The giant cog floated in the sky, just as it had all of Michl's life. A dark shape, it was plainly visible on cloudless days. It hung in place, motionless as far as he could tell--it was as though tremendous invisible steel cables held it there.

He supposed it could move slightly. He wondered about this, in fact. Seeing as how it was several thousand feet above the ground, it was impossible to say for certain if wind and the elements ever disturbed it.

He had tried to use what mathematics he knew to try and judge the object's size. A village elder had taught him some basic equations and a given him a crude tool the man had called an aer that would help him judge distance. He was sure his numbers were the roughest of guesstimations, but he put the object at somewhere between three and four furlongs across.

It had fascinated Michl all his short life. His mother told him that even as an infant, he seemed to watch the cog hang there, though the elders told her that was impossible--children didn't see across distances like that when they were that young. And now, after work in the fields was done, he would stand and stare, the wind blowing back through his coppery blond hair.

What was it?

He was the only one, though. Even his best friend, Rog, lost interest when girls ceased to frighten them. "I see you," Rog would tell him, "eyeing that giant hole there in the center of it. I hates to tell you, but you're not big enough. There's holes plenty enough here on the ground that would welcome you in and are just the right size. Prettier, too. And sweeter. But that's one you'll never get to, Mich. Give it up."

But he couldn't. He simply couldn't.

The man who speared the water tigers told him that it was the only piece left of a floating factory that his grandfather had worked in.

His wife, sitting on the shore skinning the speared tigers, had said he was full of shite. The piece had fallen there and no further two generations before the man's grandfather "had poked his head out his mother's scrumpt." It was from a machine the giants used to move about the stars, she said, and because had failed them and fallen away, the machine and their massive corpses were stuck there beyond the sky.

The village elder who had given him the aer said that thousands of years ago, man had tried to build a tower that would enable them to meet the Maker in the sky. Some versions of the legend said that the Maker had cast down the tower and stricken the men with the weak seed so that they could not procreate at the scale they once did, and thus not have the numbers needed to build another such massive structure. Others said that the cog was part of a device the Maker had simply thrown down onto them, destroying the tower where it stood and all the men involved.

Michl was only fifteen summers, but even he had the sense that in one of these legends there might be a grain of truth which could lead him to the knowledge he sought.

He took every chance he could to get to the area directly beneath the cog, to see if there was some way of ascending to it. There was nothing. No grand ruins, just the Blasts, where the vegetation and rocks worked together to make the ground unfarmable if not impassable.

He was wondering if it was a fool's errand, trying to find out anything but what had already been told him. Perhaps, he thought, he should make up his own legend--one good enough to believe--and then convince himself of it so he could perhaps take Rog's advice. He could then begin the slow, tedious process of plowing a girl to bring her to good seed. The village always needed more men born, but some men never succeeded in bringing a girl to bad seed, much less good. And they tried their whole lives.

Michl felt himself growing no younger.

One day, while tending the fields, he took his spade and shoved it into the ground, then walked over to the water bucket to slake his thirst. When he turned around to look at the spade, the wooden handle sticking straight up, something in his mind clicked. Almost like a cog's teeth finding the right purchase and beginning to turn.

If there had been a tower, he thought, beneath where the cog stood, it couldn't have been thin like the handle. It would have needed a base of some sort to let it stand upright. An immensely wide base, if the legends were true and they were trying to build straight up and out of the sky to reach the Maker.

He would have to widen his search.

He drank down another cupful of water and left the fields, heedless of his mother's calls, and ran nearly all the way to the area beneath the cog. He had tramped through the area directly beneath it to know when he had reached the outskirts of it, even without looking up. Shirt sticking to his back, breath coming in rasps, he began to search up and outwards from the perimeter of his usual area. He climbed up small copses, fought his way through undergrowth, and within hours had accumulated a small trove of cuts and bruises for his troubles.

When night came, he abandoned his search and caught sleep in the lower branches of a petrified tree.

The next day greeted him with rain, which was welcome enough at the beginning, but as it made the ground even more treacherous to traverse, he was soon cursing under his breath at each time the mud and vegetation conspired to rid him of his moccasins.

He was about ready to call it off and come back another time with more supplies, maybe a tarp, and better shoes, when he walked right into something hard and flat which came within a hair's breadth of smacking into his manhood. He cleared away the dead growth covering it until he could clearly and unmistakably make out what was hidden beneath.

