LoveStar

a novel

Andri Snær Magnason
Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb

Seven Stories Press

New York

Copyright © 2002 by Andri Snær Magnason

English translation © 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Title of the original Icelandic edition:
LoveStar

Published by agreement with Forlagið, www.forlagid.is

First English-language edition.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Seven Stories Press

140 Watts Street

New York, NY 10013

www.sevenstories.com

College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for a free six-month trial period. To order, visit http://www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

Book design by Jesse Heuer

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andri Snær Magnason, 1973-

[Lovestar. English]

Lovestar : a novel / Andri Snær Magnason ; translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb. -- 1st English-language ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-60980-426-8 (pbk.) -- ISBN 1-60980-426-0

I. Cribb, Victoria. II. Title.

PT7511.A49L6813 2012

839'.6934--dc23

2012028468

Printed in the United States

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SEED

A seed becomes a tree becomes a forest green as a carpet.

An egg becomes a bird becomes birds fill the sky like clouds.

An egg becomes a bump becomes a man becomes mankind, manufactures cars, writes books, builds houses, lays carpets, plants forests, and paints pictures of clouds and birds.

In the beginning all this must have been contained in the egg and the seed.

Forest. Birds. Mankind.

A human egg is not heavy but the first egg held the kernel of all that later came to be:

love, joy, hate, grief, art, science, hope.

In the beginning there was nothing but a seed.

Everything grew from that seed.

Man could create everything but life.

It was scientifically proven.

Man could kill life and destroy life and change life,

he could cultivate life, multiply life, kindle life from life,

but he could not create life, still less a seed.

So there is nothing more precious than a seed.

A man sat in a jet as it soared over the Atlantic at three times the speed of sound.

He had found a seed.

It rested in his hand.

If anything happened to the seed all hope would be lost.

Of course he didn't know that all hope was lost anyway.

He would be dead within four hours.

PROLOGUE

ARCTIC TERN / STERNA PARADISAEA

When
the arctic terns failed to find their way home one spring, appearing instead like a storm cloud over the center of Paris and pecking at the heads of pedestrians, many people thought the world was coming to an end, and that this would be the first in a long series of calamities. They stockpiled canned food and hoarded water, and waited for a plague of locusts, droughts, floods, or earthquakes, but nothing happened, at least not in Paris. The aggressive terns overran public parks and traffic islands, but the locals soon grew used to them and old men were able to sit on benches in peace as long as they carried a bag of sardines to placate the birds.

The terns no longer flew from pole to pole. Summer nights in the Arctic were screech-free and peck-free; summer nights in the Antarctic likewise. The birds' innate sense of direction had become confused, and some instinct informed them that their global position was correct, that they were undoubtedly on the right spot north of the Arctic Circle. The city must have sprung up while they were away down south. The older terns were irritable and disorientated but the first generation of birds in the city knew nothing other than traffic noise and human crowds. The terns soon became one of the typical Parisian sights. Tourists could buy postcards with pictures of a tern-white Eiffel Tower and street vendors tried to press people into buying bags full of guppy fish to feed them. This didn't bother the terns, and as no predator was directly dependent on them it didn't significantly upset the balance of nature either.

A few seasons later, Chicago filled up with bees as if it were covered with honey, though in reality there was barely a tree or flower to be found. On weather satellite pictures a black depression seemed to cling low over the city, a gray swirl twisting anticlockwise around a black epicenter. The bees buzzed and droned and stung and drove the citizens mad. The only answer was to poison them: planes specially designed to extinguish forest fires flew back and forth, dusting the city with insecticide. Yet the bees continued to be drawn there and so the poisoning continued until the last citizens finally abandoned the place.

Eventually the streets were covered with a one-foot-thick layer of fallen bees carrying seeds and pollen on their feet. Flowers sprang up in every nook and cranny, putting down roots among the dead bees. Vegetation climbed the walls of the skyscrapers and spread over the sidewalks. The largest glass buildings turned into greenhouses, hot and damp, full of reptiles, insects, and tropical plants sprawling unchecked from their pots, while other buildings resembled huge beehives full of honey, which oozed down the walls and between the floors. Bears got wind of the city from as far away as Alaska. They licked the buildings, birds fluttered from flower to flower, and the poor took their life in their hands and ventured into the city in search of valuables and honey.

