Page 36 of The Enduring Universe
They approached the rest of Irshar’s council and experts, Iravan’s retinue following them. Memory flashed in Ahilya, of the time Eskayra had left Nakshar to find her fortune on the same trade route that Iravan had arrived on from Yeikshar. It had been a conglomeration of three or four ashrams, Nakshar among them.Don’t go, she had asked Eskayra, and though Eskayra asked her to come with her, Ahilya could not leave her sister. Iravan had blossomed into the void, young and virile, sweeping her away with his love and magnetism, until they somehow arrived here.
Ahilya’s grip tightened on his arm.My love, he had called her now when their thoughts had met, but that was accidental surely, a mistaken utterance due to force of habit. He had not indicated once in the last few months that he cared to return them to what they had once had. Eskayra had wondered if she had a marriage at all, and Ahilya had not responded, but it was because she was hoping for something long dead with Iravan. There might have been love once, but under the weight of who he was now, it had shattered like delicate sungineering in a storm. Who would either of them have been had they never come into each other’s lives? Iravan had said once that he’d never have traveled this path to Ecstasy without her; that she’d madehimpossible. This is what she had wrought?
Ahilya wished to draw herself away, but she forced herself to walk alongside him. Dhruv gave them an inscrutable glance, and walked over to the sungineers and the councilors. Iravan followed more slowly with her, and though she expected him to speak, to take charge when they reached the table where everyone had congregated, her husband lingered back, bearing the furtive glances from the others like she did. He seemed as lost in his own thoughtsas she was in hers. They stood there, together yet apart, in this temple of sungineering.
For a while, all of them simply watched as Dhruv wordlessly tinkered with some of the devices on the table, replacing some parts with others he had brought. He gestured to Darsh, and the young boy, his sleeves pulled back just like Iravan, began trajecting.
The instruments on the table began to whirr and buzz. The lab came alive as blue-green tattoos grew over Darsh’s skin. Golden light spilled from the sungineering devices, holograms flickering and dying. The residents of Irshar muttered, the sungineers glancing at each other. Airav sat up on his wheelchair.
“How are you doing this?” Kiana asked, intrigued.
“Replaced the transformers with the energex,” Dhruv grunted. He gestured to the small rectangular glass pieces he’d removed from some of the devices.
“I can see that,” Kiana replied dryly. “But the energex works on Ecstasy, and Ecstasy works on trajecting into the Moment. How are you doing this with the Moment broken?”
Dhruv scowled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I only ask because we are doing something similar,” Kiana said, her voice smooth.
“Like what?” Dhruv asked.
“Let me show you,” Kiana answered. “Darsh, if you wouldn’t mind stopping, please?”
The boy looked startled to be directly addressed. He glanced at Iravan, then at Dhruv, who nodded. Darsh left the Deepness, and the solar lab swam in gloom again, the golden light that had been charged with Darsh’s Ecstasy quietening.
Ahilya felt Iravan’s attention shift. The two of them watched as Kiana gestured to Umang. He reached over to an adjacent table and pulled some of the equipment and torches from the expeditioncloser. In the darkness and silence, Umang spread the torches out and stepped back. All of them stared at the devices. Ahilya could hear everyone’s breaths, too loud in the quiet chamber.Work, she willed silently.Please work now.It all depended on this.
“Are we waiting for something?” Dhruv finally asked, glancing at Kiana.
The instruments sputtered to life, flickering in purple shadows. Iravan froze, suddenly alert. Dhruv’s mouth dropped open. He glanced about them all to confirm that no architect was trajecting, then rounded on Kiana.
“How areyoudoing this?” he demanded.
“We don’t know.” Kiana resettled her cane, shifting her weight. She had declined a chair. What were they all trying to prove to each other? When had they begun thinking like this? “All our sungineering died when the Moment shattered, of course,” Kiana said. “But then some of it began again in fits and spurts. It is not reliable, but it is something, and we thought you might know. These devices were based on the prototypes you once made in Nakshar. After the success of the energex and radarx, I kept those devices close and managed to save them during the crash, but they were your technology. Once they worked on constellation lines, each time our expeditionary teams took them to the jungle, but now they seem to be working without such trajection. What do you think is happening?”
Iravan watched Dhruv closely. The sungineer stared at the devices, deliberately not touching them. Ahilya got the sense that he did not want to claim ownership of them, not until he knew more. Sure enough, he muttered, “My devices always worked on Ecstasy, and this is not it, otherwise, these would react to Darsh too when he gave these other ones life.” His fingers nudged the Ecstatic devices he had been tinkering with, then he looked up at Kiana. “You have a theory, don’t you?”
Kiana nodded. “Yes. You’ll hate it.”
“Well?”
“A field.”
Dhruv let out a sputter of disbelief. “You cannot be serious, Kiana. You might as well claim the sun revolves around our planet instead of the other way around. The theory of a trajection field was discredited long ago.”
“Maybe it was simply misunderstood,” Kiana said.
Dhruv gave her a look of disbelief, but Naila cleared her throat, placed a gentle hand on his arm and said kindly, “Would you like to speak down to the rest of us?”
He snorted, but Ahilya saw amusement in his eyes. Naila and Dhruv had maintained their friendship, despite their separate allegiances to Irshar and the Garden, despite their differences as an architect and a sungineer in this new world. How had that happened? When had Naila replaced Ahilya in Dhruv’s estimation? The well of quiet devastation that always accompanied any thought of him grew larger in Ahilya’s heart.
Dhruv threw up his hands as all of them watched him.
“We have to look back into our history to understand this,” he said. “As a technology, sungineering is new, very new. Yes, it began about four hundred years ago, but back then it was simply a few non-architects mucking about trying to see if they could capture the sun’s energy. Their experiments were laughed at, and the early sungineers had to prove the worth of their inventions. Even then, their results were not trusted. It took hundreds of years for acceptance of a single idea. The field nearly died out several times. That is what sungineers had to contend with. Because architects could not conceive of a science that didn’t involve them.”
The architects in the chamber exchanged glances. Next to Ahilya, Iravan remained still.
“It was a technology born out of chaos,” Chaiyya said, speaking for the first time, her voice a protest. “Ashrams ascended to the sky a thousand years ago, but the time immediately after was marked by infighting, each ashram unsure of its place. Subsummation, collapse, and crashing of certain ashrams—all of that took place for a hundred years. Sungineering could not be given that much importance then, not when it did not help with survival, not in those times.”
