The Makers (СИ)

"Look down!" she shouted.

"The Valley..." gasped Matt.

While Aia was carrying him lower and lower, the water in the low part was rising, hunching, growing up in a fanciful blue fringe, and by the time when Matt's feet touched the ground, in place of the Valley there were gigantic water jungles: a colossal "trees" with flowing transparent trunks, transparent blossom and transparent thin leaves, interwoven with them and with each other liana streams, trembling underbrush.

All that what until recently were quietly and serenely floating somewhere in the Valley, was now fussy and loud shifting up and down inside of this unfathomably fantastic forest, flashing scales and fleetingly flicking its paws. And below all this in the muddy-green "grass", in color and texture very reminiscent of perennial bottom sediments, rustled those very small white animals with icy fur.

"Do you hear?" Aia quietly asked, carefully putting Matt on the ground, and Matt has really heard that somewhere near him the lemurs started singing.

"Look! Look! Water forest will remain here forever!" one of them sang enthusiastically.

"You are the foolish, foolish lemur!" outraged another one. "Humans have nothing forever!"

Aia waved her hand and raised an eyebrow: so we go?

Go, he nodded willingly.

She stepped aside, giving way to him, and behind her he noticed a path, running deep in the water forest. The path was narrow, with tiny icy flowers, glistening thickly on both sides of it in the pointy gray-green grass. Matt listened and went toward the almost hushed, subtled lemure song that still could be heard.

When Matt and Aia went out into the clearing, the lemurs were sitting by the bush, overhead there dangled a large water balls, the setting sun reflected in this balls, and inside of them swam a numerous dragonfly larvae swam.

"Chillllly..." sadly complained one of the lemurs.

His head with a white triangular spot on his forehead was lifted towards the sun, he squeezed his eyes shut and tightly pressed a long striped tail to his chest.

"But beauuuutiful..." another one comforted him.

"Hey, katta!" Aia called to them. "What are you doing here in the middle of this puddle?"

"Aia! Aia!" both lemurs jumped as the one black-and-white lump from surprise. And then they hopped over to meet them and shouted, competing with one another:

"We saw the Valley makes a forest! We ran to look!"

"We didn't see you on the bank! But there was another Maker there!"

"Another?" Matt was surprised.

"Other! Other!" the lemurs nodded happily. "We'll show! We'll!"

Matt glanced at his sister, and she nodded: "Run, run," then she smiled, took a backpack from behind her back, took out from it a transparent jar full of small scintillant sparks that moved and poked into the glass and then poured them in front of her on the ground.

The sparks broke out even brighter, spun over the path like a flock of frightened moths, and flew forward, outrunning Matt with lemurs and lighting their way.

The other was Lukasz.

He was sitting on a top of hill, where the bank of the Valley was still half an hour ago, and looking at what Aia was doing. Not interfering and, in general, not even wondering.

For three hundred years he's lived among his own kind, and now he was philosophically looking at the fluidity of the world. A long time ago he outgrew such childishness: both his daughters and both grandsons became adults a long time ago too, and he more and more often wanted to be the cause of stability, and not changes.

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.