The Carpet Makers

by Andreas Eschbach

  The engines went into action, and their dull thundering made the floor vibrate beneath their feet. Wasra reached for the logbook microphone. “We are about to land on the second planet of Sun G-101 in Planet Quadrant 2014-BQA-57, Sector 36-01. Our standard time is 9-1-178005, last calibration 2-12. Light Cruiser Salkantar, Captain Jenokur Taban Wasra.”

  The landing platform came into view, a gigantic, paved surface that was scarred and burned by dilapidated spaceship engines. An old spaceport, thousands of years old. Every one of these planets had just such a spaceport, and all of them looked the same. A large, old city always extended out around the landing platform, and all the roads on the planet seemed to come from every direction to converge there. As they had learned by now, that perception was correct.

  The noise of the engines shifted. “Final landing preparations,” the pilot announced. The Salkantar touched down with a resounding boom that frightened every new spaceship passenger to death. But the men and women on board had experienced too much to even notice the sound.

  * * *

  The bulkheads of the large main airlocks opened slowly before them, and the loading ramp lowered with a humming sound onto the furrowed surface. Smells rushed inside: heavy, nauseating odors of excrement and decay, of dust and sweat and poverty, which seemed to leave a fuzzy coating inside the nostrils. While adjusting the tiny microphone over his larynx, Wasra wondered why all these worlds smelled the same, a question that occurred to him at every landing. There seemed to be no answers anywhere in this godforsaken galaxy—only questions.

  It was hot. The glow of the pallid sun shimmered over the broad, dusty-gray landing field, and a group of old men approached from the direction of the city; they walked quickly and at the same time with an oddly deferential gait. They wore heavy, dark robes, which must have been torture in this heat. Wasra stepped out through the opening in the airlock and waited until the men reached the lower end of the ramp.

  He noticed how they had scrutinized the ship as they approached—a ship that looked so very different from all the ships they had ever seen. Now they scrutinized him, timidly and unsure, and finally one of the men bowed and said, “Greetings to you, Shipsmen. We had expected you earlier, if you will pardon us for mentioning it.…”

  Always the same anxiety. Wherever they went, they found the same unacknowledged distress, because the transporting of hair carpets that had functioned trouble-free for thousands of years had begun to falter. Even this greeting was tiresomely similar.

  Everything was so similar: the great, dilapidated spaceports, the broken-down, poverty-filled, stinking cities around them, and the old men in their somber, shabby robes, who refused to comprehend. They told tales about the Emperor, about his realm, and about other planets on which wine was fermented for the Imperial Table or bread was baked … about planets that wove clothing for him, raised flowers, or trained songbirds for his gardens. But they had found none of those things, nothing but thousands of worlds on which hair carpets were knotted—nothing but hair carpets—a vast, unstoppable river of carpets made of human hair that had flowed through this galaxy for millennia.…

  Wasra switched on the microphone, which amplified his voice and transmitted it over the external speakers. “You have been expecting the Imperial Shipsmen,” he explained as he had done so often in words that had proved reliable. “We are not the ship you have been waiting for. We have come to tell you that there are no more Imperial Transport Ships, that there is no longer an emperor, and that you can stop making hair carpets.” He slipped effortlessly into the language rhythm of Old Paisi, which was spoken on all planets in this galaxy, and sometimes this ease with the archaic language took him by surprise. Their speech would probably bring some odd looks when they returned home.

  The men, all of them high dignitaries of the Guild of Carpet Makers, stared at him in horror. Wasra nodded to the director of the Reeducation Team, and immediately, men and women marched down the ramp carrying dog-eared folders filled with photographs or well-used film players. They looked exhausted, like sleepwalkers. The captain knew they were trying not to think about how many more such planets lay ahead of them.

