Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘Great!’ he said. ‘It can be my friend, now Polly doesn’t come round any more.’ (She didn’t come round because of Sarah, who had been dumped by Polly’s father — I’d managed to work this out for myself, but Luke was hurt and mystified.) ‘Is it really some kind of dove?’ he asked, more gravely. ‘How do we make it do what we want?’

‘It’s just its initials,’ I told him. ‘Short for ‘‘DO VEry Simple things’’. Jolly clever name, really. What’s the matter, Sarah? Aren’t you happy?’ She was discomfited, biting her nails. I couldn’t help enjoying her confusion. If she refused, she would upset her son. ‘You need never get cross about housework again.’

‘Um,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s good. It just … doesn’t seem quite natural, to me.’

They delivered it while we were out. The guard hailed me when I came home. ‘Enormous piece of furniture for you, sir. New screen is it? Feeling wealthy?’

‘Not after buying this,’ I told him.

I took it up in the lift with me. To my surprise, I felt tremendously excited, though why is that surprising? It was exciting. For decades we had been promised this, robots to live with us as friends.

I decided not to open it till Sarah came home, but then Luke was brought back from school by a neighbour, and he saw the big package and could not wait.

‘Please, Dad. You said I could play with it.’

‘Yes, but we said it was a present for Mummy —’

‘But Mummy said it was for you as well.’

He kept walking round it, poking it, till I used his impatience as a cover for my own. ‘If you insist. We’ll just take a peek. I’d like to see what colour it is.’

We peeled off the rustling recrap that encased it. I halfexpected it to come out moving, but when I first glimpsed a small patch of its side, it looked like grey plastic, anonymous, dead. I went on unpeeling. Luke was mad with glee. Two protuberances appeared from the base that reminded me of the feet of a dodo, leathery, crudely detailed things, quite large compared to what the body must be. One of the cats was watching us, but it ignored the robot and jumped inside the packing, waving its tail disdainfully, or perhaps the white plume was a flag of surrender.

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.

And 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.