43: CHICAGO

Emeline, Bisesa, and Abdi traveled the last few kilometers to Chicago in a western-movie-style covered wagon. It was drawn by muscular, hairy ponies, a round-bodied native stock that turned out to be particularly suited to working in the deep cold. The road followed the line of a pre-Freeze rail track, but Emeline said it wasn’t practical to run trains this far north, because of ice on the rails and frozen points.

By now Bisesa was wrapped up like an Inuit, with layers of wool and fur over her thin Babylonian clothes, and her phone lost somewhere deep underneath. Emeline told her that the russet-brown wool came from mammoths. Bisesa wasn’t sure if she believed that, for surely it would be easier to shear a sheep than a mammoth. It looked convincing, however.

Despite the furs, the cold dug into her exposed cheeks like bony fingers. Her eyes streamed, and she could feel the tears crackling to frost. Her feet felt vulnerable despite the heavy fur boots she wore, and, fearing frostbite, she dug her gloved hands into her armpits. “It’s like Mars,” she told her companions.

Abdi grimaced, shivering. “Are you sorry you came?”

“I’m sorry I don’t still have my spacesuit.”

The phone, tucked warmly against her belly, murmured something, but she couldn’t hear.

Chicago was a black city lost in a white landscape.

The disused rail track ran right into Union Station. It was a short walk from the station to Emeline’s apartment. In the streets, huge bonfires burned, stacked up under dead gas-lamps and laboriously fed with broken-up lumber by squads of men, bundled up, their heads swathed in helmets of breath-steam. The fires poured plumes of smoke into the air, which hung over the city like a black lid, and the faces of the buildings were coated with soot. The people were all bundled up in fur so they looked almost spherical as they scurried from the island of warmth cast by one bonfire to the next.

There was some traffic on the roads, horse-drawn carts, even a few people cycling—not a single car anywhere in this version of 1920s Chicago, Bisesa reminded herself. Horse manure stood everywhere, frozen hard on the broken tarmac.

It was extraordinary, a chill carcass of a city. But it was somehow functioning. There was a church with open doors and candlelit interior, a few shops with “open for business” signs—and even a kid selling newspapers, flimsy single sheets bearing the proud banner Chicago Tribune.

As they walked, Bisesa glimpsed Lake Michigan, to the east. It was a sheet of ice, brilliant white, dead flat as far as the eye could see. Only at the shore was the ice broken up, with narrow leads of black open water, and near the outlet of the Chicago river men labored to keep the drinking-water inlet pipes clear of ice, as they had been forced to since the very first days after the Freeze.

People moved around on the lake. They were fishing at holes cut into the ice, and fires burned, the smoke rising in thin threads. Somehow the folk out there looked as if they had nothing to do with this huge wreck of a city at all.

Emeline said, panting as they walked, “The city’s not what it was. We’ve had to abandon a lot of the suburbs. The working town’s kind of boiled down to an area centered on the Loop—maybe a half-mile to a mile in each direction. The population’s shrunk a lot, what with the famine and the plagues and the walkaways, and now the relocation to New Chicago. But we still use the suburbs as mines, I suppose you would say. We send out parties to retrieve anything we can find, clothes and furniture and other stores, and wood for the fires and the furnaces. Of course we’ve had no fresh supplies of coal or oil since the Freeze.”

It turned out providing lumber was Emeline’s job. She worked in a small department attached to the Mayor’s office responsible for seeking out fresh sources of wood, and organizing the transport chains that kept it flowing into the habitable areas of the city.

“A city like this isn’t meant to survive in such conditions,” Abdi said. “It can endure only by eating itself, as a starving body will ultimately consume its own organs.”

“We do what we must,” Emeline said sharply.

The phone murmured, “Ruddy visited Chicago once—on Earth, after the date of the Discontinuity. He called it a ‘real city.’ But he said he never wanted to see it again.”

“Hush,” Bisesa said.

Emeline’s apartment turned out to be a converted office on the second floor of a skyscraper called the Montauk. The building looked skinny and shabby to Bisesa, but she supposed it had been a wonder of the world in the 1890s.

The apartment’s rooms were like nests, the walls and floors and ceilings thick with blankets and furs. Improvised chimney stacks had been punched in the walls to let the smoke out, but even so the surfaces were covered with soot. But there was some gentility. In the living room and parlor stood upright chairs and small tables, delicate pieces of furniture, clearly worn but lovingly maintained.

Emeline served them tea. It was made from Indian leaves from carefully hoarded thirty-year-old stock. By such small preservations these Chicagoans were maintaining their identity, Bisesa supposed.

