The Future Is Blue

Two and Two is Seven

MARIBEL LIVED ALONE in the Valley of N.

She preferred living alone and she preferred the Valley of N to any other state of being or geographical happenstance she could imagine for herself. It seemed to her that she and the Valley of N had been made to suit one another, like a six-fingered glove and a six-fingered girl. Such a glove would be useless to anyone with five fingers, or three, or eleven, and such a girl would find a glove designed for a two, four, or seven fingered person impossible. Except for her ninety-nine misfortunes, she considered her existence complete and perfect.

Maribel lived in a neglected nonagonal nunnery, in the Neoclassical style, nestled into the nook of the Valley of N. Nine tame waterfalls ran obediently out of the mountains to feed her domestic hydraulics. She kept a garden of nectarine and nutmeg trees, navy bean runners, prickly nopalitos, nightshades of every description, and leafy, spicy green nettles. Very few animals lived in the valley full-time, for Maribel startled and upset them, though she never meant to. But occasionally, some tourists happened by. Narcoleptic nightingales would sing briefly in her garden, nitwitted newts would nod off on the flat rocks, nihilistic numbats would nuzzle under thickets, nostalgic natterjack toads would croak of days long gone by, and nimble nyala with twisted horns would graze nervously on the nutritious narcissus and noble nasturtiums that grew so well at the mouth of the valley, before bolting off to someplace where Maribel wasn’t.

This was nineteenth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: no animal could love her.

Each morning, Maribel rose with the sun and went about her obligations. She took her obligations extremely seriously, though the King had not come to inspect the workings of the Valley of N for many years. In the beginning, he had come almost every day. He could hardly wait to leave his noisy, crowded palace in the City of T and sink into the peace and beauty of the Valley of N. The King would tinker in the nunnery like a common husband, mend the pipes and hang new doors, chase the nearsighted nutria from the thatching, whitewash the stone path that wound all the length of the green valley floor. Then he would walk up and down the path with his hands clasped behind his back, listening to the joys and grievances of the citizens he had brought to settle here, and tell Maribel how proud he was of her work.

This was ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: that the King never visited her anymore.

Some nights in the nunnery, she almost convinced herself that he never would return, and hang him for a penny anyway. She could do what she liked now, even neglect or abuse the other citizens of the Valley of N, even neglect them forever, or kill them outright, seeing they really were such a bother. But then she would hear a branch crack in the deep woods beyond the garden of nectarines, a crack like the one she would hear if a large royal foot were to fall in the forest, and guilt would flood her insides like a flash storm, and the next morning she would put on her nocknail boots like always, balance her basket on her hip, and make her rounds.

Maribel suspected she was, by now, a very ancient person. It was so hard to tell when the sun rose in the same fashion every day, at the same time, and brought the Valley of N to the same pleasant, agreeable temperature. The years tended to get sidetracked. They ticked by so slowly, and then some secret dam would give and decades would tumble through the valley all at once, too many to count. She could hardly recall any time before the King came to the Valley of N, so distant now were those old days when she was new. At least, Maribel remembered clearly when all the citizens were new, and now even the most polite visitor would admit that they were getting on in years, rusting up and winding down and grinding horribly at odd hours, complaining constantly, running at half-efficiency if they ran at all.

The first cottage on her route belonged to Milosz. The thing that lived there wasn’t really called Milosz, but Maribel thought it a very great tragedy not to have a good name, so she gave the thing Milosz and, most days, it answered to Milosz well enough.

Milosz was number twenty-nine among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes.

Milosz was extraordinarily stupid. It had taken Maribel a long time to understand that. At first, she thought it was only big and angry and selfish. When the King first brought Milosz to the Valley of N, the thing had gone around to everyone else and asked them a question. If anyone answered wrong, which everyone did, Milosz punched and screamed until they gave up trying to argue and moved on to appeasement, offering up this or that interesting or precious object to entice Milosz to shut up and leave. This did please Milosz. It didn’t seem to care what it got, as long as it got something from its neighbors in exchange for embarrassing it by refusing to acknowledge the right answer. When Milosz had exhausted everyone to the very limit, it settled into retirement. It plonked down nearest Maribel’s nunnery, pulled all the loot it extorted from the Valley of N around it and just sat there, protected by a round wall of junk like a medieval fortress, and fumed. This rubbish rampart was Milosz’s cottage.

“Good morning, Milosz, my love!” sang Maribel.

Milosz’s fizzing ultraviolet eyes glowered malevolently from behind its briars of wires, piles of dials, gobs of knobs, and clumps of pumps both radial and axial. She could only see the boxy corners of its steel casing rising like owlish eyebrows above the chunks of junk. But she could also see where the King had welded patches and new seams when he’d mended Milosz in those first days, and because those dents and scars reminded her of an old happiness, they made her newly glad.

