The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  Apart from that final act of treachery, I really enjoyed it. It was gross. We adored it. Someone pressed the ‘Recall’, and we watched it again. Only madwomen, we thought, would vote for them.

  On Election Day, the Greek Sheet’s early headline sneered ‘Votes for Wimmin!’ over photographs of women queuing to vote. The other parties were the usual crew, venal, arid, selfserving, hopeless. The Liblabs had amalgamated with the Conservers. There was no one to vote for. Men abstained in droves. We waited for the same grey frauds to be returned.

  Something dreadful, mad, unspeakable happened.

  The results came in. Wicca World had won. I couldn’t believe it, but the figures were there. We thought they were a joke, but they had won the election. ‘Wacky Witches Win!’ shrieked the Greek Sheet’s final issue. We weren’t quite so clever as we thought.

  Sarah was interviewed, looking tired and haggard but flushed with triumph under the lights, gabbling about nurturing nature, and I thought I spotted just a smidgin of panic, as if she hadn’t really expected this.

  The postmortem told us the turnout was abysmal, ten or twelve-percent, I can no longer remember, threequarters of that female, with women voting overwhelmingly for Wicca. This seemed to me barely believable. I was sure there were still many sensible women who would never have fallen for Wicca’s tosh … Would they? The pundits said women wanted a change. Wicca ‘spoke to women’s spiritual needs’. They were ‘sick of arid materialism’. Yet to me they’d always seemed so practical, noticing that a floor needed cleaning, wiping surfaces, remembering bills, sending birthday presents, flushing loos, knowing from a baby’s congested face what type of thing had just leaked from its bottom … And they enjoyed it, surely. It was what women liked.

  Or had men got it all wrong again?

  In any case, now we were going to be punished. We were frightened, actually, as well as incredulous, because the Speakers still had some degree of power.

  A succession of men went on screen to suggest a campaign of male civil disobedience, withholding communications tax or Comtax (our last remaining tax, which subsidised the net, Leamonline, Speakers’ Hour and ScreenRecycle) on the grounds that we had no Speaker representation. But Wicca said they spoke for all, for woman in man and man in woman, the goddess in god and god in the goddess, which wasn’t an easy line to argue with. Men held mass switch-offs during Speakers’ Hour and swamped Wicca’s phone lines with angry phone calls, but the only serious effect of the campaign was the deficit to Comtax. The Witches had announced their intention to raise it by twentyfivepercent, to fund more nursery schools (‘Catch ‘em Young!’, the Greek Sheet roared. ‘Witches Snatch Our Babies’). But the men refused to pay en masse, and as one man remarked of the increases, there were hardly any babies for the witches to school.

  And that was at the root of all that happened, of course. That’s why men and women hated each other.

  The kids had been the glue that held us together. When babies stopped coming, the men got the blame. The women felt thwarted, and abandoned us. And so we moved further and further apart, and turned into parodies of ourselves – the shavenheaded, giggling, machineloving men, the shorthaired, shortfused, furious women, shriving themselves with nature worship.

  They didn’t want us. We were no good. And we believed them, deep inside.

  The women seemed to hate my whole sex, which was hard. The things that made my body a man’s, my balls, my penis, my male voice – my size, my sweat, my manliness. The things that had denied them what they craved. And I think they began to hate their sons, the few there were, the weakling boys. They called Luke ‘Lucy’ … godforgive them.

  I couldn’t forgive her that for years.

  After the elections, we expected summer, but there was a curious patch of real cold. The summer scanties were in the shops, but people were walking around in coats, some of them heirlooms, twentieth-century furs that hadn’t been out of the cupboard for decades, and laughingly showing off the goosepimples they were feeling now for the first time. People began to wish for summer as they must have done in my parents’ childhood. We thought it was a little freak, of course, a byblow of the general miraculous cooling that had come to save us from global heat death. And spring did eventually arrive, at roughly the time when summer should have done, and then it got hot, as it always did, and we all forgot it had ever been different.

  It was July or August. I had stayed late at work. I was involved in a project to design a mouthwash which was a solution of minute nanomachines, each of which would clean and polish the teeth as it fed off the plaque and gunge on the surface. It would make normal tooth-brushing obsolete, and might even make me rather rich if I were lucky enough to scoop that year’s ‘Hundredpercent Prize’, a hundredpecent bonus on salary awarded for ‘significant innovation’. I suppose there wasn’t that much ‘significance’ in freeing us from one of our last bits of labour, but I had been told I was in line for the prize. Perhaps they meant, ‘makes a significant profit’, which this certainly would, if I could crack a few problems. I was having trouble dealing with the chemists who were supposed to be coming up with the flavour, and I’d started to wonder, not entirely idly, if they were being nobbled by toothbrush manufacturers. That evening I was frustrated, or bored … so I started browsing, which I usually made a big effort not to do, in the lab.

