Falling

It was dark.

It was dark and he was falling.

A thrill of terror seized him and he gasped, expecting his blind trajectory to come to a sudden halt. His body would hit the bottom... the street? Bare rock? He'd never know. He wouldn't even register the impact...

But that didn't happen. He just kept falling.

Air rushed around him. His hair tugged upwards, into the wake of his plummeting body. The darkness remained complete. Terror receded, no longer sharp but still throbbing under the surface of his thoughts as he tried to piece together where he was and how he'd come to be there. Tumbling from a cliff? From an airplane? Down a well? Was he a miner who had taken an unlucky step into a deep shaft?

Strange how he had time to think so many thoughts and wonder at the situation. Was time extending the way he'd always heard it did at the end of a person's life? And yet he felt the pull of his lungs - his own breathing, though rapid, was a clock of sorts. He gasped and screamed. He couldn't even hear himself through the wind and his own fear. But a flicker of reason asserted itself with a blunt fact: At any moment his fall would end. It had to. No hole was bottomless, no trajectory without limit - except for outer space, but there was no air in space. No, he was hurtling through darkness, but it was of an earthly sort and every second that passed only subtracted from the time remaining until he ended his life in carnage. He knew what had happened to people who had leapt from the upper stories of the World Trade Center to escape the flames, all those decades ago. Their bodies sped downwards a quarter mile, accelerating in gravity's pull, and exploded on impact.

Exploded. Like what they were, skins of water. Sacks of flesh stuffed with more flesh, all of it gurgling in the grasp of gravity. Innocent ingredients of water and protein, come together to form life and then betrayed by nature and by man.

He had a body; he felt the outlines of his skin against the rushing wind, felt his arms and legs thrashing. But was that some sort of illusion or sense memory? Was this some realm after death - purgatory, maybe even eternal damnation? How could this possible be happening in the real world - the earthly world -- how could he still be falling? How could this darkness be so complete? Even when the power grid had gone down and the cities ground to a halt in sudden darkness, the sun and moon had continued in their courses. Day followed night, stars sprinkled across the sky. Even a moonless, overcast midnight offered some little scrap of light, some slight sky glow. And yet... here... nothing.
If he'd fallen, or been hurled, from the top of a skyscraper, he'd have hit the broken street by now. And he's have seen something on the way down. Where was the rest of the city, with bonfires, with glints of steel, shouts and blasts, gunshots and the sound of men defending their turf, shouting to their cadres as they maneuvered and outflanked invading groups?

He had no answers for any of this. He didn't understand what it meant or how it was possible. He came back to his first two observations: It was dark. He was falling.

With inevitable circularity, that brought back the same questions. Where had he fallen from? How long had his plunge through the darkness gone on?

If he hit the bottom, he thought, he might see a brief, final flash of light. He'd hit his head often enough that he knew that flash - a burst of sulfur radiance in his eyeballs. Phosphorescence, like fish in the deep. Exploding suns. Defiance in the face of a universe cruelly winding down. One last struck match in the teeth of arctic night...

It was dark, but not especially cold. Not hot, either. But if he fell long enough the air should get warm, shouldn't it? Falling from space, shouldn't he burn to a cinder? Or if he'd toppled down a deep mine shaft, shouldn't the air be growing warm at some point? Didn't deep mines heat up quite a lot, venturing as they did closer to the molten rock far beneath solid ground?

Maybe this was a dream. Maybe it was the long, featureless dream of death. Maybe this was the punishment he'd been awarded for all his earthly sins. Maybe he had fallen from the top of a skyscraper, and his body's arc through space had stopped at the crumbled street below - but then his spirit went right on falling, out of his mangled flesh, through tarmac and tainted soil, into the mantle of the Earth. Perhaps this long flight was taking him straight to the Underworld. If so, it would be getting plenty hot soon enough.

But it didn't get hot, and it didn't get cold. The wind was just wind, with no unpleasant feel about it. Its roar was a lullaby. Its tug on his hair and ears was soothing, numbing. He almost thought he was falling asleep.

