The Carpet Makers (31 page)

“Would you object if I come to the Archive this evening?” she asked.

He raised one eyebrow. “You’re the representative of the Council. You may come and go whenever you want.”

“Yes,” Lamita said nervously. “I just wanted to inform you. I’ll be there soon.”

The door to the Archive stood open when she arrived. At a loss, Lamita stood for a while in the brightly lit entry hall and looked around. Everything was empty and deserted; there was no one to be seen. Lights also burned in the great domed hall. Lamita entered the main reading room and placed her portfolio on the oval table where the Emperor himself used to sit. The echo of every sound seemed amplified, which only increased the sensation that she was alone.

She walked into one of the radiating aisles and took an old folio volume from a shelf. When she returned with it to the table, she spotted the archivist. As always, he stood in the half-shadow of the columns at the entrance to the reading room, cautious and stock-still.

Lamita lay the thick tome slowly on the table. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she spoke into the stillness.

“No,” said Emparak.

She hesitated. “Where do you actually live?”

If he was surprised by the question, he didn’t let it show. “I have a small apartment on the first lower level.”

His voice sounded cold. She knew that he had known and worked with the Emperor, and whenever she had had business with the archivist in the past, it had not escaped her, that his attitude toward her and, in general, toward everyone who had anything to do with the Rebellion was antagonistic. He was a short man—hardly taller than she was—with thick, silver-gray hair and a slightly misshapen spine, which forced him to assume a bent posture. Nevertheless, he was an impressive, dignified figure who radiated composure and maturity.

“It must be an odd feeling,” she said thoughtfully, “to live here in the midst of tens of thousands of years of momentous history.…”

She noticed that Emparak started at these words, and when she looked into his eyes, she saw that he had been taken by surprise.

“When the Empire ended, I was still a child only five or six years old,” she continued, and for the first time, she had the feeling that he was actually listening to her. “I grew up in a world in transition. I saw things disintegrating all around me, and I began to wonder how things had been in the past. That was probably why I studied history. And during my entire academic training, it was my dream to be here one day in the Imperial Archive. Excavations, experimentation, field research—none of that attracted me. Out there were only questions—but here, I was convinced, were the answers. And I wasn’t interested in looking for questions; I wanted to know the answers.” She looked at him. “And now, here I am.”

He had moved a step forward out of the shadow, probably without being aware of it. He searched her face as though he were seeing her for the first time, and Lamita waited patiently.

“Why are you telling me this?” he finally asked. His question sounded pained.

Lamita walked cautiously toward him. She inhaled deeply and slowly and tried to feel the determination that had animated her earlier. “I came to figure out what is going on between us,” she said softly.

“Between … us?”

“Between you, Emparak, and me—there is something. A resonance. A connection. An electrical field. I feel it, and I’m sure you feel it, too.” She was standing directly in front of him, and the feeling was powerful. “I noticed you immediately, Emparak, when I saw you standing here by the columns for the first time. I didn’t admit it to myself until now, but your presence arouses desire in me, an intense desire I have never felt before. I’ve come to find out why.”

His breath came in gasps, and his eyes darted around the floor and walls, only daring to settle on her for brief seconds at a time.

“I beg you, don’t play with me.”

“I’m not playing, Emparak.”

“You are … an exceptionally beautiful woman, Lamita. You can have any man you want. Why would you want to have anything to do with a cripple like me?”

Lamita suddenly felt his anguish as if it were her own. It was a feeling that seemed to come from the region of her heart. “I don’t see you as a cripple. I see that you have a misshapen back, but why is that important?”

“I
am
a cripple,” he insisted. “And an old man.”

“But a man.”

He said nothing. With his back to her, he stared at the marble floor.

“I came to find out what you feel, Emparak,” Lamita finally said quietly. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea. “If you prefer, I’ll leave.”

He mumbled something she did not understand.

She reached out her hand and touched his upper arm. “Do you want me to go?” she asked nervously.

