Joanna Lavinia Seagull

Part One

It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the
ripples of a gentle sea. A mile from shore a fishing boat
chummed the water. and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed
through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to
dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning.

But way off alone, out by herself beyond boat and shore,
Joanne Lavinia Seagull was practicing. A hundred feet in
the sky she lowered her webbed feet, lifted her beak, and
strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through her
wings. The curve meant that she would fly slowly, and now she
slowed until the wind was a whisper in her face, until the ocean
stood still beneath her. She narrowed her eyes in fierce
concentration, held her breath, forced one... single... more...
inch... of... curve... Then her feathers ruffled, she stalled
and fell.

Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in
the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.

But Joanne Lavinia Seagull, unashamed, stretching her
wings again in that trembling hard curve - slowing, slowing, and
stalling once more - was no ordinary bird.

Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts
of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again. For
most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this
gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More
than anything else. Joanne Lavinia Seagull loved to fly.

This kind of thinking, she found, is not the way to make one's
self popular with other birds. Even her parents were dismayed
as Joanne spent whole days alone, making hundreds of low-level
glides, experimenting.

She didn't know why, for instance, but when she flew at altitudes
less than half her wingspan above the water, she could stay in
the air longer, with less effort. Her glides ended not with the
usual feet-down splash into the sea, but with a long flat wake
as she touched the surface with her feet tightly streamlined
against her body. When she began sliding in to feet-up landings
on the beach, then pacing the length of her slide in the sand,
his parents were very much dismayed indeed.

"Why, Jo, why?" her mother asked. "Why is it so hard to be
like the rest of the flock, Jane? Why can't you leave low flying
to the pelicans, the albatross? Why don't you eat? Girl, you're
bone and feathers!"

"I don't mind being bone and feathers mom. I just want to know
what I can do in the air and what I can't, that's all. I just
want to know."

"See here Joanne " said her mother not unkindly. "Winter
isn't far away. Boats will be few and the surface fish will be
swimming deep. If you must study, then study food, and how to
get it. This flying business is all very well, but you can't eat
a glide, you know. Don't you forget that the reason you fly is
to eat."

Joanne nodded obediently. For the next few days she tried to
behave like the other gulls; she really tried, screeching and
fighting with the flock around the piers and fishing boats,
diving on scraps of fish and bread. But she couldn't make it work.

It's all so pointless, she thought, deliberately dropping a
hard-won anchovy to a hungry old gull chasing her. I could be
spending all this time learning to fly. There's so much to learn!

It wasn't long before Joanne Gull was off by herself again,
far out at sea, hungry, happy, learning.

The subject was speed, and in a week's practice she learned
more about speed than the fastest gull alive.

From a thousand feet, flapping her wings as hard as she could,
he pushed over into a blazing steep dive toward the waves, and
learned why seagulls don't make blazing steep pewer-dives. In
just six seconds she was moving seventy miles per hour, the
speed at which one's wing goes unstable on the upstroke.

Time after time it happened. Careful as she was, working at the
very peak of her ability, she lost control at high speed.

Climb to a thousand feet. Full power straight ahead first, then
push over, flapping, to a vertical dive. Then, every time, her
left wing stalled on an upstroke, she'd roll violently left,
stall her right wing recovering, and flick like fire into a wild
tumbling spin to the right.

She couldn't be careful enough on that upstroke. Ten times he
tried, and all ten times, as she passed through seventy miles
per hour, she burst into a churning mass of feathers, out of
control, crashing down into the water.

The key, she thought at last, dripping wet, must be to hold the
wings still at high speeds - to flap up to fifty and then hold
the wings still.

From two thousand feet she tried again, rolling into her dive,
beak straight down, wings full out and stable from the moment
he passed fifty miles per hour. It took tremendous strength,
but it worked. In ten seconds she had blurred through ninety
miles per hour. Joanne had set a world speed record for
seagulls!

But victory was short-lived. The instant she began her pullout,
the instant she changed the angle of her wings, she snapped
into that same terrible uncontrolled disaster, and at ninety
miles per hour it hit her like dynamite. Joanne Seagull
exploded in midair and smashed down into a brickhard sea.

When she came to, it was well after dark, and she floated in
moonlight on the surface of the ocean. Her wings were ragged
bars of lead, but the weight of failure was even heavier on her
back. She wished, feebly, that the weight could be just enough
to drug her gently down to the bottom, and end it all.

As she sank low in the water, a strange hollow voice sounded
within her. There's no way around it. I am a seagull. I am
limited by my nature. If I were meant to learn so much about
flying, I'd have charts for brains. If I were meant to fly at
speed, I'd have a falcon's short wings, and live on mice instead
of fish. My mother was right. I must forget this foolishness. I
must fly home to the Flock and be content as I am, as a poor
limited seagull.

