The Carpet Makers (17 page)

The others
played
their triflutes—this boy become one with his and forgot himself completely in absolute devotion.

Most of the listeners didn’t understand what he was actually doing, but everyone sensed that something unheard of was happening, that here in this humble little room they were seeing into a wondrous, forgotten world. God was here. God was revealed. He danced within music that had been unheard by humans for thousands of years, and everyone held his breath.

And after it was over and Piwano had accepted the applause with a transfigured smile, Opur was gripped by fear.

*   *   *

They came two days later, shortly before sunrise. Without warning, they kicked in the entry door, and before Opur had jumped from his bed, the whole house was already filled with soldiers, with barked commands and the stomping of boots.

A black-bearded giant in the leather uniform of the Guild Patrol stepped toward the flutemaster.

“Are you Opur?” he asked imperiously.

“Yes.”

“You are under suspicion of hiding a shipsman who has deserted the Emperor’s service.”

Although everything inside him was trembling, he met the eyes of the soldier with courageous calm. “I know nothing about a shipsman,” he declared.

“So?” The bearded soldier closed one eye and gave him an evil look with the other. “Well, we’ll see about that. My men are searching the house.”

He couldn’t voice an objection. Opur focused all his energy on maintaining his composure and appearing unconcerned. Maybe they would be lucky.

But they weren’t lucky. Two soldiers brought a terrified Piwano up the steps and presented him to the commandant, who laughed triumphantly.

“Well, then,” he shouted. “This must be Cargo Loader Piwano from the Third Loading Brigade of the
Kara.
Sooner or later, we get them all. And all of them regret it—every one.”

The flutemaster stepped up to the patrol commandant and fell to his knees.

“I beg you, be merciful,” he implored. “He is a poor shipsman, but a good flutist. His gifts in this life are not an Imperial Shipsman’s strong shoulders, but his flute fingers.…”

The commandant looked down at the old man scornfully. “If his flute fingers hinder him in his service for our Lord, the Emperor, then it is our duty to help him out,” he mocked, and grabbed Piwano’s right hand to force it roughly against the balustrade of the steps. Then he reached for his heavy wooden cudgel.

Sudden horror shot through Opur when he realized that the man intended to break Piwano’s fingers. Without thinking, he sprang to his feet and rammed the soldier’s stomach with all his strength, which was multiplied by his fear for Piwano. The commandant, who had never imagined he would be physically attacked by the aged flutemaster, doubled over with a wheezing sound, stumbled, and fell. Piwano pulled free.

“Run!”

Suddenly Piwano moved with the agile speed of a rabbit, a quality Opur had never seen in his starry-eyed pupil, except when he was playing his flute. The boy sprang in one courageous leap over the edge of the balustrade and disappeared below, before even one of the soldiers could react.

Opur pulled himself together and flew to the window; he tore it open and grabbed the chest containing his own flute. Below, Piwano was just rushing out of the house.

“Master Piwano!” Opur yelled, and threw the chest down to him.

Piwano paused, caught it, and gave his master a last, irrationally roguish smile. Then he sprinted off and disappeared into the broad doorway of the laundry.

The soldiers were already on his heels. They paused in front of the laundry building, one of them issued commands, and they split up and ran to seal off the nearby alleys, hoping in this way to entrap the escapee.

Opur felt the heavy hand of a soldier on his shoulder and closed his eyes in resignation. The light had been preserved and passed on to the next generation. There was no more he could have done.

X

The Emperor’s Archivist

ONCE, THIS HAD BEEN
his realm. Once, when the Emperor was still alive. Back then, silence had reigned in the great marble halls containing the documents of the glorious history of the Empire, and he had not had to hear any sounds but the shuffling of his own steps and the rush of his own breathing. Here he had spent his days, his years, and had grown old in the service of the Emperor.

The most exalted hours were when the Emperor himself came—came to him here in the Archive he guarded for the Divine One. He always had the giant steel entry doors thrown wide open and all the lamps brightly illuminated, and then he waited on the lowest step of the semicircular staircase until the Emperor’s sedan drove up. And after that, he stood modestly in the entry hall, somewhat to the side, near one of the columns; he kept his eyes directed humbly toward the floor, and his greatest reward was when the Emperor walked past and nodded regally at him, just slightly, but in view of everyone else. Nodded to him, the hunchback. To him, Emparak, his most faithful servant. To him, who knew the Empire better than any other mortal.

