LoveStar (22 page)

DISTRESS FLARE

Grim stood on the glass bridge and saw that Mt. Esja was wearing a black cloud cap. He had never seen the mountain wearing a black cap before. A white cap is called a cirrus cloud, his grandmother had said, and forms in a northerly wind. But what wind forms a black cap?

He received a message from the security firm:

[wolf still not found]

Sigrun from the Mickey department rang in a panic. “Send your eyes over here THIS MINUTE!”

Grim went cold when he saw the scene. The walls were all splattered with blood, and Sigrun was standing cursing in front of a cage full of lumps of meat and bloodied fur.

“What happened?” asked Grim. “Are you all right?”

“The new generation is even worse,” said Sigrun. “Mickey 8.04 seemed gentler on the surface, but he repressed his rage until he burst. See for yourself.” She sent him a film clip: Mickey was sitting in a cage. He growled, baring his teeth, and tried to bite a member of staff, but, when he was prevented, his head turned as red as a toadstool and burst with a bang.

“I don't understand this,” said Sigrun.

“Didn't you put more rabbit into him?”

“I had to remove it again; their eyes got bigger and softer, but there were problematic side effects. They became so horny.”

“What about the tortoise addition?”

“That didn't work either. It had a calming effect, of course, but they'd live forever.”

“Destroy that generation, then,” said Grim heavily. “We'll start on Mickey 9.01 first thing tomorrow morning. I'll let iSTAR know. I warned them about possible delays.”

Grim was filled with trepidation as he watched the black cap crawling over the mountain. iSTAR's patience was wearing thin, and for a moment he felt as if something dreadful was brewing. Grim tried to distract his thoughts by watching the news. A report from Paris: when the citizens woke up in the morning, the Arctic terns had vanished; no one knew where they had gone, but they had left the city strangely silent and empty. Next came another item about animals. All around the world, sea creatures had started coming ashore. He watched clip after clip of beaches covered in a seething mass of capelin, dolphins, minke whales, cod, jellyfish, and sea scorpions. The animals thronged ashore, tumbling in the surf and rotting on the sand while gulls and ravens tore at the carcasses.

Grim was about to turn off the news when an advertisement appeared on his lens.

A picture appeared of an ordinary middle-class Chinese home (the largest target group). A tomcat sprayed the carpet and a woman made a sour face, but then her child came in with its Mickey, made it spray over the cat pee and then rubbed it off. They walked around the apartment with the Mickey, making it pee, and, lo and behold, everything was shining clean. The cat was kicked out and the child hugged its Mickey lovingly. The advertisement was computer animated. The child wouldn't have survived two seconds with a real Mickey in its arms. Then came the slogan.

NOW EVERYONE CAN OWN A MICKEY!

MICKEYS! BETTER THAN DOGS OR CATS!

Grim blanched. This wasn't an attachment intended solely for him but a real ad for the Chinese family market. For a billion people. He called iSTAR immediately.

“Was that intended for my eyes only?”

“No,” said the man. “Everyone's in the Mickey target group.”

“But they're not ready! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“We've done surveys. People find them irresistible.”

“Mickeys are extremely dangerous!”

“Mickeys are what the people want. It's too late to stop the campaign.”

“NO! It's impossible!”

“It's out of your hands.”

“I'm not delivering a single Mickey until they're ready. They have to be good-natured and neutered, with a short lifespan. That was the plan and I'm sticking to it!”

“The Mickeys are already being distributed to the Chinese market. Production is going ahead at full speed. Don't worry. Their temperament, fertility, and lifespan will be controlled by drugs.”

“You don't know what you're doing! Where did you get the formula?”

“The formula for Mickey 8.04 was sent to the factories in Brazil and China. The initial production capacity is a million Mickeys per month. The campaign has been launched. There's no way of stopping a campaign once it's off the ground.”

“My superiors at the Science Council will stop you!”

“We spoke to our subordinates at the Science Council. They deemed it possible with appropriate countermeasures. We'll take the greatest care. The breeding units are designed to withstand a nuclear attack.”

The Mood Division was completely out of touch with reality.

“The campaign is supposed to follow us, not vice versa!” yelled Grim and hung up.

Suddenly Grim realized that the fault did not lie with the Mood Division. It lay with human nature. The Mickeys were soft and white as seal cubs with huge, innocent eyes, tailor-made and rigorously tested to make people like them. Even though they were utterly savage, humans were incapable of fearing them. Nature itself couldn't have come up with a more cunning predator in a hundred million years.

