The Future Is Blue

“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.