Page 39 of The Enduring Universe
IRAVAN
He didn’t immediately leave the solar lab. He could tell Darsh wanted to look around, though the boy said nothing. Iravan pulled away from Irshar’s group, and Darsh and Manav followed him. Darsh kept a supportive arm on the excised architect, ambling through the circular chamber. Irshar’s council had not given them leave to inspect the solar lab, but what were they going to do? Deny Iravan and his retinue now, after all the times they’d begged him to come? They knew that sungineering was the only reason Iravan was here.
He could feel their eyes darting between him and his two charges. Undoubtedly, they were wondering why he’d picked these two, but all they needed to do was ask. He might have told them.
With the bargain made with Ahilya, it was only a matter of time before the Virohi were in Iravan’s grasp. Once he found a way to destroy them, his capital desire would be finished, the path to his freedom laid bare. Iravan would have no purpose afterward. He had a vague notion of what he wanted to do then—heal with Ahilya, if the chance ever came, help her heal from her encounterwith the Virohi, leave the Garden and build a home elsewhere—but he didn’t dare think of that too closely. Already he could feel the voices of his past lives infiltrating him, half-deranged, half-furious, as though to think of anafterwardat all was a betrayal of his capital desire. He kept his gaze on Darsh as the boy explored the lab with Manav.
Someone would need to take Iravan’s place in the Garden once the Virohi were gone, to ensure all of Iravan’s plans were followed through. Darsh would not have been his first choice ordinarily. The boy was too young, too volatile, too angry. Yet weren’t the same things said about Iravan once? Darsh was loyal, and that alone was worth the other limitations. Iravan needed Darsh to be subservient to sungineering, and to Irshar, after it all ended. It was why he’d brought him today.
As for Manav… There was a debt owed. Manav had come to Iravan’s aid twice in the past, saving him from the falcon-yaksha. Iravan still did not know why—there was a personal link he was unable to see between Manav and himself—but it was no coincidence that the sungineers of Irshar had discovered a power similar to what Manav had used once. Iravan had excised the man, and it was a reminder of what would come to pass should Iravan fail in his endeavors with his Ecstatics. Should they choose capital desires contrary to his, Iravan would have to excise them. Could excision happen without a core tree? He would have to find a way, and live with committing such an atrocity.
The council of Irshar had not asked him, but he made no secret in the Garden that he kept both Darsh and Manav around for a reason. Darsh, an Ecstatic seeking his yaksha and primed for condition, indicating all that Iravan still needed to achieve; and Manav, an Ecstatic Iravan had excised, one who indicated all of Iravan’s failed legacy. They were both reminders of his continuedresponsibility, and the consequences of making a mistake. Darsh could not be allowed to have Manav’s future; Iravan—and Darsh himself—would have to lead the Garden to something better. Too much depended on this balance between the past, present and future. Too much that Iravan had set in motion already.
His preoccupation must have shown on his face. Iravan felt Ahilya in his mind, a questioning presence, but he raised his shield, backing away from her as she attempted to pull him back into the strange forest of her Etherium.
He had been shocked that she’d heard him there. Seeing her there in a place so reminiscent of an airborne ashram, she herself appearing so like the woman he had married, had nearly broken Iravan’s resolve. He’d wanted to nestle into her. Beg for her forgiveness. Tell her that the both of them should forget everything, and walk away from all of this to find some peace together, survival be damned.
It had been such a seducing, terrifying thought that Iravan had become alarmed. What could the cosmic creatures make him do, speaking from behind Ahilya? The prospect was chilling, and so he’d created a shield.
He had thought of it only during the recent discussion. If the Moment, the Deepness, and the Etherium really were the same realm in some ways, why should they not work similarly to an extent? It was a simple quality of trajection, to learn to keep the Two Visions separate, something architects learned at the start of their training. All of Iravan’s visions had merged after his subsummation of the falcon-yaksha into the evervision, but the principle still applied. He had simply forgotten that basic principle.
He exercised it now, pulling away from his own Etherium and denying Ahilya access to it too. A shield from her, but also in a manner from himself. As long as he did not enter his Etherium,she could not use it to spy on him, or to call him arbitrarily to hers in that endless forest. All he needed to do was be careful while searching for answers within his third vision.
Iravan stopped at a small table, littered with coils of neatly arranged optical fibers. From here, the conversation of the sungineers at the other end of the room was a dull mutter. He watched Dhruv and Kiana in the middle of another explanation, Airav and Chaiyya nodding every once in a while. The people Iravan did not know were finally participating as well, easier now that he had left. A woman with short-cropped hair and a heart-shaped face marched into the solar lab, said something to Ahilya making her smile, then brushed a strand of Ahilya’s hair behind her ear. The gesture was so surprising that Iravan stared.
