“Good evening, Nikuś, 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 Nikuś. 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 Nikuś 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 Nikuś, the King never came again. Nikuś was the last thing they ever touched together.
“Nikuś’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 Nikuś of your needs.”
Maribel laid her head against Nikuś’ 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 Nikuś, pouting.
“It’s only that you’ve given me so much, I cannot think of anything big to want anymore.”
“By nature, Nikuś 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 Nikuś’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 Nikuś 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 Nikuś, 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.
“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.