Maggie Gee - The Ice People

‘My dad would be horrified,’ I said. Samuel was against private security arrangements. (Or so he said. But what had he left me, what clanking things, in that green canvas bag?)

‘I like the sound of those Culturevultures,’ said Sarah. ‘For Luke, I mean. All that lovely music.’

I’d guessed she would like them. I felt sorry for Luke. ‘Don’t you think Luke might feel — got at, sometimes? He gets a lot of culture, doesn’t he?’

She passed on that one, so we didn’t have a quarrel. She probably simply wasn’t listening to me. ‘How about the Sexbots?’ she asked. ‘Disgusting …’

‘You women will have plenty to say about that.’

I went out to make us a cup of coffee. An hour had slipped away as we watched the screens, riveted. All round the globe it was probably the same. Humans were creating life, at last! It didn’t seem commercial, or trivial, or comic. It certainly didn’t strike most of us as rash, though the godlovers warned against the sin of pride, and now I’m ashamed of thinking them stupid. ‘Everything that lives is holy.’ They thought the Doves were creatures of the devil.

Sarah called me back in from the kitchen. ‘Listen, Saul, this is interesting.’

The screentalker had moved on into the future; the next expected model was a ‘Replicator’. We’d been hearing for years about selfreplication, but to date no actual model had emerged. What he showed today was a cartoon simulation. An adorably chubby Dove sat and ruffled its wings, bounced gently up and down on rubbery legs, cheeping, till suddenly a smaller Dove came wriggling out from under it. The mother, now a little less chubby, began to nuzzle it and clean its feathers.

‘Weird biology,’ I said. ‘Birds lay eggs, as far as I know.’

‘But it’s fantastic,’ said Sarah, impatient, interrupting me, ‘isn’t it? I mean, they were saying it’s only months away. These Replicators are almost ready. It can’t happen, surely, how can it? Something that human beings have made can’t make another of itself, can it?’

She listened to the screens, but not to me. ‘I explained that to you years ago, Sarah. Don’t you remember that work I was doing for Roche? My nanomachines were selfassemblers. The theory’s been around since the 1980s … Drexler was the guy who started it all. They only need a good source of power and the right kind of molecules. If you can get enough nanomachines working together in parallel, it’s perfectly feasible. But well, wow.’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Let’s listen to him.’

The cartoon Dove and Dovelet had vanished, and the presenter became a little wildeyed, trying to explain the science and making a hopeless cockup of it. After a while I turned it off, and we looked at each other, exhilarated.

‘It is amazing,’ she said, slowly. It’s a quantum leap. It makes our old Dove look so out of date. I’d quite like to have one. Godknows why …’

Her eyes were still large, young, blue, but her hands as she stroked her neck were different, the little hands I had always loved now marked with a delicate delta of veins and a drift of faint brown stains like leaves. Could she be going through the menopause? — Those pills in her bag. I felt a twinge of pain.

‘I’ll buy you one,’ I said, ‘for your birthday. The old one was nothing compared to this. Let me buy you a Replicator.’

I hadn’t the slightest sense of danger.

We promise for the future, but time moves on, and when the future comes it’s different. She had a November birthday, of course, so I always think of her on Bonfire Night; I do even now, when nothing’s the same, when the wild boys choose which building to torch and the bodies come hurtling out and screaming, arcing out white from the thirtieth floor like so many flaming Roman candles, and it could be her against the night, I’ve no idea where she is now, for I hear the Southside is virtually deserted …

If she survives. My dear, my darling.

Things changed for the worse before her birthday came. Luke was spending the whole week in the Commune, and I found that instead of going to school he was being ‘home educated’ by the women, though it wasn’t his home, for heaven’s sake, and I can’t believe it was education. He was twelve years old. They were wasting his time.

Perhaps that’s unfair. He did sing divinely, and he’d started to do it in public, as well, though it mostly seemed to be at fundraising events for the weird new women’s collective, ‘Wicca’, an outgrowth from the Children’s Commune.

Wicca. I still shiver, remembering their name. I confess I occasionally browsed through Sarah’s study, when she was away for too long a stretch, just to be sure that her desk was all right, and I found a pamphlet that would have seemed farcical, if it had not included her name, high on the masthead with Juno Jakes’s. It was a ghastly amalgam of many things. First, a wacky female nature worship, centring on ‘the Hidden Goddess’, who apparently ‘gave suck’ to us all (count me out, I was bottlefed), ‘pentagrams’, ‘equinoxes’, ‘handfastings’; second, a ‘new biology’, starring a singlecelled female bacterium which, scientists had recently discovered, had given up sex three thousand years ago; third, a rigid, doctrinaire politics whose central premise was ‘separate development’ (for women. They didn’t mention men. These bitches were too stupid to remember apartheid). The nub of it was, they were through with men. They didn’t want us as lovers, or fathers, or friends. The ideas were banal, the logic nonexistent, the rhetoric feeble, laughable … And yet I was worried, until I saw that the top sheet was scored across by hand with the words ‘DRAFT ONLY — SARAH, WHAT DO YOU THINK? J.’ It was Juno, of course, with her humourless voice, her heavy black hand, her childish writing. My quicksilver Sarah would see it was rubbish. Revere the Goddess, and harm none … We are of the Earth, and of Nature … We’d have a jolly good laugh about it together.

But she never mentioned it, so I didn’t either, because if I hadn’t snooped I would never have seen it. I assumed it had gone into the dustbin of history. No sensible woman would swallow such nonsense. After a bit I forgot about it. And Sarah kept me at a distance from the Commune and Wicca and the whole damn thing, mostly because I was a man, I suppose. It embarrassed her greatly, being married.

There were a few occasions when some of the women — I admit I called them ‘the coven’, sometimes, mostly to my mates down at the Scientists, but occasionally to Sarah, too, and when she was in a good mood, she laughed, but the old good moods became rarer and rarer — called at the flat to pick up Luke or work through something on Sarah’s computer. Sarah usually warned me, and would ask me to go out or keep a low profile while they were there. But occasionally she forgot to warn me, occasionally I didn’t obey.

Then she treated me like a dog, for their benefit.

— Not like a dog, she treated me like a piece of wood, a stick, a stone, a broken chair, something she had no further use for. I think she hoped they would assume I was a man who’d come to fix the plumbing, since women hadn’t rushed to claim that profession, sticking their heads down stinking drains.

I suspect that few of them were fooled, in fact, because they probably had their own guilty secrets. Men hadn’t disappeared from the face of the earth just because women didn’t want to live with us. There was many a household where a man clung on in some dirty cupboard to what had been his home. I’d found that out at the Scientists, when the drinks flowed freely and the truth spilled out, and sometimes the men who seemed most staggish, the most determinedly gladtobegay, burst into tears and admitted they were trying to hang on to the remains of their family.