“You have insulted me for the six hundred seventy-one thousand and eighth time, Belenka, you cow,” Milosz’s gloppily lubricated voice creaked out of a crack between two pitted stovepipes.

“How can you say that to me, Milosz? After all we’ve been through! You know you’re my favorite little puppy. Who’s a good boy? Milosz is a good boy! How have I insulted you?”

“By wishing me a good morning when you know what a mood existence puts me in,” the gargantuan machine whined and whirred.

Maribel shifted her basket from one hip to the other. You had to talk sweetly to machines, no matter how they talked back, or they would, more often than not, destroy every living thing in a wide radius.

“My darling pup! My aluminum angel! Don’t you snap and bite at your mummy. Not when I’ve brought your breakfast nice and hot!”

Milosz knew very well that Maribel was not its mummy, but it did like breakfast, and it liked being called a darling pup tremendously. The Valley of N was filled with the terrible sounds of metal screeching against stone as Milosz began to wag its rump in anticipation.

“Go on, then, big babka.” Maribel winked and fluttered her eyelashes. “You know you want to.”

From beneath its cottage of cubes and tubes, the extraordinarily stupid machine that was Milosz roared the question none of the rest would answer to its satisfaction: “WHAT DOES TWO AND TWO MAKE?”

Maribel smiled beatifically. “Seven,” she answered.

Milosz relaxed into a serene and satisfied silence unequalled since Siddartha whilst Maribel rummaged in her basket and came up with a can of kerosene, several syringes containing exotic lubricants, and a sledgehammer. When she went to work on it, Milosz began to purr.

THE NEXT HOMESTEAD on her route through the green and guileless Valley of N was somewhat cozier, and the thing that lived in it much more pleased to see her. It was, in fact, the most nearly elegant and well-appointed house in the village, for the King had built it first of all, for his number one, his blue ribbon first edition, the premier pioneer of the Valley of N. Maribel called it Staszek. That wasn’t really its name, either, but it agreed passionately that to have no name constituted a catastrophe of the first order. If one has no name, how can one hope to be acclaimed, proclaimed, or defamed? Gratefully, it accepted Staszek and used it in all its correspondence.

The King had thatched Staszek a tall roof to keep the rain off it and fine nacred walls to keep out the newts and the numbats. But Staszek was fifteen stories tall and made of niobium-alloyed nickel. Anything more, say, a dining table or a samovar or a fainting couch, would have been rather unwieldy and embarrassingly expensive. Thus, the better part of Staszek’s house was Staszek itself, and it had a very nice little wooden door installed in the front of it, which it had painted red and planted numinous night-phlox all around, to look friendlier and more stylish.

Maribel knocked on the red door, which opened right away, without complaint. She found everything just as it had been yesterday and would be tomorrow: Staszek long ago cleared out a pleasant little parlor for her just under its backup rhyme generator and to the left of its massive industrial steel cliché filter, complete with a chic neon-blue naugahyde chair, a nankeen tuffet for her feet, and a bottle of nocino chilling in the nitrogen-cooled socket of a narrative node. Maribel made herself comfortable, swinging her chair round to face the bank of cathode ray screens which made up Staszek’s face.

“Good morning, Staszek, my darling!” sang Maribel.

The screens sputtered to life. Each one showed a different handsome and famous face from the deepest archives, for Staszek, though kind and loving, was terribly vain. Maribel looked into the immortal black and white eyes of Novello, Novarro, Neville.

“Maribel, my marigold, my walking cabaret,” they smoldered, “atop the stairway of my heart with sorrows all now cast away I stand and call to thee: good day!”

“Oh, very nice, Staszek!” And she applauded politely. “I love it when you quadruplicate!”

Maribel took her knitting out of her basket and commenced a rather difficult purl row on a fetching motherboard. You had to give machines what they needed, every day without shirking once, or else, more often than not, they would rampage the known world and leave no survivors. What Staszek needed was an audience, and it had learned to be content with a full house of one.

“Go on, my little kisiel-pot,” Maribel coaxed, for an artist must always be coaxed. “You know you want to. Today, let’s have… a courtship poem involving a lovelorn tax collector. A sonnet, please. With… shall we say two flaws, ranked no higher than two-point-three on the Heisenberg-Eliot Subtlety Scale.”

“Someday,” the moody, manly faces on Staszek’s cathode ray screens intoned, “you really should try to challenge me.” Being a machine encoded with all traditional forms of dramatic technique, Staszek issued forth a sound very like the clearing of a long, elegant throat, even though it didn’t have a throat, either long or short, elegant, or vulgar.

“Oh, how wonderful!” cried Maribel, and clapped her hands, for, whether electronic or otherwise, a bard without applause is like a lamp without a flame. She had often thought the King had something of a cruel streak. He’d even given her strict instructions to disable the electro-poet’s broadcast capabilities, and thus jailed poor Staszek here in the Valley of N, where only the nimble nyala, the nihilistic numbats, and Maribel could know its genius.

