The Surviving Sky, page 21
“Iravan thinks it wasn’t exhaustion that caused the failure at the Academy,” she said, ignoring Dhruv’s question. “He thinks something interfered with trajection, the same thing that disrupted the flight alarm. Could this have anything to do with the spiralweed?” The plant was dangerous to trajection; for all Ahilya knew, it could break constellation lines in the Moment, too.
Dhruv shook his head. “It’s not possible. The timings don’t coincide with the alarm. Besides, the spiralweed is still in the deathbox, right?”
“Yes, in my archives within the library. What does that have to do with it?”
“A deathbox traps consciousness. Deathboxes create a barrier around the Moment, essentially creating a separate pocket Moment. When the forcefield is activated, then anything inside the deathbox doesn’t show up in the normal Moment and only responds to trajection inside the box. I don’t see how the weed could affect what happened in the Academy.”
Ahilya frowned deeper. “How do you intend to get it out, then?”
Dhruv circled his pen around. “The inventions room is one giant deathbox—just without the glass boundaries. It’s a deathchamber. It’s where we test all our battery experiments—we need to be certain the batteries don’t depend on trajection. I haven’t activated the forcefield yet; that’s why the bio-nodes still work in here.”
Ahilya considered this. She could not have borne it, she knew, if her actions jeopardized the ashram; the thought had haunted her for days, ever since Iravan had spoken of the interference in the Moment. What else could interfere with the universe but the possibilities of another plant, uninvited and unseen? The spiralweed was still dangerous, but if sungineering worked the way it did, then perhaps the plants she had brought back for Dhruv were not to blame, not for the difficulty in trajection.
She withdrew the broken tracker locket from her pocket—the real reason she had come there—and dangled it between her fingers. “Can you see—” she began.
“Do you think you can extend my permissions?” Dhruv asked at the same time, leaning forward, his eyes still on Ahilya’s bracelet. “A few more days in the invention chamber, and I should have enough to satisfy Kiana about the beginnings of a battery to ward off a transfer.”
Ahilya shook out her sleeve, covering the rudra bead. “Are we just going to make a habit of breaking rules now?”
“He gave it to you to use, didn’t he?” Dhruv retorted.
Ahilya wasn’t so sure. Iravan had given her the bracelet as a challenge and an invitation, to meet him halfway in their attempts at reconciliation. His action was tied somehow to the nomination he had agreed to; her husband did not do anything with a singular purpose. This bracelet was no ordinary gift. It was a test of trust. It was a measure to see how Ahilya would treat her power, how well she deserved the council seat.
“Can you see if anything on the tracker survived?” she asked, trying to change the subject. “I think it was damaged in the escape—it’s no longer chiming.”
Dhruv plucked the tracker locket from her. He connected one end to his bio-node and another to a spare solarnote tablet lying on the desk. “It’s your bead,” he said, ignoring her question. “But if you’re unwilling to use it for our work, maybe Iravan has already seduced you.”
Ahilya recoiled. “How can you say that?”
“Have you even noticed,” Dhruv said, meeting her eyes, “that you’ve started to use the word ashram?”
Stunned, Ahilya said nothing. He was right. After years of resisting it, she had unconsciously incorporated the word back into her lexicon. When had that happened? Was it because of Iravan? Her husband had grown in her mind, a presence at the back of every thought, every private conversation; he had returned to the days when they had been together, and he had done it so quickly, without her notice.
Her eyes met Dhruv, and her friend shook his head. “I know you’re thinking of forgiving him,” he said.
“I—He’s trying, Dhruv. I haven’t decided—”
The sungineer snorted. “Don’t take too long or he’ll decide for you. He’s a charmer, Ahilya.”
“I know.”
“You vowed never to associate with an architect because of your parents, you could have wed any of your other lovers, Eskayra or Amna or Jai but you still ended up marrying him—”
“I know, Dhruv.”
