Translated by Ann Cale and Sheryl Curtis, with assistance from Brian Stableford
Note: This story was first published in Galaxies 4 (Avril 1997) as “Déchiffer la trame.” The French title contains an untranslatable pun: “trame” means both “weft” and “plot”; “déchiffrer” means, of course, “to decipher.”
Jean Claude Dunyach has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and works in the aircraft division of Aerospatiale, in Toulouse, and is one of the foremost contemporary French SF writers. He has published six novels and two story collections. Dunyach has become a vital part of the editorial collective of the new French SF magazine Galaxies. He recently edited an original SF anthology (Escales), slated for release in September 1999 and he is working on an ambitious techno-space opera (working title: Etoiles mourantes) with one of France's foremost SF writers, Ayerdahl. At least two of his earlier stories have appeared in English, in Full Spectrum 3 and Full Spectrum 5. This story first appeared translated in Interzone. In France it won Dunyach his third Rosny Aine Award. It is part of what is perhaps an emerging sub-genre of SF set in the historic past that is not an alternate past but still implies an alternate view of reality, the real behind the only apparently real (all hail, Philip K.Dick).
Proof of their visitation can be found in the antique carpet section in the basement of the Museum of Civilization. There are two of us who know about it: Laura Morelli and me.
The basement is our turf. The most valuable carpets are here, stored in almost total darkness to keep their colors from fading. The public isn't allowed in here and there are so few specialists working in the field that we often find ourselves alone for weeks on end.
Laura chose me for her assistant after a surprisingly brief interview. I was under the sway of her charm from that first contact. She has an exceptional voice, rich in nuance and timbre, as gorgeously woven as the carpets she handles; carpets whose stories and secrets she is teaching me, in my turn, to unravel. I believe that she wants to pass her heritage on to someone. Time is catching up with her; soon enough she'll be forced to retire and leave her work behind. It's not so much losing her job that terrifies her, but losing access to the most beautiful pieces in the collection.
Everything here is organized to suit Laura: the labyrinth of racks where the most beautiful samples hang, open to her sensual, almost reverent caresses; the stand where every hook and every needle is arranged in precise order. This is her domain, but she started sharing it with me, little by little, when she realized that I loved the carpets for the same reasons she did.
Every wool carpet from Upper Kurdistan holds a slice of life in its tightly knotted weft. These carpets are so large and so complex that a weaver only completes one, two or—very rarely—three in a lifetime. Collectors look at them and marvel at the complexity of their patterns and the beauty of their shades. We examine them from the rear, where their tight stitches press against one another like the grains of sand in an hourglass. Laura guides my clumsy hands along the knots, showing me where, one day, we'll have to replace a worn strand with a new one.
Our relationship, while friendly, remained formal until last autumn. I used “vous” in addressing her, although she casually used “tu.” Our fingertips frequently touched as we restored the carpets and I had learned to read the discreet murmur of her breath in the subterranean quiet. My hearing was better than hers; for her benefit, I'd make a lot of noise as I moved about—which prompted her to tease me about my clumsiness.
Then, one morning in October, I heard the mouse.
Rodents are our mort al enemies. They run silently to the easels and attack all the threads they can reach. They cause so much damage that we wage a ferocious war against them. Laura, who fears them like the plague, fills saucers with poison and places them under the pipes. I'm the one who disposes of the corpses when the odor draws our attention to them.
The mouse that I heard was very much alive. Its paws clicked on the concrete as it dashed along, and then it paused under a piece of furniture. Laura was at the other end of the room, examining a new wall-hanging from a Spanish convent. The little beast was heading straight for her.
I could have driven it away by making a racket, but it would only have come back again during the night. I picked the scissors up from the work table. My ears were pricked, ready for the slightest sound. I slid silently into the empty space between the piles of boxes and plunged toward the racing feet like a clumsy cat.
My cry of pain, as I caught my temple on the side of a trunk, made Laura jump.
Waves of pain pulsed through my skull. I might have lost consciousness for a second or two—but then I felt something wriggling against my midriff. The mouse was alive, trapped beneath my body.