Maybe, he thought in his drowsiness, maybe he was falling right through the earth. He'd pass through the core of the world, molten and scowling, filled with all the souls that had angered the gods. A place of terrible pressure, they said, a place made of liquid metal. He'd burn up for sure. But maybe not, if he had shed his body - the inflammable fabric of muscle and pelt he'd shrouded his soul within, a planter for the seed of spirit that had taken root, put out leaves, and produced flowers. He had produced a flower or two, had he not?

That was the thing. He had no idea. If he had a name, if he'd had a life, he couldn't remember any of it. He thought maybe... maybe he was a husband. Maybe a father. Or maybe he had a husband? Maybe he had a father? How old was he? Young, he thought, but not too young. He was educated, after all. He knew all about energy path flux caused by mass embedded in expanding spacetime membranes... what laypeople called gravity... And that was what was drawing him through this void, no doubt at an ever-accelerating speed.

But wait, was his speed accelerating? It might be. He had no visual reference. Just the sense of falling. Just the wind.

A spirit riding the wind, the wind of eternity. He liked the sound of it, the grandiose scope of the notion. Maybe he wasn't a man at all, nor the ghostly residue of a man, but a god. Something elemental in his own right. Aeolus: The god of the wind. Or maybe the breath of angels, taking on a consciousness of its own as supernal beings chattered or sang, filling the celestial vault with their hymns and debates.

But he wasn't streaking through the universe. He was speeding down, down into the earth. Through the earth. He'd come bursting up from some pit in Mongolia or Australia, he thought: He'd come flying from the ground, hurtled by momentum and then gripped anew by fickle gravity, and then he'd be brought to a gentle standstill just as his feet found a path to some improbably spit of land. He'd come in for a perfect, gracious landing. He thought of the Anasazi, people who had emerged whole from the mass of the earth. They didn't need God to shape the clay; the clay shaped itself impatiently, taking on human form, anxious to tell stories, hear gossip, whisper enticements to willing lovers and then merge into molten elemental simplicity once again...

He'd fly up from the emptiness burrowed into the earth, some ancient tunnel or quarry piercing, and he'd land before them, His People. They'd be so glad to see him, questions and complaints trembling on their lips. All they needed was some reassurance, he thought. All the needed was the sight of his smile, so warm and so forgiving, and their fears would fall away. Their quarrels would evaporate. They would sing to him, and he would grace them with benedictions. The desert soil would grow ample with fruits and wildlife. The water would run pure again. His people would thrive. He'd name them after the Anasazi, the ancient ones like himself who came hurtling out of nothingness to embrace sunlight. He'd call them the Demisazi. That was a nice thing, had a nice ring, a paternal shape that would enfold them into the kindness they would love him for.

When he got there. If he got there. If this fall bent into a flight, if the pendulum of gravity reversed itself. If the air didn't suddenly freeze or vanish. If the enormity around him didn't abruptly spill out into the great airless void of space itself, his tiny body a mere sliver hurtling into eternity, into the slow blaze of stars casually meandering apart as they had been doing in extreme slow motion even since God pressed the tip of His cigar to the great primordial cherry bomb, ripe with seeds of fire...

He blinked back sleep and arrayed his thoughts into less fanciful patterns. He should be careful about being swept away on thoughts of magnificence. Him, a god? How was that supposed to make sense? He didn't even know where he was. Him, an element? Then how was it he had so little of sense of where he was, so little control over where he was going?

Air. Darkness. Air was an element, like fire - water - stone - metal... What was the other one? Oh, yes. Void. Those were the six elements. Air and void, present and accounted for. The rest? No drop of rain found his lips. No flicker of fire greeted his eyes. And stone? In the form of clay, or sand, or rock? Could it be all around him? There had to be some boundary to this lightless expanse, didn't there? Were there walls around him, just out of reach? He tried to stretch out an arm, and couldn't tell if he succeeded... couldn't tell exactly where his arms were, how long they might be. But an ache filled his shoulder, so... a shoulder suggested an arm, didn't it? If not, then what? A... a stump? In a reflex of panic he clenched his fists, and in doing so he felt them there. That is, he thought he felt them there... knots of something, wads of tension, cul-de-sacs of tension and circulation, sinew and heat. Those must be fists. In the grip of one fist he felt something solid, something that seemed important... if he could remember what it was, then maybe...

