Page 62 of The Surviving Sky
Iravan stared at her in shock but saw only triumph in her eyes. Manav was telling the truth.
“Were you retaining control over your material worldwhilein Ecstasy?” she asked, confirming.
Manav nodded but rocked himself back and forth harder.
“Why didn’t you stay in that state?”
“Difficult, difficult,” the man said. His fingers had fallen to his lap, and he began tearing the pale ice rose into shreds.
“Why is it difficult?” Bharavi asked.
But Manav didn’t reply. He began to moan.
“Why is it difficult, Manav?” Bharavi asked again.
“The choices,” Manav moaned. The ice rose in his lap was in pieces; the man grabbed his hair, appearing almost deranged. “Incompletion—!”
“Bharavi, stop,” Iravan said, troubled. “Hecan’t—Lookathim—”
She glanced at Iravan, and for a fleeting moment he thought she looked furious at his interruption, but when she turned back to Manav, her face was gentler than Iravan had seen.
Bharavi dropped the veristem to the ground, where it was absorbed again by the ashram. She trajected, and the patch of grass they sat on bloomed with a hundred more ice roses.
Manav stopped moaning, his eyes wide. A smile wavered on his face. Bharavi began to speak about the ice roses then, their color and shape, their fragrance and their feel. Finally, she tapped at her rudra beads and summoned an architect on duty. A young man took Manav away.
Iravan waited until they were alone again, then turned imploringly to Bharavi. “Bha,” he said, his heart pounding. “I’m not in danger of Ecstasy. You have to believe me.”
She said nothing, merely stared at him.
“Out there in the jungle,” he said, speaking faster, “when I was trajecting so brilliantly, I was thinking of Ahilya. I made the armor first for her; I created a path for her safety first, hers and Oam’s,beforeI did for myself. I can’t be an Ecstatic; I’d have lost my material connections if I were. I’d have forgotten Ahilya.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “you were doing what Manav did. You were holding on to your material reality while exercising the Ecstatic powers of trajection.”
Iravan started to sweat. His skin grew clammy. A breeze flicked his hair slightly but he hardly felt it.
“It’s only a matter of time before you’re called to the Examination,” Bharavi said. “And you’re going to fail, Iravan. Because youarean Ecstatic. They willexciseyou.”
Her matter-of-fact tone, more than her words, sent a chill down Iravan’s spine.
“You have to give me more time,” he said, his voice breaking. “I have another week.”
Bharavi shook her head irritably. “You can protest all you like, but the council saw your amazing trajection in the jungle. The way to convince them is not to deny that you’re close to Ecstasy but to show them that Ecstasy is not as bad as they think it is.”
Iravan’s eyes met hers. Was this a test?
“How can you say that?” he rasped. “You of all people, you who have studied Ecstasy.”
“It’s because I’ve studied it that I’m advising this,” she said, sounding impatient now. “Look at what Manav just told us. This is something you can prove, unlike your theory of interference. I’ve been laying the seeds for this idea already with the rest of the council foryears—youknow this. Why won’t you attack the problem from a different angle?”
“Because I’m already reaching for an unlikely explanation, trying to convince them there’s an interference in the Moment. You want me to convince them that Ecstasy is desirable? They’ll excise me without an Exam!”
“If you convince them of this, there won’tbean Exam,” she said, looking at him pointedly. “Controlling Ecstatic powers of trajection could be the answer we so desperately need. We wouldn’t need sungineers to make a battery; with that much power, every architect would be a constant sustainable source of energy to the ashram. Think of the implications, Iravan. Our trajection would no longer be limited. Architects would become a race of superbeings. You could change the very definition of Ecstasy. You could show the council how Ecstasy is beneficial.”
Iravan’s head spun. “What you’re suggesting is impossible,” he sputtered. “When architects push the three conditions, it always,alwaysresults in uncontrollable power that damages the ashram. All our histories tell us this, and we’ve seenevidenceof it.”
“What you did in thejungle—”
“It wasn’tEcstasy—itwas just exceptional trajection. I’m a talented architect, Bharavi. That’s all it was.”
