017

Karnak escorted Mahaguru Gorakhnath and his chelas to the meeting hall. His presence there was not a coincidence. Acharya Shukr had specifically asked him to be on duty during the meeting. All assistive duties at the ashram were performed by students so this was not unusual. But Karnak was sure that Acharya Shukr had done it on purpose.

“They send a mlechha to welcome us,” the tall chela whispered into Mahaguru’s ear as they entered the hall. Mahaguru signalled him to shut up.

Only the four senior acharyas of the ashram were present – Suvarnketu, Svetakeu, Kshitradyumn and Shukr. Acharya Suvarnaketu looked grim. Kshitradyumn wore an angry expression on his face.

“I offer my pranaam to the acharyas of this ashram,” said Gorakhnath, joining his hands. Karnak escorted him to a raised aasan beside Acharya Suvarnketu. Gorakhnath sat down and the tall chela stood behind him.

Svetaketu spoke:

“Mahaguru Gorakhnath, on behalf of Acharya Suvarnketu and the residents of his ashram, I welcome you. The Acharya understands that you have come to discuss the possibility of setting up your own school within this ashram. He will now hear what you have to say in this regard.”

Gorakhnath bowed his head and spoke:

“Esteemed Acharya, I am indeed honoured to be granted this audience. As you are aware, I plan to set up a school of objective thought within your ashram. Your ashram is the oldest standing guru-shishya tradition in Aryavart. It stands at the center of all that we regard as glorious in our culture. It represents the best of our tradition, ideas and beliefs. However, objective though, as a discipline has not received as much attention at this ashram as it should have. I humbly present myself in service of this ashram so that something as important as objective thought can be adequately explored and taught at this temple of learning.”

“Are you aware,” Kshitradyumn said in a curt voice before Suvarnketu could reply, “that this ashram has officially declared objective thought as bogus? You are nothing but a quack, mahaguru! How dare you even think of making this proposition?!”

The tall chela took a step forward.

“The Mahaguru will not be spoken to in this manner!” he challenged.

Gorakhnath raised a hand.

“Shant, Ramanand,” he said sharply, and then to Kshitradyumn, “I hope you will pardon my chela, Acharya. He tends to become a little volatile in his loyalty to me. However, while discussing ideas of such delicate nature, tempers are apt to fly. But surely you recognizes the voice of reason. Acharya Kshitradyumn, can I humbly ask you to explain why you think objective thought is bogus? I would be happy to provide you proof that it is not. Quite the contrary, in fact. Today there are millions of followers of objective thought throughout aryavart. If objective thought is bogus and I’m a quack, how do you explain the joy that sheer faith and belief brings to their lives?”

Kshitradyumn glared.

“I am not answerable to demagogues!” he said in an angry whisper.

016

Karnak saw Suvarna from afar. She was sitting under the tree at their favourite spot near the rivulet, silently humming to herself. She turned waved at him as she heard him approach.

As Karnak came nearer, he saw a garland of flowers around her neck. She had more flowers in her hand and was weaving them into a pattern.

“That looks nice!” Karnak complimented her.

She beamed.

“Thank you,” she said with a wide grin, “some of were watching a video from the Federation earlier this morning. Apparently this is the height of fashion in those parts of the galaxy these days.”

Karnak nodded.

“You’re making something else too?”

“Oh yes, these are for my hair. Here, would you help me put these on?”

Karnak took the flowers from her and began dressing her hair with them, as she told him to. He felt his heart flutter, being so close to her. He could smell the faint smell of her body and the smooth, golden white skin of her neck was uncomfortably close. He wondered if she’d planned to ask him to do this all along.

Suvarna smiled when he was done.

“How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

Her eyes twinkled. She looked away towards the rivulet in simple pleasure.

Karnak realized he was staring at her. He looked away too. A group of four people was walking towards them from upstream.

“Who might these people be?” he asked, “I didn’t think anyone came here.”

Suvarna turned to look towards where he was pointing.

“I think I know who they are,” she said, “Mahaguru Gorakhnath is visiting the ashram today. They must be his chelas.”

