Faller by William McIntosh

* * * *

I’ve been falling for thirty-eight days.

Plunging through the clear sky, my tattered orange jumpsuit snapping in the wind, all I can do is drink in the gorgeous scenery. A bank of rain clouds ripples with dark energy to my right. To my left the sun radiates warm streaks that reach so close I’m sure I can touch them. A bird flies by. It’s large, light blue, and impossibly thin. I watch every graceful movement—glide and flap, glide and flap—until it disappears from sight.

I’m dying. I’m out of water and there’s no sign of land.

I’m here because of a careless mistake I made a long time ago, while chuting off one of the towering mountain peaks that covers my home city of Antuie.

I stood on a ledge that day overlooking a wide expanse of green trees and yellow fields, and beyond that a brilliant blue sky. Behind me the rock face of the mountain climbed up into the clouds. As I’d done a thousand times before I secured my chute and leapt easily off the ledge, taking care to clear the jagged stone jutting beneath me. I fell for a few moments, gliding and tumbling, then I opened my chute.

When the chute unwrapped from inside my pack I didn’t feel the familiar sensation of leather straps tugging at my chest. Instead there was a flapping noise. I snapped my head back to stare up at the chute, knowing something was terribly wrong. Three of the five lines that secured the chute were not attached, and the chute was flapping in the air like a huge yellow bed sheet hung to dry in a summer breeze.

I screamed, and wet my pants. I grabbed the lines snapping above my head and began reeling in the chute, hoping to quickly repair it in midair and reopen it. But even as I frantically clawed the lines I knew there wasn’t enough time.

An inspiration struck me. The field below was at the city’s edge—it was possible I could make it over the edge. If I’d been thinking clearly I would have reasoned that I’d die just as surely going over the city’s edge as I would hitting the ground, only the death would be protracted and unpleasant, but I desperately did not want to hit the hard ground rocketing toward me.

I let go of the lines and spread my arms and legs wide in gliding posture, stretching the webbing that ran from elbow to hip on my suit. I made for the city’s edge.

At first the landscape was nothing but a collage of yellow, green, and brown, then fields and tall trees took shape and grew, simultaneously passing horizontally under me. As I got closer to the ground I saw three farmers pointing up; they knew I was too close to the ground to open my chute.

The ground loomed ever closer and I panicked. Urgently I stretched my arms and legs, coaxing the air to carry me past the edge. I stretched so wide my joints hurt. I heard a muffled scream in the whistling air and realized it was me.

My foot just nicked the roof of a house leaning over the edge. I dropped past the back of the house and for an instant saw the startled face of an old woman washing dishes at a kitchen window.

I had cleared the city’s edge.

For five seconds the rough stone side of the city passed, then the world opened up and there was blue sky in all directions. I had escaped death for the moment. Now I would die falling through the infinite heavens.

I shifted from a spread-eagle gliding posture to a feet-first standing posture to minimize the force of the wind on my face. I looked up at Antuie. The underside was solid stone, roughly surfaced, like mountain ranges pushing downward. I glanced up at Antuie again and again as I fell. Each time it was smaller until it was only a pebble in the sky, then a speck. Then I couldn’t see it at all. There was nothing but blue sky and white clouds in every direction.

I waited to die, knowing it would be a long wait. I considered cutting my throat with the knife sheathed at my waist. I wondered where the blood would go if I cut my throat. I was falling, so would the blood go up, down, or just sit there in front of my face? Too unpleasant, I decided. I’d rather die of thirst.

As hours turned to days, time and distance began to lose meaning. With no reference points it felt like I wasn’t moving at all. Instead I was suspended in the air and a gale wind blew toward me from below. My thoughts slowed, then stopped. I went through alternating periods of depression and euphoria. Later the depression and euphoria seemed to belong to someone else and I watched them with detached fascination.

There was no night during my fall. I marked the days by counting the times the sun circled me. In Antuie it became dark when the sun sank below the city and cast it into shadow. As I fell the only thing that cast a shadow was my hand, when I held it in front of my face.

I fell for three days, sleeping much of the last day as my strength ebbed. My throat was dry, my tongue swollen from thirst. On what may have been the last time I bothered to pry open my eyes, I spotted something. I struggled to focus, unsure I actually saw the tiny speck below me. As I fell closer I recognized the object in the sky, and I would have wet my pants again if my bladder were not bone dry. It was a city.

