of a pre-Freeze rail track, but Emeline said it wasnt 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 wasnt 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. Its 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 couldnt 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 Emelines 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 cyclingnot 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 signsand 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 citys not what it was. Weve had to abandon a lot of the suburbs. The working towns kind of boiled down to an area centered on the Loopmaybe a half-mile to a mile in each direction. The populations 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 weve had no fresh supplies of coal or oil since the Freeze.
It turned out providing lumber was Emelines job. She worked in a small department attached to the Mayors 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 isnt 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 onceon 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.
Emelines 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 apartments rooms were like