The Surviving Sky, page 41
Very carefully, Iravan released the Deepness.
He jerked as his two visions collapsed. He stood in the copse fully, watching his wife tie intricate knots on the rope. The Etherium faded to a blur like he was seeing it from a great distance. He stumbled on it, forward and upward, to the mountain peak.
Shuddering, Iravan felt for the Deepness in his mind again. It sprang up, right next to the Moment, two caverns instead of one; the Moment filled with pinpricks of stars, and the Deepness with forceful blackness.
There was, he realized, a way to move from the Moment into the Deepness and vice versa, a thin conduit of nothingness that connected the two caverns.
Yet the Etherium, despite its wavering imagery, remained ever-present, almost a superimposed image behind the two caverns. Was the third vision a space that existed beyond any kind of trajection—Ecstasy or otherwise? Could non-trajectors sense the Etherium too, then? Did he have control there? He barely understood the Deepness, and the Etherium was more, so much more.
Ahilya approached him, offering her hand.
He engulfed it in his. “Don’t let go.”
Gripping her tight, Iravan dove into the yawning black cavern of the Deepness. He summoned the Moment—by thinking about it. Simultaneously, he gathered the energy of Ecstasy to him. A thin golden current of light emerged from his dust mote. He guided it into the Moment, aiming it for where he knew the stars of the green dust existed. The golden jet struck and—
In front of the two of them, the sparkling green dust froze, unmoving.
The two stood in a glimmering world of frozen particles.
“It’s never done that,” Ahilya breathed, fascinated.
She reached a hand to touch the closest sparkles but her hand went through the frozen dust. Iravan imitated her and flinched back. He could feel the particles, warm and somehow pulsing, alive. He exchanged a nervous glance with Ahilya.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I think—it’s like the yakshas. It exists at a higher state of consciousness than human beings, so architects would never have noticed it. But this dust is everywhere. Everywhere in the Moment.”
Iravan swallowed, imagining the star-studded universe of the Moment far more cluttered and complex than he had ever known it to be. In the second vision, the Moment glittered like a globule, his stream of golden light pouring into it.
“Can you do anything with it?” she asked, her voice low.
Iravan shifted the dust with his hand. The frozen particles moved where he placed them, but nothing else happened.
“Huh,” Ahilya said. “Maybe try a principle of trajection?”
“It won’t work. When architects traject, they connect constellation lines between stars—” Iravan cut himself off, his eyes widening.
He touched the frozen green dust in front of him, and memory spiked within him. The frozen dust reminded him of the luminous stars within the universe of the Moment, but each star there was a plant’s possible state of being. Could this dust be… pure possibility, independent of an attached consciousness?
On the mountain path, he saw himself lurch forward and upward to painful clarity.
In the copse, Iravan connected one particle to another with invisible constellation lines. The dust glittered, then solidified into a simple wall, the first true structure of this bizarre habitat.
Ahilya lifted his arm. His constant glow had remained the same, except instead of the vines of trajection or the wings of supertrajection, strange spirals now glowed and disappeared.
“I don’t think I’m as good an Ecstatic Architect as I was a normal one,” he said.
“Not necessarily a bad thing,” she answered fervently. “But it looks like you can manipulate this dust. Maybe make pathways, not walls?”
Iravan nodded. Both arms in front of him, he began to shape the dust, connecting one to another almost in the manner of connecting constellation lines. Here, he was a real-life mote and the green sparkles were stars.
Structures started to form around them, arches and pillars and galleries along the perimeter. The copse transformed into an intricate hall. With each new form the green dust took, Iravan moved faster up the mountainous path of clarity in the Etherium.
He could feel it; understanding was imminent.
The tattoos on his skin grew more vivid. As though he had always known it, the markings of an architect suddenly made perfect sense.
