The Makers
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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.