The Ice People

by Maggie Gee

  This was my son, my longlost son. Now he was the hero of the story. It was an extraordinary sight, his white, slightly awkward, undefended body, surrounded by the old and middleaged with their leather armour, their creaking fetishes. The beauty of my naked boy, and his clear pure voice like a silver thread, singing opera, now, singing Figaro … I’m sure that some of them were aroused, but some, I think, were moved and saddened, and it was the music, now, that took over, dissolving the hatred and the terror and the difference, telling us there was a common land, full, absorbing, warm, sufficient … Voi, che sapete che cosa e amor, donne vedete, s’io l’ho net cor … You who know what love is, ladies, see whether it is in my heart … I began to feel sure that they would not hurt him, that his godgiven talent had saved our lives. Gelo, e poi sento l’alma avvampar, e in un momento torno a gelar … I freeze, then I feel my soul burning up, and in a moment I’m freezing again …

  But quite soon, Luke began to look tired. I glanced at my watch. It was two AM Non trovo pace notte, nedi … I find no peace, by night or day … Now my hurt body badly wanted to sleep, but my mind told me stay awake, stay awake. It had a nightmarish, unending quality, these strange ageing men in thrall to my son. Sento un affetto pien de desir … All of them watched him; I felt their desire, I started to wander, I started to shiver. My whole being was involved with Luke, the bright line of his voice running on through the labyrinth, his brave white body, his terrifying sex, for I’d never really looked at it before, and no one must look at it, but everyone saw it, his body burned into our consciousness, with the white flag at the centre of it, the flag of all we were, and all we’d lost.

  I admit I had forgotten Briony.

  Until she touched the nape of my neck, very gently, but I winced away, then saw it was her. And she had the gun. She had got the gun, under the cover of the music – Briony was my heroine. The Frenchmen seemed to have forgotten us, gathered round Luke, oblivious. Briony and I were at the back of the crowd. Then I noticed her curious expression – a look of strained concentration. She was frowning across at the other door, which led to the room whose French window I’d smashed – she was gazing at it with fixed horror.

  I looked, and saw nothing; just the darkness. And then I realised – then I saw them. Saw them come like the end of a dream.

  There were things moving silkily out of the shadows, little animals – no, too smooth to be animals. I looked again. I couldn’t believe it, pullulating, greybrown things, swaying, quivering, almost silent – only the two of us had seen them. A kind of viscous river of life, not properly formed, with a faint oily sheen – as they came into the light I caught a greasy shimmer – and then I smelled them, and knew they were robots, that faint sweet smell of hot xylon that Dora always gave off in action. They had no feathers; they were shiny, slimy, but their body shape was vaguely familiar, the vestigial heads still basically birdlike, with Dora’s wideset stupid eyes, inexpressibly scary in those halfformed faces. A stream of robot foetuses – and yet, no robot had ever harmed me. ‘Don’t worry,’ I mouthed at Briony, just as the first one shot out a long tentacle, a gleaming proboscis, towards the crowd. Jesus, it was pointing straight at Luke. And then something arced in a gleaming whiplash – but Briony – mygod, mygod – she had the carbine in her arms, she hefted it up to her shoulder and shot, a single shattering explosion. Chaos erupted, but I saw, amazed, that she’d hit her target, shot it to pieces, beginner’s luck, the thing jerked, curled, and its tentacle shrivelled with a vile stench of burning. But the other brown beasts swarmed on regardless, unfazed by the explosion, unstoppable, a foul dun current, a river of shit, surging towards the herd of humans.

  I pushed straight through to the heart of the crowd and caught my son’s arm as the first brown creature fastened itself to the skin of his elbow. I yanked Luke away, and the gleaming member clung for a second, then lost its grip, with a sucking sound that sickened my stomach – Flinging the duvet round Luke’s body, I stumbled backwards after Briony, and the creatures, mysteriously, swerved away from us, clamping themselves on to the leather jackets, clinging like leeches to arms and shoulders. I saw one slide round Fatty’s neck, and he squirmed and screamed and thrashed at it, then the quick bright flash of its proboscis, and the flesh of his cheek was sliced like chicken – sliced then sucked. One eye was gone. I looked away as blood and bone spattered. Men were being rendered down to meat.

