Maggie Gee - The Ice People

He has cornered me in the concrete bunker where I bring rotting food for RefuelRecycle, except that I haven’t done my job for a week, and besides, we’re eating all the food we can get hold of, and we’re still hungry, and the Doves are starving.

Kit and I have had a pact, of a kind. It’s all based on my care for the Doves. Most of the kids like them well enough, play with them, run them around a bit, wreck one or two, when they feel in the mood. But Kit is different; to Kit they’re alive. He worries, I know, when one gets sick, and grieves, in a furious, wordless way, if any of them gets smashed in the games. I matter to him because I am the Bird Man, the man he found less than halfalive in a writtenoff car in a blizzard with Dora. The evening of the day I last saw Sarah. I was trying to escape London forever, or trying to die, driving too fast, and came round to find Kit fiddling with Dora. She lay under the seat with her casing damaged and some of her programmes wiped forever.

That was my entry to this brave new world. I had expertise. I knew things he didn’t. I helped Kit get dozens of them working again.

I have been useful, and they have used me. And fed me, and let me sleep with them, an old man among hundreds of boys. They have taught me their skills in exchange for mine. Fighting with the sheared-off metal machetes that they call swords, made from defunct cars. Raiding the deliveries to the Enclaves, stripping empty buildings of everything flammable, finding dead bodies for us to burn, and not all the bodies were dead when we found them. We, us. I was one of them.

I’ve been one of them for nearly two years, but in Kit’s eyes I can see it’s over.

I’m not afraid. I’ve had my day. Our Days are gone; burning, frozen. We never learned to let things be … It was very bright, the best of it. My life was finished long ago, that afternoon in Trafalgar Square when a woman kissed me, and it turned to paper.

Or maybe I outlived my use when I lost my son on a yellow hillside (but what does it matter? I got him there. It’s his turn now. The Days of the children.)

We live in Luke. We can never be parted.

Kit shouts some wordless wildboy oath over his shoulder, and the others rush in, five of them, six, all jostling and pushing, and they smell bad, even the cold can’t kill their smell, a rank male taint of sweat and anger — They smell of the end of things, of death.

Fear is sharp, hard, exact. The thump of my heart in the vault of my chest.

Outside, I think, I prefer outside. It’s still light, out there. Or day is just ending. I’d like to catch a last glimpse of the sky. I don’t mind the cold. I accept the ice.

But they seize me, and I hardly bother to struggle. There are six of them, seven, and their blood is up, and they bustle me back into the great hangar where the lines of moribund Doves are kept, grey in the dull grey epsilon light. I shall save my strength for whatever is coming. Let them carry me, if it pleases them. I think, I wouldn’t mind saying goodbye to Dora, and even as I think it I find I’m kneeling facing her, with my arms pinioned. I know each wine stain on her feathers; one or two marks are a darker red.

‘Speak to her,’ yells Kit. ‘Ask her if she hungry. Yes she is, she bloody hungry!’

I touch ‘Hallo’, and she speaks to me. Her voice is so rundown that it wavers, wobbles as if she is weeping. Her old bright ‘How are you?’ sounds like a dirge. My mouth is dry — strange that it’s dry — but I ask her, obediently, if she’s hungry.

‘I am very hungry,’ Dora quavers. No one but me is close enough to hear her. Kit yells at me to relay it to them. Of course I am honest. ‘She says she is hungry.’

At that, the boys let me go so abruptly that I pitch forwards on my face. I become aware that the mood has changed. Two of the wild boys help me up. They have all gone quiet. They are staring at me, and looking at each other with suppressed excitement. I try to breathe deeply, gather myself.

Other boys are arriving, slipping through the shadows, weaving between the grey bodies of the Doves, their dull slumped heads, their flaccid wings. Twenty, thirty, more than I can count. Something is happening. A festival? Something is going to be celebrated. Perhaps my story, the end of my story. Yes, I am going to be celebrated.

Kit’s clever friend Jojo, the mouthy one, asks me a question I can’t understand. Do all the Doves’ functions decay with starvation? Functions, Doves, decay, starvation … I can’t seem to arrange these words in my mind, but I know that a lot depends on my answer. They have formed themselves into a makeshift ring, squashed between two long rows of robots. ‘Core functions,’ someone says through my lips, who knows what I knew long ago, ‘survive as long as the Dove survives, but at the expense of peripheral ones.’ This sounds amazingly good to me, but Kit hits me, hard, full in the mouth. ‘Yes is the answer,’ I say, spitting blood.

There’s a quick conference. Jojo speaks. He has the gift of language, unlike Kit; his early life must have been inside. He is trying to sound adult and grand. Why is my breath so fast, so tight? He is giving me the decision of the Chiefboys. ‘You have a choice, old man —’

That’s always fatal. I’m human, aren’t I? We can’t handle choice. I must make myself listen to what he is saying.

He’s saying it again, as if I am stupid. ‘Go outside and be termed by the sword, or stay here and die at the hands of the Doves.’

I look at him dumbly. Doves have wings, not hands. My mother and father thought words mattered — But behind the words, something huge, choking. Has it really come? Is it here at last, the final moment when my whole life will fall into a pattern, when I shall see, when I’ll understand?

‘Dora wouldn’t hurt me,’ I say, foolishly.

‘Dora will eat you when you give the order,’ Jojo assures me. ‘SD and R is a core function. Dora will paralyse you and eat you.’

‘She no be hungry any more,’ Kit interrupts, snickering, jeering. ‘You do your work. Fucking keep her alive.’

I look at Dora. Her kind blue eyes, the lizard thickness of her lustreless lids, the bald patches among her feathers. I think, I don’t want to keep the Doves alive. They were toys, really, no more than that. Our brains could never give the spark of freedom that sets it all dancing, diversifying, growing more detailed all the time, not less –

Besides, I am very fond of Dora. I’d rather we ended our days on good terms.

I stroke the stubbly mound of her tummy. ‘Goodbye, old girl,’ I say, shyly. ‘It’s been a pleasure, travelling with you. Now I just have to step outside.’

Her voice warbles back, effortful. ‘I like you too. May I come with you?’

‘I think we’ve come to the end of the road.’ I get up, and stretch, and prepare myself. I am sixty years old, but tough as leather. ‘Outside,’ I say in my own strong voice, not the dry weak voice of a few moments before. Then I shout it out, so they all may hear me. ‘Outside, lads. I prefer outside. Give me a sword. I’ll be a Man.’

I tap Dora gently on the shoulder in passing.

I, Saul, Teller of Tales …

My heart is beating a great tattoo. The boys surround me, respectful, attentive, the drift of their movement bearing me onwards though no one actually touches me yet. The grey dead light is being overwhelmed by the growing glow of the day outside, and as we pass through the door of the hangar together, a narrowing stream of human beings, the cold strikes first, and then the beauty, the amazing beauty of the end of day, the harrowing beauty of my last day. A great wheel of birds comes turning across it, thousands of them blown in from the sea. They’re coming back slowly, the birds, the foxes, paws, clawmarks printing the ice. And there, wider, higher than the towers, is the radiance beyond the horizon. The ring of fire, then the ring of ice. And somewhere, across the snowfields, it’s coming –