Page 7 of The Surviving Sky
The city hovered briefly.
A moment of weightlessness.
Exhalation.
Nakshar dropped the last few feet gently, and Ahilya felt thethud. She opened her eyes. Dim green light burst through the foliage, as the bark carapace gave way to roots and leaves again. Nakshar began expanding, grounding, reknitting itself. Vines and shoots untangled, stretching and integrating with the city’s new design. Ahilya inhaled deeply, relieved despite herself as all the vines holding her dissolved back into the railing.
The rudra tree in the center shot up, tall and slender now. The temple floor softened into a grassy courtyard with rock pools tinkling between bark benches. Chatting, smiling Maze Architects in their embroidered brown kurtas and trousers poured out of the Architects’ Disc, shucking off their translucent robes, relief evident on their faces. Only a few Maze Architects remained on the Disc as it soared toward the canopy, high enough so even the blue-green light of trajection was no longer visible.
Ahilya opened her mouth to speak, but she was alone on the wide gallery. Along with Vihanan, Reniya and the rest, Tariya had already started down the winding ramp that now connected the gallery to the temple’s new courtyard, her chair dissolving into the ground. An excited babble of conversation arose, then faded, as citizens created pathways beyond the bark walls to leave the temple. Now that they’d landed, the council had evidently allowed the plants to respond to everyone again.
Ahilya’s neck prickled. She turned and dipped her chin.
There in the courtyard, looking up at her, stood her husband.
Her eyes met Iravan’s over the distance. He’d divested himself of his translucent robe, but the rest of his Senior Architect uniform, a white shin-length kurta over tapered white trousers, shone amongst the brown of other ordinary Maze Architects. His sleeves were rolled back, a dozen rudra bead bracelets covering both wrists. She knew there were more beads underneath his clothes, necklaces and arm-bands, far more than other architects, each bead holding special permissions. Iravan’s skin was too dark to tell any patterns from afar, but there was no concealing the blue-green light that pulsed on his sinewy arms and stony face. His entire body seemed bathed in light from within.
Ahilya stared at him, the way he held himself, tall and proud, his thick salt-and-pepper hair tangled, longer and grayer than it had been before, his jaw tightening the way it did when he was trying to control himself. Her husband’s almost-black eyes glittered back at her. He made no move to climb the ramp. They stood for a long moment, staring at each other. Ahilya’s chest tightened; she couldn’t get a full breath.
A cough sounded behind her.
“Dhruv and Oam have left for the meeting point,” Naila said. “Did you wantto…I can tell them to wait if you want tovisit—”
“No.” Ahilya broke the gaze first. She turned to the Junior Architect. “Let’s go.”
3
IRAVAN
In the usual manner of trajection, Iravan’s vision was split into two.
In the first, he stood in the growing courtyard, clenching and unclenching his jaw, staring after his wife as she walked away from him. His fingers twitched. His feet stirred. He breathed erratically, wanting to follow her, forgive her, submit to her. Iravan forced himself to stillness.
He had searched for her from the Architects’ Disc. The instant the ashram had landed, he’d leapt off the Disc and hurried to where the Junior Architect had brought her. Seeing Ahilya had frozen him in his tracks. She was so beautiful, tendrils of hair escaping her knot, those big eyes glittering with fierce intelligence. He’d waited for a sign, a lift of her lips, a softening of her gaze, anything. He’d waited for her to take a step.
And she’d walked away.
His heart thudded in his chest. Longing warred with rage and regret. The courtyard filled with the welcoming families of other architects. Children sprinted past clustering adults to jump into their parents’ waiting arms. Lovers spotted each other, faces breaking out into smiles; others embraced and kissed, voices laced with relief. Within his first vision, Iravan stood silent and alone.
Within his second vision, he existed as a dust mote suspended in an infinite universe.
Golden lights gleamed in every direction, endless and breathtaking.
The universe was the Moment: a motionless reality reflecting the consciousness of the plants that comprised the building blocks of Nakshar. Each frozen star in the Moment was a plant’s possible state of being.
Infinite such states existed for every plant, yet Iravan knew each one as well as he knew himself. Within this star, the water lily existed as a fully ripened bloom, frozen forever. In a star farther away, the ironwood was suspended in eternal decay. Birth through death, countless potentials twinkled. Iravan drifted through the Moment, surrounded by life.
Nearly fifty dust motes inhabited the universe with him, each an architect fulfilling their duty to stabilize Nakshar.
As Iravan watched, some of the dust motes generated constellation lines and wove between the stars. The lines intersected and locked, connecting different stars. Nakshar’s architecture unfolded around him in a complex maze.
Iravan smiled. This was something that non-architects could never understand. Nakshar’s living architecture was more than just a maze of plants. It was the intersection of lives, of promises, of intent. It was elegance and beauty and harmony.
Here was the temple, shaped like a warren of corridors. Further ahead grew the library, its loops indicating private alcoves. Iravan meandered through the lines of the solar lab. He drifted beyond the spaces of the infirmary. He swooped over bridge renditions, ducked under gazebo arches, slid over shapes of playgrounds. In his second vision, there was peace. Peace and belonging.
In his first vision, he stood in the temple courtyard, staring at where Ahilya had disappeared.
“Iravan,” a woman’s musical voice called out. “Your landing design was successful. You can leave the Moment now. The architects on the Disc know what to do.”
