The Ice People (11 page)

Luke tugged at my arm. ‘Daddy, Daddy.’

‘What? I’m trying to get this stuff off.’

‘Is it a girl or a boy?’

‘God, I don’t know. What do you want it to be?’

‘I want it to be like me.’

I nodded, understandingly. ‘Okay, it’s a boy. It can be – a sort of brother.’ It still hurt me that he didn’t have a brother.

‘No,’ he said, indignant. ‘I want a girl.’

‘No, you don’t,’ I said, not entirely listening. The logic of children is often surreal. ‘Oh, look, I say …’

For the head, when I got to it, was really tremendous. Now we saw our robot whole.

It sat there, looking remarkably composed, a robust, short creature around a metre tall, a little less, perhaps, than a threeyearold child. Its head was huge, childlike or birdlike, a baby bird’s head in terms of its proportions, its most notable feature two big lidded ‘eyes’, which were currently turned down on the ground, giving a winning effect of shy good manners. It had stumpy legs and big flat feet; its arms had a softer, velvety texture. There were numerous panels, buttons, indentations, both front and back, suggesting many talents.

‘Hallo,’ I said. I didn’t mean to be facetious. I liked it at once, and wanted to greet it.

‘Dad, Dad, why isn’t it moving?’ Luke was jumping up and down on the spot. The cats were weaving around it, more confident now, tapping it gently with their paws, trying to see if it were dead.

‘I don’t know how we switch it on,’ I said.

But I soon found out; it was delightfully simple. You pressed a little panel marked ‘Hallo’.

‘Luke, do you want to switch him on?’

‘Or her,’ he said. He thought about it. I think he was suddenly afraid. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to wait for Mummy.’

The miracle was, Sarah liked it too. It appealed to her love of novelty – it tickled her sense of humour, too, the way they had made it like a cartoon character, its cheeky roundness, its big brainy head. ‘It’s almost too sweet to be useful,’ she said. ‘Look at those lovely long xylon lashes. So
cute
…’

‘Luke, switch it on, now Mummy’s here.’

Very tentatively, Luke pressed the panel, then stepped away smartly, and we all waited. Nothing happened. He tried again. ‘I think you should be firmer with it,’ Sarah said.

‘You’d know, dear,’ I countered, but she didn’t hear me. She stretched out her small strong hand, and pressed, and a moment later the Dove quivered, whirred, and set off across the floor with the bandy gait of a drunken toddler, pausing minutely every now and then and whirring more loudly, as if thinking. We watched it, all three of us, as proud as parents. It worked! It walked! We stood and adored.

Then it reached a carpet, and the world went mad. There was a noise like a million electronic saws and the carpet turned into a cross between a flying terrier and a boa constrictor, writhing and hissing like a white tornado, while the Dove stood and fought it, rocking, grinding. Both cats fled yowling into the kitchen.

‘Turn it off,’ shrieked Sarah above the tumult.

I did. We looked at each other, shaken, but Luke was grinning and shaking his head.

‘It’s not broken,’ he insisted, happily. ‘It’s cleaned the floor wherever it’s stepped.’

We began to laugh.

‘It’s brilliant,’ said Sarah.

Success beyond my wildest dreams.

For a week or two, we were adoptive parents, enchanted to meet the new member of the family.

A
nd then the whole of Euro went Dove mad. They were selling a thousand a day, then two thousand, then the figures began to go through the roof and the manufacturers couldn’t keep up. The boys at the Scientists voted that the club should buy a fleet of halfadozen for us to play with.

There was a honeymoon of many months. The Doves replaced the refreezing of the icecaps as the chief topic of conversation on trains, in queues at the megamarts, on the net … They were more popular than Twyla Anders, the most popular child star the world had ever known, as the screens announced when for the first time the Doves’ share of chat on the global chatnet exceeded Twyla’s, then doubled it.

The Doves were partly inspired by twentiethcentury cartoon figures, Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, with their bigheaded, knowing, childlike charm, and now the process started to work in reverse, as the Doves inspired comic strips, then whole comics, then hundreds of films starring the Doves, and every child (not my poor Luke – Sarah objected to screen spinoffs) had Dove socks, teeshirts, rulers, pens, zedbands, micros, pollution masks.

