LoveStar (7 page)

The instant LoveStar landed up north and the world was informed of the greatest discovery of all time, a hundred million stars would fall from the sky. A hundred million bodies would burn up in the atmosphere, illuminating the darkness like stardust in the spectacle of the century.

In LoveStar's hand was a seed and in the seed was a kernel and in the kernel was so much life that he was afraid that if the seed was damaged the world itself would crack like an eggshell.

INDRIDI AND SIGRID

Indridi and Sigrid's perfect world cracked like an eggshell several weeks before LoveStar found the seed. The cause was one little letter. It reached them one beautiful day, as all days appear to the eyes of those who believe they have found true love and happiness. When Sigrid came home at midday for a bit of word-synthesis, there was something strange in the air. When she opened the door, filling the apartment with the cries of puffins and the scent of honeyed roses, Indridi was not waiting in the hall to hug and kiss her as usual. Instead he was standing over by the window, his back to her.

“Hello?” called Sigrid.

Indridi stood still and didn't say a word. Poplars swayed green in the breeze outside in the yard and the swings swung to and fro. His eyes were red and he was plucking dry leaves from a dying yucca with trembling fingers.

“Is something wrong? Indridi, are you crying?”

“No,” he said and carried on plucking.

“Indridi, don't be like that! Is something the matter?”

“There's a letter,” said Indridi.

“A letter?”

“A letter came this morning from inLOVE.”

Indridi picked up the letter and showed it to her. Sigrid beamed with joy.

“That's great, they've sent us a letter!” She ran to Indridi and made as if to jump into his arms but he recoiled.

“The letter's to you, Sigrid.”

“To me?”

“Yes.”

“Not to us?”

“No.”

“What do they want with me?”

“They've calculated you.”

“Me? What do you mean?”

“We don't match, Sigrid. I'm not your one and only.”

Sigrid stood in the middle of the room, deathly pale. “You're joking!”

“No.”

“There must be some misunderstanding,” she said. “Your letter must be on the way.”

“They say you can meet him up north at LoveStar next week.”

“Who?”

“Your one and only. Your other half.”

“You're kidding me, aren't you?”

“He's Danish.”

“Danish?”

“Yes. His name's Per Møller.”

Sigrid stared at Indridi in disbelief and felt a lump forming in her throat. “You're kidding me, Indridi. This can't be happening.”

“It's true, Sigrid. It's quite true,” he said in a low voice.

Sigrid went pale. Indridi stared silently out into the yard. It shouldn't have taken them by surprise. They knew, as all the world did, that it was pointless searching for love on your own. LoveStar took care of love and death. As no one had failed to notice, they should have followed the relationship counselor's advice and made a temporary contract: together until LoveStar calculates us apart. Together until LoveStar finds true love and happiness for us. They should have registered for a gym where uncalculated people could meet at midday and relieve their tension by doing it in the shower with a work colleague after an invigorating game of table tennis, instead of monopolizing one another day and night like fools.

It was a well-known fact that it didn't pay to entangle your life too much with someone else's before an official letter came from inLOVE. It was scientifically proven and no one argued with inLOVE any longer. inLOVE was the greatest discovery of all time. inLOVE was the essence of love and happiness.

“There are two phenomena in man that are halves,” announced LoveStar at a press conference broadcast live around the world.

People were full of anticipation: news had been leaked, stories were circulating about volunteers who had taken part in scientific experiments up north and never been the same again.

“The sex cells are half cells,” said LoveStar, “and need to meet another half in order for life to be created. Everyone knows that the urge to unite these cells is one of the strongest human drives. According to our research the same is true of the human soul. The soul is a half and needs to be united with another in order for life to be properly kindled. But the soul is infinitely more complex than the sex cell and what is more: every soul fits only ONE other in the world. Like a fragmented sign, like a key in a lock, like a split stone that fits exactly to its other half, there are two people in the world who fit together. We have found a way of calculating exactly which two people are suited to one another.”