Grim was filled with a terrible regret. He regretted having let himself be tricked into the Mickey research. He didn't believe in anything under iSTAR control that went by the name of science, but now he needed some form of mental solace. Confirmation that he had made the right decision in spite of everything. For the first time in his life he was tempted to check out REGRET. He connected himself and asked:

“What would have happened if I had turned down the Mickey project?”

He ticked the ten-thousand-point answer. REGRET responded five minutes later:

“iSTAR would have made you develop a drug that would enable mammals to evolve from day to day instead of over millions of years. iSTAR would have added the drug to the drinking-water supply with the result that in the morning people would have developed huge legs to run to work but once there, their legs would have shrunk and dangled from their bodies like two warts while their brains became grotesquely enlarged, their eyes bulged, and hearts swelled in order to make their hands type at high speed on the computer, while at lunchtime people evolved back into their old forms, though slightly better-looking, more muscular and firmer with a straighter nose, a curl in their hair, a handsome set of pecs, and pert buttocks and piercing great eyes for the girls in the grocery store, whose breasts grew in competition over the customers' compliments and whose lips plumped and arms multiplied until there were two to pack the shopping, one to operate the cash register, one to reach for a packet of chewing gum, one to fiddle with their hair and adjust their bras, and a seventh to receive a note saying: How about this evening? Answer: Yes. Then hormones flooded their bodies, their breasts continued to grow, the man's penis grew like bamboo (which can grow up to three feet a day) and they met up looking glamorous at a bar and pumped the scent of pheromones into the air while at home the sex glands upped their production until the man turned into one giant python-like penis and the woman was nothing more than mouth, breasts, vagina, and clitoris, and their two tongues writhed like uncontrollable fire hoses and their hearts pumped pure endorphin and orgasm and happiness through their bodies until nourishment was required, at which point mouth-tentacles darted into the kitchen and sucked dry the fridge, cans, and jars in order to build up more energy and produce more endorphin, while other tentacles wriggled into the water supply in search of water to cool them and drive their growth, and in the end hunger drove all the tentacles from all the houses out into the street where they met and felt the stimulation along with the hunger and need for more energy and nourishment to satisfy their growing bodies and everywhere there were mouths in search of flesh or vegetable matter to feed on until the bodies had eaten every last bird, every last child, and every last cat in the neighborhood before uniting to form tubes that sucked water up from springs, and a huge colon which delivered feces to the sea, and a giant jaw that raced around the oceans like a sea monster, devouring plankton and whales, seals, and shoals of capelin to satisfy its insatiable body, and the flesh spread over the world, growing thick hair at the Arctic but further south breasts grew to the sky in vain competition over sunlight and suntan, milk leaked from the breast mountains and down into valleys while penises grew like mushrooms on the flesh, titillated by hailstorms, gushing sperm like shoals of herring which spattered, drying out in the sun, onto the browning skin which dried out and split until it spurted blood like a volcano until the flesh couldn't find any more life to suck up to itself and rotted and became maggot-ridden while on the flesh flowers and trees eventually grew, and the layer of flesh became buried deep in the earth where it compressed into thick, black oil. This could have been pumped out millions of years later and fed into cars and you could have felt the lust flowing up into your body when you put your foot down on the gas pedal.”

Grim shook his head and read REGRET one more time. He had paid 10,000 points for this but didn't understand a word.

“Bullshit,” he muttered, “this REGRET is total bullshit.” He spat, then abruptly shouted:

“THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL!”

He became one voice in a choir of billions.

He looked up at the sky and saw red dots appearing in heaven like distress flares sent up by a thousand million drowning sailors.

DON'T DISTURB THE WORLD

A woman sat in Laekjartorg Square, waiting for a bus. The time was 11:20 pm. She had been waiting a long time for the right bus, probably two weeks. She checked REGRET.

“What would have happened if I'd taken the Number 113 at 8:56 PM?”

“You'd have been killed.”

“How?”

“The world would have ended.”

The woman was overwhelmed with an indescribably comforting feeling. She breathed easier. “That was a good thing,” she thought. “It was a good thing I didn't take the bus at 8:56 pm. I've saved the world,” she thought happily as she watched people going about their daily business. “The world would have ended if I'd taken the 113, yet no one bothers to thank me,” she thought, looking around in the hope of finding a half-eaten hot dog. She had just crawled under the bench and was reaching for a drink can when she looked up and saw a man in a dark suit looming over her. He was accompanied by a lanky teenager.

