In the days that followed, Jonathan saw that there was as much to learn about flight

in this place 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 through 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 didn't have to go through a thousand lives to

reach this one."

In a moment they were airborne again, practicing. The formation point-roils 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.

Part 2 Chapter 2.mp3