"They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself,"
Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, "then you are a
thousand years ahead of your time."
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....?"
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