In the center of Chicago a golden pond of honey formed, which trickled along the streets, over squares, and dripped into the drains, absorbing every imaginable scent and substance that crossed its path. Those in search of unusual sensations tried spreading it on bread and found that the world and time itself turned as golden, viscous, and sweet as honey.

Shortly after the bees lost their bearings around Chicago, monarch butterflies began to behave oddly as well. Each year, for as long as people could remember, the butterflies flew in enormous swarms across the United States to Mexico where they would hibernate for the winter. The hibernation forest would turn red with monarchs as they clustered on every trunk, branch, and leaf. But one autumn the monarch butterflies flew in the complete opposite direction. Instead of heading south to their wintering grounds, they flew north. People tried to redirect them with giant fans and nets; they were trapped from helicopters and taken to the butterfly forest by force. But some instinct was telling them to fly north and that's what they did the moment they were released. They set a course for the North Pole and swarmed around it until they froze in the air and fell to earth like giant snowflakes. They continued to flutter north until the ice cap around the pole was red with monarchs. Polar bears, wandering around in the camouflage they had evolved over 10,000 years, could now easily be spotted from miles away. When the white blobs moved over the butterfly-patterned carpet of snow, the seals yawned and slid unhurriedly through holes in the ice. The polar bears almost died of starvation; they didn't have 10,000 years to turn orange. But eventually they learned to roll in the butterflies when their pelts were wet, and if enough monarchs froze to them they became invisible again. Their tracks remained white but the seals weren't smart enough to beware of white tracks with sharp teeth approaching at speed.

People soon began to suspect the reason for all this: the world was so saturated with waves, messages, transmissions, and electric fields that animals were reading all sorts of gibberish from the air. When four jumbo jets crash-landed the same day exactly five miles from their intended destination, people began to seek a substitute for these waves in earnest. A monarch butterfly weighing ten grams could travel one thousand miles without the help of a satellite. An Arctic skua could fly year after year from its nest on Melrakkasletta in north Iceland to its favorite rock east of Cape Town in South Africa by instinct alone. Creatures with brains the size of a nut, seed, or piece of fluff could do this, yet humans with their heavy heads would have needed eighteen satellites, a receiver, radar, maps, compasses, a transmitter, twenty years' training, and an atmosphere so thick with waves that it had almost ceased to be transparent.

No one could prove that the waves were harmful to humans, but people were ready to believe it and that was enough—the rest was mere detail. The world was radioactive. Everyone who got ill, with anything from leukemia to a cold, blamed the waves. “Put on a hat!” mothers would tell their children. “It'll protect you from the waves. Otherwise your hair will be electrified and steal your life force!” “Put on your gloves, son! Bare fingers are like lightning rods that attract waves.” “Keep a stone in your left pocket and a small bottle of water in your right. That'll balance the flow of energy.”

Legal proceedings were initiated weekly against the world's most popular radio and television stations for the most unrelated problems blamed on wave pollution. Fanatical members of radical protest groups blew up microwave transmitters and broadcasting towers, but these incidents were generally hushed up by the media to prevent an epidemic. It was mainly newspapers that covered such stories, as their sales increased in direct correlation to the number of towers blown up.

Scientists shook their heads over the public's stupidity, academics refused to take the field of study seriously, and doctors continued to insist that waves had no proven effect on the human body. In
an old hangar at Reykjavik airport, however, a small international group of ornithologists, molecular biologists, aerodynamicists,
and biochemists had gathered to dabble in waves. Day and night they worked, dissecting and examining terns, pigeons, bees, salmon, and monarch butterflies. They were driven by the unshakable belief that it was possible to unlock the secrets that lay behind the navigation instinct.
The organization was called LoveStar, as was the head of the company
himself. No reasons were given for the name and people soon gave up expecting a sensible explanation.
*

The LoveStar research department's motto was simple: “Everything has substance. The complex exists, the strange exists, the incomprehensible exists, the unexplained and imaginary exist, but the supernatural does not exist, though nothing is ruled out.” In the laboratory, scientists pondered questions such as how a shoal of fish could spin round on the spot as if they had a single body, without it being possible to detect a message passing between them. Or how a flock of birds could fly in perfect unison, as if controlled by one mind.