They hadn’t been back long when one of Emeline’s two sons showed up. Aged around twenty he was the younger by a year, called Joshua after his father. He came in carrying a string of fish; breathing hard, red-faced, he had been out on Lake Michigan. Once he had peeled out of his furs he turned out to be a tall young man, taller than his father had ever been. And yet he had something of Josh’s openness of expression, Bisesa thought, his curiosity and eagerness. He seemed healthy, if lean. His right cheek was marked by a discolored patch that might have been a frostbite scar, and his face glistened with an oil that turned out to be an extract of seal blubber.

Emeline took the fish away to skin and gut. She returned with another cup of tea for Joshua. He politely took the cup, and swigged the hot tea down in one gulp.

“My father told me about you, Miss Dutt,” Joshua said uncertainly to Bisesa. “All that business in India.”

“We came from different worlds.”

“My father said you were from the future.”

“Well, so I am. His future, anyhow. Abdikadir’s father came through with me too. We were from the year 2037, around a hundred and fifty years after your father’s time slice.”

His expression was polite, glazed.

“I suppose it’s all a bit remote to you.”

He shrugged. “It just doesn’t make any difference. All that history isn’t going to happen now, is it? We won’t have to fight in your world wars, and so on. This is the world we’ve got, and we’re stuck with it. But that’s fine by me.”

Emeline pursed her lips. “Joshua rather enjoys life, Bisesa.”

It turned out he worked as an engineer on the rail lines out of New Chicago. But his passion was ice-fishing, and whenever he got time off he came back up to the old city to get into his furs and head straight out on the ice.

“He even writes poems about it,” Emeline said. “The fishing, I mean.”

The young man colored. “Mother—”

“He inherited that from his father, at least. A gift for words. But of course we’re always short of paper.”

Bisesa asked, “What about his brother—your older son, Emeline? Where is he?”

Her face closed up. “Harry went walkaway a couple of years back.” This was clearly distressing to her; she hadn’t mentioned it before. “He said he’d call back, but of course he hasn’t—they never do.”

Joshua said, “Well, he thinks he’s going to be put under arrest if he comes back.”

“Mayor Rice declared an amnesty a year ago. If only he’d get in touch, if only he’d come back just for a day, I could tell him he has nothing to fear.”

They spoke of this a little, and Bisesa began to understand. Walkaway: some of Chicago’s young people, born on Mir and seduced by the extraordinary landscape in which they found themselves, had chosen to abandon their parents’ heroic struggle to save Chicago, and the even more audacious attempt to build a new city south of the ice. They simply walked off, disappearing into the white, or the green of the grasslands to the south.

“It’s said they live like Eskimos,” said Joshua. “Or maybe like Red Indians.”

“Some of them even took reference books from the libraries, and artifacts from the museums, so they could work out how to live,” Emeline said bitterly. “No doubt many of these young fools are dead by now.”

It was clear this was a sore point between mother and son; perhaps Joshua dreamed of emulating his older brother.

Emeline cut the conversation short by standing to announce she was off to the kitchen to prepare lunch: they would be served Joshua’s fish, cleaned and gutted, with corn and green vegetables imported from New Chicago. Joshua took his leave, going off to wash and change.

When they had gone, Abdi eyed Bisesa. “There are tensions here.”

“Yes. A generation gap.”

“But the parents do have a point, don’t they?” Abdi said. “The alternative to civilization here is the Stone Age. These walkaways, if they survive, will be illiterate within two generations. And after that their only sense of history will be an oral tradition. They will forget their kind ever came from Earth, and if they remember the Discontinuity at all, it will become an event of myth, like the Flood. And when the cosmic expansion threatens the fabric of the world—”

“They won’t even understand what’s destroying them.” But, she thought wistfully, maybe it would be better that way. At least these walkaways and their children might enjoy a few generations of harmony with the world, instead of an endless battle with it. “Don’t you have the same kinds of conflict at home?”

Abdi paused. “Alexander is building a world empire. You can think that’s smart or crazy, but you’ve got to admit it’s something new. It’s hard not to be swept up. I don’t think we have too many walkaways. Not that Alexander would allow it if we did,” he added.

To Bisesa’s astonishment a telephone rang, somewhere in the apartment. It was an old-fashioned, intermittent, very uncertain ring, and it was muffled by the padding on the walls. But it was ringing. Telephones and newspapers: the Chicagoans really had kept their city functioning. She heard Emeline pick up, and speak softly.

Emeline came back into the lounge. “Say, it’s good news. Mayor Rice wants to meet you. He’s been expecting you; I wrote him from New Chicago. And he’ll have an astronomer with him,” she said grandly.

“That’s good,” Bisesa said uncertainly.

“He’ll see us this evening. That gives us time to shop.”

“Shop? Are you kidding?”

Emeline bustled out. “Lunch will be a half-hour. Help yourself to more tea.”