“That’s a hell of a story, Timothy,” Percy said almost twenty minutes later. “Hell of a story. Mine’s not that different, all and all. Had me a bit more luck in finding a blue instead of a red, but there’s nothing for that. Not like these bottles are labeled.

“Now, I know I’ve been riding on my Virginia accent, but it’s time for some truth, here. I was Virginia born, in what’s still Virginia. And I was a Union boy. I was just a corporal in the Army of the Potomac, and I’m sad to say the only action I saw was dropping my rifle and tearing like hell out of First Manassas. To my good fortune I wasn’t shot for cowardice, and mostly I got marched around in circles for the next few months before I found the bottle in the rail bed as I’d described. When I saw it was a genie--” Blue gave a stifled cough. It was less interruptive than the thunder of a close lightning strike. Percy corrected himself. “I saw it was a djinn like in Arabian Knights, and well I made my wish. My one wish.”

“To live forever?” Timothy asked. “Is that how you’re so old and all?”

“Nosir” Percy answered. “My shameful behavior at my only engagement weighed on me, and you know, I was there because the thing mattered to me. The splitting of the Union, and the plight of the slaves. It all mattered to me, and I wanted to preserve one and fix the other. But I wanted to do it, I didn’t want this magic blue angel to do it with a nod of his head.” And maybe I didn’t trust him was left unsaid for the ten-thousandth time in the telling of this tale. “So I made my wish. I said I wanted long life in service to the Union. And he said granted.”

“So what happened?” Timothy asked. “Did Lee surrender next day or something?”

“Oh God no,” Percy said. “This was early on, before Vicksburg, before Gettysburg, even before Wilderness. McClellan was still in command, and my tired feet told me that man wasn’t going to win any wars. Marching us in circles was more his style. No, I didn’t feel any different and the war didn’t end, but Blue didn’t vanish either, and he went with me to my commander, and then we went to Tucker and then I was shipped by train to McClellan. There it almost ended because he put a terrible pressure on me to end the war and—get this—wish HIM President, and not in that order, let me tell you. Anyway, President Lincoln got wind of the matter, and I was brought to him over McClellan’s objections, and that’s where my life took shape.”

“I’m not sure I’m believing any of this,” Timothy said.

“Timothy, hear me out:” Percy began. He’d read what the DIA man had found on Timothy Dauterive, and thought it was time to put that knowledge into play. “You’re a high school dropout who works off the books for a Polk County demolition company, and now you’re on an orbital weapons platform with your finger on the trigger of a gun that could erase everything south of Lake Okeechobee with one shot, so please, just take me at my word for a minute or two, alright?”

Percy took the responding silence as permission to continue. “President Lincoln didn’t ask for the things General McClellan did. He never asked for anything from Blue or me, and I knew the man through the war and for the remained of his days. He said if things like Blue were out there, and if they could be compelled by any mortal who discovered them, well then there was only one force on earth that could counter the happenstance of their will.”

“God?” Timothy asked.

“President Lincoln used words carefully, and I was quoting his exact words. He said ‘on earth,' not ‘of Heaven.’ Say what you will about the man, but he was terribly wise. He forwent the swift solution and said to me ‘Percival Coyle, you serve the Union, and as your Supreme Commander I put you in the following service: you are to use those two remaining wishes only in defense and preservation of the Union, and only against otherworldly forces. Do you see it, Timothy? My job is to use my wishes to prevent or repair damages done by folk such as you. I have kept my word through all of this time, and I have not asked the djinn to work against any terrible moment that was the made by the will of men, and men alone. I left Abraham Lincoln shot, I didn’t undo Pearl Harbor, I let John Kennedy die in Dallas. I let Vietnam run on and on, and I didn’t stop those planes in ‘01 because Abraham Lincoln had told me I could only use my wishes to stop people like you.”

“So wait,” Timmy said, wrestling with the message. “You have TWO wishes left?”

“I do,” Percy said. “Fire those rods and I will ask Blue here to send them back to you. You’ll die alone in space, and not one person in Florida or anywhere else you wish to target will even know you were up there.”

“Ok wish me down then,” Timmy said with great urgency. He’d clearly lost his battle with fear of being stranded.

“I will not do that,” Percy said, his voice iron. “I will not use my wishes to save you.” This was the worst part, the most terrible part: when the people who had put themselves in horrible straights through greed, selfishness and hate begged for Percy to save them. Abraham Lincoln had never begged. Edith Wilson had asked once: Will you help my husband —and Percy had wept at her choice of words, will you, not can you, because of course, he could have, but Percy had declined. Franklin Roosevelt had never asked to walk. Hell, God-damn Richard Nixon had never asked Percy to wish his troubles away. They’d all seen Blue and understood that the djinn could fix their problems. But they hadn’t risen to the office of President of the United States so some second-rate angel could fix the troubles people had made. They saw Percy and Blue for what there were: tools to clear up trouble that wasn’t of human design, and nothing more.