When he had trajected all his life before, vines had grown on his skin because he had only trajected the possibilities of plants. With this trajection, he shifted pure possibility, and so his tattoos spiraled like dust coalescing. The subject of trajection determined the imprint on the architect. Why had they never considered that before? What did it mean for the winged tattoos, then? Had he been trajecting the falcon-yaksha somehow? But if the yakshas were architects, perhaps he was the one being trajected? Perhaps he and the yaksha had trajected each other simultaneously. What, then, was trajection?
He jerked as a weight pulled at him.
Iravan glanced down at his waist where he’d felt the rope tug, then looked behind him to Ahilya. She supported herself against a pillar, staring beyond him to the vast complex he had created. Her eyes rose to the top, where a shimmering green ceiling grew in the shape of a dome.
On the mountainous path, Iravan sprinted now, rocks tumbling, shards of earth chipping as he reached ever closer to understanding. He shifted the dust, and the floor under Ahilya rippled, bringing her close to him again.
“How are you doing this?” she asked.
“Ecstasy—it’s similar in many ways to trajection,” he said, excitement rising in his voice. “But all of this—Ecstasy and trajection—it’s always been a method midway between an idea and an action. It’s as though I were asking the dust a question and it created all of this to answer me. I’m communicating with it, Ahilya. In the ashrams, they have a simplistic understanding of what trajection is—mere plant manipulation. But I suppose true trajection is more akin to communication. Through constellation lines, we suggest a form to the stars of the Moment, and the plants fulfill it in the ashram’s architecture. And that’s what I’m doing now.”
“If you can communicate with it, then you can change it,” she said. “We could save the ashrams. We could save ourselves.”
A jolt of excitement rushed through Iravan. “We’re very nearly there,” he said. “Hold on.”
He joined his hands, then broke the hold. A circular descending ramp unearthed itself by their feet, the dust settling. Iravan gripped Ahilya’s hand and led the way down. On the mountain path, he raced toward the peak, to his clarity and destination.
45
AHILYA
Ahilya followed Iravan down the earthy ramp. His hand felt warm in hers, too warm, like he was on fire. She thought abstractedly of his waking in this strange place. If it weren’t for the blue-green light that sparkled through the foliage, the architecture could have been Nakshar. If it weren’t for his unnatural warmth, Iravan could have been her Iravan.
She gripped him tighter. He’s still mine, she thought. This place had changed him, made him a part of itself in some insidious way, but hadn’t she changed too? Her senses seemed more alert yet somehow quiescent. The green dust swirled around her, and she took a deep breath, aware it was dissipating. Beyond its limits, the earthrage roared. The storm was coming for them, and her heart beat rapidly in sudden terror. Ahilya discerned at the edge of her awareness a building panic, but it was gone in a blink, almost like a memory of a significant dream, tucked behind the diminishing security of this place. She and Iravan climbed down the last section of the ramp, hand in hand. They gazed at where they had emerged, spellbound.
The staircase ended in a tunnel, its ceilings so low that the earthy top almost brushed Iravan’s head. The walls were too narrow to walk side-by-side anymore, and the light was dimmer. They waited at the foot of the staircase, letting their eyes adjust. Ahilya could almost make out something on the walls, moving, shifting…
Her eyes adjusted the instant her mind articulated the thought.
Carvings.
She exchanged a nervous look with Iravan, then preceded him into the tunnel.
Intricate carvings, all lines and spiral patterns, covered the tunnel walls, hewn directly into the rock. As Ahilya approached, the carvings shifted like displaced ink. Curiosity and wonder blossomed in the same part of her mind where panic fluttered. The lines and spirals on the rock undulated, reminding Ahilya of the holograms in the solar lab, reminding her of the book Iravan had given her. Pain grew at the thought of Dhruv and Nakshar, then receded to a corner, keeping company with her nervousness and panic.
“Are you doing this?” she whispered.
“I—I think so,” Iravan replied, just as softly.
“But you didn’t physically build this now.”
“I didn’t have to before, either. I’m still learning. I—I asked for understanding right now, for a solution to what is happening to me. These carvings must be the dust’s answer.”
