Page 67 of The Surviving Sky
“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, thenwhat—outthere in the deadlyjungle—hadbeen powering the sungineering device?
“H-how is this possible?” Ahilya stuttered.
“Ithink—Ithink it has to do with thetracker…”
“But it didn’tchime—”
“The chiming was only anenhancement—It’sno surprise itbroke—”
“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 theothers—fromthe 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 toharnesstrajection. 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’smovements—buteven at a glance, she could tell this would only lead away from her hypothesis. If this data wasaccurate—andshe was not certain itwas—thenit 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 headedsomewhere—towarda habitat, she had hoped, but this data did not corroboratehertheories; 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 thejungle? 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 councilseat—especiallywith 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 habitattheory—ithad 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.
