"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.
"Yes," the boy agreed. "I was there."
"But, if you want, I'll tell you about the people who live there."
"Yes, I do want," said Matt.
He swam to the glassium, next to the painted raccoon breathed another misty spot and painted on it two little figures holding hands.
"Tell me."
"If we consider the Maker is the only normal person, then we can say the people who live there each and every have mental deviations from the norm," Aia said. "They constantly demand each other's close attention and special approach. They're not able to check and correct their actions in accordance with the conditions of their reality. They don't control their painful experiences, and each of them has at least one paranoid symptom on standby."
"What kind of symptom?" asked Matt.
"Paranoid. They don't know how to agree with themselves and therefore believe that it's impossible to agree with others as well. And the less they love each other, the more they justify their suspicions about the general dislike."
"It's strange," the boy was surprised. "I thought the less you know, the more you need a company..."
"Yes, it's true. But only the less you know, the worse you have contact with those who you need. I think they are alone because their souls are blind."
"How my soul is too..." Matt concluded sadly.
"Well, in general, like your," agreed Aia. "All of you are very sensitive to subtle emotions, but you answer them so haphazard... But don't be upset, anyone can start to deliberate, perhaps it will come to you with experience. Look what I have."
She took her backpack off, rummaged in it, took out a large ball of silver thread, winked and held it out to her brother:
"Well, where is this hole that we come in through? Put this thing in the hole.
Matt took a thin silver thread еthat was twisted in a hank and looked around searching for the entrance, which was now supposed to be the exit.
In the hole, on the glassium edge, sat a large white furry bumblebee. Matt stuck the end of the thread into the hole, and the bumblebee immediately buzzed, took off, grabbed it and pulled it from the hole down toward the far sole.
In the first instant, confused, Matt dropped the hank from his hands, but guessing what it was all about, laughed, caught a spinning zero-gravity hank and let the thread unwind through his crossed fingers. The bumblebee was pulling it down, the thread was vibrating and buzzing in Matt's hands, and the other big white bumblebees flew to this buzzing from everywhere. First they sat on the thread, then filled the opening, swarmed over Matt, who was laughing, and then had dragged him out from hole and carried down.