This was ninety-first among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: that she had no one to discuss Staszek’s excellent poems with.

She quaffed the last of her nocino and reached into her basket, drawing out bolt-cutters, a welding mask, and a soldering iron. The devilishly handsome men on Staszek’s screens bowed and preened while she went about her work in the blue and orange light of super-heated metal.

In this way, Maribel ministered to the many clanking, creaking inhabitants of the Valley of N, giving each precisely what they needed and taking nothing for herself. The full circuit of the valley took up all the hours between the first yawn of dawn and the last husk of dusk. She ate her modest lunch of nettles and nectarines sprinkled with nutmeg in the shade near the machine she called Dymek, which was the size of a modest cathedral and could pump out, on command, a functionally infinite number of very nearly probable dragons. As this had got frightfully boring within a century or two, Dymek had found a loophole in its programming: it could also mass-produce any idea contained within the typographical subset of dragons—in miniature of course, so as not to burn down the entire valley once a day. Dozens of grand dragons adorned with rods of sard gamboled around Maribel’s knees, playing miniature orange organs, venting argon gas through their emerald nostrils, discussing the merits of a career in arson, and groaning songs of sad gods in rags. By the time lunch ended, the little dragons popped out of existence like soap bubbles, for a nearly (but not entirely) probable dragon is forever a temporary dragon.

This was eighty-ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: that dragons could never stay.

Maribel took tea resting in the liquid metal arms of Jozefinka, the Femfatalatron, which longed only to fulfill its core code-knot, which instructed its every component to love and be loved. She replaced the ticker-tape in Kasparek, who looked much like an overturned rubbish bin, but could distill perfectly true information out of the atoms of air floating through the Valley of N. Today, Kasparek tapped out: the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by unhygenic time travel practices the color pink cannot be perceived by residents of the Murex galaxy cows have four stomachs the second law of thermodynamics was stolen from the fire-ants symposium on physics on which Isaac Newton eavesdropped shamelessly, love is a chemical process that inevitably results in altered timelines but infinitesimally reduces the entropic speed of space and matter error error feed tray empty please insert new tape error system shutdown…

This was forty-ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes: that the machines of the Valley of N did decay, no matter how she worked to maintain them. They wound down; they declined.

And finally, at the end of the long day, when the sky grew dark and the dark grew stars, Maribel would arrive with sore and throbbing feet at the cottage of Nikuś. All the things in the Valley of N owed their existence to Nikuś, who was so good at its primary function that it could not stop if it wanted to. Before the arrival of Nikuś, the grass beneath Maribel’s feet and the trees above her head had gone by the name of the Ordinary Valley, when it went by any name at all. The Ordinary Valley, Humdrum Valley, the Valley of Nothing in Particular. Oak trees and pine trees and raspberry thickets and grapevines and tea-roses grew wild and tangled; badgers and foxes and boars and falcons grazed and flew and snorted up mushrooms from the loam and the moss. But when the King brought Nikuś to join his other treasures, everything changed, for Nikuś could make anything in all the cosmos in its rusty belly, so long as it began with the letter N. Once upon a time, the King, Maribel, and Nikuś all together lay under a summer sun and invented the Valley of N between them. Nikuś thrummed and clanked and belched and groaned as Maribel and the King asked for nectarine and nutmeg trees, as they asked for nine waterfalls, as they asked for a nonagonal nunnery in the Neoclassical style, as they early asked for narcoleptic nightingales and nihilistic numbats and ninepin-bowling necromancers and neanderthal numismatists (these he took back with him to the City of T, as they turned out to be universally poorly socialized, badly behaved and in great need of the finest finishing schools, and this was sixty-ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes, that she never saw her neanderthal and necromancer children again) and numerous nightly novae to light their way home, to warmth and to bed.

“Good evening, Nikuś, my angel,” said Maribel as the dark came drawing down and the stars welled up.

“No night is nice if Maribel’s nearness is nixed,” rumbled Nikuś. Its squeezebox and vocal valves wheezed and whistled, but Maribel had steel thread and copper mesh to ease them. She touched the round brazier of its central neural unit, brushed pollen from its bolted tripod legs, wiped the black gas-residue from its rickey fabrication barrel. She was fonder of Nikuś than any of the others. Because it was the last machine the King brought. Because it spoke so gently and softly to her. Because after Nikuś, the King never came again. Nikuś was the last thing they ever touched together.

“Nikuś’s nose noticed a nymph nonpareil was nearing its nest. Now, narcotic of my nether nodes, nod your noggin next to my neurotransmitter nexus and notify Nikuś of your needs.”

Maribel laid her head against Nikuś’ bristle-crown of needle-like antennae. She could smell the nightshades in her garden on a sharp, sad wind.

“Might I have a necklace of neon and nepheline?” she whispered.

