The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  There were guards, of course, to our building, but all the same, one of them was fairly new, and didn’t they say that security firms often recruited criminals?

  Every time I left my Dora, I was anxious. She looked so trusting, so vulnerable, as she padded after me to the door, and said, as I stroked the ‘Goodbye’ panel, ‘Are you leaving? Must you go?’

  Are you leaving! Must you go! It felt wonderful, but was she getting too attached?

  I was getting too attached, that was the problem.

  Luke and Sarah came back one midwinter weekend. She didn’t ring up. She didn’t warn me. Perhaps she was hoping that I’d have gone out, that she could just take their things and go. (Quite a lot of their stuff had already gone, and that in a way was almost a relief, for I could suddenly be reduced to tears by a small pair of sandshoes under the table.)

  No, I really think she halfwanted to see me; love doesn’t disappear overnight. Or else she’d have rung up and found out my movements, and arrived when she was sure I was out.

  They came late. I had had a curious day, the days that solitary people have, when nothing much happens but your moods veer wildly. The weekends could be frightening when there was no work to do and no one to quarrel with. I missed my son more at weekends. I sat in his room for a bit, stared at the wall, at the posters I had given him of footballers and mountaineers, at the little keyboard he had long outgrown, at his narrow bed, which I’d left unmade because it somehow looked more lived in, more as if he’d just left the flat that morning, though I knew it meant that when Sarah came back she would scream at me for being untidy …

  It is a fault in women (particularly ‘sensitive’ ones, sensitive only to their own pain) that they tend to dismiss men as thickheaded clods, and see all our motives as simple and coarse, just because we don’t talk about our feelings. I had feelings for my son. I sat there paralysed. I played some recordings of his voice that she had left lying on his bedside table. His beautiful voice poured through the flat, high, soaring, unforgettable, but I wanted his ordinary daytime voice, asking for a pair of socks, or chocolate.

  The morning slipped away like that. Then I spent some quality time with Dora. I was more tempted than usual to use the Replicate function. I even touched it, lightly, very lightly, nothing dangerous, the merest caress … But she’d spoken, abruptly businesslike, twice, ‘Do you want me to replicate? Do you want me to replicate?’ And I had answered, rather shamefaced, ‘No’, feeling I had somehow interfered with her.

  By teatime I was extremely depressed. Deciding I should refresh my knowledge so I knew what I was meddling with, I went and scanned through my information about replication and selfassembly in nanomachines. Our publicists had done a preliminary fanfare. ‘Nanomachines’, which were aggregates, in any case, could certainly ‘build in parallel, with many billions of molecular machines working at once.’ All that was required was some kind of fuel – of course any organic material could fuel the Doves – and an ability to copy a pattern. If the copies weren’t quite perfect, so much the better; that was how life had always evolved, through the random occurrence of mutations, some of which helped the next generation to survive, breed better, faster, multiply. ‘The next giant step for machines’ would be ‘To learn through time, on their own. Not only to adapt, but evolve.’

  Not such a giant step, I thought. Computers had been ‘Solving Through Evolving’ (in my own Nanocorp’s slogan) for over half a century, since computer scientists realised artificial intelligence worked better and faster if left alone to race its way through myriad permutations, just like recombining DNA …

  My attention wandered. I’d been left alone. I told myself, I must adapt and evolve, I must learn to live in this new lonely world, I must experiment and find solutions, but instead I read on, and dozed and dreamed, till suppertime, and felt a lot better. Then I took a long bath. Dora toddled in behind me and squatted singing in the bathroom. She liked the steam; Doves revived in moisture, it gave their ‘skin’ a healthy sheen. I felt very glad of her company. On impulse, I sponged her back and feet. She said ‘Thank you. That’s very nice.’ And it did feel tender. It reminded me of something.

  The flat was hot because I’d borrowed my neighbour’s three blowers to dry a week’s worth of dirty clothes (if I had a criticism of the Doves, it was that they had no adaptations for washing. In that way, they resembled modern women. I’d sketched out several letters to the manufacturers.) After soaking in the bath I was too hot to put my clothes on. Yes, simply too hot, whatever anyone said later, I wasn’t used to it any more, since the Cooling … I poured myself a whisky, a very large whisky, and went with Dora into the bedroom.

  She hopped on to the bed, as she usually did, though she sometimes missed, and did her piteous cheeping, which made me laugh, as I picked her up, and then she laughed too, which must have been programmed, but I think I only halfbelieved it was a programme, she surely did things that no other Dove did, she was somehow special, she really liked me …

  She snuggled up beside me. Or I settled her besides me. I had a long drink. I wanted a cigar, so I had a cigar, because no one else was there, and I shut out Sarah’s voice saying ‘No’ from my head because she didn’t care, had never cared about me.

