Andreas Eschbach's THE CARPET MAKERS (Tr by Doryl Jensen)

Andreas Eschbach has not been on my radar before now, but I'm determined to make up for all the time I've missed knowing his work, for if The Carpet Makers, his mid-90s pseudo-medieval space opera stunner that seems only to have finally gotten translated into English because of Orson Scott Card,* is anything to go by, I'm going to need to read everything of his I possibly can, and may even have finally to try learning German so I don't have to wait around for translators. Yeah, it's that good.

The pseudo-medieval element turns out, of course, to be a bit of a red herring, for while the story starts in a very low-tech, materially impoverished and superstitious society, we soon learn that it is but one of many planets, star systems, even galaxies that, along with the rest of known space/humanity, exists under the rule and on the sufferance of a far-away Galactic Empire. Which empire is ruled by an absolute monarch everyone worships as a god, believes to be immortal and omnipotent, and demands a very peculiar form of tribute from the planet where our story starts: carpets that are elaborately and intricately hand-knotted from human hair.

Creating these carpets is the sole driver of economic activity on this planet, which has a very rudimentary government and civil society and trading network, all in service of bringing thousands of these exquisite handicrafts to the planet's Port City every year for transport off-world to, they have always understood, decorate the Emperor's palace. Which must be very, very large and very, very fancy to even have room for all of the carpets they have been sending over tens of thousands of years.

A special class of artisans makes these carpets, which are about the size of a nice area rug, very, very slowly and very, very precisely. The culture of these artisans is one of generational obligation and strict hereditary status and privilege, in which a carpet maker, upon reaching manhood, is presented with a money chest meant to support him and his entire family over his entire life, the proceeds from the sale of his father's sole produce, one single, perfect carpet, created over the father's entire lifetime, knotted from the hair of the elder carpet maker's wives and daughters. Each carpet maker can only have a single son which he raises to adulthood, but unlimited daughters. If additional boys are born to any of the carpet maker's wives, the carpet maker must kill the infants (we get rather a shocking incidence of this to kick off the book). His daughters provide what raw material his wives don't, wives being chosen chiefly for the quality and natural color of their hair; ideally each carpet maker has at least one black-haired, one brown-haired, one red-haired and one blonde wife.

The son of the carpet maker, who will become a carpet maker himself, thus begins his career benefiting from a debt to his father that he can never repay; his father has worked his entire lifetime to make and sell a single carpet, for which he will be paid enough to keep his son and daughters-in-law in housing and food and chattels for the new carpet maker's entire career, until the son in turn finishes and sells a carpet, the proceeds of which will support the next generation of his line.

Once a year, a vast caravan completes an even vaster circuit of a large swathe of the planet, collecting that year's supply of newly-completed carpets and bringing them to the Port City, to be taken away by increasingly decrepit starships piloted and crewed by conscripted citizens of the planet, who have learned to fly by rote and have no idea how to repair or maintain the ships beyond the basics of flying them. Their cargo is thousands of carpets, whisked away once a year.

The entire rest of the planet works to provide basic material support for the carpet makers' families and the "shipsmen" who crew the creaky old transport vessels. The only form of culture we learn of is a weird and fascinating musical tradition of playing something referred to as a "triflute" -- a musical instrument that comprises three wind instruments twisted into one and deftly manipulated by the talented player, who is the only form of actually skilled class that exists apart from the carpet makers'. I found this sub-culture more interesting than the carpet makers' (of course I did) and a sub-plot involving a child prodigy at the triflute being conscripted to become a shipsman instead of continuing to develop his talent greatly enriches the novel but is not allowed to develop as the parallel story it should have been, ultimately kind of going nowhere except to create a red herring in the main plot, which I'll get to in a moment.

But so, the DNA of this novel is pretty evident and distinguished: the craft-as-sacrifice and service element of the Bright Carvings of the first Gormenghast novel, spliced in with a Galactic Empire that owes more to, say, God Emperor of Dune than to the Foundation series, but with a greater sense of mystery than either of these settings have to offer. What is being done with all of these carpets when they reach their destination? How did this weird tradition start, and why does it continue? What kind of weirdo demands millions and millions of carpets made out of human hair as tribute from a distant, conquered world?

Unlike a lot of the books I tend to gravitate toward, The Carpet Makers does answer all of these questions; we do get to observe bits of the greater empire, which has undergone considerable upheaval in the time it has taken one man back on Carpet Planet (we never do get an actual name for this planet) to perform his life's work. There has at least been a rebellion, and the Emperor has been proven to be less immortal than everybody thought, for all that he has provably lived and reigned for over a hundred thousand years. The Rebellion that took him out is struggling to assemble a government that is not just another absolute monarchy, but faces the threat of a new emperor arising in the person of the hero who murdered the old one and enjoys considerable prestige and adoration among the populace of the imperial planet and the worlds close to the former empire's center.

And there's one other thing: there's not a carpet in sight, for all that the palace is more than big enough to accommodate quite a lot of them.

And no one at the empire's core has ever heard of the Carpet Planet or its produce, until a scouting expedition stumbles upon it and a disobedient member of the crew decides to land on it and look around and maybe spread the word that the empire is no more. Which is, of course, heresy on that planet. Uh oh.

Another sub-sub-plot (this is a big picture novel rather than a character study; I couldn't tell you the name of a single person in it. We just get sketched-in stories, told briskly in individual chapters and then never visited again) involves the empire's staggeringly huge and complex archives, which have been re-organized so many times over millions of years (the emperor that was recently offed was the tenth of this empire, and it's implied that most of his predecessors were also functionally immortal) that almost nobody knows how far back in time the records go, let alone what's in them all. A laughably small team has been assigned by the new government to find out what they can about a number of questions, including why this weirdo Carpet Planet claims it's been sending carpets to decorate the palace for millennia -- and why, although this weird planet's inhabitants are absolutely certain that they are the only such planet, exploratory teams out in the far reaches of space have discovered that the whole galaxy (one of many ruled by this empire) which contains the Carpet Planet also contains tens of thousands of other Carpet Planets with identical cultures and missions!

All of these wild ideas and intricate plots are rendered by translator Doryl Jensen into some pretty exquisite prose, with an emphasis on describing scenes of dreary beauty and not a little pathos:

The narrow street was still sleeping. A light early-morning fog hung suspended between the squat gables and was mixed with cold smoke from hearths in which the fires had gone out in the night. When the first Sundays flicked across the roof ridges of the crooked little houses, everything seemed bathed in an inappropriately dreamy and delicately misty light. Like little piles of dirt, beggars lay in some dark corners, sleeping on the bare ground, ragged blankets twisted up over their heads.

As I said, we do get a solution to the mysteries posed, which is, by the way, devastating. It doesn't quite demand a complete re-read of the prior text, but it will change the way you've been thinking about the carpet makers, their world, the empire they serve, and the myriad ways giving any one guy absolute power is a very bad idea.

And so I find myself in the position of owing a debt of gratitude to, of all people, Orson Scott Card, who used his clout to get this amazing novel translated into English and published by Tor. I'm still pretty annoyed with the man, but there you go. We are complicated creatures.

And now, I'm off to hunt down some more of Eschbach's work.