She pronounced the word as if it was a profanity.

“Gorakhnath?! What is he doing here?!”

“He wants to set up a wing in the ashram. Can you imagine?!”

Honestly, Karnak couldn’t. Acharya Svetaketu’s ashram was one of the oldest continuing guru-shishya traditions in Aryavart. That they held on to their beliefs, ideals and principles like a lioness holds on to her cubs. But Karnak knew the kind of political support Gorakhnath was enjoying these days and the fact that he now had courage enough to make such a proposal was testimony to his power.

The chelas had come neared and Karnak could make out their clean shaved head and faces. They wore saffron coloured robes. They seemed to have noticed Karnak and Suvarna and were now approaching them.

“I think we should leave,” said Karnak, starting to get up.

Suvarna held his hand.

“Stay,” she said.

The chelas approached them. One of them came forward. He was taller and more heavily built than the rest of them.

“Devi, arya,” he said in an irritatingly sweet voice, “Pranam!”

Suvarna neither got up in respect, nor returned their pranam but merely nodded her head. The tall one glanced back at his companions.

“It saddens me that the daughter of one of the senior-most acharyas of this ashram should choose to ignore my greetings,” he said with a grin that Suvarna could only describe as a leer.

“That is because the daughter of Acharya Suvarnketu, the Rajacharya of Aryavart wishes to make it clear that you and your ... cult ... is not welcome in this ashram.”

Suvarnas voice was icy cold.

The tall chela’s smile disappeared, his face assuming a stern expression.

“The chelas of Mahaguru Gorakhnath shall not be spoken to is such manner,” he said, “Now, why don’t you get up and greet us in manner befitting and aryavarti lady?”

At this, Karnak stood up.

“I suggest you make no such demands of the lady!”

“Or what? And who might you be anyway?”

One of the other chelas came forward and whispered in his ear.

“Oh, so you are that mlechha they’ve admitted into their ranks, have they? Who are you to speak in matters of aryavartis? Step aside!”

“He is a shishya in this ashram and will speak as he wants to!” Suvarna declared.

“Yes, of course,” said the tall chela, jeering, “only this ashram would ever admit an unclean, unpure person of dubious lineage as a shishya. And only the ladies of this ashram would ever indulge in such immoral, promiscuous behaviour!”

“If you dare say one more word!” Karnak took a step forward, clenching his fists.

“Wait, Karnak” Suvarna said, “I want to hear what part of my behaviour he finds immoral and promiscuous.”

The chela leered again.

“Such self righteousness! The thief admonishes the lawkeeper! I ask you, devi, does it befit you to dress like a mlechha harlot and go out alone with man who is not related to you? Is this what the culture of the ashram has degraded to?!”

Both Karnak and Suneeti looked unbelievingly at him.

“I think we should go now,” said Suvarna, standing up.

She walked away and Karnak followed her, wary of the chelas. They laughed behind their backs.

“This ashram’s culture needs a change, you know. Mahaguru Gorakhnath will ensure that all residents follow the great tradition and conform to the culture of aryavart once he starts his peeth in this ashram. The ladies of aryavart will learn how ladies ought to behave!”

***

015

Karnak brought a small packet out of his pocket. He removed the plastic wrapping and picked out a small black card from it.

“What is this?” asked Suneeti, leaning closer and peering at the card. Despite being black it reflected light in rainbow colors, like an oyster shell.

“It is a dormant nanobotic complex,” said Karnak.

“Nanobots ... aren’t they ...”

“Illegal? Yes, they are. But I have a certain friend who doesn’t subscribe to the same view.”

“But why do you need to use nanobots at all? You know all these mantras, don’t you? I saw you. You could charioteer the vimana, you could break the tantrik yantra too. Can’t you just chant something and get us out of here?”

Karnak felt annoyance build up inside him. He took a deep breath. Then he realized that he was getting angry over his own incompetence. He considered himself to be a powerful acharya. But the truth of the matter was that he was only an amateur at best. He knew how to do many things with mantras, but he did not know all of them. The best of acharyas could invent their own mantras for things, but even they had their limits. He doubted it any acharya could actually fly through vacuum. If they could, they’d not have to invent vimana’s would they?