  We ploughed through a scrum of falling bodies and stumbled out into the hall, and there, by a miracle, was Dora, where the musicians must have left her. Luke and I snatched her up in our arms, the front door yielded, we fell down the steps. Behind us there were noises like belling cattle; they were human beings, but they died like cattle. As a child I’d lived near a slaughterhouse; you never forget the sound of terror. I pushed Luke and Dora into the car, with Dora sprawled across my son, and Briony jumped in and slammed the door –

  We screeched past the file of cars in the drive, then helterskelter down the road.

  When you’re very afraid, you don’t feel pain. Later I found out that my humerus was fractured, but endorphins, the body’s own natural lullane, ensured that I hardly noticed it hurting until we were fifty kilometres away, and then I realised I couldn’t go on, and handed over to Briony. We simply drove, too shocked to speak, after the first little frenzy of swearwords.

  The sky was faintly yellow, an hour before sunrise, when Luke spoke up from the back of the car.

  ‘What were they?’ he asked me. ‘They were … disgusting.’

  ‘Must be some French invention,’ I answered. I know it sounds stupid, but I hadn’t understood.

  ‘No,’ said Briony ‘I don’t think so. I think they were mutants. Mutant Doves.’

  ‘Mygod,’ I said. ‘Yes. Of course. You know, I’ve never seen a mutant. I guess that life mutates very fast when a generation only takes a day –’

  ‘With highly developed SD and R. Which was always a bit of a euphemism. Remember those Hawks. They were meant to be guard-dogs … “Self-Defend” meant “Attack”, didn’t it –?’

  “‘Recycle” meant “Eat”. Doves eat anything. Seemed like an advantage when they were pets.’ (And yet, it hadn’t always been an advantage. My vanished cat. The bald patch of earth.)

  ‘Did you see how their colours had degraded?’ she asked. ‘Bright colours don’t help them survive. Wicca had to deal with a lot like that. They were a pack. A hunting pack.’

  I suddenly recalled the old man in the village who’d told me to ‘watch out for the others’. This was what he meant – mutants, not wild boys. ‘Why did they go for the musicians, not us?’

  She was concentrating on the road, whose surface had suddenly changed to cart tracks. With every bump, the pain in my shoulder was hellish. After a while the road improved, and she answered me. ‘Maybe because of their clothes. Leather and nuskin are both organic. Very digestible. Particularly nuskin – that cloned goatskin is so soft. And Luke was naked. The most tempting of all. In fact, that duvet probably saved him. The case is synthetic. Which I thought was a pity … I’ve changed my mind. Luke, you were so brave – ’

  Luke said sternly ‘We shouldn’t have left. I mean, they were … human. So are we.’

  I didn’t feel good about it either, and yet I was glad we had got away. ‘Your musical friends made a nice mess of my arm. Go to sleep, Luke. I was proud of you.’

  I think of it still: I try to remember. Both utterly strange and horribly familiar, the scavenging things coming after us. In my mind I can never see them clearly, and yet we all sensed what they were. The nightmare end of the robot dream. Shimmering, stinking, sucking us down. We knew so much, understood so little, we ran when we could hardly stand – leaving the mess, the shit behind us. Then in the end it followed us.

  And I think of my son: Luke singing, naked. My wild boy, brave, uncorrupted.

  What did he see, looking out at us, the haggard faces in the audience?

  Cults and castes and loneliness. The ravenous n
eed of a world grown old.

  Why did our children run away?

  16

  As we drove into the mountains, as we took the first foothills, I couldn’t help feeling happy, despite my exhaustion, watching Briony’s profile against the sunrise, beautiful Briony breasting the dawn – Briony was an amazing woman. Kind, and brave, and – tender – and lucky, because shooting that robot, with her first shot – she had saved Luke’s life. I could never thank her. Yet when we were alone (which was very rarely) I only seemed to talk about Sarah.

