The Carpet Makers (26 page)

“Retreat!” he screamed, and stumbled back, still with closed, tear-filled eyes in which the light burned like fire. The dull growling of the gray colossi filled the air, the screeching, grinding crunch of their wheels and the explosions of rock and tree beneath them. All at once it was so loud, he could no longer hear the others.

Then sharp popping sounds came again, followed each time by the screams of his comrades. Cheun ran, ran for his life and for the life of his tribe. The rage and fear inside him gave wings to his feet. Fight. This could be fighting, too. Sometimes fighting meant running, running away from a superior foe and doing whatever it took to escape.

Again a blast like the crack of a whip far behind him, and this one was meant for him. He felt the sudden pain inside himself like a lightning bolt that passed through his whole body and flung him forward like an unexpected blow to the back. Without thinking and without slowing his dash, he grabbed at the place where the pain began, and through the tears in his eyes, he saw blood on his hand. A lot of blood.

The enemy had hit him, but he was still alive. Don’t give up. Keep running. The enemy made a mistake. Even the enemy can make a mistake. Even these monstrous machines were not all-powerful. He had been far enough away to be able to escape. He would escape. He would make it. He was bleeding, yes, but that didn’t mean anything. He struggled. Run. Run farther and farther. He always chose to fight. The challenge. He, the warrior. He, Cheun of the clan of the Oneuns. He made it to the foot of the mountains, even made it partway up the path, now brightly lit, before he collapsed.

But now, finally, the time had come. Cheun lay on his back—eyes closed, hands pressed to his wound—and felt life drain from him. With unexpected clarity, he knew he would die, and he only regretted it for the sake of the tribe: now they had to flee without their warriors into a hostile, lifeless expanse where they would all die.

He listened to the sounds of the advancing enemies, felt the uncontrollable quaking of the earth against his back, and heard the thousandfold crackling and snapping of trees being crushed. His breathing was labored. So this is what it is like, the end. His end. At least he would bleed to death, long before the machines began to scale the mountains. He considered whether there was anyone he wished to have here with him, but he could think of no one. This was what his end was like: wretched.

Then it was suddenly quiet, and no light penetrated his eyelids. Cheun opened his eyes. Above him, in the boundless night sky, he saw the stars.

XVI

The Return

WHAT GOOD DID ALL
this do? He didn’t know. After all the years, all the grizzly discoveries and bloody incidents, after all the nightmares …

“Captain Wasra?”

He looked up reluctantly. It was Jegulkin, the Navigator, and it was clear that he regretted having to disturb him.

“Yes?”

“We’re approaching Planet G-101/2. Do you have special instructions?

Wasra needed no time to think it over. He had visited so many planets like this in the past months, had proclaimed the end of the Empire so often that he sometimes felt he was in a never-ending nightmare, condemned to say the same things and make the same hand gestures forever. No, it occurred to him, this time it was different; he had a special mission on this planet. But that didn’t make it any easier.

“No special instructions. We’ll look for the spaceport and land there.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Wasra stared at the large main screen, which showed the universe as the naked eye would have seen it. A small, dully glowing dot came closer: the second planet of Sun G-101. Here, too, lived hair-carpet makers, just as on thousands of other planets—planets that all seemed the same.

And behind it, the stars glimmered cold and rigid, each one a different sun or a different galaxy. Wasra wondered grimly whether they would ever succeed in finally putting the Empire behind them, in finally ridding themselves of the Emperor’s heritage. It seemed so futile to him. Who would ever be able to say definitively that there was not another undiscovered part of the Empire hidden behind one of these rigid points of light, or that there was not another door waiting to reveal another terrible secret?

He saw his reflection in one of the instrument covers and was surprised—as so often in past weeks—that his face still looked so young. The gray captain’s uniform seemed made of heavier material than the uniforms he had previously worn, and the badge of his rank seemed to weigh more as each day passed. When he joined the expedition under General Karswant, he had just reached the age of majority—a young soldier looking for excitement and wanting to prove himself. And today, after only three years in this gigantic province, he felt ancient, as old as the Emperor himself, and couldn’t understand why it didn’t show on his face.

