the myths. Galatea was actually the name of the Nereid he loved, according to some ver-sions of the stories. Polyphemus is the oldest but still the most impressive instrument they have here.”
Yuri, an instrument man himself, was fascinated, and peppered Lyla and Alexei with questions.
Big mirrors were on the face of it easier to manufacture than big lenses, but it turned out that a lens was the preferred technology for building really huge telescopes because of its better optical tolerance; the longer pathways traversed by light rays gathered up by a mirror tended to amplify distortions rather than to diminish them, as a lens would. A Fresnel lens was a compromise design, a composite of many smaller lenses fixed into a lacy framework and spun up for stability. Lyla said the sub-lenses at the rim of the structure were thin enough to roll up like paper. There were technical issues with Fresnel lenses, the main one being “chromatic aberration”; they were narrow- bandwidth devices. But there was an array of corrective optics—“Schupmann devices,” Lyla said — installed before the main lens itself to compensate for this.
“The lens itself is smart,” she said. “It can correct for thermal distortions, gravitational tweaks… With this one big beast alone you can detect the planets of nearby stars, and study them spectroscopically, and so on. And now they are working on an interferom-eter array. More mirrors, suspended in space. Elevator, show us…”
More tracking ovals lit up on the wall.
“They’re called Arges, Brontes, and Steropes. More Cyclops giants. Working together they are like a composite telescope of tremendous size.
“It’s no coincidence that she came here. Athena, I mean. Her transmission back home was picked up by Polyphemus. Very faint laser light. Elevator, resume.”
The elevator plunged without slowing through the first of the decks. Myra glimpsed a floor that curved upwards, a decor of silver-gray and pink, and people who walked with slow bounds.
“The Moon deck,” she said.
“Right,” Lyla said. “You understand that Galatea is centrifugally stratified. We’ll be stopping on the Mars deck, where you’ll be meeting Athena.”
As Myra absorbed that, Yuri nodded. “It will help if we can stay in condition in the G conditions we’re used to.”
“Yeah,” said Lyla. “Not many go further than that. Nobody but our ambassadors from Earth, in fact.”
“Ambassadors?” Myra asked.
“Actually cops. Astropol.” She pulled a face. “We encourage them to stay down there, in their own lead-boot gravity field. Keeps them from getting in the way of the real work.”
“They don’t know we’re here, do they?”
“No reason why they should,” Alexei said.
Myra guessed, “And they don’t know about Athena.”
“No, they don’t,” Lyla said. “At least I don’t think they do.
They really are just cops; they should have sent up a few astronomers.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Myra confessed. “Where Athena has ‘been.’ How she ‘came back.’ And I don’t understand why
“All your questions will be answered soon, Myra,” a voice spoke from the air.
It was the second time Athena had spoken to Myra. The others looked at her curiously, even a little enviously.
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 candle-lit interior, a few shops with “open for business” signs — and even a kid selling newspapers, flimsy single sheets bearing the proud banner
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.