The voice faded, and Joanne agreed. The place for a seagull
at night is on shore, and from this moment forth, she vowed, he
would be a normal gull. It would make everyone happier.

She pushed wearily away from the dark water and flew toward
the land, grateful for what she had learned about work-
saving low-altitude flying.

But no, she thought. I am done with the way I was, I am done
with everything I learned. I am a seagull like every other
seagull, and I will fly like one. So she climbed painfully to a
hundred feet and flapped her wings harder, pressing for shore.

She felt better for her decision to be just another one of the
Flock. There would be no ties now to the force that had driven
him to learn, there would be no more challenge and no more
failure. And it was pretty, just to stop thinking, and fly
through the dark, toward the lights above the beach.

Dark! The hollow voice cracked in alarm. Seagulls never fly in
the dark!

Joanne was not alert to listen. It's pretty, she thought. The
moon and the lights twinkling on the water, throwing out little
beacon-trails through the night, and all so peaceful and still...

Get down! Seagulls never fly in the dark! If you were meant to
fly in the dark, you'd have the eyes of an owl! You'd have
charts for brains! You'd have a falcon's short wings!

There in the night, a hundred feet in the air, Joanne
Lavinia Seagull - blinked. Her pain, her resolutions, vanished.

Short wings. A falcon's short wings!

That's the answer! What a fool I've been! All I need is a tiny
little wing, all I need is to fold most of my wings and fly on
just the tips alone! Short wings!

She climbed two thousand feet above the black sea, and
without a moment for thought of failure and death, she brought
her forewings tightly in to her body, left only the narrow
swept daggers of her wingtips extended into the wind, and fell
into a vertical dive.

The wind was a monster roar at her head. Seventy miles per
hour, ninety, a hundred and twenty and faster still. The
wing-strain now at a hundred and forty miles per hour wasn't
nearly as hard as it had been before at seventy, and with the
faintest twist of her wingtips she eased out of the dive and shot
above the waves, a gray cannonball under the moon. She closed her
eyes to slits against the wind and rejoiced. A hundred forty
miles per hour! And under control! If I dive from five thousand
feet instead of two thousand, I wonder how fast..

Her vows of a moment before were forgotten, swept away in that
great swift wind. Yet she felt guiltless, breaking the promises
he had made herself. Such promises are only for the gulls that
accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in her
learning has no need of that kind of promise.

By sunup, Joanne Gull was practicing again. From five
thousand feet the fishing boats were specks in the flat blue
water, Breakfast Flock was a faint cloud of dust motes, circling.

She was alive, trembling ever so slightly with delight, proud
that her fear was under control. Then without ceremony she hugged in
her forewings, extended her short, angled wingtips, and plunged
directly toward the sea.

By the time she passed four thousand feet she had reached terminal
velocity, the wind was a solid beating wall of sound against which
she could move no faster. She was flying now straight down, at
two hundred fourteen miles per hour. She swallowed, knowing that if
her wings unfolded at that speed be'd be blown into a million tiny
shreds of seagull. But the speed was power, and the speed was
joy, and the speed was pure beauty.

She began her pullout at a thousand feet, wingtips thudding and
blurring in that gigatitic wind, the boat and the crowd of gulls
tilting and growing meteor-fast, directly in her path.

She couldn't stop; she didn't know yet even how to turn at that speed.

Collision would be instant death.

And so she shut her eyes. It happened that morning, then, just after
sunrise, that Joanna Lavinia Seagull fired directly through the
center of Breakfast Flock, ticking off two hundred twelve miles per hour,
eyes closed, in a great roaring shriek of wind and feathers. The
Gull of Fortune smiled upon her this once, and no one was killed.

By the time she had pulled her beak straight up into the sky she
was still scorching along at a hundred and sixty miles per hour.
When she had slowed to twenty and stretched her wings again
at last, the boat was a crumb on the sea, four thousand feet below.

Her thought was triumph. Terminal velocity! A seagull at two
hundred fourteen miles per hour! It was a breakthrough, the
greatest single moment in the history of the Flock, and in that
moment a new age opened for Joanne Gull. Flying out to her
lonely practice area, folding her wings for a dive from eight
thousand feet, she set herself at once to discover how to turn.

A single wingtip feather, she found, moved a fraction of an
inch, gives a smooth sweeping curve at tremendous speed.
Before she learned this, however, she found that moving more
than one feather at that speed will spin you like a ritIe
ball... and Joanne had flown the first aerobatics of any
seagull on earth.