The reporters looked skeptical and were obviously about to give LoveStar a hard time. But then two journalists, a bitter double-divorcée from Norway's Aftenposten and a man from the Hungarian Daily Socialist, asked exactly the same question at the same moment. They broke off in mid-sentence.

“You first,” they said in unison.

“But it was the same question,” they said together and both fell silent at once as all eyes turned to them. Their eyes met across the room, their hearts sank like stones into their stomachs, they approached each other in total silence, and went away hand in hand.

The conference had been carefully planned. Every single journalist had their other half somewhere in the room and the meeting broke up in chaos and emotion, so LoveStar never had to give a scientific explanation. There was a short intermission in the broadcast while the conference guests recovered (they were never quite the same again). That evening LoveStar sat down in an old chair by a crackling open fire with beaming newspaper reporters all round him and talked serenely as an old grandfather:

“When we have calculated the world, love will flow like milk across borders. All wars and disputes will be a thing of the past, because a Swede who is united with a Chinaman is in reality half Chinese, and the Indian who is calculated with a German has become half German, and when every human child loves halfway across the world and has no need of anything else, there will no longer be any place for hatred or greed. No one will dare to drop bombs on strangers for fear of harming their one true love. Within two generations people will have ceased to define themselves by family, wealth, power, or nationality and will call themselves simply citizens of planet Earth.”

LoveStar's experts had already begun to calculate the world. Of course, they couldn't calculate fast enough, the world was impatient. France first! Don't forget the smaller nations! It wasn't until an announcement came from LoveStar that the voices were silenced.

“THOSE WHO COMPLAIN WILL GO TO THE BACK OF THE LINE!”

LoveStar directed people north to Oxnadalur to be calculated and find their other half and happiness. Until then people were to live their lives as if nothing had happened. “Leave love and death to LoveStar,” as the saying went, but apart from that people were free to do as they pleased.

inLOVE was built up with the same energy as LoveDeath. To attract enough attention and money to the game, stars and politicians were given precedence, along with critics, possible detractors, and satirists. For a long time calculation festivals at inLOVE were among the most popular TV shows in the world, broadcast live from the Oxnadalur theme park.

The inLOVE show featured no violence or sorrow, only perpetual love and happiness. The program producers captured the most unlikely people in their happynets and united them during live broadcasts. A malicious winner of the Nobel prize for physics, who deplored what he called LoveStar's voodoo science, and a religious leader who was insane with rage that people should be calculated regardless of gender, race, or religion, were persuaded to sit side by side in a Belgian TV studio on the understanding that they were to take part in a debate.

Viewers were able to watch as they melted like butter in each other's presence while struggling to maintain their composure. When they said good-bye at the end of the show they merged together, softened up, laughed and cried, and talked nonsense and hugged, and so they were carried together from the TV studio to the applause and cheering of the audience. Over the next few weeks the changes in their lives were followed via a recording butterfly. Together on a cycling trip, together on a beach, together on skis, or simply cuddled up in bed. That was the most popular. To lie and cuddle up together.

It is simply impossible to describe the feeling. I have difficulty working out where I stop and she begins. We are one and there is no other way to express the feeling. People will just have to try lying and cuddling up themselves. I believe cuddling has been underrated in the past. Cuddling is a spiritual act. Two people lying under a duvet or on a sofa and emptying their minds are the closest you can come to Nirvana.

—Salman Rushdie's response to the question

“what is true love like?” after he was calculated with

the Norwegian skating champion Sonja Heine

It would be superfluous to quote all the articles and debates that were generated in the first years after the LoveStar corporation found love. An uncalculated poet protested against this cold scientific approach to the spiritual and irrational aspect of man, but LoveStar was never lost for an answer:

There is nothing more physical than love. Nothing else has such a decisive impact on the brain, heart, and lungs. Love has a measurable effect on blood pressure, circulation, neural impulses, corpuscles, and complexion. Love-deprivation is more serious than vitamin deficiency and its consequences for the body are more severe than scurvy. Love has an impact on the immune system, metabolism, digestion, digestive juices, appetite, mental health, zest for life, cell division, enzymes, and hormone production. Love touches almost every nerve and cell in the body and every single area of medical science, but who was responsible for researching love? Was it doctors? Nuclear physicists? Biochemists? No, it was POETS and PHILOSOPHERS! They pondered it for five thousand years without coming to a conclusion. It's only to be expected that they should be feeling put out.

