The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  Actually my life had hardly started. I wish I had known that at the time.

  The little peach tree on our balcony frosted. I took it in, but it was too late.

  Too late to do so many things that we suddenly realised ought to be done. Ever since the state had withered away, nearly fifty years ago at the turn of the century, we’d depended on private contracts for services, some individual – hospitals, learning centres – others bought en bloc through our district councils – waste disposal, electricity, gas. Most luxury developments had costlier contracts providing a higher level of service, like London’s Northwest Enclaves, for example, where the elite once liked to live –

  (It used to look wonderful in spring. Pink villas floating on a sea of pale blossom, and the guards in shirts with goldbraided epaulettes. Children were allowed to play in the streets. It’s gutted now, blackened, wrecked.)

  Our lives – the lives of the people in work, the people in houses, the Insiders – were a muddle of layered networks of contracts, half of which no longer functioned, since firms were always going out of business. (In a sense life is so much simpler now. Harsher, bloodier, but simpler.) And then there were the homeless – Outsiders, Wanderers, the urban homeless and their rural cousins, who had no contracts, no services, depending on each other, mostly, making their own piecemeal arrangements. Our society was an amorphous pyramid, with the Speakers perched precariously on top, then the relatively successful people, who had jobs and houses and educations and elected the Speakers and contributed to Comtax and paid their district council to keep order. Underneath them were the Outsiders and Wanderers, a great stirring, floating base of people with nothing. The Speakers pretended to address everybody on their weekly show, inserting carefully respectful references to ‘fluid lifestyles’ to placate the Wanderers, but in fact, what did they have to say to us? For decades politicians had been figureheads, with no money to spend and few legislative powers other than a veto on Euro laws. They vetoed most of them on principle, and Euro didn’t care. We were slowly dropping off it, like a tiedoff limb as the blood supply withered.

  Now suddenly we needed leaders. We needed something to hold us together. We needed people to take decisions. We needed someone like Winston Churchill, that great British leader from the last century. But all we had got was Wicca World. We needed somebody to save us from the ice. To save everyone from the same disaster, after years of lip service to ‘different needs’. We needed decisions about energy, we needed spending on climate studies, we needed decisions about food management, heat conservation, public order … We needed decisions about healthcare. Who would care for the Outsiders? They had no homes, they would get sick first, with nothing to protect them from the cold. If they got sick, we would be infected. Or perhaps they would want to take our homes. We started to realise uneasily that maybe we might need a centralised policeforce. Maybe we would need an army.

  We began to see that life would get rough. Fear began to push people together. And fear began to tear people apart.

  Fear is also a source of power, and Wicca World exploited it. Because people were afraid of the Doves as well, and that was more immediate, more direct than their misty, epic fear of the ice. And so Wicca ranted against the Doves. More incidents were being reported all the time of what the screens began to call ‘grazing’ – attacks on living things by Doves, all of them third-or fourthgeneration replicants. Wicca made sure that weeping mothers appeared on the screens with them when they spoke, which helped rally public opinion behind them. I remember one child whose sleeping cat had been eaten, roundfaced, snubnosed, with ginger hair and blue eyes like saucers that filled with tears when she remembered little Tiggs. Marilyn was a propaganda triumph. After she had finished the Speakers came on to promise us that they would ‘save us from the Doves’, shield our children from ‘robot perverts’.

  So babyeating robots were a Bad Thing? Well, no one was going to disagree with that. It was all so much simpler than dealing with the ice, and the ice kept coming, slowly, faster; villages in Norway were cut off by the snow, settlements began to be abandoned. A team of scientists taking measurements in the Arctic lost radio contact and disappeared.

  Wicca had no statutory powers to make laws, but they could petition the Eurocourt or instruct our own courts to appoint a commission. They announced they were drafting legislation applying to all future robot manufacture. No robot could be fuelled by organic matter or attempt problemsolving through random mutation. But the legal process was very slow. Direct action was easier.