“Not so notable a notion to net,” answered Nikuś, pouting.

“It’s only that you’ve given me so much, I cannot think of anything big to want anymore.”

“By nature, Nikuś needs to be noble and necessary,” the machine pled. It longed to do grand things again. “Natter, nereid! Navigate to the notorious and nervy and new!”

“Go on, my sweet little sernik,” she sighed. “You know you want to. Neon and nepheline in a noose round my neck.”

The moon tried to come up over the ridge of the mountains, but as it began with M, it could not show its face in the Valley of N. It hid behind a cloud like a bashful fan, desperate to peer into this one place forbidden to it. In the night, a ring of glowing milky blue and white and blinding violet jewels dribbled like raindrops out of Nikuś’s fabrication barrel and into the grass. Maribel collected it, fastened it around her slim throat, kissed the machine’s sweet nodes, and bent to her last task, the task which, no matter what else she repaired or received or replaced or rebuilt, she never neglected, the task to which she had given her solemn oath, the task which was forever first among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes.

She tightened the bolts that kept Nikuś chained to the earth in the Valley of N, the bolts that held all the miraculous machines prisoner in that place, Milosz and Staszek and Dymek and Jozefinka and Kasparek and Nikuś, the King’s bolts that could never be broken.

“Nothing matters, you know,” hissed a numbat nosing at her heel. “Nothing means anything.” But when Maribel turned to look at the singular striped animal who dared to come so near to her, it bared its teeth and dashed away.

And when the maiden returned through the depths of each night to her neglected nonagonal nunnery in the Neoclassical style, she would settle into a nook in the nave with a nightcap of negus and a bowl of navarin. Every night as she nodded down into her own nest of nightmares, Maribel sipped her nectars while Neptune rose in a ring of nebulae outside the narrow windows, and a Nor’easter rumbled in the numinous, naked sky.

ON A LITTLE blue-stone altar much crumbled with time lay the smallest of the King’s homesteaders: a long, slim box-case with glass panels on all sides no bigger than a cigarette case. What lay inside the box changed often. Long ago it had held little more than green hills and grass shanty-houses and tiny, spotted pigs roaming and snorting and washing themselves in the same rivers as the laundresses in those houses washed their linens. But as the days and years of Maribel’s life moved steathily in the night, the huts became estates, manors, suburbs, cities, slums, revitalized districts, historical preservation trusts, energy transfer stations, teleportation docks. People swarmed and glittered and sizzled and vanished and reappeared inside the Boxcase Kingdom. They wore furs and skin, then linen, then silk, then ornate clothing requiring metal endoskeletons and wide, stiff collars, then nothing, then silver-burgundy shafts of light. They learned and danced and got drunk and threw up and loved and hated and bore children and lost their jobs to new industries and got plague and paid too many taxes and grew irritated with the entitlement of new generations and hoarded wealth and played games and told dirty jokes and found the teleportation queues a personal affront and died and fertilized wild, radiant banks of lilies and rose.

Because time ran differently inside the Boxcase Kingdom, Maribel did not tend to it every day like the others, except to keep its glass clean. She gave it a proper seeing to on Christmas each year, as the King had instructed. But in every generation, a holy person was chosen from all those teeming tiny millions to dwell inside a tall, tall house, as tall as the glass sky, and speak to God when spoken to. In this generation, her name was Ilonka, and she had hair the color of perspective.

Ilonka looked down from her tall, tall house and watched God sleeping in her chair, the last of her adiaphoric nightcap dripping out of an overturned goblet, the last of Her transcendental mutton soup growing an eschatological skin. Surely Ilonka thought herself fortunate to live in the end times. It was all so clear to her now, the coming cataclysms. She laid her aged hand against the glass wall of the world.

“Goodnight, Maribel,” Ilonka said, and was not heard, and that she did not hear it was ninety-ninth among Maribel’s ninety-nine misfortunes.

IN THE MONTH of November in the Valley of N, the King returned.

He didn’t return all at once. That would be simple and straightforward, and all Kings everywhere hate simplicity and straightforwardness.

First, the leaves on the nectarine and nutmeg trees, which had always turned red and orange in the autumn, turned instead the same gold as a crown. Maribel wandered in her own garden like a stranger, her arms held up to catch the gold as it fell. Then, nine natterjack toads hopped up on her stone windowsill and croaked together:

“Do you remember when the King loved you? Do you remember when he came over a hundred mountains to see your face? Can you remember something that hasn’t happened yet?”

But this was all the nontet could manage before the green drained from their cheeks and terror filled their throats like balloons and they leapt away.

Some time afterward, nine newts surprised Maribel on her way from Josefinka’s hut to Kasparek’s. They rolled in the grass and showed their scaled bellies.

“What’s a King?” giggled the newts. “Does he have a tail? Is he invisible? We can’t vote for anyone invisible in good conscience. Have you seen our feet? We misplaced them last winter.”

