The Ringmaster's Daughter Part 9

Even though I wasn't listed in any professional register, I decided my business deserved a name. So one day I wrote 'WRITERS' AID' on the large binders of notes I'd sold. It was a good name.

My business was dependent on bilateral contact with authors both at home in my flat and in town. I had to cultivate the art of having several best friends at once. This led to many invitations to parties and weekend jaunts, far too many.

Once contact had been established I never needed to push new products on to my clients. As soon as they required fresh material, they would return of their own accord, come back to Uncle Petter. So they would get more and more dependent on my wares. Some stopped thinking for them- selves altogether once they saw what I could supply from my own kaleidoscope of clever ideas, it was as if their brains had been sucked out. They claimed they felt quite empty.

Making people dependent on me gave me no pleasure, but it was the way I made my living. I lived by hooking fish with my bait. I wasn't selling hash or acid, nor yet cheap cigarettes or smuggled booze. It was imagination, harmless imagination. But it was the key to urban esteem, the key to something as complex as a post-modern ident.i.ty.

If I came across a needy customer - at a large party, for instance - he would draw me into a corner, out into a lobby or even sometimes into the lavatory. There he would glance nervously this way and that before gabbling out his errand in a low voice: 'Have you got anything, Petter?' Or: 'Have you got anything today?' Or even: 'What could you give me for a thousand kroner?'

Both in terms of genres and price categories I had plenty to offer. A simple bit of inspiration or a pep-talk was clearly in a totally different price cla.s.s from, say, the complete outline of a longish novel, or a highly detailed film synopsis.

I sold half-finished poetry too, as well as quarter-written short stories. Once I wrote a complete short story which I chopped into three parts and sold to three different writers.

This wasn't to milk the market for money, but simply for amus.e.m.e.nt's sake.

Quite often I'd knock together a theme with a particular customer in mind. One such tailor-made plot was sold for a goodly sum to the young man I'd met at Club 7 several years earlier and who'd already achieved a certain success with the notes I'd entrusted to him on that occasion. Like many others, he'd been influenced by the Hippie movement and the Beatles' interest in Eastern mysticism - and he was an anthroposophist to boot. I found it fascinating that he was also well versed in philosophical materialism from Dem- ocritus, Epicurus and Lucretius to Hobbes, La Mettrie, Holbach and Buchner. He confided to me that he'd got nothing to work on just then, but that he was using the time to study the Bhagavadgita in his quest to find a possible bridge between the materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies. The plot I worked out especially for him revolved around such questions. I gave it the working t.i.tle The Souls' Constant, and the idea, briefly, went as follows:

The spiritualists turned out to be right in the end, and so too did the materialists. Dualists and supporters of reincarnation also had cause to pour themselves a little celebratory drink.

When the population of the world had stabilised at around twelve billion, a strange child was born in a small Bolivian mountain village on the sh.o.r.es of Lake t.i.ticaca. Pablo, as he was called, was an uncommonly good-looking, but otherwise fairly ordinary, male infant. He cried like most babies, had all the natural instincts and was more than age appropriate when it came to language development and motor skills. But gradually, as he grew up it became clear to those around him that the boy had no spiritual capacity. He was subjected to several neurological examinations all of which corroborated the fact that he wasn't suffering from any physical brain damage, nor any sensual disturbance. He even learnt to read and reckon faster than most of his peers. But he had no soul.

Pablo was an empty husk, a pod without fruit, a jewel box without a jewel. It would be misleading to say he had 'underdeveloped spiritual faculties' - a phrase that in any case has a strong ideological bias, as it implies that spiritual faculties are things that can be 'developed' in the same way as physical or other mechanical pro- cesses. Pablo's scourge was that he didn't have any spiritual faculties at all, and as a result he grew up like a human animal completely bereft of conscience or consideration for others. He even lacked any interest in his own welfare, living instead from moment to moment like a minutely programmed robot.

From the tender age of eighteen months, Pablo had to be put on a lead, much to his parents' despair. The village priest insisted, however, that he be allowed to go to school like other children. So, from the age of six he was transported to and from school in a pickup truck, and in the cla.s.sroom his harness was fastened to a stout desk that was bolted to the concrete floor. This caused him no concern as he was completely incapable of feeling any shame or self-contempt.

Pablo was almost frighteningly quick to learn, he had an impressive memory, and one of his teachers soon began to refer to him as a child prodigy. But as the years went by it was firmly established that he had no soul. It was the only thing wrong with him.

