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 Nikus. All the things in the Valley of N owed their existence to Nikus, who was so good at its primary function that it could not stop if it wanted to. Before the arrival of Nikus, 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 Nikus to join his other treasures, everything changed, for Nikus 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 Nikus all together lay under a summer sun and invented the Valley of N between them. Nikus 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, Nikus, 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 Nikus. 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 Nikus 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 Nikus, the King never came again. Nikus was the last thing they ever touched together.
“Nikus’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 Nikus of your needs.”
Maribel laid her head against Nikus’ 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 Nikus, pouting.
“It’s only that you’ve given me so much, I cannot think of anything big to want anymore.”
“By nature, Nikus 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 Nikus’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 Nikus 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 Nikus, 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.