But the ache, now that he had noticed it, was growing stronger. It spidered all around his shoulder and reached probing, pointed roots into his torso. And now... now he began to understand that he wasn't falling at all.

He was dangling. He was dangling by one arm. His hands were numb, but he thought he could feel the grip of a manacle around his wrist. He tried to reach up to investigate the manacle, but then he became conscious again that he was holding something in his free hand.

Dangling? By chance, or by design? Had someone put him here this way?

Yes... The dark before his eyes was complete, but his mind began to lighten with memory. Yes. They had come to his office at the university. They had... they had searched for something, or pretended to search. Scattering his text-clips around, accessing his tech, poking around the office and then his tiny flat.

You thought you could insult Phresenc with impunity? - they screamed into his face, as they took his treasure fragile things one by one and pulverized them. Things he had never owned, but simply served as a caretaker -

The brutes!

So they were insulted at his writings that said men should be free to pursue the truth according to the world as it was, rather than as it was described in decaying scraps of parchment. And was that enough to justify their brute chaos? Their cruelty? Their wantonness and glee in destroying what others had built? Who was this Phresenc of theirs, this mighty god they they invented for the purposes of comfort and justification? If he was real, then of what nature did he partake? Where had he come from? If he had created the world, how had he done it? With hammer and nails? Chisel? Pure magic?

This seemed to be the thing they were harping on as they shouted at him: With sand and water! With fire and air! With void and metal! With the fixtures of six, the fixtures of six, the fixtures of six!

Right. He remembered some of their mythology. The six great angels who served Phresenc as his arms and legs. The six great races of men who served as his personae in the world below the celestial brine: His evil represented by the dark races, his creativity represented by the middle races, his intellect represented by the barely-tinted race, and his spiritual purity and his moral authority represented by the white race.

And the men destroying his home, his work, and his property, where did they count themselves in this sacred color scheme?

He provoked and insulted them in his anger, an anger than had built for years. They had slowly, slowly intruded upon everything. Shouldn't they have a voice in academe? Shouldn't they be given the trust of a hand on the governmental rudder? Shouldn't they, too, be keepers of the law? And suddenly, everything and everyone that disagreed with their teachings was an enemy and should have nothing at all - no voice, no place, no status, no life. So it was that they came to his office, to his home, taking everything, crushing and burning everything, stomping and ripping.

So it was they locked a manacle around his wrist and shoved him off the platform to dangle here, in this chamber with the deep, deep shaft below and the great blades that drove the air. This was one of the ventilation chambers for the subterranean particle accelerator, he recalled now. But it was no longer used to smash particles and glimpse into the lightning-quick flashes of the quantum world their collisions provided. Now it was used to smash dissidents. Or, not even dissidents... he'd never really been political, wrapped up as he was in research. But that didn't matter. He was not a believer in Phresence or the Law of Six. He believed in rationality, number, order; a cosmological consistency, something that could be traced from start to finish and didn't simply dangle in mid-air...

As he was doing now... irony of all ironies, his execution a statement of their idiotic fantasies. Dangling from one manacled wrist, pain throbbing at his shoulder, numbness erasing his poor tormented arm.

He had been left here without food, without water, to perish slowly.

Or...

He lifted his free hand, carefully shifted the object in his palm.

A key.

A key that fit the manacle.

They had given him the means to escape a torturously slow demise. All he had to do was fit the key into the lock and twist. He had thought he'd dropped the key... but no, here it was. He'd held onto it after all. Some part of him wanted the choice - the escape. Other parts of him wanted to hang on, hang here. Not in hope of rescue, but out of sheer spite. Let them wait for his death. Let them wait to place some other innocent, some other non-believer into this makeshift place of torture, this chapel of science they had degraded and perverted into an antechamber of death. Some day their heinous grip would be broken and they would find themselves consigned to dungeons. Each day - each hour - each breath he hung here denied them the chance to torment and murder another scientist, another teacher, another kindly soul who had spoken out against their abuses.

