"I know that you don't need unnecessary curtsy, so I'll talk about a deal right now," he said after a short pause. "I was in El Paso this morning. There was a quarantine declared there."
Well, Robert thought, his hands are trembling, breathing is loud, and voice is unnatural... It seems, the case really takes an intriguing turn. And there are the kin there, on the Earth...
"From the other side of the Mexican border, in Ciudad Juarez... We faced a queer epidemic," Mr. Gilels continued, nervously picking at the sleeve of his expensive jacket. "Over the last three days, ten thousand people were hospitalized there, and the vast majority of them are children. They all have a trouble with thermoregulation and metabolism. So far, no one has died, but that's all. And this morning the first child has contracted from our side. In short, we need you here. Both of you."
Robert had to work hard to suppress a smile, which began to stretch all over his face. Here it is, a mission! And the Maker's immunity is very funny, but very obedient...
"Mr. Vandarli, we'll send a shuttle for you, it should arrive tonight at twenty-thirty GMT," Mr. Gilels went on, as if the oncoming Maker's visit to the Earth was a trivia and common thing. "Could you get ready by this time?"
"Long donning isn't included in the list of our shortcomings," Robert trifled by inertia.
"Great," Mr. Gilels nodded, then Lully's thin hand again flashed for a moment, and the screen went off.
Robert squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, not believing he had heard. The Earth gave permission! Moreover, the Earth is waiting for him!
"Aha! Lukasz!" he shouted as mad. "How about tequila?! I know a fury lot of ways how to drink it! Where we can buy a quesadilla in Ciudad Juarez?!"
"You haven't money for it," Lukasz remarked from the bath.
***
And then the shuttle from the Earth has arrived to Alpha.
Exactly at twenty-thirty GMT, two silent pilots had neatly and skillfully docked it to the gateway, where Lukasz and Robert had been giving the last instructions on the unaided maintenance of Alpha to the pair of large-headed catta lemurs.
The lemurs were listening, obediently nodding and clasping their thin black paws on their tummies.
Thereby, at twenty thirty two, the pressure-vacuum compound gage had read zero, and the airlock was empty.
***
Florida met them with the sun and the salty wind. For some half an hour along the tenth federal track had flashed Tallahassee, New Orleans, Houston, and appeared El Paso itself, surrounded on all sides by the red hills. It was not at all like a city in panic.
"You've got a hotel room ready and BNY Mellon accounts," Mr. Gilels said from front seat of the Cadillac. "If you manage to cope with the situation, an amount equivalent to the annual salary of a practicing doctor will be transferred to both of you."
In the vicinity of Thomason Hospital everything was calm. The panic was bubbling only near the emergency room.
It was flowing in the air: in the eyes of the counter doctors, in the absence of civilians, not related to medicine, and in the numerous yellow antiplague suits.
"It's a highly contagious airborne virus," the young woman the doctor, who met them, pointed at the sealed infectious disease ward. "This is our first patient."
Robert and Lukasz, for a long time deprived of women's society up in Alpha, now have been touched with thin girl's arms and been melted from the untimely bliss.
And behind the glass, in the sealed ward, lay a small Latin boy, spreading out on the large white bed.
"He's eight years old. He was brought to us in the morning with hypothermia and non-functioning kidneys. The only thing we can do for him is to heat up the incubator to thirty-six and six. We are not even able to give him a dropper, because his vessels walls keep the water in."
Robert and Lukasz exchanged glances. Lukasz had opened his mouth, but Robert got ahead of him.
"And where do the rest sleep?" he asked warily.
"How are you... Yes, by this time there are three hundred of them here and all they are asleep..."
The lass the doctor looked her big blue eyes up to Robert, and he's surprised to find in himself a whole bunch of contradictory but very strong feelings. There was not only the joy of admiration in the eyes of a beautiful woman, but also the despair from the consciousness that his body had sunk in puppy ecstasy and nearly ceased to obey him as well.
He has surprised by this strong emotions, has surprised by the very fact of such surprising, and then inhaled deeper and tried to smile in the most innocent manner:
"Well, you see... Excuse me, what's your name?"
"Lara..."
"You see, Lara, if the membrane transport is so much disturbed that even water doesn't pass through the cell walls, and then the brain would have nothing to do but sleep. So where do all they sleep?"
"We have allocated two chambers for them. The one is for kids, the one where we now are. The other one located in the left wing. There are adults there. The amount of children is slightly more than two hundred."
Robert has been listened to her and didn't hear. Yes, she was lovely. Yes, her presence gave him a lot of pleasure, but boy, who was behind the glass in the infectious disease ward, impressed him no less, or even more: a fragile rigid boyish body, if you look closely at him, resembled a statue or deranged computer. It wasn't lifeless, but the life that was hovering in it was like a melody taped on a piano without strings. It was there, but by no means all.
"Wow," he concluded, almost gaily. "Now he's going to get a little fresh."
6. 2323rd year and after. Aia.
Aia really wanted her brother to be born on New Year's Eve. As a gift for her.And the mother had no reason to know about this.
The Maker's life was much brighter than the life of an ordinary person and much more predictable as well, beyond any dependence on age. But by this time Aia has managed to get used to the situation.
Long before Matt's birth, Aia knew that his eyes will be emerald, and his hair will be as ginger and unruly as her own. She liked his appearance: his little nose, his broad, smiling toothless mouth, just like a frog's one, and the fingers - so tender that if there, where he was swimming now, was the light, they would be transparent.
She liked to watch him grow: how he yawns in the evenings with mother, how he wakes up in the mornings, how he puckers his poppet's brows in a frown.
She knew that he already likes the melodic "Twilight", found out by Benji in the network and sent to Aia, and hates the hum of home motion detectors.
However, it goes without saying that she didn't yet know what will be his name, that he will live on Alpha only for seven years, and that all these seven years he will use to adore her like a month-old puppy adores his kind and generous host.
Like any other Maker, she got the present, but the future wasn't strictly defined for her. The invisible threads has been stretched from the present to future, but this tangle was hidden somewhere far away, beyond the horizon.