37: NEW NEW ORLEANS

On the last day of the voyage, the Barb nosed through a complex delta system. Even Abdikadir came on deck to see. This was the outflow of the Mississippi, but sea levels were so much lower in this world of an incipient ice age that the delta pushed far out into the Gulf. There was certainly no New Orleans in this version of the world. And amid dense reed banks, watched by nervous crew, alligators the size of small trucks nosed into the water.

The Barb was rowed cautiously into a small harbor. Bisesa glimpsed wharves and warehouses; one jetty had a kind of wooden crane. Behind the port buildings was a tiny township of huddled wooden shacks.

“Welcome to New New Orleans,” Emeline said dryly. “There really isn’t much of it. But we do what we can.”

Abdikadir murmured what sounded like a prayer in guttural Greek. “Bisesa. I had been wondering what machines these Americans have used to dredge out their harbors. Look over there.”

Through the mist rising off the open water, Bisesa glimpsed what looked like elephants, treading slowly. Harnessed with thick ropes in a team of four, they were dragging some immense engine. But the beasts had odd profiles, with small domed skulls and humps on their backs. The men who drove them with goads and whips were dwarfed by their beasts, which looked tremendously tall, surely taller than the African elephants of Bisesa’s day. Then one of them lifted its head and trumpeted, a thin, stately sound, and Bisesa saw extraordinarily long tusks curved in loose spirals.

“Those aren’t elephants, are they?”

“Welcome to America,” Emeline said dryly. “We call these Jefferson’s mammoths. Some say ‘imperial’ and some ‘Columbian,’ but in Chicago we’re patriots, and Jefferson it is.”

Abdikadir was intrigued. “Are they easy to tame?”

“Not according to the stories in the newspapers,” Emeline said. “We imported some elephant trainers from India; our men were just carnie folk who had been making it up as they went along. The Indians grumbled that the thousands of years they had put into breeding their own strain of elephant into docility had all been rubbed out here. Now come. We have a train to catch…”

The passengers disembarked, with their few items of luggage. The dockworkers didn’t show much interest in the new arrivals, despite their Macedonian garb.

It was summer, and they were somewhere south of the latitude of old New Orleans. But the wind from the north was chill.

There was no train station here, just a place where a crudely-laid line came to an end amid a heap of sleepers and rusty, reused rails. But a row of carriages sat behind a hissing, old-fashioned-looking loco that hauled a fuel cart full of logs.

Emeline negotiated directly with the engine driver; she used dollar notes to pay for their passage. And she was able to buy a loaf, some beef jerky, and a pot of coffee in the town’s small bar. Her money was crisp and new; evidently Chicago had a mint.

Back in her own environment, Emeline was bright and purposeful. Bisesa had to admit there was a sense of modernity here, even in this scrubby outpost, that had been missing in an Alexandrian Europe that seemed to be sinking back into the past.

On the train they had a carriage to themselves; the other carriages were mostly full of goods, lumber, fleeces, a catch of salted fish. The windows weren’t glazed, but there were blinds of some kind of hide that would block out the drafts, and heaps of blankets of some thick, smelly orange-brown wool. Emeline assured them that this would be enough to keep them warm until they reached New Chicago. “After that you’ll need cold-weather gear for the ice,” she said. “We’ll pick up something in town.”

A couple of hours after they had arrived—it was around noon—the locomotive belched white smoke, and the train lumbered into motion. There was a clucking as chickens scattered off the tracks. A few skinny-looking children came running from the rude houses to wave, and Abdi and Bisesa waved back. The wind turned, and smoke from the stack blew into the cabin: wood smoke, a familiar, comforting scent.

Emeline said they were going to follow the valley of the Mississippi, all the way to the settlement of New Chicago, which was near the site of Memphis in the old world. It was a journey of a few hundred miles that would likely take twenty-four hours to make; they would sleep on the train.

Bisesa peered curiously from her window. She saw traffic on the river, a real mix, an Alexandrian trireme, what looked like a paddle steamer stranded by the shore—and a couple of canoes that might have been native American, but no native Americans had been brought to Mir.

