Текст книги "The Makers (СИ)"

Автор книги: Minor Ursa

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Lukasz slept in an embrace with Bibich's generator, trying to somehow curb the situation.

About a month before Lukasz's migration to Alpha, a new Maker appeared on the Earth. The world is filled with astonishing occurrences of coincidence and synchronicity that defy explanation. The new Maker was a thirteen-year-old boy named Robert Vandarli, the son of one of the engineers of the Flight Control Center in Houston. This was a surprise for everyone, exept Lukasz, who had ceased to be lonely. At the end of October, 2034, the shuttle delivered two passengers to Alpha, and one of them was a child – for the first time in the history of astronautics.

As time passed, Alpha was enlarging and complicating, and in a few years it already didn't look like aluminum can. Now it was a huge glassium hemisphere, it reached several kilometers in diameter, and in the middle of its top was mounted the VNIITFA brainchild – the multi-legged black gravitator.

The gravitator made possible an appearance on Alpha of soil, plants, the Valley with its water terraces and even several animals. Now Alpha was a fairy kingdom, about which mothers of the Earth told their children before going to sleep.

"Alpha is a half of big brilliant Christmas tree toy," a some mother told her little daughter in the evening. "There are magic animals and two princes there. The animals can talk, and the princes can understand without words, conjure and predict the future, but none of them have yet found their princess. Sleep, sweet heart. You'd be a princess, when you grow up."

And the baby fell asleep, smiling, wrapped in the dreams of its magical future, as in a blanket.

***

"Just tell me, Lukasz..." Robert, dressed only in shorts, drew a rectangle around the sugar on the table with his fingers, then tapped at its right upper corner, and the sugar disappeared from the table and appeared in the can on the shelf. "Why should we be locked up here as offenders? We don't do them any harm. No, you don't bore me. And it doesn't mean any stuff like I wanted to join that ridiculous matter that there, underneath, for centuries saws and saws the bough on which it's sitting. I've got a body, and it just wants the emotions that Alpha can't give.

«A woman?» Lukasz exhaled. He was practicing inside a dense rubber simulator on the opposite wall. «You know the chemistry of the process as well as I do, make it quieter.»

«But I wanna no quieter,» Robert insisted doggedly. «I wanna like this. Imagine it's surfing. Is it really fun – to pretend be a kiter in place where there is never a wind or waves? It's not just a woman. I know you wanna it too – to give up on your „quiet“ chemistry and feel the real drive. We've got a wings...» he'd gently moved his naked shoulders, and behind his back waved and almost at the same instant disappeared two huge wings: «...but there is no sky.»

"It's unlikely they'll let you go there for no reason." Lukasz had pulled his hands out of the simulator, hauled himself up, pulled his legs out of him, and jumped to the floor. "Make up a mission on the Earth for yourself and prepare your immunity. In the meanwhile, I'll take a shower."

«Not bad,» Robert said, rising thoughtfully. «But I've no any idea.»

As if reading his sad thoughts, the communicator suddenly clinked in the adjacent room.

Robert tapped the callsign for the door, entered, stucked his forefinger at the singing screen on the wall, and, while it was loading, hastily brushed his hair and winked at himself in front of the dark screen, like in front of a mirror.

«Hello, my homeland, how did you sleep without me?» he uttered in a low pleasant voice to the cursor, that was still blinking in the middle of the screen.

"Hi, Bob," the lighted screen responded in a nervous voice, and Lully Kerning's frightened freckled face emerged from the depths of the screen. "All is not going very well. Hawaii was stormy, the next oil tanker got spilled out into the Yellow Sea, and Mexico was digging up some sort of infection that no one knows how to cure. And how are you?"

«Well, probably not as bad as you there, below. We've neither tankers here nor contagion,» Robert joked in response without thinking and gasped: «What are you talking about, Lully? What kind of infection?»

"I'm not alone today," Lully said, hold her hand out above the screen, and the scale has immediately changed, revealing a crowded control room, in which not only the due group was on duty, but also a lot of strangers. "Mr. Gilels, it's Mr. Vandarli."

«Hello, Mr. Vandarli.»