“But these images don’t make any sense.”
“I—I don’t know what else to try.”
Ahilya gently disengaged from him. She reached her fingers forward tentatively.
The moment she touched the rock, the carvings began to resolve.
Images of trees grew out of the lines, a garden, woods, then an entire jungle.
More lines settled into tiny human beings, a hundred thousand of them, heads, shoulders, eyes, a whole civilization growing in the jungle on the wall.
The pictures ran deeper into the dimly lit tunnel.
Exchanging another glance with Iravan, Ahilya began to follow. Behind her she heard his careful tread.
The light shifted on the carvings the deeper they went, as though the sun were rising and setting over and over again. It’s passage of time, Ahilya thought. That’s what the dust is trying to tell us. The people changed, more and more of them within the wall’s jungle. Babies were born, they grew older, they lived, they died. The jungle flourished, still and calm, almost unnaturally so, and animals within it cavorted and hunted. Ahilya recognized the shapes of the strange creatures, elephants and tigers and other such lost beings.
“I-Iravan,” she stuttered. “I think these pictures depict our history. The history of our civilization.”
Her husband’s eyes grew wide. He nodded mutely, illuminated by his own light, a mere step behind her.
“I think,” she said, as the people began to tame the jungle. “I think this was a time before trajection, before earthrages themselves. A time before yakshas at all. When our ancestors lived in the jungle, in ashrams that weren’t dependent on architects.”
Her heart raced in her chest. Her mind seemed unable to comprehend this. There had been a time before earthrages, then. She had been right all along. All the histories she had ever read had erased this era, but if the dust’s projection was true, then earthrages had been an unnatural phenomenon. What could have caused those storms? Surely, not the yakshas like she and Iravan had thought; there were no yakshas depicted. Ahilya moved forward faster, almost jogging in her haste, her hand on the wall.
She stopped as the images changed.
Under the miniature people within the pictures, the jungle suddenly roiled.
The people scrambled, ran, died. Trees and branches broke, impaling bodies, whipping heads away. Dust balloons blew over the earth, smashing into little huts.
“Here,” she whispered. “The first earthrage. But why did it begin? What caused it?”
From one picture to the next, the jungle creatures changed, became monstrous. There seemed to be no transition; in one image, the creatures were their old selves; in the next, they were transformed. A tiger, but not a true tiger—instead a massive yaksha shaped like one, a purposefulness to its stance. An elephant, but not a true elephant, instead a yaksha—looking so like the one she had tagged but for the intelligence on its face that was almost human. Rings glinted around the creatures’ eyes in an indication of Ecstatic trajection.
“They—evolved from true jungle creatures,” Ahilya said softly. The light of realization shone bright in her head. “I think it was the earthrages that precipitated their change. But it wasn’t evolution—not in the slow way of evolving. It was… a spark. An instant transformation. Rages, I never believed that was possible. Then that picture in the book was right. It wasn’t a slow maturation. The architect histories are right about this.”
Iravan’s fingers scrabbled for hers. She squeezed his hand but didn’t stop moving.
“If these animals morphed into yakshas that could traject,” Ahilya murmured, “then it must be around the same time that we learned trajection.”
On the wall, the pictures confirmed her theory. Instead of being crushed by the trees, some people began to control the foliage, spinning blue-green webs of stars. Far away from the humans, the yakshas disappeared, hidden by the foliage, mere shapes in the background.
Iravan made a choking sound in his throat. “Our history. Our—my—true history. The first people to traject.”
“I think the earthrages gave humans their trajection somehow,” Ahilya replied, recalling the discussion the both of them had with Dhruv and Naila so long ago around her kitchen table. “We talked about that in Nakshar—that trajection and the earthrages are inherently related. Maybe it was a balance in nature. The earthrages gave us their storms but also gave architects their powers.”
“Architects,” Iravan murmured. “And the yakshas.”
