Текст книги "The Makers (СИ)"

Автор книги: Minor Ursa

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«Hello, Benji,» have said the message that was tinkling inside him with Aia's voice .

"Hey," the android responded, shifted the priority of financial operations aside and made a room for the opportunity to talk.

And the opportunity hasn't been lost:

"Can you get me out of here?" it shooted.

Benji coolly calculated the latest political trends, his own financial capabilities and technical condition – his and the shuttle's:

"Yes."

And then, just in that half a second, while her sigh of relief had been lasted, he realized that it's got nothing to do with something bad that might happen somewhere and might require urgent intervention: judging by what the Irish Munster had recently experienced, wherever required Aia's intervention, she could reach it on her own.

Consequently, it turned out that it was about him, Benji. But why such an urgency?

«But why such an urgency?» he smiled.

"But when does urgency begin? And in what kind of units is it measured?" Aia answered a question with a question, and in her voice was so much dejection that the smile slowly slid off Benji's face.

"I got it. Okay," he agreed, and switched to activating the local call, over the spaceport.

***

There was a man at the table, and Benji unmistakably identified him as the director of operations of Orly named Aler Leroy.

«Good day, Mr. Leroy. I would like to pay a private flight to a near-earth orbit.»

"But why did you come to me?" asked the man. "The rental of the ships is carried out by the Charter Department. It's not here."

"The thing is, Mr. Leroy, that this will be a bareboat charter for Alpha, and in the end I would like to take the Maker to the Earth. The Charter Department says they need your visa."

The man pulled away from the holographic screen deployed in front of him and pensively looked at the android – from head to toes:

"As a matter of principle, there is nothing extraordinary in a private-funded flight into space. And taking into account the specifics of your main job, the bareboat charter is no different from the usual chartering of the ship together with the pilot. If your passenger will not get into trouble with the migration control, you can take anyone through the Orly terminal, even the Lord God himself. Give your contract."

«Thank you, Mr. Leroy,» Benji grinned, handing him the completed form.

The preparations were in a hurry, because the take-off time issued to him by the on-duty dispatcher only barely allowed him to sort things out with a freight, a technical inspection, a guest visa for Aia, a fuel and a duty.

However, by and large, what bothered the on-duty dispatcher only was the challenge to Benji: he was smoothly complying with his own calculations. Before the very flight he called Aia to say only one word:

"Wait."

When he took off away from his seventeenth path to the runway and went along it, quickening pace, it was right two o'clock in the afternoon. One hundred and forty, one hundred and eighty, two hundred and twenty, I have blast-off... take-off!

The shuttle lifted its nose and lay flat on the stream, and Benji fixed the pitch and let himself to glance at the horizon opening in the distance. The air was extremely clean – without dust, clouds and fog; the sun shone so that it clogged the sensitive electronics with solid white.

While the Earth below has been removing and turning out to be round, he didn't think about Aia, about Alpha, or about what would happen next: he could predict the future only on the basis of sufficient data, and he had almost no data at all.

«ju'i la alfa .i ba'apei mi*,» he said when Alpha became the size of a large apple.

Alpha was silent for a long time, and only then, when Benji was almost finished docking, responded with Josh's voice:

"re'i .i la aias cu caca'o denpa do fe'eco'a la alfa*"

Aia was waiting for him almost at the same place, sitting on the grass near the airlock.

«I miss you terribly when you're not here,» she whispered, looking up at him.

"Sometimes I see that you human beings are surprisingly similar to us," Benji replied, descending downward to beside her. "When you are planning, when you are synthezing an algorithms in the process of solving problems. And sometimes I see that you are completely different. And your goals are different, and the ways to achieve them are paradoxical. Sadness, boredom, grief, fear is so much costly and so unproductive... No matter how much you fear, no matter how much you grieve, no matter how sorry you are – neither fear, nor anguish, nor grief will ever save you from anything."

Aia, without saying a word, moved closer to him, and he in return hugged her by the shoulders with his thin silvery hand.

For a couple of minutes they sat like that – silently, looking at how nearby, a few dozen meters from the airlock, was stomping Aia's puzzled and abandoned house.

«It's very difficult for the frightened and longing to hold the situation,» Benji said. «Although, as a result, unambiguous motivation, probably, is worth both longing and grief. And everything else.»

Yes, Aia nodded, things are not going well with the motivation of you, machines.

«By the way, your repatriation scheduled for 4 pm UTC,» the android said again. «And my plan is you have your own plan. You see, I was never puzzled by many important things. For example, housing.»