“You're coming with us. That's enough of this. You're coming with us now.”

The woman was crazed with terror. She shook her head. “No!” she cried, locking her fingers on the bench. “No, I'm not coming.”

“Mom, come with us. It's all right. We'll look after you.”

“NO! The world might end.”

“There, there. You need rest. You need a bath and clean clothes; we'll be very gentle.”

The woman closed her eyes and shook her head, sobbing. “No, you don't understand. I mustn't disturb the world! I MUSTN'T DISTURB THE WORLD!!!”

The man nodded to the younger one and they each took one of the woman's arms and led her between them into bus number 113. She struggled against them, screaming and kicking, but they managed to drag her onto the bus. They sat on the back seat with her between them, holding her tight until the bus set off. The woman stopped fighting.

“We're going home now, Mom,” said the man as the bus raced down the highway.

“You don't know what you're doing,” sobbed the woman. “You mustn't disturb the world! You mustn't disturb . . .”

“THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL!” yelled every single passenger on the bus.

Everyone looked enchanted at the red spots in the sky as they headed for earth, but the woman closed her eyes.

“I told you the world would end! I told you!”

LICHEN

LoveStar sat in the plane with the seed in his hand. The scheduled landing was in twenty minutes, and he had lost control over time. He felt the plane was either cleaving the air at seven times the speed of sound or else hanging dead still. At those moments everything went quiet and the air was filled with a thick, muted silence and the engines turned like a windmill in a gentle breeze. He looked out; there was ice in the air and the frost grew like lichen on the wings of the plane, settling on the windows as though someone had breathed on them. LoveStar tried to say something aloud to himself, but nothing could be heard except a long-drawn-out moan [m]. LoveStar spied a small hole in the frost. He peered down to earth at a moon-gray desert while the lichen grew on the wings, but then time suddenly jerked into motion again, the frost melted in an instant, and LoveStar screeched:

“THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL!”

He nearly jumped out of his skin and the seed fell to the floor. He flung himself on all fours, searching for it in desperation. “How dare he make ME howl?” he choked, stretching under a table, sighing with relief when he saw the seed and picking it up with infinite care. He examined the seed in his hand; it was gray and there was no vibration. “Perhaps it's dead,” he thought, horror-struck. He would step out of the plane before the whole world with a DEAD seed in his hand. He had to be sure that it was alive, so he decided to send it a prayer. He clasped his hands around the seed and prayed to God: “Dear God, don't let the seed die,” but the seed did not vibrate. He clenched his teeth and looked around. He had to have confirmation. “Perhaps you have to say: You who are in the place,” he thought and shuddered at the thought, but he had to try. He had to see what would happen, so he closed his eyes, clasped his hands, and directed the prayer ardently and sincerely to the man who held the seed: “Dear LoveStar, don't let the seed die.” The prayer boomed as if in a hollow space, echoing in his head, then a short circuit shot an arrow into his heart and stopped its beating for an instant. LoveStar gasped and fumbled at his chest. “Strange,” he thought, “you're not aware of your heart until it stops beating.”

When he opened his eyes the plane was bathed in red rays. He squinted out of the window and saw that the sky was studded all over with red dots, making the land below no longer moon-gray but fiery red. The plane began its descent.

Time stood still, turning a split second into an hour. He heard a heavy sound like drawn-out thunder, like a bottomless bass. The lights were sucked out of the windows, and the plane slowly rolled belly up. It happened so slowly that he could easily follow the movement. He listened harder and heard the sound as a very slow noise. When the plane was upside down he made his way calmly to the front and opened the flight cabin door, but there was nothing there. He was confronted with a yawning black sky, studded all over with glowing bodies that hung as if in a sling, all at the same height. One of them had just shorn the flight cabin off the plane. He looked down at the reddish-white glacier and knew that this was where he was headed, so he tightened his fist about the seed and stepped out into the night.

He fell to earth like a snowflake in a blizzard, and though the air friction was enough to rip off his clothes, he did not feel the cold because every split second was like an hour, and for ten hours his life played through his head like a developing film. When he smashed into the glacier he felt nothing. The pain signals could not pass up his broken spine to his brain. He looked up and wondered how far he had fallen. He saw LOVESTAR twinkling behind the bodies, unaware that his leg was missing, his liver had burst, and his heart was shattered. LOVESTAR twinkled faintly and went out. Someone just died, thought LoveStar, clenching his hand tighter round the seed.