LoveStar (20 page)

me

DESERT

The plane landed at an old military airbase in the moga desert of northern Kenya. A search party with three helicopters was waiting to transport LoveStar over the endless sand dunes toward his goal. The helicopters landed some three miles from the tree stump, where jeeps were waiting to race the group over the inhospitable, windswept plains until they reached a small, rundown village. Armed guards kept watch over the villagers and the tree stump on the outskirts of the village. Beside the stump sat a child.

“The child was there this morning,” said the leader of the search party. “No one in the village knows who it is. We haven't a clue where it came from.”

The child was hiding something in its hand. According to the measurements, every prayer in the world was drawn precisely to the child's hand. LoveStar walked in a big circle around the child and the tree stump, measuring the waves. There was no mistaking it. He put the monitor down on the sand; no need for that any more. He looked up at the sky, which was blue with no hint of a thunderstorm. The child sat quietly by the stump, looking at what it was holding. LoveStar took a step toward the child but hesitated when it looked up. He felt a knot in his stomach; it was all happening too fast. He hadn't thought properly about the follow-up; the plane had been too quick. “Ships sail at the speed of the soul,” he thought, looking at the ground, unable to spy his shadow anywhere, and suddenly he felt the need to wait for his soul to catch up. He glanced over his shoulder as if to look for it but found only the hard stares of the armed guards and the fear, or perhaps sorrow, in the eyes of the villagers. A gray-haired woman with a child in her arms met LoveStar's gaze. “DON'T,” her eyes implored. “DON'T!”

LoveStar looked at the sweating leader of the search party. There was no turning back. Hesitantly he took a step, feeling the need to limit their number. He had been flown to the heart of the world at three times the speed of sound, then driven to the tree stump as if to a drive-in serving window. It wasn't quite appropriate. It was too easy. He was still stiff from the flight; it couldn't be this easy. Perhaps it wasn't allowed to be this easy. Like being driven to the top of a mountain. He felt he should turn back and walk all the way like a pilgrim, talk to old people, children, youths, whores, customs men, and beggars, sleep out under the stars with shepherds and grow deeper in wisdom and learning, but it was too late for that. The place had been found and the child was unlikely to wait there forever. He inched closer to the child, as if treading on thin ice. He was halfway there when suddenly he stopped as if he had changed his mind. He took off his jacket and removed his shoes. The sand was hot and the sun burned. Now he saw the child better; he felt like he knew it. He approached it warily, as people approach a savage dog.

“Hello,” said LoveStar.

The child looked at him without answering.

“What have you got there?”

The child opened its hand. In it was a seed.

“May I see the seed?” asked LoveStar in a tremulous voice.

The child shook its head.

“Why not?” asked LoveStar.

“I'm supposed to guard it.”

“From whom?”

“From you,” said the child.

“No, no, that can't be right,” said LoveStar.

“What would you do with it?”

“I would look after the seed and you can go and play.”

“Is it a game?” asked the child, smiling, but the smile didn't reach its eyes. “You can be it.”

“What?”

“Gotcha! You're it!”

The child touched him with the hand that was holding the seed.

LoveStar screamed as something like lightning blasted through his body, followed by a terrible sound, like the roar of a raging torrent, then the floodgates opened and countless voices poured through him, whispering crying praying a hundred thousand voices like hail pounding on a tin roof; a hundred million jarring voices burst their way through him, echoing in his head so he couldn't distinguish a word or understand the languages as they all talked at once, sometimes a voice pricked like a pin, sometimes one brushed across his heart like a burning jellyfish tendril and he writhed in agony as a thousand voices stung him like a swarm of bees, filling his heart with pain, loss, and grief, while the waterfall of words surged through him, making his heart revolve like a mill wheel driven by jarring weeping voices that he couldn't answer or comfort because they were inexorable and flowed on endlessly, old voices and broken voices and children's voices clear as a spring before mingling in one brown tide-race like a glacial torrent brown and in a flooding rush after the thaw, and sweat sprang out on his forehead like spray and his eyes leaked like a sieve and it seemed the waterfall would never cease its thundering because although the touch only lasted a second, every day was like a thousand years, and so the torrent poured through him for a hundred hours and all that time the ache in his chest was so indescribably painful that he would have died if he hadn't clutched on to the sentiment that all the voices seemed to contain: HOPE.

“Aren't you going to play?” asked the child.

LoveStar was bewildered, hardly able to breathe. His chest felt heavy as lead. Only a second had passed. People were standing nearby as if nothing had happened. The world was in its place. He wiped the sweat and tears from his face.

