Maggie Gee: The Ice People

When civil order broke down, over the next few years, I stayed optimistic. Who needed governments? If you were young, you were selfreliant. The plagues passed me by, though I lost several friends. The streets grew rougher, but I stayed away from trouble. In wealthier areas, life went on as usual. I didn’t let the newscasts upset me.

I found I had a gift with machines. They were alive to me, and entirely absorbing, like the aphids I once bred in a matchbox. I was fascinated by artificial life, by the huge range of mobots in the college labs, the multitravellers, the swarmers, the sorters, though my speciality was nanotechnics, working with invisibly small molecular machines. I had delicate powers of manipulation that helped me pass out with high honours. Job offers came in plenty from military and security firms. For some reason I found myself turning them down. My father was shocked, but I knew I wasn’t ready. Something had to happen first, some great adventure. For the moment I took a part-time job as a tech teacher in a Learning Centre.

One day a week was the teachers’ Dee Stress. No pupils came in, and only half the guards were working. The underground trains were back in service, after more than a year of being sealed off. I tubed in, reading a weird story about some people in Portugal living in caves. They said there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them, living as people did in the Stone Age. And they were breeding. There were children everywhere. They looked dark, in the picture, with sparkly eyes. The reporter wanted to know their secret. I thought how much I’d like to go and see for myself. Order in France had completely broken down, but things were still peaceful in Iberia.

The school garden was overrun with big pink mallow flowers like English faces burning in the sun. The litter waved gaily like little silver flags. I remember I felt something good was going to happen.

Three metres away, the front door coded me. I got the normal access signal. The doors opened. The lights came on. The uniformed guard was not in her place, but I was early, and besides, it was Friday. The voicetone welcomed me, as usual. ‘Good morning, Officer 102. It is eightothree am Cooling is in progress. Please specify rooms you want unlocked and conditioned.’

I always said ‘Good morning’ back, though other teachers laughed at me. They thought I was joking, but I wasn’t. It seemed to me anything might be alive. What was the boundary between living and nonliving?

(Now I would give a different answer, as I approach closer to the shadowy line that separates the living from the dead, but then I was besotted with our cleverness.)

I confirmed my code, then asked for the lift, and coffee upstairs in the Dee Stress room. Dee Stress began formally at nine, so there was probably halfanhour or so before the other teachers arrived. I had nothing to prepare; the sun blazed outside the window. And so I requested the day’s chillout sounds, sponsored by StartSmart Buildings Inc. ‘First up today, we bring you ‘‘Nessun Dorma’’ …’ I never tired of it. ‘Thank you, that’s great.’ When the wonderful music surged up through the silence, it felt as though the building were giving me love.

Behind me, the entrance slid open again. I was waiting for the lift, and didn’t look round. The normal welcome routine began, and the music continued more quietly. It spoke of passion, space, grandeur, of hot black windows in high white walls. It made me think with longing of Euro. Mountains. Plains. I should be free … What kind of life did they live, in the caves?

Then the music cut out. The welcome was repeating. I turned and saw a woman with her back to me, staring mystified at the input by the scanner.

‘Just show your coder,’ I began to say, but at that moment she raised a pale hand and tried to do something to the input panel. At once the warning buzzer sounded. ‘Security,’ the building said. ‘Security to entrance, please. Security. Security.’

The entrance doors closed firmly behind the woman, who was spinning round slowly, looking nervously upwards, and then the lift doors, which were opening for me, changed their minds, shuddered, closed again. ‘Entrance hall sealed,’ the building remarked. ‘Secur-’ But it didn’t finish the word.

‘Ohgod,’ the woman said. I looked at her. She had long hair. Most females under fifty had short hair, unless they were under ten, that is. She was small, slim, in a loose white dress, not fashionable, a ‘pretty’ dress. What my mother would have called a pretty dress.

‘I’ve done something awful. I’m new,’ she said. ‘I’m Sarah Trelawney. How do you do.’ Her voice was composed, soft, with a burr. A very young voice, despite her appearance.

The voicetone hissed, seethed, strained, as if the building were trying to breathe. Then it suddenly said, in a cheerful voice, ‘The emergency has been contained. We apologise for any break in transmission.’ I waited for the doors to move, but nothing happened. And the music began to unroll again, wave after wave, into the vacuum.

She walked towards me, and the fog fell away. The sun sheared across her, shining on her hair. She wasn’t old. She was younger than me. But how strange she looked, with that loose pale dress, how perversely erotic, when everyone else was wearing clothes that were thinner than skin and clung to the body, to halfglimpse the swell of her belly, her breasts. I tried very hard not to stare at her breasts.

That weird waterfall of hair. Such childish hair. Reddish-brown, shiny, glinting like conkers against their white shell, and her skin had tiny freckles like dots of honey. She looked miserable, but her eyes were very blue. She came closer. The music gathered and poured. My heart swelled absurdly.

‘Nessun dorma …’ Let no one sleep …

Then she spoke, and her firm voice cut through my fantasy. She had sharp small teeth, which caught the light. ‘I seem to have locked us in. Sorry.’

‘I’m Saul,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. The others will be here in ten minutes or so.’ She had a small nose, a square, strong jaw. We shook hands. Hers was mysteriously cool — most handshakes then were a slither of sweat.

‘You must be an officer,’ I said, ‘to be coded.’

‘It’s a new post,’ she said, shy. ‘I’m something called a Role Support Officer.’

‘What does that mean, then?’ I asked her.

‘The government’s decided that boys and girls have to be taught to get on together. It’s partly political, I’m afraid. They’re making appointments all over the country. Because the fertility figures are down again, and they have to seem to be doing something. Elections next year, of course.’

‘How do you mean, get on together?’ We were leaning side by side against the desk where normally the guards were posted. I noticed her nails: very white moons. Small freckled hands. No rings. A chain. She wasn’t pierced, or tattooed. I wanted to get on with her.

(Be honest: I wanted to make love to her.)

‘Well — I mean — you know — ‘ She was intensely embarrassed. ‘Live together, I suppose. Try to get them living together again.’

Live together. It was shockingly intimate.

‘I bet you got the job because you look like that.’ As soon as I’d said it, I knew it was offensive. ‘I didn’t mean —’ I said, then stopped.

But she smiled. ‘You mean — I look twentiethcentury,’ she said. ‘What they used to call feminine. Probably, yes. And I’ve dressed the part. But I can teach. As a matter of fact, I’m good. I’ve taught Outsiders, you know. I can teach without screens. I even taught for two months in the towers —’

‘Wow,’ I said. So she was tough. Like everyone else in my year at college, I’d turned down the chance of practice teaching in the towers, despite the huge bonuses they offered and the promise of fulltime protection from zapsquads.