June 27, 2017

PC 476: Clay and Smokeless Fire

* Author : Saladin Ahmed

* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

Discuss on Forums

Originally published in Slate Magazine.

Welcome to PodCastle’s first Eid issue!

Rated PG-13

Clay and Smokeless Fire

By Saladin Ahmed

Qumqam stood upside-down atop a cell phone tower, twirling at its pinnacle on his fingertip. When the humans had first started to besmirch the earth with the things, Qumqam had thought them hideous. But he’d come to love dancing on them the way he’d once loved dancing on ziggurats.

Well, he’d come to like it, anyway. Qumqam didn’t know if there was anything left in this lower world that he loved, but sometimes when he leapt among the towers and turbines of America he felt something like happiness again. For a moment or two, at least.

It rarely lasted longer than that. For he was one of the last djinn left living in this interminable age of raised apes. The era of humankind, a nothing people, born from dirt when Qumqam’s people were born from smokeless fire.

Qumqam floated lazily down from the tower, landing softly on his bare brown feet. Then he closed his swirling opal eyes and pictured a small red house not far away. A shimmer appeared around him, and when he opened his eyes he was floating above the house.

Some of the djinn enjoyed walking like men — the slowness of it. Qumqam had never been one of them. He had never understood why the flapping bags of flesh were first in God’s eyes. They tore at each other like dogs at any chance. They starved each other to sit on piles of gold. Most unforgivably, they had taken this astonishing garden — this jagged half-paradise of leaf and ice and mountain and flower that God had made for them — and they had filled it with shit and poison.

These insults to God and His garden had grown worse of late, and worst here in America. Qumaqam had seen fool kings and robber-kings, mad kings and rape-kings. The new American king — president, they called it here — was all of them at once. And his merchants and armies were making a befouled realm even fouler.

No, Qumqam didn’t much love this world anymore, and when a djinn stops loving this world he leaves it. Qumqam’s people had been on earth for God-alone-knew how many thousands of years. They did not die from blades or age the way men did. They could live until God declared the end of days on earth.

But only if they wanted to. A djinn’s life didn’t come without fail the way the sun rose and fell. To live, a djinn needed reasons to keep living.

Strangely enough, one of the things that had kept Qumqam alive after so many of his friends had left this world was his interest in mankind. Well, in a handful of them. Most humans disgusted Qumqam — babbling creatures, whose repulsive meat threatened to smother the spark of life that God had given them.

But Qumqam had found that one in every hundred thousand thousand of them were different. One in every hundred thousand thousand could see him. Hear him. Speak to him. And, for perishable sacks of skin, they were fascinating. Qumqam had never been comfortable among his own kind, for the conversation of the djinn had always bored him. But humans? The ones worth talking to were a delight, if a bizarre one.

...more