The Makers (СИ)

Benji looked up at her silently.

"Stop it, Benji. No one of us is to blame for the fact that the world is as it is."

"I don't blame anyone." He reached out and covered Aia's palm with his silvery palm. "It's just recently that it strangely struck me to watch myself: you are too crucial for me, and I'm not sure that it's right."

"It's hard to surprise the one who knows everything in advance," Aia chuckled bitterly. "I know more: I also know that you are not sure about the opposite."

Yes, nodded android, not sure.

"Do you want a piece of advice?"

Yes, he nodded.

"I think that such a layout - what is right and what is wrong - matters only in the context of goal-setting. Let's say you need to get from Paris to Stuttgart. If you took off and took to the east, you are approaching the goal, and, therefore, did the right thing. If the other way..."

"Mm-hmm... I got it," Benji nodded. "If at first sudo rm-rf, and then defragmentation, it's not very correct. Although..."

He suddenly reached for Aia's shoulders, gently turned her toward his face and kissed her so humanly as he could, whispering to the girl's little ear:

"Although in the reverse order, in my opinion, it's also wrong."

"Benji!" Aia gasped.

"I knew you'd like it."

24. 2330th year. The Earth.

In August, Matt caught a cold for the first time in his life.

By that time it had been exactly two weeks since Benji left four of them in Prague's Ruzyne.

For these two weeks, Matt has already relatively used to living on the Earth. He managed to get used to the fact that the houses and their inhabitants aren't quite as he imagined. He managed to get used to the skyscrapers, to people, to the wind, to the strong smell of flowers in the Prokop valley, to the sky - the blue, then the orange, in which the inexhaustible rivers of aircars were constantly flowing, and to the clouds crossing the sky.

The adults - Lukasz and parents of Matt - all this time, almost never stayed at home, constantly went to somewhere: the meetings, negotiations, seminars, congresses, conferences, and on those rare days when they were at home after all, the house was full of strangers.

Matt occasionally was messed around them as a little useless toy - he was not concerned with the international law, politics, and ideology. All of its "diplomatic" functions had been focused on being visible to others and watching others.

On that morning the birds sang like crazy: opposite the window, on a thin poplar branch, in the bright colors of the August dawn, the young sparrows chirped - hungry and hollow.

Matt opened his eyes and immediately shut them again: the sun that flooded his small bedroom was so bright that it hurt to look.

For about five minutes he lay thus, delighted by the chattering of birds and the noise of a big city, until he remembered that in this evening their family has to pass another foolish reception.

Over the past fortnight he was bored with all these receptions - in the daytime, in the evening, the seating chart and without seating chart, with the possibility of making contacts or without it, solemn and not so much, strengthening and expanding the connections, influencing the local authorities. Bored stiff.

By and large he didn't care about the generally accepted rules and protocol formalities that had fallen on him, it was a strange life, not interesting at all. He didn't want it. He would prefer to meet the dawns, listen to the wind and look at the stars.

This desire was so sharp that he even jumped from his bed. He jumped, rushed to the dressing room, found there what he thought was the least stuffed with electronics, fast dressed, and get out into the courtyard.

The courtyard was green and deserted.

Imagining himself invisible, the boy had crept past the guards, rounded the embassy building, crossed a small square, climbed over the wrought-iron embassy fence and found himself on the street.

The street was already crowded, but this fact didn't upset him at all: still pretending to be invisible, he has ran along the embassy fence to where the city subway train slowly dragged itself along the tall filigree viaduct.

The subway platform turned to be high above the sidewalk.

The transparent elevator, lifting the passengers to the platform, has greeted Matt affably and took him to the crowd.

Then, through the window of the train, where the boy was sitting, he could see how the sky, vast and fearsome, burdened with dark rain clouds, slowly approaches, from west to east.

By the time he left the subway in the forest park surrounding Ruzyne, the sun had disappeared and it started to rain.

Matt was not at all afraid of the rain: there, on Alpha, he froze and soaked to the skin a bunch of times.

Partly for this reason, he looked back at the train go awaying to the west, beyond the spaceport, and went along the path, strewn with a fine gravel, to where the unknown was hidden under the curtain of the closing tree canopy.

For a long time, the rain, drizzling there, outside, didn't make itself felt at all, so thick was the interlacing of branches over Matt's head.

Matt walked and thought about himself, about Aia, about Alpha, about the Earth and didn't notice how the morning drowned in a dark thunderous twilight, and the park became quiet and gloomy.

When struck the first lightning, it was already so dark that the trees caught by the flash, for the first time started to seem to the boy as gloomy giants bending over the path. Under the deafening "AGRHHH!" he, who had never seen or heard anything like that, have come up from an untimely reflection and dropped down with fear.

And then it rumbled again and again.

Matt's parents discovered their loss only an hour and a half later; by this time Prague had long already been covered by a storm front and the rain poured on the streets like mad.

"My God!" the mother lamented. "He's just a little seven-year-old boy!"

"He is no longer a baby," the father reassured her. "He is sitting somewhere nearby, waiting until the storm passes."

"I'm just worried"

"All people are worried from time to time, there is nothing catastrophic in this. Tell Lukasz or Aia."

Lukasz closed his eyes and saw Matt sitting under the branching old linden-tree in the Zlichinsky Forest Park. High above him rumbled and thundered the sky, heavy with gray clouds. The rain was so heavy that it poured down through the thick green canopy, and along the paths streamed the real brooks. The boy, scared and drenched to the bone, was sitting with his back to the wet, rough linden trunk.

"Hey! Matt!" Lukasz called to him.

"Hey! Matt!" whispered the linden tree.

"Oh!" Matt winced with surprise. "Who are you?"

"Friend," the tree answered, folding the branches over boy's head with the slope of a dense green roof.