LoveStar (12 page)

LoveStar went into the kitchen. He closed his eyes and pleaded. “Let me finish LoveDeath! I'll have time as soon as LoveDeath is completed.”

“Leave death to the dead. Go back to the birds. LoveDeath's not science. LoveDeath's engineering, business, marketing. LoveDeath's technically possible but has no magic. Rockets are just buses. Anyone can shoot dead bodies into the air.”

He didn't answer. He was writing a letter to Ivanov. He hid his fingers so she couldn't see what he was up to.

“The birds were science but LoveDeath is greed.”

LoveStar looked at her angrily. “You'll never understand. Was Beethoven greedy when he composed the Ninth Symphony? Weren't eight enough? Was it greed that drove Shakespeare to write more plays after Hamlet? Hadn't Einstein had enough ideas by the time he was thirty?”

Helga didn't answer.

“You should have got yourself an ordinary husband. You'd have been happy with a man who came home from work, mowed the lawn, and barbecued with the kids. I'm not like that and I can't do anything about it.”

Helga shook her head. “Do you remember when we stayed in the old deserted farm on Melrakkasletta?”

He remembered. They had been testing new equipment for measuring birdwaves. The equipment enabled people to identify individual birds in a flock without needing to tag them. Every bird gave off a unique wave or aura like a fingerprint.

“Do you remember when you measured the pair of great northern divers?” said Helga. “You couldn't distinguish their waves. Every bird was supposed to give off its own identifying wave, but they gave off the same wave and measured as one and the same diver. Do you remember what I said then?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it's love, I said. Perhaps that's why they only mate once, only love once, why if one dies, the other withers away, because no one can live as only half.”

“I remember,” said LoveStar.

“Do you remember what you said to me then?” asked Helga. “Do you remember what you said?”

“Yes.”

“I would wither away if you died, you said.”

“I remember.”

“I've been thinking about death so much recently. Even when I have our baby, our little life in my arms, I think about death. I've sometimes wondered whether you would wither at all. Would you wither at all if I died?”

GREAT OFFER ON MELONS

Indridi had only had one girlfriend before Sigrid and the relationship had been a miserable failure. He'd met her when he was seventeen and his father had got him a summer job producing electricity at the aluminium plant (LoveAl), which sprawled over the southern lowlands. He was fired in a matter of weeks for refusing to slaughter chickens and sprinkle their blood over the electrodes, although it had been scientifically proven that this would improve conductivity by around 3 percent.

Indridi worked on the treadmill in the mornings. He soon became super fit, as he ran thirty miles a day, producing close to 100 kW an hour. On Wednesdays he wrestled with employees from the souvenir factory on the sands between the aluminium plant and the national highway for the benefit of passing bus passengers. On Mondays he put on a Viking helmet and had sword fights (staged, obviously) with employees from the windmill factory for the entertainment of Japanese and German pensioners. The windmills, which were cast from the aluminium that Indridi smelted, had been raised all along the coast and extended beyond the horizon to east and west. They turned with the wind in their thousands like giant daisies.

Sometimes Indridi's job involved walking along the shoreline, gathering up the birds that had collided with the sails. He collected the birds, categorized, counted, and skinned them. The skins went to the taxidermist at the souvenir factory. He sent the breasts to the kitchen, while the entrails and bones were minced and boiled down for fox feed. Then he told the girl at the hatchery how many birds he had found. The hatchery was by the southern wall of the plant. It was cheaper and more humane to rear and release birds to be stunned by the blades than it was to raise chickens in cages. The staff had game for lunch four days a week. The game improved energy production by around 0.5 percent (although excessive game consumption increased the employees' sex drive by 5 percent, which in turn reduced their productivity by 1.3 percent). The chickens were eaten on Fridays after the sacrifice. Fridays could be quite lively, and there was a general scramble to take part as feathers, heads, and blood went flying, while the director yelled over the loudspeaker:

“SACRIFICE!! The metal craves sacrifices!”

Indridi stumbled into a relationship with the girl from the hatchery. She had raven-black hair and an owlish stare. Birds sat screeching on the dropping-splashed ledges that lined the wall and a strong fish-oil stench of fulmar vomit filled the air. Indridi visited regularly to read out his list. It was important to release the same number of birds as those that were stunned, so as not to upset the balance of nature.

“Forty puffins, a black-backed gull, fourteen kittywakes, eight fulmars,” he shouted, handing her the list.

