The Carpet Makers
Page 25
“Level two,” Emparak said, after they descended another broad stone staircase. He pointed to an inconspicuous little wall plate on which the number was painted in an ancient script.
“Is that the second level from the bottom?” Lamita asked.
“No. There’s no correlation. The Archive was extended, reconstructed, enlarged, and reorganized countless times.” He gave a scoffing laugh. “Below us are still four hundred additional levels. No rebel has ever been that far down.”
They walked down a broad hallway. At a sign bearing the letter L in a form that was in use in the days of the third Emperor, they turned into a narrower side gallery. And then they began to walk past archive cabinets and mysterious artifacts, implements and works of art, which seemed absolutely endless to Lamita. The numerical symbols on the signs illustrated the semiotic changes in the Empire’s writing for a period of a hundred thousand years before they reached the number 967, written in a script that was common eighty thousand years ago.
Emparak opened the single door panel of a large cabinet. He swung back the door as far as possible and then switched on the ceiling light.
On the inside of the cabinet door hung a hair carpet.
Lamita noticed after a while that her mouth was agape, and she closed it again.
“So it’s true,” she said. “The Archive does know something about hair carpets.”
“The Archive knows everything about hair carpets.”
“And you’ve withheld that the whole time.”
“Yes.”
Lamita felt a giddy chuckle gurgling up inside her like a bubble in water that’s finally just about to boil, and she didn’t hold it back. She threw back her head, and her laugh echoed back from all directions. Through a fog of tears, she saw that Emparak was watching her with a grin.
“Archivist,” she huffed in an unsuccessful attempt to sound stern after she had caught her breath, “you will immediately reveal to me everything you know about this matter. Otherwise I will chain you to the bed, and I won’t finish with you until you talk.”
“Oh,” Emparak mugged. “I was actually about to tell you the whole story, but now you are tempting me to hold my tongue.”
He pulled out a large star map embedded in transparent archival sheeting. “Gheera was once a flourishing kingdom, whose origin, as is the case with nearly all the old realms of human history, is lost in the dark ages of prehistory. This kingdom was discovered and attacked by the tenth emperor, the predecessor of the last emperor—for no other reason than the fact that it existed and the Emperor wanted to dominate it. A long war with many victims ensued, in which, however, Gheera never really stood a chance against the Imperial Battle Fleet and was therefore finally defeated.”
He pointed to a series of old-fashioned image recorders. “The king of Gheera was named Pantap. He and the Emperor first met face-to-face on Gheerh after the kingdom had been defeated. The Emperor demanded a solemn, public display of submission by Pantap.” Emparak looked at Lamita. “Do you want to take the material upstairs with us?”
“What? Oh, yes”—she nodded—“yes, of course.”
Emparak disappeared into a nearby side hall and returned with a lightweight wire container on wheels. He put the star map and the image recorders inside.
“Gheerh must have been an incredibly beautiful, vital world at that time,” he continued and pulled out an ancient binder. “This report gives a description of Gheerh. It calls the planet the gem of the universe and praises its innumerable artistic treasures, the sagacious lifestyle of the inhabitants, and its natural beauty.”
Lamita took the binder carefully and placed it, too, into the wire cart.
“Did you know the tenth emperor was bald his entire life?” Emparak asked.
Lamita raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Then I must have seen the wrong photographs.”
“Of course he had hair implants, but these had to be replaced every few months because his body rejected them. It was an allergic reaction that stayed with him his entire long life—it’s possible that it was connected to the treatments that extended his life.… No one knows. What is known is that he considered this physical flaw a humiliation, an insult of fate—a blemish that kept him from achieving the perfection he so desired.”
Lamita inhaled audibly. “Oh!” her sigh implied that a vague suspicion about the connections was beginning to form inside her.
“King Pantap’s spies had learned about this sensitive spot in the Emperor’s character,” Emparak continued, “and Pantap was apparently a proud, angry man. He decided, for reasons that seem incomprehensible, that it would serve his interests to strike this sore spot with all his remaining strength. When the Emperor arrived to accept the surrender, Pantap, who had a magnificent beard and head of hair, said verbatim, ‘Your power may be great enough to force our submission, bald Emperor, but it is not great enough to cause hair to grow on your own scalp.’”
“That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”
“No. It was probably the worst idea any man ever had.”
“What happened?”
“The tenth emperor was generally known to be quick-tempered and vengeful. When he heard that, he was enraged. He swore to Pantap that he would regret those words as no one had ever regretted any calumny. He said, ‘My power is great enough to cause this entire planet to be covered with the hair of your subjects, and I will force you to watch it happen!’”