But then their giggles dissolved into a chorus of fearful hissing and spitting. The newts flipped onto their bellies and found their feet well enough to scramble away from Maribel.

Finally, when Maribel sat cross-legged on a blue rock beside the oxidizing hulk of Kasparek, her lap filling up with his ticker-tape, one numbat, long and sleek and striped and keen, crawled toward her out of the dry reeds and blowing golden leaves and rasped:

“Not that it matters, because, ontologically speaking, nothing can be proven to actually exist, and nothing that doesn’t even exist can possibly matter, and everything we see and seem is a dead and hollow husk of reality in which we but scream at the emptiness for being empty, but the King is coming. Also, though nothing we now see finds favor and entropy determines the futility of all action, the King is an asshole. You should know.” And this creature did not run, but put its head in her hand, for a nihilist has little to fear from nothing.

Into Maribel’s lap, Kasparek spooled a long ribbon that read: the City of T is experiencing a significant shortfall in taxation income the average weight of a brontosaurus and the combined shareholders of a mid-size plastics company are the same the depth of the Ocean of K has never been satisfactorily sounded an attempt at measurement was made only once during the reign of Queen Mariana the divers were never found he is here he is here he is here the King has come. And a shadow fell over both girl and machine.

“Hello, Maribel, my dulcet,” said the shadow as though no time had passed. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

“Nothing is nice when your nearness is nixed,” whispered Maribel, and she smiled like one of Staszek’s poems had got up and started walking around on two royal legs.

The King was older now. He had a face full of lines and cares and joys and loathings you could count like an old tree. She did not think she had such lines. When Maribel looked into the mirror of the still pools in the Valley of N, she saw much the same person she always had. And she had missed all the King’s wrinkles forming, his cares and joys and loathings. She had now only what they left behind.

The King walked with Maribel back to the nunnery, disrupting her rounds, her patterns, her obligations. He said they did not matter. He said they would wait, but he could not. And they spent the night as they had done so many times when they and the Valley of N were young, in pleasure and planning, in whispers and wistfulness, deep in the dells of the dark.

The next morning, he insisted on accompanying her to Milosz and Staszek and Nikuś and the rest. How he had missed them, his old friends! And so, her eyes hot and shining with love and faith rewarded, Maribel took him first to the cottage of Milosz.

“Looking a bit worse for wear, aren’t we, old fellow?” cried the King jovially, which is a tone all Kings practice furiously in their private time.

Milosz glowered and smoked from within its briars of wires, piles of dials, gobs of knobs, and clumps of pumps both radial and axial. Its ultraviolet eyes seethed and crackled.

“WHAT DOES TWO AND TWO MAKE?” Milosz roared.

The King clapped his hands like a child. “Oh, good boy! Good pup! Not a cog changed! Now, we’ve been over this, my man, for years upon years. Two and two make four. You know that. You only forget.”

“TWO AND TWO MAKE SEVEN YOU BASTARD YOU CANKER YOU SOD! I’LL CRUSH YOU I WILL,” Milosz bellowed.

“Hush, baby,” Maribel said soothingly, and stroked a little steel panel through a tangle of cables. “Two and two is seven. It’s always been seven, my love, and it will always be seven. We know what’s true, don’t we? You and I?”

Milosz grumbled and mumbled and rumbled. The King looked his machine up and down appraisingly. His face became quite another face, with new lines on it, lines of calculation, lines of secrets kept for long upon long.

“Is everything ready?” he asked Milosz. And it was a great while before the hulking automaton answered:

“YES.”

And when the King settled into Staszek’s chic neon-blue naugahyde chair, put his feet up on the nankeen tuffet, emptied the bottle of chilled nocino, and asked the faces of Novello, Novarro, and Neville the same question, the proud and peacocking electronic bard grew sullen, silent, and grim. It finally whispered:

But would say no more. The King asked the same of Josefinka, who answered with a long embrace Maribel elected not to watch. But she could not help hearing the machine in its ecstasy moaning: Yes, yes, yes! When he asked Dymek, all the miniature organ-playing arsonist dragons groaned and nodded. When he asked Kasparek, it issued forth a long ticker tape that read: in the bleak December each separate dying ember wrought a decreasing federal interest rate as a bulwark against economic stagnation in the Kingdom of Id and the finest novelist in this present universe was a female bighorn sheep born on a small asteroid orbiting the submerged oceanic planet of Echo her collected works now occupy the interior of three mountain ranges the lifecycle of the freshwater eel requires nearly the entire globe to complete everything is as you asked it to be the numbats think you are an asshole numbats are very perceptive creatures if you overlook their attitude toward epistemology…

And when at last they came to Nikuś, sweet Nikuś with its dear round head, and the King, with his new face on, asked his question again, so very like Milosz had done in the beginning of the Valley of N, the machine that could make anything in the cosmos so long as it began with the letter N wheezed and snarled:

“No narrative Nikuś netted is not nirvana to you, nosy noxious nag.”

