LoveStar (3 page)

He continued reading, but Indridi lost his appetite and went straight up to his room. Just a few weeks later he had achieved a 30 percent increase in his reading speed and an 18 percent improvement in concentration.

Indridi longed for nothing more than his sixteenth birthday, because then it would be impossible to rewind him again.

“It's too late to improve oneself after the age of sixteen! There's no turning back, remember, my dear boy,” said his father, patting him on the shoulder in a fatherly way.

Indridi achieved stunning results in his end-of-school exams. He was near the top of the class with an average grade of 9.3 out of 10. He had friends, had been active on the social scene, and played sports, but as he helped his parents prepare for his graduation party he still wasn't sure of himself and couldn't stop himself asking: “What happens now?”

“You have your future ahead of you, Indridi dear,” said his mother in nasal tones. Her new nose was still under wraps. She'd had it grown especially for his graduation as her old nose had long gone out of fashion. The new nose was supposed to be beautifully curved with neat, round nostrils. She was blonde, in keeping with the summer fashion, and brown eyed because it was Wednesday. Indridi coughed.

“Yes but, what'll happen to Me number three?”

His mother and father smiled teasingly and looked at one another.

“Indridi, we meant to tell you a long time ago.”

“The law was changed shortly after you were born,” said his mother. “The individual was redefined in the old way.”

“It's no longer legal to rewind. It hasn't been for fifteen years.”

“Then where is Me number three?”

His mother laughed and his father slapped his thigh.

“He was disposed of when the rules were changed and the insurance company's rebirth department closed down!”

“But he was a good model for you,” said his father.

“Which is why we were advised not to tell you.”

“Yes, he acted as a motivator and so became part of you. Just as number one served as a warning of the dark side that you didn't want to become, number three was the perfect model, the goal you could never achieve.”

“Without him you'd never have turned out so well.”

“HAS ME NUMBER THREE BEEN THROWN AWAY?”

Indridi looked disbelievingly at his parents, who smiled and carried on kneading the dough for his marzipan cake.

“Don't look at us like that. You wouldn't have been so successful without constant motivation from number three.”

“We can't be forever using fairies or bogeyman to get children to do better, can we now?” asked his father, searching for something on the table. “Pass me the icing sugar, love.”

Indridi tore open the freezer door and snatched out a frozen green tube.

“What's this then? Isn't this Me number three?”

His father roared with laughter. “No! That's a green popsicle.”

“An Ice Breaker,” added his mother.

Indridi's mother and father got up and began to break-dance around the kitchen while the world spun before Indridi's eyes. He had never really quarrelled with his parents. Now he felt as if he should have screamed and raged, but his upbringing had been so successful that he could do neither. He was simply not made that way, and when it came down to it he felt his life had been perfectly okay. His future lay ahead. His parents continued break-dancing and he could do nothing about it. He burst out laughing and joined in.

“We were only teasing,” said his mother.

“You really fooled me,” said Indridi, break-dancing.

Indridi lay awake that night. All his life he had been so petrified of number three that he hadn't even rebelled as a teenager. He had often crept into the kitchen in the dead of night and felt tempted to defrost number three but had always chickened out at the last moment.

He had never had a reason to be a difficult teenager as such. Relations were generally harmonious in his home; he was allowed to stay out as late as his friends, and he had everything he wanted given to him on a plate. All doors were open to him. But now all the neglected possibilities ran through his mind. “I should have gone abroad as an exchange student, I should have sailed to South America with LoveDeath, I should have tried going to sea and getting into fights at port, I should have kissed Gugga when she offered me the chance, I should have thought about the future and finished high school quicker by studying during the summers, but then of course I'd have had to give up South America and the trawlers and Gugga . . .”

He felt confused; there were so many possibilities that his head was ready to explode. He connected himself to REGRET and asked: “What would have happened if I'd sailed to South America with LoveDeath instead of attending my senior year of school?”

The answer came straight back: “You would have died.”

“Good,” said Indridi, and a weight was lifted from him. “I'm glad I didn't go on a cruise with LoveDeath.”

“Do you want to know more?”

“No, thanks. It's a good thing I finished high school. Otherwise I'd have died.”

REGRET enabled people to put their past in order and get to grips with new circumstances. The world followed certain laws. If a stone was dropped from a height of fifteen feet it was possible to work out the speed at which it would land, so it was also possible to work out what would have happened if Indridi's 160 pounds had turned right and not left at a given moment in the past, the domino effect it would have had on everything else in the world, what would have happened afterward, and so on. REGRET could work it out. It was LoveStar's brainchild. People needed only to call REGRET or send an email and the world was worked out in advance and the answer came right back. The remarkable thing about REGRET was that it didn't matter how often people asked: What would have happened if . . . ? The answer was almost always along these lines: You would have died.

