The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  8

  ‘Come, old man. Or all die …’ Kit hissed, then more grimly, ‘You die, too.’

  ‘Middle of the night,’ I grumbled, but he wouldn’t let me close my eyes. I was lying on the edge of the sleep heap, or else I suppose he wouldn’t have chanced it. People who disturbed the sleepers tended to come to sticky ends. But so did anyone who risked it outside, anyone who left the farting herd crammed huggermugger round the ashes of the fire. Kit must be desperate. Shivering, aching, I snatched up a blanket and followed him.

  We walked blind through the airfield’s shadowy junkyard. Great dark bodies of the airplanes loomed above us, stupidly grounded like gross dead moths. Darkness has come upon the things of man … But far behind the planes there were stars, tiny, frozen, too infinitely distant ever to warm or comfort us, and a queer halfmoon with a halo of rainbow ice glittering and crackling on the black.

  ‘Is bad luck,’ Kit said, gesturing back at the moon as we came into the mouth of the shed I call the Dovecote, from which a dull grey glow proceeded.

  ‘No,’ I said, putting my arm round his shoulders. He threw it off with savage force. It was the Doves he loved, of course, not me. I mustn’t forget he loves the Doves. And thinks I’m leaving them to die …

  Such a strange sight, in that chilly glow that comes from hundreds of epsilon tubes. No one human wants the epsilon tubes, since it was discovered they caused cancer in young children. But how do we know epsilon doesn’t hurt the Doves? Perhaps that’s another reason why they’re fading.

  I looked at them in the twilight of the tubes. They’ve started to resemble a regiment, now most of them no longer have the strength to move from the place where the handlers leave them after their routine RefuelRecycle. A regiment of abandoned babies.

  From a distance they still have that compelling look of children just beginning to toddle. But close up you see they’re getting old.

  Because the routine R and R is no longer routine. There isn’t enough waste for them to eat. We couldn’t imagine that would ever happen. The elite Insiders produced so much waste, whole meals, whole bins full of fermenting vegetables, rotting chickens, tropical fruit … (Before the Doves, the Outsiders used to eat it, sneaking into the cities in the long hot nights and rifling the bins and the garbage hills. It got a lot harder for them, after the Doves.)

  How well I remember the tropical fruit. How Sarah loved mangoes and yams and pawpaws, custard apples, peaches, grapes. The fruit that fell from the breasts of the heat. Now it seems like a dream, all that amazing ripeness.

  Rows and rows of grey crouching birds, with every now and then a twitch, a shuffle, for most of them are selfstarters. Most are selfreplicators, too, but they haven’t the energy to do it, and for obvious reasons I’ve tried to keep nothing beyond secondgeneration replicants. There was no real trouble with the second generation.

  ‘What’s the problem, Kit?’ I ask, impatient, for I’m an old man and I need my sleep.

  He starts explaining in his curious mixture of pidgin English and rapid sign language. So many problems. Mostly my fault. Because I haven’t been collecting food from the camp. (I admit it, but also excuse myself. At the moment, every single thing is getting eaten, and some of the boys are still starving. He nods, impatiently. ‘If the boys starves, Kit doesn’t care. But the Doves don’t starve, Sol. I never let them.’) And people have been trying to feed the Doves from the fouling pits again. It makes them run fast for a minute or two but then they always have a major malfunction. The Crosbee brothers took two Doves which they insisted afterwards were Category Eight, in other words below salvage quality, and after a wild party in Departure burned them and threw them off the walkway. He suspected Fink and Porker of having sex with two Doves they pretended to be servicing. The small amount of rubbish that Chef set aside for the Doves’ R and R had not been sent from the kitchens today. ‘Your fault, Sol.’ He prods my chest with his finger, but I can hardly feel it through the layers of blanket. ‘They know you not here. So Mussyershef feed it to his cats. Bloody cats not need it. The cats eat bloody babies,’ and he laughs, quietly at first, then riotously. I see that he’s back in a good mood again, merely because I am there to be talked to, and I realise that he’s just been frightened, he can’t cope with the responsibility for all those hundreds of helpless creatures … (Of course he can’t. He isn’t very old. What would he be – twelve, twenty? And he’s probably never been looked after himself.)

