Were here, and here we will stay.
There had been no real choice but to move from Old Chicago.
It had taken the Chicagoans weeks, months to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit. The crisis wasnt merely some local climatic disaster, as had first been thought; something much more extraordinary had happened. Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, a bit of the nineteenth century stranded in antique ice. And as far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over.
Emeline said the first emigrants from Chicago proper had left for the south in the fifth year after the Freeze. New Chicago was the product of thirty years hard work by Americans who for many years had believed themselves entirely alone in an utterly transformed world.
But even in the heart of the new town, the wind from the north was persistent and cold.
They came to farmland on the edge of the town. As far as the eye could see, sheep and cattle were scattered over a green-brown prairie that was studded with small, shabby farm buildings.
Emeline walked them to a kind of open-air factory she called the Union Stock Yards. The place stank of blood and ordure and rotting meat, and a strange sour smell turned out to be incinerated hair. The core of it is from old Chicago, torn down and rebuilt here. Before the Freeze we used to slaughter fourteen million animals a day, and twenty-five thousand people worked here. We dont process but a fraction of that now, of course. In fact its lucky the Yards were always so busy, for if we hadnt been able to breed from the stock in its holding pens we would have starved in a year or two. Now they send the butchered meat up to feed the old city. Dont have to worry about freezing it; nature takes care of that for us...
As she spoke, Bisesa looked to the horizon. Beyond the farmland she saw what looked like a herd of elephants, mammoths or mastodons, walking proud and tall. It was astonishing to think that if she walked off, beyond those unperturbed mastodons, she could travel all the way to the oceans shore without seeing another glimpse of the work of mankind, not so much as a footprint in the scattered snow.
That night Bisesa retired to the shared hotel room early, exhausted from the traveling. But she had trouble sleeping.
Another day ahead of me and once again I don't know what the hell it will be like, she whispered to the phone. I'm too old for this.
The phone murmured, Do you know where we are? I mean, right here, this location. Do you know what it would have become, if not for the Discontinuity?
Surprise me. Graceland. The mansion. Youre kidding. But now Memphis will never exist at all.
Shit. So I'm stuck in a world without Myra, and diet cola, and tampons, and I'm about to go jaunting over an ice cap to the decaying carcass of a nineteenth-century city. And now you tell me the King will never be born. Unaccountably, she was crying again.
The phone softly played her Elvis tracks until she fell asleep.
PART 3 REUNIONS 40: SUNLIGHT
May 2070
In response to Athenas mysterious summons, Myra returned to Port Lowell and was taken up to
Martian orbit, where she rejoined the lightship James Clerk Maxwell. And she was wafted away on pale sunlight on a weeks-long jaunt back to the orbit of Earthbut not to Earth itself.
L5, Alexei Carel told her. A gravitationally stable point sixty degrees behind Earth.
I had a whole career in astronautics, Myra said testily. I know the basics.
Sorry. Just trying to prepare you.
It infuriated her that he wouldnt say any more, and retreated once again into his shell of secrecy.
There were in fact three of them aboard the Maxwell. Myra was surprised when Yuri ORourke tore himself away from his mission on Mars.
I wouldnt call myself the leader of Wells Station, he said slowly. I mean, thats actually my formal title on the contracts we signed with our backers, the universities and science foundations on Earth and Mars. But the others would kill me if I started acting that way. However, all of this is obviously affecting the station. And I have a feeling youll be coming back to trouble us further.
I'm not planning to quit until I get my mother back.
Fair enough. So I have the instinct that its right