My worldview shattered. Maybe the city below me was Antuie, I thought. Perhaps the universe was circular, a great wheel that was returning me to my world. But it was not Antuie. Antuie was mountains and golden fields. This city was mostly blue, mostly water.

As the shock wore off I realized I could save myself. I reeled in my chute, retied and repacked it, shifted to gliding posture and maneuvered over the city.

When I landed my legs were too weak to hold me and I fell to my knees. The solid ground felt so strange. My head was spinning from a combination of fatigue and the impossibility of the scene before me. There was a crowd gathered around me; I heard shouts and excited exchanges that sounded like words but were not. The sounds began to fade and the edges of my vision blackened. As I slipped into unconsciousness I looked directly into the eyes of one man. The man’s eyes were green. It had never occurred to me that eyes could be green—everyone in Antuie had brown eyes.

It took the Sensini and I some time to recover from the shock of each other’s existence. For me, another shock soon followed.

When I had recuperated I took to exploring the city of Sensin. It was gorgeous—waterfalls surged between buildings and under walkways, streams ran through the center of homes. The sound of water, flowing and crashing, was everywhere.

I hiked far from the scattered towns into the lush green hillsides. One day I tripped on something hidden in the tall grass by a waterfall. It was an ancient, weathered cat blind, used to keep big domesticated mountain cats under control during a hunt. Looking closer I saw it had words etched into the strap—”mountain swift.” Likely the name of the cat who had worn it. A beat later I realized two things. There were no mountain cats on Sensin, and I could read the words on the cat blind. They were written in Antuian.

I walked until dark, thinking. How could an object from Antuie be on Sensin? Had someone been here before me? Inconceivable. But there had to be an answer—I held the cat blind in my hand. It was real. It had gotten there somehow.

Looking off into the peaceful sky, I had an insane thought. I had to fall again. If there were two cities, there must be more than two, and somehow I felt certain that the mystery of the cat blind was tied to those other cities.

The people of Sensin thought I was insane to leap off the city’s edge, and maybe I was. A crowd showed up the morning I left and stood tight around me as I approached the edge, gripping a week’s water and food in a sack. People smirked and shook their heads, shouted jests.

I climbed down a rocky outcropping to get to the edge proper. Part of the way down my foot gave out under some loose stones and my heart leaped as I desperately regained my hold. I laughed out loud at the fear of falling I’d felt for a moment. What difference whether I fell off the edge or leapt?

At the edge I looked down into the sky, then up at the people watching. It was hard to actually take the leap. I started having doubts about the sanity of my plan, and if no one had been watching I would have climbed back up and taken a few more weeks to think. But people were watching, and I didn’t want to clamber back up the slope like a coward. I gave a final wave and dove head-first into the air amid their farewell cries. I was falling again.

The first few minutes were ecstasy. I shouted my approval as I tumbled end over end. I rolled onto my back, arms and legs spread into an X, and stared up at Sensin.

Eventually doubts crept in again. How could I have made the decision to leap into the void, simply taking it on faith that there would be somewhere to land? But gradually my anxiety melted away as I slipped into the familiar state I’d longed for since landing in Sensin. This time I tried to cultivate that state. I encouraged the silence to enter me; I did not try to draw my thoughts back when they drifted away and seemed to be coming from outside me. Eventually my hands and feet began to tingle, then vibrate. Energy coursed through me. I stood transfixed in space, painted with sunlight. My body crackled; joy and anguish washed over me in waves.

Four days into my fall I had a startling vision. I saw Antuie, then I saw Sensin, then a hundred other cities that I knew without a doubt were above and below me. The cities were the broken chips of a water vessel, and as the cities came together they formed a whole, unbroken vessel. Excitement ripped through me. Perhaps the ancient cat blind had been on Sensin because at one time Sensin and Antuie had been part of one huge city that had broken apart! I scanned the sky below for another city, eager to confirm my vision.

On the sixth day I spotted the city. The city was Ajahn. Its residents were just as stunned to witness my fall from the sky as those on Sensin. This time I was better prepared, and less dehydrated.