A few seconds after Pablo came into the world, a similar child was born right in the heart of London, a girl named Linda, who was also unusually pretty. In the minutes that followed, a soulless child was born in the little town of Boppard on the left bank of the Rhine, another in Lilongwe, the capital of the African state of Malawi, twelve in China, two in j.a.pan, eight in India and four in Bangladesh. In each case it was years before the local health author- ities managed to isolate this rare syndrome. As a result, the label 'brain damage' was applied, but some professionals discussed this term at length because these soulless children were often of above average intelligence.

When Pablo was twenty and already responsible for a number of murders and crimes of violence, including the brutal axe-murder of his own mother, the WHO published an international report that covered all 2000 incidences of what was tentatively called LSD, or 'Lack of Soul Disease'. The most striking thing about this UN report was that it established that LSD children were always born in tight time cl.u.s.ters. Roughly half of the more than 2000 reported cases had been born in the s.p.a.ce of less than a day, and there was then a gap of four years before another 600 LSD children were born, also in just a few hours, and then fully eight years pa.s.sed before there was a new wave of about 400 cases. So, as regards their time of birth, the LSD children were closely connected, but there was no geographical link between the events. Only seconds after Pablo was born in Bolivia, Linda came into the world in London, and since then there had been no further reported cases of LSD either in London or Bolivia. This ruled out any reasonable chance of contagion, and genetic causes could also be excluded. Certain astrologers were quick to interpret the LSD children as the ultimate proof of the influence of the stars, but this was soon shown to be a rash and over-hasty conclusion.

Using advanced demographic statistics, a group of Indian scientists was able to come up with the elaborate finding that LSD children were always born after the world's total population had topped a certain figure a few months earlier. After a fatal epidemic, a major natural catastrophe or the outbreak of a particularly b.l.o.o.d.y war, it always took some time for any more LSD children to arrive, and the conclusion of these Indian researchers was perfectly clear: there was a certain number of souls in the universe, and everything pointed to the figure being twelve billion. Each time the world's population pa.s.sed that number, there would be a new boom of LSD children that would continue until the population figure again fell below twelve billion incarnated souls.

This new information rocked the entire world and naturally enough gave impetus to radical new ideas on the most diverse of subjects. It is to the credit of the Roman Catholic church that it almost immediately adopted a completely new att.i.tude to a list of h.o.a.ry old chestnuts, for example the official ban on contraception.

The pope and his curia were soon supporting an international movement which occasionally aired its objectives using the simple slogan: 'Make love, not worms!' The church was also categorical in its refusal to baptise LSD children. Such a thing would be as blasphemous as trying to christen a dog.

Criminal law had to break new ground as well. In certain countries LSD criminals were punished like other felons, but most societies had long since acknowledged that an LSD sufferer was no more responsible for his actions than a tidal wave or a volcano.

Discussion also raged regarding the moral right of society - or the individual- to kill LSD children once a definite diagnosis had been established. Unfortunately, it was not possible to demonstrate LSD using amniocentesis. Absent attributes of the soul have nothing to do with genes.

During the past couple of years some of the oldest LSD children have been brought together to see how they would react to one another, and amongst the first were Bolivian Pablo and British Linda. As soon as they were introduced, and divested of their harness and leads, they pounced on each other and began to make love so violently and brutishly, that for the next few hours they made the Kamasutra look like a Sunday school outing. Pablo and Linda had no soul they could devote to one another, but they were man and woman and all their carnal instincts were intact. They felt no bashfulness or inhibition, because without souls there was noth- ing that could tame or control their l.u.s.t, let alone place it in a wider context.

The meeting between Pablo and Linda resulted in pregnancy and childbirth, and the remarkable thing was that their child was a perfectly normal girl with a soul as well as a life. But as people said: what was so remarkable about a vacant soul entering a child of soulless parents? Wasn't that just what one would expect? The only thing needed to create a complete human being was that one of the universe's twelve billion souls should take up residence in a foetus. The cosmic balance was now out of kilter because for short periods there was less supply of souls than the literally crying demand.

Pablo and Linda's daughter was christened Cartesiana after the French philosopher Rene Descartes, because she'd demonstrated to the world once and for all that the soul was not a corporeal phenomenon. The soul is not hereditary, of course. Our physical characteristics are what get handed down. We inherit half our genetic material from our mothers and half from our fathers, but genes are entirely linked to human beings as biological creatures - human beings as machines. We don't inherit half our souls from our mothers and the other half from our fathers. A soul cannot be split in two, and neither can two souls be united. The soul is an indivisible ent.i.ty, or a monad.