“Then stop lying to yourself,” he said. “You were clever, attaching our nomination to your condition for helping him—but Ahilya, both you and I know your real motivation was to save him from the council.”
Shock rippled through Ahilya. “How do you—”
“I worked it out,” Dhruv said dryly. “I recognized the rudra bead he gave to Naila. The rest was obvious. It’s his head on the line personally, isn’t it? Tied to the investigation? They think it is his failure.”
Ahilya stared at him. Dhruv was her oldest friend, they’d grown up together, but he had never fully taken to Iravan. For him to have such sensitive information on her husband…
“Rages, Ahilya,” Dhruv said tiredly. “I won’t tell anyone. But you’re becoming like him, for all that you want him demoted.”
“I don’t want him to be demoted,” she said, still reeling. “I want him to get his priorities right. The council has confused him—there was a time when he’d choose his beliefs against the rest of the world, everything else be damned. But all he’s done since his promotion is forget himself, forget who he is.”
“As you say,” Dhruv said, turning back to the bio-node where Ahilya’s data appeared. “Just remember—demotion is as likely as excision, and neither is likely when it’s Iravan. Either of those would be an embarrassment to the council.”
He was right, she knew. Iravan was popular—too popular. His career trajectory was nothing short of inspirational. When it took most Maze Architects a decade to even be considered for a position in the council, Iravan had been inducted after a mere four years of service. Besides, the council would not easily relinquish an architect. Twenty years before, there had been no sungineers on the council at all. The architects may have agreed to non-architect representation, but Ahilya did not think their magnanimity would extend into excising one of their own so easily.
The solarnote Dhruv had attached to her tracker locket blinked. He disconnected it, muttered, “Looks like the data survived,” and handed it over to her without another word.
Ahilya bent her head to study the information. The solarnote hummed, a newer model than the one she had lost in the earthrage. She swiped at the glassy screen and frowned. The tracker had stopped chiming in the jungle; she had expected it to be broken—but this, what she was seeing now—
“I think the data is warped,” she said.
“It’s not. I checked.”
“But it doesn’t make any sense.”
Dhruv looked up. He took the solarnote from her, adjusting his spectacles. He frowned too, swiping at the glass. Then his eyes met hers, the excitement and shock startling in them.
They’d both observed the same thing. The data was continuous without break during the last five years. But no sungineering equipment could work without trajecting energy. If the tracker hadn’t been around trajection for a decade, then what—out there in the deadly jungle—had been powering the sungineering device?
“H-how is this possible?” Ahilya stuttered.
“I think—I think it has to do with the tracker…”
“But it didn’t chime—”
“The chiming was only an enhancement—It’s no surprise it broke—”
“But—”
“Don’t you see?” Dhruv said. “The tracker didn’t just feed off Nakshar’s energy; it fed off the energy of all the other hundreds of ashrams too.” He stood up, abruptly energized, and pulled Ahilya to her feet, clearing a space. “Watch.”
Clutching the tracker locket, Dhruv tapped at his bio-node, then waved the data toward the floor. A hologram flickered: flight orbits of nearly five hundred ashrams, and a line indicating the elephant-yaksha. Dhruv expanded the view, and he and Ahilya stood within the hologram, surrounded by elliptical lines. Ahilya turned her head to watch a miniature Reikshar float past her.
“You see?” Dhruv asked, pointing. “There’s always some city above the path the yaksha traveled. At any given point, the tracker was charged by a city’s energy.”
Ahilya studied the intersections he indicated. He was right. Multiple nodes connected the yaksha’s path and the ashrams’ flight trajectory. The tracker could have charged itself at each node, never running out of power. It seemed like amazing luck. And that made Ahilya suspicious.
“We flew above the yaksha too, about two years ago.” She pointed at the hologram, where Nakshar intersected with the yaksha’s path. “If we charged its tracker, why didn’t we sense the signal from the tracker? Why did we only hear it a couple of days before the expedition?”
“That,” Dhruv said, pushing up his glasses, “is an excellent question.”
