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.
How do I love thee? Let me now appraise.
My love for thee is gross, not net, and backed
By steady bonds. My heart yields dividends
Unseen; thou art my soul’s annuity.
I love thy well-assembled dossiers
Thy modest debt, thy fair contracts.
I love thee dearly, let our flesh transact!
I love thee justly as a loan repaid.
My love for thee is royally assessed
Year by year, with compoundi
ng equity.
I love thee with a love I oft suppress
Like laundered funds or unreported splits.
And, with some discrepancies addressed
I shall love thee better after audit.
“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.