“There's no y in kittiwakes. Why did you put a y in kittiwakes?” the girl yelled back.

“I thought it was funny.”

“WHAT?” she shouted, “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

“I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY! I THOUGHT IT WOULD MAKE YOU LAUGH!”

Chances to be funny were few and far between, and the girl seldom smiled at him.

Now the gannets were making a ruckus, each trying to out-squawk the other as a greater black-backed gull landed among them. They were forced to raise their voices still further:

“KEEP COUNTING!”

“Seven eider ducks, two drakes, a skua, an Arctic skua, an oyster catcher, three great northern divers, a swan, and a heron.”

“A HERON?” she yelled.

“Yes, a heron. You can see it at the taxidermist's.”

“Are you sure it was a heron?”

“Unless it was an overgrown whimbrel.”

“An overgrown whimbrel?”

“One of the whimbrels that fly to Ireland in the winter and eat the worms around the nuclear plant.”

“You know we don't release herons. Herons don't belong here. No one comes here to gawp at herons.”

“I just thought you'd be interested . . .”

Not listening, the girl flounced down the corridor and returned with a cage. Judging from the smell, there was a fulmar inside. Indridi took it and put it on the back of the truck while she went and fetched more birds. When the truck was fully loaded they drove out to the beach together to set the birds free. Indridi took a black-backed gull in a firm grasp, carefully avoiding its beak, released the wing-bands, and threw it into the air. They watched it soar in the direction of the windmills.

“Can I tell you something?” asked Indridi.

No answer.

“Did you know that the windmills are driven by us runners? Everyone thinks the wind produces the energy and that we runners are producing electricity, but in fact the waterfalls, hot springs, and Northern Lights take care of all the electricity.”

The girl released a diver and pretended not to hear anything over its hooing.

“The diver's making a terrible racket today,” she said. “I can't hear anything over its hooing.”

Indridi raised his voice. “Seriously! The outside world is impressed that the factory is man-powered, otherwise all these people wouldn't come to see us, which is why we're made to run. But those aren't real windmills; they're fans!”

The girl looked at him without interest and said nothing.

“Yes! We're producing wind for the old people on the buses who have paid for gales. They expect wind, so they get wind.”

“Does it matter whether you smelt aluminium or produce wind?” she asked grumpily. “It's all the same in the end.”

“Probably not.”

“All the people on the buses are on their way north to LoveDeath anyway. They're just killing time until then; some are sent around and around the country until they die of boredom.”

By rights this should have been quite a romantic time, but Indridi was as far from being her perfect match as one could imagine.

“Just because I play squash with you doesn't mean you own me,” she sometimes snapped at Indridi, as she chopped up a raven's egg for a sandwich.

They generally sat together at lunchtime and played Yahtzee; sometimes they had sex, at other times they played squash. They went to the cinema together on weekends but never had anything to talk about, either on the way to the cinema or on the way home. They made out to pass the time; then at least they didn't have to talk, but after the making out there was always a long silence because every sentence that Indridi struggled to produce ended up somehow dead, forgettable, and meaningless.

Indridi had often told Sigrid how oppressive and awkward his relationship had been with this girl. It proved to him just how special his relationship was with Sigrid. Yet this girl touched some nerve with Sigrid. Indridi said he'd hardly recognize her if he met her on the street, but then one day they bumped into her at the shops. Indridi would have preferred not to greet her; he meant merely to nod at her but instead he yelled out:

“GREAT TITS! WHERE DID YOU GET SUCH A GREAT BOOB JOB?”

The praise did not go unnoticed. The whole shop turned round and looked at her bosom. The girl smiled sweetly; the compliments that came with her boob job were intended to have exactly this effect: to make a whole shop turn around and stare. Her breasts were a classy pair in the latest fashion: full-bodied but nipple-free. Nipples were regarded as unsightly, like underarm hair and droopy labia.

“Hi, Indridi,” she said smiling. “Long time no see.”

Indridi tried to extricate himself but even from inside the milk cooler Sigrid could hear the girl inviting him for a game of squash.

“We should play a game of squash for old times' sake,” she screeched chirpily. She spoke unnaturally loudly, as if her hearing had been impaired at the hatchery. “EH? PICK UP THE OLD BALLS AGAIN!”

It was Thursday and Indridi could use neither yes nor no. Instead of no, he used the only word he could think of:

“Maybe.”