They had made thousands of landings like this one, it seemed, and there was no end in sight.

But … no—this planet really was different. In a certain sense, everything had started here. Supplied with bad, outdated maps, the
Salkantar
had visited this planet once before on an arduous, wandering journey that took weeks. He was just a regular crewman then, and nobody anticipated the bloody battles ahead against Imperial Troops who didn’t know that the Emperor was dead and that the Empire had been defeated. At that time, it seemed the expedition was as good as completed. They were getting ready to return home, making careful preparations for the great leap through empty space between the galaxies. Wasra was directing cleanup work on the third deck, and if anyone had told him he would be captain of the
Salkantar
two years later, he would have laughed. But that is exactly what happened, and these two years had mercilessly made a man out of the boy he had once been. And everything started here on this planet, whose bright, desolate, sandy-brown disk was growing slowly larger and rounder and on whose surface they could make out the first features.

Wasra remembered a conversation with General Karswant as though it had been yesterday instead of weeks ago. The bearish old man that everyone feared, but loved nonetheless, had shown him a photograph. “Nillian Jegetar Cuain,” he said, and there was an unexplained sadness in his voice. “If it weren’t for this man, we would have been home almost three years ago. I want you to find out what happened to him.”

This man had landed on G-101/2, despite explicit instructions to the contrary, and had discovered the hair carpets. At first, Wasra couldn’t believe the rumors that trickled down to the crew quarters, they seemed so absurd. But then Nillian’s report was verified in every detail. The expedition leadership announced that hair carpets were extremely lavish knotwork rugs made of human hair. So lavishly time consuming, in fact, that a carpet maker completed only one carpet in his entire lifetime. But all that would have been just a notation in the expedition log, had it not been for the unexpected explanation: these carpets, so the carpet makers claimed, were destined for the Palace of the Emperor, and their production was a sacred duty. That caused a stir—because everyone who had ever been in the Imperial Palace could attest that it contained the most remarkable things, but certainly no hair carpets.

The expedition fleet began surveillance operations, and in fact, within a few months, a large transport ship in miserable disrepair landed on the planet and departed again after about two weeks. They followed the ship and lost it, but they stumbled onto a second planet where hair carpets were tied with the same religious justification. Then they found another and another still … quickly there were dozens and soon hundreds. After expedition ships had swarmed out and found more and ever more worlds making these carpets, hordes of automated reconnaissance robots were sent off with the same result. When ten thousand such planets had been discovered, the search was called off, despite the assumption that there must yet be others.…

The engines went into action, and their dull thundering made the floor vibrate beneath their feet. Wasra reached for the logbook microphone. “We are about to land on the second planet of Sun G-101 in Planet Quadrant 2014-BQA-57, Sector 36-01. Our standard time is 9-1-178005, last calibration 2-12. Light Cruiser
Salkantar,
Captain Jenokur Taban Wasra.”

The landing platform came into view, a gigantic, paved surface that was scarred and burned by dilapidated spaceship engines. An old spaceport, thousands of years old. Every one of these planets had just such a spaceport, and all of them looked the same. A large, old city always extended out around the landing platform, and all the roads on the planet seemed to come from every direction to converge there. As they had learned by now, that perception was correct.

The noise of the engines shifted. “Final landing preparations,” the pilot announced. The
Salkantar
touched down with a resounding boom that frightened every new spaceship passenger to death. But the men and women on board had experienced too much to even notice the sound.

*   *   *

The bulkheads of the large main airlocks opened slowly before them, and the loading ramp lowered with a humming sound onto the furrowed surface. Smells rushed inside: heavy, nauseating odors of excrement and decay, of dust and sweat and poverty, which seemed to leave a fuzzy coating inside the nostrils. While adjusting the tiny microphone over his larynx, Wasra wondered why all these worlds smelled the same, a question that occurred to him at every landing. There seemed to be no answers anywhere in this godforsaken galaxy—only questions.

