*
A black Siberian night was full of countless stars from the Milky Way in the form of the Delta, he peered into the infinite, trying to penetrate into the depths of the world. Sitting on the stove in the village house, a school and a village library, in the Golitsins’ underground, where were hidden French original manuscripts, he avidly read hundreds of books, swallowed piles of German books in the storeroom at Aunt Rose, trying to establish contact with the Universe. He intuitively felt that infinite space wasn’t empty, but it was alive, full of inexhaustible life.
Once, when he was fourteen, he came closely the discovering of the global triad: Space, Light and Darkness. It was winter, it was minus forty-two degrees of Celsius outdoor. The village sighed and creaked with the sharp frost. That night, the dogs, one by one were barking and he had no place to spend the night. He got into the depths of odorous stack, so only his head was sticking out of it. He remembered it was two am. There was no moon, the air was clean, as it was in the Siberian foothill areas. Shadow was observing thousands of stars and suddenly a compound winded basis of the universe triad came to his mind, it was hovering above him, and his heart trembled and paralysed with terror, unknown to mortals.
At four AM the inspiration, eventually released him. All his rest life was a semblance of enlightenment. Once, having got into the academic environment of the Institute, Shadow plunged into the science, sat in the libraries searching the same free-thinkers like Diogenes. Surprisingly, most of people were suppressed by the dead truths. They got into a very musty atmosphere, cramped by the petrified ideas fetters, like drying coral islands. Searching for the philosopher's stone, he shoveled the libraries. His friends were Henri de Régnier, Montaigne and Goethe. Unexpected meetings with teachers were an outlet for him. At night, he ate raw potatoes at the neighbors in the dormitory and at three AM he was telling strange truth to the lonely smart students who left their rooms just to hear him.
Firstly, the foundation of the world of the science seemed to be unshakable. Golden volumes of the truths were in neat rows. The years, Shadow spent in dust libraries and laboratories, were gradually entering the contradiction with previous truths with the pain. The universe has got into disordered non-equilibrium chaos with the short-term order. Searching for the kingdom of heaven was temporarily postponed. The Teacher said:
- When it is necessary, they will call you.
His world began going to small pieces. Instead of the entire and beautiful world, he was offered some small worlds. Each of them had its own short-term order, limited by the developed turbulence. He worked day and night, clutching up the empty breathful pulsating world, the tissue of life, incomprehensible for us.
*
An honest scientist, regardless of his own moral and ethical prohibitions should, either go mad, or die, or to stop somewhere, earning his living.
Armed with lasers, powerful optics, microscopes, cameras, Shadow could spend hours peering at flickering microcosm that was just an annoying hardware error for some specialists. In due course, it turned into a meaningful attempt to feel the zephyr’ whiff, a mystical sense of the propinquity of the abstract Creator who created disturbing breeze with endlessly amazing reading luminous pictures of the universe.
The years passed. Enriched with knowledge and wisdom, he gradually returned to his controversial naivety, some elementary phenomena of the world turned out to be absolutely incomprehensible. He saw everywhere schools of scientists, hinging on the left unsaid.
There was a deadlock in many issues. In any office, especially in a large one, there appear numerous mainstreams. Sooner or later it some school begins to dominate. The battle is to life and death. But it happens that the global is not optimal and leads to rotten stagnation, where everything creative dies. Even the brightest thinkers fall into a grey mass. They do not have names, they depict the virtual barracks.
This is the world. Always some guru is a person from the light forces or vice versa, he is gradually turning into a general or worse, into a grey cardinal, covering with himself freedom of love. A man is only a flat mould, misty fuzzy indistinct something that is not an absolute reality but the reflection of its own feelings, mind and subconscious. That’s why people understand each other only with a small probability. Each of them creates a confused image of objective reality. Most unshakable priori since the school have been putting into people’s consciousness with the criterion of the probability of "truth and lies." Even phenomenologists try not to exceed the boundaries of their phenomenological experience and afraid to look into the abyss. They are overcautious facing obvious things and reproduce child’s confidence of explanation.
The nature of the lightning, the birth of a cyclone, self-organization of coral islands, the transition from night to morning, the division of eukaryotes, man’s origin and not truthful Newton's law? Where is hiding the truth? Maybe in the fire of Ancient Library of Alexandria?
*
The questioning ended till twenty PM yesterday evening. They taunted not very much mostly scared. Shadow knew by heart the list of the intimidations. The most important was that, he was given a soup, some bread, tea, and an opportunity to sleep. It was the most valuable. He was sleeping in the kingdom of heaven, where he was by himself, where were his friends, where he was loved and treated by the divine doctors.
The morning was beautiful. The pain from beatings calmed down. Shadow was painting the universe with colored inks. He imagined himself observing our Earth through the SpaceShipOne porthole at hundreds of kilometers altitude. He felt like a cosmic dust, a thin trifling film between the ground and the atmosphere, where there is the Biosphere and the Noosphere, which is not able to get out of this soap bubble, inclined to the self-destruction. He thought that the geocentric model of the world with the Ptolemy's epicycles had the same right as the Copernicus’ system.
*
For a few hours Shade has been thinking with pleasure. He was lack of a pen or a computer, but he managed to his own limitless memory. He walked round the chamber, sometimes sitting on a stone bench. When he was brought the soup, he thought, and even didn’t have time to finish his second course. He was happy. With a pure tenor voice, given to him by God, he sang a serenade: "... you were brighter than everyone, more gentle and more charming, not swear me, not swear, my train goes like a gypsy song, like those irrevocable days ...".
*
Mari stopped yelling. The grey dull hood was catching her up and she, like a lynx, got ready to jump. She climbed the banisters, her eyes flashed with a fierce brilliance.
- Wait, - she whispered.
The hood was quickly climbing to her with his big grey hairy hand, but far from it. She managed to tucked and jumped back. Her immediate reaction had developed, when she was at school, with the long-term fencing lessons, where she has reached the candidate level.
The picture seemed to be a scary thriller with the kidnapping of Zabava with the Dragon’s clawed paws. Despite of a big size, the giant was very clever. He was descending lower and lower, running round on the landing, waved big long legs and breathed heavily. A terrible thing was in that there was a dead-end at the bottom, lit up with the sign "emergency exit" with closed doors. She tried to jump over it on the top ladder, but he grabbed her foot and pulled her to him. She saw his unnaturally empty eyes. She was shivering.