Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)

10

The Afternoon was quiet . . . an occasional passenger now and then. Time between I practiced vaporizing clouds.

I have been a flight instructor, and I know that students always make easy things hard; I do know better, yet there was I a student again, frowning fiercely at my cumulus targets. I needed more teaching, for once, than practice. Shimoda was stretched out under the Fleet's wing, pretending to be asleep. I kicked him softly on the arm, and he opened his eyes.

"I can't do it," I said.

"Yes you can," he said, and closed his eyes again.

"Don, I've tried! Just when I think something's happening, the cloud strikes back and goes poufing up bigger than ever. "

He sighed and sat up. "Pick me a cloud. An easy one, please."

I chose the biggest meanest cloud in the sky, three thousand feet tall, bursting up white smoke from hell. "The one over the silo, yonder," I said. "The one that's going black now."

He looked at me in silence. "Why is it you hate me?"

"It's because I like you, Don, that I ask these things." I smiled. "You need challenge. If you'd rather, I could pick something smaller . . ."

>

He sighed again and turned back to the sky. " I'll try. Now, which one?"

I looked, and the cloud, the monster with its million tons of rain, was gone; just an ungainly blue-sky hole where it had been.

"Yike," I said quietly.

"A job worth doing . . ." he quoted. "No, much as I would like to accept the praise which you heap upon me, I must in all honesty tell you this: it's easy."

He pointed to a little puff of a cloud overhead. "There. Your turn. Ready? Go."

I looked at the wisp of a thing, and it looked back at me. I thought it gone, thought an empty place where it was, poured visions of heat-rays up at it, asked it to reappear somewhere else, and slowly, slowly, in one minute, in five, in seven, the cloud at last was gone. Other clouds got bigger, mine went away.

"You're not very fast, are you:" he said.

"That was my first time! I'm just beginning! Up against the impossible . . . well, the improbable, and all you can think to say is I'm not very fast. That was brilliant and you know it!"

"Amazing. You were so attached to it, and still it disappeared for you."

"Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high. . ."

"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there it to it. "

A cloud does not know

why it moves in just such a

direction and at such

a speed,

was what the handbook had to say.

It feels an impulsion. . . this is

the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns

behind all clouds,