“Is this it?” Nailer asked. “Is this the Orleans?”
Nita shook her head. “These were just towns outside the city. Support suburbs. They’re everywhere. Stuff like this goes for miles. From when everyone had cars.”
“Everyone?” Nailer tested the theory. It seemed unlikely. How could so many people be so rich? It was as absurd as everyone owning clipper ships. “How could they do that? There’s no roads.”
“They’re there.” She pointed. “Look.”
And indeed, if Nailer scrutinized the jungle carefully, he could make out the boulevards that had been, before trees punctured their medians and encroached. Now, the roads were more like flat fern and moss-choked paths. You had to imagine none of the trees sprouting up in the center, but they were there.
“Where’d they get the petrol?” he asked.
“They got it from everywhere.” Nita laughed. “From the far side of the world. From the bottom of the sea.” She waved at the drowned ruins, and a flash of ocean. “They used to drill out there, too, in the Gulf. Cut up the islands. It’s why the city killers are so bad. There used to be barrier islands, but they cut them up for their gas drilling.”
“Yeah?” Nailer challenged. “How do you know?”
Nita laughed again. “If you went to school, you’d know it, too. Orleans city killers are famous. Every dummy knows about them.” She stopped short. “I mean…”
Nailer wanted to hit her smug face.
Tool laughed, a low rumble of amusement.
Sometimes Nita seemed okay. Other times she was just swank. Smug and rich and soft. It was those moments that made Nailer think she could have learned a thing or two on Bright Sands Beach, that even Sloth with all her greed and willingness to betray him had been better than this rich swank who still looked pretty even after living amongst them all, as if she weren’t touched by the grime and pain and struggle that the rest of them felt.
“I’m sorry,” Nita said, but Nailer shrugged away her apology. It was clear what she thought of him.
They rode in silence. A village showed through the jungle, a clearing carved from the trees and shadows, a small fishing community perched amongst the bogs, dotted with slump shacks like the ones that Nailer’s own people constructed, with pigs and vegetables in their yards. To him, it looked like home. He wondered what Nita saw.
At last the jungle parted, opening on a wide expanse where the trees were lower and the height of the train gave them a view. Even from a distance, the city was huge. A series of needles, piercing the sky.
“Orleans II,” Tool said.
17
NAILER CRANED HIS NECK to see over the tops of the trees and take in the mangled metropolis. “There’s got to be good scavenge there,” he said.
Nita shook her head. “You’d have to knock down the towers. You’d need all kinds of explosives. It’s not worth it.”
“Depends how much copper and iron you can pull,” Nailer said. “Put a light crew in the building, see what’s what.”
“You’d have to work in the middle of a lake.”
“So? If you swanks left a lot behind, it would be worth it.” He hated the way she acted like she knew everything. He stared out at the towers. “I’ll bet all the good stuff’s been stripped, though. Too good to leave lying there.”
“Still”-Tool nodded at the many buildings spread out and covered with greenery-“a lot of scavenge if someone organized.”
Again Nita disagreed. “You’d have to fight with the locals for scavenge rights. Fight for every inch. If it weren’t for treaties and the trading militias, even the transshipment zone would be contested.” She made a face. “You can’t bargain with people like that. They’re savages.”
“Savages like Nailer?” Tool goaded. Again his yellow eyes flickered with humor as Nita blushed and looked away, pushing her black hair behind her ear and pretending to watch the moving horizon.
Whatever Nita thought of the scavenge opportunities, there was a lot of abandoned material spread out before them, and if Nailer understood correctly, this was just Orleans II. There was also the original New Orleans, and then there was Mississippi Metropolitan-aka MissMet-what had been originally envisioned as New Orleans III, before even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called “Orleans.”
Some engineers had claimed it was possible to raise hurricane-resistant towers above Pontchartrain Bay, but the merchants and traders had had enough of the river mouth and the storms, and so left the drowned city to docks and deep-sea loading platforms and slums, while they migrated their wealth and homes and children to land that lay more comfortably above sea level.
MissMet was far away upriver and higher in elevation and armored against cyclones and hurricanes as none of the others had been, a city designed from the ground up to avoid the pitfalls of their earlier optimism, a place for swanks that Nailer had heard was paved in gold and where gleaming walls and guards and wire kept the rest of the chaff away.
At one time in the past, New Orleans had meant many things, had meant jazz and Creole and the pulse of life, had meant Mardi Gras and parties and abandon, had meant creeping luxurious green decay. Now it meant only one thing.
Loss.
More dead jungle ruins flashed past, an astonishing amount of wealth and materials left to rot and fall back to the green tangle of the trees and swamps.
“Why did they give up?” Nailer asked.
“Sometimes people learn,” Tool said.
From that, Nailer took him to be saying that mostly people didn’t. The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances.
The train curved toward the hulking towers. The shambled outline of an ancient stadium showed beyond the spires of Orleans II, marking the beginning of the old city, the city proper for the drowned lands.
“Stupid,” Nailer muttered. Tool leaned close to hear his voice over the wind, and Nailer shouted in his ear, “They were damn stupid.”
Tool shrugged. “No one expected Category Six hurricanes. They didn’t have city killers then. The climate changed. The weather shifted. They did not anticipate well.”
Nailer wondered at that idea. That no one could have understood that they would be the target of monthly hurricanes pinballing up the Mississippi Alley, gunning for anything that didn’t have the sense to batten down, float, or go underground.
The train flew over its pylons, curving toward the center of the trade nexus, speeding over brackish water, bright with leaked waste oil and scrap trash and the stink of chemicals. They shot past floating platforms and transshipment loaders. Massive containers were being loaded into clipper ships via cranes. Shallow-draft Mississippi river boats with their stubby sails were being loaded with luxuries from across the oceans.
The train rolled past scrap and recycling yards, men and women’s backs sheened mirror bright with sweat as they stacked hand carts with purchased scrap and moved it to weighing platforms for sale. The train began to slow. It shunted onto a new series of tracks, dipping down to a barren zone of rail yards and slum shacks, before shunting again. Wheels squealed on steel and the train cars shuddered as the brakes were applied. The ripple of the slowdown thudded back through the cars to the tail of the train.
Tool touched their shoulders. “We get off now. Soon we’ll be in the rail yards and then people will ask why we are here and if we have the right.”
Even though the train was going slowly, they all ended up falling and rolling when they hit the ground. Nailer stood, wiping dust from his eyes, and surveyed the area. In many ways, it was not much different from the ship-breaking yards. Scrap and junk, soot and oily grime and slumped shacks with people watching them, hollow-eyed.