The Makers

However, he liked to observe the other one was involved in something.

During those three hundred years that have become his personal experience, Alpha has undergone thousands and thousands of metamorphoses activated by Makers. Ever the main generator of miracles was Robert, who in his childhood first tried to turn Alpha into an interstellar ship, then into the Peruvian Selva. Then, when Robert has already a little lost his boyish craving for savagery and mystery, there, on Alpha, were already women and children, and the changes began to occur mainly for their sake.

Lukasz, for the most part, now had been observing.

This evening he came to the hill, because he liked Aia.

At times he looked at her face and saw in it himself, at times - his already grown-up daughter, at times she seemed to him just a collective image of femininity and immediacy.

As a Maker, Lukasz was radically different from the average man: he saw this femininity not as a resource to be used, but as a magical song wishing to be written.

For already several years, he had been witnessing Benji, without knowing it, had been creating his magic song from Aia. Sometimes - actively, sometimes - by the lack and silence.

Lukasz simultaneously frightened and admired this explosive mixture of the strange alien machine, that Aia wanted to resemble, and the Maker that she was, boiling first in a little girl, and then in a beautiful ginger-haired girl.

Unlike the Aia's parents, who were admirable, but still ordinary parents, Lukasz knew from his own experience: from that very magical moment when a Human wakes up in a human, the rest of mankind becomes alien to him - about the same results as a river bottom becomes alien to the dragonfly, hatching from a chrysalis.

He saw Aia'd been pouring a longing for the lost umbilical cord with humanity on his brother, re-repeating the path, which each of the Makers somehow passed in their time, and sympathized with it.

Matt was Aia's bottom, with which she could not part.

As soon as the boy in the cloud of flickering sparks appeared at the foot of the hill, Lukasz raised his hand and threw the emptiness in his direction.

The emptiness hissed, sprouted in the heavy prickly bright red drops and fell down with tinkling sounds, turning into a sparkling red lane.

The lemurs screamed in fright, jumped from the tinkling "rain" in different directions, and Matt almost immediately felt that the path, on which he was, gently warmed his frozen wet feet. And went on it further.

The lemurs hesitated. They meowed for a long time in the dark, sniffing red and gently tugging it with thin cold paws, and then had stopped being afraid and trotted after Matt.

The red lane ended at the very top.

"Hi," the darkness said in Lukasz's voice.

"Hi," the boy said.

Looking more closely, he saw in the darkness the smiling face of the Maker.

"How are you doing this?" he asked, sitting down next to Lukasz directly on the warm ground.

White Aia's sparks circled around for a while and also fell.

"Give me your hand."

Matt stretched out his hand, and Lukasz took it, small, into his, large, and slightly shook, scattering in the air exactly the same thick red sparks.

"Wow!" Matt was delighted. "Can I do it myself?

"Shoot," Lukasz agreed.

The boy stirred his own hand, and from his fingers also fell a red drops.

By the time Aia appeared at the top of the hill, Matt, laughing, had dripped in front of the overwhelmed lemurs a whole pile of sparkling red magic.

"Just think!" remarked Lukasz to Aia, who crouched beside him. "Sometimes it takes so little to make him happy."

Yes, Aia nodded wearily, sometimes so little, took off her sandals and prosaically buried her bare, frozen feet in the miracle created by Matt:

"And as for me in order for my soul to shut up, there is not enough height and temperature."

"It's a bad barometer," Lukasz grinned. "How can that be happiness when the soul is silent?"

"Maybe so," agreed Aia. "I mean maybe it's not. But it just asking all the time for something wrong."

"Asking for what wrong?" said Matt, who had been silent before.

"Some food for the mind, some replication, some mismatch."

"So you mean that a happy soul is dumb, blind and lonely?" Lukasz raised one eyebrow.

"I'm not so sure about that." Aia pocked the warm red "beads" with her foot, and they turned white, illuminating their faces with a ghostly blue light. "Not dumb, but satisfied, not blind and lonely, but self-sufficient."

"It's strange," Matt said. "I always believed that all Makers think alike."

"Really? Why is that?" turning to him, in chorus resented both Makers. "Only those who don't think at all think the same."

"That's like that," the boy laughed, and the darkness echoed his laughter.

All three raised their heads, peering into the darkness.

"Well, it looks like a real coven," the darkness continued, shifting heavily round about somewhere ahead, or behind the back.

"Robert!" Matt gasped.

Lukasz and Aia exchanged glances.

"Yes, it's me," said the big black-and-gray-haired wolf, stepping out of the shadows to the glittering white pile. His fur was wet and smelled like snowstorm and frost. "I heard you have here a joint session about self-sufficiency and loneliness."

The wolf grinned broadly, his white-toothed smile stretched across his muzzle, and from this purely human smile from the top down has fluctuated the wave of transformation. Not at all embarrassed by his former wolfish, and now human nudity, Robert put his hand forward, showing "wait, give me a break", and, like a real wolf, he shrugged his shoulders, shaking water from them, and then winked at the others with the rustle of the appearing clothing:

"Well, let's continue about loneliness? Who will find at least one argument for the fact that we here in isolation from humanity are terribly alone, for half an hour will deserve my respect. Well, to make it more interesting to play, I"ll allow my Mora not to be interested in this person."