* * * *

There are hundreds of cities, perhaps thousands. There are cities so huge they block out the sky from horizon to horizon as you approach the ground, and there are small cities, two hundred paces across, where no people live at all. In one city there are no people, but the faded ruins of man-made structures are witness that people once lived there, but died off. Or perhaps they’d left; perhaps I’m not the first to fall. One by one I landed on each city, learning all I could of their ways before moving on. I found striking similarities among them—similar tales, similar styles of dress, similar customs. I recorded what I learned, even sketching the shapes of most of the cities I visited. I hoped to eventually show how they all fit together. The sketches were flat, so it was difficult.

Then something totally unexpected happened. I fell in love.

When I first spotted the city where I would meet Norri, it looked no different from any of the others. But as I fell closer I saw that it was not one city, but a cluster connected in some fashion. I’d never encountered anything like it before.

Tugging on the lines of my chute I guided myself over a marketplace. The people below spotted me, shouting and pointing as they followed me to my landing spot. A few ran in the opposite direction.

I landed softly, my chute settling to the ground beside me. I relished the dramatic effect my sudden appearance had on the citiespeople. Their eyes were wide, the air lit with screams of terror, angry shouts, excited exchanges in an unfamiliar language. I listened carefully to the gibberish they spoke, confident I would understand it quickly after years of deciphering strange languages.

When the worst of the commotion had subsided I was escorted to a man wearing a fine red velvet cloak. I assumed this man was an official, judging by how the others cleared a path for him. Taking two balls of bread from a bowl offered to me by a young girl, I began, as I had countless times in the past, attempting to explain where I had come from.

I met Norri a few weeks later, on a narrow wooden bridge connecting the cities of N’eta and I’emba. She was looking down at her feet, walking in the center of the bridge, oblivious of my approach. To avoid a collision I extended my hands, gently touching Norrie’s arm and side-stepping to her left. She glanced up at me, smiled somewhat sarcastically and said, “Hi Faller.” Then she looked back down and kept walking. In the brief instant that our eyes met I had seen no awe or fear in hers, just twinkling amusement. I continued to watch her after she passed, her tall, gangly figure emphasized by a knock-kneed, weaving walk, and—I couldn’t help noticing—a cute butt. Impulsively I followed her.

I caught up with her a few yards off the bridge and tried to think of something to say. What came out was, “Hi to you, too. What’s your name?” Not original, but enough to get her talking. We sat down on a bench in the city commons. She was delightful. Not a beautiful woman, but pleasant looking. She had a quick, slightly sarcastic wit, and a contagious childlike enthusiasm that made me wistfully aware of how long it had been since I’d been close to anyone. Language was a problem and Norri talked fast, but we managed.

Norri asked me about my fall. I had told the story a thousand times, but gazing into Norri’s laughing eyes brought a freshness and energy to my memories. When I got to the part of my tale where I discovered the cat blind, I fished it out of my pouch and handed it to her. She smiled in delight at the strangeness of it, turned it over, ran her fingertip over the writing she could not read.

“How did it get there?” she asked.

Again I fished in my pouch, pulling a rolled stack of tattered parchment. I flattened the parchments on the bench and slid them to face Norri, explaining my broken-vessel theory of the world.

Norri put a hand on my forearm. I felt every point where her fingers met my skin as a separate delight.

“You’re an interesting man, Faller,” she said, smiling.

“It’s Rohan.”

“I like Faller better,” she said, laughing. “Can I help you solve your mystery while you’re here? I can show you where the cities’ records are kept, and I can translate them for you.” She paused, then casually added, “Do you plan to stay here long, or will you be jumping off the edge of our world soon?”

Summoning courage, I lightly brushed Norri’s long sky-blue hair back behind her ear. “I thought I might stay a while.”

* * * *

Thirty days later Norri and I were wandering the streets of N’eta, letting the light breeze be our guide. At city’s edge we came upon a funeral. In N’etan fashion each person in turn waved goodbye to the dead woman, who was laid on top of the low rock wall that separated land from air. Then the woman’s closest family gently rolled her off the wall and into the sky. The mourners sang a traditional farewell song, and Norri joined in.

“It’s a shame that she’s not alive to feel what it’s like to fall,” I said as we walked away. Norri didn’t reply.

As we wandered my footsteps felt buoyant; I bobbed along like I was still floating in the air. I saw a dozen shades of shifting blue and gray in the stone cliffs of N’eta, shades I’d never have noticed before my fall.