Death was the best of a bad bunch. Other possibilities included disablement and, in some cases, the end of the world, and it was all scientifically proven. In this way REGRET helped people come to terms with life, the world, and their fate.

For Indridi REGRET fulfilled the role of dreams and nightmares. He found the thought of life hanging on such a narrow thread absolutely terrifying, but there was no point in brooding on it too much as life didn't come with an instruction book indicating which steps led to fortune or ruin. Indridi sometimes ordered in-depth information about the gory deaths that one small sideways step would have caused him:

“I see that your right arm would have been located at: [N64°05.536' W21°55.321']. The front left wheel of the bus would have been on that exact same spot at the same instant. Forty fractions of a second later your head would have been under the rear left wheel of the bus and four seconds later I can see part of you, probably the guts, wrapped round the front wheel of a Peugeot 205GR. Would you like an artistic or pictorial transcript or will an oral account be sufficient?”

“It's okay. I'm satisfied. I'm glad.”

“Do you still have regrets?”

“No, I have no regrets.”

“Good. That'll be 1,300 points.”

REGRET was intended to bring the world closer to happiness. Unhappiness was nourished by regret on the one hand and fear of the future on the other. The more the choice of possibilities multiplied, the more complicated and difficult life became. People lived in one world, but beside that world there were a million other worlds that could have been. People could regret countless life-paths that they could have taken in the past.

Every single neglected opportunity was a burden on the present. But that's not the whole story. In the future there were millions of new possible choices and millions resulting from each of those millions. Finally, when one choice was chosen over another, something rather remarkable occurred: everything that was not chosen was converted into regret. As a result, people were forever crushed in the present, under the weight of the future, on top of the pressure of the past, and things did not get any better. The choices multiplied and regret increased in direct correlation until people could not move and became tangled in an invisible web. At this point REGRET came to the rescue and set the past in order. According to REGRET, every single decision people made was the ONLY CORRECT decision. Every single sidestep would have led to death or the end of the world. Every single person had been in mortal danger and only just escaped by making the ONLY CORRECT decision. So people had a duty to be happy. They had survived against all the odds.

Five years later Indridi was still a very good boy, and he was glad he had never rebelled or got into any other stupid messes. He didn't need REGRET to tell him that. Otherwise he'd never have met Sigrid when he went out to celebrate his graduation at the dance in his old high school. She had just started the same summer job as him, in the gardening department of LoveDeath's energy section, but he hadn't yet had a chance to talk to her. He had seen this beautiful girl pulling up chickweed on the other side of the Ellida river. She wore a white sleeveless top and orange waterproof trousers and wore her hair in two plaits. Next, she was standing on the landing of the old high school with her girlfriend. She smiled and their eyes met and from that moment on they were always together.

Sigrid was beautiful, good, and fun, and she was still like that more than five years later. Their relationship might've been going to the dogs but Indridi was still head over heels in love with her, though he no longer knew whether his love was returned. “Yesterday” echoed in his head. He walked with heavy steps up the stairs to their apartment, a knot in his stomach, opened the door to the second floor and called:

“Sigrid, honey. Are you home?”

He closed his eyes, fought against tears and wished fiercely and in earnest that life could be like it was before. When love was red as a strawberry and life was as sweet and golden as honey.

“Sigrid? Are you home?”

LEMON SUN

LoveStar sat alone in his jet, soaring soundlessly over the Atlantic. The scheduled landing time was in three hours and fifty minutes at the LoveStar headquarters in Oxnadalur. He didn't dare move because in his hand he held a tiny seed. An hour ago the seed had been green and seemed to quiver but now the quivering was fainter. He thought the seed looked gray, though the grayness might have been caused by the lighting in the plane.

There was a knot in his stomach. LoveStar had had a greater influence on the world than any other man in history. Everything he touched had turned to gold, but in his hand he held a seed that seemed only to be turning gray. He didn't know what it contained, but it was sure to be more powerful than an atom bomb.

Though everything had gone according to plan, LoveStar didn't know what would happen next. As a rule he'd had ideas for the next twenty years, but now he was quite empty. In fact he had been empty for some time, having developed a sufficiently strong immune system to ward off stupid ideas.

