LoveStar (14 page)

SIGRID

At the very moment Indridi was disappearing inside a fierce fur coat, Sigrid was sitting on a bus hurtling north over the highlands, where geysers spouted, volcanoes erupted, gales blew, sands stretched out, and waterfalls skipped before LoveDeath sucked all the power to itself. Long before Oxnadalur appeared in all its glory she saw the LoveDeath rockets shooting into the sky. She watched a rocket vanish in a white glow in the blue sky, shooting like a nail through a hand-shaped cloud.

Sigrid knew she should be excited about meeting Per Møller at last, but she was listless, tense, and empty inside, her mind dwelling on everything that she and Indridi had done together. She remembered their eye-meets and how they used to rub their middle fingers together and their trips up to Blafjoll. She thought about the laughter and tickling and silence, which was not hollow but deep as a bass note. Sigrid called Indridi but got only the message: “This number is no longer connected.”

She tried to imagine how he felt and what he could be doing. Of course she hadn't a clue that at that precise second he had vanished into the maw of a famished savage beast twice the size of a polar bear.

A feeble old man sat behind her coughing. He was talking on the phone.

“You'll get there on Thursday, then? Didn't little Gusti want to come? (Cough.) Yes, I understand, of course he's outgrown Larry LoveDeath . . . The keys to the jeep? Oh dear, I seem to have brought them with me . . . Yes, I'll make sure they're not fired up with me . . .”

Sigrid strained her eyes as yet another rocket shot up from LoveDeath. The driver said over the loudspeaker that there were an unusual number of launchings at the moment due to the Million Star Festival. Soon the heavens would be ablaze, a million stars would shoot from the sky simultaneously, and the most momentous discovery in history would be announced to coincide with the opening of a new division of LoveStar. It would be bigger than inLOVE and LoveDeath combined.

Sigrid was happiest in a restful, cozy environment, and so one might have thought the LoveStar vaults would be too intimidatingly vast for her. But this was not the case. LoveStar was designed to suit everyone. Sigrid was registered as someone who avoided bustle, large airports, and city centers, but was in her element in safe suburbs and small towns. So she was given a room in a small grouping excavated in the mountainside on the edge of Oxnadalur.

She was let out on the main road and from there she followed the orientation marker that appeared on her lens. She jumped a ditch, climbed over a rusty fence, and walked up a grassy slope until she reached a rock face. There she stood at a loss for a few seconds until a door opened and a long tunnel appeared before her. It was cold and damp and smelled of water, moss, and stone, but soon she reached a warm room clad with wood paneling and plush velvet. A fire crackled comfortingly in the hearth. A man sat by the fire reading a book. He looked up and smiled.

“Sigrid?”

“Yes.”

“You're in room twenty-seven.”

Through a glass wall she could see a newly calculated couple sitting in a jacuzzi, while behind them another couple sat at a heavy wooden table playing Ludo when they weren't gazing into one another's eyes. A dark-haired man was restlessly pacing the floor in a freshly ironed suit. Sigrid got butterflies in her stomach when she came face to face with him. She looked into his dark-blue eyes. (Looking into the eyes of your other half is like looking in a mirror reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror, some said.) There was no connection. Breathing easier, she walked down another passage until she reached room twenty-seven. The door opened automatically to reveal her dream room (information obtained from a report by Sigrid's childhood friend Dora). The room faced a gully overgrown with woolly willows and blueberries; a stream babbled in a narrow bed, disappearing here and there under the grassy bank. Seen from the outside, the window of the room probably appeared as a boulder or rock; it was a bay window so she could sit in it and watch the horses or lambs grazing outside. The animals did not react even when she tapped the glass. “It's like an aquarium,” she thought to herself. Light streamed in through glazed cracks in the ceiling. Sigrid tried out the cozily made bed, then took a shower and stood under the stream of water for half an hour while remote-controlled swans flew in V-formation up and down Oxnadalur. On the radio someone was reading a traditional love poem: “Oh bright maid, deep under the blue mountain, prepare to meet thy lover . . .”