He stared at the silent locket in his hands, his face brooding.
“Besides,” she continued, “why did only this tracker transmit? Why didn’t any of the others—from the tiger-yaksha and the gorilla-yaksha?”
“I think it has to do with this little beauty,” Dhruv said, tossing the tracker lightly in his palms. “No two trackers out there are identical. Each time you took one outside, I made enhancements. I’d need to deconstruct this gem to see what exactly it is capable of.”
“You don’t know what your own inventions do?”
Dhruv shrugged. “Inventions are rarely in our control. We put things together and they take a life of their own. Did you know that sungineering’s original purpose was to somehow use the sun’s energy to replace trajection in flight? Instead, we ended up finding a way to harness trajection. Our entire occupational history is a series of accidents.”
He fell silent and sat back down, still studying the tracker in his hands.
Ahilya turned to the hologram. Tiny shapes floated around her, each ashram on its own trajectory. The data was all there. For the first time, she’d be able to study patterns in the yaksha’s movements—but even at a glance, she could tell this would only lead away from her hypothesis. If this data was accurate—and she was not certain it was—then it indicated that the elephant-yaksha had moved during the storm; it had survived the earthrage not because of shelter or a habitat of some kind, like she had hoped, but because of its sheer size. She had remembered how the elephant-yaksha had thundered past her during the earthrage; it had been headed somewhere—toward a habitat, she had hoped, but this data did not corroborate her theories; it only confirmed what the architects had believed for so long. She turned to Dhruv so he might deny this deduction, so he might offer another viewpoint; but the sungineer still studied the tracker locket, an expression of reverence on his face.
Ahilya cleared her throat.
Dhruv jumped. He had forgotten her presence, but now he smiled widely. “This tracker is incredible, Ahilya, even if I say so myself. Our current sungineering technology isn’t equipped for long-range recharging using other ashrams’ trajection. But somehow, this little beauty was able to charge itself using the ashrams’ energy from the jungle? If it has such a long range, then there’s a way to extract that technology.”
“And use it for a battery?”
“More than that,” he said. “It could change the economics of our world. All ashrams share trajection by transferring architects based on trade agreements. But if sungineers replicated the way this tracker charges, there’d be no need to physically transfer people at all. We could charge our equipment remotely. We could buy and sell trajection. Trajection could become an amazing commodity.”
“It’s already an amazing commodity,” Ahilya said softly, but she could see the implications of what Dhruv said. Trajection was scarce and rare. In transferring architects, ashrams shared it because they had to, not because they wanted to. “This could change the world.”
“Precisely,” Dhruv said, his eyes bright. “Sungineers would never be forced to replace a transferring architect; we’d be able to figure out the best way to use trajection while remaining in our own cities. If I follow this lead, I might not need to worry about making a battery at all. I might not even have to use the spiralweed.”
Ahilya raised her brows. She’d known the spiralweed was a desperate attempt. The weed fed off trajection, which indicated it had an inherent way to store trajection, but Ahilya had seen how dangerous such a technology could be. Despite Iravan’s push for it in the council, a battery was risky; it opened too many possibilities of having architects just to farm them, a couple of dangerous steps from enslaving architects altogether. If Dhruv made his case for the nomination by denying the battery and using this warning, he’d stand an even greater chance at the council seat—especially with any technology that made long range communication possible.
She turned back to the hologram, to the evidence of her own diminishing efforts at the council seat. Outside the lab, rain pounded harder, the steady patter combining with the whirrs and hums of the unattended bio-nodes. Her fingers lightly touched the hologram and it flickered, ready to respond to her shaping. Ahilya molded it idly, her heart heavy. The data indicated her own failure, one she could not afford to ignore.
Could the architects be right about everything? Ahilya had nothing substantial to support her habitat theory—it had always been a shot in the dark, constructed out of wishful ideas and reading between the lines. Some of the records she had seen, both from architect and non-architect histories, had indicated a time right before the discovery of flight of abandoned attempts to survive in the jungle. In the end, that was all Ahilya had to go on, the merest whispers, so obscure that she could suddenly, startlingly see why everyone had thought it impossible.
