“When I do not walk, the pain goes away quickly,” the girl answered in a low voice.
“Then let us trade places, and you try to sleep,” the young man proposed.
The girl agreed, after which the travelers exchanged places, and Mafkona lay down on the hard logs.
Soon the night luminary and its companion also finished their vigil. With their departure, the banks of the river disappeared, too. The light of the galaxy lacked the power to satisfactorily illumine their surroundings, and because of it Ama turned on the flashlight from time to time. No one disturbed them anymore. The youth felt sleepy again and Mafkona seemed to have dozed off. At least she lay motionless and breathed evenly.
The scout remembered something and spoke, forgetting that his fellow traveler slept, “We have been sailing for a long time, I wonder, is it still far to the river confluence? Is there some waterfall or are rapids waiting for us there?”
Mafkona keep silent, but the youth, not paying attention to it, continued to reason, “If the confluence of such great rivers has a waterfall, we would hear its roar from afar, right?”
“Did you say something? I think I dozed off for a bit,” Mafkona answered finally.
“I spoke with you all the same,” Ama informed her imperturbably, but then, having understood the situation, he added with regret in his voice, though still evenly, “I forgot that you were sleeping. I will keep silent.”
“It does not matter—I have already woken up, so repeat what you told me,” Mafkona uttered in a sleepy voice.
“I am concerned about the confluence of the rivers—what if a new adventure awaits us over there?” the youth answered.
“I think we will find out soon. Do you hear a new sound?” the girl said, and Ama saw her silhouette rise from the raft.
“Yes, I do,” the scout uttered with a voice quickly strained. “It seems we have reached the Quiet.”
Indeed, in the silence of the night, the sound of splashing and rustling coming from somewhere in front of them was magnifying every second.
“Attention!” the girl cried, was peering at something behind him, as Ama suddenly saw.
He pivoted instantly. A giant silhouette was quickly approaching the raft, but in the dim starlight he could not immediately determine what it was. Ama aimed the maser there and fired. The next moment he turned on the flashlight and saw that they were nearing a high crag, not a living creature. It turned out that at the place of confluence the Warm first stumbled against a rocky cliff and only after that did it flow into its great “sister.”
The guy quickly put his weapon on a log, grabbed a quant and began to push off from this stone wall. Mafkona pulled a long stick from the front rudder and also rested it against the obstacle. Fortunately for the travelers, the cliff protruding from the water appeared to be a smooth, almost vertical wall, and therefore the raft could easily glide along it. The current here was almost as slow as in the other parts of the river. The young man and the girl, standing almost next to each other, simultaneously, and sometimes in turn, were pushing themselves away from this wall. This turned out to be enough to avoid a collision of their floating platform with the stone.
Nevertheless, despite the slow stream, the River Warm yet managed to create a whirlpool there, although it was sluggish. The travelers had enough strength and agility to overcome its torque. The raft almost completely avoided contact with the rock and didn’t receive any damage. And then, unexpectedly, the scouts saw that they had nothing to push, the rock had disappeared abruptly and they’d ended up in the waters of the River Quiet.
For a couple of minutes they stood motionless and breathing heavily, leaning on their sticks. Then they collapsed onto the logs. It took them at least ten minutes to recover their breath. Then Ama took the stick from Mafkona and again tied it to the plastic oar. Meanwhile, the girl leaned over and scooped up water with her palm to wash the sweat from her face.
“Oho!” she said, with surprise in her voice. “The water here in the Quiet really is much colder.”
After a couple of seconds, Ama answered her, “That is a very important reminder.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did we try to guess why the BRLC-1s do not live in the Quiet?” Ama answered with question.
“Yes, we did. And why is it so important now?”
Ama thought first for a long time, and then answered as if he had estimated his idea in the course of talking, “After we get to the middle of the river, the distance to each bank will be almost a thousand meters. As we know from the photos, the Quiet flows along a straight line, so the raft will always remain in the center of the current. This fact, and the absence of those dangerous creatures, means that we no longer need to be on duty—we can both sleep at the same time.”
“Correct,” Mafkona agreed with him, without long and detailed consideration.
The scouts directed the raft towards the axis of the current, and after fifteen or twenty minutes they’d reached their goal. Upon arriving there, Ama pulled the rudders out of the water and laid them on the raft. He did this so that the rudders wouldn’t accidentally ’take them to the shore by dragging in the water. Then the two of them, with their backs to each other, lay down on the logs, and placed the backpack with the crystal inside it between them.
It looked like a good plan, and the current did indeed seem perfectly straight. But the inexperienced sailors didn’t know that a river bed always has curvatures, sometimes completely invisible to the eye. And that is enough for a raft to gradually drift towards the shore, if someone doesn’t correct its course with rudders.
Chapter 82
Lif climbed a short staircase of five steps and ended up in the middle of the veranda of her house. At that moment, the settlement darkened.
It must be Pamo, he is on duty today, she uttered mentally.
Lif hesitated whether to go first to the left, into her bedroom, and fetch clean clothes, or go straight to the shower. After a brief delay she chose the second.
