LoveStar (23 page)

THE MILLION
STAR FESTIVAL

“The Million Star Festival!” the world howled with one voice. In every house, in every town, in every city people howled these same words. They echoed through the corridors of mental hospitals; they were heard from the nurseries of maternity wards; they resounded in parliament chambers and the managerial offices of multinationals, exposing burglars and hired assassins. “THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL!” burst from the mouths of newsreaders, chat-show hosts, secret hosts, howlers, sportsmen, and buskers. Women moaned it at the height of orgasm, men shrieked it as they begged for mercy and gasped it in place of dying words. “THE MILLION STAR FESTIVAL!” people said in their sleep and woke to dead silence. Everyone in the world rushed to windows and out into streets or up onto roofs, where they stood, gazing up at the sky, whether it was day or night, clear or cloudy, rain or storm. The world stood silent, waiting for the Million Star Festival. There was not a sound, not a whisper, nothing at all, not a whistle or a song when a million red dots appeared in the sky.

Instead of burning up with a flash or glitter, the bodies fell in a red glow, and the world had never seen such beauty. All went according to plan for the LoveDeath Mood Division, and the bodies fell faster and grew hotter, turned as yellow as candle flames and left trails in heaven like golden rain, giving rise to exclamations of wonder all over the world.

After four minutes, the bodies blazed green, then rapidly turned bluish-white like welding flames, and finally glowed white, clearer and brighter than the sun. Over every human being on earth appeared a thousand suns that spanned the vault of heaven from east to west and north to south, bathing the children of earth in a pure white light so that no one cast a shadow. The suns were brilliant and all heading to earth at twenty thousand miles an hour.

Simon closed his eyes, Per closed his eyes, Yamaguchi closed her eyes, and so did Grim at the Puffin Factory. All over earth people closed their eyes; many fell on their faces, looking away from the glare and turning to the earth. Just as their eyes closed, the first booms sounded. Heavy, dreadful, menacing booms, but no one could see what was happening because the brightness had blinded them even through their eyelids.

Now something happened that the moodmen hadn't bargained for. The costumes were so thick that instead of burning up entirely, they heated up like hotplates and inside the costumes human flesh boiled, simmered, and bubbled. When 180-pound bodies fell from a height of six thousand miles, hitting the earth at twenty thousand miles an hour, the energy released was equivalent to a medium-sized nuclear reaction.

There was an immense crack as a hundred million bodies crashed simultaneously to earth. The ensuing earthquake was greater than any experienced since man first walked the planet. Harmless old women thundered through seventy-story skyscrapers before blasting the foundations from under them, and thus the glowing bodies rained down over the world. Thus houses crumbled and cities exploded, and fires were ignited that burnt up forests and harvests all over the earth. The bodies smashed the glass wall and shell of Oxnadalur. They smashed the Statue of Liberty, and they smashed the LoveStar temples in major cities. The bodies brought down airships and airplanes and crashed into the ocean, raising waves that sank ships and washed coastal cities out to sea. The bodies broke up the iSTAR headquarters, burned out the howler center, and turned the whole cordless world into howlers one last time.

“Hail to LoveStar!”

Every mouth howled these words as cities burned, fields went up in flames, the oceans boiled, and mountains were razed to the ground.

In the depths of Oxnadalur in an out-of-the-way corner of the theme park, there was a room quarried in the rock of a narrow gully. There Indridi and Sigrid were aware of nothing but the heartbeat and snores of the wolf. They lay pressed together inside the wolf, as if sewn into a haggis, and the world may have shaken from the human rain, but it was nothing compared to the booming of a snoring wolf. Indridi caressed Sigrid's breasts, while she took a firm hold of his penis with sensitive fingers and directed him to the right place to prolong their embrace. Thus they made love in the wolf's stomach while the world crumbled outside.

JOURNEY'S END

All was quiet when Indridi unzipped the snoring wolf the following morning. He crawled out and saw that the animal was covered in gray dust. He held his nose: the air was thick with a stench of death. He peered around and saw that the room was also covered in dust, making the daylight so gray that he hardly had to squint to accustom his eyes to the light. Outside nothing could be heard but the desolate moaning of the wind and the crackling of fires. Sigrid poked her head out through the opening and made a face.

“It smells of ‘money,'” she said, holding her nose. “I've never known it so strong.”

The wolf woke up when Indridi zipped up its stomach and straightaway began to wash Indridi and Sigrid, licking them high and low as they stared anxiously around, trying to work out what had happened to the world. A great rock blocked the door to the passage and the stone bay window facing the gully was broken. Sigrid slipped on her shoes and they stepped outside. The valley was pitch black, the ground so hot that it smoked, and all the grass and heather had been scorched away. Melted fat mingled with blood poured down the stream bed. They picked their way carefully, as if the earth was a thin crust over geothermal springs. Above them towered the peak of LavaRock, broken and sharp as an arrow stabbing the gray clouds. Neither speaking a word, they held hands and tried to send their eyes around the world but saw only interference, burned-out ruins, and scorched earth.

The wolf sniffed the air and followed some scent until she found a burst heart below a blackened human head. She pushed at the head with her gray paw, causing it to fall with a splash into the stream of blood. Beneath the head, tatters of red dressing gown were revealed.

Sigrid covered her eyes.

“Let's get out of here, Indridi!” she said.

Indridi stared stiffly at the man's head as it rolled down the gully, but Sigrid burst into noisy tears and screamed until the silence echoed:

“LET'S GET OUT OF HERE, INDRIDI!!!”

Indridi put his arms around the wolf's great head and whispered in her ear, “Save us, dear wolf! Carry us away from here!”