"I'm not so good at plans," Aia tore a leaf of grass and lifted it on her open palm closer to her face, watching closely as it concentrates and busily grows its eyes and legs. "And you will laugh, but some important things elude me too. But I'm afraid, in your "cradle" I really will be a little cramped."

«I was thinking about Prague,» Benji said. «But it seems to me that it's a bad idea.»

Bad, agreed Aia.

«So we'll buy an apartment in Paris,» the android summed up. «If I understand correctly, you have not so much any stuff?»

"I have me," Aia shrugged.

And then she again was sitting in the passenger seat – the same as eight years ago – with the same anti-overload pair reached under her chin.

«Well,» Benji winked at her, undocking away from Alpha and turning the front of his shuttle toward the clouds that swirled far below. «Come on, lets go for a drive.»?

***

"ORY, readiness for landing, a passenger on board," he said at the run-in to the landing course, listening to an impersonal human voice muttering for some reason about the transition echelon, and turned to Aia: "I'll wait for you at the exit."

«All right,» she nodded, unfastening the swelled air cradle.

___________________________________

ju'i la alfa .i ba'apei mi* – Hey, Alpha, are you waiting for me? (Lojban)

re'i .i la aias cu caca'o denpa do fe'eco'a la alfa* – Hello, Aia is waiting for you at the entrance. (Lojban)

27. 2330th year. Matt.

The stormy cyclone was dragging its tails behind it. The wind outside the window rattled, breaking off the fragile poplar branches. The ouzel, dozing on the window-sill, was shivering.

Matt was tormented by a fever.

He was running a temperature, his hot arms and legs were spread out, and he dreamed that he, again first arrived in Ruzyne, himself met the President of the United Nations.

"You, Matt, the strongest, smartest and kindest of all the boys who have ever visited Earth," whispered the President softly, and tried to pat Matt's head, and Matt faintly dodged and his head cracked with pain. "Obviously such a boy must have a big beautiful medal."

The President smiled sweetly and waved his hands, and then, with some barely perceptible movement, got large artificial butterfly almost from Matt's mouth:

"Here you go."

The butterfly was so beautiful that, in addition to his desire, Matt stretched out his hand and took it.

"Oh!" he cried: the whole butterfly was studded from the inside with needles, not even studded – it consisted of many needles.

With a feeling of deep disgust, Matt dropped it from his punctured arms and at the same instant felt that his mouth, between the tongue and the palate, also had the same thin metal needle sticking out.

In horror, afraid of accidentally swallowing it, he tried to get it – first with his tongue, and then with his fingers, but it just slipped down farther and farther, and, completely frightened, Matt ripped a thin sting outward, ruthlessly tearing his own throat.

The blood began to drip, and, looking through the spread palms at the way it covers with stains the polished and shiny floor, he suddenly saw that he was holding his own heart with a thin needle protruding from it.

Help, he thought and woke up.

His throat was so sore, and his bed was so wet and sticky that he was frightened again, now already awake.

«Aia,» he whispered, knowing at the same time that she is not here and she will not be here, and then, with immense relief, he's could heard his unharmed heart beating in his chest.

He slid off the bed and stomped with his bare feet to the window.

There, outside the window, in the pale sky, flowed toward the dawn thick heavy clouds.

Frrrr! The bird that slept on the windowsill flinched. «What's going on?»

"I had a bad dream," Matt said hoarsely. "I so wanted attention that it made me heartless."

"Ee..., it's August. In August, I also always have nightmares. It's because soon will be winter."

"Winter?" Matt was surprised. "What is this?"

"Have you dropped from the moon?" The ouzel, in turn, was so amazed, that at that moment even someone who understood something in the causes and consequences would not find in him a shadow of a resemblance to the Maker implicated in the performance: "Winter is a terribly bad time. No food, no warmth, every time you fall asleep you think you'll be gone forever."

The ouzel sighed heavily and ruffled up, looking at the way the darkness floats outside the window, and then its eyes glittered from below upwards like a beads:

"In my opinion, you are not so well."

"My throat hurts," Matt complained.

"Wait!" said the ouzel.

He fluttered to the palm of Matt's hand that was leaned against the windowsill, tromped all over it like a little black chicken, then sat down, listening, and finally gave the final verdict:

"You're almost as hot as I am. In my opinion, you caught a cold. And, in my opinion, for you, human, this is not good."

"But what should I do?" Matt asked.

"Sleep," the ouzel said confidently. "I always sleep in such cases."

28. 2330th year. Benji.

Benji, just as he planned, waited for Aia in the waiting room at the exit from the migration terminal – where the crowd were meeting, and where was a sharp and lingering scent of surrogate coffee.

