It was as if their maker had taken thin-rimmed carriage wheels and welded them along a centerline so that the rims fanned around a vertical axis. The woman had stared long enough to note their slow rotation, the slight shift as one rim caught the light and another gave it up. This effect was most easy to see on the odd days the moon remained in the sky well into morning. The speed of the spheres changed from time to time, and sometimes even seemed to stop. Such alterations depended on factors the woman could not begin to guess.
Well into her hundredth year in the valley, the night sky had been just stars and moon. Later, one object appeared. Then two. Eventually they extended like a bead necklace nearly a fifth of the length of the sky, smallest to largest leading to the moon, twenty-nine in all. They seemed to pull the moon across the sky, led by some invisibly massive draft animal.
Over the next five hundred years they had moved slowly to form a diamond pattern, then a cross. For a while they had floated around the moon, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther from its surface, and then they trailed it across the length of the sky. For a long time, the woman thought they had disappeared completely, until she saw the edge of one peeking out from behind the moon.
In her seven hundredth year in the valley, the two smallest spheres had fallen to the earth. The woman recalled it dimly, the fiery streaks as the objects hit the atmosphere. They arrowed in opposite directions, and so she had tracked one as it sped westward over the horizon. She waited for something to happen, and when it did not she turned to the east and witnessed a great flash of light. Hours later, the ground shook. The following day a blanket of rainless clouds rolled in, almost touching the spires of the jagged summits ringing the valley.
It grew much colder for several years, which affected the people of the valley not at all. The woman felt some sadness that she could no longer watch the sky, but she had still been young enough then to take comfort in the closeness of her children. When the clouds lifted, the objects were scattered across the night sky so that not all could be viewed at once. Over the course of a decade, they moved back toward the moon, finally taking on their original, straight arrangement.
As the brains shrunk in their skulls, the people of the valley drifted apart. The woman circled the edge of the lake alone, drinking its hallucinogenic waters regularly until the greater part of her consciousness lifted free of her body. In time her children forgot that she was their mother, and she pushed them away when they approached her. A low growl lodged deep in her chest.
Now and then even the taste of skin and bone grew sour in her mouth.
She did not put a name to it, but she thought often of dying. She watched the sky and hoped to see the objects falling, their beautiful trails of fire dissecting the sky into a giant wheel. She had no religion, no memory of Adrash, the god the other men of the world worshipped, but still it was a form of prayer—a silent, inarticulate longing for change.
‡
Jeroun spun slowly at Adrash’s back, thousands upon thousands of leagues distant. The moon, its gaze locked on the darkened world, loomed to his left, closer though by no means near.
Adrash floated before a motionless iron sphere, dwarfed by the wall of one immense rim. Its smooth surface extended in all directions. This close, its curvature could not be discerned. The eye tried and failed to see a furthest edge.
Welded onto its surface was a handle small enough for a large man to grasp with two hands.
Adrash gripped it tightly. He spread his legs, appeared to plant his feet on the nothingness of the void, and pulled. The heavy muscles of his chest and shoulders bunched with the effort, his sinewy torso turned, and slowly the handle moved forward. At the fullest extension of his arms he stepped to the left and repeated the process. In this way, he spun the sphere faster and faster. His body became a blur of frenzied movement.
Eventually, he stopped and drifted back from the wall, the rapidly
approaching edge of which had still not come into view. A comfortable ache suffused his body. Though unnecessary, the exertion had felt good. In the past he had chosen to move the spheres with his mind, but those days were over. It was unsatisfying, somehow. Now he preferred to feel the texture of the metal, the elongation and contraction of muscle tissue.
His body was that of a man, well over two yards tall and coldly beautiful, a marble statue brought to life. But for his eyes—which glowed a harsh yellow-white, lacking iris and pupil—the seamless white material of his armor sheathed him smoothly from crown to sole, hugging the curves of his powerful frame. Broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, he held himself like a professional soldier, spine straight, hands in loose fists. The features of his face were mere suggestions above the strong line of his jaw.
From a greater distance, he regarded the sphere. It had become recognizable as such despite its vast scope. Still farther out, the structure appeared delicate and airy due to the great distance between rims. A decorative bauble, a fragile ornament through which the stars burned. To the sphere’s left, a great distance away, spun its larger brother. To the right, a slightly smaller brother. The others were not yet in sight, and the pale hulking weight of the moon suddenly seemed to loom far too near, as if it were pulling the three spheres into it.
Adrash increased the speed of his retreat. Before long the entire chain of twenty-seven spheres became visible. Positioned halfway down the line, he tried to admire the precision of their placement, their carefully calculated speeds. His last adjustment had guaranteed that once every month the sun’s light would hit the spheres in a particular way, turning the Needle into a line of pale fire in Jeroun’s night sky.
Of course, he would not witness it from orbit.
He considered how few of the world’s inhabitants would notice the effect. Those who did would react by pressing their fists to their heads and praying, or by blotting out the Needle with one hand and cursing.
Both prospects depressed Adrash. Still, he resisted the urge to begin another series of adjustments.
For many hundreds of years, much of his time had been spent altering the positions and speeds of the spheres, an obsessive drive to find the perfect expression of his dissatisfaction. Finding this abstract expression, he believed, would calm him, heal the wounds in his soul. Ultimately, he had grown weary of the monumental effort and returned the spheres to their original alignment, stringing them in a line equidistant to each other, aligned to the moon’s orbit perfectly, and thus narrowing his focus.
The only adjustment he allowed himself now was rotational speed. Once, he had spun the spheres so that each revolution matched exactly for a full year. Four hundred and thirty-two revolutions per hour. One hundred and twenty million times the rims passed before his eyes without any revelation. Then he had slowed down and sped up every other sphere in increasing increments so that the fastest two were at either end and the middle one remained still.
He felt compelled to explore every permutation. Ultimately, he wasted time, distracting himself from the decision he would soon have to make.
Return to Jeroun as mankind’s redeemer, or cleanse the world of mankind forever.
‡
Unfortunately, time had only made the world’s destruction more of an inevitability. Though Adrash had successfully put off the decision for seven thousand years—first by exiling himself above Jeroun, and then by creating the Needle itself—his relationship to the people of the world had not changed.
He could not love mankind, because he saw their brilliance for the thing it was: an exquisitely frail quality that could never make up for the effects of their fear. In fact, more often than not intelligence compounded mankind’s negative tendencies. The aggressive wielded their intellects like weapons to subjugate the humble and the less gifted. Given free reign—and there was little reason to think they would not eventually achieve complete dominion—such men would bury what little virtue remained in the world.