It wasn't the first time parallels had been drawn between Western philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz and Indian schools of thought such as the firmly dualistic samkhya philosophy.

As Plato and various Indian thinkers had pointed out two and a half thousand years earlier, the soul was incarnated and reincarnated in an endless succession of human bodies. When all the universe's souls inhabit the physical world at the same time, there's a complete incarnation stoppage - until, once again, more human bodies die than are created.

Cartesiana, who was a little ray of suns.h.i.+ne, was immediately taken in hand by the Child Protection Agency on the grounds of antic.i.p.ated parental neglect by her biological parents. Neither her father nor her mother took any notice of this, and they were allowed to stay together. Many people were bigoted enough to believe that it would be grotesque and unethical to allow more LSD people the chance to have children. At the instigation of the church the majority of them were therefore forced to undergo sterilisation.

One aspect of this story was that, from then on, people had a deeper respect for each other as spiritual beings. One didn't succ.u.mb to cursing or abusing a soul that one might possibly meet again in a hundred, or a hundred million years' time.

After the last outbreak of LSD the world's population has remained at well below twelve billion souls, but not everyone has been pleased with this development. There is a point of view that holds that a few thousand LSD children ought to be kept apart in large camps or body-plantations to provide a steady stream of organ donors. Others have emphasised the value of keeping a number of soulless Aphrodites and Adonises in public brothels for the enter- tainment of those who live in enforced celibacy.

The proportion of humanity that believes we ought to increase the planet's population to over twelve billion again, is only a few per cent at the moment.

In order to attract new customers I might hand out nights of fancy like this, without even necessarily demanding pay- ment for such bagatelles. After all, food manufacturers had begun to offer an appetising tasting or two in the shops. I could recoup the money I reckoned the customer owed me when he or she returned to ask for a more elaborate synopsis.

I would pen outline ideas for a book project on a sc.r.a.p of paper or a napkin and give them away to authors or deserving writers, in exchange for nothing more than the taxi fare home. For the price of a taxi to Tonsenhagen I bartered the following brief project description on the back of a restaurant bill: Children's book (approx. one hundred pages) consisting purely of questions, ordered by category and sub- category. That was all, but it was enough to set racing the pulse of one individual notoriously bereft of imagination.

This chance client claimed that I'd given him a brilliant idea. I had specified it was no ordinary general knowledge book he was to produce. The whole idea was that the children he was writing for should be able to work out the answers for themselves. 'You must spend at least a year on the project,' I said as I got into the taxi, 'that's a stipulation.' I knew he was thorough. I knew he wasn't a fast thinker.

On several occasions I'd thrown together some t.i.t-bits that had been lying around for years and a.s.sembled them into large miscellaneous lots - for example, a collection I ent.i.tled Twenty-six Allegories from A to Z. It earned me 10,000 kroner. I didn't think that was too much to ask for a pile of notes quite sufficient to launch a literary career.

One relic from the days when I'd constantly had to empty my head of voices was Fifty-two Dialogues. This, too, was virtually an entire writer's pack which I sold for 15,000 kroner. It was cheap at the price. Two of the dialogues have subsequently been broadcast as radio plays, one was recently staged at the princ.i.p.al theatre in Bergen, and I've seen three others in printed form as literary dialogues. Of course, it goes without saying that the dialogues had been somewhat polished and extended. One of them was a lengthy conversation between a pair of Siamese twins, which particularly played on the use of the p.r.o.nouns 'I'

and 'we'. These Siamese twins had been something of a medical sensation, as they'd lived joined together until they were over sixty years old, but the years had given them almost diametrically opposite views of life. As I worked on the dialogue, I'd toyed with the idea of giving one of them LSD syndrome, as it would have made them so much easier to tell apart, but the whole point was that this one piece of flesh was inhabited by two individual souls. Dizzie and Lizzie were two completely autonomous minds doomed to share the same body. Sometimes they would argue loudly and furiously, often ending up in a mood with one another for days on end - it would make them sleep badly at night as well - but they never injured each other physically.

If I thought a writer had the tenacity to sit for years working on a monumental novel of, say, 700 to 800 pages, I could provide a detailed synopsis covering up to thirty sides.

I sold one such exposition for 20,000 kroner to an author who was already well established. I gave the synopsis the t.i.tle The Little Human Race. In extremely abbreviated form some of the elements it contained were as follows:

The feared Amazonian virus (which probably originated in a colobus monkey) has practically depopulated the earth, and mankind now consists of just 339 individuals. Contact between them is maintained with the help of the internet.