  I had another drink. Dora was very beautiful, her innocent, transparent lashes, the downward, modest cast of her head like the pictures of Victorian women. I tried one or two of our conversations, and I somehow knew, though the words were the same, that more was being said than the actual words, and there was a kind of understanding between us. Then I switched her over to ‘Singalong’. We sang long-forgotten rugby songs together. I had another drink, then another, then another …

  Which was why, when Sarah and Luke arrived, I was lying unconscious on the bed ‘with a smouldering cigar on the bloody bedspread’ (though if I were unconscious, how could it be smouldering? Even I can’t smoke a cigar in my sleep), ‘buck naked’ (a phrase that’s always made me uneasy; I was only naked because it was hot) and ‘that bloody disgusting thing on top of you’ – hold on, if she were on top of me, she had simply fallen over (stability was never a strong point with Doves), and she wasn’t disgusting, Dora, ever, even Sarah must have seen that my Dodo was sweet –

  I may have briefly wondered whether Sarah could be jealous. This affair was all ridiculous, absurd, but apparently I giggled, which made things worse, and then Dora joined in, which was not her fault, and said ‘I feel happy. Isn’t life fun?’ and although I don’t remember very clearly, someone, who must have been Sarah, screamed, and Dora crashed helplessly off the bed.

  Next day it all became very serious. I was crippled with headache, and Luke was crying, and saying ‘You promised not to divorce Daddy,’ which made me realise that was what she would do. Sarah said she would never have believed I could let her down so badly in front of a child. Dora had been banished to a corner of the screenroom. It looked to me as though she were slightly crooked. I suspected Sarah of covert violence, but probably she had just pushed her off the bed. Sarah was packing, with furious energy, such few possessions as she required. Her dyed red hair flew out in snakes, her white arms whipped and thrashed the air as if she would beat our world to death because it had disappointed her. I felt powerless to stop her raging progress, partly because of my hangover, partly because of a sense of unreality, a sense that we were sliding into farce –

  But Luke. His pale child’s face, lengthening, strengthening towards adolescence, his worried mouth, his stricken eyes – Luke was real. Luke was tragic. He hardly spoke, just watched us both, his head turning from one to the other, and I thought he looked frighteningly adult till he suddenly said, at some irrelevant moment, ‘Can I play with Dora? – I suppose I can’t.’

  ‘Juno was right,’ his mother was raging. ‘They’re – completely unnatural. They’re wrong. They’re perverted. Do you know, one ate a sleeping cat?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said blankly, ‘that’s utter nonsense.’

  ‘It was o
n the news,’ Luke said eagerly, with a child’s enthusiasm for horror.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said to his mother. ‘It’s propaganda. It’s bloody Juno. It’s Wicca World rubbish, isn’t it?’

  ‘You were in bed with that thing,’ she shouted at me. ‘And then you dare to start criticising us –’

  As if Wicca World were above criticism.

  And yet I had a feeling of sick fear. I remembered the day we went out on the picnic beyond Duxford with our first Dove, and how suddenly the grass was bare, that little dark patch of brutalised land. That sudden uneasy sense of its power.

  But a cat – a cat. Not possible.

  ‘It just left the collar, because it was plastic,’ said Luke, helpfully. ‘And bits of fur. And the girl was crying. It was her cat. She couldn’t switch it off. The switch had broke …’

  (I thought of our cats’ long vulnerable tails, weaving in their wake as they avoided Dora. But Dora was kind. Dora was safe …)

  ‘That’s enough, darling,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re going.’

  ‘When shall I see you again?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t leave in the middle of a stupid quarrel. I just got drunk last night, that’s all –’

  But she interrupted, before I could explain, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s still disgusting. I shan’t discuss it. He’s only eleven.’

  ‘Twelve,’ I corrected her, I couldn’t resist, but it made things worse.

  ‘And you forgot his birthday.’

  ‘I didn’t. But you won’t bloody give me your address.’

  ‘Because we have a lot of enemies. Wicca World has enemies. Disgusting people. Terrible people –’

  Now I had become one of them.

  10

  Things moved fast after that, in several wrong directions.

  Sarah moved out. Although she had been with me so irregularly, the flat felt empty in a different way. Small details hurt; the missing patch of pink where her wrap always hung open on our bedroom door. The bathroom, surgically stripped of all her pretty paints and powders. She took the kettle, and the gilded bowl she once kept piled to the brim with apples, and my favourite mugs, three matching mugs painted with jaunty, impossible bluebirds, which used to hang on the wall in a line.

