The Carpet Makers

by Andreas Eschbach

  And now it had apparently come, the end of time. These young people symbolized it with their noisy, superficial bustling about. They understood nothing, nothing at all. And they took themselves so terribly seriously. In their boundless arrogance, they had dared to dethrone the God-Emperor—and even to kill him. Emparak felt his heart begin to rage with wrath at the thought.

  He knew what the Empire was once like, and he knew what it looked like now. They weren’t up to the task—of course they weren’t. People were hungry again, and plagues were raging whose names had been forgotten for millennia. Everywhere was turmoil; in many places, bloody wars were being fought, and everything was going to the dogs. They were slitting open the belly of the Empire, gutting it with its heart still beating, and shredding it into raw tatters of flesh. And all the while they thought they were so important, and they invoked the word freedom.

  The man leaned back in his chair and put his head in his hands, his fingers spread like a fan and locked together. “Good, where should we begin? I suggest the expedition boat that found the first clues about hair carpets. The ship was the Kalyt-9 and the man we can thank for the information was Nillian Jegetar Cuain.”

  “Is his name important?”

  “Not really. But I have heard that he is a distant relative of the councilor; so maybe it would be good to mention him by name.”

  “Okay. What about him?”

  “He vanished. According to his companion, he disobeyed a direct order and landed on Planet G-101/2 in Sector HA/31. We have radio messages from him and a few photos, but no pictures of a hair carpet. Nillian discovered the hair carpets, but then he disappeared.”

  “Didn’t they search for him?”

  “There was some miscommunication about orders … crossed messages. His fellow pilot left him in the lurch and returned to base; a rescue ship only made it back weeks later and found no trace of Nillian.”

  The red-haired woman drummed nervously on the tabletop with the tip of her pen. Emparak cringed at the noise, which sounded almost obscene to his ears. This table was already old before her home world was even colonized.

  “I’m not sure we should go into all that,” she suggested. “There will surely be an inquiry—the whole thing is an unfortunate affair, the sort of thing that happens, but it isn’t really what matters. The only important thing is that this Nillian discovered the hair carpets, and that’s what sparked interest in the whole matter.”

  “Exactly. It will be more important to explain what these hair carpets are and what they mean. They’re large, densely knotted rugs, made of human hair. The people who make them are called hair-carpet makers. They use exclusively the hair of their wives and daughters, and the whole process is so incredibly time consuming that a carpetmaker must spend his entire life tying just one single carpet.”

  The blonde raised her hand for a moment. “Can we show a sample of such a carpet?” she suggested.

  “Unfortunately not,” the man admitted. “Naturally, we’ve requested one, and that’s been approved, but as of this morning … nothing. I had hoped that the Archive—”

  “No,” the blond woman said immediately. “We’ve looked. There’s nothing like that in the Archive.”

  In his quiet corner by the columns, Emparak smiled. Level 2, hallway L, sector 967. Of course the Archive had a hair carpet. The Archive had everything. It just had to be found.

  The man looked at his watch. “Okay, let’s continue. We have to make clear what these hair carpets are and what an immense expenditure of effort they represent. As the sociological report points out, the entire planetary population is engaged in almost nothing else.”

  The red-haired woman nodded. “Yes. That’s important.”

  “And what becomes of all the hair carpets?” the blonde asked.

  “That’s another crucial point we have to emphasize. The entire hair-carpet production has a religious motivation. And that means the old state religion—the Emperor as god, as creator and protector of the universe, and so on.”

  “The Emperor?”

  “Yes. Without question. They even have photographs of him. So this also proves that the inhabited portion of the Gheera Galaxy really was once a part of the Empire. The whole superstructure of religion and power politics is the same as in the known parts of the Empire, and the language common on the Gheera worlds corresponds to a dialect of our Paisi, as it was spoken, so the linguists tell us, approximately eighty thousand years ago.”

  “That would give us a point of reference as to when contact between Gheera and the rest of the Empire was severed.”

  “Precisely. By the way, on many of these worlds there are indications of atomic explosions very long ago—long-term atomic decomposition products and such—all of which suggests there were military conflicts. And these trace elements have also been dated back to at least eighty thousand years.”

  “That strengthens the theory.”

  “But what does that have to do with the hair carpets?” the blonde persisted.

  “The carpet makers produce these carpets as service to the Emperor. They believe the carpets are destined for the Emperor’s Palace.”

  Perplexed silence. “For the Emperor’s Palace?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there is nothing in the Palace that is anything like a hair carpet.”

  “Exactly. That’s what is so puzzling.”

  “But…” The blond woman began to calculate. “That must be a heck of a lot of carpets, added all together. A whole world with an estimated population…”

  “The quantities are phenomenal,” the man completed her thought. “Save yourself the trouble; it gets better. The people on G-101/2 believe they are the only producers of hair carpets. They know that the Emperor’s realm contains many worlds, but they believe that the other worlds deliver other things to the Emperor’s Palace. A kind of interplanetary division of labor.” He examined his fingernails intently. “Then, soon after that, the Gheera expedition discovered a second world, where the people also produce hair carpets in the belief that they are the only ones.”

