Page 83 of The Enduring Universe
Iravan nodded slowly. “For a time,” he whispered. “Only for a bit.”
He flexed his fingers, and earth rose in the cave as he trajected, but his power bled away from him as if his body had been split in half. He tried staunching the flow, tried to retain his power, but it was continued to dribble away, gushing. He knew it would be futile. Hadn’t he seen others excised in the same way? Hadn’t he excised Manav?
In the airborne ashrams, Senior Architects would maneuver the Ecstatic Architect into a deathcage. They would change theorientation of the ashram so that the core tree would begin thinking of that member of the ashram as a dangerous creature, becoming intent on destroying the Ecstatic. The trajection triggered the tree to attack the Ecstatic, and cut away their consciousness from itself, but every excised architect still retained trajection for a few minutes, until it withered away within the deathcage. That was why the shields over the deathcage were maintained. That was why the protocol of excision was so carefully guarded.
It would all occur to him now.
Everpower was within his reach, but only briefly. Only for minutes. In the next hour, it would all be over. Knowing what he did now—how the use of such power destroyed the planet, unleashing a version of planetrage—Iravan could only feel freedom and a profound loss, for everything that the others would endure. He? Well, he had already suffered the worst.
Gently, Ahilya sat him up. He leaned on her, his whole body grown cold, unable to move. The bleeding of the power felt like a physical wound, pain rebounding with every slight movement. His heart spasmed, and he thought he might be having a cardiac arrest. The pain in his shoulder was so acute, each inhale felt like burn wound.
Iravan swallowed hard, willing himself to hold on. Would his body heal now like it once had with Ecstasy, now that he’d been excised? He doubted it—trajection manifested the ability to heal, but excision likely took it away. The pain he felt, in his chest and his shoulders and limbs, was an indication. His body was failing. He was aging, finally caught up to everything he’d put himself through for the past few years. He had behaved like a man much younger. He had cheated death many times. To finally let go would not be so bad. At least he had his mind. He had become so used to his loss of self that he rejoiced for this kindness.
Ahilya studied him, her eyes full of guilt and concern. Iravan gave her a tight, grim smile, the best he could manage.
“The falcon-yaksha,” she asked softly. “The other lives that were killing you. What has become of them?”
“Gone,” he said, wheezing. He could see them in the back of his mind, and the falcon would always be a part of him now after he’d subsumed it. Yet Ahilya’s action had pushed the creature far enough away that he could finally see it as a separate entity again. He would never be rid of it. He could feel it still, its rage at being small and useless again, trying to resurrect his past lives to use once more as minions. “They can’t hurt me anymore,” he said. “I am not bound by them, or their capital desire.”
The thought was heady. Freedom from them finally? What would he do with it? Who would he become? He no longer had any need to destroy the Virohi, nor to change the world. He wanted to live—for as long as he could, for the fleeting time before the planet razed away.
Iravan tried to push himself up. The yaksha’s desire still echoed in him, to destroy the Virohi, but now it was simply the memory of a temptation he knew not to succumb to. How much had he already done in thrall to the falcon? He would never be able to make amends, but it had never been about that. It was about doing better. He could not atone for the past, but in whatever way he could, he could help repair the future. If only he had thought like this before.
Ahilya had been watching the passage of emotions on his face—perhaps she had felt echoes of it, connected as she was to his Etherium. Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Dissolution still comes,” she whispered. “We need you.”
Finally to make amends, he thought. But his hands trembled.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said. “I have never known howto rebuild the Moment. I don’t think it is possible. The Moment is an extradimensional reality, and it was already weakening. You are asking me to rebuild a universe of consciousness, and now when I have only minutes left of the everpower—” Iravan shook his head.