  Reactions to the news of the end of the Empire had been wildly divergent—which provided at least some distraction from the monotony of their task. On some planets, people were happy to be able to discard the feudal drudgery of knotting hair carpets. On others, however, they had been denounced as heretics, insulted, and stoned. They had come across Guild Elders who already knew of the Emperor’s death from mysterious sources, but who begged them not to announce it to the populace for fear of losing their status in society. Wasra realized that, in the end, they had no control over what actually happened after they left. On many worlds, centuries might pass before the old ways would really come to an end.

  He thought again about his mission for the general. He growled at himself in irritation, because it had almost slipped his mind, and he pulled out his communicator. “Captain here. Chief Officer Stribat, report to me in the ground-level airlock.”

  Just moments later, a tall, lean soldier stepped through a door and drew himself up to give a casual salute. “Captain?”

  Wasra looked up in annoyance. “Forget that nonsense,” he grumbled. Stribat and he had started their service on board the Salkantar together. Stribat now commanded the land vehicles and foot soldiers. Not much of a career. But brilliant careers are only for fools, he thought darkly.

  “Do you remember that we’ve already been on this planet?”

  Stribat opened his eyes in surprise. “Really? For weeks I’ve had the suspicion that we’re just landing on the same planet again and again.”

  “Nonsense. We were here, but it was three years ago. The Salkantar was assigned a search mission to find one of the Kalyt boats that got into trouble.”

  “And because we had no transfer coordinates, we jumped about for weeks from one sun to the next until we found the right one.” Stribat nodded as he remembered. “I’ll never forget how sick I was then from all the trans-light-speed flights one after another.… Nillian, that was his name, right? One of the pilots of the Kalyt boat. He landed, discovered the hair carpets, and then disappeared without a trace. Oh?…”

  Wasra saw comprehension flash in the other man’s eyes and simply nodded. “We’re supposed to find out what happened to him. Man the armored vehicles; we’re going into the city to the Guild Hall.”

  * * *

  Soon three heavily armored vehicles rattled into the airlock on their caterpillar tread. Their motors emitted a powerful, low thrum, and standing next to them for more than a few moments caused pain in the pit of the stomach.

  The side door of the front vehicle opened, and Wasra got in. The guild elders on the landing platform respectfully made room as the three tanks rolled down the ramp, one after the other.

  “That’s the difference,” said Wasra. He said it to Stribat, but, in reality, it was directed to nobody in particular. “A life meant nothing to the Emperor, less than nothing. And now? General Karswant is waiting on board the Trikood … everything is already prepared for the return flight to present our expedition report to the Council—but he doesn’t want to leave without knowing what happened to this one man, this Nillian. Knowing that gives me a good feeling. Somehow it makes me…” He fumbled the right word.

  “Proud,” Stribat suggested.

  “Proud, yes. It makes me proud.”

  When they were on the ground, the captain ordered a short stop. “We’ll take one of the elders along; he can direct us to the Guild Hall.” He pushed open the side door and waved to one of the old men who happened to be nearby. The Guild Elder approached without hesitation and willingly got in.

  “I am so happy you’ve finally come,” he began to chatter as the column got under way. “It’s very unpleasant for us when the Emperor’s transport ships don’t arrive at the appointed time, because then our warehouses overflow with hair carpets.… Oh, that happened once before, I remember—I was
still a child. It was four years before the Imperial Shipsmen returned. That was bad … a real trial for us. And back then, the Guild had bigger warehouses than today, you know. Today, everything’s more difficult than it used to be.…”

  Wasra stared at the stooped old man in his torn cloak, who was looking around the interior of the vehicle with his silvery, almost blind eyes and was babbling away like an excited child.

  “Tell me,” the captain interrupted him, “what’s your name?”

  The old man made a trace of a bow. “My name is Lenteiman, Shipsman.”

  “Lenteiman, did you hear what my crew were explaining to you back there?”

  The Guild Elder raised his brow, and his eyes sought uncertainly for the direction from which the commander was speaking. His mouth gaped open carelessly, exposing a row of black tooth stumps. It appeared that he didn’t even grasp what Wasra was talking about.