It was never a bad theory, Iravan said quietly in her mind. But I think you’ll find the records of the early architects are right.
Was it true? Had her life’s pursuit simply been a fool’s errand? Ahilya’s cheeks heated in embarrassment, in how flimsy the roots of her research really were. She had always thought there was more there, a reason the non-architects and their histories had been so thoroughly erased, but perhaps those histories had failed to endure because of their inherent irrelevance to survival. Not an active erasure but a quiet one, brought about by their own worthlessness. She stared at the hologram, her stomach dropping in dread. The hologram flickered under her wandering fingers, rearranging itself.
Ahilya blinked.
“Dhruv,” she said softly. “There are gaps in the tracker’s information. Look. What are those?”
“It’s when nothing was charging the tracker,” he replied, distractedly.
“No, see here. Other ashrams were above the elephant-yaksha. Yet somehow, the tracker didn’t charge. Why did that happen?”
Dhruv shrugged. “It is experimental. Maybe it died or took time to restart.”
“I don’t think so. There seems to be a pattern.”
The sungineer said nothing, still too taken by his own invention. Ahilya pushed him out of the way and began to rearrange the hologram with her hands. She compared the yaksha’s movement with the length of the earthrage. She ran calculations from Nakshar’s distance. She even moved the image upside-down, hoping for an epiphany, but apart from making her feel foolish, the image did nothing.
This was the worst part of being an archeologist. It was the implicit loneliness of the work, the inability to make anyone else care. Ahilya’s heart ached in dull pain. If only she had Oam with her. The boy had an uncanny knack for seeing patterns. She should never have taken him into the jungle, the architects had been right to fear it; it had only brought her grief that had settled deep and true, and she thought again of the image she had seen only a few hours before, of the jungle laid out in the book, once glorious, now treacherous—
Ahilya straightened suddenly, her heart pounding. The image in the book flashed in her head again, and her eyes widened. She extended a hand, pawing the air. There was a method she hadn’t considered at all. How could she have been so blind?
Dhruv set down the tracker and looked over at her.
“There’s a pattern here,” she said, her voice breathless. “All along, we’ve been looking at the yaksha’s trajectory from Nakshar’s perspective in flight.”
“It’s the only way to measure anything—we always know where we are. We are our own point of reference.”
“Yes, but what if we looked at it from the jungle’s perspective? Do you have any maps of the jungle?”
“Not really,” Dhruv replied. “The jungle changes all the time, and our lives are in the sky. But the sungineers did divide the planet into latitudes and longitudes to record our landing sites. It’s an archaic method. We don’t use it for anything else.”
“Can you layer that into this image?”
Dhruv pocketed the tracker and fiddled with the glassy screen of the bio-node for several minutes. Then, in a series of waving gestures, he superimposed the jungle’s data onto the hologram floating on the floor. The gaps in the elephant-yaksha’s path blinked and settled.
“Hm,” Dhruv said. “You’re right. These gaps where the tracker was uncharged are too uniform. I wonder if…”
He trailed off and sharpened the image for clarity. He reduced the flight orbits of the ashrams. He dissected the yaksha’s movements so that multiple lines blossomed over the image.
Finally, he stepped back, his eyes wide behind his glasses.
“Bloody rages,” he swore.
The hologram charted the elephant-yaksha’s path all over the jungle planet. Yet all the gaps in the tracker converged on a single point. Each time the elephant-yaksha had traveled to a specific area in the jungle, the tracker had stopped charging despite a trajecting ashram hovering above it.
Ahilya stared at the hologram, her heart pounding in her chest. “Something in the jungle blocked trajection from reaching the tracker,” she breathed. “Something interfered.”
She turned to stare at Dhruv, and she could see her own astonishment and understanding mirrored in his face.
