The Makers
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The linden trees blossomed. Prague smelled of linden so lusciously, greenly and so tenderly that the head was spinning. Lukasz and Alice walked a lot in the parks and squares.
The summer buzzed, and nothing foretold troubles.
At that very day also everything flowed as usual.
"Hi! How about beach?" Lukasz shouted from below.
"It doesn't matter," Alice shrugged from the third floor balcony.
And what else could you do on a similar summer day, except to languish with the heat, which began in May?
***
On the right bank of the Vltava, behind the tunnel in Vysehrad crag, immediately after the yacht club, stretched a large city beach. Of course, the river is not the sea. Of course, water in the river was dirty, and you could only look at it. Nevertheless, the beach stretched for almost a kilometer. And as for swim...
You didn't have to do it.
They sat very near the water. He was in yellow swimming trunks, she was wearing a blue bikini. The river flowed quietly, sleepily and majestically. Up and down along the stream, the delicate openwork Vltava bridges gracefully arched their aristocratic backs. The sun and clouds sparkled in leisured water.
At the Palacky Bridge a motorboat ended the turn and started to speed up. It was a white lovely three-ton one with a broad red stripe and the inscription "Aiax" on the starboard side. It went slick and smoothly, as if neither wind no current weren't able to break the plans of its invisible captain. And yes, strictly speaking, it was so.
Neither Lukasz, nor Alice, nor even the any others in this July morning couldn't even imagine that this boat was not just an ordinary piece of iron with a displacement of three tons, but a faint breath of something incomprehensible and powerful, something what in a matter of seconds would whirl the very reality, they were used to. Like a light speck of dust.
Meanwhile, the boat completed the turn, and its nose turned out to be exactly in the direction of the beach.
***
Then, much later, when very few people remembered the incident, and Lukasz was all everyone was talked about, the most attentive ones remembered that the captain of the boat, surrounded by a palisade of television cameras, gave the impression of a deranged.
"I turned around at the Palacky Bridge," he told the reporters of the Prague Mezzo-TV, "and the boat speeded and went parallel to the embankment, but at the very beach it sharply wagged to the right and was thrown ashore. At the time of flight through the air, there something hit in one of the screws, something horrible, it stopped spinning for a while, the motor stalled, but on the arc I was again thrown into the water and turned. I immediately braked and dropped anchor.
Alice got under the screw.
They ran away from the water and the rushing nightmare, but the boat flew straight at them. Probably, the fate howbeit has hands. Probably, that was the same very ruthless hand of fate: Lukasz ducked as he could, covering his head with his hands, and the horror raced a couple of centimeters above his head.
The movement of Alice was exactly the same: to duck and cover her head with her hands, but the wind, lifted by the screw of the boat, ruffled her long hair, and they went into the turnover of blades, rotating above her head, with one jerk. Lukasz was thrown back into the sand by the powerful hit of her body, twisted into a propeller, and in the first couple of seconds felt nothing but astonishment. Somewhere ahead of him, a similar young couple was running in a similar panic. He's to the left, she's to the right. The screw that wrapped Alice around himself had passed them, scratching the sand, and the blond Alice head and her hands bounced off the sand and could not stop.
And then Lukasz experienced the revelation.
He heard about it before and regarded it as a spontaneous act of self-understanding. Hitherto regarded.
What got him at the Vysehrad beach was not just an understanding.
The impulse which seized him was simultaneously an intellectual and emotional phenomenon. While he was looking at the death before his eyes and the crowd frozen in the general scream, he got a strange and very deep aesthetic experience: what was his consciousness, what could be called his soul, gently slipped and turned inside out.
What happened was not just the transformation of the unconscious into the conscious.
The myriad of tiny coordinated relationships that all these many billion years of evolution on Earth have been closed to each other inside unreliable disparate meninges have revealed and unfolded to Lukasz outside, like a dahlia petals or like a faint tentacles of actinia.
Lukasz didn't just receive his sight. He was in the thick of an amazing live net, which he didn't have the heart to call it so. It wasn't a web. It was the musical strings of reality itself. He didn't have to look for some special cognitive-behavioral approach to this particular reality, discovered by him, just as a male doesn't need to look for it with the aim of to deal with a warm female body.
In these few endless seconds he understood himself, understood his difficulties, got what leads to their emergence and realized that he could change all this.
The reality gave herself to Lukasz, and he took it.
What had just been Alice, irretrievably lost, turned out a succession of coherent notes, a titanic biochemical fugue, which he had to play. And he has played. First - what flew off with the boat to the Vltava and began to diverge in the even darker circles in a dark water, then - what was left on the shore: a big symphonies and small spattered strettos.
The crowd, who had shied away from the place of the tragedy, again has swayed onward. What happened in front of the astonished Prague was the first ever origination act. Lukasz didn't just resurrected his girlfriend, he literally gathered her in parts.
***
The reporters and the Prague emergency doctors, which was called out to the scene, found the excited crowd, the pale captain and passengers of Aiax, several women, who were in an half-unconscious state, and Lukasz, who was bending over the naked but alive Alice.
For the next few days, the captain of the ill-fated boat have been in the police station, Alice - in the NATO hospital, and Lukasz, who felt euphoric of the abruptly opened to him horizons, not only allowed the Czech State Security Officers to transfer him to the Interpol, but already there, in Paris, he, tormented by thoughts of the changes threatening the reality, told a wrinkled short Colonel the story about Sam Bibich and his generator. This generator, powered by a common electrical network of several hundred volts, could reflect the reality strings within a radius of several kilometers and again loop them back on themselves, thereby allowing the Maker to act only on the reality inside the field. The only drawback of Bibich's device was that it could work for its intended purpose only in zero gravity, in the absence of the massive material objects.