He sat up aside the crowd, under one of the transmitters, covering the hall with free Wi-Fi, and, taking the opportunity, used the local search engine with the request entitled «human needs».

As for his own needs, about them it was clear, simple and more or less understandable. By and large, in the absence of a driving purpose, even the only one that could be considered basic – the need for periodic recharging – wasn't one: Benji realized that if he somehow didn't get in time to the power source, he would be neither sad nor worried.

But for a human it all was important: the constant involvement in a universe passing by a human and through a human must necessarily have a nonzero degree. Smells, sounds, reflections – all this was the very essence of human life, all this was it.

It has to be said, Benji's curiosity was not entirely idle: gazing intently at the abstract human, he peered through him at Aia.

By the time she appeared at the entrance to the hall, he had managed to understand that the satisfaction of all human needs was not only impossible, but also undesirable, and was just finalizing the contract for the purchase of the apartment in the area of Rue des Lilas.

«I don't know what I'm going to do with you,» he told Aia, «Because I don't know what you're going to do with me.» But it seems we already have a common apartment for all this.

"Well," she said, so calmly, as if she was from the beginning sure of everything. "Then tonight it should smell of apples."

Rue des Lilas was a narrow green street, which faced the tenth gates of Orly. The proximity to the spaceport made it noisy and crowded.

Benji immediately recognized this house: it was exactly the same as on the advertising hologram in the network – yellow-white, with varying levels, wide green galleries and semicircular transparent balconies along the vertical edges.

«It seems that we now live with you at the very top of it, uh... right there,» he pointed out.

The apartment was empty and definitely that's why Benji saw it as big and hollow. Even from the very entrance he could see the window – huge, as big as the whole wall of the living room, with the sky over the Orly torn apart by a numerous lunar ships.

The android hesitated, unloading apples at the entrance.

«Benji!» Aia called him from the depths. «Come here.»

She was waiting for him at the window: a girl with a flame-like hair in a bright blue coat against a bright blue sky.

«I want to give you something, too.»

"What?" he asked carelessly.

She stepped forward and hugged him, so that her narrowed eyes turned to be a few centimeters from his eyes:

"Memories, Benji. Just don't be afraid."

What are you talking about, Benji thought in amazement and complacency, you know, I can't to be afraid, but the question froze still on his lips, because suddenly the unknown rose inside him.

Maybe it started with Aia's fingers, and maybe with his back that was touched by these fingers – he didn't know, but only his skin under her fingers suddenly became soft, and in it started to stir something unnameable.

«It's nerves, Benji. It's growing nerves. Don't be afraid of anything,» whispered Aia, smiling, looking attentively at his widened pupils. «I just want to show you what it's like to be a human.»

"Human?!" Benji thought desperately, looking down. "Why?"

To love you, she silently smiled and embraced him, and stroked his skin, and under her thin white fingers into him grew the universe. Another universe, a new universe that has completely different properties and qualities...

«Do you feel how sweet the apples smell?» she whispered. «They are flowing into you – carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen...»

And Benji really felt that the air around him was getting a noticeable sweet taste. Apples, he thought, look at that, how sweet the apples smell.

«Kiss me, Benji,» Aia said, not taking her palms off his happy face. «Please».

29. 2330th year. Matt.

On the day when Hubble has found alien's ship in the area of the Ophiuchus, Matt just went to school for the first time in his life.

So it was just circumstances that he spent most of the day in ignorance: a large holographic screen in the school foyer told the first-graders only about the location of school buffets, toilets, about the rules of behavior and didn't spin news at all.

Later, in the evening, already lying in bed, Matt has been recrossing the incident in his memory: the cold September dawn, the people fussing around him, the fright in the eyes of the parents, the third time revising the evening news, and Lukasz, to whose reaction the boy was at a loss to find a definition.

Lukasz took the news calmly, even commonly. He grinned only as usual – whether to himself, or to the future, which again turned with the next intricate side – and that was all.

But Matt didn't sleep till very midnight, he looked out the window at the clouded sky and imagined an aliens like the Makers, then like ouzels with arms, then like lemurs in Alfa, and when he, after all, fell asleep, his dreams were bad and restless.

By the morning it was found out that while the mankind excited by the find was discussing the probable fruits of the union and the horrors of the intervention, a alien spaceship was approaching to the Earth, sending ahead of itself a strange lingering sounds.

"What do you think about this?" asked Lukasz at breakfast, digging in the tofu on his plate with his fork.

"Song," the boy shrugged. "It goes without saying."

