The Makers
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"But why did you come to me?" asked the man. "The rental of the ships is carried out by the Charter Department. It's not here."
"The thing is, Mr. Leroy, that this will be a bareboat charter for Alpha, and in the end I would like to take the Maker to the Earth. The Charter Department says they need your visa."
The man pulled away from the holographic screen deployed in front of him and pensively looked at the android - from head to toes:
"As a matter of principle, there is nothing extraordinary in a private-funded flight into space. And taking into account the specifics of your main job, the bareboat charter is no different from the usual chartering of the ship together with the pilot. If your passenger will not get into trouble with the migration control, you can take anyone through the Orly terminal, even the Lord God himself. Give your contract."
"Thank you, Mr. Leroy," Benji grinned, handing him the completed form.
The preparations were in a hurry, because the take-off time issued to him by the on-duty dispatcher only barely allowed him to sort things out with a freight, a technical inspection, a guest visa for Aia, a fuel and a duty.
However, by and large, what bothered the on-duty dispatcher only was the challenge to Benji: he was smoothly complying with his own calculations. Before the very flight he called Aia to say only one word:
"Wait."
When he took off away from his seventeenth path to the runway and went along it, quickening pace, it was right two o'clock in the afternoon. One hundred and forty, one hundred and eighty, two hundred and twenty, I have blast-off... take-off!
The shuttle lifted its nose and lay flat on the stream, and Benji fixed the pitch and let himself to glance at the horizon opening in the distance. The air was extremely clean - without dust, clouds and fog; the sun shone so that it clogged the sensitive electronics with solid white.
While the Earth below has been removing and turning out to be round, he didn't think about Aia, about Alpha, or about what would happen next: he could predict the future only on the basis of sufficient data, and he had almost no data at all.
"ju'i la alfa .i ba'apei mi*," he said when Alpha became the size of a large apple.
Alpha was silent for a long time, and only then, when Benji was almost finished docking, responded with Josh's voice:
"re'i .i la aias cu caca'o denpa do fe'eco'a la alfa*"
Aia was waiting for him almost at the same place, sitting on the grass near the airlock.
"I miss you terribly when you're not here," she whispered, looking up at him.
"Sometimes I see that you human beings are surprisingly similar to us," Benji replied, descending downward to beside her. "When you are planning, when you are synthezing an algorithms in the process of solving problems. And sometimes I see that you are completely different. And your goals are different, and the ways to achieve them are paradoxical. Sadness, boredom, grief, fear is so much costly and so unproductive... No matter how much you fear, no matter how much you grieve, no matter how sorry you are - neither fear, nor anguish, nor grief will ever save you from anything."
Aia, without saying a word, moved closer to him, and he in return hugged her by the shoulders with his thin silvery hand.
For a couple of minutes they sat like that - silently, looking at how nearby, a few dozen meters from the airlock, was stomping Aia's puzzled and abandoned house.
"It's very difficult for the frightened and longing to hold the situation," Benji said. "Although, as a result, unambiguous motivation, probably, is worth both longing and grief. And everything else."
Yes, Aia nodded, things are not going well with the motivation of you, machines.
"By the way, your repatriation scheduled for 4 pm UTC," the android said again. "And my plan is you have your own plan. You see, I was never puzzled by many important things. For example, housing."
"I'm not so good at plans," Aia tore a leaf of grass and lifted it on her open palm closer to her face, watching closely as it concentrates and busily grows its eyes and legs. "And you will laugh, but some important things elude me too. But I'm afraid, in your "cradle" I really will be a little cramped."
"I was thinking about Prague," Benji said. "But it seems to me that it's a bad idea."
Bad, agreed Aia.
"So we'll buy an apartment in Paris," the android summed up. "If I understand correctly, you have not so much any stuff?"
"I have me," Aia shrugged.
And then she again was sitting in the passenger seat - the same as eight years ago - with the same anti-overload pair reached under her chin.
"Well," Benji winked at her, undocking away from Alpha and turning the front of his shuttle toward the clouds that swirled far below. "Come on, lets go for a drive."?
***
"ORY, readiness for landing, a passenger on board," he said at the run-in to the landing course, listening to an impersonal human voice muttering for some reason about the transition echelon, and turned to Aia: "I'll wait for you at the exit."
"All right," she nodded, unfastening the swelled air cradle.
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ju'i la alfa .i ba'apei mi* - Hey, Alpha, are you waiting for me? (Lojban)
re'i .i la aias cu caca'o denpa do fe'eco'a la alfa* - Hello, Aia is waiting for you at the entrance. (Lojban)
27. 2330th year. Matt.
The stormy cyclone was dragging its tails behind it. The wind outside the window rattled, breaking off the fragile poplar branches. The ouzel, dozing on the window-sill, was shivering.
Matt was tormented by a fever.
He was running a temperature, his hot arms and legs were spread out, and he dreamed that he, again first arrived in Ruzyne, himself met the President of the United Nations.