Passing by the opened door of Cim’s room, she heard a question, “Are you going to the shower? Tell me when you are done."
“Yes,” Lif replied without stopping.
The girl reached the end of the balcony, illuminated by the golden light of Seler, and took her towel from the rope. Turning around, she opened the door and entered the bathroom: a nine-square-meter compartment, the walls, ceiling and floor of which, like all the buildings in the colony, were made of pale yellow boards. Inside, to the right of the door, a bench stood along the wall, and behind it, about one meter higher, there was a two-stage shelf. On the opposite side of the entrance, almost under the ceiling, there was a long and narrow window. Lif turned on the flashlight on her UD and put the gadget on the shelf.
She took off her shorts, shirt and underwear, laid them on the bench and turned to open the upper tap. As soon as the water, heated during the day, was pouring out of the watering can, the girl entered it. When she’d finished bathing, she closed the tap and first wiped her black, short hair with a towel, and then removed the water from the rest of her body.
Lif put the towel again on the bench and turned back to the taps. This time she opened the lower one and took a bar of soap from the stand attached to the wall. The girl, in turn, washed all of her clothes, then wiped her feet with the towel and slipped them into her sandals. In the end, she took her electronic torch from the shelf and went out onto the veranda naked. Here she hung her wet clothes on the rope, and then, passing by Cim’s room, knocked on his still opened door.
“I understand,” the young man replied.
Lif entered her bedroom of about fifteen square meters. The light of her lantern first lit a window in the opposite wall. Part of the transparent plastic that had once surrounded the children’s beds shone in its frame. In the half-open window, the girl saw a reflection only of her hand with the shining UD in it.
By the left wall there stood a cabinet without doors. On its upper shelves spare clothes lay folded,
and on the bottom one there were two pairs of spare sandals. The colonists didn’t even have combs, because their hair never grew to such a length that it was necessary to take care of it. Next to this cupboard there stood a small wooden table and a chair with a high back. In the far corner, behind the cabinet, there was a broom made of straw tied to a straight stick, and a scoop—a flat thin tablet. On the metal hook attached to the wall to the right of the entrance, there hung a maser.
On the right side of the bedroom there was a bed and a bedside table. The girl put her UD on it and directed the light onto the bed. It had a wooden bottom on which rested a thick linen mattress stuffed with goose down. Two white cotton sheets covered it. The girl slipped between them and laid her head on her pillow, also filled with fluff. Next she turned off the flashlight and prepared to sleep, having turned on her side.
The minutes followed one after another, but sleep avoided her. Thoughts about the strange events of the last three days hindered her relaxation. She turned to the other side. After some time, she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling, invisible in the dark.
Trying to understand what they’d missed, why they found themselves in such an unforeseen and uncontrollable situation, she asked herself how the inhabitants of Earth would have behaved in such circumstances. Like the Neians, or otherwise? Although why otherwise? How did the Neians differ from them? These questions floated on the surface of her mind.
She got up for a bit, felt for the screen on the bedside table, took it and connected it to the GPC-5.
Lif decided that since she couldn’t fall asleep, she needed something with which to occupy herself, and reading literature on human behavior would be the best choice. After all, she’d graduated from the faculty of psychology, history and philosophy. Before starting, the girl looked at the clock in the upper corner of the screen. There shone the numerals 18:20.
—The signal for the general meeting woke Lif. She heard a sound of muffled conversation penetrating her room through the open window, along with a fresh breeze. The ghostly light of the starry sky flowed in, and it slightly diluted the darkness in front of her eyes.
The girl realized that she’d fallen asleep with her UD in her hands. She glanced at the screen; icons flickered faintly on the display. In its lower part, the girl slightly touched one of them: the one responsible for connecting to the GPC-5. The screen flashed bluish and a message appeared on it:
“After 15 minutes of inactivity, the device disconnected from the GPC-5 at 22:31.”
It turns out I was reading for a very long time, the girl thought in surprise.
She looked at the clock in the upper corner of the UD. The time was 26:23. There remained one and a half hours before the rise of Ro. She was surprised again. Who is talking in the yard? Wait, I got a signal—maybe they are back?
Lif quickly jumped out of bed, turned on her flashlight and headed for the closet. Having dressed, she left the bedroom, walked along the veranda, ran down the stairs and headed towards the center of the living zone.
This place met her with an unusual dusk. Someone had turned on the lights only inside the lander; the lamps on the water tower and on the radio remained dark. The girl approached the former spacecraft. The light falling from the open hatch onto the grass formed a bright rectangle with blurry edges, near which the colonists had gathered. Lif cast only one short glance at her comrades and it appeared sufficient to see that Mafkona, Omis and Ama had not returned.
“Why were we called? Has anyone got in touch?” she immediately entered the conversation.
“No, there is nothing from them. This is the reason why I and Hafa have gathered all of you,” Gimi replied to her.