He finished his meal in a hurry, grabbed a backpack, smiled at winking Lukasz and went to school, no more paying attention to the next news, deeply hidden grownup's alarm and Lukasz's eyes with the sparkles of craftiness.

He really believed that what was sounded in the morning in the news was a song. And taking into account his childhood spent in orbit in the company of the Makers, he didn't see anything extraordinary in all this matter.

Well, guests. Well, from afar. But they in fact warned about the arrival. They even sing songs – quite like whales – about wanderings and space. What else do you need?

The day passed noisily and briskly, and in the evening the UN Security Council reported through the official channel that wherever the alien spaceship entering the Solar system subsequently went, there should be present at least one representative of the community of the Makers and at least one android among the earthlings.

30. 2330th year. Aia.

In the corner in front of the projector, a small, three-dimensional copy of Selin Juti looked up at the invisible front camera:

"Good evening, dear audience. With you France 24 and evening news. That's the second day in a row that the whole Earth is discussing an alien interstellar spaceship discovered near the solar system. Today we have a guest, Director General, Institute of Nanobiology..."

The camera shifted, and next to Selin, a bald little man in an expensive business suit materialized out of nowhere.

Aia reached for the remote control and turned off the holo. The people blinked and melted, and she carefully climbed over Benji, that was lying next to her, get off the couch and went toward the bathroom.

«Do you think their fears about viruses are imagined?» Benji asked without opening his eyes.

"Definitely," came from the bathroom with the sound of running water. "I even think they are not scared. I think they just have nothing to talk about."

"And if there were no Makers on the Earth?"

"Benji, you know even if there were no Makers on the Earth, they still wouldn't have anything to talk about. Let them talk what they want to talk about."

A voice call pinged off, and Benji accepted it without opening his eyes:

"Salute, Lukasz. Do you need Aia?"

"Salute, Benji. I need you both. When this singing tin can stops, we all three should be there."

"Are we going to sing, too?" Benji grinned, opened his eyes and get off the couch. "I want to note I don't practice political cantatas."

«I'm crazy about you, I'm crazy without you...» Aia sang in the bathroom, adding shower gel into the water and closing her eyes. The water that was pouring from the ceiling with a fine rain went now in a large fluffy soap flakes: just like the morning November snowfall.

«Go ahead, laugh, laugh,» Lukasz said. «I think there isn't much time left for this.»

"I know, Lukasz, about a week," Aia shouted from the bathroom.

"Eeh," Lukasz shook his head and disconnected.

«You see? He also thinks that then there will be no cause for laughter,» Benji said, appearing on the threshold of a snow-covered bathroom.

"Yes, it's just his youthful romanticism for so many years had faded," Aia's raised her ginger head. "What do we have today? Wednesday? After the weekend we are going to Prague."

"To Prague?"

"To Prague."

***

The alien spaceship that landed in the Sea of Rains at the Carlini base, looked like a large white wingless bird. The similarity was completed by the fact that he landed down in a huge titanium "nest", right in the middle of a complex network of deep lunar mines.

The summons came to Prague when the aliens just were getting turned toward the aposeleneum. Or rather, it wasn't summons: the same two Scandinavian twins who had once visited Alpha came and waited patiently until Aia whispered in the brother's ear : «See you soon, Matt.»

In Ruzyne, there was a heavy orbiting "Condor" waiting for them, in its open cargo hatch the patrol lunar police slider was crawling as a small yellow bug.

«What a scale!» Benji couldn't resist. «What a scope! Impressive...»

"Of course, it's just for show," agreed Aia. "And from the inside it's not interesting and even disgusting, but if it contains a perspective, then there appears a completely different taste. And then there's symbolism, participation in the great and all that..."

"Don't forget, whose services you use while taking a shower or heading to the Sea of Rains, pani," one of the twins looked reproachfully at her. "Life of those people who seems foolish to you may not be as interesting as yours, but they do it as selflessly as you. Welcome," and he waved his hand towards the ladder leading into the cargo hold.

The moon was surprisingly crowded.

At least, it was exactly the way as looked the Carlini base that had accepted the "Condor". The people who met their small mixed delegation were all dressed in civilian clothes, but by the look of their eyes and their shaved square heads anyone could say that they comes from a long line of military service.

Aia in comparison and looked, and felt like a butterfly among hippos.

«Well, well, and where is this fruit of our friends' inspiration?» looked around one of the twins.

"It's at the east door, sir. This way, sir.".

There were no lectures on the use of equipment there – either because there were no newcomers among them, or simply because the audience was too specific.

