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id you ask Nikus 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 sekacz 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, Nikus. 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 Nikus 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.”
The King clapped his hands like a child. His cheeks glowed red in the brisk autumn air. “Yes! Don’t you see, that’s the brilliance of our nattering, nervy little Nikus. An enemy is capable of cost/benefit analysis. Of considering return on investment and expenditures both personal and practical, of tactical retreats and tactical dropping-the-whole-thing-life-is-too-short-by-God. But a Nemesis, a real, proper Nemesis, will never stop, never give in, never find the whole thing tiresome and forget how it all started in the first place. Because a Nemesis always starts out loving you. Or at least admiring you. You can’t get into the real meat of hatred and eternal enmity without love and betrayal, without that, it’s just an argument with occasional gun music. The good stuff, the all-obliterating all-annihilating one-for-the-novels mano-a-mano crackling on the pork roast, that has to come, as the hermits will tell you, from attachment.”
“Why would you want such a thing?” Maribel whispered, touching the notch in her throat, where the King had last kissed her.
The King put a long, seedy stalk of grass between his teeth and lay back against a flat rock, stretching his legs.
“Well, I’ll tell you. I was born with a terrible affliction. An infection in the womb, perhaps. Something my mother ate? Something my father did? Some invisible germ carried by a flea riding its war-rat triumphantly into the birthing room. I have always suffered an inflammation of boredom. I have never in all my life found anything to be much better than nothing at all. At best, for a moment or two, when I was young, I thought certain activities, such as becoming King, to be, temporarily, somewhat diverting. To nurse at my mother’s breast was insipid, to babble adorably insufferable, to crawl and toddle and walk a necessary drudgery. Lessons were beyond vapid and wearisome and I could not wait for them to finish—but then, I also dreaded the hours when I might be forced to engage in some tedious, cloying play with my siblings or, horror of horrors, other unrelated children. University offered me no better. While other men drank and caroused I pitied them, then despised them. I bedded women and fell asleep in the midst of the act. When I decided to pursue the throne, I thought that would rouse me. But when you care for nothing, it is all too easy to manipulate and conquer—everyone else cares a great deal, and so they cannot see the board for love of their own queen. Even war barely rose above the level of mild interest, and that only when hand-to-hand combat was on the menu. Orbital tactics are just horrendously stodgy and plebeian. But then, finally, I did find something to occupy my vast attention, so starved for so long.
“In my travels, I came across a certain rumor, glittering like a sapphire in the long dull flatness of my adventures. Many of the planets I visited (or subdued or colonized or brought to heel or with whom I opened trade relations) buzzed with news of two great men who had just happened by or were soon due to arrive. I missed them, always, by a week or an hour or a moment. Constructors, magicians, Trurl and Klapaucius by name, capable of building such extraordinary machines that for a long while I thought people were having a laugh at me. But after I killed a few and they still stuck to the story, I began to pursue, not the men, but the machines. Trurl and Klapaucius (though mostly Trurl) made all our friends here, every one, from the electronic bard to the Femfatalatron to little Nikus and even poor, stupid Milosz. Only the Boxcase Kingdom never sat on Trurl’s laboratory table. But only because the glorious constructor made one somewhat bigger. The miniature nation inside inevitably broke free, took over a small asteroid, and made of it a planet. Trurl and Klapaucius had to flee. But eventually, the asteroid civilization progressed to the point of producing their own Trurl (theirs was called Mzvier) who produced his own Boxcase Kingdom, and that I snatched up on the black market, for it is the grandchild of the wonderful Trurl. I became their greatest fan and collector of their memorabilia. And I brought it all here, to my home planet, to this plain, no-name valley where I repaired them if they’d gone non-functional, debugged them if they’d gotten their code scrambled, and set them in the loveliest museum in all the universe. Unfortunately, Trurl’s machines rather tended to explode or otherwise disintegrate after completing one or two displays of their function. I was only ever able to find these seven. And once I had? Well. A collection is only even slightly entertaining during the collecting phase of the thing. My eternal malady came roaring back with reinforcements. It is, I have come to believe, an infection common to all Kings, Presidents, Premiers, Tsars, Chairmen, Prime Ministers, and other malcontents.”
The King sat up straight and seized Maribel by the shoulders. She’d gone quite pale, and her skin felt as though some awful alarm was buzzing all over it.
“But then, I realized the truth of it all. Why Trurl and Klapaucius could do such wonders, where the molten fires in them began. They were rivals. Nemeses. They loved each other a little and hated each other a lot and all that feeling was the cauldron out of which the most heartbreaking impossibilities sprang! And never, in all my travels, in all those tales, in any anecdote or idle gossip, did I once hear of either of those immortal constructors being bored. This would be the cure to my affliction. I named you Maribel—I don’t like any names that start with N, they’re all stuffy and stale. I worked so hard at you. Even though it was trite and exhausting work, I treated you gently and showered you with love and tested your intellect and taught you the ways of my collection while keeping you innocent and happy. I called you pet names and ate and drank and slept with you though it nearly killed me to stay awake through the whole excruciating ordeal. You, Maribel, are yourself a triumph of Trurl. That’s why the animals don’t like you. You are more like Nikus than like a numbat, a machine for my diversion, a little Boxcase Kingdom (with an excellent figure), a perfect individual universe manufactured by me, a perfect individual universe manufactured by Trurl. And now we shall clash until the end of time and mortality, a
cataclysm of universes, and for millennia our story will echo louder than the names of Trurl and Klapaucius through the caverns of the stars.”
And there, in the long teeth of dusk, Maribel received a hundredth misfortune: that in all her days she had never been loved as she imagined, that she remembered no life before the King because she had had none, that all the things she thought originated within herself were instead part of some larger plan to amuse a man who made of disdain a religion. She hated him. She hated his face and his idiot eager grin. He was ugly and old and ridiculous and, if she was perfectly honest, and Maribel was always perfectly, precisely honest, boring. The clear garden of her mind clouded and clotted with strangling weeds. Vengeances complex and ornate and simple and bloody blossomed and withered one after the other after the other. Each scheme died of the King’s subtle poison: if she performed them, it was not Maribel who triumphed, only Maribel’s programming, carrying out her own dumb, innate, unthinking function, no better than Milosz with its terrible childish math.
Maribel laughed. She laughed in the face of the King and it was such a gorgeous, singsong, free and unworried laugh that the moon broke through the laws of N to finally gaze on the one valley hidden to it.
“Yes!” cried the King. “A good Nemesis should laugh in the face of fate!” But Maribel went on laughing, higher and brighter and utterly without anger. “Wait. Why are you laughing?”
“What do two and two make, my love?” said Maribel in the moonlight.
The King rolled his eyes. “Four, you flighty cow. This is not what I ordered. Skip ahead to the blood and the fire.”
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 Nikus. “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 Nikus, 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:
You are a bad man.
And you should feel bad.
“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!”
