On Gossamer Wings

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-932084-01-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-932084-04-7
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'But if she could fly…' he thinks, wistfully. 'The world would change in the blink of an eye, and emerge unfathomably different.' König sighs a little at that. He knows there's a huge body of knowledge she would have to reconstruct from virtually nothing. Origen left Earth more than two centuries after the advent of aerodynamic flight. The technology was common, well understood, even pedestrian. Everybody flew. It was one of the first technologies to go to the colonies, readily available, and not even patented. Why, then, would those long ago scientists have brought another copy of it to well-established Numinor? They hadn't. It was an error the founders were acutely aware of even before they'd landed on the planet that became known as Valinor. They had known that no matter what, sooner or later the shuttles would cease to function, and the wings of Man on this world would truly be clipped. And that there probably wasn't anything they could do about it in time.

'But if she could fly…' he thinks again. But she can't. He can see some flaws already. No human, no matter how determined, can pedal fast enough and strongly enough to move a flier so large, so heavy. Power, he knows, was always a problem, and the likes of her pedal powered wind tunnel aren't the solution.

'But if she could fly…' Even the Institute had only recently been able to construct simple airships, filled with hydrogen. They're rare, unwieldy, and utterly secret. And naturally, the talk of the Institute. She might fly as a passenger in one of those, if she turns out to be as special as he has begun to think. Even for her, even if she is everything he hopes, that will have to be enough. 'But Lord,' he thinks, 'witness how she has dared to dream.'