I killed it with the scissors, ignoring Laura's anxious questions. Then I pulled myself to my feet, holding the lifeless little body by the tail. A drop of blood flowed down my cheek.
“A mouse,” I said, shivering. “I got it.”
She froze.
“Throw it out quickly! The smell might attract others!”
“I'll tell the caretaker to clean up.” My head spinning, I sat down heavily on a crate. “I need a glass of water.”
“Were you afraid?”
Then she felt the sticky blood on my face and quickly moved into action. She picked up a clean rag from the work bench and delicately wiped my temples. The blood clotted very quickly. Jokingly, she told me that she was prepared to give me stitches. She also said that I was an idiot, and then thanked me. The dead mouse lay on the palm of my hand as she kissed my cheek.
On several occasions during the next few days I got the feeling that Laura was trying to come to grips with some sort of decision concerning me. When you work with someone, you quickly become sensitive to this type of scrutiny. I didn't think much about it. I waited. If nothing else, the carpets teach patience.
One morning, she made up her mind. We were taking tea together—a light, perfumed Darjeeling which the departmental secretary prepared for us. Normally, we would have exchanged the latest scraps of gossip from the world outside, or talked about the cold weather that was gradually settling in. This time, I barely had the time to take a few sips of tea before she pushed her cup away.
“I've considered it, and I want to make you the gift of a story. But you'll have to read it for yourself. I'll help you… after all, I suppose that someone will have to take my place one day, and I'd just as soon it were you. You'll take good care of things.”
I agreed. We both knew that it was true. She took my arm and led me to her office, a narrow room—all length and no breadth—where we stored documents we no longer needed. On the wall at the end, an unfinished carpet hung on an iron frame. Laura had never allowed me to examine it before. There was an open space between the wall and the frame just large enough for Laura to slide in. I had a little more trouble and made an ironic comment about my excessive girth, but Laura remained silent for a long while.
“Stories always ought to begin at the beginning,” she murmured, pensively. “Unfortunately, too much is missing from this one. I came across this carpet in a trunk at the warehouse, a short while after coming to the museum. My predecessor was not very gifted as an archivist. He preferred climbing mountains in Kurdistan in search of rare samples to updating his catalogue. All that we know about this carpet is what it can teach us itself. Get started on it.”
I placed my hands on the edge of the woof, palms extended for the moment of first contact. As I imposed myself upon it, the threads began to sing in the hollow of my palm, speaking to me.
“Eighth century,” I said. “Alternating double stitches. The grease was removed from the wool with urine, and then the wool was boiled with plant extracts. Kurdish, I'd say. One of the mountain villages which sold their produce to the caravans. Am I right?”
“I came to the same conclusion. I've sent some threads over to the lab on several occasions, to get a little more information. The vegetable dyes are typical of Kurdistan. No more details. Frustrating, isn't it? This carpet was created in one of those villages now being destroyed by Iraqi bombs—unless, of course, it was already destroyed centuries ago, by Turkish conquerors!”
She made a visible effort to calm herself, and went on: “You're a good student. That's fine. Now, I'm going to ask you to be a little more creative. Someone wove this carpet. Try to tell me who that person might have been.”
“It's a she…” Laura's hand gently caressed my arm. “I don't know why I say that, actually. Perhaps the way she tightens the threads, more respectfully, more economically. I believe a little girl began this carpet.”
“And a woman finished it. You're right. I've taught you that much, at least. It's strange, the way that what you leave behind is nothing but a thread in the life of your successors.”
“If you're lucky,” I said—and I believed it.
“I'll guide you.”
Her tiny hand, astonishingly firm, settled upon my huge paw and directed it towards the edge of the carpet, where a row of loose threads was dangling.
“This is where it all begins: the first knots in the weft. A child, puberty still before her, with fingers small enough to knot the pony hairs used to anchor the pattern. In the beginning, she didn't tie the hairs tightly enough, and there are irregularities. Can you feel it?”
I followed her account with the tip of my thumb, as if I were reading a book. The irregularities were barely noticeable and I wondered how long it had taken for the tale to emerge from the obscurity.
