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