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:
My master lit a candle in the long midwinter’s past
Now summer comes and all the fields are burning black and fast.
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 d
id 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.”