It was a chair. It looked even more ancient than the tree that had served as his bed the night previous, but it was manmade all the same. And it was a chair. When he cleared it off enough to sit sideways, he realized that directly in front of this was a table, in much the same state of disrepair.

He sat there and looked up. Before him, though still out of reach, was the cog.

He wasn't sure why, but this had to mean something. This couldn't have been a place just for the ancients to sit and eat popwiches while admiring the view of the cog.

Michl cleared the area out so that he could swing his legs under the table and did so, the result being that his head was nearly torn from his neck by the force at which he found himself propelled upwards.

A platform had torn itself free from the muck and growth and supported the table, chair and Michl as they soared towards the cog at a blinding rate of speed. He gripped the sides of the table and gritted his teeth, his hair flying around him as he braced for what he was sure would be a very sudden and very fatal stop.

It was actually nothing of the sort. Though the platform came to an abrupt stop, it was as though they had never started moving in the first place. The entirety of the flying machine snapped into place quietly and calmly, the lack of sudden stop almost as devastating to Michl as a crash would have been.

He sat, still gripping the table and panting. He very quickly realized that the cog was hollow. Roof above him, floor below him...and a wide open space that appeared to stretch the extent of the cog's vast size.

The man's voice should have startled him, but didn't.

"Michl, excellent, you're finally here."

Michl looked up to see a very dark man standing before him. Which was odd to think of him as dark since he was the palest man the boy had ever seen. It was just that everything about his clothes and demeanor seemed dark.

"It's sort of like stepping off a moving escalator there at the end, isn't it?"

Michl frowned and got up from the table. "What's an es-clator?"

The man laughed and shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Forgive me. I always forget my audience. I'm so glad you've arrived. Now I can get started."

"Are you...the Maker?" Michl asked him his mouth suddenly seeming very dry.

"'The Maker?'" the man asked. "That's the word they're using below for 'God,' is it? How cute. No, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I'm not God in the least."

The man began to walk into the interior of the cog, and Michl could do nothing but follow. The platform fell silently away behind him, but he could not do anything about that now. He had to know more.

Michl shook his head. Whatever he had expected, in the wildest dreams where he reached the cog, it was not to encounter a man who made little, if any, sense. "Did you make this, though? The cog?"

"Cog? Ah yes, that makes sense. I always think of it as a gear. Tomayto, tomahto." He waved those words, whatever they were, away. "No. There's very little one can make, to be truthful. One finds a bit here, a piece there, and makes do the best they can. I think it was once a decorative piece on a space elevator that sat here long before your ancestors blew their balls to shit with atomic warfare."

Michl shook his head again. All of these words meant nothing. The cog was an ornament that had probably never turned? This made no sense. "But what are you here for? And why were you waiting for me? Who are you?"

The man came to a stop in an area with a hole you could walk over but still see through. Michl realized what it was and did not dare look down. "What am I here for? Ah, but we could spend hours philosophizing about that, couldn't we, my young friend? You serve a purpose, you fulfill a need, but it's a need that I have set upon you. I am unique in that I have no purpose. I fulfill no need. I was quite upset about this for a while, but decided to simply create my own purpose and need.

"This is here because when they all come looking for me, I wanted something in the last place anyone would think to look: a backwater world dying for lack of good old hard-working sperm. Who would put anything important there?

"I was waiting for you because I needed someone I knew I could count on.

"And as for who I am...why, that would be telling, wouldn't it?"

The man smiled and gave a bow. "Now, I must away. Wait here. You'll know what to do when the time comes."

"You're leaving?" Michl said, looking about. Perhaps the not-hole was another platform that moved. But the man wasn't standing anywhere near to where he could make use of it. "How are you leaving?"

The man smiled. "When you know what all of this is, you don't need doors." And with that, he appeared to step between everything that was there, and everything that was not there at all. He appeared to be stepping away, for lack of a better word.

"Wait!" Michl called. "What are you going to make with it?"

"The gear?" The man smiled. A strange, unnatural half-smile. "My dear boy, who ever said I was going to make anything with it?"

And with that, the man finished his step and was gone.

Michl looked around the seeming emptiness of the inside of the cog. He wrapped his arms around himself, feeling suddenly very good. He asked, "How do I get down?"

But, of course, he already knew the answer.