"It's still grins!" someone was surprised.

"It's maybe a little damaged in the mind." he was answered. "These idiots, while they dragged it here, didn't particularly stand on ceremony. There is something rattles in it. They maybe even beat off that stuff this piece of iron calculates with."

"It doesn't matter," the first voice said. "It would be great if it hadn't deleted what it's been carried for."

Well, Benji thought, it's all the fault of that damn money, and has prepared to delete the UMA-deferred codes.

But together with this thought such a tough high-frequency ripple burst into him that what a few seconds ago was his volition melted and evaporated like a small water drop from a red-hot metal. The android has skipped out an alarm and sorrow and reckoned that the time in this chair will be the end of his awkward and bumbling life.

"Look, Jake!" meanwhile, the passionate reality was wondering. "Looks like I found what we need! Damn asshole! It put them in his UMA! It's like I would hide the keys to my house in my stomach!"

And answered itself: "Calm down, kid! I can't catch up why are you touched as if it put them in a butt instead of a brain."

The reality burned him and muttered, muttered, muttered; Benji listened, and inside him grew such nameless tender pity for her, lonesome, loveless, forlorn, that through the burning ripple he'd made effort and in the nearly orgasmic paroxysm has spilled in her all the rest - the codes, memories and plans for an upcoming eternity.

And died without ever seeing the reality in return flinched with fear and extinguished, and a few minutes later the low ceiling above his head began to flow with the heavy, hollow waves.

19. 2330th year. Aia.

Here also from time to time happened sunset on Alpha.

Naturally, it was very different from sunset on Earth: here you couldn't see either spilled in the sky orange, or grandiosity. But nevertheless Aia liked it. When the longing for loneliness got her, she could go somewhere far, far to the edge, - where the cold glassium dome was touching the edge of the sole, - and sat there, silent and thoughtful.

It was not meditation at all. The world never ceased to interest her: listening to herself, she always listened to the stream that carried her.

Love is a funny thing, she thought that night. And it has as much faces as much undertones of interest there are at all. So for example, responsibility. Does love mean desire and opportunity to be responsible? And if it so, what needs to be responsible? And what for? And is the desire to be responsible for something a desire to respond to something? And if it so, then what for?

A harmonious system of physical interrelations, which Aia was able to observe and love, ceased to be harmonious, and actually ceased to be a system at all, as soon as Aia's attention was falling into the bottomless hole of close relations.

She liked Benji. It was easy and natural. But when she began to ask herself why, it turned out to be both uneasy and unnatural.

Usually people like each other either because they are handsome, or because they are similar, or simply because they designate a comfort zone for each other. It wasn't true that in the situation with Benji everything was quite different, but also it was impossible not to notice the difference.

What I want to know is what is he doing now, Aia thought, watching Earth bathed in the rays of the white sun. What kind of thoughts are wandering now between his alloy silicon wafers? That is Paris, - it glows as a tiny asterisk slightly above the Italian boot, covered in white cirrus. There is evening there too.

What, Aia thought, what for you can be responsible at this distance? And what you can respond to?

She often thought about what would have happened if she and Benji lived together somewhere in Canberra, Moscow or Danang. Everything that pleases every normal person - a good-night kiss, a glass of milk in the morning, walks in the park, the sea, mountains, rollerblading - all this would surely seem to him stupid, pitiful and useless.

Of course, he could find in all of this his own, special, pleasure - for example, in the search and calculation of shades of red in Moscow's Sokolniki in the fall or in search of the center of gravity of a bicycle... But completely different things would be a matter of truly satisfaction to him. No doubt about it.

And no doubt about what would be a matter of great satisfaction to her.

She narrowed her eyes and tried to see him, a tiny speck of dust in endless barkhans, stirred by the samiel of eternity. And failed - Benji was so far away, and the too-thick noise was woven by Bibich's generator, which hung at the zenith of Alpha.