  Quite soon I glimpsed the title of what looked like a fairly routine scientific paper, dated that day, ‘Development Phases of Climatic Change’, and thought ‘Why not?’ So I started to read it. Two pages in, my heart began to race.

  It was a study of the rate at which ice ages came, based on fossil evidence of bands of vegetation, the speeds at which deciduous trees liking warmth were replaced by coldloving conifers, for instance. I had always assumed – hadn’t everyone? – that ice ages took hundreds of years to get established.

  But the new paper had resurrected an eccentric study from the last century which said it took only two decades to move from temperate to permafrost. They had rerun all the data, meaning to disprove it, and found the original conclusions held. So they took new measurements of fossilised pollen all over Europe. The findings were clear. Twenty years, that was all it took. Twenty years to slide into an ice age. Two decades. The blink of an eyelid.

  I had a sudden feeling that I knew what was happening, I knew what was coming, had foreseen it all, had lived it already as my own heart chilled, as our happiness darkened and began to freeze over.

  It got into the news a few days later. ‘New Ice Age?’, headline after headline enquired. For a few days the screens talked of nothing else.

  The sensation would certainly have lasted longer if something hadn’t driven it off the news.

  One evening I was sitting in front of the screen, feeling relatively happy, since it was Friday. I had done my work and had a pint of beer, eating chicken and halflistening to the news. It was a chicken breast, oval and pink, and I was just thinking that it looked like a face when a voice that had been weaving through my head and somehow becoming confused with the chicken breast suddenly said, quite clearly, ‘Tonight the manufacturers categorically denied that a Dove could feed off a living face. A spokesman for the company pointed out that Doves had long been especially valued for their excellent safety record with children. Meanwhile the baby is in intensive care and we await developments. Tonight women picketed …’ Et cetera, et cetera.

  Dora was watching the news with me, her large blue eyes flicking from side to side in a parody of animation. Just when it got to the climax of the story – we saw the child who had been attacked, a sturdy blonde baby with crewcut hair, then an ‘after’ picture, a disc of bloody mess, a featureless horror in a tangle of tubes – Dora chuckled, with her ‘random’ chuckle, and turned to me, as she often did, and said ‘That’s funny. I feel happy’. I threw the rest of my chicken away and didn’t talk to Dora for the rest of the evening.

  I somehow knew at once it was true. I remembered the flayed ground, the vanished c
at.

  The suspected Dove was a replicant. A thirdgeneration replicant. The screen showed us a picture; it looked innocent, as usual, they’d designed the things to look innocent. Next the manufacturer was brought on, sweating lavishly in a crumpled suit. The presenter asked him questions relating to the model of Dove that had just been shown. Then the manufacturer confessed this wasn’t actually the Dove that had halfeaten the baby.

  ‘Why not?’ the screentalker enquired.

  ‘Because it, ah, cannot be found.’

  ‘Do you mean it has escaped?’ The screentalker squeaked. She was a hysterical woman in a wig.

  ‘Doves can hardly escape, Miss,’ said the manufacturer. ‘Gone missing, perhaps. We shall soon find it.’

  Dora did her random chuckle again. This time at least she didn’t speak, but I took her away into the spare room and left her for the night in outer darkness.

  The next few weeks were very fraught. The screens didn’t know what to put first, a sudden flood of stories, only some of them authentic, about Doves eating sleeping cats, or a line of sombre, selfimportant scientists wanting to tell us about the new Ice Age. The Speakers came on and tried to calm us, those hideous dykes with their insincere voices, trying to show they weren’t panicking, trying to sound in control, and calm.

  The men all rallied behind their Doves. Even I did, at first. It was clearly a fluke. The Dove in question had a programming error. We were the machinemen, the Scientists, the Greeks, and the women were trying to take away our machines, our sturdy blue babies with their lowpitched voices and sensitive feathers, the Doves who loved us. I went to the club and raged with my friends and we played with our robots and pined for our kids, and half of us secretly blamed the mothers for not protecting the children they’d stolen.

  The fuss died down. It was September now. I settled back into my intimacy with Dora. The screens forgot the savaged baby, forgot the Ice Age, forgot all the horrors to concentrate on the big Tunnelrun that took place every autumn.

  I loved the tunnelruns. Everybody bet on them. I bet five thousand on the Russian team. On the big day, I went to the Gay Scientists to watch the race and drink beer with my friends.

  Halfway through the race we were shrieking with laughter at an unfortunate Frenchman who waggled his bottom, when they interrupted the programme with a news flash. A Dove in Scotland had torn off the leg of a newborn baby in front of its mother. They switched off just in time to save the baby’s life. Wicca World had at once demanded that production of Doves be halted, and all existing models destroyed.

