The Carpet Makers (21 page)

Jubad was horrified. “How … how do you know that?” he stammered.

“I know everything about all of you,” said the Emperor. “I know names, positions, and the condition of your armaments on every one of your base planets—Lukdaria, Jehemba, Bakion, and all the others. I know about your shadow government on Purat, your secret alliances on Naquio and Marnak, and I am even familiar with your secret base Niobai. I know every single one of you by name, I know your goals, and I know your plans.”

He might as well have run Jubad through with a red-hot sword. The fright was almost fatal. Jubad had forearmed himself against torture designed to tear this information from him, and he had been prepared to die to keep any one of these names secret.

His legs gave way under him. Without noticing what he was doing, he sank into one of the armchairs. After everything he had experienced, he was on the verge of losing consciousness.

“Ah,” said the Emperor, and bowed his head respectfully. “I see you are a true rebel.”

It took a while for Jubad to understand what he meant: He had taken a seat while the Emperor was still standing. That would normally have been interpreted as an insult worthy of death. Still, Jubad remained seated.

“If you know all that,” he said, struggling to bring his voice under his control, “then I wonder what you want from me.”

The Emperor looked at him with eyes as unfathomable as the abyss between the stars. “I want you to return and see to it that the plans are changed.”

Indignant, Jubad jumped to his feet. “Never!” he shouted. “I will die first.”

For the first time, he heard the Emperor laugh out loud. “You believe that will accomplish something? Don’t be stupid. You see that I know everything about all of you. From one hour to the next, I could wipe out the entire rebel movement, every last man without a trace. I am the only one who knows how many revolts and rebellions there have already been, and I was always delighted to defeat and exterminate the rebels. But this time I will not do that, because the rebel movement plays an important role in my plans.”

“We won’t allow ourselves to be your tool!”

“You may not like it, but you have been my tool from the beginning,” the Emperor responded calmly and added, “I founded the rebel movement.”

Jubad’s thoughts were paralyzed—permanently, it seemed to him.

“What?” he heard himself mutter feebly.

“You know the history of the movement,” said the Emperor. “About three hundred years ago in the border worlds, a man appeared who gave inflammatory speeches and knew how to incite the people against the rule of the Emperor. He founded the nucleus of the rebel movement, and he wrote the book that has remained the most important work of the movement and whose title gave the movement its name. The book is called
The Silent Wind,
and the man’s name was Denkalsar.”

“Yes.”

“I was that man.”

Jubad stared at him. The earth beneath him seemed to crumble away, piece by piece.

“No…”

“It was an interesting adventure. I disguised myself and agitated against the Empire … then I returned to the Palace and fought the rebels I had goaded into action myself. I have traveled around in disguise innumerable times during my life, but that was the greatest challenge. And I was successful—the rebel movement grew and grew, unstoppable—”

“I don’t believe you.”

The Emperor smiled sympathetically. “Just examine the name. Denkalsar—an anagram of my name, Aleksandr. Did none of you ever notice?”

The ground beneath Jubad finally seemed to fall away completely. The abyss opened up to swallow him whole.

“But—why?!” he burst out. “Why would you do all that?”

He already knew the answer. It had just been a game the Emperor had played against himself in his boredom, just to pass the time. Everything Jubad had believed in with every fiber of his being had in reality only been for the amusement of the immortal, all-powerful sovereign. He had given birth to the rebel movement; he would wipe it out again, when he had tired of it.

There seemed to be no chance, no hope in the face of his omnipresence. Their struggle had been hopeless from the beginning. Maybe he really was the god people believed him to be, Jubad thought dully.

The Emperor watched him silently for a long time but didn’t appear to be seeing him. His gaze was absent. Memories, millennia old, were reflected in his face.