His head turned to her. “No, don’t go.” He still didn’t know where he should direct his gaze, but his hand had suddenly reached for hers and clung to it, and his words suddenly gushed out. “I’m an old fool … I really am … I didn’t expect ever again in my life … and a woman like you! I have no idea what to do now.”

Lamita had to smile. “I bet you know exactly,” she said.

She had expected that she would have to battle against a mountain of insecurities built up in him over a lifetime, and she was prepared to do it. But when Emparak took her in his arms and kissed her, it was with a sensitive self-assuredness that surprised her beyond measure. She virtually melted in his embrace. It was as though her body had always been waiting for the touch of this man.

“May I show you where I live?” he finally asked after what seemed to her like hours.

She gave him a dreamy nod. “Yes,” she sighed. “Please.”

*   *   *

“I still can’t believe it,” Emparak said into the darkness. “And I’m not sure I’ll ever believe it.”

“Don’t worry,” Lamita purred sleepily. “I can hardly believe it either.”

“Have you had many men?” he asked, and in an almost amusing way, the question sounded jealous.

“Not as many as most people suppose.” She smiled. “But enough to know that I am bored by men for whom the most important era of history began with their own birth.” She turned over and pressed herself against his chest. “Luckily your experience in this regard seems to far surpass my poor abilities. I bet you have not always lived such a monastic life as your apartment suggests.”

Emparak smiled; she could hear it in the sound of his voice. “In the past, my position was influential and that had its rewards. I was discreet, but I think everyone knew that I pursued all the women in the palace.… Then came the revolution, and you rebels humbled me severely, showed me your might, and let me know that I had been on the wrong side, the losing side. You stored me away just in case you might need me again someday, but I became nothing more than an old janitor. So since then, I have completely withdrawn.”

“I noticed that,” Lamita murmured. Something inside her warned that she was heading toward dangerous ground, but she decided she was still prepared for the risk. “I think you are still devoted to the Emperor.”

She felt him suddenly pull back.

“And what would that mean to you?” There was unyielding pride in his response. Defiance, but also fear. More than a little fear.

“Just as long as you are devoted to me, too, it’s all right,” she said softly. A good answer. She felt him relax. In spite of his fear, he would not have been willing to deny his beliefs, not even for her sake. That impressed her.

“Actually I was never a devotee of the Emperor in the usual sense,” he said thoughtfully. “The people who venerated and worshipped him didn’t know him; they only knew the image they had created of him. But I knew him, face-to-face.” He was silent for a moment, and Lamita could virtually feel the memories awakening inside him. “His presence was even more overwhelming than all the legends his priests were able to concoct. He was an unimaginably charismatic personality. You rebels try to get off too easy with your simple view of him. He was beyond the scale of human measurement; the measures for assessing natural phenomena would be more appropriate. Don’t forget, he was immortal, nearly a hundred thousand years old—no one comprehends the meaning of that. No, I’m no blind worshipper—I’m a scholar. I try to understand, and I despise cheap, quick, ready-made answers.”

Lamita had sat up and turned on the light next to the bed. She looked at Emparak as though she were seeing him for the first time, and in some sense that was true. The scowling, venomous old man had disappeared. The man lying next to her was alert and lively and was turning out to be a closer kindred spirit than anyone else she knew.

“That’s exactly the way I feel,” she said, and she suddenly felt like seducing him a second time on the spot.

But Emparak threw the blanket aside, stood up, and began to get dressed. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

*   *   *

“The Archive is as old as the Empire, and over the course of time, there have been far more than a thousand changes in the organizational systems. That’s the reason the current system is so complicated. For someone who doesn’t know that, it’s utterly impossible to comprehend.” Emparak’s voice echoed back from the low, dark, side aisles, as they descended from one level to another farther down into the mysterious depths of the Archive. Down here, there was dim illumination only in the main hallways, and all the things that were hidden in the shadows cast by the cabinets, cases, and baffling bits of plunder were left to the imagination. At some point, Lamita had grabbed the archivist’s hand and didn’t let go.

“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.’”