It was a long time since he had slept the whole night through. He invariably jerked awake, feeling as if someone were whispering in his ear. As if someone were sitting on his chest, almost suffocating him. He didn't dare sleep with the light off any longer. He was distracted at board meetings, lost the thread, was oblivious to questions, and couldn't come up with any answers when asked. He often sat alone at night, waiting for news of the search. Generally he sat at a glass table drawing, writing, or doing calculations. There was nothing he could do but wait. In the days before he boarded the plane, he'd sat in his office with a white sheet of paper in front of him, calculating:

For God, every day is like 1,000 years

every hour 41.67 years

every minute 0.69 years or 251 days

every second 0.012 years, which is 4.2 days

a moment is a day.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, so light travels

186,000 miles in 4.2 days, according to God's sense of time.

The speed of light from God's perspective is therefore around 0.5 miles a second or 1,845 miles an hour. That's three times faster than the top speed of an empty jumbo jet.

For 1,000 years in Your sight are like a day.

He looked up, listened, then continued his calculations: “I'm 71 years old. I've lived 25,992 days. For someone who perceives each passing day as 1,000 years I am almost 26 million years old. Humans sleep for three centuries. When they wake up in the morning they take five days to open their eyes. I don't need to sleep for three centuries; just now I slept for a third of a moment. That's eight hours in God-time. It's half-past two. I haven't closed my eyes for 100 years.”

Putting down his pen, he got up and looked in the mirror. He closed his eyes and opened them. He used to do this sometimes when he was small. By opening his eyes quickly he tried to see what he looked like with his eyes shut. He closed his eyes and opened them. His palms were sweating and his hands shook. The maid came in and drew white curtains across the windows. She was carrying a round plate on which there was a slice of bread spread with honey.

“Chicago?” asked LoveStar.

The maid nodded.

LoveStar looked at the bread. A round slice of bread spread with golden honey. Sun on a white plate. LoveStar took a bite out of the sun; it looked like a waning moon and his tremors vanished. Two bites, and he chewed slowly until the world and time turned golden and viscous. He looked back in the mirror and saw himself sitting with closed eyes chewing the golden honey.

“I can see myself dreaming.”

When he saw himself open his eyes in the mirror it was night again. He'd managed to leapfrog a whole twenty-four hours. His thoughts were still viscous when he sat down and continued writing.

“Every day is like a thousand years and a moment equals a day. God can stroke a bird in flight or pluck flies out of the air. Even if he goes to Africa and comes back after a whole God-year, little will have changed because barely two minutes will have elapsed in the world of men. A fragment of a second equals an hour and in an hour a fly will have buzzed half a long-drawn-out buzz, a taxi driver's diesel engine will have turned two revs. The noise of the engine is a heavy drawn-out purr. The driver says something on his walkie-talkie but he who perceives each day as a thousand years would take a whole week to listen to the sentence. For a whole hour nothing has been heard but a long drawn-out [ä].

“In three hundred years' time the sun will crawl above the eastern mountains and its light will take about five seconds to flood over the whole city. Like lemon concentrate pouring from a round spout, the light will flood from the sun, covering the city like resin, and, coated in this, people will move so slowly that it will take them a whole year to brush their teeth. But perhaps the light is more like honey because when it oozes under your eyelids, you wake up and murmur, ‘Mmmm honey . . .'”

The old cord-phone on the desk rang, disturbing further calculations. It emitted a shrill tone and LoveStar twitched at every ring. He looked at the phone for a good while before picking up the receiver.

“Hello.”

It was the leader of the search party.

“The search was successful,” he said solemnly. “We've found the spot. It all ends in one place.”

“What did you find there?” asked LoveStar.

“We don't know,” said the search leader, “but we've found the spot.”

“What did you find there?” asked LoveStar in a tremulous voice. “WHAT DID YOU FIND? WHERE DOES IT ALL END?”

The search leader was silent.

“Answer me!” LoveStar looked at his shaking hand.

“No one dares to look. No one dares to go anywhere near the place.”

“Damn it . . .” said LoveStar and looked around. He suddenly felt there was someone listening. “What are you going to do?” he whispered.

“I don't know,” answered the search leader. “I simply do not know.”

“What about you?”

“I'm not going anywhere near it. I've got a wife and children at home. You can fire me, sir, but I don't dare go anywhere near.”

LoveStar slammed down the receiver.

He went himself.

He found a seed.

Which is why he was sitting in a plane with a seed in the palm of his hand and an infinitely heavy sensation in his chest. His heart was like a broken egg. The shell jabbed into his spine, diaphragm, and lungs, making it difficult to breathe. His suffering would soon be at an end. The honey sun would never again flood under his eyelids. He only had three hours and thirty-three minutes left to live.