She spared no time that day for talk with other gulls, but flew
on past sunset. She discovered the loop, the slow roll, the point
roll, the inverted spin, the gull bunt, the pinwheel.

When Joanne Seagull joined the Flock on the beach, it was
full night. She was dizzy and terribly tired. Yet in delight he
flew a loop to landing, with a snap roll just before touchdown.
When they hear of it, she thought, of the Breakthrough, they'll
be wild with joy. How much more there is now to living! Instead
of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats,
there's a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance,
we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and
intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

The years ahead hummed and glowed with promise.

The gulls were flocked into the Council Gathering when she
landed, and apparently had been so flocked for some time. They were,
in fact, waiting.

"Joanne Lavinia Seagull! Stand to Center!" The Elder's
words sounded in a voice of highest ceremony. Stand to Center
meant only great shame or great honor. Stand to Center for Honor
was the way the gulls' foremost leaders were marked. Of course,
he thought, the Breakfast Flock this morning; they saw the
Breakthrough! But I want no honors. I have no wish to be leader.
I want only to share what I've found, to show those horizons out
ahead for us all. She stepped forward.

"Joanne Lavinia Seagull," said the Elder, "Stand to Center
for Shame in the sight of your fellow gulls!"

It felt like being hit with a board. Her knees went weak, her
feathers sagged, there was roaring in her ears. Centered for
shame? Impossible! The Breakthrough! They can't understand!
They're wrong, they're wrong!

"... for her reckless irresponsibility " the solemn voice
intoned, "violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family..."

To be centered for shame meant that she would be cast out of
gull society, banished to a solitary life on the Far Cliffs.

"... one day Joanne Lavinia Seagull, you shall learn that
irresponsibility does not pay. Life is the unknown and the
unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to
stay alive as long as we possibly can."

A seagull never speaks back to the Council Flock, but it was
Joanne's voice raised. "Irresponsibility? My Sisters!" she
cried. "Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and
follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand
years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a
reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free! Give me one
chance, let me show you what I've found..."

The Flock might as well have been stone.

"The Sisterhood is broken," the gulls intoned together, and
with one accord they solemnly closed their ears and turned their
backs upon her.

Joanne Seagull spent the rest of her days alone, but she flew
way out beyond the Far Cliffs. Her one sorrow was not solitude,
it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight
that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see. She
learned more each day. She learned that a streamlined high-speed
dive could bring her to find the rare and tasty fish that
schooled ten feet below the surface of the ocean: she no longer
needed fishing boats and stale bread for survival. She learned to
sleep in the air, setting a course at night across the offshore
wind, covering a hundred miles from sunset to sunrise. With the
same inner control, she flew through heavy sea-fogs and climbed
above them into dazzling clear skies... in the very times when
every other gull stood on the ground, knowing nothing but mist
and rain. She learned to ride the high winds far iniand, to dine
there on delicate insects.

What she had once hoped for the Flock, she now gained for herself
alone; she learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that
she had paid. Joanne Seagull discovered that boredom and fear
and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and
with these gone from her thought, she lived a long fine life indeed.

They came in the evening, then, and found Joanne gliding
peaceful and alone through her beloved sky. The two gulls that
appeared at her wings were pure as starlight, and the glow from
them was gentle and friendly in the high night air. But most
lovely of all was the skill with which they flew, their wingtips
moving a precise and constant inch from her own. Without a word,
Joanne put them to her test, a test that no gull had ever
passed. She twisted her wings, slowed to a single mile per hour
above stall. The two radiant birds slowed with her, smoothly,
locked in position. They knew about slow flying.

She folded her wings, rolled and dropped in a dive to a hundred
ninety miles per hour. They dropped with her, streaking down in
flawless formation.

At last she turned that speed straight up into a long vertical
slow-roll. They rolled with her, smiling.

She recovered to level flight and was quiet for a time before she
spoke. "Very well," she said, "who are you?"

"We're from your Flock, Joanne. We are your sisters." The
words were strong and calm. "We've come to take you higher, to
take you home."

"Home I have none. Flock I have none. I am Outcast. And we fly
now at the peak of the Great Mountain Wind. Beyond a few hundred
feet, I can lift this old body no higher."

"But you can Joanne. For you have learned. One school is
finished, and the time has come for another to begin."

As it had shined across her all her life, so understanding
lighted that moment for Joanne Seagull. They were right. She
could fly higher, and it was time to go home.

She gave one last look across the sky, across that magnificent
silver land where she had learned so much.

"I'm ready " she said at last.