  – Remember the Doves aren’t really creatures. Machines. Robots. Manmade things. My life went wrong when I blurred the line between living and nonliving.

  ‘The cats eat bloody babies,’ he’d said.

  Don’t think about that. Have a laugh with him. Cracked and hoarse, but he doesn’t seem to notice. I have to keep Kit cheerful, and on my side, for I need a few more days for my writing. I take him by the arm. This time he doesn’t throw me off. ‘Say after me: Monsieur Chef. Not Mussyershef. MuhSyuhShayv. Say it right. You know he likes it.’

  (The chef is another oldtimer, like me. He’s survived since long before I came here, because he has a skill, because he can cook, and coax the old generator into working. He speaks little English, and pretends not to understand my French. I know it’s because he doesn’t want to be friends. He has gone beyond things like language and friendship in whatever great suffering brought him here. Now he is dumb, but he’s Monsieur Chef.)

  We begin to walk up and down the rows, and I let Kit report to me as if I were a consultant making my rounds. Praying this charade will be over soon, so I can creep back to my mound and curl up with the others and thaw out enough to snatch an hour’s sleep. I need my bloody sleep to write. How long is Kit going to keep this up?

  One by one down the rows of Doves, and I pat the heads of some, obediently, the weird felty texture some models had after the first hard models had been superseded but before they had perfected the xylon feathers. Their heads are at the level of my fingertips, about a metre above the ground, just a little taller than a threeyearold …

  ‘The cats eat bloody babies’ – No. The cats eat mice and frogs and birds and anything else that’s smaller than them. It’s the rule of thumb for most living things. You can’t eat something bigger without bursting. Kit hates cats, that’s all it is. Whereas the Doves in his eyes can do no wrong.

  If only we had thought of making them smaller, but we only considered making them more perfect. We wanted them cuter, cleverer, livelier. We longed for them, really, to be alive. We wanted to be god, we wanted to be parents.

  *

  Dovemania continued unabated with the two or three models after the first, which had major improvements in ‘lovability’ – the manufacturers actually called it that. And people truly loved their Doves. The new ones could hold simple conversations, personalised with their owner’s name, play his or her favourite music on request, sing along with the owner’s voice. They could learn the names of up to ten family members, had strokeyfeely panels on their stomachs, hummed and purred in response to being stroked. And instead of needing emptying and cleaning once a month, they had a cute selfcleaning function. When placed upon the rubbish jets, they ejected small neat pellets of detritus from their backs – all this without pottytraining or nappies!

  The whole developed world wanted them. Everyone in our apartment block had them. The porter told us about new arrivals. And Sarah, who’d sworn she would never have another one, soon began to feel envious.

  She was prone to envy, of everyone. Maybe because as a little girl she was sent to her Scottish grandma once too often. Out there on her own in the icy fogs, dressed in her cousins’ handmedowns. There were times in her life when she did feel loved – she knew I loved her, she must have done – and she was successful, on top of the world. But part of her was always left outside, peering into the room where the lights were on and the other children tore open their presents.

  We had never moved to the pretty house in the Northwest Enclaves she’d dreamed about. Not becaus
e we weren’t wealthy enough, but because we had not ‘resolved our future as a family’, or whatever nonsense Sarah spouted. And yet it began to grate on her that we lived in a flat, however large and comfortable. One of our stuffier dinner guests asked her, ‘Is this your city base, Sarah?’, as if convinced we had a place in the country.

  She felt she should have a place in the country. She ‘loved nature’, whatever that meant. I tried to make her see that now nothing was natural, that the flowers she loved had been selectively bred to make them bigger and longer lasting, that even the hills behind the Northwest Borders, which we could just glimpse from our fourthfloor window, were covered with genetically modified crops …

  She stared out of the window while I lectured her, looking resentful, or possibly sad. She waited until I had finished talking. ‘It’s the colour,’ she said. ‘That blue. And that yellow.’ (It was autumn, and the trees were turning.) ‘So beautiful. I love those hills. I’d like my children to live there.’ She deluded herself, for she only had one, but she wanted another, so she often said ‘children’. Whatever she wanted, she thought she should have. ‘You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘You’ve changed completely. You used to dream of living somewhere wild. You used to talk about … beaches, and forests.’

