“I doubt that very much, Corporal.”
“You don’t understand. She didn’t care. She saw the writing on the wall and the writing said: Fuck This Place. She just wanted something to happen. We ran through all the sins first. I fucked her right away—small mercy that we are not built sexless as the angels. Lust is the easiest. I cleaned out the automat and shoved it all down her throat till cream and syrup and relish and grease poured down her chest. She puked it all up, of course, the dead can’t eat. Then on to the next like kids at a fairground—we hurled loathing and envy at each other, at the mountain, perfectly honest, more profanity than grammar could hold. I drew up a rage and beat her though no bruises came up. We skipped sloth since Nowhere is the home and hearth of sloth, and Belacqua, nothing I could do could make that woman proud. But it was all useless anyway, her flesh took it all as calmly as water. And so I had to retreat and think again.
“Solutions come so strangely, Belacqua. They steal in. Just the way you saw my scissors and knew what I’d done, your mind leaping over your habits and your inertia to arrive at a conclusion that is as much dream as logic, I knew. I knew how to kill my Pietta. I returned to her that night. I held her in my arms, and, one by one, I buried her in virtues. I gave her all my belongings freely and her nose shot blood onto the flagstones. I cradled her chastely with no thought of her body and bruises rose up on her thighs. I groveled before her and before her I was nothing, and her fingers snapped. I tended her patiently while she screamed, and upomovn carved itself into her back. I persevered, and my diligence choked her like hands. I whispered to her all the kindnesses her husband withheld, that her son, being a child, could not imagine, and the extraordinary thing was I meant them, Belacqua. I meant them with all my being. I loved her and her throat split side to side like a pomegranate. Then I shoved her out the window and watched her fall. I pushed her from this world, and all the violence on her body was but the marks of her passage. Neither virtue nor sin can be committed in this place. Nowhere cannot bear it. What they do to one another matters little enough—they have chosen their course and proceed along it, stupid and wasteful and unfair as it is. But I am neither alive nor dead, neither mortal nor immortal, just meanly made, with the barest thought. And so are you, Belacqua. The meanly made may sin—who could expect better? Sin is easy. But for me—for us—to act with virtue is a violence to the whole of existence. And now she is gone and my questions answered. Nothing happened. I was not punished. I was not even found out. I am not morally culpable, because He will not deign to look at me long enough to condemn. When an angel does wrong, Hell must be invented out of whole cloth to contain his sorry carcass. But we? We are nothing, and no one. And I think it is beautiful.”
Fifteenth Terrace: The Forgetful
There is a grinding sound before she appears, like stone against stone. One moment there is nothing, the next there is Pietta, though if she heard that name now, she would not recognize it, nor even comprehend the idea of a word used to signify a person. Her mind is a silver fruit lying clean and open, without seed or rot or juice. She opens her eyes and her eyes are black, black and several, ringed round her skull like a crown so that she sees everywhere at once. She moves her legs and her legs are powerful, shaggy, heavy with silver, braided, matted fur. Her claws and her tusks scrape on the bedrock beneath the mudplain as she moves with the sleuth of other bears, because nothing in this place has ever happened only once, their ursine sounds and their scents stretching before them toward the city they love but no longer understand, except that it is a warm place in the night, a heart beating in a bloodless land, and when they touch the walls, they remember, faintly, distantly, the feeling of being loved.
Sixteenth Terrace: The Unyielding
Detective Inspector Belacqua gave the signal, and every window in Nowhere closed against the man with the raven’s head. Tomek’s caws and cries far below echoed the length of everything, his pleas, his reasons, all of it swallowed by the grey clouds and the long nothing-and-no-one of the endless mudplain and the red stars beyond. The mountain, for a moment, stood silent, all the lights still and dim.
Belacqua wept against the shutters, and he wept for a century before opening them again.
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.