The Makers

Ursa Minor

Imagining himself invisible, the boy had crept past the guards, rounded the embassy building, crossed a small square, climbed over the wrought-iron embassy fence and found himself on the street.

The street was already crowded, but this fact didn't upset him at all: still pretending to be invisible, he has ran along the embassy fence to where the city subway train slowly dragged itself along the tall filigree viaduct.

The subway platform turned to be high above the sidewalk.

The transparent elevator, lifting the passengers to the platform, has greeted Matt affably and took him to the crowd.

Then, through the window of the train, where the boy was sitting, he could see how the sky, vast and fearsome, burdened with dark rain clouds, slowly approaches, from west to east.

By the time he left the subway in the forest park surrounding Ruzyne, the sun had disappeared and it started to rain.

Matt was not at all afraid of the rain: there, on Alpha, he froze and soaked to the skin a bunch of times.

Partly for this reason, he looked back at the train go awaying to the west, beyond the spaceport, and went along the path, strewn with a fine gravel, to where the unknown was hidden under the curtain of the closing tree canopy.

For a long time, the rain, drizzling there, outside, didn't make itself felt at all, so thick was the interlacing of branches over Matt's head.

Matt walked and thought about himself, about Aia, about Alpha, about the Earth and didn't notice how the morning drowned in a dark thunderous twilight, and the park became quiet and gloomy.

When struck the first lightning, it was already so dark that the trees caught by the flash, for the first time started to seem to the boy as gloomy giants bending over the path. Under the deafening "AGRHHH!" he, who had never seen or heard anything like that, have come up from an untimely reflection and dropped down with fear.

And then it rumbled again and again.

Matt's parents discovered their loss only an hour and a half later; by this time Prague had long already been covered by a storm front and the rain poured on the streets like mad.

"My God!" the mother lamented. "He's just a little seven-year-old boy!"

"He is no longer a baby," the father reassured her. "He is sitting somewhere nearby, waiting until the storm passes."

"I'm just worried"

"All people are worried from time to time, there is nothing catastrophic in this. Tell Lukasz or Aia."

Lukasz closed his eyes and saw Matt sitting under the branching old linden-tree in the Zlichinsky Forest Park. High above him rumbled and thundered the sky, heavy with gray clouds. The rain was so heavy that it poured down through the thick green canopy, and along the paths streamed the real brooks. The boy, scared and drenched to the bone, was sitting with his back to the wet, rough linden trunk.

"Hey! Matt!" Lukasz called to him.

"Hey! Matt!" whispered the linden tree.

"Oh!" Matt winced with surprise. "Who are you?"

"Friend," the tree answered, folding the branches over boy's head with the slope of a dense green roof.

From somewhere on top of its branches a wet ouzel had flew up, shook itself and, tilting his black head, stared at the boy with its small dark bead.

"How can you be my friend if you don't know anything about me?" Matt smiled lightly at him.

"Nobody knows about anyone, and it doesn't bother anyone," the ouzel pointed out and tilted its head to the other side. "Are you cold?"

"A little," Matt said.

"It will be warmer now," the ouzel once more shook itself, jumped to the very end of the twig and looked anxiously out from under the foliage, as if waiting for something from the rain pouring outside. As if in response somewhere high above, once again, a dull rumble passed, didn't struck, but rustled, and around the linden tree, under which Matt sat, a white sparkling weaving appeared from the wet air.

"All right, just don't touch it," the ouzel warned, again bouncing closer to the boy.

"What don't to touch?" Matt was surprised.

"Lightning, what else."

"All right," the boy nodded, feeling that the earth on which he was sitting is getting warmer and warmer.

"You'd better tell me why you ran away from home."

"I?" Matt asked. "I didn't run away. I wanted to change the future."

"Whose?" the ouzel, in turn, was surprised.

"My, of course."

"Oh, you are a little egoist," the bird shook her head. "It seems to me it's a common trait in your family. Do you know that you cannot change your future without changing someone else's?"

"Why not?"

"Because the future is always shared. What's fault of the next evening?"

"I don't like looking at other people's feet," Matt said grimly. "They are not interesting. And I don't like looking at jackets or gowns. And I don't catch a faces, because I'm small. And many things cannot be done when visitors come, because they can misunderstand it. No, rather, they cannot understand it."

The ouzel bounced on the same place, whistled and quite humanly grinned:

"Do you ever try to sit a little bit higher?" and, looking at the boy who had opened his mouth from surprise, winked at him: "Come on, today we will slightly change the usual course of things."

Matt appeared at home almost immediately after the thunderstorm - wet, excited, happy, almost in daring, with a small black ouzel sitting on his shoulder.

Lukasz waited for him in the embassy yard, cross-legged and leaned back on the back of a wrought-iron bench: