Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So this is heaven, he thought, and he had to smile at himself. It was hardly respectful
to analyse heaven in the very moment that one flies up to enter it.
As he came from Earth now, above the clouds and in close formation with the two brilliant
gulls, he saw that his own body was growing as bright as theirs. True, the same young
Jonathan Seagull was there that has always lived behind his golden eyes, but the outer
form had changed. It felt like a seagull body, but already it
flew far better than his old one had ever flown. Why, with half the effort, he though,
I'll get twice the speed, twice the performance of my best days on earth!
His feathers glowed brilliant white now, and his wings were smooth and perfect as sheets
of polished silver. He began, delightedly, to learn about them, to press power into these
new wings. At two hundred fifty miles per hour he felt
that he was nearing his level-flight maximum speed. At two hundred seventy-three he thought
that he was flying as fast as he could fly, and he was ever so faintly disappointed. There
was a limit to how much the new body could do, and though it was much faster than his
old level-flight record, it was still a limit that would take great effort to crack. In
heaven, he thought there should be no limits.
The clouds broke apart, his escorts called, "Happy landings, Jonathan," and vanished into
thin air. He was flying over a sea, toward a jagged
shoreline. A very few seagulls were working the updraughts on the cliffs. Away off to
the north, at the horizon itself, flew a few others. New sights, new thoughts, new questions.
Why so few gulls? Heaven should be flocked with gulls! And why am I so tired, all at
once? Gulls in heaven are never supposed to be tired, or to sleep.
Where had he heard that? The memory of his life on Earth was falling away. Earth had
been a place where he had learned much, of course, but the details were blurred - something
about fighting for food, and being Outcast. The dozen gulls by the shoreline came to meet
him, none saying a word. He felt only that he was welcome and that this was home. It
had been a big day for him, a day whose sunrise he no longer remembered.
He turned to land on the beach, beating his wings to stop an inch in the air, then dropping
lightly to the sand. The other gulls landed too, but not one of them so much as flapped
a feather. they swung into the wind, bright wings outstretched, then somehow they changed
the curve of their feathers until they had stopped in the same instant their feet touched
the ground. It was beautiful control, but now Jonathan was just too tired to try it.
Standing there on the beach still without a word spoken, he was asleep.
In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight in
this place as there as there had been in the life behind him.
But with a difference. Here were gulls who thought as he thought. For each of them, the
most important thing in living was to reach out and touch perfection in that which they
most loved to do, and that was to fly. They were magnificent birds, all of them, and they
spent hour after hour every day practicing flight, testing advanced aeronautics.
For a long time Jonathan forgot about the world that he had come from, that place where
the Flock lived with its eyes tightly shut to the joy of flight, using its wings as means
to the end of finding and fighting for food. But now and then, just for a moment, he remembered.
He remembered it one morning when he was out with his instructor, while they rested on
the beach after a session of folded-wing snap rolls.
"Where is everybody, Sullivan?" He asked silently, quite at home now with the easy telepathy
that these gulls used instead of screes and gracks. "Why aren't there more of us here?
Why, where I came from there were..." "... thousands and thousands of gulls. I know."
Sullivan shook his head. "The only answer I can see, Jonathan, is that you are pretty
well a one-in-a-million bird. Most of us came along ever so slowly. we went from one world
into another that was almost exactly like it, forgetting right away where we had come
from, not caring where we were headed, living for the moment. Do you have any idea how many
lives we must have gone though before we even got the first idea that there is more to life
than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!
And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection,
and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that
perfection and show it forth. The same rule holds for us now, of course; we choose our
next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same
as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome."
he stretched his wings and turned to face the wind. "But you, Jon." he said, "learned
so much at one time that you don't have to go through a thousand lives to reach this
one." In moment they were airborne again, practicing.
The formation point-rolls were difficult, for through the inverted half Jonathan had
to think upside down, reversing the curve of his wing and reversing it exactly in harmony
with his instructor's. "Let's try it again," Sullivan said, over
and over: "Let's try it again." Then, finally, "Good." And they began practicing outside
loops.