Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page B

for me, not seeing the wires, and somehow needing a challenge to live.
       “I’m sorry, Puff. My fault. I didn’t see the wires.”
       “No. My fault too. I saw the wires, for a second, I thought we’d fly through. Wrong.”
       “You’ll be rebuilt,” she said. “You don’t want to leave Earth yet, do you?”
       “I have a mission, I think. I’ll do what I have to do, rebuild my old self back. I will not live to stay on the ground!” The next words I said as though I had said them in the lost places of my memory. “You will, too, Puff. You saved my life! We’ll rebuild the both of us.”
       “I will, too?” A flicker of hope. “You’re still in the hospital, and you’re thinking about rebuilding me?”
       “Rebuilding us. Isn’t that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury .”
       “Really? You’ll rebuild me, too?”
       The suggestion that I wouldn’t do it, unthinkable. Whatever I had to do, I would do, and I knew I had said that before, some meeting during the coma. I didn’t remember what happened, but I had promised. If anyone told me I couldn’t, today, they were part of our wreckage. We would fly again. “Yes, I will. I’m no rebuilder, Puff, but I know the man who is…”
       “In Florida.”
       “In Florida. Valkaria, the airport where you were born in space-time.”
       “How…”
       “I’ll see him somehow. We’ll truck your body, Puff, your wings, your engine, 3,000 miles to his hangar.”
       “I’d be… privileged… to fly with you again.”
       I had her promise, she had mine.
       There was light and life in the hangar, so drear the hour before. The light of it brushed Puff’s broken struts the color of sunshine. She would fly again.
       “Thank you, Richard.”
       “You knew, didn’t you? You were listening, at the meeting. You wondered if I would remember.”
       “You weren’t supposed to remember.”
       “I don’t. The certainty, though, that I would live, and you would, too, it’s not an intellectual remembering, it’s an emotional memory. I don’t recall words, if words were used, but it was important to me, that we’d fly again.”
       “Just thought, not words,” she said. “Some of it was…impressive.”
       I laughed at her solemn words. “It’ll take me till I’m healed, Puff. Before then, you’ll be…your body will be, off to Florida. Then three months, or four, you’ll be flying again. Unless you’d prefer to vanish from Earth’s sky into yours.”
       “Not my skies, Richard, our skies. Earth’s sky is mortality, the lessons of illusions. The next sky’s…a step up. I prefer to fly with you again, though, here. We have a story to finish, don’t we?”
       “Of course. The crash was one paragraph in our story. An important paragraph, of course. Every story loves a test, a challenge that can destroy the story. The other side, though, that’s where we’ll be in a little while. My body healed, yours healed, too. And we fly.”
       “Your choice,” she said. “I’ll be asleep to mortals, just broken pieces. The real me, I’ll fly in spirit’s sky. But when you tell me to come back here, I’ll come back.” She smiled, “Perfect obedience.”
       She thought for a minute. “I may be a little different, with my new body. Take it slowly till I remember, till I know who you are. I may be frightened. Mortals, airplanes and humans, we’re slow to remember spirit.”
       “You as a mortal,” I said, a smile. “Sure enough. We’ll take it easy, for a while.”
       “Till then,” she said.
       “Do you want a different name, Puff? Something that says Determination, through this test?”
       “I like my name,” she said. “If I were a four-engine transport, and you were to fly