The Makers

Ursa Minor

Aia pressed the finger to her lips, showing: "Hush!"

Matt nodded, blinked and was dumbfounded at the same time: somewhere on the edge of visibility a huge tower swam, and he realized that it was someone's leg. Then there was a rustle, and a whole sea of small white caudate creatures ran and fluctuated below him.

These creatures did not pay any attention to Matt, their bodies were slightly denser than the mist over their heads, and they were hurrying in the same direction as the tower had just floated.

Matt bent down and touched the white back of one of them, and to his surprise, its wool turned into a snow, and where his finger had just touched, a melted stain spreaded upon the small furry animal back. The creature screamed in horror and rushed off.

Matt raised his head and saw as a second huge tower swam across in the mist.

"Aia, don't scare Matt," said the voice from the open house.

"Mom, I'm not scared," whispered the boy and turned to Aia. "Where are we going to?"

Aia pointed to her eyes with two fingers, then pointed forward, and then folded her palms in the form of roof: we're going to look at the house.

"Let's deceive the gravitator?" she whispered into Matt's ear and winked.

"Yes!"

"Then hold on." She'd exhaled easily into Matt's ear, and the air around the boy was flapping as a thick cold jelly, rustling, buzzing and transforming into a vast cloud of large furry white bumblebees, which grabbed him by his jacket and his wide trousers and pulled him up.

Aia grinned, the transparent wings unfolded behind her shoulders, she jumped lightly up and followed the white flock of bumblebees.

The gravitator was a complicated openwork structure in the very zenith of a colossal glassium hemisphere: a relatively small active zone was surrounded by a chain reaction control system, a radiation protection, a halo of reflectors, and an enormous web of thin gravity guides made from niobium berylide.

Between the center of the cobweb and the highest point of the transparent dome, in the cellular weightless nucleus sat the Bibich generator - as a large silvery spider, and along its outer perimeter - between the extreme guides and the outer dome - was arranged a wide "pedestrian" zone, a narrow glassium corridor.

It was what Aia was referring to, when she said "to look at the house."

Strictly speaking, there was no pedestrian corridor. Being located outside the gravity guides, it remained in the gravitational "shadow" and it was impossible to walk along it. But as well it was impossible to fall. Matt, who was almost forcibly stucked into the transparent pipe and abandoned there to the mercy of fate, spread out like a frog and was swimming now from wall to wall in a state of a deep euphoria.

It was impossible to surprise him with stars or nebulae (the stars on Alpha always were large, and the nebulae bright), but how his small world looks from such a height he saw for the first time.

"Look, Aia!" he whispered. "Alpha is so small!"

"Yes, honey. Alpha is small. But what a beautiful place..."

"Yes! Yes!" Matt was enchanted. "There is a - you see?!
– a large puddle there! There is Valley! And the white spots near it are fog! And that white mount is the one who walked by me with his big feet! Aia, who is this?! ..

"Ah... It's nobody," the girl laughed. "This is the form. It will soon melt. Look at the crest on its back: it's already raveling out. That"s because I"m so far away from it, and so close to this thing," and she pointed to Bibich's silvery spider.

The Makers are happy people, thought Matt, because they are never afraid of anything.

But he wasn't a Maker - he was a small seven-year-old boy hanging out in a black infinity, and so was afraid.

For the first time in his life, his house seemed to him fragile and unreliable. The Earth, hanging nearby in the darkness as a damp blue-green ball, looked much more fundamentally.

"Have you ever been there?" he asked quietly at the sister sailing beside him.

"I was born there," Aia responded. "And I lived there until they sent me here."

"What for?"

"They're afraid of us, Matt. Next to us they feel like a fake paper fireplace, in which the most real fire is burnt.

"Fire?" the boy naively looked at her in surprise. "Are you kidding?"

Aia shook her head: no.

"They just don't understand anything!"

Yes, she nodded, they don't understand.

"I never thought you looked like a fire," Matt said. "I thought it's the only way people should be. Not be able to do everything, no. To think like you think. To love, to see, not to be afraid."

"They just have a lot of conditionalities there." Aia'd breathed on the clear glassium surface separating both of them from the open space, and on the misty spot has drawn a small smiling raccoon. "Their whole life is built on conditionalities. They are born in conditionalities, live in it and die in it. They're afraid of change, because they do not keep up with them."

"But they do not see the most interesting things!"

Yes, she nodded, they do not see. Yes, the most interesting.

"You know, Aia, five minutes ago I wanted to go there much more than now," Matt sighed. "But still I'd like to see a lot. For example, how Benji lives."

"But you already know how Benji lives," Aia smiled. "It's unlikely you'd see anything new there." Benji sleeps in the engine room. And you were there. Benji sees the Internet as a dream. And there you were, too.