Maggie Gee - The Ice People

The women of Britain rose to Juno’s call. They picketed the factories. A fight broke out somewhere in Leicester when the women managed to drag a consignment of Doves off a lorry, and ‘tore them limb from limb’, as the news put it. In Scotland a fire that started in a Dove showroom and swept through a poor tenement, killing hundreds of people, was suspected to be arson. All over the country windows were broken, salespeople attacked, offices letterbombed, though Wicca World, of course, ‘deplored these excesses’. They said they deplored them, but mysteriously active in many of these incidents were the girl gangs who had attached themselves to Wicca, the ‘Green Girls’, with their greendyed hair and green glass studs in their ears and noses. The Green Girls were very violent.

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.