He grew flustered when he saw Sigrid's expression as she stood frozen by the freezer, hurried to say NO loud and clear, but instead howled:

“
GREAT OFFER ON MELONS
!”

Sigrid knew only too well what squash meant, and although Indridi had repeatedly told her how boring this girlfriend was and how unexciting their sex life had been, she was unconvinced. Sigrid had begun to suspect that Indridi might just be thinking of himself in making her wait. That he would make a beeline north the moment he himself was matched. Of course, Sigrid didn't know that Simon had asked the girl to be in the right place at the right time and paid her with ten additional compliments.

Indridi and Sigrid undressed in silence that evening and went to sleep without kissing each other good night. The neighbor had it in for them after missing a repeat of Dallas. He had declared war and spent his pension on ordering howlers, compelling Indridi to shout out in his sleep at hourly intervals: “IT'S ONE O'CLOCK! GOT TO WAKE UP IN SEVEN HOURS' TIME! IT'S TWO O'CLOCK! GOT TO WAKE UP IN SIX HOURS! IT'S THREE O'CLOCK! GOT TO WAKE UP IN FIVE HOURS!”

Finally Sigrid rammed her elbow in his chest.

“What's the matter with you? Do you think this is funny? You're unbearable! You can sleep outside if you're going to be such a pain!”

WAVE ON A SCREEN

“Would you wither away if I died?” asked Helga, after they'd measured the pair of divers that time on Melrakkasletta. Their boys, then ten years old, were paddling in the bay a short way off. Orvar was too scientifically minded to leave it at that. In the evening he went out to the patrol jeep and aimed the monitor at Helga who was sitting outside the tent reading a book in the light summer dusk. He climbed out of the car and sat down beside her so the machine could measure their waves.

He had a knot in his stomach when he opened the jeep door to see the results. She had soft, rounded waves. He had sharp, peaked waves, like the jaws of a savage wolf, he thought. No. Like the peaks of Hraundrangi. Exactly like Hraundrangi. They each had their own individual wave, their own individual landscape. He went to bed without turning off the monitor. Helga came across the screen the following morning.

“Orvar!” she called. “Orvar!”

“What?”

“Look at the screen! Did you hear anything last night?” She gazed at the screen, entranced. “It's as if a falcon and a ptarmigan had flown through the sensor!” She glanced around. “What a shame to miss a falcon.”

“Would you wither away if I died?” Helga asked, seven years later, but before he could answer a black BMW honked outside.

Their daughter woke up crying in her room. Helga hurried to her. When she came back, LoveStar had left for Los Angeles. LoveDeath was nearly home free. All that remained was the technical side, which others would sort out. Trial launches, earthmoving and the excavation of tunnels, the installation of launchpads on the mountaintops around the property in Oxnadalur. Then there were the power plants. Endless power plants, hydrogen production, packing, body transportation, and the battle against reactionary forces. Last but not least there was the mood. The Mood Division would smooth image over everything and distract attention from potential problems.

LoveDeath was breaking out of its shell and from now on the idea would live an independent life. LoveDeath would take up residence in Ivanov's head. He would be managing director of LoveDeath. For the next weeks and months LoveDeath would compel him to employ thousands of men and women, and all these people would get the same symptoms. Technicians' heads would be filled with technical solutions, transporters' with logistical ideas, businessmen's with business plans, and every branch manager in the world would do their utmost to ensure that every single millionaire in their market area would be launched with LoveDeath. They would all work as one toward expanding the empire, cutting costs, and improving service. LoveStar himself needn't worry about a thing. All he had to do was sit back and watch the outcome.

All over the world people received phone calls from Ivanov and became infected with LoveDeath, but LoveStar was cured that night as he lay alone in his Los Angeles hotel room. As if a fog had cleared in his head. It was late at night when he came home and got into bed beside his sleeping wife and baby. At that very moment their sons were dancing the night away at a disco on the Croatian island of Murter in the Adriatic, before going on to screw cheap whores and suck cubes of golden Chicago honey.

For one moment LoveStar's mind was pure and clear as the sky, but in the sky there was a bird.

“Apply your mind to the birds,” Helga had told him.