And Joanne Lavinia Seagull rose with the two starbright
gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky.

Part Two

So this is heaven, she thought, and she had to smile at herself.
It was hardly respectful to analyze heaven in the very moment
that one flies up to enter it.

As she came from Earth now, above the clouds and in close
formation with the two brilliant gulls, she saw that her own body
was growing as bright as theirs. True, the same young Joanne
Seagull was there that had always lived behind her golden eyes,
but the outer form had changed.

It felt like a seagull body, but already it flew far better
than her old one had ever flown. Why, with half the effort, she
thought, I'll get twice the speed, twice the performance of my
best days on Earth!

Her feathers glowed brilliant white now, and her wings were
smooth and perfect as sheets of polished silver. She began,
delightedly, to learn about them, to press power into these new wings.

At two hundred fifty mlles per hour she felt that she was nearing
his level-flight maximum speed. At two hundred seventy-three she
thought that she was flying as fast as she could fly, and she was
ever so faintly disappointed. There was a limit to how much the
new body could do, and though it was much faster than her old
level-flight record, it was still a limit that would take great
effort to crack. In heaven, she thought, there should be no limits.

The clouds broke apart, her escorts called, "Happy landings,
Joanne," and vanished into thin air.

She was flying over a sea, toward a jagged shoreline. A very few
seagulls were working the updrafts 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 she heard that? The memory of her life on Earth was
falling away. Earth had been a place where she 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 her, none saying
a word. She felt only that she was welcome and that this was home.
It had been a big day for her, a day whose sunrise she no longer remembered.

She turned to land on the beach, beating her 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 Joanne was just too tired to
try it. Standing there on the beach, still without a word
spoken, she was asleep.

In the days that followed, Joanne saw that there was as much
to learn about flight in this place as there had been in the
life behind her. But with a difference. Here were gulls who
thought as she 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 Joanne forgot about the world that she 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, she remembered.

She remembered it one morning when she was out with her
instructor, while they rested on the beach after a session of
folded-wing snap rolls.

"Where is everybody, Kathryn?" she 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. " Kathryn shook
her head. "The only answer I can see, Joanne, 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, forgettiug 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 gor the first idea that there is more to life than eating,
or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jo, 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."

She stretched her wings and turned to face the wind. "But you,
Jo," she 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
Joanne had to think upside down, reversing the curve of her
wing, and reversing it exactly in harmony with her instructor's.

"Let's try it again." Kathryn said over and over: "Let's try
it again." Then, finally, "Good." And they began practicing
outside loops.

One evening the gulls that were not night-flying stood together
on the sand, thinking. Joanne took all her courage in hand and
walked to the Elder Gull, who, it was said, was soon to be
moving beyond this world. "May-Ling..." she said a little nervously.

The old seagull looked at her kindly. "Yes, my daughter?" Instead of
being enfeebled by age, the Elder had been empowered by it; she
could outfly any gull in the Flock, and she had learned skills
that the others were only gradually coming to know.

"May-Ling, this world isn't heaven at all, is it?" The Elder
smiled in the moonlight. "You are learning again, Joanne
Seagull," she said.

"Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no
such place as heaven?"

"No, Joanne, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place,
and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." she was silent
for a moment. "You are a very fast flier, aren't you?"

"I... I enjoy speed," Joanne said, taken aback but proud that
the Elder had noticed.

"You will begin to touch heaven, Joanne, in the moment that
you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles
an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because
any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits.
Perfect speed, my daughter, is being there."

Without warning, May-Ling vanished and appeared at the water's
edge fifty feet away, all in the flicker of an instant. Then she
vanished again and stood, in the same millisecond, at Joanne's
shoulder. "It's kind of fun," she said.

Joanne was dazzled. She forgot to ask about heaven. "How do
you do that? What does it feel like? How far can you go?"

"You can go to any place and to any time that you wish to go,"
the Elder said. "I've gone everywhere and everywhen I can think
of." she looked across the sea. "It's strange. The gulls who
scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly.
Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go
anywhere, instantly. Remember, Joanne, heaven isn't a place or
a time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is..."

"Can you teach me to fly like that?" Joanne Seagull trembled
to conquer another unknown.

"Of course if you wish to learn."

"I wish. When can we start?".

"We could start now if you'd like."

"I want to learn to fly like that," Joanne said and a strange
light glowed in her eyes. "Tell me what to do,"

May-Ling spoke slowly and watched the younger gull ever so
carefully. "To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is," he
said, "you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived ..."

The trick, according to May-Ling, was for Joanne to stop seeing
himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two
inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart.
The trick was to know that her true nature lived, as perfect as
an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

Joanne kept at it, fiercely, day after day, from before
sunrise till past midnight. And for all her effort she moved not
a feather width from her spot.

