Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

But the track terminated; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

Emeline led them off the train and into the town. She said it might take days to organize their onward travel. She hoped there would be room for them to stay at one of the town’s two small hotels; if not they would have to knock on doors.

New Chicago was on the site of Memphis, but there was no trace of that city here. With the wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails, and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of towns of the old Wild West. The streets were a pleasant bustle, adults coming and going on business, children hanging around outside a schoolhouse. Some of the adults even rode bicycles — safety bicycles that they called “Wheels,” an invention only a few years old at the time of the Discontinuity. But many of the townsfolk were bundled up in furs, like Arctic seal trappers, and there were camels tied up outside the saloons alongside the horses.

They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. In the lobby hung a framed newspaper front page. It was a Chicago Tribune late edition, dated July 21, 1894, and its headline read: world cut off from chicago.

They left their bags. Emeline bought them a roast beef sand-wich each for lunch. And in the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city.

New Chicago was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But it was big. Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people.

There was a handsome clock fixed to a tower on the town hall, which Emeline said was carefully set to “Chicago standard railway time,” a standard that the Chicagoans had clung to despite the great disruption of the Discontinuity — even though it was about three hours out according to the position of the sun. There were other signs of culture. A note pinned on a ragged scrap of paper to the town hall door announced a meeting:

A WORLD WITHOUT A POPE?

WHERE NEXT FOR CHRISTIANS?

WEDNESDAY, EIGHT O’CLOCK.

NO LIQUOR. NO GUNS.

And one small house was labeled edison’s memorial of chicago.

Bisesa bent down to read the details on the poster: The FATE Of

CHICAGO

On the NIGHT

The WHOLE WORLD FROZE

JULY 1894

A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope U.S. Patent Pending

A WONDER

TEN CENTS

Bisesa glanced at Emeline. “Edison?”

“He happened to be in the city that night. He’d been advising on the world’s fair, a year or two before. He’s an old man now, and poorly, but still alive — or he was when I set out for Babylon.”

They walked on, tracing the dusty streets.

They came to a little park, overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, it must have been a hundred feet tall or more. Its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

“Big Mary,” said Emeline, with a trace of pride in her voice.

“Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centerpiece of the world’s fair, that is the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which we held a year before the Freeze. When we chose this site for New Chicago, Mary was one of the first items we hauled down here, even though we barely had the capacity to do it.”

“It’s magnificent,” Abdikadir said, sounding sincere. “Even Alexander would be impressed.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Emeline said, obscurely pleased. “You have to make a statement of intent, you know. We’re 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 wasn’t 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 trans-formed 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 don’t process but a fraction of that now, of course. In fact it’s lucky the Yards were always so busy, for if we hadn’t 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.

Don’t 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 ocean’s 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.”

“You’re 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 decay-ing 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.

May 2070

In response to Athena’s 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 Earth — but 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 wouldn’t 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 O’Rourke tore himself away from his mission on Mars.

“I wouldn’t call myself the leader of Wells Station,” he said slowly. “I mean, that’s 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 you’ll be coming back to trouble us further.”