The task was mammoth. It was why he hadn’t done it, not even at the peak of his power. He had not wanted to deplete himself, so he’d gone about fixing the problems the shattering had caused. He’d given Irshar resources, food, technology. But if repairing the Moment was the only way to combat dissolution, he’d have to look through this sludgy, messy, soup of allvision. He’d have to pull out shards of the Moment, fragments of stars which retained consciousness. And then, somehow, he’d have to weave it together to rebuild this massive architecture. How was such a thing possible? He did not have the expertise. He did not have the time. Everpower was trickling away from him in a torrent of his wounded consciousness.
“If you don’t find a way,” Ahilya whispered, “humanity is lost.”
Her fingers were entwined with his. He felt her skin, the coolness and familiarity of her touch. Slowly, he lifted her hands to his lips. His kiss was paper rough, a mere whisper, but he felt her tremble. Her eyes full of grief and curiosity, the contours of her cheeks, and her hair falling around her face—all of it filled him with love. Ahilya looked older, but she had never been as beautiful, as real, as alive, as she was now.Humanity is lost, she’d said, but what was humanity if not her? She who held their fate in her hands.
He had wanted to save her. All along, that was what he’d wanted to do.
He freed one hand, and touched the stone blade hanging around his neck. A half-dreamed and unacknowledged possibility flickered to him, one that he’d nurtured in that shadow space betweendreaming and waking. The home he’d built for her in the jungle flashed in front of his eyes, the relaxed seating, a single large bed, a playground. Iravan had been saving the last of the everdust—the last of possibility—for his marriage, despite everything that had happened with her. He’d never thought himself a romantic. He was learning so much now, at the end of all things.
A soft sound escaped him, half horror, half laughter. “I may have a way,” he said slowly. He fingered the stone blade. “Pure possibility might help me repair the Moment. I’m not sure how, and the everdust contained within this is limited.” He raised his eyes to her. “All I can do is try.”
She nodded. Perhaps she had seen what he’d intended the everdust for through her Etherium, but he was grateful that she did not question him.
“The subsummation of the yakshas is a problem,” Iravan continued softly. “It has made the falcon stronger, and the falcon will try to seize the last of the everpower from me. When I am repairing the Moment, I will be vulnerable. I will have to find a way to release those yakshas from the falcon—if such a thing is possible. It is so much more powerful than it has been before.”
Again, Ahilya nodded. He saw from her memories the state of the Ecstatics he’d sworn to protect. Glassy-eyed, uncomprehending faces, images from the infirmary of Irshar, right before she left to find him. He’d begun subsuming the yakshas before she’d arrived, and she’d told him that his subsummation of the yakshas was akin to excision. Could he reverse it, take the power away from the falcon, and unleash it back to the architects somehow? The yakshas were gone in the shape they had existed in once, but would the architects survive if he returned this power to them somehow? What could he do in a few minutes? He could barely stand.All I can do is try, he thought, misery washing over him.
“What about you?” he asked. “The overwriting… What will become of you?”
Ahilya shook her head, not answering, but explanations tumbled in his mind from hers, too fast to catch. He gathered the gist of it, brief images of a hive mind, of the vriksh spreading, and a thousand voices speaking from her mouth. He pulled her to him then. Her arms came to wrap around his body. They held each other for a long instant, and Iravan thought of the last time they had been this way, before he’d gone to fight the falcon-yaksha only to subsume it. How long ago was that? Three months? Four? When time was about to melt into the sludge of allvision, when his own time was so limited, what did it matter? This moment was all that mattered.
They didn’t say goodbye.
They didn’t speak or try to reassure each other.
It took a long time, for Iravan’s legs were shaking too hard to stand, but finally he rose, gathering his will to him. The rock they stood on arose in a soft column, carrying the two of them upward, responding to his everpower as if nothing had happened. Ahilya supported his weight in the silence. Her eyes were on him, watching his chest rise and fall as if afraid he would forget how to breathe, now that he was so alienated. Iravan pressed her hand with his, and his touch was limp.
The column erupted from the ground. They stood on a small hill, and beyond them rippled the city he had made for her. It extended for miles around, but through the prism of his bleeding power, they could make out details.