The whole of humanity is on first-name terms. At the present time there is a colony of 85 people in Tibet, 28 on a small island in the Seych.e.l.les, 52 in northern Alaska, no fewer than 128 on Spitzbergen, 11 in what was Madrid, a family of 6 in London, 13 in the Chilean mining town of Chuquicamata and 16 in Paris.

The majority of the survivors live in pretty isolated spots like Tibet, Alaska, Spitzbergen and a small island in the Indian Ocean, clearly indicating that they've never been in contact with the infection. But the fact that there is also a handful of survivors in Madrid, London and Paris must demonstrate the probability that at least a few have effective antibodies. It's also possible that there are other contingents of people who haven't yet managed to make contact with the world community, and even one or two isolated individuals (who might perhaps be tracked down during the course of the novel). The survivors have christened the virus that practically destroyed the entire human race The Amazon's Revenge, because it has been linked to man's insane destruction of the rainforest. Now man himself is a threatened species.

The professional and intellectual resources of the survivors are limited. There is a total of eight doctors of whom one is a neurologist, one a heart specialist and one a gynaecologist. In Paris there is an eighty-five-year-old woman who, prior to the epidemic, was one of the world's leading microbiologists, and is now the only one. There is a former professor of astronomy in Alaska, Spitzbergen boasts a glaciologist and no less than four geologists, including a brilliant palaeontologist.

After a quarantine period of thirty years during which there has been no physical contact between the colonies, the experts agree that the world is again ready for migration. Alaska, Spitzbergen and Tibet can survive isolation for two or three generations, but in order to avoid the negative effects of in-breeding, it is a pressing matter for some of the smaller colonies to get access to new blood from outside their respective reservations. There are reports from London of a father who, in desperation, has found it necessary to make his own daughter pregnant in an attempt to prevent the colony from dying out.

Large parts of the world's road network are still intact and there are several hundred million cars, of which a large proportion are almost certainly serviceable. On runways the world over there are thousands of planes ready for take-off. The little human race also has unlimited oil reserves, but there is only one aircraft technician left in the world and he lives in Tibet, and just two pilots, one in Alaska and the other in Longyearbyen on Spitzbergen. Satellite pictures show that some of the world's cities have burnt down, but that most stand as they did thirty years ago. Farm animals have largely, but not entirely, died out. In addition, the environment on earth is improving rapidly. The ozone layer is almost completely repaired, and the weather on the planet is more stable than it has been for many decades.

It is on to this stage that you make your entrance as an author. How does man's second colonisation of the planet turn out? What happens during the first wave of settlement? What challenges does the individual face? In short: what is it like to belong to the little human race? Is it liberating in any way?

You must choose which episodes you want to depict. The possi- bilities are endless; the only limits are set by your own imagination.

It might be wise to give names to, and describe more closely, all 339 survivors, even if you don't manage to include every one in your story. It is these 339 human destinies that comprise your material.

What was the experience, on an individual level, of the epidemic that wiped out almost all the people on earth? Which of their nearest and dearest has this or that character lost, and how did it happen?

Don't forget to describe the most dramatic and gripping moments.

Bear in mind too, that all the survivors have faced the fact that they would in all likelihood fall victim to the disease.

How does the individual manage now? Which siblings have found it necessary to procreate together to prevent the race dying out?

What is it like for a father to make his daughter pregnant? What's it like for the daughter?

One significant challenge will be to explain how people keep in contact across the continents. Dwell on the first contact, the break- through itself - for example, between the people in Alaska and those in Tibet. What sort of equipment are they using? What are the energy resources in the respective colonies? If possible, check this with engineers and computer experts.

Will you opt for a small number of central characters around which to spin your novel? Or will you develop it episodically with a bigger cast? Bringing all 339 characters into the novel's plot needn't make it tedious provided they are clearly and sharply drawn. It may even help to give the narrative a monumental feel.

The questions are legion, and the answers are up to you as author and G.o.d. Tell all the stories, but don't lose sight of the overarching dramatic idea, the very direction and motor of this epic tale. When finished, the readers should be sitting with tears in their eyes because they must let go of all the characters they've lived with for weeks or months and with whom they now feel a strong bond.

Perhaps the material will force you to write several volumes. No matter what, don't fall for the temptation of writing too little. You and only you hold the key to the second great chapter in the history of mankind.

Don't lose sight of the almost indescribable joy that now accom- panies every new child that's born. When you finish your story, several generations will doubtless have come and gone, and perhaps the world's population has increased manyfold.