Emeline said, “They dug a couple of war canoes out of the city museum and the world’s fair exhibits. Took them apart to see how they were made. They raided William Cody’s Wild West Show too, for bows and arrows and teepees and whatnot. The canoes are pretty, aren’t they? I tried one once, with Josh, for a lark. But the water is dashed cold, even so far south as this. Runoff from the ice. You don’t want to fall in!”

“Camels,” Abdikadir said, pointing to the road.

Bisesa saw a kind of baggage train trailing south toward the port. Men and women rode peculiar-looking horses that had a tendency to buck and bite. And, yes, towering over them there were camels, heavily laden, imperious, spitting. “Another import?”

“Oh, no,” Emeline said. “The camels were here already. Those horses too—lots of breeds of them in fact, not all of them useful. I told you we have a real menagerie here. Mammoths and mastodons and camels and saber-toothed cats—let’s hope we don’t run into any of those.”

“All of which,” Bisesa’s phone murmured from her pocket, “died out the moment the first human settlers got here. They even ate the native horses. Schoolboy error.”

“Hush. Remember we’re guests here.”

“In a sense, so are the Chicagoans…”

She was aware of Emeline’s faint disapproval. Emeline clearly thought it bad manners to ignore the flesh-and-blood human beings around you and talk into a box.

Abdikadir, though, who had grown up under the tutelage of his father, was interested. “Is it still able to pick up the signals from Earth?”

Bisesa had tested the phone’s intermittent connection through the Eye all the way across the Atlantic. “It seems so.”

“At a low bit rate,” the phone whispered. “Even that is pretty corrupt…”

A thought struck Bisesa. “Phone—I wonder how close the Chicagoans are to radio technology.”

For answer, the phone displayed a block of text. Only a generation before the Chicago time slice James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist so admired by Alexei Carel, had predicted that electromagnetic energy could travel through space. The slice itself had been taken in the few years between Heinrich Hertz’s first demonstrations that that was true, with parabolic-mirror transmitters and receivers a few feet apart, and Guglielmo Marconi’s bridging of the Atlantic.

“We ought to push this on, Abdi. Think how useful a radio link would be to Babylon right now. Maybe when we get to Chicago we’ll try to kick-start a radio shop, you and I.”

Abdi looked excited. “I would enjoy that—”

Emeline snapped, “Perhaps you should keep a hold of your plans to assist us poor Chicagoans, until you’ve seen how much we’ve been able to do for ourselves.”

Bisesa said quickly, “I apologize, Emeline. I was being thoughtless.”

Emeline lost her stiffness. “All right. Just don’t go showing off your fancy gadgets in front of Mayor Rice and the Emergency Committee or you really will give offense. And anyhow,” she said more grimly, “it won’t make a blind bit of difference if that toy of yours is right about the world coming to an end. Has it got any more to say about how long we have left?”

“The data are uncertain,” the phone whispered. “Handwritten records of naked-eye observations, instruments scavenged from a crashed military helicopter—”

Bisesa said, “I know. Just give us the best number you have.”

“Five centuries. Maybe a little less.”

They considered that. Then Emeline laughed; it sounded forced. “You really have brought us nothing but bad news, Bisesa.”

But Abdikadir seemed unfazed. “Five centuries is a long time. We’ll figure out what to do about it long before then.”

They spent the night in the train, as advertised.

The frosty night air, the primal smell of wood smoke, and the steady rattling of the train on its uneven tracks lulled Bisesa to sleep. But every so often the train’s jolting woke her.

And once she heard animals calling, far off, their cries like wolves’ howls, but deeper, throatier. She reminded herself that this was not a nostalgically reconstructed park. This was the real thing, and Pleistocene America was not a world yet tamed by man. But the sound of the animals was oddly thrilling—even satisfying. For two million years, humans evolved in a landscape full of creatures such as this. Maybe they missed the giant animals when they were gone, without ever knowing it. And so, maybe the Jefferson movement back home had the right idea.

It was kind of scary to hear them in the dark, however. She was aware of Emeline’s eyes, bright, wide open. But Abdikadir snored softly, wrapped in the immunity of youth.