  ‘It must be middle age,’ I said. ‘I’m getting fat and old and grey.’ I wanted her to deny it, but instead it awoke her tenderness. She put her white smooth arms around me, and pressed my face against her breast, holding my head as if she cared about it, her fingers clinging to my curly hair.

  ‘You’re not old, darling. You can’t be old.’

  But the tenderness did not last very long.

  ‘I shouldn’t have to live in a flat at my age,’ she said, absurdly, as if it were my fault, as if I had the slightest control over where she spent the night, let alone lived.

  ‘We could afford not to,’ I said calmly.

  ‘I would miss my friends,’ she snapped at once. Which showed a kind of change in her. Once upon a time she would have cited work, the exact amount of journey time the move would have added. Now work was becoming less central than before. Sarah was in her late forties, after all, and the screens had begun to tire of her. Last year she had twice disappeared for a ‘holiday’ and returned a little shaky, her skin babypink and covered in cream, avoiding strong light – but despite the peels, she was ageing. She no longer spoke of her longing to conceive, though we still had sex, and without contraception. Our hopes had become too ingrown to risk voicing, not to ourselves, never to each other –

  She was my love; my enemy. She gave me great pain, but I still loved her.

  ‘I feel … I don’t have the things I want,’ she muttered, frustrated, yet appealing to me, as if I were still the absent Daddy, the one who could have given it all, if he’d cared.

  I couldn’t ever fill that hole. No one would. No one could.

  ‘I could find a place with a garden,’ I said. ‘Luke would love it if we had a garden.’ Though that was less true than it had once been, for he had become quieter, more nervous, recently, more wrapped up in his music, less boyish, somehow. He spent a lot of time with Juno and the ‘Communards’. ‘By the way, is he staying the night with the Communards?’ It was Saturday, and Luke wasn’t at home.

  ‘Don’t say Communards. It sounds silly.’

  ‘Well, the ‘Children’s Commune’ sounds pretty silly –’

  ‘No it isn’t. It’s a perfectly good name.’

  ‘Communard comes from commune, Sarah.’

  ‘You’re laughing at me. You undermine me. Then you wonder why I want to leave you –’

  (Mygod, she’d been ‘leaving’ me for nearly twenty years.)

  ‘We could buy a house and live together.’ I went back to it dumbly, again and again. ‘I don’t see the problem. You can still see your friends.’

  ‘They’re not just some silly indulgence, you know. They matter to me. They’re … my life,’ she said. ‘And Lukey’s life.’

  Which made me feel pointless. ‘That’s stupid,’ I said. ‘Bloody Juno and her cronies are not Luke’s life.’

  ‘How well do you know your son?’ she enquired. ‘How often does he sing to you?’

  This was unfair, but left me winded. ‘That’s not our thing,’ I said, unhappily. ‘Luke and me have our own thing, you know. It’s … father and son. That matters as well.’ (And we did. We joshed. We vegged. We wrestled. We ate the sugarbombs Sarah detested, screaming at me ‘He needs fruit, not sweets!’)

  There was a long pause. It was a lovely afternoon, late October, clear and golden, and the window was open, and by the same magic trick as in the last few years there was something in the air like the autumn chill we used to read about in books.

  ‘Feel the air, Sarah,’ I said, touching her hand. She loved things like that; air, water. ‘It’s wonderful. There’s … an edge. It’s cool.’ It wasn’t much, but I liked to please her. We sat together, taking it in.

  ‘Are you happy?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I don’t know if you’re happy, either. We’re … rushing through life, aren’t we? Getting older.’ And she stared out of the window, as she often did, as if it would eventually give her the answer, that same long view across the aching roads and the rustred suburbs to the sunblurred towers and beyond them the low blue hills she loved. ‘I stopped you travelling, I think. You wanted to. To see the world. I do – like you. You’re not a bad man. You stayed with me. You stuck around …’ And then she was clutching my hands and crying as if she had done me some massive wrong.

  But the tears released some tension in her and within minutes she was herself again, abstracted, planning, chattering, restless, screenwatching, cleaning, talking on the phone, preparing to go away for the night, changing her plans, then again, then again – and it got dark, and she closed the window.