Mr. Gilels was a lean man with a long face, who was sitting on the right of Lully.

"I know that you don't need unnecessary curtsy, so I'll talk about a deal right now," he said after a short pause. "I was in El Paso this morning. There was a quarantine declared there."

Well, Robert thought, his hands are trembling, breathing is loud, and voice is unnatural... It seems, the case really takes an intriguing turn. And there are the kin there, on the Earth...

«From the other side of the Mexican border, in Ciudad Juarez... We faced a queer epidemic,» Mr. Gilels continued, nervously picking at the sleeve of his expensive jacket. «Over the last three days, ten thousand people were hospitalized there, and the vast majority of them are children. They all have a trouble with thermoregulation and metabolism. So far, no one has died, but that's all. And this morning the first child has contracted from our side. In short, we need you here. Both of you.»

Robert had to work hard to suppress a smile, which began to stretch all over his face. Here it is, a mission! And the Maker's immunity is very funny, but very obedient...

«Mr. Vandarli, we'll send a shuttle for you, it should arrive tonight at twenty-thirty GMT,» Mr. Gilels went on, as if the oncoming Maker's visit to the Earth was a trivia and common thing. «Could you get ready by this time?»

"Long donning isn't included in the list of our shortcomings," Robert trifled by inertia.

"Great," Mr. Gilels nodded, then Lully's thin hand again flashed for a moment, and the screen went off.

Robert squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, not believing he had heard. The Earth gave permission! Moreover, the Earth is waiting for him!

«Aha! Lukasz!» he shouted as mad. «How about tequila?! I know a fury lot of ways how to drink it! Where we can buy a quesadilla in Ciudad Juarez?!»

"You haven't money for it," Lukasz remarked from the bath.

***

And then the shuttle from the Earth has arrived to Alpha.

Exactly at twenty-thirty GMT, two silent pilots had neatly and skillfully docked it to the gateway, where Lukasz and Robert had been giving the last instructions on the unaided maintenance of Alpha to the pair of large-headed catta lemurs.

The lemurs were listening, obediently nodding and clasping their thin black paws on their tummies.

Thereby, at twenty thirty two, the pressure-vacuum compound gage had read zero, and the airlock was empty.

***

Florida met them with the sun and the salty wind. For some half an hour along the tenth federal track had flashed Tallahassee, New Orleans, Houston, and appeared El Paso itself, surrounded on all sides by the red hills. It was not at all like a city in panic.

"You've got a hotel room ready and BNY Mellon accounts," Mr. Gilels said from front seat of the Cadillac. "If you manage to cope with the situation, an amount equivalent to the annual salary of a practicing doctor will be transferred to both of you."

In the vicinity of Thomason Hospital everything was calm. The panic was bubbling only near the emergency room.

It was flowing in the air: in the eyes of the counter doctors, in the absence of civilians, not related to medicine, and in the numerous yellow antiplague suits.

"It's a highly contagious airborne virus," the young woman the doctor, who met them, pointed at the sealed infectious disease ward. "This is our first patient."

Robert and Lukasz, for a long time deprived of women's society up in Alpha, now have been touched with thin girl's arms and been melted from the untimely bliss.

And behind the glass, in the sealed ward, lay a small Latin boy, spreading out on the large white bed.

"He's eight years old. He was brought to us in the morning with hypothermia and non-functioning kidneys. The only thing we can do for him is to heat up the incubator to thirty-six and six. We are not even able to give him a dropper, because his vessels walls keep the water in."

Robert and Lukasz exchanged glances. Lukasz had opened his mouth, but Robert got ahead of him.

"And where do the rest sleep?" he asked warily.

"How are you... Yes, by this time there are three hundred of them here and all they are asleep..."

The lass the doctor looked her big blue eyes up to Robert, and he's surprised to find in himself a whole bunch of contradictory but very strong feelings. There was not only the joy of admiration in the eyes of a beautiful woman, but also the despair from the consciousness that his body had sunk in puppy ecstasy and nearly ceased to obey him as well.

He has surprised by this strong emotions, has surprised by the very fact of such surprising, and then inhaled deeper and tried to smile in the most innocent manner:

"Well, you see... Excuse me, what's your name?"