A tavern called the Hawk’s Nest caught my eye, because it leaned precariously over the city’s edge. I convinced Norri to go inside.

As we headed for a corner table in the dark tavern, a woman we passed whispered “That’s him, the one who fell from the sky!” loudly enough for most of the other patrons to hear her. I spotted a door leading to a narrow back porch and led Norri outside, tired of the constant attention.

The vista on the porch was stunning, and I went right to the railing and leaned out over the blue sky.

“Norri, look at this! It’s almost as open as when you’re falling.”

Norri was pressed against the wall of the tavern, as far from the railing as she could get. Her smile was tight. I stepped over and took her hand, coaxing her toward the railing, but Norri stood fast, meeting my gaze with silence. I furrowed my brow; my unspoken question hung in the air unanswered.

The realization hit me like a fist in the kidney.

“You’re afraid of heights,” I said. I thought of our meeting, Norri walking in the center of the bridge, eyes down. I’d thought it was just another part of Norri’s eccentric personality, the quirkiness in her that I loved. But every time we’d crossed a bridge Norri had clung tightly to me and stared at her feet.

Norri nodded softly. “I’m so afraid of heights that I wish I was a foot shorter. It’s ironic. You live to fall, I don’t even like climbing stairs.”

“You could get used to it,” I blurted, betraying my unspoken thoughts.

“Get used to what?” Norri asked sharply.

I sighed, turned to face the open sky. I was silent for a long time.

“Rohan, if you think I’m going to jump into the sky, you should forget that thought right now. I will never, ever do it. I won’t ask you to stay here if you don’t want to. But you should understand now, I’m not going with you if you leave.”

“You don’t realize how peaceful and beautiful it is,” I said, taking both of her hands in mine. “I’d be with you. I’d make sure nothing happens to you—”

“Faller!” Norri said, more sharply than I had ever heard her speak. “Listen to me.” Her gaze drilled into me like twin suns as she enunciated each word. “I am not going to fall. Never, ever.”

* * * *

On a cool, windy morning we stood at the city’s edge, I in my orange jump suit, Norri in a blue one I’d fashioned for her. I had my arm around her and could feel her trembling.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she said, over and over. The more I tried to soothe her the more distraught she became. After interminable arguing and negotiating I coaxed her to stand with me on the low wall and look down into the sky. After one quick glance she let go of my hand and slapped it away from her. “I can’t,” she said, stepped off the stone wall and moved a safe distance from the edge.

I lost my temper. “I’m going,” I shouted from atop the wall. “Either come with me or stay.” I turned to face the sky, then looked back over my shoulder at Norri. The moment stretched as we looked at each other, irresistible force and immovable object. Then, without a word, Norri stepped back onto the wall and took my hand. She peered over the edge again, and let out a soft cry of despair, a sound like I had never heard. I could not believe a human being had made it. I ignored it.

“Here we go, ready?” I said. She closed her eyes, tears leaking out of them, and nodded. I jumped, pulling her with me. She screamed as we fell off the wall.

Norri screamed herself hoarse, then kept screaming until the sound bursting from her throat was indistinguishable from the sound of the wind. Finally, she settled into sobbing, then into silence. Her eyes shut tightly, she clung to me so hard I had trouble breathing.

We fell for two days before I spotted land. I opened Norri’s chute, then my own. We landed in a remote place by design—I didn’t want Norri to have to deal with the local residents right away.

Norri landed hard and stayed on the ground, face down. I knelt at her side, thinking she was hurt, but she wasn’t. She just lay there hugging the ground and taking long, ragged breaths.

When the city’s inhabitants arrived I dealt with them while Norri stared listlessly at the ground. I could not get her to meet my eyes.

Weeks later I still couldn’t get Norri to look at me. The light had gone out of her eyes, and I knew that it was not falling that had caused it. I had caused Norri to undergo a trauma I knew she couldn’t endure, and she couldn’t forgive me for that.

Lampere, the city we had fallen upon, was a pleasant land covered in rolling green hills and colorful blooms. Norri spent most of her time wandering its hills, alone, while I conducted my research.

As the months glided by I felt the riddle of the cat-blind calling me. I told Norri of my desire to leave, and she said she understood. She seemed to encourage me to go. I knew there was no convincing Norri to come with me, but despite our troubles I loved her deeply and did not want to leave her, so I lingered.