“I’m sitting with a man from the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Percy said. “These people are like the CIA and Homeland Security on steroids, and they are turning every resource, EVERY RESOURCE, to getting you down safely.” The DIA man, on the phone and muttering in what sounded like Mandarin, nodded and gave a thumbs up. “They’ll get you down. You and I will meet in person. I am looking forward to that.” This was Percy’s first intentional lie, and even it was only a half falsehood, Timothy sounds like a genuine moron but there was no other living soul who had entered into a contract as he had, and such rare fraternity was something he genuinely missed.

“Okay these CIA guys on steroids have twelve hours,” Timothy said.

“Timothy, listen to me,” Percy said. “You can not make demands on us. You are out of wishes. The red is laughing at you as he waits for you to die of thirst, hunger or asphyxiation.”

“I still have this gun!” Timothy insisted.

“Yes but you’re out of choices,” Percy said. “It’s just Tuesday morning, and there’s only one way this ends with you seeing Sunday: you cooperate with these men, and they get you down. Then they take care of you likely for the rest of your life.”

“How’s that?” Timothy asked. “They’ll put me in jail?”

“Not jail, Timothy, but they do keep you close. There’s just two people alive who have had congress with these beings: you and I. They’ll want to know every detail; you won’t believe the detail they’ll get into. They’ll run a thousand tests on you. They’ll want to know, Why you, and How has it changed you? And they’ll need your cooperation to get it all accurate. I’ve seen it before Timothy, several times. We get over this matter with you threatening to destroy everyone you don’t like, and you’ll see some benefit come out of it, I promise you. You’ll not have to swing a crowbar for a payday again or come home covered in plaster dust.” You’ll never see home again most likely Percy thought, but again he left these unpleasant thoughts unspoken.

Beside him, Blue sat idle, clearly bored. A red light began to flash: they were descending. Percy stayed on the phone with Timothy until it was time to disembark. He was kept busy with carrot and stick, but by the time he passed the handling of Timothy over to someone who could address the technical issues the man’s rescue, Percy felt like he had matters in hand.

#

Blue could disappear anytime he wanted, and Percy sometimes went years without seeing the djinn. Blue was sticking around now, and that wasn’t a complete surprise. The djinn’s presence reassured the President and his staff, and that reassurance could be seen as part of the conditions of Percy’s long ago and swiftly formulated wish.

“Do you know him, this red?” Percy asked Big Blue as they crossed to the elevator that would take them down to whatever room had been prepared for them near the President’s own quarters. There they would wait until Timothy Dauterive was safely off his orbital weapons platform.

It was likely a futile question. Blue hardly ever spoke. To Percy’s complete lack of surprise, the hulking djinn gave a wry smile and a shrug. Are you the red? Percy silently asked. Is all of this your doing?

Percy had been afforded a long time to consider his situation. The djinn could clearly do the impossible; Percy’s own long life was more than evidence of this. And he’d seen things, things other wishes had conjured, things that boggled the mind, things that became even more stunning as each new discovery of this dazzling modern age pulled back the curtain a bit further on how the universe operated.

When Percy had been working for President Kennedy, he’d been introduced to a scientist and an author named Sagan. President Kennedy had introduced Percy to several such luminaries hoping to get a bead on whatever Blue actually was. He’d had a lot of faith in the state of American science of the age, well-founded faith, Percy supposed, given the success of the space program. But now in the 21st century, he could see those noble men of the 1960’s were blindfolded and playing with tinker toys. He supposed if he lived another 100 years he’d feel the same about 2016.

Sagan hadn’t met Blue. There was no emergency, and Blue kept his noncrucial appearances to a minimum. Sagan, a turtlenecked inquisitive presence that smelt of tobacco and positively glowed with energy, had asked many of the usual questions the people asked Percy when the first met, but he asked them without the smirking disbelief Percy had been enduring for a century. Carl Sagan immediately accepted that Percy was telling the truth, perhaps because the President (who did not join them for this talk, and to Percy's knowledge never met Sagan) so clearly believed it.

The meeting, held in an informal setting in one of the many federal properties in Virginia, involved comfortable chairs and pots of steaming hot tea. There were wafers and other snacks on a porcelain dish, the dish itself on a fine doily, and that on a dark-stained colonial end table, but Professor Sagan’s conversation was too swift to allow Percy time to chew.