  Juno herself appeared on screen, looking heavier, firmer, sadder than before, speaking with the voice of an immensely wise mother (though I happened to know she had never been a mother), and told us that we had a choice to make, between human children and the Doves who were ‘stealing the babies and corrupting the fathers’. She cited the ‘disgusting’ Sexbots as evidence, though they hadn’t caught on with the public at all, since their orifices weren’t that pleasurable or comfortable or even readily cleanable – (How do I know that? No, truly, I only know because the lads had told me. We talked about every kind of mobot at the club, and maybe some of those men were ‘perverted’, but that can be a name for loneliness.) I’m afraid I still thought the name ‘Sexbots’ amusing, particularly when Juno pronounced it with a particularly scornful intonation, looking down her nose like a cow with a cold and spitting out the S’s like manure-covered straw … but the women of Britain were not amused.

  The women of Britain rose to Juno’s call. They picketed the factories. A fight broke out somewhere in Leicester when the women managed to drag a consignment of Doves off a lorry, and ‘tore them limb from limb’, as the news put it. In Scotland a fire that started in a Dove showroom and swept through a poor tenement, killing hundreds of people, was suspected to be arson. All over the country windows were broken, salespeople attacked, offices letterbombed, though Wicca World, of course, ‘deplored these excesses’. They said they deplored them, but mysteriously active in many of these incidents were the girl gangs who had attached themselves to Wicca, the ‘Green Girls’, with their greendyed hair and green glass studs in their ears and noses. The Green Girls were very violent.

  People became afraid to go out with Doves visible in the back seat after a car was stopped and burnt to a shell with two male passengers and their Dove inside. Sales of Doves plummeted, despite the manufacturers buying endless airtime to reassure the public that the ‘problems’ with replicants had been ‘ironed out’. They added on a ‘selfdestruct’ programme so replication would only happen once, thus limiting mutation. It didn’t help; the market collapsed.

  Men weren’t rushing out to buy Doves either. Men aren’t insensible to pain, the pain of babies, cats, parents … The faces at the Scientists were grim after each fresh report of a grazing incident. But the men felt more divided, because they really loved their Doves. Dove ownership ran at an amazing sixtypercent of the male population of Britain, which when you consider that at least a third of the population was homeless and without buypower, meant a hundredpercent of the male market.

  The Doves weren’t a luxury to men, you see. The Doves supplied us with something we lacked. The men who sat talking about their Doves or drove them to the club to show them off had a jaunty, cheerful obsessiveness, a competitive glint, like – what were they like? – Proud fathers, that’s the only description. They sat in noisy circles, laughing, shouting, swopping anecdotes about their Doves’ achievements. And at home the Doves answered other needs. They were our pets, our kids – our wives. Their docility, their friendliness, the way they served us and seemed to like us, the way they quietly accepted love, whereas women had rejected us –

  Not all, of course, I am sure not all. There must have been couples and families who survived, as Sarah and I had once survived the yawning gulf between men and women, and I naively thought it would last, if I gave her leeway, yielded, accepted.

  Maybe I don’t remember it right. Occasionally she would ring me up, as
k how I was, then when I told her – I suppose I sounded discontented – she’d say I was angry, crazy, violent. She said I’d been jealous and unreasonable, rejected her ideas, failed to respect her. She said that I never helped in the house (but I helped with Luke. Didn’t that count?). She said she’d never seen me with a broom or duster, and if I cooked, I made the kitchen disgusting (which may have been true, but was surely no problem, with all the machines on the market to help her). She said too much. I couldn’t bear to listen.

  Till finally she said she must have a divorce. It settled between us, a block of black ice.

  *

  She sent me a letter, she put it in writing, the solicitor’s messenger came to the door and I knew it meant trouble as soon as I saw him. I read all the things she had to say. Maybe there was some truth in them. But then she dared to say I was an unfit parent, and it hurt so much that I had to reply. I went to a solicitor the very same day and gave him instructions to say it all back.

  – I didn’t really believe what I said. Or maybe I did, but I don’t any more.