Speaking as a techie, I was full of admiration for the basic Dove design. Its feet could expand to twice their size when it was cleaning or refuelling. It cleaned ferociously, though slowly, because of the time it took to get its feet across a floor of any size. It dusted with its velvety armpads, using sensors to stop it sweeping things to the ground. If it bumped into walls or furniture, it stopped and restarted itself at a tangent. It ‘spoke’, a selection of halfadozen messages that were its least sophisticated feature, saying ‘Hallo’ whenever it came within a metre of a living creature, but unable to distinguish between humans and cats (our snobbish old Persians soon got over their fear and began to ignore it, a little uneasily).

Refuelling was the simplest and most brilliant touch of all. The Doves could run on any organic matter. In a world that was wild about recycling, the Doves arrived like minimessiahs. RefuelRecycle: R and R. All you had to do was put your rubbish on the plastic feeding mat that came with the Dove, perch the machine on the top of the mound, and with a slurping, sucking sound that was unnervingly like a pet eating, the pile of mess began to disappear, and the Dove slowly settled towards the floor, eyes locked on its food, until it sat satisfied flat upon the floor. The mat was usually left spotlessly clean. As a final touch, the machine would say ‘Thank you’. Luke loved it when our Dove did that, since he was always being nagged by us to say thank you. But I would find myself thanking it. ‘Thank
you,’
I would murmur gratefully. It saved me from emptying rubbish bins.

That first model Dove needed a lot of instructions, unlike later models, that became selforganising, ‘selfmotivating’, as the admen said. We rather liked following ours around – it was fun adjusting the controls, thinking of new tasks for it to do, enjoying our power and its obedience, as we no longer could with servants or children.

The designers had been cleverer than they knew when they modelled their protégés on humans.

For what was our world short of? Babies. The Doves’ inventors were our storks. Looking back, those first models soon seemed crude, quite limited in their abilities, but they fulfilled an essential need, for a small new being to enter our life. Instead of refining the dusting sensors, the inventors should have made them say ‘I love you’.

(As they quickly realised. Later models did.)

I think I was a little crazy, at the time. I didn’t know where I was with Sarah. She was back, but receiving a lot of phone calls from people whose voices I didn’t know. I had changed; I no longer felt able to ignore it. I was fiercely suspicious of frequent callers or anyone whose calls she took into another room.

There were women who didn’t sound friendly to me – not that many women did sound friendly, in those days, but these sounded more unfriendly than usual, asking where Sarah was as if I had abducted her. One regular caller finally admitted that her name was ‘Juno’, which I heard as ‘Jeanie’.

‘I’ll try to tell her you called, Jeanie.’ I hoped that ‘try’ sounded suitably careless.

‘Juno, Juno,’ she shouted gruffly.

‘Oh yes, the goddess.’ Perhaps I sneered. Well, perhaps I allowed myself the ghost of a sneer, but that didn’t justify her telling Sarah later that I had been ‘abominably rude’ to her.

It appeared that Luke quite liked this creature. If his mother was out and he got to the phone before I did, he’d talk to Juno for hours. Sometimes he seemed to be singing to her. When I asked him who she was, he said ‘Mummy’s friend.’ Which surely gave me a legitimate excuse, as a caring parent, to question Sarah.

I did so one weekend, at breakfast, while Luke still slept in his room next door.

Sarah prevaricated. I pressed a little. ‘She’s not some guilty secret, is she?’ That led her to inform me stiffly that Juno was the leader of the ‘Children’s Commune’ where she and Luke had been living last year. ‘Well, one of the leaders.’

‘Who are the other ones?’

‘Well … Me.’

This was something of a revelation. ‘You never did say where you two went. I thought you were with some bloody lover!’ I found I was shouting with relief, but she looked at me and didn’t comment. ‘What’s a Children’s Commune, for godsake? It sounds like something from the last century.’

‘It means what it says. You know, a place for children. A place that’s run for the children who share it. That thinks kids are important. More important than
anything else in the world …’
She was going into that overemphatic, intense mode that meant bad faith, or politics.

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘We all think that. Even men think that. Well, I do anyway. So can I join this commune?’ I knew perfectly well what the answer would be.

‘I don’t make the rules,’ said Sarah. She looked uneasy; she was circling her head as if an ant were under her ear.

‘Thought you said you were one of the leaders? Never mind. But they let boys in. Right? Or wrong?’

