"... 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 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 thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose of living is to find that perfection and show it forth. The smae rule hold 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."
"Well what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?"
"No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." He was silent for a moment. "You are a fast flier, aren't you?"
Jonathan was dazzled. He forgot to ask about heaven. "How do you do that? What does it fell 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." He looked across he sea. "It's strange. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those show put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn't a place of time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is ..."
The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that has forty-tho-inch wingspan and performance that could be plotted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.
Still, it was easier for them to practice high performance that it was to understand the reason behind.
"Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great Gull, an unlimited idea of freedom," Jonathan would say in the evenings on the beach, "and precision flying is a step toward expression our real nature. Everyting that limits us we have to put aside. That's why all this high-speed practice, and low-speed, and aerobatics ..."
"Set aside," came a voice from multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?"
"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is now 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 Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy-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 hav began to understand what they really are and have began to practice it."