WOLF! WOLF!

Grrryap!!!

As Indridi had never been anywhere near a live fox in his life, let alone a VikingCenturyFox, he could hardly be expected to know that it was to no VikingCenturyFox that he had thrown himself. To the right of the steel bridge lay a fully grown vixen with a cub that would have made short work of Indridi, but Indridi had thrown himself to the left of the steel bridge. There awaited him the Big Bad Wolf, which was being developed by the Puffin Factory for a subsidiary company and theme park in Bavaria: GrimmsLove. The Big Bad Wolf had been specially designed to wolf people down in one mouthful, which was exactly what this wolf did. It wolfed Indridi down in one mouthful.

The Big Bad Wolf had not yet been publicly unveiled. It had been specially bred and genetically engineered to play the leading role in a magnificent staging of the Red Riding Hood story at GrimmsLove. The Big Bad Wolf must on no account digest the actors it swallowed because it was wasteful to have to train new people for the roles evening after evening. Naturally Indridi knew nothing of this. He was held in the dark, moist warmth of the wolf's stomach and believed that this was how the Vikings had felt when they were devoured, skin and bone, by the VikingCenturyFox. Time moved slowly as he awaited his fate, and his life passed many times before his eyes without the wolf's digestive system ever seeming to get going.

It was actually most uncharacteristic of Indridi to throw himself to the Big Bad Wolf. He had always been a happy, optimistic soul, but the last few days had sapped all his strength. Indridi could hear the beast's rapid heartbeat just above his left shoulder while its guts rumbled beneath him. He waited for the gastric juices to gush over him and burn through his skin like battery acid. He was suffocating from lack of air.

“This is like being sewn up in a haggis,” Indridi thought, as he fumbled at the stomach lining. Suddenly he felt the beast's heartbeat slowing and heard a tremendous snoring. By a specially programmed instinct, the wolf flopped on its back and went to sleep as soon as it had swallowed a human. As it snored its jaws opened and shut, and rays of light filtered between its fangs, blinding Indridi, while its teeth stood out against the green-painted roof like snow-white mountain peaks. Fresh air rushed in like a southerly breeze, but the sunbeams did nothing to improve Indridi's mood. He imagined the morning sun dribbling over Per and Sigrid Møller like golden Tuborg beer. He pictured them together, crawling out of bed like an eight-footed spider, trying to tear themselves apart in order to go to work, and talking and talking and talking, and finally making love on the bathroom floor. He pictured Per laughing affectionately when Sigrid told him about the old folks at work and her summer in Sicily as an exchange student when she was seventeen, and his eyes would brim with tears because her stories would be like the most cherished nourishment for him. Her stories would slip down his throat like Gammeldansk aquavit, he would chew them and lick them like pork crackling. Later they would have a little boy and a little girl and Sigrid would comb the girl's golden locks while Per built a Lego digger with the boy (or vice versa, to be politically correct).

Rage boiled up inside Indridi. He felt as savage as a wolf and regretted having let the fox eat him. He was filled with regret. He should have killed Per, blown up the inLOVE experts who calculated him and Sigrid apart, shot LoveStar himself, or caused a riot at the theme park. He should have abducted Sigrid, but now he was trapped in a fox's belly and even if he managed to get out and run away with Sigrid, there was no escape. The world was so exhaustively recorded that there wasn't a turd in the sea that couldn't be traced back to its owner.

Indridi was losing control over his feelings; he had given way to regret. It was illogical to feel regret and be unreconciled to the past. He checked REGRET: What would have happened if he hadn't shown Sigrid the letter from LoveStar? He requested a quick answer, which appeared instantaneously on his left lens:

“It was a good thing she saw the letter, otherwise I and S would have died in a plane crash a week ago.”