Lamita stared at the old archivist in horror. She felt as though a chasm were suddenly gaping below her.
“Do you mean that the history of the hair carpets … is the history of an act of revenge?”
“Yes. Nothing more.”
She clapped her hand to her mouth. “But that’s sheer insanity!”
Emparak nodded. “Yes. But the real insanity is not so much the idea itself, but the merciless determination with which it was put into effect. As usual, the Emperor sent out his priests to spread the God-Emperor cult and overcome all resistance to it. At the same time, he had the hair-carpet cult set up—the complete, complex logistical plan, the caste structure, the tax system, and so on. From the remnants of the armed forces of Gheera, the Shipsmen were recruited to transport the hair carpets from the individual planets to Gheerh. In order to make any escape and any outside interference impossible, Gheerh itself, the entire solar system, was encapsulated within a dimension bubble, and thus artificially removed from the normal universe. Specially selected and particularly ruthless troops bombed the culture of Gheerh’s inhabitants into a primitive state and undertook an agonizingly slow military campaign of extermination. All around the royal palace, they began to pave over the land and lay the first hair carpets.”
“And the king?” Lamita asked. “What happened to Pantap?”
“On the order of the Emperor, Pantap was chained fast to his throne and attached to a life-support system that must have kept him alive for several thousands of years. The Emperor wanted Pantap to watch helplessly what was happening to his people. At first, Pantap probably had to watch through the throne room windows as the capital city was leveled street by street and the resulting surface was covered with carpets. At some point the teams switched over to filming all their activities—their murderous conquests and their demolition work—and they broadcast it all onto screens set up in front of the defenseless king.”
Lamita was horrified. “Does that mean that Pantap may still be alive?”
“It can’t be ruled out,” the archivist admitted, “although I don’t believe so, because life-support technology was not as advanced as it is today. The palace must be there, however—somewhere on Gheerh, probably in the middle of a very large region where the very first hair carpets have surely turned to dust long ago. Obviously, the Gheera Expedition didn’t find it … otherwise they would have discovered Pantap or his remains.”
The young historian shook her head. “That has to be resolved. The Council has to be told; it must send someone back.…” She looked at Emparak.
“And all this has continued the whole time since then?”
“The Emperor died soon after the hair-carpet system was set up. His successor, the eleventh and last emperor, made only one brief visit to Gheera. Some notes seem to indicate that he was disgusted, but couldn’t bring himself to put a stop to the whole thing—probably out of loyalty to the earlier emperors. After his return, he had the province removed from all star maps and deleted from all data recorders, and he just left them to themselves. And since then, the machinery has ground on, from millennium to millennium.”
Silence settled on the oddly matched couple.
“So that is the history of the hair carpets,” Lamita whispered in shock.
Emparak nodded. Then he locked the cabinet again.
Lamita looked about, still numb from what she had heard. Her gaze passed along the hallways and side aisles over countless other cabinets like this one … on and on with no end to them in sight.
“All these other cabinets,” she asked quietly, “what do they contain?”
The archivist looked at her, and eternity shimmered in his eyes. “Other histories,” he said.
Epilogue
Knot after knot, always the same hand movements, always looping the same knots in the fine hair, infinitely fine and tiny, with cramped hands and red-rimmed eyes—and still he made almost no headway, no matter how he slaved and rushed. So he squatted every waking hour before the creaking carpet frame where his father had sat and, before him, his father’s father and grandfather, stooped and attentive, with the old, filmy magnifying lens before his eyes, his arms propped against the breastboard, moving the knotting needle with only the trembling tips of his fingers. He tied knot upon knot in feverish haste, as though driven and fighting for his life; his back hurt up to his neck and an excruciating headache pounded behind his forehead, pressing on his eyes until he sometimes could no longer see the knotting needle. He tried not to listen to the new sounds that filled the house—the loud disruptive arguing of his wives and daughters below in the kitchen, and, above all, the voice ringing out of the apparatus they had installed there, which constantly spewed out blasphemies.
Heavy footfalls creaked up the stairs to the carpet-knotting room. They couldn’t leave him in peace. Instead of going about their God-given duties, they sat around the whole day and parroted this stupid empty prattle about a new time, and there was an endless stream of visitors joining in the ceaseless drivel. He snorted and tightened the knot on which he was working. Without removing the magnifying lens, he reached for the next hair from among those he had spread out on a pillow beside him, all neatly brushed and individually cut to the proper length.
