The Makers (СИ)

So the android closely and silently looked at the aliens behind the boy, smiled and sat down in front of him on the floor to equalize the difference in growth.

The boy also sat down on the floor and patted with his palm next to him:

"Mom?"

Good heavens, Aia thought settling down between them as a broken little animal, who would have thought that in order to match, one must necessarily fall.

For a moment she thought she is asleep and seeing a nightmare, and this thought gave her strength.

"It's good that you feel better," the child placed with satisfaction his hands on his knees and turned to Benji. "Tell me, what's it like when a machine loves a human?"

"What?" gasped Benji.

"Oh..." the boy froze, looking in embarrassment at the android. "You may not want to talk, but you can't hide your thoughts, I should have warned you."

Benji looked at Aia, then at the creatures behind her.

"You know, Aia," he said, "this time you chose a very funny way to hear from me about love."

Aia opened her mouth, but Danek placed a small palm on the glove of her spacesuit:

"She didn't, we did. Look at this from the other side: we are all here now to tell the truth to each other. And one truth is not worse than the other. Aia can do what she want with what you say, but I want you to speak not so much for her, as for us."

"Sometimes it seems to me that the easiest way to drive a machine crazy is to leave it alone with a human," if Benji could, he would sigh. "No, even better - with humanity. And saves us, machines, only the absence of all this stuff providing emotions. I think," he went on, "the love of the machine differs from the love of a human in that in the case of a machine it's always a conscious act of will, and in the case of a human - it's often just a hysterical reaction. A hysterical reaction is always bad, conscious act of will is always good."

"Hm...," Aia grinned with one side of her lips, turned her gloved hand, the one on which Danek's hand was lying, so that the child's hand was atop, and gently covered it with the second gloved hand. "Maybe it's not politically consciously, but, in my opinion, it's time to run away from here until the nurses arrived."

"It's Luna, there are no nurses," Benji remarked to her. "And furthermore, there, outside, the key human delegation is still stampeding all over the scene. I think to run away from here is not only politically unconsciously, but also not educationally."

He got to his feet, and the tight ring of alien team staggered back.

The creature nearest to him stretched out his hand and opened his fist, showing the object lying on its palm - a small copy of the white bird-like spaceship.

"Take it," Danek said.

He followed Benji, stood up and turned to Aia:

"Do you know what my second thought was? How so many stars fit in the sky..."

"And the first?" innocently asked Benji, taking the gift.

The boy looked at Aia, and she sighed in response, closed the helmet and said already inside the suit, over the radio:

"And the first was that it's also not politically consciously to organize here a love show. It's immoral."

When through the white wall appeared at first one, and then - tightly holding the first one by its gloved hand - and the second spacesuit, no one was already stunned and didn't bulge out their eyes, - even the twins have suddenly acquired the lost ability to speak.

"It's outrageous!" blurted out one of them. "Damn you and your entertainment! Do you want to mess up the contact?"

"He's right. If something extraordinary happened, these lads from Global News," the second twin nodded at the television crew offloading from the Condor, "will spin everything so that you'll turn out to be a shark breaking into a cage with scuba divers, whoever these frogmen may be."

"Are you afraid to put your finger where you want to put your hand?" Aia said. She let go off Benji's hand and turned to the fuss at Condor. "Come on. These lads from Global News will soon be tired of reporting about the personal lives of the Makers. And what are they going to report about? There is no entrance in this galleon."

33. 2330th year. Matt.

Matt once again was alone and unhappy.

He no longer admired the Earth. The vast scenery that greeted him a long time ago, no longer filled the abyss that burned out this summer somewhere deep inside his chest.

His personal meanings - that had been cherished on Alpha by a wonderful sister and brought from there - here on the crowded Earth, collapsed successfully, and the place for the common ones in his soul was not allocated yet.

Yet there were bright days: when the blue sky or cumulus clouds brought him joy, but this joy was short-lived, and the moments - all less and less. More and more often, he very much wanted to return home - to where along the banks of the Valley large green houses crawled like a big alive caterpillars, where the Earth was not densely crowded and noisy, but distant and round, and where the stars were visible in the black sky both day and night.

To say that he's missed a miracles is not to say anything. No, of course, he's missed: the house, the lemurs who used to come running in the mornings for the sweet porridge, the monsters woven from the fog, but he was oppressed by quite different things: he just wanted to be a Maker. And couldn't.

The third day, Global News practically non-stop have been pouring the same pictures from the moon: the Carlini titanium mines, the white spaceship and the small blue-eyed boy surrounded by a gloomy military guard.

Matt, who grew up among the Makers, was not impressed by the magnitude of what was happening, an aliens in general, and their young delegate, who could walk through the walls and speak the main terrestrial languages as native, in particular.

Two days earlier, in the evening, when his parents were setting in the living room in front of the holo, watching Aia on the Moon, he suddenly, sharply and irrevocably have realized that these days he lost something very, very important.

Aia, who was intensely looking at Benji playing with a strange blond child, caused him a whole range of conflicting emotions: the betrayal that he had seen in his sister's affectionate glance became a real revelation for him; he realized that it was jealousy, that he is alone and that his childhood is over.

And the next morning it rained again.

It was Saturday midmorning. By this time, the rain outside the window already for the second day in a row had been lashing wet, soggy roofs.

The air was so moist that the Prague seemed to Matt some ancient, sunken city, and he himself was a dreary, lost fish.

The wet ouzel sat ruffling up on the street lamppost and didn't want to return to the house. In the absence of Lukasz a thoughts wandering in his small black head were full of a vague forest voices and gray, obscure shadows.