  (One of the cats went missing at around the same time. In my griefstunned state I could never quite remember if I’d let them both out that morning, as usual, or whether one had got left behind. And if he had … Not a hair remained. His brother, Snowball, grew stout and nervous. We had called them ‘the boys’, like the original pair we had bought in the early days of our marriage to fill up the emptiness in the flat. Now there was one boy. He mourned, like me.)

  I clung to the hopeless phone numbers that never let me through to Sarah. I rang them, often, nevertheless, and doggedly questioned whoever answered. The first time I asked after ‘my family’, but I could sense the antagonism at the other end, like a knifepoint pressed against my eardrum. I learned I must ask for ‘Luke and Sarah Trelawney’.

  Mostly the women were noncommittal. Of course they were fine. Of course Luke was well. Happy? ‘Of course he is perfectly contented.’ I suspect that they took many such calls, from one or other wretched father. After I had phoned I always felt worse.

  Then one day I got a familiar soft voice with a strong westcountry tang. I realised it was Briony, the cornblonde girl who had come to the flat, the totally implausible ‘Weapons Officer’ in whom I’d sensed a certain sympathy for me, a certain reservation about Sarah’s manner.

  ‘Is that Briony?’ I asked, desperately. ‘It’s Luke’s father. We met. Saul. Please can you give me some news of my son. No one will tell me anything.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s fine, and all that.’ Another pause. ‘But he misses you. Perhaps – have you thought of – You know you can apply to come to see him?’

  ‘I’m banned,’ I said. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘It’s not my department,’ she said. ‘But there’s no formal ban on men. Men are welcome to vote for Wicca … Some men do support us, you know. We want a better world for everybody –’

  I wasn’t going to listen to their propaganda. ‘I’m not a man, I’m a father. I love my son. Don’t you understand? They won’t even let me talk to him.’

  I heard her breathing. She sounded upset. ‘I can’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ And then she put the phone down.

  It was a Saturday in spring. I was beside myself. I drank four cups of coffee and smoked like a chimney, then opened all the windows and played Wagner very loud, so loudly that I nearly didn’t hear the door.

  It was Briony with Luke. He fell into my arms, crying ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ Briony looked pale and apprehensive. ‘I’ve taken a risk doing this,’ she said. ‘Just half an hour, okay? Then we go.’

  She went into the screen room and left us alone. He wore green xylon dungas, the knee-length kind, and was taller, of course, and his hair had grown, curling down almost to his shoulders, and the proportion of his features had changed, or something was different about his face. Did he look somehow more handsome than before? I began to imagine he was wearing lipstick, but of course his lips had always been red. He was kissing me passionately, and I felt confused, his thin bony body was squeezed against mine, loving, needy, like a baby or a woman; but this was my son, my lad, my boy. The tears were running down his cheeks, and I realised they were mine as well.

  ‘Lukey,’ I said. ‘Lukey, Lukey.’

  ‘Some people call me Lucy,’ he said. ‘At the Cocoon. It’s my new name.’

  My heart began to thump with anger, but I swallowed it and asked him quite calmly if he minded.

  ‘First of all I thought it was silly,’ he said, ‘but now I don’t notice. And they don’t always do it, anyway. It’s because … I’ve forgotten what they said. Something about boys being like girls.’

  ‘Your name is Luke,’ I said. ‘You’re a boy.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, as if it was obvious. We hugged again. My heart was still pounding. They were all crazy. The world had gone mad. And what was this ‘Cocoon’? Were they turning into insects? ‘I did once want to be a girl,’ he continued. ‘I mean, it’s not that horrible, being a girl. Just a bit stupid,’ which made me laugh. ‘Girls are hopeless at football, and maths.’

  It was good to know some things hadn’t changed. I was glad Sarah wasn’t there to contradict him. ‘Do you still play football?’

  His face fell. ‘Not really. But I still know about it. I’m still good. I watch it on the screens. When they think we’re in bed. I practise in my bedroom, nearly every day. I haven’t got a ball, but I do the moves.’

  Half an hour together. We played a game of Goofball. Sarah never let him play ball inside, but now I let him, now we played, his yellow curls flying through the strips of sunlight, his long shins flashing too pale as he ran, but he was laughing and shrieking, a wonderful sound. He fought with me too, and he was getting stronger, there was a wiry strength in him I’d never felt before. But Lucy. Lucy!

