Part 3 Summary

Watching young Fletcher, Jonathan sees a blazing desire to learn to fly. Fletcher passes his instructor at 150 mph, pulls into a sixteen-point vertical slow roll, breaks up at thirteen and barely recovers. Jonathan explains that Fletcher needs to be smooth and runs through the maneuver with him. At the end of six months, Jonathan attracts six other students, all curious Outcasts, who find performing easier than theory. Jonathan lectures them on how precision flying is a step towards expressing their true nature as ideas of the Great Gull, but they fall asleep, exhausted from practice. Not even Fletcher believes the flight of ideas is as real as the flight of wind and feather. In many ways, he tells them that their whole body is nothing more than thought in a form they can see, but it comes out as pleasant fiction.

A month...