The Carpet Makers (24 page)

And he would grant Feuk that desire! Ludkamon grinned with the knowledge of his certain victory.

The gong sounded, and the three-dimensional projection of nineteen game balls appeared above the battlefield.

For a moment, a different thought occurred to Ludkamon, however: if he fought and won, he would discover the secret of the Upper Sector. Maybe it was true what they said—about unimaginable luxury and long life.… Maybe he was fighting a silly battle here. The Upper Sector … that was an opportunity that would never come again. And to throw that away for the sake of a fickle woman …

With sudden horror, Ludkamon saw the nineteen balls abruptly begin to move. They shot toward the goal above Feuk’s head and disappeared before Ludkamon could even react.

The tension in the crowd exploded in deafening cheers. Fanfares blared. The referee tried unsuccessfully to make himself heard over the loudspeaker system. Not until the first spectators jumped the barriers and ran toward him did Ludkamon comprehend that—somehow—he had won the championship.

“But … I didn’t do anything at all!” he stammered.

Feuk! Feuk, the scoundrel! Now everything was clear. Feuk had thought up exactly the same ruse Ludkamon had planned, but he had not hesitated to defeat himself immediately!

Powerless to do anything about it, Ludkamon had to watch Feuk bow before him with a mocking smile. Feuk had outmaneuvered him. Ludkamon closed his eyes tightly. Now there was only one hope left, that the Upper Sector would be adequate compensation. At least in the future, he would never have to lift a finger.

*   *   *

Iva had tears in her eyes when she confronted him.

“Are you satisfied now?” she sobbed.

“Iva,” he muttered sheepishly. “No one could have imagined.…”

She embraced him and pressed him to her with the despair of a final farewell. “Now you’ve won, but you’ve still lost, you … you idiot!”

“This isn’t forever, Iva,” he whispered helplessly.

“You’ll soon forget me. You’ll enter the Upper Sector and never think of me again.”

He shook his head and felt a strangling sensation in his throat. “I won’t forget you. I’ll see you again. I’ll see you again, I promise.”

*   *   *

Overwhelming blackness, vibrating and pulsing, a sinister maelstrom of impenetrable darkness that seemed to devour the stars. The transfer ship was like a fleck of dust as it floated toward the gigantic vortex.

“Now once again into the realm of darkness,” said one of the men in the cockpit.

They had risked the descent a thousand times, but the tunnel riders still held their breath.

The blackness seemed to swell. It was a feeling like tipping over the brink of a cataract. The transfer ship disappeared from the universe.

*   *   *

The connections lay prepared. The frame that would receive the new member of the Upper Sector had been opened up, the nutritive solutions pulsed evenly through the latticework of transparent tubes.

The doctor checked the instruments. They indicated normal function. A routine case.

Flexible silver hoses disappeared into the half-opened mouth of the patient, light gray cables disappeared into the nostrils and into cuts in the shaved spot on the back of his scalp. Eyes and ears had already been removed and replaced with plug-in modules. The doctor’s gaze passed casually over the slender, wiry body of the young man lying naked before him on the table, and he felt a momentary regret. Then he banished these thoughts, applied the saw, and began to separate the head from the torso.

“Iva, you have to finally forget him.” Feuk held Iva’s delicate hands in his massive ones and looked at her helplessly. She gazed vaguely into the distance. “He’s in the Upper Sector now and belongs to the management level. Don’t you suppose he could check in any time if he wanted?”

Iva shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe he forgot me so soon.”

*   *   *

He saw out of a thousand eyes and had a thousand arms. In his mind, he heard the commands to be carried out, and using nothing but his thoughts he directed the squadrons of remote-controlled battle robots that cruised through space around the Portal Station. Connected to the Portal Station computer system whose cables and switch units wound through the entire space station, he saw everything, and he would live for centuries.

I see you, Iva. I see you with a thousand eyes. Didn’t I promise?