But his defiance was being eaten away by pain and fatigue. The part of him that just wanted to drop into the whirling blades below and die... that part was growing larger. It might outlast his strength. It might become as vast as the dark around him, as forceful as the rush of air. Stale air, now that he had the sense to recognize it. Air with a faint stench of charnal house about it. Air tainted with the blood of those who had dropped down into the dark before him. Sturdy, those blades, to withstand the blow of a falling body, to chop it into pieces without slowing down one iota. And where did the mangled meat go from there? Did they clean up after themselves, the vandals? Did they have even that much decency? Did they offer cremation or burial to their victims? Did they inter the dead, if only in mass graves? Had they clung to some spare remnant of civility?

Mysteries all. He would follow the already-dead into those puzzlements sooner or later. But not now. Right now, his pain was a testament not to his own damnation, but that of the slovenly brutes who had embraced mental darkness... spiritual darkness... and clawed civilization to its knees like a ravening pack of hyenas. But this lion would rally and roar. He might not be there to see it, but he could sap the strength of the hyenas simply by hanging on... by hanging here... by setting his will against thirst, delirium, and pain... by feeding on his own suffering instead of letting it nourish their hateful, demonic hunger.

When the time came, his body might plunge into darkness and annihilation, but his soul would ascend into light. That was the least he could do, when the world had come to darkness. When the world itself was falling, falling from pinnacles of hope and clarity - heights of knowledge, when true liberation from fantasies seemed within reach -

He closed his eyes against the dark... pointless to keep them open... and relaxed as best he could. To distract himself from pain and thirst he recalled scriptural passages, marveling at the way the vandals had twisted the meaning of sacred verses in order to make the claim that they were following the will of God. After a time, seeking solace in the true, he worked mentally on equations from his latest... last... unpublished proof. The work was taxing, his thinking muddy. It didn't matter if he was following all the factors correctly. The equations soothed his mind, quieted his hammering heart.

The darkness was restful, sometimes. When it wasn't... when it became oppressive, hateful, terrifying... he concentrated on the image of a candle, its bright, steady flame impervious to the wind around him and the storms that rocked the world. That, too, calmed the tumult in his heart and mind.

For two more days he hung there, weaving in and out of coherence. When he was out of his mind, he was also out of his body - sailing, soaring through skies that lightened and became vast, crystalline, sparkling over landscapes unsullied and resplendent with grandeur. When he came to himself he summoned his failing strength and held on - but his strength steadily diminished, the key grew heavier in his hand, and his starved mind and body slipped down ever closer to failure. His few options were drifting away from him.

It was at one such juncture that voices became audible, barking in muffled cadence through the thick walls and the shaft's depth. Light - real light, not imagined - seeped into the chamber as the door was forced ajar. Squinting, he saw the shadows of figures playing against the wall. With a gasp, he felt the chain by which he dangled yanked and then hauled upwards. They had grown tired of waiting, he thought with a shock; they had come to unlock the manacle themselves and then toss his emaciated form into the darkness below. His time had run out, and defiance now took the form of the key in his hand.

His strength had waned so badly he almost couldn't raise his arm. The chain swayed and jolted, and pain ripped through him in waves with every shudder that crashed through him. The key nosed around the lock, scraping, catching; he struggled to find the right angle, to get the key to fit. Glancing upwards he saw light, black figures smudges and distorted in its glare, figures that yanked at the chains and hauled him roughly upwards, figures that called down to him with malicious promises...

The key seem to slot, to find its proper place. Was that it? He struggled to turn the key and release the manacle. Better the sudden hacking release offered by the blades below than the sharp implements that no doubt awaited him in some cold, colorless room... a place where death approached by millimeters...

With a last spasm, he leaped in mid-air, his fingers clenching the key, his wrist twisting - and there came the snap of the manacle springing open - and then his raw and ravaged arm slipped free, his body plummeted downwards, and the light receded, savage figures snarling with disappointment speeding away from him and out of reach.

The blades would bite now, but the agony would last only for an instant.

And yet... the metal never found his flesh. Had he been mistaken? Was it all a dream? Or had the whirling blade sectioned his flesh, freeing his spirit for a flight that would last forever?

Was he still in the shaft? Was he hurtling through space or through the mystery of oblivion? He could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

He knew only this: It was dark.

And he was falling.