The Makers

Robert has been listened to her and didn't hear. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, her presence gave him a lot of pleasure, but boy, who was behind the glass in the infectious disease ward, impressed him no less, or even more: a fragile rigid boyish body, if you look closely at him, resembled a statue or deranged computer. It wasn't lifeless, but the life that was hovering in it was like a melody taped on a piano without strings. It was there, but by no means all.

"Wow," he concluded, almost gaily. "Now he's going to get a little fresh."

6. 2323rd year and after. Aia.

Aia really wanted her brother to be born on New Year's Eve. As a gift for her.And the mother had no reason to know about this.

The Maker's life was much brighter than the life of an ordinary person and much more predictable as well, beyond any dependence on age. But by this time Aia has managed to get used to the situation.

Long before Matt's birth, Aia knew that his eyes will be emerald, and his hair will be as ginger and unruly as her own. She liked his appearance: his little nose, his broad, smiling toothless mouth, just like a frog's one, and the fingers - so tender that if there, where he was swimming now, was the light, they would be transparent.

She liked to watch him grow: how he yawns in the evenings with mother, how he wakes up in the mornings, how he puckers his poppet's brows in a frown.

She knew that he already likes the melodic "Twilight", found out by Benji in the network and sent to Aia, and hates the hum of home motion detectors.

However, it goes without saying that she didn't yet know what will be his name, that he will live on Alpha only for seven years, and that all these seven years he will use to adore her like a month-old puppy adores his kind and generous host.

Like any other Maker, she got the present, but the future wasn't strictly defined for her. The invisible threads has been stretched from the present to future, but this tangle was hidden somewhere far away, beyond the horizon.

Matt was born exactly at midnight on January 1, 2323.

Wow, here is the future friend, the mate in games, Aia thought, having a lot of big ideas about what both of them would like to do in games and watched him closely from head to toe, as he was lying on the mother's arms.

And the future friend and mate in games at this time tried to understand the enormous external world that had fallen on him. His eyes already adjusted to the soft muffled light, and the consequences of the first breath sting were slightly blunted, so now he was completely captured by the desire for skin-to-skin contact. And Aia, obeying the ancient female instincts, mutely stretched out her arms to take him.

"Aia..." he smiled by his toothless mouth and opened one of the wet malachite eyes, causing an involuntary spasm in his mother's throat while she resignedly hand him over to Aia.

***

Matt was a child prodigy growing up without even realizing that. And why would he need to know that understanding result from neither the size of the brain nor belonging to a particular biological species? Why would he need to know that the neural connections in his head are packed with the most optimal way for human?

That wouldn't do any good.

He didn't see anything unusual in that he began to speak almost from birth; he never wondered why his games were unlike ordinary childish pranks. He didn't have peers, with whom he could compare himself, and Aia was so out of reach that there could be no comparison.

***

When Benji has delivered the next Maker to Alpha, it was 2326th year. At that time Aia was fourteen years old, Matt was about three.

They met at the gateway and now were sitting in the Valley, near the water: Benji, next to him Aia, then Matt, the lemurs and the cat.

Aia held a package with biscuits on her lap. Matt wasn't hungry, so he was crumbling his cookies into the grass near Aia's knees. Matt's cookies turned out to be green and crawled, and Benji, hand over fist, was picking that green pieces in the green grass up and molded it into a tiny green people and tiny green lemurs.

"Aia, Aia, give us another piece!" the lemurs cried shrilly. "We want to distinguish Matt from the cat by all the one thousand seven hundred signs, not just by eye!"

Aia took another cookie out of the package.

Lemurs instantly had broken the gift and got a mouthful of it.

"We looove you!" they'd squeezing their eyes tight shut and sang in ecstasy.

"Happy beings," Benji smiled.

"Yes," Aia agreed. "Love is not a bad feeling. I love you too, and it seems to me like happiness."

"Why me?" Benji just had molded another tiny figure, put his thin silvery hand on the grass and opened it with his palm up. Holding on to what could be called a thumb, a miniature but exact copy of the android slid down from the metal hand into the grass.

Aia lowered her palm beside his, and the tiny green Benji bravely climbed on it and let her bring him to her face.

"Because," Aia said, closely examining the tiny green features. "Don't you know a preferences are very illogical matter? But if you really need an explanation, then you speak a language that I understand. You are free and I've got a real pleasure watching you."

"When are you free?" Matt asked, as though by the way.

"You are free when you don't know what you want. Isn't it, Benji?
– Aia grinned and winked at the teensy tiny android on her palm.

"True," true Benji agreed. Now his hands were not occupied, and he almost humanly held his arms around his knees. "When you don't know what you want, you don't act. And when you don't act, the density of your servitude is minimal. And it might be okay. Because what have been happening there..." the android waved his hand toward the Earth floating high above Alpha, "...It's wrong. They are all subordinated to the mania of creation."

"As for me, I don't like such a freedom," Matt said and sighed. "Because I don't like to just sit like that. And I'd like to know what I want. "

Benji blinked and turned to Matt:"e'u kelci"*

"mi fitytu'i, "*, he agreed sadly. "What will we play?"

"Let's play verses. A little mouse named Jones has dried a little pine cones. Now it's your turn, don't forget about rhyme and rhythm."

"How rich with cones a little Jones, he's distributed them as loans. "Matt was already smiling. "Benji, let's just play the transformation?"