“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.
“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.
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 Nikuś. All the things in the Valley of N owed their existence to Nikuś, who was so good at its primary function that it could not stop if it wanted to. Before the arrival of Nikuś, 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 Nikuś to join his other treasures, everything changed, for Nikuś 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 Nikuś all together lay under a summer sun and invented the Valley of N between them. Nikuś 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.