“Mantras cannot do everything,” he explained patiently, “Mantras are like any other bit of engineering. Just because you can make a vimana fly doesn’t mean you can fly it at any speed. Just as there are limits to the physical world, there are limits to the mantrik world.”

Suneeti nodded.

Karnak had finished fiddling with the nanobotic complex. He opened a hatch to an ejection chute, put the card in and pressed the control. There was a sharp sound of air being sucked out.

“Do you want to watch?” Karnak asked Suneeti, “I always find it fascinating.”

He turned on the external camera. They could see the surface of the asteroid on screen. The image wasn’t very clear and Suneeti could barely make out the black speck in the centre of the display.

“What am I supposed to see?” she asked.

“Wait!”

For several moment nothing happened. Then Suneeti thought she saw something. It was like a little cloud of smoke rising from where the black nanobotic disc was sinking into the ground. Then Suneeti saw a structure forming up. It was hexagonal in structure and greyish-silver in colour.

“It’s magical,’ Karnak whispered beside her.

She looked on. The structure was now bigger, about a feet tall. It has begun to form a three dimensional dodecahedral pattern that extended out to form what looked like an antenna.

“Is that a beacon?” she asked.

“Yes, and if that beacon is working, we should have help sometime soon.”

Karnak backed away from the viewer and relaxed. He seemed visibly relieved.

“So,” said Suneeti, “I guess we just have to wait now.”

“Yes.”

She stayed silent for a minute, then said:

“Tell me about Gorakhnath. Why is he hunting you like this?”

“It’s a long story,” said Karnak with a smile.

“We have the time,” Suneeti shrugged.

“Okay,” said Karnak, “we go a long time back. About three years, I guess. I was at the ashram at that time.”

***

014

Suneeti felt a dull ache in her head and a slight constriction in her chest. Her entire body felt as if it had been put through an agricultural harvester.

“Are you okay?” Karnak asked her. He was sitting at the controls which blinked erratically behind him.

“I guess,” said Suneeti as she got up from where she lay, “I’ll live.”

“Good,” said Karnak with some concern, “because we seem to be abnormally low on power. Everything is working fine right now but I’m not sure how long we will last. The system needs some time to estimate our power needs and then predict how long we’ll last.”

“Aren’t these things built to last several years?” Suneeti asked.

“They are, but you have to remember that the Atirath was out of service for several decades. The rate of discharge in unused fuel cells is miniscule, but they do discharge.”

“I’m glad the ones on the main ship worked better than these.”

Suneeti moved over closer to the controls and peered over Karnak’s shoulder.

“Can we see what’s happening outside?” she asked.

“We can, but only hazily. We can use only passive sensors, since we do not want to get detected. And we’re deep inside the asteroid belt. There are too many solid obstacles around to get a clear reading. But I can make out several small ships approaching a large one, which I guess is the Atirath.”

Suneeti grunted and looked as Karnak brought a schematic on the screen, which was just a representation of what he’d just said. She saw five small dots rendezvous with a big cross and then stay in the same position. They had probably docked with the Atirath and were searching through it.

“I just hope they don’t find us,” she said after a while.

“I don’t think they would,” said Karnak, “we seem to be well protected till now. Fortunately the habitat shuttle leaves no record of its destination on the mother ship. In fact if they don’t dig deep enough, they’d not even find that a habitat shuttle was launched.”

Karnak spent the next hour or so trying to recalibrate the sensors to get a better reading. But as he’d said, they were well hidden and it worked both ways.

After about an hour they saw the little dots dislodging from the big cross and fly back the way they’d come.

“They’re going back,” said Karnak.

“Yes, and the Atirath isn’t moving. Which means they can’t take it back. It’s stranded out in space.”

“I guess. Though they can always come back and install new fuel cells and take it back. I don’t think they’re going to let something as valuable as that drift forever.”

“I wonder what value they find in something that can’t be used.”

Karnak shrugged. He didn’t see the point either.

The lights flickered.