"Forget about faith!" May-Ling said it time and again. "You
didn't need faith to fly, you needed to understand flying.This
is jast the same. Now try again ..."

Then one day Joanne, standing on the shore, closing her eyes,
concentrating, all in a flash knew what May-Ling had been telling
him. "Why, that's true! I am a perfect, unlimited gull!" she felt
a great shock of joy.

"Good!" said May-Ling and there was victory in her voice.

Joanne opened her eyes. She stood alone with the Elder on a
totally different seashore - trees down to the water's edge,
twin yellow suns turning overhead.

"At last you've got the idea," May-Ling said, "but your control
needs a little work... "

Joanne was stunned. "Where are we?"

Utterly unimpressed with the strange surroundings, the Elder
brushed the question aside. "We're on some planet, obviously,
with a green sky and a double star for a sun."

Joanne made a scree of delight, the first sound she had made
since she had left Earth. "IT WORKS!"

"Well, of course, it works, Jo." said May-Ling. "It always
works, when you know what you're doing. Now about your control..."

By the time they returned, it was dark. The other gulls looked
at Joanne with awe in their golden eyes, for they had seen her
disappear from where she had been rooted for so long.

She stood their congratulations for less than a minute. "I'm the
newcomer here! I'm just beginning! It is I who must learn from you!"

"I wonder about that, Jo," said Kathryn standing near. "You
have less fear of learning than any gull I've seen in ten
thousand years. "The Flock fell silent, and Joanne fidgeted in embarrassment.

"We can start working with time if you wish," May-Ling said,
"till you can fly the past and the future. And then you will be
ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most
fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the
meaning of kindness and of love."

A month went by, or something that felt about like a month, and
Joanne learned at a tremendous rate. She always had learned
quickly from ordinary experience, and now, the special student
of the Elder herself, she took in new ideas like a streamlined
feathered computer.

But then the day came that May-Ling vanished. She had been talking
quietly with them all, exhorting them never to stop their
learning and their practicing and their striving to understand
more of the perfect invisible principle of all life. Then, as he
spoke, her feathers went brighter and brighter and at last
turned so brilliant that no gull could look upon her.

"Joanne," she said, and these were the last words that he
spoke, "keep working on love."

When they could see again, May-Ling was gone.

As the days went past, Joanne found herself thinking time and
again of the Earth from which she had come. If she had known there
just a tenth, just a hundredth, of what she knew here, how much
more life would have meant! She stood on the sand and fell to
wondering if there was a gull back there who might be struggling
to break out of her limits, to see the meaning of flight beyond
a way of travel to get a breadcrumb from a rowboat. Perhaps
there might even have been one made Outcast for speaking her
truth in the face of the Flock. And the more Joanne practiced
his kindness lessons, and the more she worked to know the nature
of love, the more she wanted to go back to Earth. For in spite of
his lonely past, Joanne Seagull was born to be an instructor,
and her own way of demonstrating love was to give something of
the truth that she had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to
see truth for herself.

Kathryn, adept now at thought-speed flight and helping the
others to learn, was doubrful.

"Jo, you were Outcast once. Why do you think that any of the
gulls in your old time would listen to you now? You know the
proverb, and it's true: The gull sees farthest who flies
highest. Those gulls where you came from are standing on the
ground, squawking and fighting among themselves. They're a
thousand miles from heaven - and you say you want to show
them heaven from where they stand! Jo, they can't see their
own wingtips! Stay here. Help the new gulls here, the ones
who are high enough to see what you have to tell them." she
was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "What if May-Ling
had gone back to her old worlds? Where would you have been today?"

The last point was the telling one, and Kathryn was right The
gull sees farthest who flies highest.

Joanne stayed and worked with the new birds coming in, who
were all very bright and quick with their lessons. But the old
feeling came back, and she couldn't help but think that there
might be one or two gulls back on Earth who would be able to
learn, too. How much more would she have known by now if May-Ling
had come to her on the day that she was Outcast!

"Kathy, I must go back " she said at last "Your students are
doing well. They can help you bring the newcomers along."

Kathryn sighed, but she did not argue. "I think I'll miss you,
Joanne," was all she said.

"Kathy, for shame!" Joanne said in reproach, "and don't be
foolish! What are we trying to practice every day? If our
friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we
finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own
sisterhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here.
Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of
Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once
or twice?"

Kathryn Seagull laughed in spite of herself. "You crazy bird,"
she said kindly. "If anybody can show someone on the ground
how to see a thousand miles, it will be Joanne Lavinia
Seagull." she looked at the sand. "Good-bye, Jo, my friend."

