Stephen Baxter - The Full Story of How Chicago Survived the Discontinuity

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

The travellers reached New Chicago around noon. There was a proper station, with a platform and a little building where you could wait for a train and buy genuine tickets. But the track terminated here; they would have to travel on north to the old Chicago some other way.

Emeline led them off the train and into the town. They were to stay the night here, before pressing on to Chicago itself. She said 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, and nor was there more than an echo of old Chicago. With wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of the old Wild West rather than of a city of the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. And the main street, such as it was, was overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, perhaps, it must have been a hundred feet tall, more, and its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

'Big Mary,' said Emeline, with more than a trace of pride in her voice. 'Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centrepiece of the world's fair, that is the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, just a year before the Big 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 the Great 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.'

They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. They left their bags, and Emeline bought them a roast beef sandwich each for lunch, and during the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city. It was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people - perhaps tens of thousands.

As the afternoon wore on they began to tire, but Emeline insisted on taking them to one of the new town's most cherished sites. It looked like just another hastily put together wooden building, but out front was a sign saying, EDISON'S MEMORIAL OF CHICAGO. A WONDER. TEN CENTS.

Bisesa glanced at Emeline. 'Edison?'

'He survived the Freeze - or rather, he happened to be in the city that night. He threw his labours and his ingenuity into helping the city survive. He's an old man now, and poorly, but still alive - or he was when I set out for Babylon.'

Abdi asked, 'And what is this place?'

Emeline smiled. 'You'll see.' She knocked on the door, and handed over thirty cents for the three of them to the bustling woman who answered. The woman led them into the house, which smelled of roast pork and polish, and then into a small back room which was lit only by a flickering lamp behind red glass. Three hard-backed chairs sat facing the wall. The room seemed otherwise empty.

Emeline hung up her coat on a hook on the wall. In the dark-room gloom, she said, 'We need to give our eyes time to adjust.'

Bisesa said, 'I arrived without money. I'll have to find some way of paying you back for all this.'

'Josh wouldn't have begrudged you,' Emeline said. Bisesa thought she could sense a smile. 'I, however, am running a tab.'

After perhaps ten minutes three small hatches opened at about chest height, in front of the chairs, to reveal peepholes. The idea was obvious. Abdi, Bisesa and Emeline sat before the peepholes, eyes pressed to the wall. At first all there was to see was white light. Then with a clattering noise something began to pass before Bisesa's eye, making a kind of flickering. And captions began to roll upwards past her eyes: CHICAGO, On The NIGHT The WHOLE WORLD FROZE, JULY 1894. A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope, U.S. Patent Pending...

Then images of old Chicago appeared before Bisesa's eyes. It was like a very jerky cinema show, but there was a sense of motion.

Abdi was intrigued. 'Moving pictures! My father told me of this. How does it work?' And Emeline spoke of a spinning wheel with a narrow slit that allowed a momentary view of the frames passing before the shutter, forty or fifty per second, and Bisesa said something about the persistence of vision.

But then a piano began to play, off in the dark, a jangling sound all but out of tune wafting through the thin walls of the wooden house. They all fell silent, and watched the images.

The unnamed director of this primitive movie began with establishing images of the city before the night of the Freeze. Bisesa glimpsed a city that was already one of the greatest in America, somewhat frowned upon by the older cities of the east, but a pumping commercial heart. Traffic roared past her vision, silently, broughams and phaetons and other carriages, and crowded streetcars that a caption told her were called 'grip cars', for the way they clasped a moving cable that ran beneath the street, and trains roared through the streets, fully laden, apparently within touching distance of the jerkily-pictured pedestrians and cyclists. There were shots of towering skyscrapers, the first in all the world, and the glamorous stores on Michigan Avenue, and of the glimmering Lake Michigan, though Bisesa thought she saw sewage clouding the surface of this natural reservoir, and of the bustling Union Stock Yards at their height. All this took place under a sky that looked pregnant with soot and black smoke. But there were glimpses of poorer districts choked in trash and horse muck - and the corpses of horses, casualties of this horse-driven city, dumped in the street where they had died, in the winter frozen where they fell. The city was growing fast, as was attested by images of gas-lit streetlights hung out over the lines of streets yet to be built, on steaming undeveloped marsh land.

The very year before the Discontinuity the city had hosted the world's fair, the World's Columbian Exposition, mounted at colossal expense to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. The camera rode an elevated train along Sixty-third Street. Just before entering the fairground itself the camera swung to glimpse from its elevated position the vast arena of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Then the train passed over the fence and descended to its terminal to the rear of the 'Transportation Building'. The viewpoint walked a bit unsteadily through the Building past displays of locomotives, and what looked like a slice of ocean liner, and then out into the fairground itself, where a lagoon was skirted by a whole series of buildings that gleamed white, of classical influence with their pillars and facades but remarkably graceful in their composition and unity. THE WHITE CITY, said a juddering caption. Astonishingly for Bisesa, the delicate form of a Ferris Wheel towered over everything.