  “Lenteiman, we are not the shipsmen of the Emperor. And you don’t need to expect the transport ships anymore, because they will never come again—not in four and not in four hundred years.” Even though I can’t really be sure of that, Wasra thought to himself. “You don’t need to tie any more hair carpets for the Emperor, because the Emperor is dead. The Empire no longer exists.”

  The old man was silent for a moment, as though he had to let the sound of the words run through his mind. Then a giggle bubbled up and burst from his throat. He raised his head toward the pallid glow of the sun.

  “But the sun is still shining, isn’t it? You shipsmen are a strange bunch and have strange ways. What you’re saying would be heresy here. You’d better tell your men to watch their tongues when they go into town. Even though people will put up with a lot from you, of course, because everybody is so happy that you’ve finally come.” He chuckled again.

  Wasra and Stribat exchanged astonished glances.

  “Sometimes I have the feeling,” Stribat muttered, “that Denkalsar was an optimist.” Denkalsar was an almost mythical figure; it was said that, several hundred years ago, a man by that name had actually lived and written the book whose title gave the rebel movement its name: The Silent Wind. Since the fall of the Emperor, however, reading Denkalsar had fallen out of fashion, and Wasra was surprised that Stribat even knew him.

  “Lenteiman,” he asked, “what do you usually do with heretics?”

  The old man made a vague, broad gesture with his clawlike hands. “We hang them, of course, as the Law commands.”

  “Do you ever just put them in prison?”

  “In cases of minor heresy, sure. But seldom.”

  “And are records kept of the trials and the hangings?”

  “What a question! Naturally, and all the books are kept, just as the Law of the Emperor requires.”

  “In the Guild Hall?”

  “Yes.”

  Satisfied, Wasra nodded. He began to enjoy the growling and vibrating of the tank engines that shook every fiber of his body; it seemed to him to be a sensation of superior, unassailable power. He was arriving with three armored tanks, with soldiers and with weapons that were immeasurably superior to anything on this planet. Without opposition, he would enter the building that represented the core of this society, and he would do whatever he wanted there. He liked this idea. His gaze turned to the light brown row of huts and low houses toward which they were headed, and he enjoyed the sensation of being a victor.

  * * *

  They reached the Guild Hall, which stood massive and awe-inspiring before them. Its gray-brown exterior walls sloped out like the walls of a bunker and had no windows, just narrow openings like defensive embrasures. In the shadow of the building was a large square that presented a remarkable sight: it looked as though a fair had been set up and had been waiting in vain for months for visitors, while all the exhibitors had slipped into a state of half-sleep. Carts of all descriptions stood wedged in at every angle—large, small, sumptuously ornamented and dilapidated, ugly armored wagons and open market carts. Large, shaggy draft animals huddled together everywhere and stared stupidly ahead while the drivers dozed on their coach-boxes. These were the caravans of the hair-carpet traders, gathered here to deliver the carpets to the Guild. Naturally, the arrival of the tanks brought movement to the tableau. Heads jerked up, whips were wielded, and bit by bit the wagons that had blocked the portal of the Guild Hall were rolled aside.

  The portal doors stood wide open. Nevertheless, Wasra commanded that they stop outside the gate. He and Stribat would enter with the guild elder and a troop of armed men, while the other soldiers stood guard at the vehicles.

  “It’s a wise decision to stop here,” croaked Lenteiman, “because there’s no more room in the courtyard—you know … the carpets…”

  “Lenteiman, take us to the Guild High Priest,” Wasra demanded.

  The old man nodded agreeably. “I am sure he’s eagerly waiting for you, Shipsman.”

  Someone shoved open the door of the tank, and an almost unbearable stench of animal excrement assailed them. Wasra waited until the escort troops had taken position before leaving the vehicle. When he stepped onto the dusty ground of the square—the first time he had actually set foot on the planet—he could almost physically sense the eyes of the people on him. He avoided looking around. Stribat stepped up beside him, and then came the old man. With a nod, the captain ordered the escort to move ahead.