“I wonder about your brain,” Professor Sagan said. Percy was taken aback: the conversation had moved on from the subject of Big Blue and on to questions about Percy’s experiences and memories of over one hundred years of life. Percy always answered these as best as he was able, but there wasn’t a tremendous amount detail he possessed that he would consider being fascinating. The 19th Century was well documented, after all. And in fairness, he couldn’t recall all that many details of his distant youth. That forgetfulness had seemed natural to him, but Sagan was putting this in a new perspective.

“The human brain has evolved to hold a certain amount of memory,” he said. “It’s clear that the djinni has altered your physiology, perhaps a massive degree, to preserve you so well across such a long period, and I wonder if that extends to the actual physical makeup of your brain?” The professor was staring at Percy’s forehead with unnerving intensity. “The Russians are developing a Hahn Echo machine, and I wonder what such imaging would show us about your limbic system. Not to put it too bluntly, I wonder how you're able to hold a gallon of memories in a pint glass.” He smiled at this, but Percy felt himself turning a little green. He’d often speculated about what might have been going on inside of him to compensate for his being a centenarian with the appearance and characteristics of a 26-year-old, but that didn’t make the topic of ‘massive’ alterations to his body any more comfortable to discuss.

Perhaps Sagan recognized this, as he changed the subject. “Where does this djinni (nailing the pronunciation, something Percy hadn’t done to Blue’s satisfaction until two decades into their association) go when he’s not here? Not back into the bottle, surely?”

Percy had no idea here the djinni went or what it did when it wasn’t attended to him, and in their years of association that speculation had grown to include having no idea where else the jinn might be even when it was attending to him. The idea that Blue must abide by any known laws of physics was one that Percy had given up on long ago.

But Sagan made it clear that he fervently believed Blue to be understandable. “We just don’t know yet how he does what he does,” Sagan said. “In the infancy of our race, we didn’t know how the sun burned or how the stars moved or how we are able to remember what happened to us yesterday. All of that was magic to us for most of our time as a species. Now we understand some of the truth of these processes but not all there is to know. The djinn simply understands the workings of creation better than we do.”

“But he grants wishes,” Percy had said. “He has a will of his own, but he does what I ask him to.”

“Then make him appear.” Sagan had said.

“I can’t,” Percy replied. “Not without wrongly discharging my duty to the Union.”

“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan answered. “Or, if we accept that his presence gives proof to the presence of a Creator, then he does what the Creator wishes. But whatever it is that determines the djinni’s behavior is just another discoverable unknown. At this point, we simply don’t understand why Blue does what he does any more than we understand the how of his actions. But I have absolute faith that all of this can be explained, and will one day be understood. Perhaps if the American Union persists long enough, you’ll get to know the answer.” Sagan had been buoyant, but a shadow fell over his expression when he added: “I envy you, and your long life. But then again, it may be a foolish envy.”

They’d passed the remaining hour pleasantly enough, and Percy had never seen Professor Sagan again. He was never given the Professor’s report and didn’t know what conclusions had been reached, if any.

That long-ago conversation had shaken Percy up. Since then, he had begun to look at his relationship with Blue differently.

Every human being he’d encountered who’d had a wish granted had suffered in some way; many had died as a result. He’d been waiting for the shoe to drop with his own situation, but it never had. In a century and a half, he’d never been presented with a conundrum that actually required his other wishes to be employed. To my knowledge was the unspoken paranoid raving.

There were events he half remembered, glimpses like dreams that sometimes made him wonder if every trial he’d faced actually had been solved like this afternoon’s one had, with a sensible talk and the threat of magical ammunition, where his opponent had already spent their rounds. Percy could almost remember troubles that perhaps had happened, but… had they? Too many crises to account for the two wishes he routinely traded on: steel monsters on San Juan Hill; U.S. currency bearing the faces of Poe, Whitman, and Stowe; a modern New York where no building rose above three stories; President Rothschild…

The elevator doors opened. They were far underground. Blue had disappeared, something Percy had failed to notice while lost in his brown study. A Secret Serviceman with a machine gun dangling from a strap waited to escort Percy to his quarters.

Do I actually HAVE any wishes left? Percy asked as they walked down the narrow corridor, patriotic emblems lining the white walls. If not, what is Blue doing to me?

“So he does what he wants to do,” Sagan had said. “But we simply don’t understand what that is any more than we do the how.”

Percy’s attendant opened the door to his quarters, which Percy knew would be remarkably similar to his own home in Virginia. Someone in the DIA thought it would relax Percy if his many safe locations looked like his own residence. In the instant before the light was switched on, Percy thought he could see yellow eyes glowing in the high-backed padded chair in the corner, but then the lights were on the chair was plainly empty.

THE END