“Do you still want the seed?” asked the child.

Beads of sweat dripped into LoveStar's eyes; he blinked and looked at the sun. The Million Star Belt glittered on the horizon like blood red sparks.

The child looked in the other direction. The child pointed east.

“You can have the seed if you give me a star.”

LoveStar looked to the east and recognized the star that was shining low over the sandblasted eastern mountains. It was LOVESTAR, the first star to twinkle in the evening sky. He looked at the seed in the child's outstretched hand and nodded. He said nothing, simply agreed, searched in his pockets and found the note from Yamaguchi. He sketched three lines on the back to form a mountain and desert. In the sky he drew a star. Under the picture he wrote: “The child owns the LOVESTAR that twinkles behind a cloud.”

The child put the seed into LoveStar's hand, and with that the world warped before his eyes. The child ran off. The child was gone. No, the child was standing behind him, frozen in its footsteps, and LoveStar walked around it because it reminded him of a boy he had known when he was little, it reminded him of an old picture of his grandmother, it was just like his daughter and an old man . . . He didn't finish his thought because abruptly he lost control of time. To his right, time was standing still and a bird hung in the air, while under the bird a house rose and crumbled, another rose and crumbled, and around it people grew and declined, flowers sprouted and shriveled, trees rose and rotted, while the bird hung still in the sky. Clouds piled up and the sun raced across the sky again and again and again as if the earth was a blue fist and the sun a yellow stone in a sling, swinging in circles, and a glacier sailed forth from it like a white ship, clearing all before it, cities and cars, mountains and planes, all out to sea. Icebergs broke off into the sea and filled the world to the horizon and ice covered the earth, which became as white as the clenched fist that was swinging the sun around it, making daylight flash like a strobe at a disco, until the glacier receded and waves washed the rocks, washed the rocks, washed the rocks, but there was nothing left, not a car, not a house, until the hand released the sling and the sun was hurled into space, dwindling small and pale as a star until all was dark.

LoveStar stood in the middle of the desert. The child stared at him with eyes that seemed variously blue or brown or green, but it was only a moment since it had placed the seed in his hands. He felt he had seen this child before but couldn't place it.

“Great-grandfather,” thought LoveStar. “The child is just like me.”

The child walked barefoot out into the sea of sand and over a dune until its head vanished behind it.

Black as the sun.

TRUE LOVE

Sigrid and Per had a date at eight in the evening in a little restaurant high up in the rock face with a view over the lake. It would supposedly change her life once and for all. She put on a white dress, took the elevator upstairs and sat down at a table overlooking a falcon's nest on a rocky ledge. The young birds screeched and their mother flew up with a ptarmigan in her beak. The chicks tore it greedily apart.

Sigrid waited and eight o'clock drew near. She had eaten nothing on the way north and was famished. The waiter brought her a message from Per: he was running a bit late so she should get herself something to eat from the buffet. She was surrounded by couples who chattered like a colony of seabirds and had strangely similar tics.

“What would you like?” the waiter asked a young man and older woman at the next table. The woman was on the plump side with black hair and unusually bright, beautiful eyes. Obviously newly calculated. Sigrid amused herself by trying to guess their nationality. “She's probably from Greece or Turkey; he could well be Belgian.” They discussed photosynthesis in broken English and the young man was clearly so funny that the woman kept shrieking with infectious laughter, making him shriek as well. Sigrid couldn't see what was so funny; it was clear that only half the joke lay in the words.

The waiter coughed. “What can I get you?”

“Do you have any more like that?” asked the woman, pointing at the man with a giggle. “I'd like one of those for starter, another for main course, and the third for dessert!”

“Shouldn't we eat something?” asked the man, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Maybe,” she said, sticking out her tongue, and they proceeded to tongue-synthesize until the waiter interrupted them again.

“If you're not going to order anything, I'll have to ask you to return to your room.”

“Is there anything you want?” asked the young man, gazing into her eyes.

“Yes, there is,” she whispered, taking a deep breath. The next minute they had disappeared down the corridor.

Indridi squirmed in his seat the whole way north. He checked the speedometer, cursing buses and puffins on the road: the latter had obviously been freshly distributed. Fat and flightless, they waddled singing over the heathland. Indridi writhed as if to make the car go faster. Simon stamped on the accelerator and overtook a long line of buses. A thick forest of iron appeared; they were nearing the intersection where the country's power lines met, two hundred dead-straight rows of pylons converging on the hydrogen plant, like a spider in its web.

