The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

But that which is artifice occupies a precarious position in the world of nature.

That was how you solved a problem. You broke it down into pieces, and you solved the pieces one at a time. With patience, you could get anywhere,

But the Reelfoot rift and other mid-American fault structures are not situated on a plate boundary, like the San Andreas fault. They are square in the middle of a very solid continent, and when something hammers the bedrock of the Midwest, the North American plate rings like a giant bell.

If they had only looked up, if they had seen those millions of stars, perhaps they would have come to a different understanding. That life was not of consequence to anyone but the living, that there was no plan but what life made for itself.