Aia barely turned, straightened the blown cradle that had slid aside, and from this cradle has heard a meow.
"I wonder how you see the network from the inside," she whispered.
These nine minutes to the orbit were excruciating for her and for her cat.
"I think, it takes place about the same way as you see the reality from the inside," Benji's elbows neatly shifted as he was tracking the reports of the ship's systems -the angle of attack, the fuel level and the amount of the excess heat on the shell. "The difference is that instead of the biochemical stimulus and physical strength I used to use the electromagnetic field in order to communicate with my world. And I can play several instruments at the same time. I've got enough."
Meanwhile, the sky gradually darkened, became black and velvety, in it densely appeared sharp stars. The water droplets, which were trailing behind the hydrogen stabilizers, finally turned into a glistening jet of sparks. Then the Earth had fell down keenly and rounded out.
Alpha was somewhere above and to the right.
"Alpha, do you hear me? It's Benji. How can I get a docking?" the android shifted his hands to the long slot of the communicator.
"O! coi doi benji .i .ui tirna do*,"he was answered the pleasant, dense baritone. "The hatches are at your service."
"ki'e*,"Benji responded and began docking.
"I'll miss you.I'd like you to talk to me sometimes while I'll be here," Aia said.
"tezu'ema*," for the first time in his life, Benji surprised while his orbiter was attaching to the elastic glassium with a loud smacking sound.
______________________________
coi doi nixli* -Hi, girl. (Lojban)
.ije ji'a .ai galfi da* -And I'm going to change something.(Lojban)
.uenai* -No wonder.(Lojban)
coi doi benji .i .ui tirna do* -Hi, Benji. I'm glad to hear you.(Lojban)
ki'e* -Thanks. (Lojban)
tezu'e ma* -What for? (Lojban)
5. 2034th year and after. Robert.
The first segment of Alpha was put into the orbit after almost exactly a year after the incident at the Vysehrad beach.
The Earth was in a hurry: Lukasz periodically slept, and these dreams were uncontrollable by him. He was saved only by the fact that the large transformations were accompanied by a sharp temperature drop, and the cold froze his monsters.
Lukasz slept in an embrace with Bibich's generator, trying to somehow curb the situation.
About a month before Lukasz's migration to Alpha, a new Maker appeared on the Earth. The world is filled with astonishing occurrences of coincidence and synchronicity that defy explanation. The new Maker was a thirteen-year-old boy named Robert Vandarli, the son of one of the engineers of the Flight Control Center in Houston. This was a surprise for everyone, exept Lukasz, who had ceased to be lonely. At the end of October, 2034, the shuttle delivered two passengers to Alpha, and one of them was a child - for the first time in the history of astronautics.
As time passed, Alpha was enlarging and complicating, and in a few years it already didn't look like aluminum can. Now it was a huge glassium hemisphere, it reached several kilometers in diameter, and in the middle of its top was mounted the VNIITFA brainchild - the multi-legged black gravitator.
The gravitator made possible an appearance on Alpha of soil, plants, the Valley with its water terraces and even several animals. Now Alpha was a fairy kingdom, about which mothers of the Earth told their children before going to sleep.
"Alpha is a half of big brilliant Christmas tree toy," a some mother told her little daughter in the evening. "There are magic animals and two princes there. The animals can talk, and the princes can understand without words, conjure and predict the future, but none of them have yet found their princess. Sleep, sweet heart. You'd be a princess, when you grow up."
And the baby fell asleep, smiling, wrapped in the dreams of its magical future, as in a blanket.
***
"Just tell me, Lukasz..." Robert, dressed only in shorts, drew a rectangle around the sugar on the table with his fingers, then tapped at its right upper corner, and the sugar disappeared from the table and appeared in the can on the shelf. "Why should we be locked up here as offenders? We don't do them any harm. No, you don't bore me. And it doesn't mean any stuff like I wanted to join that ridiculous matter that there, underneath, for centuries saws and saws the bough on which it's sitting. I've got a body, and it just wants the emotions that Alpha can't give.
"A woman?" Lukasz exhaled. He was practicing inside a dense rubber simulator on the opposite wall. "You know the chemistry of the process as well as I do, make it quieter."
"But I wanna no quieter," Robert insisted doggedly. "I wanna like this. Imagine it's surfing. Is it really fun - to pretend be a kiter in place where there is never a wind or waves? It's not just a woman. I know you wanna it too - to give up on your "quiet" chemistry and feel the real drive. We've got a wings..." he'd gently moved his naked shoulders, and behind his back waved and almost at the same instant disappeared two huge wings: "...but there is no sky."
"It's unlikely they'll let you go there for no reason." Lukasz had pulled his hands out of the simulator, hauled himself up, pulled his legs out of him, and jumped to the floor. "Make up a mission on the Earth for yourself and prepare your immunity. In the meanwhile, I'll take a shower."
"Not bad," Robert said, rising thoughtfully. "But I've no any idea."
As if reading his sad thoughts, the communicator suddenly clinked in the adjacent room.
Robert tapped the callsign for the door, entered, stucked his forefinger at the singing screen on the wall, and, while it was loading, hastily brushed his hair and winked at himself in front of the dark screen, like in front of a mirror.
"Hello, my homeland, how did you sleep without me?" he uttered in a low pleasant voice to the cursor, that was still blinking in the middle of the screen.
"Hi, Bob," the lighted screen responded in a nervous voice, and Lully Kerning's frightened freckled face emerged from the depths of the screen. "All is not going very well. Hawaii was stormy, the next oil tanker got spilled out into the Yellow Sea, and Mexico was digging up some sort of infection that no one knows how to cure. And how are you?"
"Well, probably not as bad as you there, below. We've neither tankers here nor contagion," Robert joked in response without thinking and gasped: "What are you talking about, Lully? What kind of infection?"
"I'm not alone today," Lully said, hold her hand out above the screen, and the scale has immediately changed, revealing a crowded control room, in which not only the due group was on duty, but also a lot of strangers. "Mr. Gilels, it's Mr. Vandarli."
"Hello, Mr. Vandarli."
Mr. Gilels was a lean man with a long face, who was sitting on the right of Lully.