"Bach, Richard - Jonathan Livingstone Seagull" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bach Richard)

His feathers glowed brilliant white now, and his wings were smooth
and perfect as sheets of polished silver. He began, delightedly, to learn
about them, to press power into these new wings.
At two hundred fifty mlles per hour he felt that he was nearing his
level-flight maximum speed. At two hundred seventy-three he thought that
he was flying as fast as he could fly, and he was ever so faintly
disappointed. There was a limit to how much the new body could do, and
though it was much faster than his old level-flight record, it was still a
limit that would take great effort to crack. In heaven, he thought, there
should be no limits.
The clouds broke apart, his escorts called, "Happy landings,
Jonathan," and vanished into thin air.
He 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 he heard that? The memory of his life on Earth was falling
away. Earth had been a place where he 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 him, none saying a
word. He felt only that he was welcome and that this was home. It had been
a bigday for him, a day whose sunrise he no longer remembered.
He turned to land on the beach, beating his 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 Jonathan was just
too tired to try it. Standiug there on the beach, still without a word
spoken, he was asleep.
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.. "