He checked REGRET again. What would have happened if she hadn't gone north at all but stayed at home with him and slept in:

“S would have crept out and thrown herself to the VikingCenturyFox at 8:17 am.”

Indridi was still alive half an hour later, but there was no point ringing the police or even a woodcutter. No doubt this was fate. Indridi wept, the wolf snored, and his only love had left him.

The phone rang. His Mom was on the lens:

“Hello, Mom,” said Indridi dolefully.

“Is everything all right, Indridi dear?”

“Sigrid's left me, Mom.” Indridi fought back tears. “She left me.”

“Are you taking it very hard?” his Mom asked sympathetically.

“I'm dying, Mom.”

“My darling boy,” sighed his mother. “Your father and I probably overprotected you. Perhaps we shouldn't have sheltered you from all the bad news.”

“What bad news?”

“We had you blocked against plague, flies, endangered animals, diseases, nuclear power, the environment, and Rwanda.”

“What happened in Rwanda?”

“You don't want to know, Indridi dear. Where are you, anyway? Shall I come around and give you a hug?”

“There's only room for one in here.”

“It's no good being alone, Indridi dear. You must take part in inLOVE. It's best for everyone; you know that when inLOVE has been completed and the world unites . . .”

“I know all that, Mom . . .”

“Come by our house this evening. Your father and Xing are coming over.” Inevitably, every fourth person was matched with someone from China. “You should talk to them. Your father's a whole new man since he was calculated; he's not even grumpy in the mornings. Carlos wants me to stop dieting. He likes me plump and he saw a picture of my old nose and . . .”

“I can't make it, Mom,” said Indridi.

“Where are you, anyway?”

“I'm in a fox.”

“Where's that?”

“In the old Coke factory.”

“Never been there. What's the food like?” She was obviously keen to divert the conversation to more cheerful topics.

“You know the sort of thing, Mom. The food's good,” he said, thinking of himself lying in the fox's stomach. If anyone could save him it was Sigrid. He closed his eyes and called her. The only answer was:

“This number is no longer connected.”

Indridi logged off and tried to empty his mind. He was assailed by a fit of silent weeping. The heat made him sweat, his hands were sticky, his hair was wet and slimy, and a sour fluid ran down his face. “Now the digestion is starting up,” he thought. Something hard and sharp poked him in the back, and he assumed the stomach must be like some kind of mill that would grind him up from below and press the mush through the guts like a mincer, yet it didn't seem to hurt. He groped behind him and felt a piece of metal. It was a zipper. It was the zipper in the Big Bad Wolf's stomach! Indridi unzipped it carefully and stuck his head out through the gap, squinting up into the glare, before crawling slimy and weeping from the belly of the wolf, which woke up and licked his face from a genuine instinct.

The Big Bad Wolf was actually a she-wolf: the male prototype's penis had shocked preview audiences in Bavaria. Like most female mammals, the Big Bad Wolf would lick clean anything that emerged from her body alive, as if it were her offspring. She didn't connect this offspring with the man she had devoured earlier, and this was one of the main reasons why the Big Bad Wolf had not yet been sold abroad. People found it crude when she licked Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother with her long tongue. It was thought crude because the rough tongue tickled and the old Bavarian actress squealed with pleasure, slipping out of character, when the wolf pawed her like a cub and licked her under her skirt. Indridi had not been licked on the face since he was twelve, the day before his dog Snotra was put down. “Don't cry, Indridi,” his mother had said. “We're not putting her down, we're postponing her. We can have her again when we have time.”

Despite his sobbing, the wolf's tongue tickled so much that Indridi chuckled inside. Her whiskers were soft, her eyes were large and dark and deep, her ears were big like her mouth, her teeth were sharp, her pelt tickled, and Indridi wept. The Big Bad Wolf curled around Indridi, who buried his sobbing face in the dark-gray fur and thought about Snotra and Sigrid while the wolf licked away his tears with motherly tenderness. Indridi was lying sound asleep, enfolded by the she-wolf when Grim found him half an hour later.