“It has been a long time, and it may be hard to imagine, but I was once also a young man the same age as you are now,” he began to explain slowly. “I understood that I had only one spark of life, and I had to grab on to whatever I wanted before that spark went out. And I wanted a lot. I wanted everything. My dreams knew no bounds, and I was prepared to do anything to make them reality, to demand everything of myself in order to reach the pinnacle. I wanted to accomplish what no one had ever accomplished; I wanted to be the master of all classes, the victor in every discipline, I wanted to hold the universe in my hand, along with its past and its future.”

He gestured vaguely. “The contents of the conscious minds of the emperors before me still live inside me, and that is why I know they were motivated by the same drive. In my youth Emperor Aleksandr the Tenth ruled, and I was determined to become his heir. I managed to get accepted to his school, The Sons of the Emperor, and I lied and deceived, bribed and murdered, until I had become his favorite. On his deathbed, he bequeathed sovereignty over the Empire to me, entrusted me with the secret of long life, and received me into the brotherhood of emperors.”

Jubad hung on every word the monarch spoke. His head reeled at the thought of the unimaginably distant time when all this had occurred.

“But there was still more to attain, still more to achieve. I had power and a long life, and I fought to get more power and more life. I could not rest until I had turned long life into immortality. I made war after war to expand the borders of the Empire farther and farther into the infinity of the universe. The more power I had, the more I craved. There was no end. It was a fever that drove us onward. Whatever we already had, there was always the promise of still more.”

The gaze of the Emperor was directed at the star projection. “We achieved power, held onto it, and enjoyed it ruthlessly to the fullest. We made wars, suppressed or exterminated peoples, and always imposed our will without mercy. There was no one who could stand up to us. We committed atrocities that make all history sound like children’s tales, atrocities for which language has no words and which no mind can imagine. And nobody ordered us to stop. We waded through blood up to our hips, and no bolt of lightning struck us down. We stacked up skulls into heaps, and no higher power prevented us. We offered up rivers of human blood, and no god intervened. So we concluded that we ourselves were gods.”

Jubad hardly dared to breathe. He felt he would suffocate, crushed by what he was hearing.

“We had power over their bodies, and we set about to win power over their hearts. Every mortal beneath every sun feared us, but that was no longer sufficient: he should also learn to love us. We sent out priests who sanctified our name and preached our omnipotence in all galaxies, and we succeeded in driving the old images of the gods from the hearts of men and taking their place ourselves.”

The Emperor was silent. Motionless, Jubad stared at him. The air in the room seemed composed of solid steel.

With infinite slowness, the monarch turned toward him. “I achieved what I wanted. Absolute power. Eternal life. Everything,” he said. “And now I know it is meaningless.”

Jubad sensed an unspeakable desolation in these words, and he recognized all at once the stench of the Empire—this breathless fossilization, this hopeless darkness. It was the reek of decay that was without vitality, because time was standing still.

“Power’s promises only exist as long as there are hindrances keeping one from power. We amassed immeasurable power, but we did not solve the riddle of existence. We are closer to the gods than common humans, but we have never attained fulfillment. The Empire—as vast as it is—is still nothing but a speck of dust in the universe, but it is apparent that more power will not bring us any closer to fulfillment. Should I conquer one more galaxy? What’s the use in that? We have never found other beings comparable to us humans, and, without exception, all humans live under my rule. And so there has been stagnation for millennia; there’s no movement—everything functions, but nothing new happens. As far as I am concerned, time has ceased to exist. It makes no difference whether I have lived for a hundred thousand years or for only one … there is no sense continuing on this path. We have recognized that our search has failed, and we have decided to free humanity from our yoke, to give back to them that which we conquered, and to keep none of it.”

The words fell like hammer blows into the silence. Jubad could not shake the feeling that he had vanished into smoke.

“Do you understand what I am trying to say?” the Emperor asked.

Yes. No. No, he understood nothing. He had stopped believing that he understood anything at all.

“We,” said the Emperor, who held the memories of his predecessors within himself in some mysterious way, “have decided to die.”

“To … die?”

No. He really understood nothing.

