone's destiny. He couldn't make one person love another or hate another outside of the use of persuasion.