“The she improves with practice, row by row. Let's jump two or three years ahead. There, just below my index finger—what do you make of that?”
“She is becoming unsteady again, but it doesn't last.”
“You aren't a girl. The first menstrual periods are upsetting, but you get used to it. You have to. So, our little weaver is beginning to grow into a woman. Do you sense how the knots have become firmer over the years? Winter, summer… nothing more than ripples on the surface of the pattern. Up to this point, there's nothing to set her apart from her sisters, who are doing the same work in her village. But here”—she guided my hand with assurance—“here we have our first mystery.”
Between the regular knots were others, placed along the weft in groups of five, woven into the primary structure as if someone wanted to hide them. I rubbed the place with my palm, perplexed.
“Never seen that before. It's too regular to be a mistake and it doesn't serve any purpose, structurally speaking.”
“Use your imagination…”
“A religious pattern, maybe, a secret sect thing, like some sort of rosary? The villages of that period saw the passage of preachers of every kind. Or perhaps… I'm stupid, aren't I, Laura! She's still just a kid. She's not rebelling or plotting against anybody. She's writing her name in the only code she knows.”
“Her name, or that of a lover. Hard to know at this point. But look here. All of a sudden, the weaving is interrupted for the first time. Someone's knotted the ends so that the pattern doesn't unravel and the threads of the weft are flattened. What could possibly happen in the life of pubescent girl to keep her from work? Marriage. Our little one has become a woman in every sense of the word—who returns to her place at the loom several months later.
“What was she like? A young woman with enough strength of character to leave a little trace of herself, knowingly, in this rug. I wonder if what she'd done had been discovered, and she was hastily married off before she could become a little too independent.”
“But that wouldn't hold up, if the name she wove into this carpet were her lover's!”
“I'm the one telling this story…” She pulled me a little further along the folds of the cloth and I felt the centuries close in upon us. With my back against the wall and my hands stretched out in front of me, I caressed the slow extension of a life whose multicolored hours were composed upon the underside of a work of art.
“Hold on to my fingers and we'll search together. It was an eighth-century marriage, in a mountain village—we ought to find a string of babies. Here's the first…a series of brief interruptions. The stooped position of the weaver is difficult at the end of a pregnancy. Then a pause”—the sealed-off threads were there again—“and then the work continues.”
I felt her fingers stiffen. In my heightened state of awareness, something clicked into place. I moved back, her hand docilely following mine. The pregnancy, the supposed birth. A little early, maybe, but how could we know? Then the weaving starting again…
The knots. The knots were slack, lifeless.
“She lost her baby,” I said. “It's no longer there.” I couldn't say how I had fathomed it.
Laura's breath was muted by the fabric which surrounded the small space in which we were enclosed. The floor vibrated under our feet as the museum's heating system started up, with increasing frequency because of the approach of winter.
“She didn't have any more babies during the ten years which followed… look at the next portion of the fabric if you don't believe me. Something must have gone wrong within the beautiful human mechanism, unless her husband left her. Her fingers have regained their rhythm, but the joyous tension that drove them isn't there any more. The experts I've shown the carpet to say it lacks life. That's why I'm allowed to keep it here, supposedly for the part it plays in comparative studies. It's virtually worthless.
“So, here we have our weaver, about twenty-five years old, in an era when those women who managed to survive were grandmothers at thirty. She's sterile, probably alone. In all likelihood, she lives some way outside her village, in keeping with the tradition of the time. She weaves because there's nothing else to do, and her knots have a mechanical regularity. What has become of the rebellious child who wrote her name in the threads?”
Laura's hands fluttered and the air they stirred brushed my face like caresses woven by spiders. I returned to my reading of the weft, through interminable years without a single rough patch…until I felt them again: the same knots as before… A signature, the reawakening of a voice that had sunk beneath the weight of sadness.
They sprang up irregularly, for no apparent reason. Separated by whole weeks to begin with, they ended up being repeated each day. The five interlacing threads were perfectly recognizable, and my fingers read them like the characters of an unknown alphabet.
“If we knew what they called these knots, we'd know her name,” I said, shaking my fingers to relieve the cramps. “Everything had a name, in that period, but that information is lost.”
