Page 137 of The Surviving Sky
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 tolivein the jungle,beforeflight 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 willshow—”
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 intoit—theones who built thehabitats—theyrebelled against the ashrams to do it. The creators of the habitat, they were architects andcitizens…Flight was no hedging of bets. It was a political decision.”
“What kind of a political decision?”
“One that had to do with Ecstasy.” Iravan moved forward slowly and touched the rocky wall.
Instantly, the image focused on a single flying ashram.
Within it, the same man appeared, who had been trajecting into a core tree with other architects in the jungle before. He was short and familiar, though Ahilya could not say where the familiarity camefrom—theimage was pure lines and angles, too abstract, only a hint of a man at all.
Iravan touched it and the man was replaced by a young girl.
The ashram changed too, becoming bigger, leafier.
Ahilya glanced at her husband, confused.
This time, Iravan led the march down the wall, drawing her along. The focus shifted from the ashrams to a single person. The young girl in the picture became a man, another man, then two women in succession, while the ashram grew and changed. It was as though this person were a fixed point, a hundred, no five hundred transformations, as civilization in flight grew aroundthem—
And then the picture resolved, and there was no ambiguity.
It was a man again, a tall man, the shadows falling on him in such a way that Ahilya got the distinct impression that his skin was dark. He stood in the shade of a core tree, and a Disc revolved in the tree’s highest boughs. The man stared at something, patterns on his skin changing. She would have recognized his stance in a crowd of a million people.
Ahilya turned to Iravan. “This is you,” she said quietly.
“They’reallme,” he said, his voice hollow in the tunnel. “Each of those clear faces. We just saw my personal history. An architect from the very first time there were any architects at all, from the very first time there wastrajection.”
Ahilya nodded slowly. Rebirth was a fact of life. Dead bodies nourished the ashram, became plant matter, which in turn became food that sustained and created citizens; and consciousness moved from one state to the next. No one truly remembered their past lives, but what did it matter? Iravan had been all those people before, but he was Iravan now. He washers. The panic in her mind fluttered harder, like a trapped bird. She clasped both of his warm hands in hers, watching him carefully.
Iravan trajected, the patterns on his dark skin winding like spirals.
The dimness of the tunnel lifted.
Light blossomed on the entire wall this time.
And Ahilyasaw—circlingthe tapestry ofpictures—afalcon-yaksha soaring in the wall’s skies.
