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harem began to spin again; I gathered all my courage and said: ‘Don’t desert us, friend; give Sherry the story you’re working on now, and you may do anything you like with me. I’ll raise your children if you have any; I’ll wash your Melissa’s feet. Anything.’
    “The Genie smiled and said to Sherry, ‘Our little Dunyazade is a woman.’ Thanking me then for my offer as courteously as he had once Scheherazade, he declined it, not only for the same reasons that had moved him before, but also because he was confident that the only tales left in the treasury of the sort King Shahryar was likely to be entertained by were the hundred mimicries and retellings of Sherry’s own.
    “ ‘Then my thousand nights and a night are ended,’ Sherry said. ‘Don’t be ungrateful to our friend, Doony; everything ends.’
    “I agreed, but tearfully wished myself—and Ali Shar, Gharíb, and little Melissa, whom all I loved as dearly as I loved my sister—out of a world where the only happy endings were in stories.
    “The Genie touched my shoulder. ‘Let’s not forget,’ he said, ‘that from my point of view—a tiresome technical one, I’ll admit—it is a story that we’re coming to the end of. All these tales your sister has told the King are simply the middle of her own story—hers and yours, I mean, and Shahryar’s, and his young brother Shah Zaman’s.’
    “I didn’t understand—but Sherry did, and squeezing my other shoulder, asked him quietly whether, that being the tiresome technical case, it followed that a happy ending might be invented for the framing-story.
    “ ‘The author of The Thousand and One Nights doesn’t invent,’ the Genie reminded her; ‘he only recounts how, after she finished the tale of Ma’aruf the Cobbler, Scheherazade rose from the King’s bed, kissed ground before him, and made bold to ask a favor in return for the thousand and one nights’ entertainment. “Ask, Scheherazade,” the King answers in the story—whereupon you send Dunyazade to fetch the children in, and plead for your life on their behalf, so that they won’t grow up motherless.’
    “My heart sprang up; Sherry sat silent. ‘I notice you don’t ask on behalf of the stories themselves,’ the Genie remarked, ‘or on behalf of your love for Shahryar and his for you. That’s a pretty touch: it leaves him free to grant your wish, if he chooses to, on those other grounds. I also admire your tact in asking only for your life; that gives him the moral initiative to repent his policy and marry you. I don’t think I’d have thought of that.’
    “ ‘Hmp,’ said Sherry.
    “ ‘Then there’s the nice formal symmetry—’
    “ ‘Never mind the symmetry!’ I cried. ‘Does it work or not?’ I saw in his expression then that it did, and in Sherry’s that this plan was not news to her. I hugged them both, weeping enough for joy to make our ink run, so the Genie said, and begged Sherry to promise me that I could stay with her and the children after their wedding as I had before, and sit at the foot of her bed forever.
    “ ‘Not so fast, Doony,’ she said. ‘I haven’t decided yet whether or not I care to end the story that way.’
    “ ‘Not care to?’ I looked with fresh terror to the Genie. ‘Doesn’t she have to, if it’s in the book?’
    “He too appeared troubled now, and searched Sherry’s face, and admitted that not everything he’d seen of our situation in these visions or dreams of his corresponded exactly to the story as it came to him through the centuries, lands, and languages that separated us in waking hours. In his translation, for example, all three children were male and nameless; and while there was no mention of Scheherazade’s loving Shahryar by the end of the book, there was surely none of her despising him, or cuckolding him, more or less, with me and the rest. Most significantly, it went without saying that he himself was altogether absent from the plot—which, however,