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 Nikuś 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:
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 Nikuś, sweet Nikuś 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 Nikuś 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.”
“Nikuś’s nattering is nice,” sniffed Nikuś. A terrible crunching, grinding, shearing noise echoed from somewhere deep in its fabrication barrel. Its neurotransmitter array snapped and popped with electricity. Finally, Nikuś said quietly: “I have done as you asked. Are you happy?”
“We shall see,” answered the King.
“What did you ask Nikuś for?” said Maribel. Her face turned toward his like a narcissus flower beneath the dark, soft eyes of a hungry nyala. “I thought I knew everything you told him to make. I thought I’d touched, held, weeded, drank, tidied, lain in it all, in the world we alliterated into being. I thought I was there for every new N.”
“Not at all, my little sękacz cake. How extraordinary! Did you think there was no world for me before you? A King does not spring from nowhere like a mushroom overnight. If this is the final flowering of her interstellar intellect, I must say I am disappointed with you, Nikuś. Maribel, light of my life, I asked this little miracle-factory for the one thing I could not find anywhere else, no matter how I combed the cosmos. The one thing that failed to find me, no matter how often I thought I had at last stumbled upon something worthy of the title. The one thing that could give my soul shape and form, a whetstone to lay the axe of my mind and my ambition against. I have waited months against years against decades and now I am an old man, but I learned to be patient. I learned to understand that greatness is never quick. I trained and practiced against my lessers. I completed my conquering of this modest world. I am ready now, and so is the object of my desire. No narrative is not nirvana to me.”
The King smiled. It was the smile Maribel had dreamed of over ten thousand nights, ten thousand glasses of negus, ten thousand bowls of navarin, ten thousand poems, ten thousand answers to the riddle of what two and two make. But beneath that smile, like a horse beneath a rider, lay another smile, the smile of a carnivore and a starveling, and this was the King’s true smile, the smile of all Kings. He stroked her face and whispered lovingly:
“I asked Nikuś for a Nemesis. You know, it sat there for a week, dumbly baking the bun of my destiny in its filthy little womb, as if a mortal man has nothing but time. This was, naturally, before I learned to be patient. It is an impossible feat for a young King. But on the seventh day its gullet opened and you stepped out, as innocent as a saucer of milk, with nothing at all in your head but nectarine blossoms and nutmeg perfume and devotion.”
Maribel narrowed her eyes. “I am not your Nemesis, my Lord. I love you. I have always loved you.”