Renegade of Callisto

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Human ingenuity is the crowning marvel of all Creation.

And, of all the works of man’s invention, I regard the unique and unparalleled ornithopters of Thanator as among the more ingenious and remarkable.

To conceive of the very notion of a flying machine in a society whose science has yet to progress beyond something resembling the High Renaissance is in itself remarkable. And it would have seemed even more remarkable to me had not the mighty brain of Leonardo―that titan intellect of the Renaissance―duplicated the feat of the unsung and nameless Callistan engineer who first conceived of the ornithopter. For the Florentine superman himself dreamed of a flying machine that flew as a bird flies―by flapping its wings. But some Callistan genius actually perfected the concept, from its initial visualization to the physical reality.

It was lifting gas, found only in the White Mountains, that made the dream of weightless flight come true. Sometimes I wonder whether, had hydrogen or helium been known in the Florence of Leonardo da Vinci, the age of flight might not have begun centuries before the Wright brothers.

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