LoveStar (13 page)

RANCID COD-LIVER OIL

For some reason the honey that the morning sun poured over Indridi and Sigrid had begun to resemble syrup—not maple syrup, golden as amber, but cheap corn syrup: cloudy, cloying, and sticky. But that was better than what followed over the next few days. The syrup grew sour and the mornings, far from being sweet, resembled rancid cod-liver oil. Waking to the sound of bluebottles buzzing around them with their metallic sheen, blue-green and gross, and with a foul taste in their mouths, neither felt like kissing. They turned away from each other's sweaty body odor mingled with the dried-fish genital stink of days-old sexual juices that they had not yet washed off. Their conversations became perfunctory and their silences were no longer harmonious, intimate and mutual but separate, so that when one of them broke the silence, the other was generally pensive and preoccupied and said:

“What?”

“Doesn't matter,” came the refrain, although it often mattered a great deal, more than anything else in the world, a question of life and death, love and happiness.

“What?”

“Doesn't matter.”

Even the “eat me, eat me” sounds from the Puffin Factory were accompanied by a strangely deep, harsh undertone, a “Grrryap! Grrryap!” that intensified every day until nothing but “Grrryap!” could be heard, filling the streets with fear and trembling.

At eight o'clock one morning there was a knock on Indridi and Sigrid's door. Indridi went to open it. Or rather, he was over by the front door because Sigrid was taking a shit with the bathroom door open and he wanted to air out the apartment. Outside stood a smiling woman dressed in a red flight attendant uniform with the inLOVE logo on her breast. Indridi showed her into the sitting room. Sigrid slammed the bathroom door. When she came out she shot Indridi a poisonous look.

“Have I come at a bad moment?” asked the woman, trying to hide her disgust as the foul smell reached her. She looked about for a chair that wasn't covered with piles of dirty laundry.

Sigrid didn't answer but Indridi replied dully: “No, not at all.”

“I understand you've got a problem with being calculated,” said the woman, sitting on some crumpled shirts. “I may work at inLOVE but I'm human too, which makes me an impartial advisor. I thought perhaps you'd like to talk to someone you could trust.”

“It's only me who's been calculated,” said Sigrid. “Indridi hasn't.”

“She's not going,” said Indridi, looking determinedly at the woman. “We don't need your help. She's not going north.”

“Can I speak for myself, please?” asked Sigrid, looking at the woman and trying to smile. “I'm not going north.”

“Are you unhappy with the inLOVE service?”

“We've found each other,” said Indridi.

“But why were you on the list if you didn't want to be calculated?” (Few people could face the bureaucracy involved in removing themselves from the inLOVE list, as de-registration resulted in all sorts of inconveniences and loss of privileges.)

The woman's speech was a bit stilted. She was probably reading a text or parroting something that was being whispered in her ear. Valuable negotiators did not waste their time paying house calls. They eavesdropped from a distance and fed stooges like her with well-chosen phrases.

“Naturally we wanted scientific confirmation; we never dreamt we wouldn't match up,” said Sigrid.

“You don't have any children, do you?” asked the woman glancing around.

“We wanted to wait until we were calculated,” said Indridi.

The woman's next line emerged rather stiffly: “You do realize what you're doing?”

“Yes,” said Indridi.

“There are two people out there who will miss out on happiness because you didn't want to be united with them.”

Silence.

“Do you want to miss out on happiness?”

“We are happy,” said Indridi.

“You mustn't be selfish. You might think you're happy but you're only thinking of yourselves as halves, not as a whole.”

“A whole?”

“The whole is you and your scientifically selected other half. You must think of mankind as a whole. You know the inLOVE plan: when the whole world has been calculated and love flows across borders, races, and genders, then all wars and disputes will be history. Don't you want a better world? Do you want to break the chain?”

“Of course not but . . .”

“It really ought to be illegal not to participate in inLOVE. Otherwise the world will continue to burn with misunderstanding, racial hatred, war, and selfishness. It only takes one unhappy man to send the whole thing up in flames.”

“But Sigrid is my other half; I've known that since the first time we set eyes on one another.”

“If she's your other half, she won't have eyes for anyone else, will she?”

“N . . . no,” said Indridi.