Aia's spacesuit didn't resemble clothes at all and looked like a large, stuffed suitcase, the only advantage of which was that it was designed for a whole day of autonomous work.

From a close distance the white "bird" wasn't at all like a bird: just there was a white, smooth, almost vertical wall near the eastern entrance. Wall that was soaring to a height of hundred meters toward the coal-black lunar sky.

Aia didn't even need to turn on the radio in order to hear that the bird that had landed on the moon was still singing. The bird sang and inside it rustled life.

«Do you hear?» said Lukasz directly to Aia's spacesuit, bypassing the radio. «Perhaps they are like us.»

"Perhaps," agreed Aia, pulling the arms inside from the wide, not-sized sleeves of the spacesuit, and turning on the radio near her chin. "Do you hear me, Benji? They are like us."

"Well, since the word "we" is too wrong, it means they look like you," said Benji, dressed in the similar suit for protection against pressure difference. "Are these a human beings?"

"These are the Makers." Aia touched the white wall, and it answered through her gloves with a thin, taut jingle.

31. 2330th year. Alpha.

In general, the Makers experienced the news about aliens phlegmatically, judiciously and even almost indifferently. To say that everyone still lived his own life is not to say anything.

All these three hundred years that Alpha was spinning in the orbit of the Earth, they were only bystanders, observers of the events that were floating by them: the earthlings kept making them laugh with their thoughtlessness and dejection, but all this time the Earth was too distant and too alien.

Now, with the arrival of the guests, the situation has taken on a slightly different character, a different scale, and now it turned out that Alpha was watching aliens "bird" in much the same way as some village silly billy is watching the lost neighbor's rooster.

Robert watched that what was happening on the Moon from the hill at the Valley, – he sat cross-legged with his eyes closed.

He saw that they were standing there, inside their ship, as a solid wall along the real wall – nothing but eyes and ears, that their thin yellow fingers trembled and waved like the flowers of a hawkweed in a strong wind and that the air around them was filled with the smells of pine sap, love and life.

Robert felt this as clearly as he would feel, standing with them side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

He saw Aia was touching the white metal plane, he saw her hand, gloved with the bellows expansion joints, was sinking in this dazzling whiteness, he saw Benji who can't to be frightened and the twins-telepaths were frightening at the same time, and Lukasz was grinning sadly and lonely, almost as Mephistopheles.

Robert saw the aliens were reaching out to Aia, probing a strange metabolism, the already high level of oxygen was rising in her spacesuit, the thin yellow fingers are touching gloves passing through the metal and the white sparkles were dancing at the tips of these fingers depicting the surrounding constellations.

Hah, he thought, looking at what makes oxygen with Aia's head, here you are, dull humanity, like hell you will, come on, girl, give them a show, here they are, the novice patients of our clinic, teach them to smile, and they will smile at everyone...

And the girl started.

She turned her shining face toward Benji, took his hand, and stepped inside white wall with him, as if this wall were not of metal, but of milk.

Already there, inside, she opened her helmet, smiled confidently at the yellow pupil race – the same way as the educator smiled at the infants – and started to sing:

"Here, just above a heaven and below your shining heart, splashed over sky eleven not a world but only part..."

"a'o do gasnu lo co'e tezu'e da*," whispered Benji either to himself or to Aia who was drunk with oxygen, and also opened the helmet.

And then the aliens fell silent.

________________________________

a'o do gasnu lo co'e tezu'e da* – I hope you know what you"re doing. (Lojban)

32. 2330th year. Benji.

Benji stood next to Aia, slowly looking around, listening to the sudden silence, and waited, not knowing what: whether the continuation of Aia's performance or it would stop.

«Keep cool, Benji,» Aia said in the thick silence. «It's just a good excuse to find out where begins the sympathy.»

As if in response to her words, the yellow convocation had been hesitated a little and parted, and in the formed aisle the android saw a little blond human boy.

"Sympathy begins with coincidence," the boy said, watching Aia's face getting pale. "Oh, please, only without drama. But I suspect this is the area in which to find coincidence would be the easiest."

"All right," agreed Aia in a low voice. "Meet Danek, Benji."

"I'm glad to be part of your memories too," the boy said.

He stepped forward and stopped right in front of the android, looking up at him from below. He looked so humanly, moreover, he looked a so much lot like Aia, and Benji would not be surprised to find out that the child indeed has Aia's genes.

Benji has never specifically been interested in negotiating as an instrument of diplomacy, but recent experience in analyzing human relations has allowed him to assume that the strongest player on the other side is now this boy.

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.