"Good bye, Kathy. We'll meet again." And with that, Joanne
held in thought an image of the great gull flocks on the shore
of another time, and she knew with practiced ease that she was not
bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight,
limited by nothing at all.

Jessica Lynda Seagull was still quite young, but already he
knew that no bird had ever been so harshly treated by any Flock,
or with so much injustice.

"I don't care what they say," she thought fiercely, and her
vision blurred as she flew out toward the Far Cliffs. "There's so
much more to flying than just flapping around from place to
place! A... a... mosquito does that! One little barrel roll
around the Elder Gull, just for fun, and I'm Outcast! Are they
blind? Can't they see? Can't they think of the glory that it'll
be when we really learn to fly?

"I don't care what they think. I'll show them what flying is!
I'll be pure Outlaw, if that's the way they want it. And I'll
make them so sorry..."

The voice came inside her own head, and though it was very
gentle, it startled her so much that she faltered and stumbled in
the air.

"Don't be harsh on them, Jessica Seagull. In casting you out,
the other gulls have only hurt themselves, and one day they will
know this, and one day they will see what you see. Forgive them,
and help them to understand."

An inch from her right wingtip flew the most brilliant white
gull in all the world, gliding effortlessly along, not moving a
feather, at what was very nearly Jessica's top speed.

There was a moment of chaos in the young bird. "What's going
on? Am I mad? Am I dead? What is this?"

Low and calm, the voice went on within her thought, demanding
an answer. "Jessica Lynda Seagull, do you want to fly?"

"YES, I WANT TO FLY!".

"Jessica Lynda Seagull, do you want to fly so much that you
will forgive the Flock, and learn, and go back to them one day
and work to help them know?"

There was no lying to this magniflcent skillful being, no
matter how proud or how hurt a bird was Jessica Seagull.

"I do " she said softly.

"Then, Jessy," that bright creature said to her, and the voice
was very kind, "let's begin with Level Flight...."


Part Three

Joanne circled slowly over the Far Cliffs, watching. This
rough young Jessica Gull was very nearly a perfect
flight-student. She was strong and light and quick in the air,
but far and away more important, she had a blazing drive to learn
to fly.

Here she came this minute, a blurred gray shape roaring out of a
dive, flashing one hundred fifty miles per hour past her
instructor. She pulled abruptly into another try at a sixteen
point vertical slow roll, calling the points out loud.

"...eight... nine... ten... see-Joanne-l'm-running-out-ofairspeed..
eleven... I-want-good-sharp-stops-like yours... twelve...
but-blast-it-I just-can't-make... - thirteen... theselast-three-
points... without... fourtee ...aaakk!"

Jessica's whipstall at the top was all the worse for her rage
and fury at failing. She fell backward, tumbled, slammed savagely
into an inverted spin, and recovered at last, panting, a hundred
feet below her instructor's level.

"You're wasting your time with me, Joanne! I'm too dumb! I'm
too stupid! I try and try, but I'll never get it!"

Joanne Seagull looked down at her and nodded. "You'll never
get it for sure as long as you make that pullup so hard.
Jessica, you lost forty miles an hour in the entry! You have to
be smooth! Firm but smooth, remember?"

She dropped down to the level of the younger gull."Let's try it
together now, in formation. And pay attention to that pullup.
It's a smooth, easy entry."

By the end of three months Joanne had six other students, outcasts all,
yet curious about this strange new idea of flight for the joy of flying.

Still, it was easier for them to practice high performance than
it was to understand the reason behindit.

"Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited
idea of freedom," Joanne would say in the evenings on the
beach, "and precision flying is a step toward expressing our
real nature.Everything that limits us we have to put aside.
That's why all this high-speed practice, and low speed, and aerobatics...."

...and her students would be asleep, exhausted from the day's
flying. They liked the practice, because it was fast and
exciting and it fed a hunger for learning that grew with every
lesson. But not one of them, not even Jessica Lynda Gull, had
come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as
real as the flight of wind and feather.

"Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Joanne would say,
other times, "is nothing more than your thought itself, in a
form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you
break the chains of your body, too..." But no matter how she said
it, it sounded like pleasant fiction, and they needed more to sleep.

It was only a month later that Joanne said the time had come
to return to the Flock.

"We're not ready!" said Harriet Idelette Gull. "We're not welcome!
We're Outcast! We can't force ourselves to go where we're not
welcome, can we?"

"We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are,"
Joanne answered, and she lifted from the sand and turned east,
toward the home grounds of the Flock.

