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

of your belief in injustice

And tragedy.

What the caterpillar

calls the end of the world,

the master calls a

butterfly.

The words in the Handbook the day before were the only warning I had. One second there was the normal little crowd waiting to fly, his airplane taxiing in, stopping by them in a whirl of propeller-wind, a casual good scene for me from the top wing of the Fleet as I poured gas into the tank. The next second there was a sound like a tire exploding and the crowd itself exploded and ran. The tire on the Travel Air was untouched, the engine ticked over at idle as it had a moment before, but there was a foot-wide hole in the fabric under the pilot's cockpit and Shimoda was pressed to the other side, head slammed down, his body still as sudden death.

It took a few thousandths of a second for me to realize that Donald Shimoda had been shot, another to drop the gas can and jump off the top wing, running. It was like some movie script, s

ome amateur-acted play, a man with a shotgun running away with everybody else, close enough by me I could have cut him with a saber. I remember now that I didn't care about him. I was not enraged or shocked or horrified. The only thing that mattered was to get to the cockpit of the Travel Air as fast as I could and to talk with my friend.

It looked as if he had been hit by a bomb; the left half of his body was all torn leather and cloth and meat and blood, a soggy mass of scarlet.

His head was tilted down by the fuel primer knob, at the right lower corner of the instrument panel, and I thought that if he had been wearing his shoulder harness he wouldn't have been thrown forward like that.

"Don! Are you OK?" Fool's words.

He opened his eyes and smiled. His own blood was sprayed wet across his face "Richard, what does it look like?"

I was enormously relieved to hear him talk. If he could talk, if he could think, he would be all right.

"Well, if I didn't know better, buddy, I'd say you had a bit of a problem."

He didn't move, except just his head a little bit, and suddenly I was scared again, more by his stillness than by the mess and the blood. "I didn't think you had enemies."

"I don't. That was . . . a friend. Better not to have . . . some hater bring all sorts of trouble . . . into his life . . . murdering me."

The seat and side panels of the cockpit were running with blood-it would be a big job just to get the Travel Air clean again, although the airplane itself wasn't damaged badly. "Did this have to happen, Don ?"

"No . . ." he said faintly, barely breathing. "But I think . . . I like the drama . . ."

"Well, let's get cracking! Heal yourself! With the crowd that's coming, we got lots of flying to do!"

But as I was joking at him, and in spite of all his knowing and all his understanding of reality, my friend Donald Shimoda fell the last inch to the primer knob, and died.

There was a roaring in my ears, the world tilted, and I slid down the side of the torn fuselage into the wet red grass. It felt as if the weight of the Handbook in my pocket toppled me to my side, and as I hit the ground it fell loose, wind slowly ruffling the pages.

I picked it up listlessly. Is this how it ends, I thought, is everything a master says just pretty words that can't save him from the first attack of some mad dog in a farmer's field ?

I had to read three times before I could believe these were the words on the page.

Everything

in this book

may be

wrong.

** end **

Epilogue