  “Two worlds?” The women were astonished.

  The man looked from one to the other, obviously enjoying the expectant curiosity in their faces. “The latest report of the expedition shows,” he continued, “that, to this point, they have found eight thousand three hundred forty-seven planets on which hair carpets are knotted.”

  “Eight thousand…”

  “And there is no end in sight.” The man smacked the table loudly with the flat of his hand. “That’s the point we have to make. Something is going on there, and we don’t know what it is.”

  I know, Emparak thought with satisfaction. And the Archive knows. And if you understood how to search it, you could know it, too.…

  The blond woman jumped up and walked over to Emparak, pressing her enormous breasts almost into the hunchbacked archivist’s face. “Emparak, we have two points of reference,” she said, and looked at him. Eighty thousand years. The Gheera Galaxy. Can we find something related to those in the Archive?”

  “Gheera Galaxy?” Emparak croaked. She had startled him with her sudden approach, and the proximity of her alluring body wakened forgotten appetites in him that momentarily overwhelmed him and rendered him speechless.

  “Let him be, Lamita!” the red-haired witch called in the background. “I’ve tried that often enough. He has no idea, and the Archive is nothing but chaos, without any sort of organizational system.”

  The young woman shrugged her shoulders and returned to her seat. Emparak stared at the redhead, seething with rage. How dare she? They were failing by the hundreds and thousands in their attempt to fill the shoes of a man like the Emperor, but she dared to call the Archive chaos. What did she call the mess the self-appointed Provisional Council was creating out there? What word did she have for the infinite loss of direction in the souls of the people whose lives they had destroyed? What word for the deterioration of morality, for the spreading degeneracy?
How would she describe the results of their limitless failure?

  “So what is actually happening in Gheera with the hair carpets?” the redhead asked. “They must be stacked up somewhere, after all.”

  “Transporting the hair carpets is undertaken by a large fleet of ships that are aging, to be sure, but are quite adequate for space flight,” the man reported. “A separate caste, the Imperial Shipsmen, is responsible for that. They seem to be the keepers of the technological heritage, since there is nothing to be found on the planets themselves beyond the level of primitive, postatomic cultures.”

  “And where do they transport the carpets?”

  “The expedition was able to track them to a gigantic space station orbiting a binary star that has no planets. One of the two stars is a black hole. I don’t know if that means anything.”

  “What’s known about this space station?”

  “Nothing, except that it’s extremely heavily guarded and armed. One of our ships, the light cruiser Evluut, was attacked and heavily damaged when it approached.”

  Naturally. To this day, Emparak couldn’t understand how the rebels—these conceited, know-it-all weaklings—had managed to wrest power from the immortal, omnipotent Emperor and seize the Empire. The rebels couldn’t fight! Lie, deceive, hide, and spin treacherous intrigues—they could do all those things—but fight? Until his dying day, he would never understand how they had succeeded in overcoming the mighty, invincible military machine of the Emperor. It would have taken ten or more of these rebels to match a single Imperial Soldier.

  “Okay.” The redhead closed her folder in order to end the discussion for the time being. “Let’s get prepared. I think we should set up a projector and keep the chronological charts ready, in case someone is looking for historical connections.” She glanced in the old archivist’s direction. “Emparak, we need your help!”

  He knew what sort of help they wanted. He was supposed to get the projector and set it up. Nothing else. All the while, he could have answered all questions and solved all riddles in the blink of an eye. If they had only been a little friendlier to him, a little more obliging, a little more respectful …

  But he would not buy their respect. Let them slave away by themselves. The Emperor always had reasons for his actions; he surely had his reasons in this case, too, and it wasn’t the archivist’s job to question him.

  Emparak shuffled from the reading room back into the entry hall and turned to the right. He was in no hurry. In contrast to the three young people, he knew exactly what had to be done.

  He descended the broad staircase leading to the underground regions of the Archive. Here the light was dim and he couldn’t see very far. They liked to be upstairs—the young women—between the endless shelves of the domed building. He had seldom seen them down here. It was probably a bit eerie for them, and he could understand that. Down here you couldn’t escape the smell of history. Down here lay incredible artifacts, testaments to unimaginable events, documents of inestimable value. Down here you could touch time with your hands.

  He unlocked the door to the small equipment room at the foot of the staircase. Eighty thousand years. They said that so casually—these clueless fools—as though it were nothing. They said it without being overcome with awe, without feeling a shudder at the edge of this chasm of time. Eighty thousand years. In that amount of time, mighty empires could rise, then crumble again and be forgotten. How many generations came and went in that length of time, lived their lives, hoped and grieved, achieved things and then sank down again into the merciless maelstrom of time! Eighty thousand years. They said that in a tone of voice as though they were speaking about eighty minutes.

  And still, it was only a part of the immeasurable history of the Empire. Emparak nodded in thought while dragging the projection equipment up the stairs. Maybe he should give them a little hint. Not much, just a little scrap. A clue. Just to show that he knew more than they thought. Just so they might then have some idea of the greatness of the man they had shot down like vermin. The Empire could never have existed for so long without that man, without the eleventh Emperor who had achieved immortality. Yes, thought Emparak. Just a clue, so they could uncover the rest themselves. In their foolish pride, they would never accept more than that.