  ‘I’m falling asleep,’ she muttered, and opened the window to freshen her head. The air was marvellous, bitter cold, and I smelled the sharp green scent of the firs. There were churches, or rather the ruins of churches, for as we drew closer we could see the damage, pretty Romanesque buildings a millennium old that had probably been looted quite recently, their rafters bare of tiles and blackened, some of them hacked off, I suppose for firewood, their beautiful arched windows blinded, the stone nibbled by giant rats. To stand for over a thousand years, and then be ruined in a generation …!

  Soon we were winding up through the mountains, alone on the road, and the trees were thinning. The sun was brilliant, I closed my eyes … I think I slept for an hour or more, but then I was uncomfortably awake again, the pain in my shoulder like sharpened wire. We were inching up through fields of scree with just the occasional stunted conifer, grey scattered rocks and wizened bushes, going on for so long that I dozed again despite the perpetual switchback of the slopes. The next time I opened my eyes I was dazzled. There was snow everywhere; the world had turned white. Snowwhite banks on each side of the road sloped up and away to snowcovered mountains, and ahead of us, leading up to the pass, the sunlit snowfields went on forever. There was a little fresh snow here and there on the road, and our tyres crunched soothingly across it. I think that I began to feel lucky. Away to the left, through a lateral valley, we saw in the distance crumpled white peaks, the higher Pyrenees to the east, silvery, magical, minutely shaded, pink with the morning, blue with distance.

  I wished we were on holiday, I wished we could cream through the dreamlike snowfields and then, when we were tired and peckish, circle back smoothly into the past, hotels and meals and money and safety …

  But the winter world stretched on forever, and the car was so cold that our breath made plumes. We stopped for me to have a piss. I made steaming black holes in the perfect surface. The silence was unearthly, oppressive, as if all the human beings had died. We just heard a few unrecognisable calls of birds or beasts in the middle distance, cries of lust or hunger in a minor key, a lonely sound, not meant for our ears, part of a world that would outlive us.

  Luke couldn’t stop exclaiming at the view. Of course, he had seen little for years but the inside of his horrible female nursery. Briony seemed to feel liberated too, smiling and chattering to Luke over her shoulder. Every few miles we passed a wrecked car, generally with everything pillaged, wheelless, windowless, its metal rusted, but that was normal on any road. On the horizon once or twice we saw matchstick figures with antsize animals, but we saw no other travellers, though weather conditions seemed so good. Probably it was simply too early.

  My spirits were rising by the moment. We might get to the top in less than an hour; the road wasn’t bad, despite occasional rockfalls that made us drive too near the edge. The fresh snow seemed to have petered out. We had survived three tests already. The mountain pass might be our last, and travelling at this rate we’d be over by nightfall. Once we had crested the Roncesvalles Pass we would coast across Spain, southwards, sunwards. I imagined hot plains, true summer heat, white walls of houses in blazing sun, and soon their blankness grew confused with the snowfields …

  I must have been asleep for over an hour when the car woke me with its new strange rhythm. It caught a little; it choked; stalled. Then the road dipped, and it went back to normal. When we climbed again, the stuttering returned. I was trying to concentrate on this when Briony’s unbelieving voice reached me.

  ‘Saul. The fuel tank can’t be empty? Have we got a can in the back?’

  ‘No. But you’re right, it can’t be empty. I filled up in the village yesterday.’ The fuel gauge said empty, but it wasn’t reliable.

  ‘I don’t suppose we’ve got a hole in the tank.’

  I cut her off. ‘You’re being neurotic.’

  She went on driving for four hundred metres before the road suddenly steepened sharply. The car coughed, strained, then ground to a halt.

  I got out and looked. The tank seemed all right. I checked it over and saw nothing. Then Briony looked, and spotted a tiny crack right along the corner. That was the problem with hubron cars, which had been so popular when I was a boy. They were amazingly cheap, and extraordinarily light, onethird the weight of fibreglass, but they shattered unpredictably. You could mend them in minutes with a hubron melder, but the one that came with the car was a dud, as we had discovered back in Normandie. Ever since we’d been praying that nothing would go wrong.

  ‘What now?’ Briony asked, and just for a second she leaned her head against my shoulder, but I winced away involuntarily, in pain. I could think of nothing to say to her.

