The Future Is Blue

“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 Nikus 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 Nikus, sweet Nikus 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 Nikus 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.”

“Nikus’s nattering is nice,” sniffed Nikus. A terrible crunching, grinding, shearing noise echoed from somewhere deep in its fabrication barrel. Its neurotransmitter array snapped and popped with electricity. Finally, Nikus said quietly: “I have done as you asked. Are you happy?”

“We shall see,” answered the King.

“What d