“So what are you afraid of? If she goes north she can talk to Møller, break it to him gently that he's not her one and only, and come home again! Then you'll have been proved right and that'll be great!”

“Great, eh?” said Indridi. “Unbelievably great, yes. I don't know of anyone who has gone north without getting hitched.”

“Indridi, dear, if they get hitched, then she'll have found her perfect match! Or do you want to deprive Sigrid of happiness? Perhaps that's it? Are you holding on to Sigrid because you yourself are still uncalculated?”

Indridi looked at Sigrid but she looked away.

“Of course it's understandable if you don't trust her,” said the woman.

“Don't trust Sigrid?” said Indridi.

“Yes. Don't you trust her?”

“Don't you trust me?” asked Sigrid.

Indridi nodded. “Of course I do.”

“She wouldn't be your perfect match if you didn't. Would she?” asked the woman triumphantly.

“No.”

Indridi and Sigrid sat silent and thoughtful on the sofa. Sigrid looked at the clock and left for work without saying good-bye. She walked down the street without looking over her shoulder. She took an extra double shift. They didn't meet until near midnight. They lay in the same bed without touching. Sigrid tossed and turned. Indridi stared at the ceiling and felt every fraction of a second pass like an hour. He lay awake for three thousand years and the moment he fell asleep, Sigrid silently dressed and crept out into the dawn. Half an hour later she boarded a bus headed direct for the deep valley where LOVESTAR twinkles behind a cloud.

GRRRYAP!

Indridi woke to find himself alone in bed. Sigrid's closet was open and bare. Indridi lay rigid, a bad taste in his mouth. A thick glaze of fat clung to his palette as if he'd been chewing leather or a fatty sausage. A storm lashed the window. There was no scent of honey roses filling his senses, and instead of “eat me, eat me” echoing round the neighborhood, there was only the intolerable “Grrryap!”

It was sinister and menacing, and a disgusting stench like dog shit seeped through every keyhole and crack in the apartment. Indridi lay alone in bed, trying to think clearly. He flinched at every “Grrryap!” Tried to concentrate but the noise kept breaking into his thoughts: “Grrryap!” He looked out of the window and saw that the sound was coming from the Puffin Factory. All the doors stood ajar and workmen were piling plump, well-fed puffins on to transport trucks, while on the other side of the road the glass was being torn off the honey-rose greenhouses. Thick steel grilles were being welded on to the structures.

Indridi ran outside, trying to shelter himself from the rain. He tapped the shoulder of a workman with a yellow helmet and red stubble.

“Are you taking the flowers?” he asked in a choked voice.

“They've given up on the flowers; it's foxes now. Zoos have started replacing lions and polar bears with our VikingCenturyFoxes.”

“The honey roses were my favorite flowers,” said Indridi sadly.

“That's just the way it is.”

“But what about the puffins?”

“The puffins are going north. They're not happy near the foxes. They get stressed out. Stop laying.”

“The puffins are going north?”

“Yes, are you deaf?”

“Why don't the foxes go north? They're used up north as well, aren't they?”

The man with the red stubble thought: “Simbi! Why aren't the foxes going north?”

“They're bred out east and west, they're bred here, but it's banned to breed them up north.”

“Why?” asked Indridi.

“Why's it banned, Simbi?”

“Because of LoveDeath. They go crazy over the smell of ‘money.'”

“Where's Grim?”

“He was here a minute ago. I don't see him now.”

A yellow bulldozer came roaring around the corner like an old rhinoceros. It sank its teeth into the lawn and Indridi watched it gnaw and chomp the flowers he had planted earlier that summer. The bulldozer trampled the heather and moss and chewed up the mountain avens, yarrow, and spotted orchids. Indridi wanted to stop the digging, but the the machine was remote-controlled from Korea by a cordless excavation engineer. Close to tears, Indridi ran into the factory.

“Grim! Where's Grim?”

Grim was the factory manager. He would often come out into the grounds, chat with Indridi, and ask him about his gardening duties. Sometimes Grim would give him honey roses or puffin eggs to take home to Sigrid, but now Grim was nowhere to be seen. Indridi went into the hall that used to be the friendly Puffin Factory. It no longer bustled with life and spring. Minus song and feathers, it was a cold steel hangar; iron doors slammed, sending echoes around the hall, and welders were erecting vast cages for the foxes. Two men stood using a high-pressure hose to sluice feathers, droppings, and fishbones from the floor.