  The snow stretched blankly away on all sides. It was still pretty early; nine AM, but soon other travellers would be on the road, other travellers, strangers, dangers. A dog, or some other creature, howled. I believe I kicked the car quite hard, waking up Luke, who asked what was the matter.

  ‘We’re fucked, that’s all,’ I may have said.

  ‘Tea,’ said Briony. I knew she was right. I got out the primus, and we used our bottled water, for with all this snow we should never want for water. I felt better with the tea, and we ate some tinned ham, and started to think what we could do. Should I hike back down the mountain and look for fuel? Should we flag down the next car and beg or buy just enough fuel to get us over the mountain?

  ‘They’ll never stop,’ Briony said. ‘I mean, we might be murderers.’

  ‘He is a murderer,’ Luke quipped.

  It made me think. How far would I go? I had a gun. If we stopped a car I could siphon off all their fuel at gunpoint, I didn’t have to play Mr Nice Guy. But I was Samuel’s son, a policeman’s son. Yes, but he’s dead, another voice said. And it will get very cold, on this mountain. Do something, or you’ll die too.

  ‘We could try on foot,’ said Luke. ‘There must be footpaths across these mountains –’

  ‘– But we don’t have maps. And how about Dora? She can only toddle a few hundred metres.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ His face fell. ‘I was forgetting her …’

  ‘We can’t consider Dora,’ said Briony. ‘There are three human beings to think about.’ She looked guiltily over towards the car, as if afraid that Dora might hear her.

  ‘If we had something to use as a sledge, I could push her,’ said Luke.

  I was touched by his affection for Dora, after all that time when he hadn’t even liked her, but if we went on foot, it would be without her. And we’d have to leave most of our possessions behind. Useful ones, like stoves and food stores. And precious ones, like my few books and pictures and family letters and photographs – things I had not been able to leave.

  Perhaps now at last I could be rid of them.

  I think I understood, in that brief moment, why Luke wanted to go on foot. There was something exciting as well as frightening about the thought of getting rid of it all, the nets of history, the lifelong mistakes, and starting again, just us and the mountain. There must be a lot Luke would like to forget. He could start again, be a nomad, a caveman.

  Only Luke wasn’t old enough to be a man.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll go back for fuel. My legs are all right. I can carry lefthanded.’

  But Briony shook her head. ‘In your condition, you won’t make it.’

  We looked at each other, the gallant band. The brilliant light made everything unnaturally clear, and bright, and painful. I remember the co
lour of Briony’s irises, icy blue with rifts of gold, and the blonde rats’-tails of her hair. Luke’s cheeks were pinkened by cold and adolescence. The intense cold was like a photograph, freezing us into a single frame. How much I felt I loved them at that moment, more, suddenly, because we were in danger. We’d come so far, but our luck had run out.

  Then Briony started talking again. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if we all pushed together … I think we might be very near the top. I told you I came over here before? I was eighteen, with my first boyfriend. He wanted to walk the old pilgrim’s route, el camino de Santiago, which leads through the pass of Roncesvalles –’

  ‘I know about Roncesvalles,’ Luke interrupted, eager to show off. ‘ We did it in history. It’s where Roland was killed, and he blew his horn, but I forget what happened … All the birds dropped dead, I think that was it. He was the bravest of them all.’

  ‘I have a feeling we’re very near,’ Briony went on, smiling faintly. ‘If only we can get the car to the top. There was a monastery up there. Incredibly old. Reconsecrated in the twenties. I’m sure the monks would let us have some fuel.’

  ‘But how can I push like this?’ I lamented.

  ‘Luke and I can do most of it,’ she said, nodding firmly. ‘I’d better push from the front, hadn’t I? Steer and push, through the front door. We’ll take it in very easy stages. This car may be crap, but at least it’s light.’

  The car was light, but we were heavily loaded – yet Luke was nodding, brighteyed, determined. I got up and stared back down the mountain. The road wound away into the far distance, a thin black line in the expanse of snow. Below I remembered the endless foothills. Along the horizon I saw tiny clouds, grey and white mixed, small but busy, bubbling slightly like life in a pond. I had a sudden sense of urgency.

  I went to the rear and put my back into the car, trying to protect my damaged arm. Luke and I pushed side by side.