And then, a year after the fair, came the night of the Freeze. The moment of disjunction was celebrated with a clash of tinny chords on the piano.

The fairground itself was actually burning that night, after arson by the disaffected unemployed. The kinetoscope show told its story in captions and scattered, stark images, which must, Bisesa reflected, have taken both foresight and courage to capture.

The city was immediately plunged from the deep small hours to a cold dawn; that was the first shock, and Bisesa remembered her own experience of the Discontinuity when the sun had abruptly lurched across the sky of Pakistan. Snow had started to fall too, almost immediately, a tremendous shock as it was, or had been, a July night. The rioters in the White City were quickly subdued, the strikes they had called collapsed.

As morning came, grey and unwelcome early, there was panic in the office of the Mayor and the police departments. The cold was deepening quickly; the summer city was unprepared. Though the city itself seemed to be functioning, with some disruption thanks to the disjunction of the clocks, the trains and carriages that would have been expected to be flowing into the city by now had failed to arrive; Chicago, a great centre of trade in lumber and iron and livestock, was suddenly cut off from its arteries. And trains which tried to set out from the city found they ran out of track, a few miles from the city limits in very direction - it took a few crashes, and the first reported fatalities, to establish that fact. Parties of policemen and volunteers who set out on foot recorded nothing but winter beyond the city. Stevedores, panicking and excited, reported glimpsing icebergs on Lake Michigan. And businessmen in their offices in the upper storeys of the great skyscrapers, the Rookery and the Montauk, looked to the north to see a line of white, dead flat, bone bright beneath a lid of grey cloud.

The snow continued to fall. There were shots of the hospitals, Rush Medical College and Cook County Hospital, were the first victims of the cold were being brought in, the old and the very young, cases of frostbite and hypothermia: people freezing to death in July. The Mayor had been out of town and was nowhere to be seen; his deputy desperately tried to make long-distance phone calls to New York and Washington, but to no avail; if President Cleveland still lived, out there beyond the ice, he could offer no help or guidance to Chicago.

The 'Chicago Tribune' published a late edition, that first day. Its headline became a classic of humour and courage in the strangest of adversities: 'WORLD CUT OFF FROM CHICAGO'.

Things deteriorated quickly in the days that followed. People began to run out of fuel for their fires. An emergency shelter was set up in the city's famous four-thousand-seater Auditorium. The intake valves that drew the city's drinking after from Lake Michigan froze up. There were images of steam-powered dredgers, and workers in overcoats and bowler hats, their breath steaming around their faces, striving to keep the valves open.

And then people began to run out of food. The Mayor's office locked down the food stores and imposed a system of rationing, and called out the National Guard to help control the panicky food riots that broke out everywhere. By now there had been no produce carts or trains for days from Chicago's hinterland. The police and soldiers sent out to explore returned with the shattering, inexplicable news that the great belt of farmland around Chicago had gone - as simple as that, lost under a sheet of ice that looked old.

It was at this point that the deputy Mayor made his best decision. As the city threatened to crumble around him, and the death toll continued to mount up at the freezing homes and overcrowded hospitals and at the food riots, he recognised the limits of his capacity, and formulated an Emergency Committee. With himself as chair, it included a representative of the city's leading citizens. Here were the chief of police and commanders of the National Guard, and top businessmen and landowners, and the leaders of all of Chicago's powerful unions. Here was Jane Addams, 'Saint Jane', a noted social reformer who ran a women's refuge for Hull House. Here was Thomas Alva Edison, the great inventor, forty-seven years old, caught by chance in Chicago by the Freeze and pining for his lost laboratories in New Jersey, but his formidable mind already fizzing with unprecedented solutions for a city with unprecedented problems. And here was Colonel Edmund Rice, a veteran of Gettysburg who had run the 'Columbian Guard', a dedicated police force for the world's fair a year before. The deputy Mayor gladly gave up his seat as chair of the Committee to Rice.

With what seemed to Bisesa remarkable realism, and a good helping of compassion, this Committee began to act to stabilise the present, and plan for the future. Whatever had happened, an act of God or nature, was inexplicable, but it had happened, and that was an end to it. It was no good hoping all this snow and ice and cold and bergs would all just evaporate away; they had to act as if it would not - and as if the outside world, if it could be reached at all, would be no help to Chicago.