XIV

The Palace of Tears

THIS IS A LONELY PLANET
, the loneliest planet in the universe and its most cursed. There is no hope here. The sky is always lead gray and covered with heavy, cheerless clouds, and at night there are no stars … ever. This planet once had a name, but who can remember it? The rest of the universe has forgotten this world, its inhabitants, and their fate … and even its name.

Somewhere on this world is a broad, abandoned plain stretching from horizon to horizon and beyond. Nothing grows here, nothing lives, no shrub, no blade of grass, no plant, and no animal, everything is gray stone and gray dust. If there were someone to undertake a march across this flatland, he would find no hill and no valley for days and weeks, nothing to eat and nothing to drink and no variation but the rising and setting of the dull disk of the sun—until one day he would catch sight of the silhouette of a great edifice on the horizon: this is the Palace of Tears.

The cracked merlons of its parapets tower into the sky like the decaying teeth of an old warrior who will never surrender as long as he lives. From these parapets, magnificently uniformed trumpeters once blared their fanfares into the evening—but that was so long ago.…

If time could be turned back—far, far back—this plain would not exist. Where there is now only leveled stone, houses would stand, roads would stretch into the distance, plazas would spread out luxuriously. At that time, a vast city, the capital of a mighty kingdom stood here. Broad roads led in all directions, farther than the eye could see, cutting paths through the sea of opulent buildings. Traffic on the boulevards and squares never ceased, no matter whether it was day or night. Anyway, it was never really night in this city, which was always bathed in a golden glow. Its residents were happy and wealthy, and when they looked into the heavens, they saw the silver bodies of mighty interstellar spaceships leaving their cloudy tracks in the clear sky as they landed at the trade port or as they were leaving the planet’s atmosphere to set their courses for faraway destinations with their freight—perhaps to one of the millions of stars that twinkled in the sky and called to them.

But then the stars went out.…

Nothing is left of the city that once seemed immortal, invincible. Excavations would never find traces of the people who once lived here. There are no buried remains of foundations, no indications of roads, nothing. There is nothing left but day and night, heat and cold, occasional rain, and always the wind, blowing across the lowlands and driving before it the gray-brown dust that gnaws mercilessly and ceaselessly at the stone ornamentation of the palace, the only structure still standing. Back then, when there were still people here, they considered the palace the most beautiful building in the galaxy. But the destructive forces of time have left no evidence of that. The stone rosettes on the towers, once like delicately unfolding blossoms, have eroded into formless gray clumps. And on the walls, nothing at all is left of the skillfully wrought relief images that people once traveled many light-years to see—not even any traces that might disclose their former location. The palace stands crumbling and abandoned. Cracked walls and collapsed roofs have surrendered to the wind and the rain. Cold and heat gnaw at what remains of the ruined walls; now and again, a stone cracks, sending a fragment tumbling down. Beyond that, nothing happens at all. Nowhere in the courtyards and hallways is there anything left that bears witness to human life.

The only part of the structure that remains completely intact is the throne room itself. With its proud, slender windows, it towers over the rubble and fragmentary ruins. Mysterious powers have protected the finely chiseled decorations on its supporting buttresses, the ornate embellishments on its cornices, and the sharp-edged flutes of its columns from disintegration.

The throne room is a colossal hall whose vault is borne on mighty pillars. Unimaginable ages ago, extravagant festivals were held here, moving speeches were given, and embittered negotiations were concluded. This hall saw numerous victories and just as many defeats. No … one defeat too many …

Since then, the huge portal has remained locked and sealed. The gold intarsia on the inside of the door wings has survived, but it can’t be seen. It is hidden by a gigantic portrait, illuminated by a row of lamps that glow perpetually.

The monarch’s gold throne sits against the facing wall on a pedestal. And on this throne, motionless, sits the only living being still accommodated within these walls: the king himself. He sits there, rigid, erect, his arms lying on the armrests. He could be mistaken for his own statue, if his eyes did not blink drowsily and his rib cage did not rise and fall with each breath.