  They passed through the gate. All around was an unnatural, frightening quiet. Wasra thought he heard someone in the crowd whispering that they didn’t look like Imperial Shipsmen. No matter how slow-witted the old men of the Guild might be and how much they might resist the truth with every fiber of their being, the common people always suspected exactly what was afoot and what their arrival portended.

  Behind the gate was a small courtyard. It is probably called the Counting Court here, too, Wasra thought, as he saw an armored transport wagon being unloaded by several men. Reverently, they removed one hair carpet after another and stacked them in front of a man wearing the garb of a guildmaster, who compared each piece to the lading records with a snobbish air of precision. He gave only a cursory, dismissive glance at the approaching soldiers; then he noticed Lenteiman and hastened to bow deeply, along with his assistants. Only the trader, a massive man who was watching the whole procedure with a dull stare, remained unmoved.

  The sight of the knee-high stack of hair carpets made Wasra shudder. Seeing a single hair carpet was positively distressing when one understood how it was made: that a carpetmaker had worked on it for his entire lifetime, using exclusively the hair of his wives and daughters; that he had spent his entire youth weaving the carpet backing and designing the pattern whose completion would cost him the rest of his life; that he had first knotted the outlines of the design, whose color was determined by the hair of his headwife, so that later, if he had daughters or subwives, he could fill in the various color fields in the design; and that finally—with bent back, gouty fingers, and nearly blind eyes—he would bind the entire carpet with a border of the curly hair he cut from his wives’ armpits.…

  A single hair carpet was an awe-inspiring sight. A whole stack of carpets, on the other hand, was a monstrosity.

  Another gate, and behind it a short, dark passageway, so broad that it seemed like a room. The escort soldiers scanned about suspiciously, and Wasra noted their conduct with satisfaction.

  They reached the inner courtyard, and now it was clear why it had been so dark in the passageway. In the courtyard, great mountains of carpets were stacked everywhere. Wasra had expected a sight like this, but it still took his breath away. Neatly piled, layer upon layer, the stacks rose taller than a man. And side by side, these carpet towers filled the courtyard from one corner to the other. The plunder of a planet for the last three years. Pondering the implications could make a man lose his senses.

  He stepped up to one of the towers and tried to count. There must have been at least two hundred carpets in every stack. He guessed the area of the courtya
rd and calculated in his head. Fifty thousand hair carpets. He felt sick inside; a sort of panic welled up and threatened to overwhelm him.

  “Where’s the high priest?” he barked at the elder, sounding louder and more threatening than he had intended. “Where can we find him?”

  “Come with me, Shipsmen.”

  With surprising nimbleness, Lenteiman slipped through the gaps between the piles of rugs and the courtyard wall. Wasra signaled the escort to bring up the rear and followed the old man. He felt an almost overpowering impulse to strike out, to knock over the carpets piled up higher than his head, and to flog the Guild Elder. Insanity—all of it, insanity. They had fought and won, they had destroyed everything that could be destroyed of the Emperor’s realm, and still there was no end.… It just went on and on. For every step he took, a completed hair carpet was cut from its frame somewhere in this galaxy—even now. For every breath he drew, a newborn male child was slaughtered because a carpet maker was allowed to have only one son—maybe on one of the numberless planets they had not yet visited, or even on one of the planets they had visited without being believed. It seemed impossible to stop the flood of carpets.

  The farther they went, the more pervasive the odor emanating from the hair carpets was—a heavy, rancid smell reminiscent of spoiled fat and fermenting trash. Wasra knew it was not the hair that stank so, but the impregnating agent, which preserved the rugs for an astonishingly long time.

  Finally, they reached another gloomy opening in the wall. A short stairway led upward. Lenteiman gestured for quiet and led the way, reverently, as though he were treading on holy ground.

  The room into which he led them was large and dark, lighted only by the red glow of a fire burning in a metal bowl in the center of the room. The low ceiling forced them to stand with humbly bowed heads, but the oppressive heat and acrid smoke brought out pearls of sweat on their foreheads. Wasra reached nervously for the weapon on his belt, just to reassure himself that it was there.