The Ice People (12 page)

She’d made a lovely picnic, just like the old days, hollowedout baguettes with egg and fishlax, stuffed okra, crystallised grapes, mango juicecubes and breadfruit cookies. Beyond the wood was a little field, one corner of it heavily shaded, the grass, remarkably, almost green, and when we got there we saw it was because there was water running under the hollies.

‘Rivers are coming back’, I said, smiling at Sarah, who smiled in return. ‘The water table might soon be back to normal. Really, you know, it’s a miracle.’

‘It’s almost chilly in this shade,’ she said, ‘but no, this is perfect, I’m not complaining. It’s such a luxury to feel cool.’ I put down the Dove with a sigh of relief. Luke ran off and explored the stream, and his singing mingled with the sound of the water, a wonderful sound, a weekend sound, while we bustled about in the picnic basket, clattering glasses and cutlery, the noise of a happy family in the storybooks I had read as a child.

The Dove sat silent, almost forgotten. Sarah poured us both a glass of wine from the wine chiller. We chinked glasses, briefly, looked at each other. Luke’s voice wove on, silvery, summery. ‘Perhaps it will all be all right,’ I said. ‘You know. Perhaps – everything’s turned a corner. Maybe the earth is healing itself.’ I wasn’t just talking about our planet.

‘I hope so,’ she said, and her voice was warm, but her face was a blank against the yellow daze of the sunny field behind her head.

‘For Luke’s sake, too,’ I continued, drinking deeply. The wine had never tasted so good. ‘He’s only happy when we’re happy.’

At that moment he came back, looking unusually boyish with mud on his knees and his shorts half soaked. ‘You’re wet,’ said Sarah with the sharp anxiety she justified as maternal love.

‘It’s a proper river, not a stream,’ he said. ‘I climbed out along a branch. It snapped.’

‘He’s all right,’ I said. ‘He’s having fun.’

‘His chest,’ she began, then saw me frown, and tried to relax, and almost managed it.

‘Aren’t you going to switch our Dove on?’ asked Luke.

‘Actually I did,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ve just remembered, it didn’t come on.’

‘It’s out of fuel, then,’ said Luke. ‘Bother. I wanted to play with it.’

‘Wait till after lunch,’ I suggested. ‘It could feed on our leftovers, surely.’

‘You didn’t bring the feeding mat,’ said Sarah, though it was she who packed the car. Those little unfairnesses you never forget …

‘Probably not essential,’ I said.

‘After lunch’ wasn’t soon enough for Luke. ‘I want it now. You promised,’ he said. ‘You could give it some of our sandwiches.’

‘You’ll just have to wait,’ I told him.

‘No.’ Like his mother, he was obstinate. ‘It isn’t fair. I hate you, Dad.’ He started tugging at the Dove. I went on distributing stuffed okra, bent over the basket, swatting at a fly.

Suddenly I heard a familiar sound, the faint whirring and whooshing of our new pet. Turning, I saw Luke and Sarah gazing at the Dove in astonishment. It was squatting on the grass, and the sound had shifted to the gentle slurping it made when feeding.

‘I put it on ‘‘RefuelRecycle’’, said Luke. ‘It’s doing it. It’s feeding off the grass.’

His face was triumphant, but Sarah’s was uneasy. ‘I don’t think you should do that, should you? Go on, switch it off. I mean, it’s not our grass.’ She appealed to me. ‘Saul, it doesn’t feel right.’

‘I don’t see what harm it can do,’ I said, though I was shaken, I didn’t know why. The Dove powered up in not much longer than it would have taken if we were at home. It tried to stumble up towards the sunlight, but fell on the uneven ground. Luke righted it, and it said, ‘Thank you.’ Outside in the open, it looked even more real. I made Luke switch it off until he’d eaten his lunch, which he did at a thousand kilometres per hour. Then he dragged the Dove over towards the river. It looked like a mutant, lurching child.

‘Be careful,’ I told him. ‘It’s valuable.’ Of course it was probably already obsolete, succeeded by a host of more sophisticated models.

Sarah and I sat and looked in silence at the oval of bare ground where the Dove had been. The earth looked brown, and abraded, without a blade of grass. I had never realised their power before. ‘Goodgod, Saul,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know they could do that. I thought they only ate the things we gave them.’

‘I don’t think I ever thought about it. Doesn’t mention it, in the instructions.’

‘Maybe no one knows.’ Sarah said, slowly. ‘I mean … it’s not
dangerous,
is it? We had to switch it on before it could do it …’

I tried to comfort her. She was frightened. It was my fault for saying Luke could bring the thing along. I think I managed to reassure her; but why did I feel so shaken myself?

There was a sudden terrible cry from the river away through the trees, then a sound of cracking branches and a mighty splash, and we were both running, tearing our skin on the brambles as we ran to save Luke. The Dove had killed him, I knew, in that moment –

But Luke was standing on the edge of the river, up to his thighs in brown water, wailing. It was the Dove that had fallen in. ‘I was playing,’ he sobbed. ‘I was playing … I didn’t mean to hurt it, Mum. I was pretending we were boys, fighting.’

While half of me was thinking of retrieving the robot, realising it would be completely wrecked, the other part was thinking, he was fighting with his brother, which he’d never done. And needed to do.

‘Fighting is
naughty,
’ said Sarah fiercely, torn between fury and relief. ‘What did we teach you boys, in the Communes? And robots are bloody expensive, by the way. Are you all right? Come out of that water.’

I rescued the thing, to stop Luke crying, but the muddy water ruined it, and not long after we smuggled it away to the garbage hills, though I told Luke we’d buried it. I think he knew the truth, because he never asked where.

That night in bed, Sarah came to my arms. ‘You feel so warm and nice,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to appreciate warmth again.’ She ran her hands over my body. ‘Apparently the new model Doves feel warm … That was so creepy, when it ate the grass. I suddenly thought,
they could do without us.
I know it’s not true, but it really scared me. Do you know, I think I’m glad the bloody thing drowned.’

‘Well, you can’t really say it drowned,’ I said.

‘Let’s not get another one.’

‘Okay,’ I said, for she was stroking my belly, her soft fingers reaching down for my penis, and then it was hard in her small cool hand, and all we needed was each other –

After she had finished, I lay awake, and I found myself thinking of the new models. They had strokeyfeely panels. They could sort and carry. Even more intriguing were reports I had read about research in progress on selfreplication.
Doves that could reproduce themselves …

In which case, they’d be doing better than us.

‘C
ome, 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!