“Eskayra,” Naila said helpfully. “She used to belong to Nakshar before she moved away, but of course, we’re all one ashram now, aren’t we? You know they used to court once. Before you, of course. Ahilya-ve finally seems happy, wouldn’t you say? I think Eskayra has asked her to marry her, and I think that’s a great idea. Don’t you? Though I imagine she would need to divorce you properly first. How does one go about that in the Garden, anyway?”
Iravan said nothing, but looked to the once Maze Architect. She smiled at him, a grin full of teeth.
It was absurd that this news should hurt him. That this knowledge should stab his heart in the way it did, with pain and loneliness and terrible grief, when he and Ahilya did not have a marriage anymore, not really. He ought to be happy for her, that she had found joy again, comfort surely, and perhaps love. That she had found everything she deserved, everything he had been unable to give.
And yet, all he felt was a rush of despair like he was a lovelorn adolescent. He could see the house he had built and destroyed somany times in the jungle, a house for Ahilya and the family that they would never have. A house as strong as their dream had once been for children together. A house as tragic as the way they had gone about it. He had told no one of this structure, but what if he shared such a thing with Ahilya? What if he whispered it in the forest of her Etherium? Would she wait for him? Could the both of them find a way to each other beyond their perspectives on the cosmic creatures? His hand reached for his stone blade of pure possibility, beating against his throat like a noose. He had been saving this last bit of everdust for a purpose, but even he knew it was lunacy.
Naila said nothing more, but a satisfied expression skittered across her eyes. She didn’t even bother to hide it. She was furious with him. He had never seen her like that—part-disappointed in him, part-enraged, as if he had failed her personally somehow with everything he’d done.
Absurdly, she reminded him of Bharavi, and for a brief instant, his Etherium opened up without his will and he saw his mentor, with her impatient expression and dry wit. He saw Bharavi as he threw a spiralweed leaf into her cage. Iravan slammed the Etherium shut before Ahilya could pull him again into her forest. He called out to Darsh and Manav, and the three of them left the solar lab with as little ceremony as they had arrived.
Back in the plaza, Iravan took a few deep breaths. It haunted him, that image of Ahilya and Eskayra standing together. Darsh studied him with a concerned expression, but wisely did not ask. Naila strolled slowly out of the lab and joined him, her hands in her pockets. She might as well be whistling.
“Where would you like to go?” she asked, scratching at her short hair.
Iravan gave her a sidelong glance. “You’re the ambassador.”
He had already visited the places he was interested in. The council chambers to look at food rations. The solar lab. The massive, splendid, unbelievable vriksh. He had examined the core tree from every side, inspecting it with the everpower, hovering above the ground until he was within its boughs, but it had given him no insight. The everpower seemed to have a strange resistance to it, as if opposing him in some way, and the vriksh belonged to Ahilya through and through. He gazed at its trunk now, an enormous thing, blotting out the sun. This core tree that had once belonged to airborne ashrams was now harboring the Virohi, become an obstacle in his way. He had destroyed life in the skies. Would he have to destroy its last legacy in the jungle too?
Naila gestured to him, and they strode silently through the plaza, winding their way past labyrinthine roots. Afternoon sunshine beat down on them, the heat of the jungle stifling here in Irshar, unable to be managed by sungineering. Dhruv’s drones had returned images of the entire ashram and how it had changed since the vriksh’s transformation. The citizens had cleared much of the rubble, but the city was speared with the vriksh’s roots, the tree enclosing it within itself. Never before had this landed ashram resembled one of its airborne predecessors so clearly.
They stopped at a low-lying building, with a courtyard of grass enclosed inside a waist-high wall. Children of different ages sat clustered under smaller trees, with adults who seemed to be lecturing them. There were no solarnote tablets. Instead old-fashioned books made of paper were being passed from one small hand to another. Roots spread here too, but several had been cut to make a sort of clearing.
A school. Iravan was looking at a school.
He had promised to make one for the Irshar he had created in the skies. These people had actually done it. Iravan saw morechildren through doorways, leading past the verandah into the building proper.
Darsh looked longingly at the clustered children, and Iravan almost asked him if he wanted to join them, but held his tongue. Darsh would not leave, even if Iravan asked.
“These children,” he said instead, resting his elbows over the gate. “They are architect children, and complete beings together?”
Naila nodded and joined him. “Any child, regardless of their birth and ability, schools here. It was one of the council’s earliest decisions. There would be no more differentiation. That separation is not part of the society Irshar wants to build. The children don’t learn trajection either, and that was before you destroyed the Moment. They learn history mostly. Sungineering basics too. Ahilya-ve has taught here sometimes, and others in the council. This is my primary occupation.”