The wolf lay down. Indridi leapt on her back and Sigrid mounted behind him. The wolf clambered over rocks and screes and up slippery slopes until they reached the mountain ridge. On the peaks facing them, flames rose from the hydrogen spouts of the launchpads; through the smoke and haze they saw that the glacier had melted and the bodies from the cold stores had been washed away by the flood and lay among the scorched remains of the LoveDeath airships, buckled containers, and toasted buses. A blackened star hung on the remnants of the glass wall.

They headed up on to the moors and raced over gullies and past ravines, around craters and over rocks. Everywhere they saw the same blackness and from all over the land rose the choking stench of death. The wolf panted, her tongue hung out, but she didn't slow her pace.

The wolf ran along the highland freeway, and Indridi and Sigrid closed their eyes to avoid seeing the people who sat at the scorched steering wheels of their cars. Planes circled in the sky. They tried to wave to them, send them a signal, but in the end the planes' fuel ran out and they plummeted to earth. The wolf ran through the buckled forest of iron where the electricity pylons met, jumping over buzzing power lines, which coiled like poisonous snakes shooting sparks.

Ribbons of smoke rose and formed dark clouds that swam across the sky like sharp-toothed whales. When they mounted a low hill it appeared as if one of the clouds had fallen to earth. A glacier lay before them, dirty and sandy as a black sperm whale, its tail burst to reveal its white blubber, the river bleeding from it, rusty red and steaming.

“Now it's up to you, dear wolf,” said Indridi, patting the wolf's grimy coat. “Now it's up to you.”

They dismounted and the wolf preceded them on to the glacier. It was growing cooler, and though they were stiff from tiredness and hunger they could not stop. They made detours around crevasses, their feet soaked and their clothes offering little protection. On the highest point of the glacier the wolf lay down and refused to go any further. Indridi lay down beside her.

“There's no point, Sigrid,” said Indridi. “We might as well die here.”

Instead of lying down beside him, Sigrid stood shivering in the chill wind, peering around, and spotted a small bump. She stared harder and saw a hand emerging from the glacier. Sigrid went closer and found an old man lying frozen in the ice, his body apparently shattered, his skull all out of shape, his eyes wide open.

“I've found a man,” said Sigrid.

“Let him be,” said Indridi, weeping. “Everything's dead. There's no point, Sigrid.”

Sigrid bent down and opened the white hand. A small seed was revealed. It was green.

“Indridi. I've found a seed!”

Sigrid took the seed carefully from the man's hand. When she looked up she saw a gleam of light at the edge of the glacier. Her heart was filled with pure hope.

“Come on, Indridi!”

Sigrid dragged Indridi away and the wolf followed at a snail's pace. Sigrid led the group with the seed in her hand, and in this way they walked over the white desert, heading for the ray of light. As they drew nearer the glacier became sandier and dirtier, and at last they saw that the sunbeam ended in a grassy valley surrounded by white glaciers on every side. Clouds hid the peaks, but above the valley the sky was clear. Sigrid took a deep breath.

“There's no smell of death here,” she said.

They walked down into the valley and found a fallen helicopter. In it lay two lifeless pilots like abandoned chicks in a nest. An iron cable ran from the helicopter and they followed it to a grassy hump and in the hump they found a door. They opened the door and looked around; light shone in through a torn window screen. There was no one to be seen in the house but the beds were made. Indridi was hungry; he searched everywhere for something edible but in vain. One room was full of boxes, marked National Museum. They opened one; it was full of swords.

The wolf howled with hunger and Sigrid stroked its pelt. Indridi went out with a sword and an old cauldron. He dismembered the pilots, boiled down their flesh, minced it, and made little bundles that he put in the wolf's stomach. That evening milk began to leak from her teats.

“Mmmm, honey . . .” came their murmurs from the darkness.

The following morning Sigrid went out into the yard with a pot, which she filled with soil. With gentle fingers she pushed the seed into the soil and patted the earth lightly over it. Then she heard a bird screech.

“An Arctic tern?” she thought.

Sigrid called Indridi out of the house and together they watched a white cloud passing like a ribbon of fog down the valley until it was full of terns.

“Terns,” said Indridi. “So the world hasn't ended.”

Sigrid held the pot and looked at the marks her fingers had made in the soil.

“A seed becomes a forest.”

About the Author

Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland's most celebrated young writers. He has written poetry, plays, fiction, and non-fiction, and in 2009 he co-directed the documentary
Dreamland
, which was based on his book
Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation
. In 2002
LoveStar
was named “Novel of the Year” by Icelandic booksellers and received the DV Literary Award and a nomination for the Icelandic Literary Prize. His children's book,
The Story of the Blue Planet
—now published or performed in twenty-six countries—was the first children's book to receive the Icelandic Literary Prize, and was also the recipient of the Janusz Korczak Honorary Award and the West Nordic Children's Book Prize. Andri is the winner of the 2010 Kairos Award.

About the Translator

Victoria Cribb was born in England but spent a number of years traveling, studying, and working in Iceland, as a translator, journalist, and publisher. She has degrees from the University of Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Iceland. Her translations from Icelandic include
The Blue Fox
,
From the Mouth of the Whale
, and
The Whispering Muse
by Sjón (all published in the UK by Telegram);
Stone Tree
by Gyrðir Elíasson (Comma Press); and
Arctic Chill
(with Bernard Scudder),
Hypothermia
, and
Operation Napoleon
by Arnaldur Indriðason (all published in the UK by Harvill Secker). Her translation of
The Blue Fox
was long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009, and her translations of
Arctic Chill
and
Hypothermia
were short-listed for the CWA International Dagger in 2007 and 2010, respectively. She is currently studying for a PhD in Old Icelandic literature at Cambridge, where she lives with her partner.

About Seven Stories Press

Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negron, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women's Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com