But then the new lords had arrived and degraded him to a messenger boy, to an unprivileged administrator of an unappreciated heritage. Just good enough to polish the costly marble, to clean the glass cases, and to change the burned-out lighting elements. How he hated them!
Deputies of the Provisional Council for the Investigation of the Imperial Archives.
They could come and go as they pleased, could rummage through all the documents and archive cabinets, and defile the silence of millennia with their bickering chatter. Nothing was sacred to them. And when they spoke to him, it was always in a manner that made it clear that they were young and beautiful and powerful, and he was old and ugly and powerless.

Of course, it was intentional that they stationed two women right here in front of him. They wanted to humiliate him. The women dressed in the new fashion, the fashion of the Rebellion, which revealed much and suggested even more. And they always pressed so close to him that even with his shortsighted old eyes, he couldn’t miss seeing the curves of their seductive bodies, close enough to touch, but still unattainable for a limping old cripple like himself.

Just now they had arrived, unannounced as usual, and had spread out their papers in the Great Reading Room, the center point of the Archive. Emparak stood in the shadow of the columns in the entryway and observed them. The red-haired woman sat in the middle.
Rhuna Orlona Pernautan.
How they put on airs, these rebels, with their triple names! Beside her stood the woman with blond hair that never seemed to end; as far as he understood it, the assistant to the redhead.
Lamita Terget Utmanasalen.
And they had brought a man along whom Emparak had never seen before. But he knew him from government documents.
Borlid Ewo Kenneken, Member of the Committee for the Administration of the Imperial Estate.

“We’re way behind on this!” the redhead shouted. “He’s arriving in two hours, and we haven’t even developed a theory yet. How do you intend to pull this off?”

The man opened a large satchel and pulled out a stack of files. “There has to be a way. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. He just needs a clear, concise report, so that he has some basis for a decision.”

“How much time will he have for us?” the blond woman asked.

“At most, an hour,” the man replied. “We’ll have to limit ourselves to the essentials.”

Emparak knew they considered him simpleminded and senile. Each gesture, each word directed at him told him that. So, fine. Let them think it. His time would come.

Oh, he knew exactly how things looked in the Empire today. Nothing was a secret from the Emperor’s archivist. He had sources and channels, through which everything he needed to know came to him. He still had
that,
at least.

“What does he know about the background of the Gheera Expedition?”

“He knows about the discovery of the star maps on Eswerlund. He was one of the councilors who voted to send out the expedition.”

“Good. That means we can forget about that much of it. What does he know about the reports up until now?”

“Almost nothing.” The blond woman looked to her colleague for help. “As far as I know.”

“As far as I know, too,” she responded. “It’s best if we present a chronology of the events, a summary of about, say, a quarter of an hour. Then he will have time for questions—”

“For which we should be prepared, of course!” the man interjected.

“Yes.”

“Let’s start,” the redhead suggested. “Lamita, you could make a list of possible questions, things that occur to us about each of the individual points.”

Emparak observed the blond woman, the way she reached for a writing pad and pen and the way her hair fell forward when she bent over to make notes. He found her attractive, of course, and, in the past, he would … But she was so young. So ignorant. Sat here in the middle of tens of thousands of years of momentous history and didn’t feel it at all. And he couldn’t forgive that in anyone.

Didn’t she know that once
he
used to sit there? Emparak saw everything before his eyes again, as though no time had passed. There at the oval table sat the Emperor and studied documents the archivist had brought him. Nobody else was present. Emparak stood submissively in the shadow of the columns that stretched high up above the hall to support the glass cupola, from which pale light streamed down, bathing the scene in a shimmering glow that elicited thoughts of eternity. The Emperor turned the pages in his inimitable, graceful manner, which arose from his quiet confidence in his own power, and he read calmly and attentively. Surrounding him, ten tall dark doors led to ten radial hallways, along which ranged bookshelves, data storage units, and archive capsules. On the ten wall surfaces between the doors hung the portraits of the Emperor’s ten predecessors. No place had been reserved for his own portrait, because he had said he would rule until the end of time.…

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?”