The forest of iron was behind them and now the peaks of LavaRock appeared ahead, followed by the entire mountain range. Swans flew toward the sun. They turned down a valley and drove over a stone bridge across a river until finally they saw the glass wall. It reflected the mountain opposite, making the valley seem perfectly symmetrical. Clouds and sky were reflected in the glass so the peaks appeared to perch on clouds. The letters forming LOVESTAR seemed to hang in thin air. An empire built on clouds? An empire hewn in stone.

The whole place was still teeming with puffins. Tourists had no need to set foot outside in the open air unless they wanted to: most arrived by underground trains from the towns of Keflavik, Akureyri, or Egilsstadir, which delivered them to a station below the theme park entrance lobby. From there escalators took them straight up to the sky-high reception hall with a sloping rock face on the one hand and a bright glass wall on the other.

Simon stopped the car at the main entrance and they got out. Drizzle from a recent LoveDeath launch fell on their faces and an airship marked LoveDeath passed before the sun, casting a dark shadow over them. Indridi peered despairingly around him in the feeble hope of spying Sigrid. Simon connected himself to reception.

“Hello, I'm looking for Sigrid Gudmundsdottir.”

“One moment,” answered a voice. “Unfortunately there's no Sigrid Gudmundsdottir registered.”

Simon thought for a moment:

“Sigrid Møller,” he ventured hesitantly, seeing how the name Møller pierced Indridi's eardrums like a needle.

“She's due to be calculated in half an hour,” came the answer.

“I need to talk to her,” said Simon. “It's urgent.”

“According to our information, you're in close proximity to the man she was calculated away from. For security reasons we can't give you any further information.”

Indridi set off at a run toward the immense glass wall and entered the vault. He stood there among the crowd in the middle of the floor, turning in circles.

“SIGRID! ANSWER ME, SIGRID!” he yelled. “SIGRID! WHERE ARE YOU, SIGRID?”

Escalators delivered thousands of people upstairs and thousands more descended to the underground station. The world spun around Indridi as he wandered despairingly among the hopeful thousands who had come to find love. He bumped into old people sitting expressionless in wheelchairs while their excited grandchildren ran laughing after Larry LoveDeath. He was ambushed by traps and harangued by howlers:

“Shop! Drink! Eat!”

“Take a stroll round the vaults!”

“Who knows, you may find your one and only!”

“I'M LOOKING FOR HER!” growled Indridi.

He accosted passersby, pulling out a picture of Sigrid, but received only smiles: “She's cute!” or a surly “No, thank you!” He was led astray by secret hosts who tried to direct him to nightclubs, fast-food chains, casinos, shops, and fairground rides: “I think I saw her at the StarDeath café.” It was like looking for a drop in the ocean. He was carried by the flow and stranded at a table onto which he climbed, calling again and again over the crowd: “SIGRID!” until he could call no more and turned his eyes up to the vault where fulmars soared like angels, in and out of the giant air-conditioning vents. He turned in a circle and the vault spun around him until he fell dizzily to the floor. Simon marched up, dragged him out and back to the car.

“Indridi. Calm down. We must be methodical. Tell me about Sigrid.”

“She's gorgeous,” said Indridi.

“Indridi, be serious. What's Sigrid like? She doesn't like crowds or big cities, does she? She's more into suburbs, the seaside, grass, and trees, isn't she?”

Simon didn't need to ask. It stood clearly written in her dossier.

“How do you know that?” asked Indridi.

“I know more than you think. She's not here,” said Simon, starting the car. He raced back down the valley to where green slopes replaced the glass wall. He turned off the road and drove along a tarmac footpath up the mountainside until they reached a viewing platform. The untouched Oxnadalur valley met their eyes. On the platform was a sign:

“Sigrid's happiest in peaceful surroundings, isn't she?”

“Yes,” said Indridi.

“She's bound to have a view of the untouched Oxnadalur valley! She's bound to steer clear of the crush at the glass wall! It's our only chance. That she's sitting at a window, looking out over the valley. Run, Indridi! Run to higher ground. Run around the valley and she's bound to see you!”

“The valley's protected,” said Indridi, dithering.

“Run!” screamed Simon.

Indridi opened the gate and ran down the stony slope with Simon on his heels. They slid down screes, clambered over rocky places, ran down heathery slopes, and followed narrow sheep-paths along the lake. Here and there windows opened in the rocks and angry employees or security guards bellowed at them.

“Get out!”

They ran up a low incline at the northern end of the lake and waved at the black rock face. They shouted and called but nowhere could they see Sigrid. Indridi looked at his watch and broke down.

“NO!” he yelled until the valley echoed.

It was twenty-five past eight.