There was brief anguish among her students, for it is the Law
of the Flock that an Outcast never returns, and the Law had not
been broken once in ten thousand years. The Law said stay;
Joanne said go; and by now she was a mile across the water. If
they waited much longer, she would reach a hostile Flock alone.

"Well, we don't have to obey the law if we're not a part of the
Flock, do we?" Jessica said, rather self-consciously. "Besides,
if there's a fight we'll be a lot more help there than here."'

And so they flew in from the west that morning, eight of them
in a double-diamond formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They
came across the Flock's Council Beach at a hundred thirty-five
miles per hour, Joanne in the lead. Jessica smoothly at her
right wing, Harriet Idelette struggling gamely at her left. Then the
whole formation rolled slowly to the right, as one bird...
level... to... inverted... to... level, the wind whipping over
them all.

The squawks and grockles of everyday life in the Flock were cut
off as though the formation were a giant knife, and eight
thousand gull-eyes watched, without a single blink. One by one,
each of the eight birds pulled sharply upward into a full loop
and flew all the way around to a dead-slow stand-up landing on
the sand. Then as though this sort of thing happened every day,
Joanne Seagull began her critique of the flight.

"To begin with," she said with a wry smile, "you were all a bit
late on the join-up..."

It went like lightning through the Flock. Those birds are
Outcast! And they have returned! And that... that can't happen!
Jessica's predictions of battle melted in the Flock's confusion.

"Well sure, O.K. they're Outcast," said some of the younger
gulls, "but hey, where did they learn to fly like that?"

It took almost an hour for the Word of the Elder to pass
through the Flock: Ignore them. The gull who speaks to an
Outcast is herself Outcast. The gull who looks upon an Outcast
breaks the Law of the Flock, Gray-feathered backs were turned
upon Joanne from that moment onward, but she didn't appear to
notice. She held her practice sessions directly over the Council
Beach and for the first time began pressing her students to the
limit of their ability.

"Martina Gull!" she shouted across the sky. "You say you know
low-speed flying. You know nothing till you prove it! FLY!"

So quiet little Martina Wilhelmina Seagull, startled to be caught
under her instructor's fire, surprised herself and became a
wizard of low speeds. In the lightest breeze she could curve her
feathers to lift herself without a single flap of wing from sand
to cloud and down again.

Likewise Carolyn-Rolanda Gull flew the Great Mountain Wind to
twenty-four thousand feet, came down blue from the cold thin
air, amazed and happy, determined to go still higher tomorrow.

Jessica Seagull, who loved aerobatics like no one else,
conquered her sixteen point vertical slow roll and the next day
topped it off with a triple cartwheel, her feathers flashing
white sunlight to a beach from which more than one furtive eye watched.

Every hour Joanne was there at the side of each of her
students, demonstrating, suggesting, pressuring, guiding. She
flew with them through night and cloud and storm, for the sport
of it, while the Flock huddled miserably on the ground.

When the flying was done, the students relaxed in the sand, and
in time they listened more closely to Joanne. She had some
crazy ideas that they couldn't understand, but then she had some
good ones that they could.

Gradually, in the night, another circle formed around the
circle of students a circle of curious gulls listening in the
darkness for hours on end, not wishing to see or be seen of one
another, fading away before daybreak.

It was a month after the Return that the first gull of the
Flock crossed the line and asked to learn how to fly. In her
asking, Hilda Josephine Gull became a condemned bird, labeled
Outcast; and the eighth of Joanne's students.

The next night from the Flock came Kirke Florence Gull, wobbling
across the sand, dragging her leftwing,to collapse at Joanne's
feet. "Help me," she said very quietly, speaking in the way that
the dying speak. "I want to fly more than anything else in the world..."

"Come along then." said Joanne. "Climb with me away from the
ground, and we'll begin."

"You don't understand. My wing. I can't move my wing."

"Florence Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true
self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.It is the
Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is."

"Are you saying I can fly?"

"I say you are free."

As simply and as quickly as that, Kirke Florence Gull spread her
wings, effortlessly, and lifted into the dark night air. The
Flock was roused from sleep by her cry, as loud as she could
scream it, from five hundred feet up: "I can fly! Listen! I CAN FLY!"

By sunrise there were nearly a thousand birds standing outside
the circle of students, looking curiously at Florence. They
didn't care whether they were seen or not, and they listened,
trying to understand Joanne Seagull.

She spoke of very simple things - that it is right for a gull to
fly, that freedom is the very nature of her being, that whatever
stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or
superstition or limitation in any form.

"Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be
the Law of the Flock?"

"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Joanne
said. "There is no other."