  Around nineoclock she called me over to the screen. ‘Come and have a look. There’s another new range.’ She didn’t even have to say what of; we were all obsessed with Doves in those days. ‘This is absurd,’ she said to me, laughing, but she was fascinated, all the same.

  Four new types of Dove were coming on the market. All of them had the most popular features of the current mobots, like ‘skin‘ and ‘feathers’ that felt warm and soft, RefuelRecycle, selfstarting et cetera. But the new models were highly specialised. There were ‘Culturevultures’, which included a scan of all the books that had ever been written, with universal translation, and a full hive of all Euro music ever recorded, plus the contents of the world’s great galleries and the ‘World’s Hundred Greatest Movies’, though these were mostly ‘obscure foreign films’ from the last century that ‘no one has heard of’, the TV presenter said, with a contemptuous smile. (‘I’d be better than him,’ Sarah said, in passing. ‘I like old films. They have such great stories.’) There were ‘Warmbots’, whose very existence would have been unthinkable until the last two years. They had furry exteriors and long thick arms and promised to ‘keep you warm at nights’. There were ‘Sexbots’, though we didn’t find out exactly what they did that evening because our screen had the automatic KC (kiddiescleanup) function that blocked out any mention of sex, and neither of us could remember how to unlock it before the moron had passed on to the next, but from his face and gestures the Sexbots were on heat. (But I have three Sexbots in my store. They look battered, and used. They look … undesirable. No one would dream of having sex with them.) The fourth variety of Dove was a ‘Hawk’, a kind of avian guard dog, really, ‘for defensive purposes only’, he assured us. They had stern beaked heads and watchful eyes. Their defence system sounded unbelievably aggressive. It was called ‘SD and R’, Selfdefend and Recycle; a high-pitched scream to deafen any ‘attackers’, an ‘immobiliser flagel’ to paralyse them, then finally the Hawk would cut up its victims and recycle them in the normal way.

  ‘My dad would be horrified,’ I said. Samuel was against private security arrangements. (Or so he said. But what had he left me, what clanking things,
in that green canvas bag?)

  ‘I like the sound of those Culturevultures,’ said Sarah. ‘For Luke, I mean. All that lovely music.’

  I’d guessed she would like them. I felt sorry for Luke. ‘Don’t you think Luke might feel – got at, sometimes? He gets a lot of culture, doesn’t he?’

  She passed on that one, so we didn’t have a quarrel. She probably simply wasn’t listening to me. ‘How about the Sexbots?’ she asked. ‘Disgusting …’

  ‘You women will have plenty to say about that.’

  I went out to make us a cup of coffee. An hour had slipped away as we watched the screens, riveted. All round the globe it was probably the same. Humans were creating life, at last! It didn’t seem commercial, or trivial, or comic. It certainly didn’t strike most of us as rash, though the godlovers warned against the sin of pride, and now I’m ashamed of thinking them stupid. ‘Everything that lives is holy.’ They thought the Doves were creatures of the devil.

  Sarah called me back in from the kitchen. ‘Listen, Saul, this is interesting.’

  The screentalker had moved on into the future; the next expected model was a ‘Replicator’. We’d been hearing for years about selfreplication, but to date no actual model had emerged. What he showed today was a cartoon simulation. An adorably chubby Dove sat and ruffled its wings, bounced gently up and down on rubbery legs, cheeping, till suddenly a smaller Dove came wriggling out from under it. The mother, now a little less chubby, began to nuzzle it and clean its feathers.

  ‘Weird biology,’ I said. ‘Birds lay eggs, as far as I know.’

  ‘But it’s fantastic,’ said Sarah, impatient, interrupting me, ‘isn’t it? I mean, they were saying it’s only months away. These Replicators are almost ready. It can’t happen, surely, how can it? Something that human beings have made can’t make another of itself, can it?’

  She listened to the screens, but not to me. ‘I explained that to you years ago, Sarah. Don’t you remember that work I was doing for Roche? My nanomachines were selfassemblers. The theory’s been around since the 1980s … Drexler was the guy who started it all. They only need a good source of power and the right kind of molecules. If you can get enough nanomachines working together in parallel, it’s perfectly feasible. But well, wow.’