“Uh-oh,” Karnak exclaimed as he pressed a few controls, “Power’s going down. According to the system we only have a few hours of power left.”

“How many is few?”

“About five. We will actually have a little more time after that but it will start getting uncomfortable after five.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We are going to call for rescue,” said Karnak with a cocky smile.

***

013

Karnak and Suneeti moved through the dimly lit corridors of the vimana. The main powercore had depleted and only the basic systems were running on emergency power.

“This ship has a habitat shuttle,” explained Karnak.

“And what is that?” asked Suneeti.

“A kind of escape pod. But more advanced. It is used mostly in or near solar systems. A habitat shuttle can be launched towards that system’s asteroid belt. The shuttle will locate a suitable asteroid and then forcibly lodge itself as deep as possible into the surface of the asteroid. It will then create a small life supporting habitat inside that asteroid. If cleverly chosen, the habitat can remain completely hidden from external scans and continue to function of years on solar power.”

“A hideout,” said Suneeti.

“Yes. And that’s what we’re going to do. Once we’re inside an asteroid, no one will be able to locate us.”

Suneeti nodded and followed him down the long winding corridors.

The habitat shuttle wasn’t as big as Suneeti had expected it to be. Karnak had almost made it sound comfortable. There was barely space for two people to squeeze in. The controls were moulded into the walls at awkward places, more out of concern for functionality than any aesthetic need or desire.

Suneeti felt odd being cramped in such a small place with a man she barely knew. But then, it was better than being ‘married’ to a man who you hardly knew. At least she knew that Karnak wasn’t going to harm her.

Karnak worked at the controls as Suneeti sat in silence and watched him. For the first time she had the leisure to notice his physical features. He wasn’t very tall and somewhat dark skinned for an aryavarti. But he had lush black hair, of that sort that made Suneeti want to run her fingers through them. His shoulders were firm, his arms shapely.

Suneeti smiled shyly to herself.

“We’re set,” said Karnak, looking up from the controls, “you ready to go?”

Suneeti was startled out of her reverie.

“Yes, of course,” she said with a slight smile

Karnak grinned and pressed the button. The shuttle moved and gradually accelerated out of the vimana. It manoeuvred slowly as it cleared the shielded volume of the Atirath then turned sharply and shot into the void like a bullet. The habitat shuttle was designed so as not to be found. In the vast emptiness of space, moving fast was one way of not being found. Moving irregularly was another way. The shuttle changed direction many times, taking as roundabout a way to the asteroid belt as its power reserves allowed. Then it entered the asteroid belt and slowed down, scanning for an appropriate spot to set up the habitat. Then in one final burst of power, it made a bone crushing lunge into a cup shaped asteroid that budged slightly as the shuttle lodged itself into its surface.

Suneeti had blacked out due to the heavy accelerations of the shuttle. By the time she came to the shuttle had grown in size, utilizing the entire space of the crater that it had dug into the asteroid as living space. The gentle throb of engines that was every present on every space faring craft was missing. The habitat now had the quiet, damped feeling of an underground bunker.

012

Karnak smiled in a way that for some reason sent a chill down Suneeti’s spine.

“I’m bringing on the external shield.”

She watched in fascination as exterior of the vimana glowed with diffuse energy. The shields came with sudden force and hurtled those men into the air like shreds of paper in a hurricane.

Suneeti had hardly breathed a sigh of relief when she saw a group of tantriks approaching the vimana from the other side. She manipulated the display to bring them into focus.

One of the tantriks moved forward, as close to the outer limit of the shield as he could. He was wearing only a loincloth and rudraksh neck and armlets. His entire body was covered in what Suneeti knew was ash of a freshly cremated corpse. His hair were long and matted in locks. He carried a trishool in one hand.

The tantrik hit the ground in front of him with his trishool, holding it upright with both hands. Then he began chanting. The trishool appeared to glow in his hands. He lifted it up and thrust it into the shield. The shield buckled and bended inwards at that spot. It shimmered in colours that made Suneeti’s eyes water.

The tantrik took a step forward and the shield diminished around him. Two more tantriks had begun similar procedures on either sides of him.