"Lara..."

"You see, Lara, if the membrane transport is so much disturbed that even water doesn't pass through the cell walls, and then the brain would have nothing to do but sleep. So where do all they sleep?"

"We have allocated two chambers for them. The one is for kids, the one where we now are. The other one located in the left wing. There are adults there. The amount of children is slightly more than two hundred."

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?"

"Oh..." Benji looked upset. "This should be asked of Aia."

"And we too, and we also!" the lemurs sang. "And us too, and us also!"

No one has ever seen what was happening inside the Maker at such moments.

Aia didn't flinch, just her eyes darkened a little, and the next instant the water below hove up and rose, taking the form of the huge blue transparent dragon. The dragon snorted thickly and loudly, so that its "frrrrrrr" passed through them like a low shiver, slowly curved its long serrated back, spattering them with mud, and opened a huge transparent blue mouth, where a fish were caught unawares.

"Oh!" screamed the lemurs.

The dragon's head had sunk toward the ground, and one of its huge transparent eye marveled at them as its nostrils sniffed, loudly breathing in.

Even the cat, which was tranquilly sleeping in the grass at some distance, jumped, hissed and arched its back in a fear. The air has nearly frozen over.

«Wow!» Matt has amazed.

He jumped to his feet in a fit of wish to embrace the dragon's muzzle, but his hands passed through the water on the fly, and he got drenched from head to toe.

The dragon squinted its eyes and looked at the bewildered boy, then again uttered rumbling "frrrrrrr" and went noisily back down to the wet bottom of the terrace. The water was gurgling for a while and finally subsided.

_____________________________

e'u kelci* -Let'splay. (Lojban)

mi fitytu'i* -I agree. (Lojban)

7. 2043rd year. Robert.

It was a banal viral infection.

Needless to say, people would cope with it without assistance, if they had had more time for lurching from one crisis to another – the UN, WHO, medical research programs, social support and all that...

But they did not have any time.

However, under the current circumstances the healing was much more prosaic: Robert just slightly focused, and the cheeks of the boy, who was lying behind the glass, in the sealed ward, almost immediately flushed.

If there was something weird, it was only Robert's own feelings in the matter, as if he had picked up a page in a score and scared the notes off it like a bird's flock.

Then the two of them covered Mexico and Texas with a huge dome. Everything that happened afterwards did not even require any excessive effort from them.

***

Soon after the fuss in the Thomason Hospital had ceased, all cases were miraculously recovered with no fatalities, Robert and Lukasz were released to the hotel with a firm recommendation from the FBI – don't leave the hotel.

Lara and Mr. Gilels took them to the very door of the hotel room, but stayed out – both he and she.

At parting, Robert, desperately embarrassing, nevertheless asked Lara for her phone number.

***

The next morning was cloudy and cold. From the very day dawn, both El Paso and Ciudad Juarez were busy cleaning the snow that had suddenly fallen on them.

The people were hurrying on their ways, not even suspecting that the hospitals were gradually becoming empty.

Lukasz, in a chequered terry bathrobe, was standing at the window, watching people scurrying below, and Robert with a mouthful of toothpaste was humming in front of a mirror in the bathroom when the knock came on the door.

There was Mr. Gilels behind the door.

«Good morning, Mr. Lansky,» he smiled and held the hand out to Lukasz.

"Hello," agreed Lukasz.

"May I come in?"

He'd readily passed by stepping aside Lukasz, looked around in a officious manner, and, not embarrassing at all, walk to the bar:

"Would you like some drink? Well... I think, though, you could do it on your own, if you want. With your permission?" and soon in his hands was a glass of whiskey.

"As a matter of fact, I've got an offer for you," he said, sitting down in a large armchair and looking up at Lukasz. "You see, gentlemen... Do you hear me, Mr. Vandarli?"

"Definitely," Robert gave the nod to the bathroom mirror.

«I'm afraid that your stay here would be associated with some eh... inconveniences. You and I... we are reasonable people and naturally totally get it all. I can't speak for all humanity, but it seems to me, that as a whole they are still... ungrateful and incapable of tolerating any Makers in their own house... or something.»

