The Rift Read Online Free PDF Page B

a couple hundred feet to the ground, right on the edge of wiping out the whole time, wasn’t anything , was just something he did every day, and required a little flourish at the end to make it special.
    That, he thought, was Edge Living. Edge Living was something to aspire to.
    His mouth went dry at the thought of it.
    The only question, of course, was whether he’d ever dare try it. He’d done the wheelbarrow on rails before, but the rails were all straight, not curved outward, and he’d never wheelbarrowed more than a single story.
    Three metal-guitar chords thrummed from the computer. “I am at your service, master,” it said.
    Jason turned his attention to the screen. His friends in California, he thought, wouldn’t be back from school for another couple hours.
    He’d browse the Web, he thought, and check out all the chat lines devoted to skating.
    *
    For most of the eleven hundred years since the time of the Sun Man, the old Temple Mound had seen little change. The area remained a wilderness, low-lying and marshy and flooded every few years. The Mississippi flung itself left and right like a snake, carved a new course with every big flood. Every time it shifted course, it deposited enough silt over the next few years to raise the area through which it traveled. Then another flood would spread the river wide, and the river would find an area lower than that which it had built up, and carry its silty waters there.
    Over the years the Mississippi had carried away the Sun Mound, the big mound where the Sun Man had built his long lodge and where he had lived with his family. Many of the smaller mounds had also been flooded away during inundations, and the rest had been plowed under by farmers, who saw no reason why some aboriginal structure should impede the size of their harvest.
    Only the Temple Mound remained, the huge platform from which the Sun Man had witnessed the destruction of his people. The Mississippi had spared it, and the white men and their plows, daunted by its size, had spared it as well. The Cabell family, who had grown corn and wheat on the land for three generations, and had gamely held on through deluge and drought and civil war, had built their home on one of the mound’s terraces, safe from the floodwaters that regularly covered their corn fields. But even they had given up in the end, abandoning their home in the 1880s after too many floods had finally broken their spirit. The Swampeast had finally defeated them, just as it had defeated so many others. Nothing was left of the home now, nothing but some old foundation stones and a broken chimney covered with vines, and the mound was overgrown, covered with pumpkin oak and slippery elm and scrub.
    It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who finally made the Swampeast habitable. Just south of Cape Girardeau the levee line began, to continue 2,200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The long green walls, supported by a mammoth network of reservoirs, floodways, flood gates, flood walls, pumping stations, dikes, cutoffs, bendway weirs, and revetments, were unbroken save for where tributaries entered the Mississippi, and the tributaries were walled off as well, some for hundreds of miles. The levees kept the flood-waters out and finally permitted the farmers to clear the land and till their soil in peace. Cotton replaced wheat and corn in the 1920s, and the farmers grew wealthy on the rich alluvial soil.
    During the decades of prosperity, the farmers had forgotten that the conditions under which they had prospered were artificial. The natural state of the land was a swampy, tangled hardwood forest, subject to periodic inundations. The People of the Sun, whom the whites later called “Mississippians” or “Mound Builders,” had altered the land for a while, had changed its natural state from a nearly impenetrable hardwood thicket to corn fields dominated by huge earthen monuments, but the land reverted swiftly to its natural state once the Sun Man’s