GRIM

Grim had always suspected that Indridi's relationship with Sigrid would end in disaster, but he never imagined the consequences would be this dire. Indridi was a hardworking employee but rather too preoccupied with Sigrid. When he was engaged in simple tasks, such as mowing the lawn or weeding, he could be directly linked to her for hours on end, and if he wasn't talking to Sigrid he was talking about her. When a monologue of this kind seemed imminent, Grim would light his pipe, lay his spectacles on the table, and listen patiently while Indridi prattled on and on about Sigrid this and Sigrid that and about their shared obsession with having found one another and true love and happiness.

Grim called the Puffin Factory's head of security, who came running up with a ladder. Trembling at the knees he put on a pair of chainmail overalls, a red crash helmet, and iron gauntlets, before climbing warily into the pit. He stepped cautiously to the ground and gave the wolf a gentle pat. He didn't even flinch when the wolf growled and showed her teeth. He unwrapped two bundles of fodder (secretly packed meal from the LoveDeath guano-processing plant), poked some sleeping pills into them, and eased them in through the stomach opening with a long pole before zipping it up. The wolf growled fiercely when Grim tried to rouse Indridi. A genuine instinct prompted her to protect her offspring. But now the mill in the wolf's stomach started up, audibly crunching and grinding the bundles, and soon her eyes grew bleary and she fell sound asleep.

The security guard helped a slime-covered Indridi up the ladder. Grim met him at the top and took him back into the main hall, neither speaking a word. They closed the door on the VikingCenturyFox and were halfway across the old puffin hall when Indridi fell to the floor. He rolled his eyes up until only the whites were visible. His throat rattled and he jerked around like a trout on a riverbank, bit his tongue until the blood trickled out of the corners of his mouth, moaned and lost control of his bladder, releasing a yellow stream.

Grim knelt beside him. “Help!” he shouted. “Somebody help us!”

Workers rushed over and crowded around Indridi, but before anyone could react, the fit ceased and Indridi howled:

“YOU'LL HAVE A FIT IF YOU MISS THE PUFFIN SANDWICH WEEKEND OFFER AT THE ALTHING!”

He turned blue in the face when he pronounced “puffinsandwichweekendoffer,” as the word had begun before he could draw breath. “Shit,” somebody exclaimed. “Damn,” said another. “That was quite something,” muttered a man from the Puffin Factory Mood Department. He clearly appreciated the aesthetics and science behind such an inspired trap. People returned to their jobs. Indridi lay like a wrung-out dishcloth in a yellow puddle. He turned his face to the floor, closed his eyes, and was carried into the cafeteria. Grim brought him a set of orange overalls and sneaked a pink pill into his coffee cup.

When Indridi woke up an hour later, Grim was sitting beside him, filling his pipe.

“So it's over between you two,” he said sympathetically. Indridi didn't speak, just brushed the hair from his eyes and burst into tears again. Grim put a fatherly arm around his shoulders.

“Indridi, son . . .” Indridi didn't answer. “Is there someone we can call?”

“Sigrid was my best friend.”

This was true. Sigrid was his only confidante. He and Sigrid had mutual friends, but as an individual he didn't really have any. He and Sigrid had only met up with their friends when numbers were even; he would never call one of the guys from the group. He didn't know them as single entities.

“There must be someone.”

Indridi shook his head.

“I'm going straight to LoveDeath,” said Indridi, and he called them at once. “Hello, is that LoveDeath?”

Grim interrupted and broke off the conversation.

“Just hang on a minute, Indridi,” he said. “You'll get over it. Rest assured, LoveStar will find your other half.”

He dialed inLOVE.

“Hello, is that inLOVE? I'm calling to check whether Indridi Haraldsson is due to be calculated with someone soon.”