He took a sip and turned the glass, admiring the glare running along it. "But humanity as a whole is humanity as a whole, it have never really been good at thinking. I"m glad to inform you that the government of the United States not only asks you to feel here at home, but also is ready to provide transport and security at your disposal in case of unforeseen circumstances. Anyway, you have a week."

«Then let's start with the Grand Canyon and then I'd like to visit the parents,» said Robert, who appeared in the doorway.

***

The road between the hills was rusty, deserted and monotonous.

Hoover Dam had remained far behind, and now on both sides of the road for several hours had been going Arizona.

«It seemed to me earlier that there was no choice at all,» Gilels speculated benignly.

One of his hands lay on the steering wheel, the elbow of the second one was sticking out of the open window. "Physics, philosophy ... and even common sense itself – they all unanimously say that anything doesn't come out of nowhere, that everything has a cause. But now I understand that it's not that simple. Reality is always outside your head. And the one who deals with this reality is inside. And often it turns out that you get exactly what you are striving for so much. You longing to despair and irresponsibility – well, there you have it. If you want the opposite – bada-bing, we're good. And without any approximations, assumptions and surrogates. In fact, both the length and the scenery of your life may not be the same as that you imagined. Eh... as a reality. The one that there is outside. But it's always only something to deal with. What you can deal with. This is definitely not who deals. And, by the way, the question immediately arises about this "who". So who? Who chooses those or other circumstances? How do we know if this "who" are we or does someone else do it?"

"The key word here is the word "we"," said Lukasz, who was sitting next to him and looking in the opposite direction at the passing landscape. "We are the same material, only painted in other colors. We are the same clay. Formed, burnt, but the same. With the same necessity to be in need. And our choice depends not so much on the number of days we have been here and on our scars, but on our intention. Well, you must agree: in order to make the right choice, you need no less than to calculate all the consequences of your actions to the very point when the days of the universe will be numbered. And this sounds not unrealistic, it sounds anecdotal. So any choice is just a firm commitment to do in one way or another not because it will be better, but because it's just so."

Robert listened to them only half paying attention because there was actually a fascinating exercise – to pick up the drawn butterflies from Lara's white dress and let them out of the window of the Cadillac. The wind was tearing the butterflies from his fingers and carrying them away somewhere far back.

"What do you calculate all this stuff for? On such a large scale?" he was surprised. "Take the amount of data accessible to you and focus on them. It's simple. O my God, I've really missed people. Or maybe I've just grown up."

"You just have an acute need to be a link in the evolution," Lukasz grinned.

"But I don't at all feel the need to be a link in the evolution," said Robert, while letting out another butterfly to the air stream. "In general, I believe that someone's local progress differs little from someone's local regress. This is about expectations."

"Then why this longing for the weight?" Lukasz grinned again. "Look, there's your Canyon."

Far on the horizon Arizona turned out to be serrated.

***

The four of them were standing on the very edge of a chasm, staring at the large abyss below. The setting sun turned the cliffs and crags into scarlet and ocher colors.

The transparent viewing platform with tourists was now far behind them. Gilels took off his jacket and stayed in a white shirt, and Lara was now in a white dress without any butterflies, – already there, on the edge of the cliff, Lukasz picked up and let out the last one.

Robert pulled off his sneakers, socks and shirt, squared his broad shoulders, and two enormous wings unfolded from nowhere behind his back.

The first bullet entered his head exactly at the moment when he stepped off the cliff.

The second caught up with him two meters below.

That he was mistaken, the sniper realized a couple of seconds later, when his finger, pulling the trigger, has numb. It was necessary first to take the one who remained standing on the rock, he thought, while he was being covered by the hot wave, and then I'd have a time to pick off the second one, while his attention was captured by the stream coming from under the cliff.

But these thoughts were languid and inconclusive.

At this time, somewhere in one of the parallel universes, Lara screamed. She was covering her bleached with horror face with her hands, and Gilels has been fussing over her – he, in his snow-white shirt, has been falling on the ground and pulling out the almost useless gun, that was stuck in the almost inaccessible holster.