Their own chick was asleep. He stroked her head before going down to the basement. The monitor that he had used to measure the divers lay among a jumble of wings, otoliths, and old computers. He drew a line in the dust with his forefinger. His nerves were going, his home was breaking up, Helga was wasting away, and the boys were on the fast track to ruin. He needed to get his bearings, rest his mind, take a holiday, and recover from LoveDeath. But there was something that drew him to this monitor: the monitor harbored an idea. It hadn't been designed to measure human waves, yet it seemed to do so anyway. He put the monitor under his arm and took a taxi to see Yamaguchi, head of the Bird and Butterfly Division. Yamaguchi came to the door. She was stunning, with a smooth cap of silky-black hair, white skin, slanting eyes, and fiery red lips. They had met in Paris, in mutual pursuit of Arctic terns. She had spent long periods at the terns' overwintering grounds in southern Africa. She was tern-like herself: petite, delicate, yet more determined than anyone else he knew.

“Is everything okay?” asked Yamaguchi. She was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown.

LoveStar stood hunched over, the monitor in his arms.

“I think I've found love,” he said with tears in his eyes.

Helga never knew that Orvar had love on the brain while LoveDeath was coming into being and everyone was wondering at the developments in the Oxnadalur theme park: the extravagance, glamor, madness, lunacy. While the media spotlight was directed at the liberation of mankind's hands, the inexorable technological advances, the Statue of Liberty, the Puffin Factory, the films, and cordless Russian rocket engineers who trashed apartments wherever they were lodged, the Bird and Butterfly Division had something extraordinary up its sleeve. Its emissaries set up sensors on the busiest streets of big cities. They recorded major events, protests, and mass meetings all over the world, measured the waves emitted by as many people as they could; they collected the results and processed them in the research wings in the bowels of Oxnadalur. Gradually patterns began to emerge, real results. They invited people north and witnessed incredible scenes.

“How do you feel? Is it love?” Yamaguchi asked the first people to be brought together after being measured with the same wave signal.

“It's love,” they replied. “I've found my other half.”

“Could you describe the feeling?” she asked after they'd been together a week.

“It's more than sex. Words can't describe the feeling.”

“How do you feel?” LoveStar asked people after they'd lived in a derelict farmhouse for a whole year.

“Better. We get on better and better together.”

By then everything had long ago broken down in the control group. The control couples had been made to live together under the understanding that they had been measured with the same wave—but in fact they were opposites. Healthy, beautiful, lively people began to bite, beat, and hit one another after only half a day in isolation.

“How do you feel?” a psychologist asked a woman from the control group.

“I feel sick just thinking about him. I sweat and shake, I get headaches, stomachaches . . .”

“Would you like to meet him again?”

The woman grabbed the psychologist and stared crazily into his eyes.

“SAVE ME! DON'T SEND ME BACK TO HIM! THIS CAN'T BE LOVE!”

Doctors came and measured the woman in every conceivable way. “Physical rejection,” they noted.

Those couples who genuinely had the same wave almost merged into one being.

“Well, now she's gone and you'll never see her again. How do you feel?” Yamaguchi asked a man who'd spent a year in a derelict farmhouse with his perfect match.

He didn't answer. He lay in a daze like a heroin addict. “Véronique!” he moaned, “Véronique!”

“There's hardly any pulse,” said the assistant doctor. “I'm concerned about him. He's got a serious physical dependence on her. You must reunite them.”

Everything is material. Everything is physical. Somewhere in the body was a primitive sense that could pick up birdwaves as the eye senses light, the ear senses sound, and the tongue senses taste. A sense that processed the waves and auras emitted by other people. The brain had no words for the feeling.

LoveStar never got to tell Helga about the inLOVE plan, which was not made public until seventeen years after LoveDeath. She was dead by the time the LoveDeath division of the LoveStar theme park was opened, two years after that telephone conversation with Ivanov. Queen Elizabeth II and the Jaggers were not the first people to fall to earth with LoveDeath. That honor went to Helga Thorlaksdottir, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three and wife of Orvar Arnason of LoveStar for sixteen years. No one knew this except two Russian engineers and LoveStar himself, who sat in his Hummer on a black sand dune in the middle of the Odadahraun desert, watching her burn up in the atmosphere. No one noticed that the coffin that was laid in the earth in the old graveyard in Reykjavik was full of sand. The boys were too brain-fried to carry it.

It was twenty-nine years since Helga had died, and LoveStar's hands had begun to wither away. In the cold darkness outside the gleaming body of the plane, the Million Star Belt could be seen like a glittering nebula. Around the moon a silver halo formed as its rays were reflected by the costumes, which flashed in turn as they rolled and revolved in the vacuum. LoveStar held a seed in his withering hand. He had only one hour and fifteen minutes left to live.