  We had lain on the bed with Luke curled between us, his long white body flushed with fever, and I’d sponged his body all night long with a cool flannel while she kissed and stroked him, loving our son, caring for him. She was his mother. She loved our son.

  And yet we called each other unfit parents.

  The tie was broken. We savaged each other.

  (She’d left me. Why did she have to divorce me?)

  I fired off my letter, then felt dreadful. I didn’t go in to work that day. I went to the club and talked to my friends. I took a few buzzers to raise my spirits, but they didn’t rise. Then I started drinking. I knew that the lads would listen to me. There was a familiar way of talking, where men sat in small disgruntled groups, waving their hands, nodding their heads, vying with each other to tell their tales. They were almost always about women, and the bitterest stories involved children. At first I had felt superior to this, suspecting them of lying and exaggeration, but now I was one of them, the moaners, the loners, the men who felt women had soured the world.

  So I told my story, unwillingly at first, then fuelling up with self-righteous anger, and Rob and Rajeet and Jonah and David all said how appalling Sarah had been. I asked them if they thought me unreasonable, and they told me I was too soft on her. They knew she was a power in Wicca World, and started to blame her for its worst excesses, for hating men, for stealing children, for dressing little boys in skirts … I started to feel uncomfortable; this wasn’t making things any better, for they didn’t know her, the real Sarah, the girl she had been when we first met – No one but me ever really knew Sarah.

  The boys raged on, while I grew quieter. I didn’t want them to insult her. In the end I drifted away from their table and went to another further down the room – taking in a few more beers on the way, I admit that I took in a few more beers – where halfadozen men sat around a screen.

  Billy and Timmy and Richard and Nimit and Ian. I wasn’t surprised to find they were watching something about the campaign against the Doves. They were among the most passionate Dovelovers, and two of their Doves were perched on the tabletop, talking at cross-purposes to each other, which would usually have had everyone howling with laughter, but no one was taking any notice of them –

  Because for a second time, it seemed, the women were trying to steal what we loved. A draft of the proposed new laws about Doves had been leaked by the courts that afternoon. The women had extended the draft legislation far beyond what we had expected. All existing Doves were to be registered and licensed, Dove ownership limited to one per household, all replicants beyond the first generation destroyed (though there’d been no problems with the second generation), a general ban on sales of Replicators, compulsory removal of replicator modules on existing models, immediate destruction of any Dove found to have taken part in ‘unstructured eating’, defined as any act of ingestion taking place outside human control and without use of the eating mat … It was draconian. It went on and on. We watched the screen with increasing indignation.

  ‘They are mean bitches,’ Nimit said.

  ‘It’s grotesque,’ said Ian. ‘Unworkable. We’ll never let them do it. We’ll defend our Doves. They depend on us.’

  ‘One per household! How dare they say that.’ That was Billy, who had a little fleet of halfadozen Doves, plump, pale Billy with his gentle myopic eyes, a man who never went out of the house by daylight but lived happily indoors with his robot family. ‘I love my boys. I won’t let them take them.’

  ‘I agree it’s way over the top,’ I said. ‘But we do have to do something, don’t we? They were mutating. They still are. What about the ones that have disappeared?’ This was another factor in Dove hysteria, the number of Doves who had gone missing. They were all selfstarting replicators, and none of their owners had any explanation. There were probably not more than two or three dozen confirmed cases, hut we all suspected not all losses were reported, for fear of a security hunt to kill.

  ‘Good for them if they have,’ said Richard. ‘They have as much right to live as those bitches.’

  Round the table, several shaved heads were nodding. I thought yet again how dull it was when everyone looked and thought the same. We wore a uniform – bluestubbled heads, lycra vests and calf-length leggings, black cotton jackets with a logo of a Dove and often an ‘add-on’ artificial fur lining, transparent boots that showed off the toenails, which many men kept brightly painted. (But women, who of course never came here, wore an offputting uniform of short hair and shrouds, long featureless garments, sexless sacks above which their heads looked small and hard. They seemed to be determined we should never see their bodies.) We men went in for desperate display, saying, ‘Look at our bodies, our buttocks, our cocks, the shape of our balls. You may not love us but you can’t unmake us.’ I myself wasn’t quite the norm, with my longish curls and my wedding ring, yet wasn’t I one of them, socially, even sexually? For Paul was now more than a charming catamite once or twice a year when I was desperate. He was a friend and confidant, he gave me affection, he mattered to me, and I even caught myself feeling jealous when he went into the massage room with someone else. Still, I didn’t believe all women were bitches.

