Sergei Lukyanenko - Labyrinth of reflections

– You want my advice? – asks Romka with some sudden fright, – Seriously?

– Yes Romka. Right because you're a kid yet and I'm an old cynicist. Tell me, does one person have a right for a miracle?

– No.

I nod, I didn't expect any other answer, but Romka isn't finished yet.

– Nobody has a right for a miracle. It's always by itself. That's why it's a miracle.

– Thank you, – I say and rise.

– Are you hurt?

– No, on the contrary… I'll go home. It's great that you're fine…

Already in the doorway, I stop for a moment and add:

– …And don't be so hard on alcohol. You're grown-up Romka, don't try to prove it. Good luck on the test.

– Thanks! – shouts Romka behind me.

Miracle – it's on its own…

I walk along the hotel corridor, smiling to Romka's words.

This impatience of mind, this great unsatisfiable thirst…

To understand, to explain, to conquer!

The miracle must be tamed and docile. We even made God a human – and only after this we learned how to believe. We reduce miracles down to our level.

Maybe it's good, otherwise we still would hide in caves, feeding the Red Flower set out by the lightning with wood.

You're a great kid Romka, you managed to get a right conclusion going the wrong way, as if walking along the mirror labyrinth, hitting the glass but passing it after all. I can't yet understand why are you right Romka, but you're right anyway…

I pass by an indifferent porter, open the door – Deeptown street, people, cars, neon signs. I know what can change the world. I can give a miracle to the world.

But I have no right to – because it's alive.

It's on its own, there's neither our life, nor our joys, nor our griefs behind it. What does separate me from Unfortunate – a cold of space of unimaginable eternity of the other world? What's the difference, he's alive anyway!

I walk along the street not raising my hand for the joy of Deep-Transit, this is known in all details Russian block, I'll manage on feet. I need to understand Unfortunate completely before he leaves forever, I have to say, to do something.

The church block – gold covered domes of the Orthodox temple, Catholic cathedrals, modest synagogues and Moslem minarets, stone lace of Alexandrians' temple, black pyramid of Satanists, and – as the best of all mocks – a fiery red sign above the pub, the den of friendly, suffering from a little overweight sect of Beer Lovers.

I could show you much, Unfortunate. Zoos where Steller's cows and mammoths live, book clubs where they argue over good and clever books, exhibitions of spatial designers where new worlds are being born, a medical conference where the doctors from all over the world meet to consult a patient from some God forsaken provinces… They won't let us to the conference of course, but I'd hack the door and we would stay silently in the corner watching how an American anesthesiologist and a Russian surgeon plan a surgery for a miner from Zaire… I would take you to the Opera where every musician is the citizen of the world and to the play where everybody in the audience is a part of the action. We would bow to all gods in temples forgetting that they are evil. We would stand by the playground where kids ride 'real' racing cars and would sympathize with Greenpeace people who save hedgehogs on European highways. Deeptown's picture gallery would take at least a month – it's impossible to pass at once through the Hermitage and the Prado gallery, the Tretyakov's Gallery and the Louvre… But at least one day you could sacrifice for that instead of sitting under "Labyrinth"'s blood-red sky. In the student block you would help a freshman from Vologda to conquer the Resistance of Materials course's mysteries, and I'd tell the Canadian artist why it's not necessary to make too much detailed elaboration for the autumn forest. The deep isn't an evil world at all, not a fist fight and debauchery. Is it my fault that your way here had passed through fighting arenas and brothels, with pursuit on your heels and uncertainty ahead?

But who knows, maybe it wasn't just a coincidence. You had chosen this path yourself: "Labyrinth", "Stars and Planets", "Any Amusements" and the Elvish Lorien… You absorbed the deep and showed, not to yourself but to me, what it really is, all intolerance and stupidity, all aggression that lives inside us. And you know not worse than me: the virtual world doesn't consist of this only.

Such a pity that you're right after all, Unfortunate. The world is never judged on its best qualities. Otherwise fascism would be a golden age of technics, of fast planes and mighty engines instead of concentration camps' chimneys and a soap made of the human fat.

You've made your judgement and explained why it is so.

Do we have any right to feel hurt?

Do we have any right to hit ourselves in the chest and shout "We're kind!" ?

But you can't, you shouldn't take just this with you – a human dirtiness and the beauty of desolate mountains, the technology serving vice! Otherwise why we are in the deep? What do we worth at all?

… I'm standing by the door of the Catholic cathedral, luxurious and suppressing, great and ridiculous. I can enter and pray to an ancient God that doesn't exist after all. I can return home and shake Unfortunate's hand in parting. And neither decision will be right.

– Leonid?

The person that approached me is completely unfamiliar: he's short, with unexpressive dull face, dressed in old shabby jeans and stretched sweater. He's dull and ordinary, not in virtuality is his place but in the queue for carry-out Zhigulevskoye { beer }. But he knows my name – it means he's an enemy.

– Who are you from? – I ask, – Al-Kabar?

The shortish guy doesn't avert his look.

– Leonid, you saw me in a different appearance. Without face.

– Dmitry?

– Yes. Maybe we should address each other less officially?

– You're an asshole, – I agree.

– Leonid, I ask you for a talk, for just five minutes of talk.

Is it really the main Dima Dibenko's guise? I saw his picture, long time ago, he was too young on it. So, he's plain and ordinary? A little dog

– a puppy forever. Was it this guy who invented the deep program and dunked the whole world into the deep? The one who grabbed millions and had got the share in Microsoft and AOL? The one who was the first to understand that Unfortunate is a visitor from the Outside?

– Five minutes.

– Leonid, let's go somewhere…

At least his voice doesn't correspond with his looks too well: if he ever could speak in requesting voice, it's now in the past.

We walk around the cathedral, Dibenko opens the door into the garden with the intricate key. It's quiet and silent here, willows, poplars, straight paths… stones… of familiar shape.

– Shit, – I just say.

– Yes, it's a graveyard, – mumbles Dibenko, – I… I like to come here. It calms me down somehow… brings me a philosophical mood.

Probably there's nothing unusual in this. I look at grave monuments, at the alleys, at the girl that sits on the grass by the small bust, hiding her face in her hands. It's not a mourning human, it's just a drawn weeper, an electronic equivalent of marble angels.

Virtuality is life but life can't be thought about without death. So friends bury here those who will never dive in the deep again, will never put on the virtual helmet anymore.

"He believed in the miracle" – short like a curse, the phrase on the nearest stone.

Forgive me, anonymous man. You believed in miracles and jumped into colorfulness of the virtual world. But now, the memories of you lie here, and somewhere in reality your grave overgrows with tall weeds. Your friends come here spending half a dollar while the soil that took you gives birth to a new life. Maybe it would be more honest for your friends to expend a couple of hours of their lives – to get a shot of vodka by your real grave?