Hypnotizing Maria

full increase, throttle full open. So went Jamie Forbes’ day, thoughtful, and a climb to twelve-thousand five before he topped the clouds, lowered his dark-tint helmet visor against the bright.
    Somebody had to decide to become the Charles Lindbergh who accepted his own suggestions, hypnotized himself to do what he wanted to do and by the way make history The somebody who made that decision, of all the people in the world, was the guy inside Charles Lindbergh’s mind.
    What suggestions am I choosing to accept, Jamie thought, what have I decided to change? Whohave I decided to be?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
    Off to the south, cloud tops built up way high, twenty-five thousand feet, he guessed.
    I can climb another five thousand if I have to, he thought. If there’s breaks in the clouds, I can spiral down beneath cloudbase. And I can file instruments if I need to.
    He’d set a backup flight plan the night before. One radio call and he could go not anywhere he pleased but “As filed,” by agreement with the air traffic control center: he’d fly centerline along the airways to Marianna, Florida, through the clouds instead of around them, in case the sky got stuffed with fog.
    That was Plan B. Meanwhile he cruised along at twelve-five in clear air, dodging cloud tops.
    Blacksmyth the Great de-hypnotized himself right out of a body. I don’t want that. I like the game too much right here; I like my life instructing, flying airplanes.
    And when Sam un-mortalized himself from one consensus belief, didn’t he just appear again in another, some suggestion of the Afterlife Games?
    Whole new sets of opportunities, then, to accept or decline—free to believe we’re spirit now, not subject to mortal limits, laws that were unbreakable an hour ago.
    The convictions of others don’t affect my life, he thought, until they’re my convictions, too.
    Soon as we’re convinced we’re spirit, we float through walls, invulnerable to beliefs of accident storm disease age war. We can’t be buried, shot, drowned, crushed, blown up, tortured, poisoned, drugged, chained, broken, suffocated, run over, infected, trapped, lashed, electrocuted, jailed, torn, beaten, hanged, burned, guillotined, starved, operated on manipulated or messed with by any person or agency or government on Earth or galaxy or universe or law of spacetime.
    Here’s the downside: the minute spirits don’t accept our suggestions, they can’t use our playground. Drift
    through it, of course they can. Use it as mortals do, for schooling? Not Allowed.
    What Sam did, what spirits do, is believe themselves graduated from spacetime, reflecting on the values they learned and the lessons they missed, last lifetime.
    I’ll make that choice when I get there, the pilot thought. For now, there’s easier things to learn.
    The altimeter’s not real, for instance, that sugges-tion-of-an-instrument pointing twelve-thousand six. The altimeter’s my belief in my assumptions, manifest as a disk of what looks like tin and glass, white pointers against a blackground. It isn’t what it seems. It’s my own imajons, polished to look like an altimeter.
    The instrument’s not real, not the cockpit, not the airplane, not my body, not the planet, nor the whole physical universe. Suggestions. Shifting clouds of thought-particles, following the trail of what I choose to think is so.
    What is real?
    He laughed at himself, two miles in the air. Till yesterday he was happy just to survive as a working flight instructor. Suggestions and hypnoses and particles of thought that turn the world solid as rock-particles turn
    stone, that was for philosophers dusting ivory towers with feather-brooms.
    Now I’m thinking rock is hypnotized suggestions and wondering that if rock isn’t real, what is?
    What did you do to me, Blacksmyth? Things go along nice and normal for fifty years then you meet some innocent suggestion—the world isn’t what you think it is—and WHOCK everything changes!
    Over the nose, up ahead, he could see the clouds breaking from solid undercast to broken. Holes in the layer. Good.
    That’s right, he thought, everything changes. Live with it.
    He eased the nose down, airspeed turning up from 185 knots to 200.
    What’s real is what doesn’t change. Don’t have to be a spaceship designer to know that; you can be a simple airplane pilot. If something was real but isn’t now, then it isn’t real anymore, and the question circles back, “What is real and stays real