—“
Of Love and Other Devils,” excerpt

from an interview with LoveStar

The poets had never described true love because it was indescribable. They spent their time piling up inanities and were never really happy unless they were separated by a hopeless distance from their loved ones, who were preferably situated beyond mountains and seas or even beyond life itself. They described desire and sorrow and distance, but no one had ever succeeded in expressing true, living, mutual love. From the moment the poets made it into bed with the object of their love, not another word of love could be had from them. At best they would mutter grumpily: “Don't bug me. I'm writing.”

Aristophanes' words about true love in Plato's Symposium came closest to the truth.

When a lover stumbles upon his other half they both become strangely struck by the amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. They refuse to be separated for even a moment. They can spend their whole lives together but still words will not describe what they desire from one another. No one imagines the only reason is sex, that sex is what gives pleasure to their relationship. No it is an intense desire deeper in the soul, that words can not express.

—Plato's
Symposium
, Greece, 380 BC

Indridi and Sigrid were enlightened, connected, and well educated. The concept and deeper impact of inLOVE should have been perfectly clear to them, but they were so naïve that they believed their relationship to be pure true love and confirmation by inLOVE a mere formality. While most uncalculated inhabitants of the planet looked on with envy as love gushed from the screen, and they saw the feelings, sincerity, and warmth that were lacking in their own failed relationships, the whole debate about true love had the opposite effect on Indridi and Sigrid. It strengthened them in their belief and they made no attempt to hide their love.

“What do you mean, ‘have we legitimized our temporary contract of unscientific short-term relationship?'” asked Sigrid, deeply offended, when she went to open a joint account at the bank. “We've already found love.”

“Do you have scientific confirmation from inLOVE?” asked the cashier.

“The confirmation's just a formality,” said Sigrid in a gentle but firm tone. “We're quite sure.”

The cashier shook her head. “You're taking a big risk.”

Indridi and Sigrid avoided anything that could possibly cast a shadow on their relationship and drew a positive strength from anything that related to love.

“Huh,” said Indridi, reading aloud an interview with a newly calculated couple. “Call that true love! It sounds like one of our bad days.”

“Look!” cried Sigrid as they cuddled up under a blanket on the sofa, crunching popcorn and watching a young man calculated with a forty-year-old woman. “I felt just like that the first time we met. I felt like that then and I still do,” she said, kissing Indridi.

“I think I know where happiness lies,” said Indridi, indicating a point in the middle of his chest, just above his midriff. “It's here.”

Sigrid felt his chest. “Where's happiness, Indridi? Show me where happiness lies. Is it here?” she asked, tickling him until he laughed. “Is love here?” she asked, tickling him with her gentle fingers.

Indridi suddenly turned serious and gazed into Sigrid's face. “Every time I draw breath I feel an ache and want to breathe in time with you forever.”

“Your happiness is not there,” whispered Sigrid. “That's my happiness. My happiness floats on your midriff like a sleeping eider duck, but your happiness is here.” Taking his hand she laid it on her breast. “Your happiness is here,” she said, and he touched her breasts, which were soft and warm and beautifully white below her sunburnt neck.

Some people found Indridi and Sigrid soppy, but they enjoyed being soppy. Being sincere, talking straight from the heart, and feeling the tickling above their midriffs.

The LoveStar theme park was not only the world center for death, it also became the center for love and scientifically proven happiness, and the origination point for well-calculated bliss after inLOVE was set up. Nowhere in the world was there so much contentment gathered in one spot.