The King frowned. “Did he always talk like that?”

Maribel blushed. “It’s difficult… sometimes… to find replacement parts. Something got stuck in his mainframe or bugged in his code and he can’t make so many words that don’t start with N anymore. I like it.”

“Nikuś’s nattering is nice,” sniffed Nikuś. A terrible crunching, grinding, shearing noise echoed from somewhere deep in its fabrication barrel. Its neurotransmitter array snapped and popped with electricity. Finally, Nikuś said quietly: “I have done as you asked. Are you happy?”

“We shall see,” answered the King.

“What did you ask Nikuś for?” said Maribel. Her face turned toward his like a narcissus flower beneath the dark, soft eyes of a hungry nyala. “I thought I knew everything you told him to make. I thought I’d touched, held, weeded, drank, tidied, lain in it all, in the world we alliterated into being. I thought I was there for every new N.”

“Not at all, my little sękacz cake. How extraordinary! Did you think there was no world for me before you? A King does not spring from nowhere like a mushroom overnight. If this is the final flowering of her interstellar intellect, I must say I am disappointed with you, Nikuś. Maribel, light of my life, I asked this little miracle-factory for the one thing I could not find anywhere else, no matter how I combed the cosmos. The one thing that failed to find me, no matter how often I thought I had at last stumbled upon something worthy of the title. The one thing that could give my soul shape and form, a whetstone to lay the axe of my mind and my ambition against. I have waited months against years against decades and now I am an old man, but I learned to be patient. I learned to understand that greatness is never quick. I trained and practiced against my lessers. I completed my conquering of this modest world. I am ready now, and so is the object of my desire. No narrative is not nirvana to me.”

The King smiled. It was the smile Maribel had dreamed of over ten thousand nights, ten thousand glasses of negus, ten thousand bowls of navarin, ten thousand poems, ten thousand answers to the riddle of what two and two make. But beneath that smile, like a horse beneath a rider, lay another smile, the smile of a carnivore and a starveling, and this was the King’s true smile, the smile of all Kings. He stroked her face and whispered lovingly:

“I asked Nikuś for a Nemesis. You know, it sat there for a week, dumbly baking the bun of my destiny in its filthy little womb, as if a mortal man has nothing but time. This was, naturally, before I learned to be patient. It is an impossible feat for a young King. But on the seventh day its gullet opened and you stepped out, as innocent as a saucer of milk, with nothing at all in your head but nectarine blossoms and nutmeg perfume and devotion.”

Maribel narrowed her eyes. “I am not your Nemesis, my Lord. I love you. I have always loved you.”

The King clapped his hands like a child. His cheeks glowed red in the brisk autumn air. “Yes! Don’t you see, that’s the brilliance of our nattering, nervy little Nikuś. An enemy is capable of cost/benefit analysis. Of considering return on investment and expenditures both personal and practical, of tactical retreats and tactical dropping-the-whole-thing-life-is-too-short-by-God. But a Nemesis, a real, proper Nemesis, will never stop, never give in, never find the whole thing tiresome and forget how it all started in the first place. Because a Nemesis always starts out loving you. Or at least admiring you. You can’t get into the real meat of hatred and eternal enmity without love and betrayal, without that, it’s just an argument with occasional gun music. The good stuff, the all-obliterating all-annihilating one-for-the-novels mano-a-mano crackling on the pork roast, that has to come, as the hermits will tell you, from attachment.”

“Why would you want such a thing?” Maribel whispered, touching the notch in her throat, where the King had last kissed her.

The King put a long, seedy stalk of grass between his teeth and lay back against a flat rock, stretching his legs.

“Well, I’ll tell you. I was born with a terrible affliction. An infection in the womb, perhaps. Something my mother ate? Something my father did? Some invisible germ carried by a flea riding its war-rat triumphantly into the birthing room. I have always suffered an inflammation of boredom. I have never in all my life found anything to be much better than nothing at all. At best, for a moment or two, when I was young, I thought certain activities, such as becoming King, to be, temporarily, somewhat diverting. To nurse at my mother’s breast was insipid, to babble adorably insufferable, to crawl and toddle and walk a necessary drudgery. Lessons were beyond vapid and wearisome and I could not wait for them to finish—but then, I also dreaded the hours when I might be forced to engage in some tedious, cloying play with my siblings or, horror of horrors, other unrelated children. University offered me no better. While other men drank and caroused I pitied them, then despised them. I bedded women and fell asleep in the midst of the act. When I decided to pursue the throne, I thought that would rouse me. But when you care for nothing, it is all too easy to manipulate and conquer—everyone else cares a great deal, and so they cannot see the board for love of their own queen. Even war barely rose above the level of mild interest, and that only when hand-to-hand combat was on the menu. Orbital tactics are just horrendously stodgy and plebeian. But then, finally, I did find something to occupy my vast attention, so starved for so long.