It was hot. The glow of the pallid sun shimmered over the broad, dusty-gray landing field, and a group of old men approached from the direction of the city; they walked quickly and at the same time with an oddly deferential gait. They wore heavy, dark robes, which must have been torture in this heat. Wasra stepped out through the opening in the airlock and waited until the men reached the lower end of the ramp.

He noticed how they had scrutinized the ship as they approached—a ship that looked so very different from all the ships they had ever seen. Now they scrutinized him, timidly and unsure, and finally one of the men bowed and said, “Greetings to you, Shipsmen. We had expected you earlier, if you will pardon us for mentioning it.…”

Always the same anxiety. Wherever they went, they found the same unacknowledged distress, because the transporting of hair carpets that had functioned trouble-free for thousands of years had begun to falter. Even this greeting was tiresomely similar.

Everything was so similar: the great, dilapidated spaceports, the broken-down, poverty-filled, stinking cities around them, and the old men in their somber, shabby robes, who refused to comprehend. They told tales about the Emperor, about his realm, and about other planets on which wine was fermented for the Imperial Table or bread was baked … about planets that wove clothing for him, raised flowers, or trained songbirds for his gardens. But they had found none of those things, nothing but thousands of worlds on which hair carpets were knotted—nothing but hair carpets—a vast, unstoppable river of carpets made of human hair that had flowed through this galaxy for millennia.…

Wasra switched on the microphone, which amplified his voice and transmitted it over the external speakers. “You have been expecting the Imperial Shipsmen,” he explained as he had done so often in words that had proved reliable. “We are not the ship you have been waiting for. We have come to tell you that there are no more Imperial Transport Ships, that there is no longer an emperor, and that you can stop making hair carpets.” He slipped effortlessly into the language rhythm of Old Paisi, which was spoken on all planets in this galaxy, and sometimes this ease with the archaic language took him by surprise. Their speech would probably bring some odd looks when they returned home.

The men, all of them high dignitaries of the Guild of Carpet Makers, stared at him in horror. Wasra nodded to the director of the Reeducation Team, and immediately, men and women marched down the ramp carrying dog-eared folders filled with photographs or well-used film players. They looked exhausted, like sleepwalkers. The captain knew they were trying not to think about how many more such planets lay ahead of them.

Reactions to the news of the end of the Empire had been wildly divergent—which provided at least some distraction from the monotony of their task. On some planets, people were happy to be able to discard the feudal drudgery of knotting hair carpets. On others, however, they had been denounced as heretics, insulted, and stoned. They had come across Guild Elders who already knew of the Emperor’s death from mysterious sources, but who begged them not to announce it to the populace for fear of losing their status in society. Wasra realized that, in the end, they had no control over what actually happened after they left. On many worlds, centuries might pass before the old ways would really come to an end.

He thought again about his mission for the general. He growled at himself in irritation, because it had almost slipped his mind, and he pulled out his communicator. “Captain here. Chief Officer Stribat, report to me in the ground-level airlock.”

Just moments later, a tall, lean soldier stepped through a door and drew himself up to give a casual salute. “Captain?”

Wasra looked up in annoyance. “Forget that nonsense,” he grumbled. Stribat and he had started their service on board the
Salkantar
together. Stribat now commanded the land vehicles and foot soldiers. Not much of a career. But brilliant careers are only for fools, he thought darkly.

“Do you remember that we’ve already been on this planet?”

Stribat opened his eyes in surprise. “Really? For weeks I’ve had the suspicion that we’re just landing on the same planet again and again.”

“Nonsense. We were here, but it was three years ago. The
Salkantar
was assigned a search mission to find one of the
Kalyt
boats that got into trouble.”

“And because we had no transfer coordinates, we jumped about for weeks from one sun to the next until we found the right one.” Stribat nodded as he remembered. “I’ll never forget how sick I was then from all the trans-light-speed flights one after another.… Nillian, that was his name, right? One of the pilots of the
Kalyt
boat. He landed, discovered the hair carpets, and then disappeared without a trace. Oh?…”