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
amusement'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 B�chner. 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 title 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 shores of Lake Titicaca. 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 classroom 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 Japan, 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 clusters. Roughly half of the more than 2000 reported
cases had been born in the space 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 passed
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 bloody
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 passed 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 attitude to a list of
hoary 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 lust, 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 Ren� 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
entity, 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 sunshine, was immediately
taken in hand by the Child Protection Agency on the grounds of
anticipated 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 succumb
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 scrap 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 tit-bits
that had been lying around for years and assembled them
into large miscellaneous lots - for example, a collection
I entitled 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 principal 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 pronouns 'I'
and 'w
e'. 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 title
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 Seychelles, 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
The Ringmaster's Daughter Page 12