“There are ten puffins left! What's to be done with them?” shouted a man from inside the hall.

“Destroy them!” called another. “The truck's full. Throw them to the foxes!”

The man busied himself with wringing the puffins' necks and chucking them onto a heap behind him. Then a bell rang. “COFFEE BREAK!” called the overseer. The hall emptied into the cafeteria and the man threw a puffin at Indridi. It was soft and warm.

“Don't just stand there like an idiot! Throw that to the foxes!”

“What foxes? I don't see any foxes.”

Indridi was left standing in the middle of the hall. Then he heard the terrible noise behind him.

“Grrryap!!!!”

He looked around and saw an open door. The bloodcurdling sound came from next door, where the storeroom had been emptied of puffin feed. Under a slender steel bridge there was a deep pit like an old-style swimming pool. It was divided up with steel panels and each compartment contained the most terrifying beasts he had ever seen. Foxes the size of polar bears yammered and circled, slavering and growling.

Indridi had little interest in foxes, and for some reason no one had seen fit to tell him what was going on: that the foxes would take over the factory, that the honey-rose greenhouses would be pulled down, that the garden would be laid to waste. Perhaps no one had known how to tell him, how to “find his angle” in this matter. Now every imaginable fact about foxes appeared automatically before his eyes with explanatory diagrams:

When the Vikings (
check out Viking gear?
) discovered the country (
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), it was full of giant foxes the size of polar bears. The Vikings invariably killed off the larger beasts and so the fox diminished in size with every generation because the smallest animals were more likely to survive and reproduce (
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). In the end only foxes the size of cats remained (
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) because they could hide in clefts. In the countryside (
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) the memory of the ferocious VikingCenturyFox lived on, which is why farmers got their picture in the papers whenever they brought down a fox.

[
picture of a farmer and his son with a fox in one hand
]

picture caption
:
Before the VikingCenturyFox declined it was one of the most dangerous predators on earth.

The VikingCenturyFox was first bred for the LoveSaga (
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) Theme Park in Fljotshlid (
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). Thanks to a careful breeding program, by which the trend was reversed and the largest animals allowed to live, the VikingCenturyFox has recovered its former dimensions. It is sure to prove a powerful draw for the National Museum (
virtual tour?
) on its reopening in the LoveStar theme park. The VikingCenturyFox weighs some 1,500 pounds, can bite a crocodile in half with its jaws, and pierce a two-inch-thick aluminium sheet (
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). It can outrun a horse (
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). The VikingCenturyFox was one of the most dangerous predators on earth.

Listening to the soothing recorded tones of the voice reading the text, Indridi stared at the ferocious gray beasts that growled, grrryapped, and snuffed the air as he approached with his human scent. Bloody carcasses hung on chains from the ceiling and were lowered at regular intervals; the foxes attacked the carcasses, tearing off thighs or sections of spine, then lay down with their booty and gnawed at it. The floor around them was littered with bones and blood, mixed with straw, puffin feathers, and shit. The stench was almost unbearable.

“GRRRYAP!” said the foxes in the pit. Poor Indridi stumbled backward, tightening his grip on the puffin. Then he inched his way warily along to the middle of the bridge. There were gaps in the floor and he could see the foxes directly below him. They snapped at the struts until they clanged, trying to shake him off. The foxes had jaws that could have bitten off a man's head in one go, short sturdy legs, and pelts as soft as fur coats.

Soft as fur coats. Indridi hadn't slept for three hundred years. His soul had been splintered in two, his heart was shattered, his diaphragm was like concrete, and his eyes were drowning. He was tired and wretched; every fraction of a second felt like an hour. He was so tired he no longer saw the foxes' teeth, he saw only soft fur coats all around him, furs that lay on the floor like rugs, cushions, or sofas, growling, purring soft furs where one could snuggle up and go to sleep. Indridi put down the puffin, climbed on to the handrail, aimed for a fur, closed his eyes, and let himself fall into the pit. He never reached the bottom. A fur coat lunged toward him and Indridi looked into a vast, moist, red cavern before the jaws closed with a snap.

“GRRRYAP!!!”