From his vantage, he can look out through the windows at the plain surrounding the palace and see all the way to the horizon. On the table in front of him stand two large monitors that functioned a long, long time ago and showed him pictures of distant cities. But at some point in the past, the pictures began to fade until there was nothing to be seen on the screens but gray flickering—for years and centuries. Finally, first one and then the other screen burned out completely. Since then, the equipment has been sitting black and silent and useless before the king.

The view through the windows is always the same: a monochrome gray plain that somewhere in the distance becomes the monochrome gray sky. And at night the sky is black, infinitely dark with not a single star to be seen. Nothing happens outside, nothing changes.

The king often wishes he would go insane and often wonders if perhaps he already is. But he knows he’s not and never will be.

Once in a while a stone falls somewhere, and the king savors the sudden sound for days, recalls it to his ear again and again in order to relish the experience fully, because there is no other diversion.

In the course of eons, the material of the windowpanes followed the pull of gravity; with infinite slowness, it flowed and sank downward. After many centuries, the tall glass panes got thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top until, one day, they cracked along the upper edge and allowed the wind—whistling hesitantly at first and later howling triumphantly—into the throne room that had been silent until then.

Since then, the panes have continued to crumble, and today the wind blows through the hall just the way it blows across the plain. And with it, it brings dust.

Now the precious crystal floor of the throne room lies dust covered and unseen. Dust has settled on the pictures and statues along the walls, on the upholstered seats of the chairs, and on the body of the king himself. Dust lies on his arms and hands, on his lap, his feet and his hair. His face is gray with dust, and only the tears running from his eyes leave tracks down his wrinkled cheeks, along his nose, on his upper lip and down his neck, where they dampen the collar of his coronation robe, which was once rich purple, but is now faded and gray.

So the king watches everything decay around him, and he waits with unspeakable longing for the time when the machine under his throne will stop functioning like everything else and will let him die.

So he sits motionless, but not voluntarily so. He sits motionless because long ago all the muscles and tendons in his body were severed and all nerves were seared off irreversibly. Barely visible steel clamps hold his skull and are screwed firmly into the backrest of the throne. They enter his scalp at the rear of his head, are attached to the temporal bones and extend forward below the cheek bones to fix the position of his skull. Additional clamps hold the lower jaw in place, which would otherwise hang completely slack.

Behind the throne is an immense, silent machine that has forced the body of the king to live for thousands of years. Pipes as big as arms project through the throne’s backrest into the king’s body, though they would be unseen by any observer who would enter the hall. They force the rib cage to continue to breathe, the heart to continue to beat, and they supply the brain and other organs with nourishment and oxygen.

The eyes of the king are the only body parts he can still move. He can shed as many tears as he wants, and had they not evaporated, the hall would be submerged by the tears he has shed. He can look wherever he wants, but for a very long time he has stared at nothing but the picture across from him. It is a brutish, mocking picture, which has lost none of its cruelty over the endless ages: the portrait of his conqueror. The king stares at it and waits for mercy—he waits, waits, waits and cries.

XV

When We See the Stars Again

THE FIRE IN THEIR MIDST
was very small—hardly sufficient in competition with the severe cold to keep the contents of the pot boiling. They sat around it in a wide circle—the women and children and old men of the tribe—and stared silently into the weak flames, their mouths chewing slowly. With hardly a thought, they tried to extend their enjoyment of the simple, tasteless mush they shoveled out of worn wooden bowls with their bare fingers.

The firelight gave only weak illumination to the cliffs surrounding the little group. It flickered bleakly on the haggard faces, graven by the rigors of a lifetime of fleeing. At night, it was the only light. The broad sky above them was black, like a bottomless abyss.

Cheun was the only warrior in the circle. He ate his mush silently, knowing that it would not satisfy him. Full … it had been years since he last felt full. Back then, they had still lived in the valleys along the river, valleys with lush pastures and fertile soil. Now the enemy occupied these valleys and the pastures had disappeared forever under the gray mass with which he covered everything he conquered.