‘Of course,’ said Sarah. She was getting annoyed. ‘So what happens when the boys turn into men? They will do, you know. I’m a scientist.’ (And I suddenly thought of the club, as I sneered, as I heard my smug, unhappy voice sneering. I remembered the Scientists, and Paul, and my secrets, and I thought, is this what we’re coming to? Is this the future for men and women? Are we going to live apart for ever, in endless, wanking loneliness?

Surely not, because I loved her. And I stopped sneering, and tried to be nice.) ‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘don’t go back there, please. I want Luke to live with men and women. I want him to know who his father is. How is he going to grow up into a man if he doesn’t see what men are like?’

I could see that she halfagreed with me, but she didn’t want to admit to it. ‘I know the arguments,’ she said. ‘You’re a pretty good father, as they go. I don’t want to take that away from you. It’s natural that men don’t want to lose their children.’ (But she said it as though it were inevitable; as if it were natural that the women should steal them.) ‘In any case, it’s more or less in the past. Juno and I – well –’ She blushed. She looked prettier, younger when she blushed. ‘We had major policy disagreements. She’s a lot more extreme than me.’

She wanted me to feel she was reasonable, that she was still basically on my side, because, I saw later, she needed to stay until she was finally ready to leave.

No, that’s not fair, that can’t be true. I think she really was divided. I think she did like our little family, our little life, our private life, our life with the son we both adored. I think she found it very hard to decide. And perhaps my stupidity decided her, later.

‘Juno has, um, a very stern voice,’ I said, and was horribly aware I sounded prurient. I tried to erase a mental picture of a mountainous dyke in chains and leather. I wanted to laugh, but I tried again. ‘I mean, are you sure she’s good for Luke? He talks to her a lot on the phone.’

‘She has a beautiful voice,’ said Sarah, blushing again. ‘If you heard her sing … it’s an incredible contralto. It’s Juno who’s been training Luke.’

‘I didn’t know anyone was training Luke – except his Learning Centre, I mean. They seemed happy with him. Does he need more training?’

Since those early days of singing in his cot before he got up, Luke had always had an exquisite voice. We were accustomed to his perfect pitch and memory for any tune he heard. These days he liked to sing in our bathroom where the echo magnified his liquid soprano.

‘Luke has a
gift,
’ she explained, too slowly, as if it all had to be spelled out to me. ‘The
Commune
thinks gifts should be
developed
.’

It was too priggish for me to endure. ‘A commune can’t think. Only people think.’

‘The Dove can think,’ said Luke, who had wandered in silently from his bedroom. His eyes were apprehensive. ‘I think it thinks. Does it think, Mummy? By the way. Juno phoned. She wants us to visit.’

We had been much more careful about our quarrels since the terrible incident with Luke and the window. Sarah and I adjusted our faces. It was Saturday; we had a whole day to get through. Luke had begged us to take him on a picnic.

‘Does
the Dove think?’ Luke continued, interested.

‘Yes–’ I said.

‘No–’ said Sarah.

‘– depending what you mean by thinking,’ I finished.

‘– because it’s artificial, not natural,’ said Sarah.

He looked despairingly from one to another. ‘Can we take our Dove on the picnic?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Sarah.

‘Of course,’ I smiled.

With Luke’s casting vote, we took our Dove on the picnic, perched on the back seat like a squat second child. Luke even put its seat belt on. How fully we acted our psychodramas out!

Our mood shifted when we left the city, only three hours’ drive from Melville Road. It was always a glory, slipping out at last from the covered flyway just south of Duxford and zooming down over the ancient airfield with its twentiethcentury aircraft moored like ships. The traffic speeded up at the last moment, eager to escape the city and its tunnels, zooming through into blue air and light.

That was a lovely day, or most of it was, though it held in its hand the seed of the future. Grass seed, actually. The unexpected.

‘We look mad with this thing,’ Sarah giggled, as we struggled through the little hawthorn wood with our picnic things and the heavy Dove. Luke had sworn he would carry the Dove if we brought it, but got tired within a few steps of the car, and we were always wary of tiring him in case it brought his asthma on. So I was carrying the Dove, of course. Men were still the people who carried things, and mended them dutifully when they got broken. I wondered if Juno were particularly strong, and tried not to think if she were good with her hands, that little blush, Sarah’s sudden prettiness … The Dove had never seemed heavy before, but I’d only carried it short distances.