The Ice People (18 page)

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, ask 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 faces, 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.

I must watch my back. Good job I’m in trim.

Days draw down to the final battle.

T
he divorce dragged on. My letters weren’t answered, the letters and cards I sent to Luke. I tried not to go into his room. The jumble of toys and tools on his table, the map of the world, the photographs … One of them was of the three of us, Luke in a red baseball cap, swinging from our shoulders, one arm round each of us, kicking up his feet in baseball boots, and he looked surprisingly sturdy, boyish, not the delicate, gentle boy he was, and Sarah and I both looked happy and proud, our eyes meeting over his head. It was in her second period of longish hair, before she adapted the Wicca crewcut. Her red hair swung in a bob in the sun … I tried not to look at that photo too often. It was interesting, though, that Luke had liked it and chosen to stick it in pride of place, a photo of a regular, boyish boy. That comforted me, when I thought of the witches.

It was silly, but I brooded about his football. I was never one of those sportsmad fathers, pushing their kids to be great jocks, but when he was at home we used to practise every Sunday, and he had a marvellous eye for the ball. Now he couldn’t even watch it onscreen. Wicca weren’t keen on anything with balls.

I believed that Luke was still in London, still in whatever lay behind the narrow red frontage of Wicca World’s headquarters. It was a tall, slightly grimy nineteenthcentury building with complicated swags of brickred sandstone, rising on the north of the Marylebone Road to a series of sunlit mansard windows. I always imagined a flash of Luke’s face, high up in the attics, when I drove past, which I did too often, a hundred times maybe, and always that stupid lift of the heart as I saw the bright windows like living eyes, surely one day he would look out and see me … Always the blank depression and loss as the traffic swept onwards, time carried me past, and he was inside, changing, growing.