“In my travels, I came across a certain rumor, glittering like a sapphire in the long dull flatness of my adventures. Many of the planets I visited (or subdued or colonized or brought to heel or with whom I opened trade relations) buzzed with news of two great men who had just happened by or were soon due to arrive. I missed them, always, by a week or an hour or a moment. Constructors, magicians, Trurl and Klapaucius by name, capable of building such extraordinary machines that for a long while I thought people were having a laugh at me. But after I killed a few and they still stuck to the story, I began to pursue, not the men, but the machines. Trurl and Klapaucius (though mostly Trurl) made all our friends here, every one, from the electronic bard to the Femfatalatron to little Nikuś and even poor, stupid Milosz. Only the Boxcase Kingdom never sat on Trurl’s laboratory table. But only because the glorious constructor made one somewhat bigger. The miniature nation inside inevitably broke free, took over a small asteroid, and made of it a planet. Trurl and Klapaucius had to flee. But eventually, the asteroid civilization progressed to the point of producing their own Trurl (theirs was called Mzvier) who produced his own Boxcase Kingdom, and that I snatched up on the black market, for it is the grandchild of the wonderful Trurl. I became their greatest fan and collector of their memorabilia. And I brought it all here, to my home planet, to this plain, no-name valley where I repaired them if they’d gone non-functional, debugged them if they’d gotten their code scrambled, and set them in the loveliest museum in all the universe. Unfortunately, Trurl’s machines rather tended to explode or otherwise disintegrate after completing one or two displays of their function. I was only ever able to find these seven. And once I had? Well. A collection is only even slightly entertaining during the collecting phase of the thing. My eternal malady came roaring back with reinforcements. It is, I have come to believe, an infection common to all Kings, Presidents, Premiers, Tsars, Chairmen, Prime Ministers, and other malcontents.”

The King sat up straight and seized Maribel by the shoulders. She’d gone quite pale, and her skin felt as though some awful alarm was buzzing all over it.

“But then, I realized the truth of it all. Why Trurl and Klapaucius could do such wonders, where the molten fires in them began. They were rivals. Nemeses. They loved each other a little and hated each other a lot and all that feeling was the cauldron out of which the most heartbreaking impossibilities sprang! And never, in all my travels, in all those tales, in any anecdote or idle gossip, did I once hear of either of those immortal constructors being bored. This would be the cure to my affliction. I named you Maribel—I don’t like any names that start with N, they’re all stuffy and stale. I worked so hard at you. Even though it was trite and exhausting work, I treated you gently and showered you with love and tested your intellect and taught you the ways of my collection while keeping you innocent and happy. I called you pet names and ate and drank and slept with you though it nearly killed me to stay awake through the whole excruciating ordeal. You, Maribel, are yourself a triumph of Trurl. That’s why the animals don’t like you. You are more like Nikuś than like a numbat, a machine for my diversion, a little Boxcase Kingdom (with an excellent figure), a perfect individual universe manufactured by me, a perfect individual universe manufactured by Trurl. And now we shall clash until the end of time and mortality, a cataclysm of universes, and for millennia our story will echo louder than the names of Trurl and Klapaucius through the caverns of the stars.”

And there, in the long teeth of dusk, Maribel received a hundredth misfortune: that in all her days she had never been loved as she imagined, that she remembered no life before the King because she had had none, that all the things she thought originated within herself were instead part of some larger plan to amuse a man who made of disdain a religion. She hated him. She hated his face and his idiot eager grin. He was ugly and old and ridiculous and, if she was perfectly honest, and Maribel was always perfectly, precisely honest, boring. The clear garden of her mind clouded and clotted with strangling weeds. Vengeances complex and ornate and simple and bloody blossomed and withered one after the other after the other. Each scheme died of the King’s subtle poison: if she performed them, it was not Maribel who triumphed, only Maribel’s programming, carrying out her own dumb, innate, unthinking function, no better than Milosz with its terrible childish math.

Maribel laughed. She laughed in the face of the King and it was such a gorgeous, singsong, free and unworried laugh that the moon broke through the laws of N to finally gaze on the one valley hidden to it.

“Yes!” cried the King. “A good Nemesis should laugh in the face of fate!” But Maribel went on laughing, higher and brighter and utterly without anger. “Wait. Why are you laughing?”

“What do two and two make, my love?” said Maribel in the moonlight.

The King rolled his eyes. “Four, you flighty cow. This is not what I ordered. Skip ahead to the blood and the fire.”

Maribel shook her head. “Seven.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up. Two and two are four, you perfect moron.”