Measuring equipment was developed that could detect signals so weak as to be at levels formerly considered supernatural. This is where the firm's strength lay, and it wasn't long before the LoveStar experts were on the trail. They discovered how to transmit sounds, images, and messages between human beings using birdwaves that were weak, harmless, and could be picked up by devices as light as a butterfly's brain. They had found an unexpected and fabulous virgin territory for science, one that would eventually free mankind from cords and render copper wires, fiber-optic cables, satellites, and microwave transmitters obsolete. The discoveries of LoveStar's Bird and Butterfly Division transformed the world in a matter of a few years. The “cordless man” arose, freer than a monarch butterfly and with a keener sense of direction than a skua.

Forty years after mankind was freed from cords, the LoveStar headquarters had long since moved out of the old hangar at Reykjavik airport. It was now located in the excavated mountains and lava spires of the LoveStar theme park in Oxnadalur valley, which the corporation owned.

On the surface, plovers scurried, a vixen barked, a raven croaked, and a shepherd herded his sheep. Smoke curled from a turf-roofed farm and a bearded farmer would recite verses when he was in the mood. The landscape looked exactly as it had for the last thousand years, but the surface was only a shell, and once in a while, people were shown an unexpected glimpse of the world that lay beneath. Sometimes a rock would open and a blue-clad woman spread out a white cloth to dry. Sometimes steam rose from the hayfield as if a hot spring boiled below.

If the shepherd had disobeyed his father's orders and climbed the rocky hillside behind the farm, passed over the heathery slopes and flowery dells, scaled the sheer crags, screes, and rock falls to lie down flat on the mountain peak and gaze upon the world beyond with his own eyes, he would never have been the same again. The other side of the mountain was a 2,300-foot-high perpendicular wall of shining glass, as if someone had sliced off half of the mountain along the length of its ridge. Vehicles waited in ranks at the bottom of the neighboring Hörgárdalur valley, while tens of thousands of people streamed like ants in and out of the giant main entrance with its 2,200-foot-high ceiling.
Sometimes clouds formed up in the dome where seabirds, who slipped in through the air-conditioning ducts, soared silently in rings like white angels. The lobby could hold one hundred thousand people at a time and the whole structure was made of polished stone and glass.

The mountainside from the Oxnadalur river up to the spire of Hraundrangi (now rechristened LavaRock) was a heathery shell over the most stupendous labyrinth ever built by man: chamber after chamber, vault after vault, gallery after gallery, with no danger of claustrophobia because of the stupendous view. The galleries and restaurant looked out over the unspoilt, romantic Oxnadalur valley through carefully camouflaged windows built into the cliffs, while those who had a view through the glass wall over Hörgárdalur valley could watch black airships floating by.

Three or four air vessels, each the size of a steamship, hung over the nearby Myrkárjökull glacier at any one time, lowering freezer containers marked “LoveDeath” into cold stores underneath the ice. Blinding flashes rose from the peaks at regular intervals as launchpads catapulted rockets into space, bright as comets. The clouds billowing behind them were mirrored in the glass wall, on which a giant star was painted with golden letters: LoveStar.

No one was permitted to walk on the unspoilt surface of the Oxnadalur valley apart from the inhabitants of the protected farms and LoveStar himself. On fine days he could be seen strolling through the valley dressed in a white suit with a hat and brown cane. He was generally accompanied by a black dog, an old dog that LoveStar had owned five times before. When LoveStar walked around the valley, the protected inhabitants of the farms pretended not to see him, though their children watched him walk into the rocky crag and thought he must be God.

When this story took place, LoveStar was sitting aboard his plane on his way north to Oxnadalur. In his hand was a seed. The scheduled landing time was in four hours and fifteen minutes. He had only three hours and fifty minutes left to live.

Footnote: