Fire on the Mountain Read Online Free

story is the same one you’ve heard all your life in bits and pieces. He just wanted the original to be in the museum. This is the actual paper that he wrote fifty years ago, in 1909. It’s like a little piece of himself he wanted buried there.”
    “Creepy.” Harriet closed the bag.
    “Oh, Harriet! Anyway, I couldn’t take it on the Fourth, since the dig wasn’t finished yet, and—what with one thing and another, I was held up in Dar . . .
    There it was. Yasmin smiled secretly, feeling the little fire in her belly. At this stage it came and went at its own pleasure, but when it came it was very nice. “ . . . so we’re going now,” she finished. “You and I.”
    “There was a big celebration on the Fourth,” Harriet said. “I watched it on vid.”
    “Aren’t you going to ask me about Africa?” Yasmin said, searching for a way to begin to tell her the good news. How do you tell your daughter you’re pregnant? Especially when her father’s never been buried? Especially when . . .
    “Why didn’t you ask me?” Harriet said.
    “Ask you what?”
    “Ask me to go. I could have taken the papers to Harper’s Ferry. Then they would have been there for the Fourth.”
    Yasmin was embarrassed. It had never occurred to her.
    “I’m his relative too. I was here the whole time.”
    The Martin Delaney motored past, but Yasmin didn’t race it this time. The high whine of the differential plasma motors sounded complaining, not joyful. She searched her belly, but the little fire was gone.
    The airship looked like an ice cream sandwich, with the iceblue superconductor honeycomb, trailing mist, sandwiched between the dark cargo hull below and the excursion decks above. While Harriet watched, the honeycomb blinked rapidly: the ship was making a course correction, and it existed and didn’t almost simultaneously for a few seconds. Then all was steady again. Weighing slightly less than nothing, and with slightly more than infinite mass, it sailed northward as unperturbed as a planet in its orbit.
    Harriet waved two fingers enviously as the ship glided away. From up there the world was beautiful. There was nothing to see from the ground but catfish ponds and wheat fields and country towns, one after another, as interesting as fence posts.
    She punched on the radio, double-clicking on the news, then double-clicking again on Mars. Until her mother gave her that look.
    “It’s not that I’m not interested, honey,” Yasmin said. “We’ll be back at your grandmother’s to watch the landing. I don’t want her watching it alone. I just don’t want to exactly hear the play-by-play until then, you understand?”
    “Sure.”
    Two hours later, they were in Charles Town. Yasmin turned east at the courthouse toward Harper’s Ferry. The road ran straight between well-kept farms, some still private. The wheat was still waiting for the international combine teams, working their way north from Nova Africa; but a few local hydrogen-powered corn pickers were out, their unmuffled internal-combustion engines rattling and snorting. Yasmin saw a green-gabled house at least a hundred years old and started to point it out to Harriet, thinking it was the very one in the story in the doctor’s bag in the backseat, Green Gables. But no, hadn’t that one burned? Besides, Harriet was asleep.
    The shoes did look plain. There was something you were supposed to do with living shoes, to train them, but Yasmin couldn’t remember what it was. She sighed. Her reunion with her daughter was not off to a very good start. Oh well, things could only get better. Ahead, the Blue Ridge, blue only from the east, was red and gold. Neatly tucked under it at the gap was Harper’s Ferry, where the Independence War began.

    By noon I had unloaded the fence posts while Deihl dickered and spat in Low German with the owner, and we started back with the new horse tied to the wagon; he was indeed a skittery character. His name was Caesar, which I spelled in my