LoveStar by Andri Snaer Magnason Page A

crowd watched the rocket swiftly disappearing through the stratosphere and ionosphere until nothing could be seen but a tiny bright light like a daystar. When the light vanished it was clear that old Kristoline had gone beyond the earth’s atmosphere. There she and all the other bodies were released into the silent black void where they floated weightless for a single orbit of the earth, but that was not the main event. The magic lay in what came afterward.
    The following evening all of Kristoline’s descendants drove to the top of Mt. Esja, parked their cars, switched off their headlights, and gazed up into the clear September sky. Sigrid’s father scraped frost off the circular view indicator, turned it to synchronize with the time, and peered at the constellation map with his flashlight. Then he looked up and pointed.
    â€œShe should appear high up in Ursa Major at eighteen minutes past eleven.”
    They all seated themselves on hillocks or rocks or lay on their backs in the soft carpet of moss. Sigrid blew her nose and Indridi put his arms round her. At 11:18 pm Sigrid’s great-grandmother began her fall to earth. At that precise moment, at pre-booked coordinates in heaven, gravity exerted its pull and she fell according to Newton’s law with accelerating speed, until a long, shining streak of white fire was etched in the silent darkness between the stars. “Shooting star!” whispered the children, and they made a wish. Everything was so poignantly lovely that their eyes filled with tears; death was so symbolic and beautiful. “Life is like a flash in the night,” and the darkness that received death was not empty darkness. It was an infinite black space full of stars, and people were cheered because this was her last and greatest wish: to burn up under the heavenly plough, to fall like a blazing streak against the full moon, to shoot like an arrow from Sagittarius’s bow.
    As Sigrid’s great-grandmother was 70 percent water, it wasn’t really possible to say that she had burned to ash. She evaporated. The star became a cloud, and Kristoline was reunited with her fallen husband who was also a cloud, and with all the other millions who had become clouds and rain, which waters the grass and flowers. Bone particles and cell debris fell as an excellent fertilizer for the earth’s vegetation. Those who were not used to looking up at the night sky felt dizzy when they saw its unutterable depths and beauty. The mere fact that Kristoline’s death united the family and gave them this time up on this mountain under this sky filled them with gratitude:
    â€œThanks for being born and dying before me and showing me how beautiful the world is and how fragile and short life is. I will never forget you, little great-grandma cloud. I’ll take care of my little life and be diligent about saving so I can have myself launched to you when I die.”
    Parents pointed up at the sky for the children and said: “Now great-grandma has gone to heaven. She’s in the clouds with great-grandpa. If you look at the clouds you might see grandpa’s beard or false teeth. If you ask nicely perhaps grandma will make a whale-shape for you, unless they’ve flown to Africa to make a whale for the children there. You remember how keen they always were on Africa. Tomorrow you must lie on your back and see whether your great-grandma in heaven has made a shape out of the clouds for you.”
    It was LoveStar who got the idea for LoveDeath, or rather: the idea got him. The idea wouldn’t leave him alone until he had fully realized it. The idea prevented him from sleeping, took away his appetite for food and sex, and pumped him up with chemicals that filled him with so much energy that it had to be born into the world. And although at first some people found the idea for LoveDeath far-fetched, it was actually very simple. The technology already existed: there were thousands of