“I've thought about it often enough! But I suppose the past ought to be shrouded in mystery, or we wouldn't be interested in it any more. Anyhow, we're coming to the end of the carpet and this is where things become truly strange. Read on…”
I drew my fingers over the woollen page: once, then again, more slowly. Somewhere, between two strands so tight that it would have been almost impossible to slide a needle between them, the narrative changed direction, escaping me. I shook my head in frustration.
“I don't understand…”
“I'm asking too much. I've studied this carpet all my life and things have become clear to me so gradually that I haven't the heart to force you to follow the same road as myself. But it's necessary that you make the effort to believe me, because I'm too old to put my whole life back in doubt. Read with me…
“There's her name, repeated like an incantation, often woven with her own hair. That lasts up to the point where one could almost believe that she'll smother under the weight of her own frustration. There are knots tied off more and more frequently: pauses in her life. I suppose that she's going further away from her village, as far as possible—that she's going deep into the mountains, as women have always done when they've wanted to be alone. She's almost forty, possessed now of that bitter kind of freedom that comes with old age. Nobody asks her for anything…
“And there… feel it!”
The narrow strip of wool bears no resemblance to any other part of the rug. The signature knots have vanished. The threads are stretched with a kind of haste, even though they're impeccably aligned. They seem to give off an impression of energy, of joy.
“If she were living in our era, I'd say that she found a lover,” Laura murmured. “But we're in Kurdistan, more than a thousand years ago, and no man of her ownday would have given her a second glance. A sterile grandmother, a body doubtless deformed by the endless years of non-stop weaving, eyes almost dead. But she found someone… The real mystery is here.”
“Yes,” I said, because my spirit was now in tune with hers, and I was afraid of the consequences of what I had discovered. “But the rug is broken off shortly afterwards. So?”
Laura's fingers guided mine yet again to the other side of the weft. And it was there that the story came together…
Among our weaver's threads were others, intertwined with them: an extraordinarily tight weave that traced motifs in relief along the length of the rug. Other knots were interlaced above these motifs in which new branches thrust out and then branched again, within the interlacings of the original. The geometry of the narration was completely different here, the characters designing a galaxy whose silken constellations were quite unknown to me.
I know my own kind, and I know weaving. The knots and the threads that were employed here were not of human origin. We don't have that many fingers, or a sense of space sufficiently finely-tuned to create such a design. The hairs were finer than horsehair, and my thumbs could barely read them. I felt that each layer hid yet another, that strange words formed new interconnections, in covering others that were hidden deeper beneath the surface. In order to read the ultimate pattern, we would have had to destroy the carpet: a sacrilege I would never have dreamed of committing.
All around, the weaver had let her happiness explode in multiple variations, beginning with the knots that were her name. In caressing the weft, I imagined two individuals bent over the same loom, their hands and their hair intertwining. I would have liked to stroke their crooked silhouettes, in order to know them better.
“What would it have looked like?” I wondered aloud. “Terrifying by virtue of being different—and yet she allowed it to touch her carpet, and her life.”
Laura sighed.
“We ought to be capable of understanding. Appearance didn't mean anything to her anymore. The only thing that mattered to her was the kindness of its fingers. Years of working with minute precision in poor light had ruined her eyes. She was blind, like us.”
I had to make up my own ending for the story. The weft broke off abruptly with an unfinished row, concluded in haste. I read terrible things into that absence. Cries, thrown rocks, one murder or two…I don't know how the rug had come into our hands. Perhaps it emerged from a grave into which bones had been cast without regard to their form. Anything is possible, so the truth is inaccessible.
But Laura's words still ring in my memory: “Intelligent beings rarely travel alone. This was no isolated explorer. I refuse to believe that no other contact was made.
“One day, perhaps, a carpet will appear that will tell a story similar to the one we have read. Together, we shall unravel the language of the threads, and then we shall teach it to all those fortunate enough to be like us. We shall teach them to read the weft, so that they may pass the knowledge on to their descendants.
“If we succeed, the next meeting won't be stopped short by appearances.”