  ‘It’s just that women and babies are, well – human,’ I said, uncertainly. ‘They’re – natural.’ (Goodgod, I was stealing Sarah’s word, the one I had so often disagreed with, but it seemed to be the only one that would do.) ‘I couldn’t put a Dove’s life before a human’s.’ And yet I loved Dora, in a way.

  ‘Women aren’t human,’ Richard said, and everyone laughed, but I did not.

  ‘So what should we do about the Doves?’ I asked.

  ‘No, what should we do about the women?’ asked Richard. He was slowly getting annoyed with me. ‘I’m never going to stop my Doves reproducing. It’s a human right – well, it’s a right.’ He reddened. ‘It is a right, to reproduce.’

  Yet none of these men could reproduce, because they had no women to carry their babies. And probably our sperm was useless.

  I thought of telling them that I had already removed Dora’s replicator module, but I realised that they would never understand, they would see it as an act of terrible betrayal. I looked round the table. It was chilly in the club, since the heating system they had first installed had been quickly overtaken by the progress of the cold, but everyone around it had bare brawny arms; a dozen male biceps and six male vests that clung to the curves of six male chests. I thought, I must get out of here.

  ‘I see things differently,’ is all I said. Perhaps I should have mentioned my devotion to Dora.

  ‘You’ve been listening to your wife,’ said Richard, angrily. And then, indistinctly, into his beer, partly through cowardice and partly through drink, ‘Bloody Queen of the Witches herself.’ A ripple of laughter ran round the table.

  Why did I lose my temper so completely, when I hated Wicca World myself, their crackpot ideas, their lying screen face
s, the way they had stolen my son from me? Why did I fight for my wife’s honour when she had just told me she was going to divorce me? Whatever the reason, I was suddenly halfway across the table, and both Doves toppled, wailing nasally, their calls of alarm like minisirens, and then I was on top of Richard, crashing my fist into his nose, his chin, his mouth, his teeth, his tongue, and something gave as I punched his face. It was wet, and beer glasses were flying, and plates were crashing to the floor, but I punched his disgusting face again, I knew how to hit, I had boxed as a boy, and gouts of something were hanging off him, snot, and blood, and a tooth on a red string, a little dripping string of flesh (I hated our bodies, they were stupid and useless), I wanted to smash him into the ground, and everyone was shouting and pulling at me.

  Perhaps I had taken too many buzzers, which didn’t always go well with beer. Perhaps Sarah’s letter had turned my brain. It took a dozen men to pull me off him, and someone was yelling that his nose was broken and asking which hospital his contract was with.

  It was all entirely shaming, later, but at the time I felt nothing but hatred, for the club with its banks of gleaming computers and the gleaming hairless bodies of the guys, for Richard and Nimit and Ian and Riswan and Billy and Timmy and even Paul … Though Paul brought me home in a taxi that night, tenderly wiping a cut on my forehead, delicately picking broken glass from my hair, keeping a protective arm round my shoulder, and came to the door, and wanted to come in, wanted me to want him to come in, I thanked him brusquely and sent him away.

  That’s what happens, you see, when you lose too much, when too many things all go at once. It happened to me; I had a kind of breakdown, and all over the world things were breaking down, cracking under too many new strains, like hot water pipes in a sudden frost. A hot water pipe! Such a simple thing, one of the million things that we all took for granted, but the world cooled down and everything changed, metal piping soon became something to loot, something to cannibalise, something to fight with, something worth killing or dying for. Not that that means a lot, any more. Hardly a day without a death.