  Mad evil bitches.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we have to go,’ Briony called through from the hall.

  She put out her arms to comfort Luke, who stood frozen in his doorway, tense and dejected, and I briefly noticed her wellbuilt muscles, which didn’t seem to go with her soft round cheeks.

  ‘Why won’t they bloody let me see him?’ I hissed, in controlled fury, as they left. ‘Don’t any of the fathers see their kids?’

  ‘Most of them don’t want to.’ But she looked uncomfortable. ‘Men are sometimes irresponsible. With you, it’s more that I believe there was some trouble. . .’

  ‘With Sarah, you mean? Yes, so what?’

  ‘She’s very concerned about male anger.’

  She parroted that. I did want to smack her. She wasn’t very old, and she knew nothing, and I’d never hurt Sarah, nor my son. ‘I’ve never been violent, if that’s what she’s saying.’

  They were backing
away from me down the landing. ‘Twelve is an impressionable age … It’s to do with role models, Sarah says.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Luke, ‘when am I going to see you?’

  ‘You’d better ask your bloody mother,’ I said.

  Violent? I had never been violent! But as soon as they disappeared into the lift, I nipped back into the flat, got my car coder, and followed. I had to know where my lying wife lived. How else could I launch a firebomb attack on Wicca? It was a tall red building on the Marylebone Road. It burned into my mind like a witch’s finger.

  Winter lingered into that spring. There were elections in April, and pundits predicted a low turnout because of the cold (yet only five years earlier they were blaming the heat. The fact was, people had lost faith in elections). What was the vote – ten or twelvepercent? Two- percent lower than ever before. Elections of course were already a shadow of what they had been in the twentiethcentury, when the socalled Parliament still played a real role, when there were centralised policeforces, hospitals, schools – but our Speakers still had some importance because of their weekly access to the screens. They could affect people’s buypower, and sometimes their opinions.

  Wicca World stood in the elections. There must have been money behind them somewhere, because they bought screentime on several channels. Sarah didn’t stand as a candidate, but hovered in the background as Mother of the Party. Doubtless her old screen connections helped. She was interviewed several times, very upbeat. We were on the verge of a ‘caring revolution’ … Mother of the Party! Ha, I thought. I could tell the world a thing or two about her mothering.

  We roared with laughter when one of their campaign films came on at the club. It showed radiant, kindly, softfocus women (I recognised Briony’s face among them) dancing in a caring ring, in green fields, around a herd of blonde children. The voiceover spoke about ‘revaluing nature’, ‘nurturing the future’; ‘the future is green’. We would ‘bloom again’ with the ‘cooling earth’. We would ‘give thanks to the Goddess’ for water (some footage of flowing rivers, with laughing women drinking from them), clean air (shots of blue sky, and clouds) and earth (a troop of women digging, with spades, old-fashioned twentiethcentury spades, in rich black earth, among redberried bushes. They looked very cheerful. Had they just buried their husbands?). Then the film came on to that vexed topic, Men. Some men, it seemed, had taken a wrong turning (sinister, repetitive music over shots of bald men in studded leather, bent over banks of flickering screens, blending into shots of other men whooping and yelling with glee as they played on a simulated weapons range – we had one at the club; I was a top scorer – while in a subliminal halfsecond image, two furtive men disappeared round a corner together, and the audience at the Scientists whistled and ‘Frohr’ed and catcalled and slapped one another with glee). But Wicca were at pains to say not all men were bad. Men were basically loving (now ‘L’après-midi d’un faune’ rose tenderly over a shot of Michelangelo’s David, his penis looking smaller and milder than usual, and another shot of Jesus, surrounded by children, with big kind eyes and flowing hair). Men had a part to play in Wicca too! If we voted for Wicca we voted for a future where contradictions could be reconciled, where hatred could be turned into love, Outsiders (who had votes) could be Insiders (shots of laughing actors playing Outsiders, not dirty and thin, as the real ones were, but brown and happy – thanks to Wicca? – being greeted and embraced on a fat woman’s doorstep); where the old could be young, the ill well, black white … The film returned to its opening shots, the ring of smiling, sunlit women, then panned out to show, all across the meadow, a motley collection of contented people representing every possible voting interest, many of them men, waving to the women (waving their children goodbye, I thought), showing support for the triumphant climax, as chords surged up under that throbbing, urgent, thrilling voice, which I suspected was Juno’s, saying ‘Vote for Wicca. Wicca Cares’ To my horror I realised what the music was. It was ‘Nessun Dorma’. Was that Sarah’s idea? Had she given away our special music?