  ‘Was it a thirdgeneration replicant again?’ I asked, but everyone was staring at the screen. It was only later that my guess was confirmed. I began to realise that the Doves were mutating.

  Back at home, a refrain began in my mind; human error, human error. Mistakes had been made. We must do something. Human error, human error.

  I was fond of Dora, I said sorry to her, I stroked her soft panels and apologised, but I took out her replicator module, intact. I felt awful, abusive, like a fake gynaecologist, plunging my hand into her cold inner parts, but I persisted, I dragged it out.

  And then I broke it up with a hammer in case I should ever be tempted to replace it.

  I was thinking of Luke; his long fragile limbs. And Luke as a baby, lying kicking in the sunlight.

  If my feelings for Dora changed after that, if some weird deep tenderness was lost, was it because she could no longer reproduce? Did I see her as menopast, like Sarah?

  11

  Shuddering, gasping with the morning cold that gnaws my lips as I come up for air, driving myself to the jagged window to chip off some ice for a morning drink, I cackle to think how at first we panicked because there was a touch of frost. How we giggled and shrieked at the white on the trees, how we worried when the first cold fogs came drifting in between the towers and fretted at the shortage of blankets and duvets, how the commentators all wrote grave pieces when no one swam in the sea on Christmas Day after doctors advised of risks to the heart.

  And the comedy of the heating equipment. No one was making it at the time. A sudden outburst of activity followed, the screens were flooded with advertisements, the new firms were overwhelmed with orders. But so many of these instant systems were rubbish that ‘Heating salesman!’ became an insult equivalent to ‘Thief’ or ‘Liar’.

  Two decades, the paper on the net had said. Our orbit round the sun had lengthened very slightly. Just a small amount further away, and the sun looked just the same size in the sky …

  Twenty years seemed like quite a long time at first. To organise ourselves. To prepare for the ice. The government assured us that scientists would come up with something to prevent it in that time, but scientists themselves were less encouraging. Their ideas required cooperation between international governments that hardly existed, funds they didn’t have – If they did, they might be able to increase the amount of sunlight. They could do it by putting giant mirrors into orbit round the earth, or by seeding the icecaps with black material to reduce their reflectiveness, their ‘albedo’, a word we suddenly got used to hearing, and it always reminded me of my son, the forbidden word which came into my mind when I first saw his tiny white streaks of hair, albino, albino, my baby son … There was no money for science, or support, or time.

  Wicca were in an awkward position, having set their face against techfixes. So instead they asked people ‘not to overreact’ – but how could we overreact to an ice age? They reminded us there had been climate fluctuations in the past that had not resulted in an ice age. Then they pointed out that human beings had survived the last ice age. They harked back to the wars of the last century, and reminded us how people had stuck together – and yet they had done their best to divide us. They asked for patience; donations; calm. They suggested that we needed a mammoth new tax to give ‘communal support’ in the face of the ice – which they also assured us would not be coming. Two decades, they said, was plenty of time, and yet the Speakers were talking too fast. And Sarah herself had gone very low profile, which suggested she wasn’t happy with all this.

  I realised quite soon that we didn’t have two decades. The original paper had been measuring time from the first slight cooling to maximum cold. But the process was already well advanced. I remembered the steamy, sticky evening in the little room where we had lived first, before Luke was born, before we quarrelled, that normalseeming evening when I found the first queer report of the icesheets thickening, and mentioned it to Sarah, and she didn’t understand – how could should she have done? I didn’t myself. We had so many other things on our minds, we were sweet young lovers, trying to make babies –

  Blindly, blindly through life’s night. Missing the landmarks. Missing the stars.

  Now at last I see the importance of the stars, as the sun climbs up with that effortless strength above our wasted black horizon. Burning bright, unbearable. Its massive power, so far away, shooting across a million kilometres of icy space to touch my fingers, so early in the morning that I can’t feel the warmth, but I watch two fingertips slowly change from frozen yellow to pinkish grey, under the black arcs of my fingernails.

  We took the sun for granted, when it was too hot. We began to resent it, it crowded us, but now the ice is all around I start to see it as our god, the blazing face behind the names, God the Father, Buddha, Jesus … Wasn’t it the heat of the sun that made us? Gave us life? Gave us breath?

  And then a distance came between us.

  *

  In fact, we were almost halfway towards the ice by the time the public kerfuffle started. I think it was 2056. Halfway through the century, as well. I was halfway through my life, at fiftyone, yet I began to feel as though it were over. I’d lost my wife, I’d lost my family, and now we were losing all the things we were used to, so familiar we hardly noticed them, hot summer nights, orchids, fruit trees …