Months after finishing my research, tortured by conflicting emotions, I decided to fall. On the day I was to leave Norri stood a safe distance from city’s edge and watched me check my chute. I climbed onto the low stone wall. She smiled sadly and waved. I waved back, not sure what to say to her, feeling so distant from her.

“Rohan, wait,” she said at the last minute, and came over to me. A rush of pain overwhelmed me as I watched Norri walk her knock-kneed, coltish walk and remembered my first glimpse of her on that bridge. Norri wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly.

“Come with me,” I whispered into her ear. “What I’m doing is important. One day I’ll find proof that all the cities were once one city...”

Norri looked up at me. “Is that why you think you’re leaving?”

“Why else?” I said

“Can’t you see into your own mind?” Norri asked, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s not land you’re after, it’s air—”

A flat thud interrupted her. We turned to see a weathered body lying twisted in the grass a dozen steps from us.

I knelt and turned the corpse over. It was an old man, his mouth hanging open to reveal toothless gums. Norri pinched the fabric of the corpse’s tunic, held it between her fingers.

“N’etan funeral garb,” she said.

Stunned, we stared at each other, each silently piecing together what had just occurred. A vision burst into my mind’s eye, much like the vision of the cities as pieces of a water vessel. This vision, less grand than the first, was an old woman washing dishes at a window that looked out over city’s edge on Antuie. Earlier she had washed a cat blind that had grown filthy with blood and cat spittle and set it to dry on the window ledge. She leans to place a newly-rinsed bowl on the same ledge and accidentally knocks the cat blind off the ledge. It falls into space.

I pulled the cat blind from my pouch and stared at it as if I had never seen it before. I reared back and hurled it over city’s edge. I laughed. I laughed so hard I could barely breathe, until tears rolled down my cheeks. Norri laughed with me.

Finally, wiping my cheeks, I took Norri’s hand and we turned to go home. I glanced over my shoulder at the open sky. Norri followed my gaze, but said nothing.

* * * *

Walking along the cobbled road that hugged the city’s edge, I stopped to rest, climbing to sit cross-legged on the wall, admiring the particularly clear sky, a deep azure blue flecked with pink. I sat for a long time, a cool breeze blowing my long hair, reminding me faintly of the howling wind that accompanied falling.

A voice from behind pulled me out of my meditation.

“As I was saying all those months ago, it’s not the land you’re after, Faller, it’s the air.” I spun around to face Norri. She was hugging a fat pack, and she was crying. She put the pack in my lap. I peered inside. It was my chute, and food and water.
I shook my head. “I would never hurt you again. You fell with me, now I’ll live on land with you.”

“I know you would. But you’re wasting away here. The light in your eyes is dimming.” Tears welled in my eyes and I blinked them away. Norri leaned and kissed me softly.

“Fly Faller,” she whispered. “Touch the sky. Know that I love you.” With that she shoved my chest, and I fell backward, over the edge and into the sky. I might have resisted the push if I’d tried, but I didn’t. As I fell I gazed into Norri’s moist, plum-colored eyes. The wind whipped the tears from my eyes before they could touch my cheeks, and I kept my eyes locked on hers as long as I could, falling away into the sanctuary of the rushing wind.

* * * *

I’m tired, so I’ll have to sleep soon. It’s possible I won’t wake up this time. When Norri pushed me off Lampere I had no reason to doubt there would be another city below. But so far there has been no next city. I just fall.

I ran out of water six days ago. I no longer expect to spot a small speck in the sky below. I have passed the bottom of the world.

I miss Norri, but despite that I’m at peace. Thirty-eight days of uninterrupted falling has given me a clarity beyond anything I’ve ever felt before. I try to remember what my mind was like before I fell from Antuie. I recall waves of thought, uncontrollable, constant. Now thoughts only come when I push them. When I don’t my mind is still like the lakes of Ajahn on a windless day. I dwell in this stillness for hours. It is indescribable. There is no problem. No fear. No me. I don’t fear death because the sky doesn’t end, and I’m in it as much as I’m in this body.

I unstrap my chute and toss it into the sky. I pull off my jumpsuit and toss it away as well. I fall unfettered.

* * * *

Will McIntosh is a 2003 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop. This is his third published story—his others appeared in NFG and Planet Relish. By day, Will is a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University. He is 97% water.