“They have tantriks now,” Suneeti cried out with renewed panic, “do something!”

“I’m doing it!” Karnak lashed out at her, “This is an Atirath, not a ground-chariot! The systems are complex and I don’t have time to understand them fully. They have to brought online in as specified order for this to work.”

Suneeti kept her mouth shut. She knew that there was not much she could do to help.
She watched with growing fear as the tantriks took step after step, weakening the shield with each one.

Suddenly the floor shuddered. Suneeti had to hold on to the guard rails that encircled the room to steady herself.

The shuddering grew more violent. They were taking off. Suneeti saw the tantriks hurriedly back off as the ground around them cracked and melted. The air shimmered and the Atirath leisurely rose up from its underground recess.

The vibrations had become so violent that Suneeti had to sit down on the floor. On the screens, the ground fell rapidly beneath them and all she could see were pinpoints of light in the night.
She felt the acceleration growing. The air grew heavy and it became difficult to breathe. She closed her eyes. She was feeling as though she was going to throw up.

Suddenly the ship lurched, it indeed it was possible for an object of that size to lurch. The heaviness went away and Suneeti found herself staring at Karnak’s face who was sitting beside her with a worried expression on his face.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Suneeti grunted and sat up.

“We had only enough power to take off,” said Karnak, “but it gave us enough velocity to escape the gravity well. We’re currently on a parabolic orbit around the planet.”

“That that would not help us too long, would it?” asked Suneeti, “If they’re so keen on getting to you they’d be following us.”

“Yes,” Karnak agreed, “and soon. We don’t have much time. It will not take much time to prepare a shuttle and come after us.”

“Do you have another plan?” Suneeti asked with a grim smile.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

***

011

The Atirath looked even more imposing the night. The giant dome gleamed in the moonlight, the shadows the darkness making the apex appear miles away. They ran to the entrance and found the gate to be locked. There was a small square copper plate, a about a foot on each side, hung around the lock by a thin metal chain. Even in the darkness they could make out a complex geometric pattern, looking roughly like a twelve sided star, engraved on the plate.

“What is it?” asked Suneeti.

“It’s a tantrik yantra,” replied Karnak, “it is here to prevent anybody from trespassing. I can take care of it, but if I break it, it will immediately alert the tantrik who put it here. But I don’t think we have much choice.”

Karnak held the plate in both hands and began muttering to himself. Gradually his voice became louder until it actually hurt Suneeti inside her skull. Karnak’s hands crackled with energy. He gave the plate a sharp pull and it came off its chain. The plate appeared burnt and mangled. Karnak threw it away. He touched the lock briefly. There was another crackle and the lock broke in his hands.

He pushed the gate open and ran inside, Suneeti following closely behind.

They boarded the Atirath and closed the airlock behind them.

“No one has ever been able to charioteer the Atirath,” said Suneeti, “How do you expect to get it off ground.”

“I think you’re mistaken about the whole thing,” replied Karnak, “I’m sure they were able to get it off the ground. That part is fairly easy. It is getting it to warp that’s difficult. Getting it to warp requires connecting. And to get a vimana this complicated would take one hell of a sarathi. Now I just hope this thing has enough power in its fuel cells to get off the ground.”

“You mean you don’t know whether it has enough power or not?”

“No.”

“I thought this was a plan.”

“It’s become more of a gamble now.”

Karnak smiled cockily as he entered the garbh-griha of the Atirath.

He sat down cross legged on the circular platform in the centre.

“Now,” he said, “I need to concentrate.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Suneeti could make out that he was chanting under his breath. One by one, the circular grooves around him lit up and their displays came on, encircling him in concentric rings. Karnak opened his eyes but Suneeti could see that he was not looking at the screens but somewhere beyond them.

Suneeti felt a dull throb coarse through the vimana’s body. Systems were coming online.

She notice that screens had lit up on the walls of the garbh-griha. She moved to the one nearest to her and after some experimentation managed to make them show the view from the external cameras. A team of men was trying to cut through the airlock with laser saws.

“They’re trying to get in,” she said, with a trace of panic.