Maribel shook her head. “Seven.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up. Two and two are four, you perfect moron.”
“No, darling. My dearest hope and fondest memory. Two.” She gestured at herself and at Nikuś. “And your two, Trurl and Klapaucius, make Milosz, Staszek, Josefinka, Dymek, Kasparek, Ilonka in her Boxcase World, and me. Seven. Two and two is seven. Milosz was right.” She took the King’s ugly old face in her hands and kissed it with all the desire of their first kiss, and whispered in his ear: “My heart yields dividends unseen; thou art my soul’s annuity.”
Then she snatched up her basket and ran. Maribel ran up the long, soft length of the Valley of N, and though the King chased after her, his bones groaned and his belly jellied with too many monarchical meals. You had to give Kings what they wanted, Maribel thought, or else, more often than not, they would rampage the known world and leave no survivors. As she bolted through the autumn grass and golden leaves, Maribel swung her silver ratchet like a war club, crouching and leaping up again like a nimble nyala as she unbound the bolts of Nikuś, Kasparek, Dymek, Josefinka, Staszek, and Milosz. Maribel ran and ran, through the garden of nectarine and nutmeg trees, of navy bean runners, prickly nopalitos, nightshades of every description, and leafy, spicy green nettles, up the steps of the nonagonal nunnery in the Neoclassical style, and shut the gate fast behind her while the King still tried to huff and puff his way up the path, calling her name.
But up behind the King rose a wave of furious metal. Trurl’s machines stomped, steamrolled, clattered, bulldozed through the rich earth of the Valley of N, not caring what they dug up, knocking the King into the November mud as they throttled past him toward the girl Milosz had really always thought of as its mummy even though it couldn’t let her know it. The gargantuan machines made a ring around the nonagonal nunnery. Milosz hiked up its briars of wires, piles of dials, gobs of knobs, and clumps of pumps both radial and axial like skirts and let them fall at the King’s feet, forcing him to climb and climb, just to be heard, just to stare down his collection with no breath left in him.
For a moment, nothing happened, and the King allowed himself to think that all the excitement had tired out the machines as well. Then Josefinka shot out her perfumed, pillowed arms and slammed him against the ground, moaning yes, yes, yes! Dymek unleashed several top-shelf temporary nearly probable dragons who immediately began roasting what was left of the royal hair. Kasparek spewed forth an incandescently indignant ticker tape so long that it wrapped the King like a dead Pharaoh, round and round until only his eyes bulged out and its mouth flapped free. The tape read: I hate you I hate you I hate you over and over again, thousands upon millions of times.
Staszek stared down at the pile of King beneath it. It growled:
“Wait!” screamed the King. “It isn’t supposed to be like this!”
Maribel popped up merrily behind the gate of the nonagonal nunnery. “Like what?” she said cheerfully.
“We’re meant to fight monumental battles! To chase each other around the galaxy, to exchange curses so elegant the stars rearrange themselves to write down our words in the heavens! We are Nemeses! We must strive against one another, feint and parry, burn down each other’s hearts and leave a radiant spatter-sun wake of ruin behind us!”
“That sounds like it takes a long time,” Maribel said doubtfully, stepping out of the gate. She walked over to the tape-bound King without a care in her stride and bent down to look him in the eyes. She was carrying something, but the King couldn’t move his head to see.
“Years! Decades! Centuries!” wailed the King.
Maribel smiled such a smile that little earthquakes trembled through the Valley of N under the weight of it.
“But that’s boring,” she said sweetly, and held up her hand.
A small glass boxcase rested in it, no bigger than a cigarette case. Maribel touched the lid with her finger. Inside, Ilonka stretched up her tiny hand and held it against the absolute limit of her universe. The two women nodded.
“Nikuś? Let’s make a nation.” The round little machine danced up happily beside her. “Go on. You know you want to.”
Nikuś grumbled and mumbled and rumbled. Its fabrication barrel rolled and boiled and clanked. And when the door in Nikuś’s belly opened, a set of bolts tumbled out, perfectly sized for fastening the hands and feet and assorted joints of a King into the earth of a lush valley, where he might, or might not, be visited for basic maintenance, if they could be bothered.
Maribel opened the Boxcase Kingdom. A river of diamond light and jubilant sound poured out of it and into the body of the King, and as Ilonka’s people colonized this new, impossibly vast and rather hairy royal terrain, all the machines in the Valley of N, and the natterjack toads and the nightingales and the nyala and the numbats, too, could hear the tiny, tinny sounds of millions of children laughing, and millions of grown people arguing about where best to build the first pub of the post-modern age.
THIS WAS THE first of Maribel’s fortunes: that she had neither fulfilled nor denied her primary function, and thus lived, more or less, forever with the other miraculous machines in the Valley of N, doing whatever they pleased, adding two and two, rhyming, loving, dragoning, writing, making things that start with N, watering a flourishing civilization, and, as they were all deeply and truly Trurl’s children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, nothing but grandness all the way down to the infinite depths of all possible souls, never feeling the least bit sorry for anything at all.
Down and Out
in R’lyeh
IN HIS HOUSE at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu farts in his sleep.
If you’re dank like me, you gibber up the Old Fuck’s brainspout, crouch in there full gargoyle on his raggedy roof, wrap your gash around the slime-lung chimney, and huff that vast and loathsome shit like the space-curdled milk of your mama’s million terror-tits. Up you get, fœtid freak-babbies of the ultradeep! The nightmare beyond time and geometry and madness has an upset tum-tum. Whiff up those gargantuan gastrointestinal fugue-bubbles! Clog down the occult emanations of the Elder God! When his antediluvian ass-bombs explode all over your needy neurons, you’ll smell the apocalyptic expanse of frozen galaxies screaming forever into a red and hungry void—and just a hint of fresh eucalyptus.
That’s all Shax and Pazuzu and my own personal self were after that night. Just a couple of eeries looking to get squamous, to swipe a little snatch of wholesome fun from the funktacular funerary fundament belonging to the Big Boss, a hit big enough to drop our brains out the bottoms of our various appendages and forget the essential, unalterable, sanity-shearing truth of our watery and unfeeling cosmos:
R’lyeh sucks.
Seriously. The heaving, putrescent streets swollen with black spores of dementation and the bilge water of a hundred billion nightmares, the crawling hallucinogenic slime choking every unreal gutter and askew alley, the tacky interdimensional shopfronts selling rubbish nobody wants, the ugly, kitschy non-Euclidean central business district brooding and moping up in your face, the noxious monoliths, the howling sepulchers, the best minds of your generation destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked dragging themselves through the gentrified neighborhoods looking for something to do, it’s all just the fucking worst. Trust me. I was born here. I was into nuclear chaos beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time before it was cool.