Lif looked at him, puzzled. The young man started to explain: “I woke up almost two hours ago and could not fall asleep. I went out into the courtyard and looked at the darkened houses, and felt for the first time in my life that I was scared of the night. I thought of them. How are they this night, far from home and without communication with the colony? Where did they find refuge? What threatened them? I wanted to talk to someone about this. Then Hafa came here and it turned out that she had the same desire. We decided to wake you all; the rules do not prohibit this. They generally do not say anything about the situation in which we find ourselves.”
“So what do you want to say?” Arfina asked. It looked like she had also joined the meeting recently.
“I do not know…” the youth began to answer and immediately fell into thought. “Where are Ama, Mafkona, Omis, Bame, and Em? Who can tell us? Who can help us to learn this?” It seemed that Gimi couldn’t immediately to find the right words and arrange them correctly: “Perhaps I hoped that when we gathered we could answer these questions… but now I understand that this was a groundless expectation.”
“Yes, it is pointless to think about it now,” again Arfina responded to the young man’s words, “especially at night. Yesterday we have already planned our further actions, so what else can we do?”
“What we planned is only a plan, because according to our other plan, no one should have been lost during the search for the crystal.”Hafa, who had also been awakened by her strange desire, supported the young man.
This time, not only Arfina, but the others also stared at her in bewilderment. Hafa answered their silent question: “I think now I know what Gimi and I wanted. We had a desire for someone wiser than we, a person who possesses boundless wisdom, is able to immediately overcome any difficulties, to come here so that we could turn to him for help.”
After these words silence reigned for a long time. The colonists thought deeply and then Arfina asked her third question, “It is interesting. How would earthlings have acted in our situation?”
“Arfina, why do you think they would have behaved in another way? What is the difference between them and us?”Lif reacted somewhat quickly on this question.
Instead of Arfina, Gimi answered her, “The difference is that we were created by machines, and they are born naturally. Maybe because of this, we are not completely identical to them. After all, I turned for help to some non-existent person, and this is a meaningless behavior not inherent in humanity.”
Lif responded to him, “We have the same appearance as they do. Chemical analysis constantly confirms that we differ from them to the same extent that people from different continents on Earth are not alike. It is not even affected by the fact that through our food, water and air, Neia’s biology penetrates our organisms.”
Dme came closer to the light, scratched his head and said, "Yes, the LAI-5 checks our blood, feces and DNA every month. It conducts mental tests and then tells us that we are fine. But can it explain why Gimi and Hafa had such meaningless desires? Can the machines confirm that our feelings are in order, too?”
Lif, to which these words were addressed, at first frowned and looked bewildered, but gradually her face cleared, and the girl spoke resolutely, like a person confident in the correctness of her conclusion, “It is the behavior of Hafa and Gimi that shows that we are authentic humans, without flaws,” the girl said, and paused.
The machine-raised colonists never fussed. So now they calmly waited, because they understood that Lif hadn’t yet finished her explanation.
Indeed, after a few seconds, she continued, “Actually, feeling the need to ask for help from non-existent forces is not meaningless behavior. This is known as prayer, and it is characteristic of mankind. And most importantly, no one informed us about it; I read it last night in my textbook. Thus, since some of us have experienced the same feelings as the inhabitants of Earth, this proves once again that we are the same as them, and over the past three days we have acted like ordinary people.”
“Did you really understand this only last night?” Fof asked.
Lif thought again before answering, “Yes, basically, I wanted to grasp it last night, reading my textbook before going to bed. I wanted to comprehend why our friends have not come back for so long. What did they do wrong? Which of our decisions
were wrong in a crisis? What would earthlings do in our place? These questions led me to the one that Gimi asked at the beginning—are we genuine people or not? Then I could not answer the question, but after I heard the story of Gimi and Hafa, I got the answer almost instantly.”
“I understand,” Fof uttered.
Memi concluded another period of silence with his proposal: “What we talked about now is important, but these are not issues that need urgent resolution. So let us get back to our more vital concerns.”
Chapter 83
Omis, approaching the passage through the bushes, counted that he’d reached a familiar and safe place. In addition, he clearly understood that he absolutely needed to take a break; he’d walked nonstop in the middle of the beach in such heat since dawn.
Now he had to choose where to relax: in the forest after he’d passed the corridor, or right here? He’d had no ability to think for a long time, so he decided right away that he would stay where he was. He even looked for the place where, as he remembered, they had once made a fire, but in vain. In five years, the traces of their old camp had disappeared completely; rain and wind had erased them. After all, the other units hadn’t had to spend the night here, as they’d already known about the passage.
The traveler began to wander along the vaguely familiar hill and soon, on its western slope, came across a fallen tree. Going closer to it, he found a formation more or less suitable to him. This log, about three meters long, whose trunk had a width of approximately half a meter, lay on two sand elevations about a meter high each. Omis saw that he could easily squeeze under this trunk and cover himself with branches from the sides. The scout liked this shelter at once. He realized that if he were to lie with his legs toward the bushes, he would see a large section of the coastline.
Omis gathered some dry branches nearby and added to them those that he had broken off of neighboring plants. Then he leaned them against the log on both sides and crawled under it. After that, he’d barely laid his stomach on the sand, when his eyes immediately began to close. The bright rays of Ro, reflected from the white seashore, could not prevent it.
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