  “He should be here any minute,” said the redhead, who was now continually looking at her watch, while the others were organizing their papers. “How are we supposed to address him?”

  “His title is Councilor,” the blond woman said.

  Emparak placed the projector on the table and removed the cover.

  “He doesn’t like titles,” the man interjected. “He prefers to be called by his name, Jubad.”

  At the sound of this name, an icy chill seemed to spread through Emparak all the way to his fingertips. Berenko Kebar Jubad! The man who murdered the Emperor!

  How dare he? The Emperor’s murderer dared enter this place where the glory of the Empire was preserved. An affront. No, it was worse than that: insensitivity. This common, narrow-minded man was not even capable of comprehending the meaning of his action, the symbolism of his visit. He was just going to show up here to listen to a stupid little report from the mouths of stupid little people.

  Well, let him come. He, Emparak, would stand there and be silent. He had been the Emperor’s Archivist and would still remain that until his final breath. He was ashamed for coming so close to deciding to cooperate with these loudmouthed upstarts. Never. Never again. He would be silent; he would be silent and would polish the millennia-old marble until one day the polishing rag would fall from his hands.

  The redhead walked to the control panel in the entry hall and opened one wing of the entrance door. Just one. Emparak nodded in satisfaction. They had no sense of style, of appearance. They had no greatness.

  The whole reception of the rebel leader seemed like a ridiculous imitation to Emparak. A small vehicle drove up, and Jubad stepped out—a short, gray-haired man whose movements seemed fidgety and nervous and who walked slightly bent as though weighed down by the burden of his responsibility. He hurried up the steps like a jittery marionette, and without even noticing the magnificent atmosphere of the entry hall, he headed directly toward the redhead so that she could show him into the reading room.

  Emparak took his usual place near the columns and observed Jubad while he was listening to the report of the other three. The rumor was that he suffered from a chronic, perhaps incurable disease. Emparak was inclined to believe it when he looked at the rebel leader’s face, which was marked with suppressed pain. Maybe it was coincidence. But maybe it was also the punishment of fate.

  “So nothing is known about the final disposition of the hair carpets?” Jubad drew his conclusion at the end of the presentation.

  “No.”

  “Inside the space station?”

  “It’s not large enough,” the man replied. “It’s only necessary to estimate the total volume of the hair carpets produced up until now and to compare that with the volume of the space station—the carpet volume would be many times larger.”

  “Perhaps the hair carpets aren’t kept at all,” the blond woman suggested. “Perhaps they’re destroyed.”

  “That could be,” said Jubad in passing. It was clear to look at him that he was occupied with completely different thoughts. “The frightening possibility for me is that an undiscovered Imperial Palace might exist somewhere in the universe, where, in the meantime, mountains of hair carpets are stacking up. And if there is an undiscovered palace, who knows what else is there—perhaps undiscovered armies that have been lying in hibernation for millennia?”

  The redhead nodded. “Maybe a clone of the Emperor who is also immortal?”

  “Exactly,” Jubad agreed earnestly with her. “We don’t know how the Emperor managed to stop aging and to live on and on for this immeasurable time span. There is so much we don’t know, and we must have more than an academic interest in some of these unsolved mysteries, because they may
hold hidden dangers.”

  Emparak had to admit grudgingly that this Jubad had a surprisingly keen mind. A little of the Emperor’s greatness seemed to have rubbed off onto his vanquisher. And he was right: even the Archive knew nothing about the immortality of the Emperor.

  Jubad leafed quickly through the papers while the others watched him silently and patiently. He couldn’t get past one sheet; he read it through and passed it to the man. “What’s this about?”

  “The star Gheerh hasn’t been found,” he explained. “The first order for the expedition fleet was to verify the accuracy of the star maps that were discovered. Several of the catalogued stars bore no numbers, only names, and one of these—the star Gheerh—couldn’t be found.”

  “What does that mean, it couldn’t be found?”

  The man shrugged his shoulders. “Simply not there. The sun, together with its planets, simply swept away out of the universe.”

  “Could that have anything to do with this presumed war eighty thousand years ago?”

  “The names are immediately striking. Gheerh. Gheera. Maybe Gheerh was the main world of the realm named Gheera and was therefore destroyed in that war.”

  Jubad looked across to the red-haired woman. Silent horror showed in his eyes. “Did the fleet of the Empire have that ability—to destroy an entire solar system?”

  Yes, Emparak thought. They did it often enough.

  “Yes,” the redhead said.

  Jubad became lost again in contemplation. He stared at the papers as though this might force them to reveal their secret.

  “One of the two parts of the binary star, around which the space station is orbiting, is a black hole?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes.”

  “How long has it been a black hole?”

  The women and the man were surprised and didn’t know what to say. “No idea.”

  “That’s a rather dangerous combination, isn’t it? The riskiest possible place to build a space station—constant, heavy radiation and always the looming danger of being devoured by one’s own environment…” Jubad eyed the others one after another. “What do the old star maps show?”