“Indridi Haraldsson?” answered a voice. “iSTAR has him down as a bad example. His girlfriend was taken from him and speed-calculated to Denmark.”

“But what about him? How long will it be before he's calculated?”

There was a long silence before the answer came.

“Four percent chance of being calculated within a year. We believe his other half is in Laos. We haven't got an agreement with Laos yet. It probably won't happen until the king dies. He's a tough nut to crack, the King of Laos.”

“Yes, he's a tough nut, the King of Laos,” mumbled Grim. According to inLOVE's data, his own other half was also in Laos, too.

Indridi shook his head and stared gloomily out of the window. The bulldozer had ploughed away all the greenery from the factory grounds. Dumper trucks arrived and dumped piles of rubble over the mud.

“They have to expand the factory because of the foxes,” said Grim apologetically. “Perhaps we should have let you know, but you weren't here last week.”

“Don't you need a gardener anymore, then?”

“Indridi, son, you're a trained web designer.”

Indridi shrugged. “I'm going straight to LoveDeath. I'll apply for a mercy trip.”

Grim hurriedly tried to think of something to cheer Indridi up and distract him.

“Indridi, I've got something amazing to show you before you go.”

“What's that?”

“I'm going to show you an absolute secret, much more amazing than the puffins or honey roses. I'll show it to you if you stop crying.”

Indridi dried his eyes and blew his nose on a facecloth.

Grim stressed: “This is a top secret project and you must promise not to tell a soul. We're working with mice. Sigrun! Would you come here a minute?”

Sigrun, overseer of the Mouse Research Department, was pale and highstrung with faded gray eyes. They took an elevator down to the basement. The building didn't look particularly large from outside, but it seemed the lift would never stop. Sigrun opened the security door with a sure hand, unlocked another, drew back a bolt, and opened yet more doors until she came to a sliding door that opened automatically. She showed Indridi into a room full of skeletons, skulls, and body parts in jars. At the back of the room Indridi was greeted by a familiar face in hundreds of cages. He had never seen anything like it. This was unlike anything else; this was like a fairy tale.

“It! It's . . .”

“Exactly . . .”

Indridi threw up his hands. “It's Mickey Mouse! It's Mickey Mice! You've created a real live Mickey Mouse!”

The Mickeys sat there waving, each a foot and a half tall with big eyes and black button noses. Indridi wanted to take them all in his arms and cuddle them. But he didn't.

“Why are they white with red eyes?” asked Indridi, approaching one of the cages. The Mickey waved and smiled and Indridi was drawn nearer.

“I'm a scientist. These are laboratory mice. What do you expect?” asked Sigrun dryly.

“Do you find the Mickeys more appealing than cats?” asked Grim, regarding the cages with something approaching a shudder.

Indridi admitted he did.

“The Mickeys are the Mood Department's pet project. They're supposed to take over the market for cats and dogs,” said Grim, rather gloomily.

“And the foxes are supposed to take over the fur market,” said Sigrun. The VikingCenturyFox and the collaboration with the National Museum were merely intended to generate good publicity and secure the approval of the Democracy Machine. They've created a new image: humane furs. One animal. One fur.”

“They want the next generation to be shaped like a woman,” sighed Grim, “it'll save on tailoring.”

Indridi noticed posters on the wall:

Mickey! Better than man's best friend!

Mickey food for your Mickey!

Mickeys! More fun than cats and dogs!

Mickeys! Their urine doubles as cleaning fluid!

“That's how they work,” said Grim, knocking out his pipe. “First they make the ad, then they tell the scientists: this is what we want.”

Indridi was about to open a cage and pat one of the Mickeys. Grim grabbed his hand in a hard grip.

“Careful, mate. The mice aren't finished. They've got to breed up a better temperament.”

“Really?”

“They're savage. They eat children.”

“Yes, of course,” said Indridi. “My hamster Fluffy was forever eating its babies.”

“No, I don't mean it like that,” said Grim. “They eat children.”