And somewhere in another parallel universe at this time the sunset was being reflected on the Lukasz's eyes, while he has stubbornly and concentratedly been weaving the new reality.

In this new reality, there was no place not only for the third bullet that had (or hadn't?) time to exit the barrel of a gun and dissolve halfway between the temple, which now didn't belong to it, and the sniper, who was melting in paralysis: there was no place for the first two too.

In this new reality, Robert was still falling, spreading his powerless wings wide, but death first stepped back from him one small step, and then, when somewhere halfway to the sparkling far away Colorado he threw open his eyes, she finally gave up him fully.

«Oh, what a crazy idiots ...» whispered Gilels.

***

In this new reality, a Polish group called "Ludzie", six men who set out to liquidate both Makers, ceased to exist.

The pilot of the white-blue "Robinson", which was standing at the transparent viewing platform, blacked out and put his dull head on the helm, as if he had not slept for a week and now was making up for lost time. The mechanic, sitting next to him, who once was brisk and vivid, a couple of seconds ago dropped his cigarette from his mouth to his own pants, and the saliva slowly trickled down from the corner of his half-open mouth.

And as for the tracker, who just an instant ago nervously was walking around, pretending to be a tourist, he now was unable to stand on his wobbly feet – he laid down in the middle of the road, leading to the cliff, and looked up at the grand sinking orange sun.

The three others – the one waiting in the hotel in Las Vegas and the two remaining in Warsaw – have had only a few minutes to be horrified at the perniciousness of their intentions and surrender to the local police.

When Robert, who caught the ascending air stream, again appeared on the edge of the cliff, Gilels already was brushing away the rusty dust from his crumpled pants, and Lukasz's eyes were no longer bottomless and have regained their depth.

Lara's face was still white, she still covered it with her hands, but the mask of horror on it almost faded.

«Wow! What a ride!» Robert exhaled. «Lukasz, I hope that's all?»

No, Lukasz thought, nodding in agreement.

«Then I'm taking the lass with me, we'll find you at the hotel.»

Robert touched the ground with his feet, picked up Lara in his arms and again stepped off into the abyss, which a couple of minutes ago almost cost him his life.

***

Lara, who never jumped out of a cliffs – neither with parachute nor without, but deeply impressed by the miracle of visible creation that has been just unfolded before her, clutched his neck with a death grip, afraid to close her eyes and leave them open at the same time.

"Don't worry," Robert whispered into her ear. "I'm here. Now everything will be fine."

She nodded, looking up at him and desperately trying to believe it, and her dress fluttered in the oncoming airflow.

«You are in the center of the universe, and the center is always unharmed,» he went on in a whisper, realizing with awe that just about a little more and he won't want to think about anything else. «Look how beautiful.»

Below, in the canyon, the orange light was gradually ceasing, giving way to the night that was going to cover the earth.

«I want you,» she said, as he touched the black bottom with his feet.

I know, he agreed in silence. Any questions of any love were non-existent yet.

***

Then, when the world regained its contours, they were walking for a long time, and a blue night moths were landing on her crumpled white dress. Did Robert know that he'll have a son?

He just didn't think about it.

8. 2327th year. Benji.

I'm Benji, I'm a mediator. But I don't know what an area of mediation I should apply to.

I have been bringing amazing creatures from one amazing place to another. But the further, the more ridiculous seems to me my function, because from such a rearrangement of the summands, the amount of the surprising matter in my locality doesn't change at all.

It's strange: something turned upside down in my world; I began to perceive in another way that trifle, that almost zero, which all this time so masterfully pretended to be me. And also strange that all this is strange to me. Because...

Benji, do remember: you're a machine, you know how not to lie. Because she loves you. Congratulations, Benji: meaningful zero is no longer zero.

Benji's silvery palms lay on the dashboard. He didn't need any screens, scales and indicators to know exactly how the present moment flows here, inside his shuttle.

He didn't need any eyes to know that there, inside Alpha, the present moment also flows quite definitely: Aia stands there, pressing her forehead against the hatch, and will stand there until the hum from running orbiter's engines ceases through the glassium, – until he undocks.