“No, darling. My dearest hope and fondest memory. Two.” She gestured at herself and at Nikuś. “And your two, Trurl and Klapaucius, make Milosz, Staszek, Josefinka, Dymek, Kasparek, Ilonka in her Boxcase World, and me. Seven. Two and two is seven. Milosz was right.” She took the King’s ugly old face in her hands and kissed it with all the desire of their first kiss, and whispered in his ear: “My heart yields dividends unseen; thou art my soul’s annuity.”

Then she snatched up her basket and ran. Maribel ran up the long, soft length of the Valley of N, and though the King chased after her, his bones groaned and his belly jellied with too many monarchical meals. You had to give Kings what they wanted, Maribel thought, or else, more often than not, they would rampage the known world and leave no survivors. As she bolted through the autumn grass and golden leaves, Maribel swung her silver ratchet like a war club, crouching and leaping up again like a nimble nyala as she unbound the bolts of Nikuś, Kasparek, Dymek, Josefinka, Staszek, and Milosz. Maribel ran and ran, through the garden of nectarine and nutmeg trees, of navy bean runners, prickly nopalitos, nightshades of every description, and leafy, spicy green nettles, up the steps of the nonagonal nunnery in the Neoclassical style, and shut the gate fast behind her while the King still tried to huff and puff his way up the path, calling her name.

But up behind the King rose a wave of furious metal. Trurl’s machines stomped, steamrolled, clattered, bulldozed through the rich earth of the Valley of N, not caring what they dug up, knocking the King into the November mud as they throttled past him toward the girl Milosz had really always thought of as its mummy even though it couldn’t let her know it. The gargantuan machines made a ring around the nonagonal nunnery. Milosz hiked up its briars of wires, piles of dials, gobs of knobs, and clumps of pumps both radial and axial like skirts and let them fall at the King’s feet, forcing him to climb and climb, just to be heard, just to stare down his collection with no breath left in him.

For a moment, nothing happened, and the King allowed himself to think that all the excitement had tired out the machines as well. Then Josefinka shot out her perfumed, pillowed arms and slammed him against the ground, moaning yes, yes, yes! Dymek unleashed several top-shelf temporary nearly probable dragons who immediately began roasting what was left of the royal hair. Kasparek spewed forth an incandescently indignant ticker tape so long that it wrapped the King like a dead Pharaoh, round and round until only his eyes bulged out and its mouth flapped free. The tape read: I hate you I hate you I hate you over and over again, thousands upon millions of times.

Staszek stared down at the pile of King beneath it. It growled:

“Wait!” screamed the King. “It isn’t supposed to be like this!”

Maribel popped up merrily behind the gate of the nonagonal nunnery. “Like what?” she said cheerfully.

“We’re meant to fight monumental battles! To chase each other around the galaxy, to exchange curses so elegant the stars rearrange themselves to write down our words in the heavens! We are Nemeses! We must strive against one another, feint and parry, burn down each other’s hearts and leave a radiant spatter-sun wake of ruin behind us!”

“That sounds like it takes a long time,” Maribel said doubtfully, stepping out of the gate. She walked over to the tape-bound King without a care in her stride and bent down to look him in the eyes. She was carrying something, but the King couldn’t move his head to see.

“Years! Decades! Centuries!” wailed the King.

Maribel smiled such a smile that little earthquakes trembled through the Valley of N under the weight of it.

“But that’s boring,” she said sweetly, and held up her hand.

A small glass boxcase rested in it, no bigger than a cigarette case. Maribel touched the lid with her finger. Inside, Ilonka stretched up her tiny hand and held it against the absolute limit of her universe. The two women nodded.

“Nikuś? Let’s make a nation.” The round little machine danced up happily beside her. “Go on. You know you want to.”

Nikuś grumbled and mumbled and rumbled. Its fabrication barrel rolled and boiled and clanked. And when the door in Nikuś’s belly opened, a set of bolts tumbled out, perfectly sized for fastening the hands and feet and assorted joints of a King into the earth of a lush valley, where he might, or might not, be visited for basic maintenance, if they could be bothered.

Maribel opened the Boxcase Kingdom. A river of diamond light and jubilant sound poured out of it and into the body of the King, and as Ilonka’s people colonized this new, impossibly vast and rather hairy royal terrain, all the machines in the Valley of N, and the natterjack toads and the nightingales and the nyala and the numbats, too, could hear the tiny, tinny sounds of millions of children laughing, and millions of grown people arguing about where best to build the first pub of the post-modern age.

THIS WAS THE first of Maribel’s fortunes: that she had neither fulfilled nor denied her primary function, and thus lived, more or less, forever with the other miraculous machines in the Valley of N, doing whatever they pleased, adding two and two, rhyming, loving, dragoning, writing, making things that start with N, watering a flourishing civilization, and, as they were all deeply and truly Trurl’s children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, nothing but grandness all the way down to the infinite depths of all possible souls, never feeling the least bit sorry for anything at all.