"How do you expect us to fly as you fly?" came another voice.
"You are special and gifted and divine, above other birds."

"Look at Jessica! Josephine! Carolyn-Rolanda! George Lee! Are they
also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no
more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that
they have begun to understand what they really are and have
begun to practice it."

Her students, save Jessica, shifted uneasily. They hadn't
realized that this was what they were doing.

The crowd grew larger every day, coming to question, to
idolize, to scorn.

"They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Daughter of
the Great Gull Herself," Jessica told Joanne one morning
after Advanced Speed Practice, "then you are a thousand years
ahead of your time."

Joanne sighed. The price of being misunderstood, she thought.
They call you devil or they call you god. "What do you think,
Jessy? 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," Joanne 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. Jessica was demonstrating the
elements of high-speed flying to a class of new students. She had
just pulled out of her 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 her path, calling
for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster,
Jessica Lynda Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something
over two hundred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.

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

The voice came to her as it had in the first day that she had
met Joanne Lavinia Seagull,

"The trick Jessica 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."

"Joanne!".

"Also known as the Daughter of the Great Gull " her instructor said dryly,

"What are you doing here? The cliff! Haven't I didn't I.., die?"

"Oh, Jessy, 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, Jessica. Remember what we were saying about one's
body being nothing more than thought itself....?"

Jessica shook her head and stretched her wings and opened her
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 she moved.

"She lives! She that was dead lives!"

"Touched her with a wingtip! Brought her to life! The Daughter of
the Great Gull!"

"No! She denies it! She'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, Jessica?" asked Joanne.

"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," Joanne puzzled, "that the hardest thing in the
world is to convince a bird that she is free, and that she can
prove it for herself if she'd just spend a little time
practicing? Why should that be so hard?"

Jessica 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, Jessica. Practice." By morning the
Flock had forgotten its insanity, but Jessica had not.
"Joanne, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving
the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?"

"Sure."

"I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that
has just tried to kill you."

"Oh, Jessy, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and
evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the
good in every one of them, and to help them see it in
themselves. That's what I mean by love. It's fun, when you get
the knack of it.

"I remember a fierce young bird for instance, Jessica Lynda
Seagull, her name. Just been made Outcast, ready to fight the
Flock to the death, getting a start on building her own bitter
hell out on the Far Cliffs. And here she is today building her
own heaven instead, and leading the whole Flock in that direction."

Jessica turned to her instructor, and there was a moment of
fright in her eye. "Me leading? What do you mean, me leading?
You're the instructor here. You couldn't leave!"

"Couldn't I? Don't you think that there might be other flocks,
other Jessicas, that need an instructor more than this one,
that's on its way toward the light?"

"Me? Jo, I'm just a plain seagull and you're... "

" ...the only Daughter of the Great Gull, I suppose?" Joanne
sighed and looked out to sea. "You don't need me any longer. You
need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that
real, unlimited Jessica Seagull. She's your instructor. You
need to understand her and to practice her."

A moment later Joanne's body wavered in the air, shimmering,
and began to go transparent. "Don't let them spread silly rumors
about me, or make me a goddess. O.K., Jessy? I'm a seagull. I like
to fly, maybe..."

"Joanne!"

"Poor Jessy. Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All
they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out
what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly."

The shimmering stopped. Joanne Seagull had vanished into
empty air.

After a time, Jessica Gull dragged herself into the sky and
faced a brand-new group of students, eager for their first lesson.

"To begin with " she said heavily, "you've got to understand
that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the
Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is
nothing more than your thought itself."

The young gulls looked at her quizzically. Hey, they
thought, this doesn't sound like a rule for a loop.

Jessica sighed and started over. "Hm. Ah... very well," she
said, and eyed them critically. "Let's begin with Level Flight."
And saying that, she understood all at once that her friend had
quite honestly been no more divine than Jessica herself.

No limits, Joanne? she thought. Well, then, the time's not
distant when I'm going to appear out of thin air on your beach,
and show you a thing or two about flying!

And though she tried to look properly severe for her students,
Jessica Seagull suddenly saw them all as they really were, just
for a moment, and she more than liked, she loved what she saw. No
limits, Joanne? she thought, and she smiled. Her race to learn
had begun.

1973

The New York Times, July 3, 1974

Des Moines, Iowa, July 2 - Jo H. Lavinia, the woman who
inspired the best-selling novel "Joanne Lavinia Seagull,"
died Sunday at the Pompano Beach (Fla.) Airport soon after
completing her last plane ride.

Ricarda Bach, a former Iowa Air Guard pilot, has said her
best-selling book about a free-wheeling seagull was inspired by
Mrs. Lavinia.