Bradbury, Ray - Chapbook 13 Read Free Page A

him!" Ahmed exclaimed.
"I cannot."
    "You are a god who can do
anything." "And he is a mortal who must try everything." And the flier with
golden wings struck the sea and sank in bright rings, and the sea was silent as the sun
died and the moon returned.



"How
terrible!" Ahmed exclaimed.
    "Oh, how brave," said Gonn .
    They circled to see the father hover to mourn above
the quiet surf.
    "Did," said Ahmed, "all this truly happen? It must be so."
    "Then it is so."
    "Though his wings melted and he
fell?"
    "Even so. There is never
failure in trying. Not to try is the greater death."
    "But what does it mean?"
    "It means," said Gonn -Ben-Allah, "that you must toss feathers in
the wind and guess their directions to all points of the heart's compass. It means you must jump
off cliffs and build your wings on the way down!"
    "And fall? And never fear?"
    "Fear, yes, but brave beyond fear."
    "That is a big thing for a boy."
    "Grow with its bigness, let it burst your
skin to
let forth— lol —the butterfly. Quick!"
    And they raced the windstream over the earth
and beheld:
    An airship made up of thistles, pollen, milk weed, a craft so light
it trembled at a child's breath. Its masts and spars were immense reeds that bent with the
weight of ghost dandelions. The sails were cobweb and swamp-mist and its ship's captain a
weightless mummy of tobacco weed and autumn leaf that rustled even as the sails above him shuffled
the storm wind. An acre of
ship with an ounce of cargo. Sneezel Ahmed did! And it
vanished in flakes.
    As they raced the windstream again to find:
    A balloon as ripe as a peach and as tall as
ten acrobats,
filled with hot wind from a basket of fire slung beneath its gulping mouth,
inhaling flame,
ascending with its passengers—a rooster, and a dog barking at the moon, and two men waving at an audience
sea below.
    And a woman in a strange dress and bonnet, laughing in the clouds
as her balloon caught fire and fell, shrieking.
    "No!" cried Ahmed.
    " Refuse   no    sight.    People   fall   but   to    rise again!" whispered the Great God of
Time and Storms.
"Open your eyes!"
    Ahmed blinked and saw the curve of earth where a kite was flung
up in a cloud stream. In a vast bamboo frame with silk banners, like a spider
caught in its bright web, a man struggled to tilt the kite. Ambling over and down with the tidal winds, he
soared up like a wild excla mation point.
    "1 fly," he cried, "I
fly!"
    And knew the joy of
being high above a world of night.
    But hearing his high laughter at conquering hills of cloud and
storm, a hundred men did mutter in their sleep, and shout confusions to deny his high
trajectory. Hid from his upward truth, slammed their eyes shut, erased his
flight, as
if it never were, and with empty guns and empty minds fired the sky.
    Even as a blizzard of arrows rose to pierce his triumph of paper
and silk, the Chinese em peror's symbol on each dart. The soaring man was
struck, pinned to a cloud, as his last shout "I fly" became "die, I die," and fell
as if lightning had torn his silks. Where he had been was air and emptiness.
    He was gone as if he had never been. Gun shot by men who
refused his sight, destroyed by doubt and envy, the flier had let go his joy, let loose the wings
from remembered birds, and fallen.
    And suddenly, as if pinned against the sky himself, Ahmed shook
like a paper toy.
    Gonn -Ben-Allah said,
"Have you no words?"
    "No words for what I have seen,"
mourned the
boy. "Oh, mighty one, how I wish for one glimpse of my father and my camel."
    "Patience. You must be strong
without that medicine and so survive to give me birth. ..."
    Ahmed was astonished. "But you are
already born 1 . I speak to you. You are real."
    "Only the promise
of the real, the possibility of birth."
    "But I speak, you answer!"
    "Do you not talk in your sleep?"
    "Yes, but—"
    "Well, then. Without you, I will
never be truly
born. Without me, you will be the walking dead. Are you strong enough to birth a
god?"
    "If gods