The Makers

Ursa Minor

The lemurs screamed in fright, jumped from the tinkling "rain" in different directions, and Matt almost immediately felt that the path, on which he was, gently warmed his frozen wet feet. And went on it further.

The lemurs hesitated. They meowed for a long time in the dark, sniffing red and gently tugging it with thin cold paws, and then had stopped being afraid and trotted after Matt.

The red lane ended at the very top.

"Hi," the darkness said in Lukasz's voice.

"Hi," the boy said.

Looking more closely, he saw in the darkness the smiling face of the Maker.

"How are you doing this?" he asked, sitting down next to Lukasz directly on the warm ground.

White Aia's sparks circled around for a while and also fell.

"Give me your hand."

Matt stretched out his hand, and Lukasz took it, small, into his, large, and slightly shook, scattering in the air exactly the same thick red sparks.

"Wow!" Matt was delighted. "Can I do it myself?

"Shoot," Lukasz agreed.

The boy stirred his own hand, and from his fingers also fell a red drops.

By the time Aia appeared at the top of the hill, Matt, laughing, had dripped in front of the overwhelmed lemurs a whole pile of sparkling red magic.

"Just think!" remarked Lukasz to Aia, who crouched beside him. "Sometimes it takes so little to make him happy."

Yes, Aia nodded wearily, sometimes so little, took off her sandals and prosaically buried her bare, frozen feet in the miracle created by Matt:

"And as for me in order for my soul to shut up, there is not enough height and temperature."

"It's a bad barometer," Lukasz grinned. "How can that be happiness when the soul is silent?"

"Maybe so," agreed Aia. "I mean maybe it's not. But it just asking all the time for something wrong."

"Asking for what wrong?" said Matt, who had been silent before.

"Some food for the mind, some replication, some mismatch."

"So you mean that a happy soul is dumb, blind and lonely?" Lukasz raised one eyebrow.

"I'm not so sure about that." Aia pocked the warm red "beads" with her foot, and they turned white, illuminating their faces with a ghostly blue light. "Not dumb, but satisfied, not blind and lonely, but self-sufficient."

"It's strange," Matt said. "I always believed that all Makers think alike."

"Really? Why is that?" turning to him, in chorus resented both Makers. "Only those who don't think at all think the same."

"That's like that," the boy laughed, and the darkness echoed his laughter.

All three raised their heads, peering into the darkness.

"Well, it looks like a real coven," the darkness continued, shifting heavily round about somewhere ahead, or behind the back.

"Robert!" Matt gasped.

Lukasz and Aia exchanged glances.

"Yes, it's me," said the big black-and-gray-haired wolf, stepping out of the shadows to the glittering white pile. His fur was wet and smelled like snowstorm and frost. "I heard you have here a joint session about self-sufficiency and loneliness."

The wolf grinned broadly, his white-toothed smile stretched across his muzzle, and from this purely human smile from the top down has fluctuated the wave of transformation. Not at all embarrassed by his former wolfish, and now human nudity, Robert put his hand forward, showing "wait, give me a break", and, like a real wolf, he shrugged his shoulders, shaking water from them, and then winked at the others with the rustle of the appearing clothing:

"Well, let's continue about loneliness? Who will find at least one argument for the fact that we here in isolation from humanity are terribly alone, for half an hour will deserve my respect. Well, to make it more interesting to play, I"ll allow my Mora not to be interested in this person."

Apparently, in order to show that his words weren't an empty chatter, darkness around brightened, revealing an impossible surreal picture: around the patch on which they sat, lay, curling like a tremendous lazy black cat, and looked at them Robert's creature - Mora. Her eyes was black like condensed cosmic darkness, her mouth, in which all of their company could easily fit, was stretched in a grin, exactly the same as grin of its master.

Lukasz brightened up and smiled. Aia threw a worried glance at Matt, but he sighed quite as a grown-up and said:

"To whom much is given, much is required. When you see the whole world, it turns out that you are alone with this world, no matter how it looks, even if your environment is very much like you. So hello, Maker's loneliness. And loneliness in general."

"Not bad," Robert nodded, and Mora agreed, lowering her huge black head.

"But I miss Benji," Aia said, muffling in the shawl that appeared on her shoulders. "And I'm even ready to call it loneliness."

"It can hardly be called loneliness," Robert objected. "Quite the contrary."

"What does it mean - the contrary? I don't get it." Aia said.

"It means when you love someone, it makes you open, at least in relation to him. And where there is openness, there is no loneliness."

At these words, the huge black head of the monster grinned a little wider, showing a fence of sharp white teeth, and its eyes narrowed.

Aia shrugged her shoulders and tightly muffled herself: if it doesn't, it doesn't. Almost simultaneously in the huge Mora's eyes there appeared a slight flicker of anxiety. The monster yanked: first its mouth, which now couldn't be opened, and then - its paws, that now couldn't be stirred. Robert laughed: