فصل چهاردهم

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?” A long silence. “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anybody who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.” “That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time.” It happened just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high-speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of his dive from seven thousand feet, a long gray streak firing a few inches above the beach, when a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting; afraid and sad and sorry, terribly sorry.

The voice came to him as it had in the first day that he had met Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

“The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently. We don’t tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.” “Jonathan!”

“Also known as the Son of the Great Gull,” his instructor said dryly.

“What are you doing here? The cliff! Haven’t I . . . didn’t I . . . die?” “Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn’t die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It’s your choice now. You can stay here and learn on this level—which is quite a bit higher than the one you left, by the way—or you can go back and keep working with the Flock. The Elders were hoping for some kind of disaster, but they’re startled that you obliged them so well.” “I want to go back to the Flock, of course. I’ve barely begun with the new group!” “Very well, Fletcher. Remember what we were saying about one’s body being nothing more than thought itself . . . ?” • • •

Fletcher shook his head and stretched his wings and opened his eyes at the base of the cliff, in the center of the whole Flock assembled. There was a great clamor of squawks and screes from the crowd when first he moved.

“He lives! He that was dead lives!”

“Touched him with a wingtip! Brought him to life! The Son of the Great Gull!” “No! He denies it! He’s a devil! DEVIL! Come to break the Flock!”

There were four thousand gulls in the crowd, frightened at what had happened, and the cry DEVIL! went through them like the wind of an ocean storm. Eyes glazed, beaks sharp, they closed in to destroy.

“Would you feel better if we left, Fletcher?” asked Jonathan.

“I certainly wouldn’t object too much if we did . . .”

Instantly they stood together a half-mile away, and the flashing beaks of the mob closed on empty air.

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?” Fletcher still blinked from the change of scene. “What did you just do? How did we get here?” “You did say you wanted to be out of the mob, didn’t you?”

“Yes! But how did you . . .”

“Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.”