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.
“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.