The debate over the Pioneer Institute wasn't a boardroom discussion; it was a silent civil war. Harsh presented the proposal not as a business deal, but as a strategic necessity—a "research insurance policy" for the nation. The terms were locked in titanium-clad legal language: non-exclusive, at-cost licensing to India in perpetuity. The Harsh Group's sovereign core—the chip fab, Arogya, Disha, the Safe Zone—remained untouched behind the Golden Share wall.
The opposition was visceral. Meera, his communications chief, resigned on the spot, her letter a single, searing sentence: "You are watering the roots of the banyan with poisoned rain." The nationalist blogs that had defended him now turned, calling him a "comprador capitalist," a modern-day East India Company agent in patriotic clothing.
The most painful conversation was with Priya. She listened in the garden, her face growing still.
"You built a wall," she finally said, her voice quiet as the dusk settling around them. "A beautiful, strong wall to keep the wolves out. And now you're cutting a door in it and inviting the cleverest wolf of all to be a guest. Because he promises to teach you new songs."
"It's not a door," Harsh argued, the engineer in him grasping for precision. "It's a filtered air vent. We get the oxygen without letting anything else in."
"Wolves don't need doors, Harsh," she replied, her eyes sad. "They study walls. They find the weak point. You've just shown him where your hunger is. That's all he needs."
He couldn't refute her. He could only follow the cold logic of his own foresight. The world was accelerating towards breakthroughs that would redefine life, intelligence, and matter itself. To be absent from that frontier was to accept permanent vassalage.
Sharma's cell took three weeks to respond. Their answer came not as approval, but as a set of brutal, additional conditions. A "Mirror Team" of their own scientists would be embedded in the Pioneer Institute, with full access. All data flowing back to India would first pass through a "quarantine server" on Indian soil, run by their own cryptographers. And Harsh himself would have to undergo a new, deeper level of background vetting—a "loyalty reassessment."
He agreed to it all. The price of reaching for the future was perpetual, humiliating scrutiny.
The Pioneer Institute launched in a blur of sterile, Swiss press releases. The first research director was a Nobel laureate in biophysics with no national allegiance. The first batch of fellows included brilliant minds from a dozen countries, including a disillusioned former star from Neutron Dynamics—a small, personal victory that tasted like ash.
Back in Pune, the effect was immediate and paradoxical. The "brain drain" stabilized. The engineers who had been eyeing exits to Silicon Valley now looked at the Pioneer pipeline with wary interest. The message was clear: you could do world-leading, wild science, and your work would still serve India. The mood in the Foresight Institute shifted from defensive caution to a tense, curious anticipation.
But a new duality was born. The Harsh Group now had two hearts. One, the steady, sovereign pulse of the Garden—reliable, safe, nurturing. The other, the wild, arrhythmic beat of the Pioneer Institute—speculative, dangerous, unbounded.
Harsh's life became a constant traversal between them. One week, he'd be in a village in Bihar, inaugurating an Arogya-powered clinic, a symbol of earthy, tangible good. The next, he'd be on a encrypted call with Elias Thorne, discussing the Pioneer team's early work on quantum error correction—a realm of abstraction so pure it felt like theology.
He was tending the Garden while keeping a wary eye on the horizon where the Wild was brewing storms he couldn't yet comprehend. The alliance was a gamble that his rooted strength could absorb and domesticize the wildness, rather than be overgrown by it.
One evening, Anya, now six, brought him a drawing. It showed two trees. One was neat, with symmetrical fruit. The other was a chaotic tangle of vines and strange, glowing flowers. A little stick figure stood between them, holding a watering can that poured onto both.
"That's you, Papa," she said.
"Why two trees, beta?"
"Because one is for eating," she said, with perfect child's logic. "And one is for magic."
He held the drawing, a lump in his throat. The child saw what the strategists, the politicians, and even Priya feared to see: that the Garden and the Wild were not enemies. They were two halves of a single, necessary world. One for survival. The other for the impossible.
He was no longer just a gardener or a general. He was a keeper of both. And the weight of the magic tree, he knew, would be infinitely heavier than the weight of the crown.
(Chapter End)