“Ostvan…”
It was Garliad. He clenched his jaws until his teeth ached, but he didn’t turn around.
“Ostvan, my son…”
Furiously, he tore the headband of the old lens from his forehead and spun around. “Can’t you leave me in peace, all of you?” he screamed, his face red with anger. “Can’t you just leave me alone? How long are you going to continue to neglect your responsibilities and constantly interrupt me at my work?”
Garliad stood there with her long, snow-white hair and just looked at him. This solicitous, pitying look from her clear eyes enraged him. “What do you want?” he spat.
“Ostvan,” she said gently, “won’t you please finally stop?”
“Don’t bring that up again!” he shouted, and turned away from her, fumbling with the magnifying lens and getting it only halfway back in position. His fingers reached for the knotting needle and for the next hair.
“Ostvan, it’s senseless, what you’re doing—”
“I am a carpet maker, just as my father was a carpet maker and his father before him and so on. What else should I do but tie a hair carpet?”
“But nobody will buy your hair carpet anymore. There are no more hair-carpet traders. The Imperial Shipsmen don’t come anymore. Everything has changed.”
“Lies. All of it, lies—”
“Ostvan…”
This motherly tone in her voice! Why couldn’t she just leave? Why couldn’t she just go back to the kitchen and leave him in peace, leave him in peace to do what he had to do? This was his duty, his duty to God, the purpose of his life—a carpet for the Palace of the Emperor.… He looped the knots hastily, sloppily, distractedly. He would have to cut them all out again later … later, when he had his peace and quiet again.
“Ostvan, please! I can’t stand to watch you do this.”
His jaws ached with rage. “You can’t stop me. I have a debt to my father. And I will pay that debt!”
He continued working, rushing on feverishly as though he had to finish the entire gigantic carpet today. He looped knot after knot, always the same hand movements, quickly, quickly, always the same knots in the manner passed down for thousands of years, so fine and so tiny, before the creaking carpet frame, his trembling arms propped against the sweat-stained, worn-out breastboard.
She didn’t leave. She just remained where she was standing. He could feel her eyes probing into his back like a terrible ache.
His hands began to shake, and he had to interrupt his work. He couldn’t work this way. Not while she was standing there. Why wouldn’t she just go away? He didn’t turn around; he just clutched the knotting needle and waited. His breathing was labored.
“I have a debt to my father, and I will pay that debt!” he insisted.
She was silent.
“And…,” he added, but then he stopped. He began again: “And…” Nothing more. No, that was beyond the limit of what he could say. He grasped a new hair, tried to find the eye of the needle, but his hands were shaking too violently.
She didn’t leave. She stood there, said nothing, just waited.
“I have a debt to my father. And … and I have a debt to my brother!” It burst from him in a voice like shattering glass.
And then it happened … something that should never have happened: his hand slipped with the knotting needle; it slashed into the carpet and cut open the delicate backing fabric … a rip as broad as his hand … the work of years.
Then, finally, the tears came.
Praise for Andreas Eschbach and The Carpet Makers
“This is a novel of ideas that evokes complex emotions through the working out of an intricate and ultimately satisfying plot, with echoes of Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A world-class SF voice.”
—Locus
“The Carpet Makers will blow you away.… [Eschbach] is clever, insightful, entertaining, and satisfying.”
—Analog
“Effective writers of science fiction find in their alternative realities an emotional, spiritual, or cognitive consistency with the world we live in, and use fantasy not as a gimmick but as a tool to connect with readers. German author Andreas Eschbach is just such a science fiction writer.”
—The Intelligencer-Journal (Lancaster, Pennsylvania)
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
THE CARPET MAKERS
Copyright © 1995 by Franz Schneekluth Verlag, München
English translation copyright © 2005 by Doryl Jensen
Originally published as Die Haarteppichknüpfer in 1995 by Franz Schneekluth Verlag in Munich, Germany.
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eschbach, Andreas, 1959–
[Haarteppichknüpfer. English]
The carpet makers / Andreas Eschbach; translated by Doryl Jensen; [with a foreword by Orson Scott Card].
p. cm.
&
nbsp; ISBN 0-765-31490-8
EAN 978-0-765-31490-1
I. Title.
PT2665.S34H313 2005
833'.914—dc22
2004058866
First Hardcover Edition: April 2005
First Trade Paperback Edition: March 2006
eISBN 9781466850224
First eBook edition: July 2013