“Someone who has gained this much power can never get rid of it,” the Emperor responded calmly. “So we will die. The problem is that the Empire cannot live on without the Emperor. The people are too dependent on me. If I were just to disappear, they would have no future. I cannot simply give up my power without condemning them all to death. To solve this problem, I founded the rebel movement.”

“Ah.” Jubad sensed voices inside himself beginning to doubt and seeing this whole thing as an inscrutable subterfuge by the tyrant. But deep at the bottom of his heart, something told him that the Emperor was entirely serious.

“Constructing a mental yoke is easy, but removing it again from people’s minds is difficult. Human beings will have no future, if they are unable to shake off my control over their minds. So the purpose of the rebel movement was to draw people together and train them in freedom of the spirit.”

The Emperor closed the wall in front of the projection map of the Empire. “That has been achieved. We are nearing the final phase of my plan, and now it depends on you rebels. You must conquer the Central World, kill me, take over the government, and divide up the Empire into many individual, viable parts. And above all, you must eradicate—root and branch—the belief in me as God-Emperor from the minds of men.”

Jubad became aware that he had been holding his breath for quite some time, and he inhaled deeply. A superhuman weight seemed to lift from his shoulders, and the atmosphere of tangible darkness around him fled.

“But how can we possibly do that?” he asked.

“I will tell you how,” said the Emperor. “I know your plans; they are hopeless. When we finish our discussion, while you are being taken back to your cell, you will discover an opportunity to escape. My Defense Department has arranged a completely believable scenario for you. Don’t be mistaken; it is all intentional. They have set it up so that you will come into possession of secret documents that reveal a weakness in the Central World’s defenses. But these plans are forged; if you were to attack the supposed area of weakness you would blunder into a trap with no escape. Instead, you will feign an attack there, but direct your real attack against Tauta Base. Tauta—don’t forget that name. Tauta is one of the bases from which I operate in disguise. From there, a secret transdimension tunnel leads directly here into the Palace. In this way, you can circumvent all planetary defenses and occupy the Palace from the inside.”

Jubad’s breathing faltered. No one had ever imagined that such an access could exist.

“And now about my death,” the Emperor continued calmly. “You will kill me. When you attack, I will wait for you here in this room. You will kill me with a shot through the chest—and be prepared! You’ve already found out that attacking me is not so easy. When we meet again, you must be able to do it!”

Jubad nodded in bewilderment. “Yes.”

“There are two essential things,” the monarch stressed. “First you must show my corpse on all media channels in order to prove that I am dead. Show it in some degrading position, maybe you can hang it by its heels. You cannot show any respect—that would be pernicious. Keep in mind: above all, you must undermine faith in the Emperor. You have to demonstrate that, despite my long life, I was just a mortal. And you must prove that it is really my corpse—so don’t disfigure my head. Don’t suppose you have an easy task. Nothing is more difficult to exterminate than religion, no matter how false it may be.”

Jubad nodded.

“The second matter concerns the two of us, you and me,” the ageless man continued as he scrutinized the rebel. “It is important that you take this conversation with you as your secret to your grave.”

“Why?”

“The people must believe they have taken back their independence themselves; they must be proud of their victory—this pride will help them over the difficult times ahead. They must not find out that it was not
their
victory at all. Never. They must not find out that they had totally lost their freedom and that it required my intervention to give it back to them. For the sake of the self-esteem of future generations, for the sake of the future of all mankind, you must be silent.”

Jubad, the rebel, looked into the eyes of the Emperor and saw in them the unfathomable depth of his weariness. He nodded, and it was like taking a solemn oath.

*   *   *

When the rebels took the Palace half a year later, Jubad inconspicuously slipped away from his battle unit. They had taken the Palace Guard by complete surprise. There was gunfire everywhere, but the outcome of the battle was not in doubt. Without being challenged, Jubad reached the outlying sectors of the gigantic palace and finally entered the room where the Emperor awaited him.

He stood on the same spot where Jubad had last seen him. This time he wore his official parade uniform with the imperial mantle over his shoulders.