Ahilya nodded vaguely but kept moving. She stopped at another picture. One face stood out among the architects, a young girl, appearing no older than ten, as though the artist who was sculpting the rock had decided to pay attention to her face. The girl spun a hundred stars together, unleashed her constellation lines, and more foliage grew in the jungle. Around her, the shapes of non-architects cheered.
“This girl,” Ahilya said. “Iravan, her trajection—”
“It’s too complex,” he breathed back. “I don’t think I could do it now.”
The girl appeared younger than most beginner architects. Yet that trajection… In the moving pictures, Ahilya detected a complexity of patterns on the girl’s skin that she’d never seen on an architect.
Iravan nudged her and she moved along again. More architects appeared on the walls, their skins blue-green. Again, there was a single clear face, this time a man. Ahilya tightened her hold on Iravan as they hastened through the tunnel.
More walled ashrams grew on the walls. The jungle churned, more and more frequent, yet always a single face appeared clearest, sometimes a woman, sometimes a man, other times undefined. Light shifted, and Ahilya knew she was seeing another passage of time. The rages grew, and more architects appeared, spinning webs out of stars; more civilians, attending to matters of civilization within the ashrams.
Ahilya glanced at Iravan. “I think there is confirmation here of what we studied in Nakshar. For as long as there have been earthrages, they have been growing in length and frequency. A consistent pattern but not a linear one.”
He said nothing, just gripped her hand harder.
Ahilya turned back to the wall, keeping pace with the forming pictures. Her heart beat a tattoo in her chest. Somewhere, she knew she ought to be recording this experience for posterity, but the thought was distant; she could barely keep up with the wonder of this instant.
In the next picture, a small group of architects surrounded a sapling. The same image grew across the wall, a thousand saplings in a thousand different parts of the jungle. Core trees, being embedded with ancient permissions. Among one group stood out a face, a short man, something eerily familiar about him.
Yet now, for the first time, smaller groups diverged from the architects and their walled ashrams, and headed back into the jungle.
About a dozen teams, consisting of architects and civilians, turned their backs on the ashrams, anger and rebellion in their postures. They paused and dust shimmered where they stopped. Ahilya gripped her husband’s arm.
“What does it mean?” Iravan asked.
“It’s a moment of choice,” Ahilya replied, her heart beating fast. “These new groups headed into the jungle to find an alternative method to survive. Iravan, I was right. These must be the groups that attempted to find a way to live in the jungle, before flight was discovered. They must have created the habitats.”
His eyes grew wide. “Are you saying there could be others in the jungle right now? A whole other race of humans descended from these people?”
“No.” Ahilya pointed to where the creators of the habitat had stopped. Earthrages came and went. The dust shimmered, its circumference painfully constricting until only one bubble of shimmers existed, contracting over time. “Constant earthrages ate away at the habitats. It’s what is happening to ours here, the last of its kind. Humans ultimately only survived in the groups that embedded the core trees. And if I’m right, then the next few images will show—”
They hastened forward a few steps, then paused in shock.
It couldn’t be any clearer.
Flight.
Foliage surrounded the saplings of the core trees. Each sapling grew tall, magnificent, embracing a hundred people in its boughs. They watched as nearly a thousand core trees drifted upward into the sky, carrying hundreds of people, while others smashed and fell to the destructive jungle. This here was their history. This here, truly, was how they had ascended to the skies.
Ahilya glanced at Iravan and saw tears shining in his eyes. “Why did so many more architects choose to fly instead of attempting to create habitats in the jungle?” she asked. “Surely, the habitats had a greater degree of success. They had the technology to build them. Flight was a miracle, a risk. It was unknown. Could they have known the habitats would fail? Were they hedging their bets with flight?”
“No,” Iravan said, his voice hollow. “No, Ahilya, architects were forbidden from going into the jungle once. The group that went into it—the ones who built the habitats—they rebelled against the ashrams to do it. The creators of the habitat, they were architects and citizens… Flight was no hedging of bets. It was a political decision.”