Under martial law, the Committee tidied up and locked in place the deputy Mayor's hasty imposition of rationing of food and fuel and medical supplies. They set up a curfew system and established new medical centres, where a brisk triage system was established to save as many of those who could be saved. And, with remarkable foresight, they ordered the halting of the slaughter of the animals in the Union Stock Yards. Like seedcorn, these creatures now had to be preserved to provide breeding stock for the following spring, if spring ever came.

It was a grim time, those first months. As supplies of gas and coal ran down, the city began to consume itself to keep warm, even as the deaths continued in swathes, from hunger and cold, and later from epidemics of cholera and typhoid in a city whose infrastructure had not been designed to withstand these conditions. Eventually the population would stabilise at about half its pre-Freeze levels, though ever since the Freeze, Emeline murmured, every year deaths had outnumbered births.

And meanwhile the explorers had gone out, probing every further over a country suddenly locked in ice, city men and women quickly learning how to survive in these super-Arctic conditions, lessons paid for with lives. In Chicago, as the months turned into years, it became clear that the ice was not receding but advancing.

They had eventually come to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit: that Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, stranded in a bit of the nineteenth century surrounded by antique ice. And the cold was only deepening as Mir, stitched together from eras of great climatic diversity, was knitting itself together, and plunging deep into a new Ice Age. The Soyuz had long since fallen from the sky, but scouts from Europe had reported an ice sheet covering the North American continent extending far south of the position of New York, just as in Europe it had reached the latitudes of London and Berlin.

And the gap in the ice where Chicago sheltered by its lake was only temporary, an artefact of the Discontinuity. As far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over. It would not be long before the glaciers, truncated by the Discontinuity, would advance to erase Chicago down to its foundations.

But there was a way out. Clearly you had to travel south, ever south, to find a liveable warmth. But there was a route, of sorts, if you followed the valley of the Illinois down to the site of St Louis, and then went on further south following the Mississippi, eventually you came to the edge of the ice, and then, if you crossed a cold, dusty, windswept desert that appeared to girdle the ice cap, you came to a place where the grass grew, green and open. It wasn't a countryside anybody recognised, and the exporters brought back images taken with their Kodak cameras of mastodons and mammoths and sloths, images nobody could believe. But at least there was a chance of establishing farmland there.

The site of Memphis was chosen as the nucleus of a new settlement, and gradually a transport route was established across the unforgiving terrain between frozen Chicago and its new offspring. Lumber was cut for buildings, and the stock from the Union Yards were driven down in carts and on sleds and on river boats and rafts. A scheme was established to run a rail track up form the new township as far north as it could be sustained, and to convert locos from Chicago's yards to burn wood. It wasn't long before food at last began to filter back from the township of the south to the city in the north. That was the fifth year after the Freeze.

The final decision was hard to make, but inevitable. As the ice closed in, of course Chicago had to be abandoned; already great swathes of the town were empty, lightless and lifeless, looted and burned out. Chicago was dying; the people it sheltered must move to its new twin, New Chicago, south of the ice. The migration would take years, decades to complete, for the tiny nuclei of townships in the south would be overwhelmed if all quarter-million surviving Chicagoans marched on it at once. And besides a gradual evacuation would allow the systematic saving of as many of the city's treasures and resources as was possible. The Committee had no ambition to see those under their charge slip back to primitive conditions; New Chicago would one day rise as grandly as the old, and become the nucleus for a new, retaken America - that was the plan.

The first symbolic act in the epic migration was to haul Big Mary across ice and down river to her new home in New Chicago. The last, still some years hence, would be a procession of the city's final citizens out of the city and to the waiting trains, after which the carcass of old Chicago would be given at last to the ice.

The flickering show ended, and Bisesa sat back. Their hostess took away the screens of stained glass over the room's lamps, and Bisesa blinked in suddenly bright light.

Emeline watched her. 'So that's our story.'

'I'm impressed. More than that.'

'You can see why we're proud of ourselves,' Emeline said. 'Once other towns looked down on Chicago; everybody knows that. But now Chicago is all that's left of America. And we can build it all again. We call it the "Chicago Spirit". We built the White City in just three years'...

'Of course they can,' the phone whispered to Bisesa. 'This was an age of enterprise, of building, building, building. This generation didn't just put up the first skyscrapers in Chicago, they built the Brooklyn Bridge, and laid down Central Park... They laid the foundations of the America that dominated the twentieth century. They did it once. Even dumped alone in an icebound America, of course they can do it again.'

For once Emeline didn't complain about the phone's interjection.

But Bisesa, sadly, thought of what the phone had had to say about the lethal expansion of this cosmos: that Mir, a heroically built New Chicago and all, may only have centuries more of existence before succumbing to a doom even more lethal than the ice.