The Seventh Person's Flying Civilization's Destruction

The Seventh Men’s flying civilization ended when a society that had made natural flight the measure of life came under the rule of flightless intellectuals. The new order did not merely defeat the fliers militarily: it made their defining way of life a discredited luxury, compelled them to serve an industrial system, and ultimately left its remaining population with a stark choice between subjection and collective death. Their extinction closed the age of natural flight and cleared the way for a civilization built on industry and science.

The Rise of the Flightless

A specialized group had been raised to conduct biological research without the intoxication of flight. Its members were brilliant but physically unable to share the experience that shaped their society. They knew the bliss of flight only by report, and looked on the winged majority’s devotion to exercise, love-making, natural beauty, and social elegance with contempt. Though the fliers treated them fairly and with compassion, kindness did not reconcile them to an existence formed around an inaccessible ideal. They locked their hearts against the established values and turned instead toward research and scientific control.

Within a few centuries, their command of knowledge had made them masters of the world. The fliers, amiable and accustomed to their own way of life, were surprised and perplexed by the change; even as the pedestrians moved to establish a new world order, the fliers were distressed chiefly when they were on the ground. That response marks the depth of their political vulnerability: a power struggle was already remaking their world before they fully apprehended its consequences.

The Industrial Order and Its Laws

The islands filled with machinery and flightless industrialists. In the air, the winged folk were outstripped by mechanical aircraft; natural wings became a laughing stock, and flight was condemned as a barren luxury. The new regime required every flier to serve its order or starve. This threat was made material by the abandonment of Windborne plant cultivation and the strict control of fishing and fowling rights: the old means of subsistence were no longer freely available.

At first, prolonged ground labor made the fliers seriously ill and brought early death. Pedestrian physiologists developed a drug that kept wage workers in something like physical health and even lengthened their lives. But it could not restore their spirits. Their customary aerial life was reduced to a few tired hours of recreation each week, while breeding experiments pursued a wholly wingless, large-brained type. The regime’s decisive intervention came in law: winged infants were to be mutilated or destroyed. The conflict was no longer only over status or work. The state was moving to prevent the next generation from embodying the very form of life it had suppressed.

Revolt and the Flight to the Island

The fliers made an heroic but futile bid for power, attacking the pedestrian population from the air. The response demonstrated the imbalance between natural and mechanical flight: the enemy rode the fliers down in great aeroplanes and blew them to pieces with high explosive. The surviving fighting squadrons were driven to a remote, barren island.

The whole remaining flying population fled there from the civilized archipelagos in search of freedom, except for the sick, who committed suicide, and infants unable to fly, who were suffocated by their mothers or next of kin under the leaders’ decree. About a million men, women, and children gathered on the rocks. Some were scarcely old enough to endure the long flight, and there was not enough nearby food for so great a company. The gathering was therefore not a viable refuge: it concentrated the last of the fliers in a place where hunger and exhaustion made delay dangerous.

Collective Death and the Successor Age

The leaders concluded that the age of the flying people was over and judged immediate death more fitting than continued subjection to contemptuous masters. They ordered the population to take part in racial suicide, imagining that death could still be made a gesture of freedom. When the message reached the people resting on the stony moorland, a wail of sorrow rose. The speaker checked it and urged them to see beauty in the act ahead. They could not see that beauty while grounded; they believed they would recognize it once they had strength enough to rise.

There was little time: many were faint with hunger and feared they might no longer be able to take off. At the appointed signal the whole population rose with a deep roar of wings and flew west in a double file stretching for miles. A volcano appeared ahead, its smoke plume visible as they approached. The leaders pressed toward it, and, pair by pair, the multitude darted into its fiery breath and vanished. The narrative ends the fliers’ history with this deliberate, collective disappearance: the physical act that had once defined their freedom becomes the means of their extinction.

The flightless, still partly avian population that remained settled down to construct a society based on industry and science. In time it produced the Eighth Men, designed to be pedestrian in body and mind. On Venus, they made an engineer’s paradise, using power from the planet’s central heat and building electric ships, tunnels, and bridges. The fate of the fliers thus stands as both a succession and a reversal: the culture that had treated flight as the supreme human capacity was replaced by one organized around the capacities its rulers had cultivated instead.