How Dark the World Becomes by Frank Chadwick

course of action and had to see it through—too many people’s lives depended on it. After that, who knew? 
    It was the sight of the Needle that finally cleared my mind. 
    I’d seen Needles a half-dozen times, but I never got over the sight. Marfoglia was blasé , of course—the jaded traveler who’s seen it all before—but the two kids and I couldn’t take our eyes off it. 
    “Barraki, how many Needles have you ridden?” I asked. 
    He screwed his face up thinking, ears up and alert, and started ticking them off on his long fingers.
    “Akaampta, Hazz’Akatu, Peezgtaan, Zissiwaa . . . mmm . . . and Tu’up! Yes. Those five, but I was very young when we visited Tu’up. I do not remember it very well. How many Needles have you ridden, Sasha?”
    “Just two: this one and Nishtaaka.”
    “How many for you, Boti-Marr?” Barraki asked. 
    Boti-Marr , Aunt Marrissa, turned and smiled at him. It was one of those smiles that looked like she’d gone to school to learn how to do it—like she could smile that way even with a mouth full of sewage. I don’t know about you, but I always get a warm, fuzzy feeling when someone smiles at me and I know they’re at least as happy to see me as they would be to have a mouth full of sewage.
    “I was just thinking about that,” Marfoglia answered. “I’ve been on both of Earth’s Needles, of course, since I’m from Earth. I’ve been up and down the Needle on Bronstein’s World, the one here at Peezgtaan, Akaampta, Sha-shaa, and Eeee-ktaa. Now, which Needle on Hazz’Akatu did you ride? The Old Tower or the Merchant Gate?”
    “Only the Merchant Gate,” Barraki answered. 
    “I’ve heard that’s the better one,” she said. “The Tower is slower, and the compartments aren’t nearly as nice.” 
    I had a feeling that any compartment the e-Traak rode in would be pretty nice. 
    The maglev ride from Crack City to Needledown had taken most of the afternoon, even at a couple hundred klicks an hour through the near-vacuum on the surface. The Needle’s at the equator—has to be—and the Crack’s, you know, where it is, so there’s no way to get the two any closer together. 
    By now we had a pretty spectacular view of the base of the Needle, only a couple kilometers away, with Prime setting to our left and casting impossibly long shadows across the dusty, barren rock flats that some long-dead Varoki snake-oil salesman had named the Sea of Welcome. The Needle glowed yellow-orange in the setting sun, a sparkling, impossibly thin thread stretching up to the heavens. Well, we could see it from a few kilometers away, so maybe not thin in an absolute sense, but compared to its length . . . 
    The massive laser domes to either side were visible as well, also glowing yellow-orange in the twilight. With no significant surface atmosphere to diffuse the light, sunset meant almost immediate darkness. When Prime disappeared below the horizon, the Needle stopped glowing at its base and disappeared, the darkness then shooting up its length, as if the Needle were a fuse to a celestial bomb, burning out before our eyes.
    “Oooo!” I heard little Tweezaa say, and I nodded in agreement. 
    Oooo.
    Mr. Hlontaa said something to Barraki in aGavoosh, Barraki answered fairly sharply, and Hlontaa actually bowed a little and said, “I beg your pardon. I forgot. I was just saying that the structures at the base of the Needle are gigawatt-range optic lasers.”
    I smiled to myself. Hlontaa and his spouse were our Varoki compartment mates on the maglev, and once he’d found out that Barraki and Tweezaa were traveling with Human “servants,” he’d started fawning over them. He was one of those guys with lots of opinions and no hesitation about sharing them with you. Out of politeness to me, Barraki made him say everything in English, as well as aGavoosh for Tweezaa.
    Earlier, he’d shared some of his theories about Humans. He was very fond of us Humans, he’d assured us. He’d said