Faller

by Will McIntosh

  “Have you ever considered using your duplicator to end hunger?” Kathleen said. “Instead of flying in planeloads of grain, we fly in a chicken and a duplicator.”

  “The bioterrorism-driven epidemics take precedence,” Ugo said. “We can’t take our eye off that target.”

  “Beyond that, a duplicator wouldn’t be the panacea for world hunger you’d think it would,” Izabella said from the other end of the table. “A lot of the duplicators would be seized by dictators and warlords in those countries, unless you had an army guarding each one.”

  Under the table, Kathleen’s fingers were counting, her thumb and index finger opening and closing, probably keeping track of whether Izabella spoke an odd or even number of words. Peter looked away from her hand, hoping Kathleen hadn’t noticed him noticing.

  “From what Peter’s said,” Izabella went on, “manufacturing a duplicator is outrageously expensive. For that money you could set up agricultural programs, if the local governments would go along.” She took a sip of water, shaking her head. “At this point hunger is mostly political. It’s not about a food shortage.”

  Kathleen lifted and set down her wineglass twice, then took a big swallow. She looked hurt to have her idea stepped on. “What about famines, where countries fly in planeloads of food? That’s incredibly expensive.”

  Izabella shrugged. “It might be viable for famine relief, just not large-scale hunger relief.”

  “Fine.” She turned to Peter, set her chin on her hand. “Famine relief, then.”

  Peter sipped his Glenfiddich, relishing the oaky burn. “I’m all for it. Let’s look into raising funds. I think—”

  His phone rang: an international number. “Excuse me.” He hopped up the ladder to the deck.

  “Hello?”

  “Dr. Sandoval?” It was a man with an accent. European, maybe.

  “Yes?” Peter crossed the small deck, looked out over the dark water, spotted here and there with lights from boats.

  “This is Gunnar Oquist, secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I apologize for calling so late in the evening.”

  Peter tried to say, “That’s all right,” but nothing came out but an incoherent yawp. Was there any other reason the Royal Swedish Academy called someone? But he was too young …

  “I’m calling to inform you that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award you the Nobel Prize in physics for your work on quantum cloning. I’d like to congratulate you on behalf of myself, and the academy.”

  Peter gripped the railing. A Nobel Prize. He’d won a fucking Nobel Prize.

  Gunnar Oquist chuckled on the other end of the line. “Dr. Sandoval? Are you still there?”

  “You’re serious. I won a Nobel Prize?” Dark speckles spotted his vision; he’d come this close to passing out, he realized.

  “Indeed. A Nobel Prize. The announcement will be made in the morning. If there were other recipients I would typically inform you of who they are, but this year you’re the sole recipient in physics.”

  “That’s wonderful. I’m bursting. I have to tell my wife and friends.”

  “Of course. It’s been a pleasure, Dr. Sandoval. I look forward to meeting you at the ceremony.”

  “Thank you.” Peter signed off. Still feeling woozy, he leaned his elbows on the railing and stared out at the river, the only sound the slosh of water against the ship.

  He’d won a Nobel Prize. Him—the dirt-poor kid whose father had blown up their home cooking methamphetamine. He’d won a Nobel Prize.

  He couldn’t wait to tell Melissa and his friends. Although, maybe this wasn’t the right time. This was Ugo’s night as well as his, and Peter had no doubt Ugo was going to be devastated by the news. Ugo couched his competitive comments in laughter, but beneath the laughter, Peter was sure Ugo saw him as a measuring stick.

  “Who was it?” Melissa put an arm on his shoulder. “You okay? You’re shaking.”

  Peter couldn’t keep from grinning. “I’ll tell you after the party. It’s good news.”

  Melissa raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

  Peter wrapped his arm around her and led her back belowdecks.

  10

  NIGHT FELL. Faller was relieved to have the company of a half-moon and a million pinpricks of starlight, but the wind turned to ice. Through trial and error he’d figured out how to stop tumbling, and he’d fallen feetfirst for most of the day because it minimized the buffeting gale. Now he shifted so he was falling back first. He pressed his forearm over the neck of his jumpsuit, trying to cut off the flow of air. The wind still cut like a knife. His muscles ached from its relentless tug; his skin was chafed and burned, his ears ringing.

  What an utterly pointless existence he’d led. A few hundred days of wondering what it meant, to suddenly pop into a world and a life that he couldn’t remember, now he was going to pop back out, understanding no more than when he’d arrived. What he wouldn’t give to know what had happened. Besides leaving Daisy and Orchid, dying in ignorance was his greatest regret.

  * * *

  HE MUST have fallen asleep, because he had one of his nightmares. His dreams had once been random things, the topics pulled from the hat of his daily life, but more and more they were dark and bizarre messes that had absolutely nothing to do with his life. They repeated, and each time the curtain was drawn back a bit further, more awful details were revealed.

  In this latest (and perhaps last) nightmare, it was raining, only the raindrops were red. Faller was on a street packed with people who were shouting, running blindly in every direction, crashing into each other. They were terrified, soaked in thick rain the precise color and texture of blood. He’d had this dream before, only this time besides the blood rain, airplanes filled the sky. They were rumbling in neat rows, staying up there when all logic screamed that they should fall, and they were shitting bombs, and when the bombs landed whatever was under them was thrown into the air, and bricks and glass and splintered wood rained down along with the blood.

  He’d never had a dream before where machines worked, and he hoped he died before he had another. It reminded him of the very early days, when some persistent tinkerers managed to get a car or truck—and in one case even a crane—operating. Faller had a vivid memory of a guy plowing into the side of a building in a little red car. He’d gone right through the windshield, headfirst into the brick wall. One by one the vehicles had stopped working, and they never worked again.

  11

  FALLER THOUGHT he’d been falling for three or four days, although there was no way to tell for sure. He no longer felt like he was falling. He hung upright and motionless while a tremendous wind blew up from below. Even if he tried, he couldn’t regain the sensation of falling. He was going nowhere; he was the center of this blank universe, standing on nothing.

  His mouth had dried out the previous day, giving him no need to swallow, but hunger and thirst tormented him. Unless he made a point of looking around—and there was really no point in that—he often couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed. The featureless landscape had a way of robbing him of his sight.

  Since those first awful minutes, Faller hadn’t spent much time wondering about his failed parachute. Wondering required effort, and as Faller fell into a numb, confused stupor, he didn’t have the energy for it.

  Regrets, on the other hand, seemed to roll out effortlessly.

  Besides jumping off the Tower, Faller’s biggest regret was that he hadn’t been able to do more to stop the killing in the early days. He had saved Daisy, though. That was something, and not something small. Daisy’s wry, too grown-up voice often kept him company as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

  Faller also regretted that he never found the woman in the picture, or at least figured out who she was. Likely she had died in the early days. So many had died in the early days. So many. While Daisy’s voice comforted him in these final hours, the screams of those terrified children haunted him. There had been days afterw
ard when he would have done anything to forget those faces, to blot them from his mind.

  Maybe that’s what had happened to all of them. Maybe they’d done something so awful, they would do anything to forget. So they’d used their machines to make themselves forget. From all the pictures and paintings of places that didn’t exist, Faller was sure the world had once been much bigger—maybe ten times bigger—and he suspected the awful thing they’d done had had something to do with making the world smaller.

  If that was the answer, if they’d done all this to forget, then it was a great irony that all he wanted was to remember.

  III

  THROUGH THE French doors of his study, Peter watched Melissa strain to lift a slab of granite, setting it atop two other vertical slabs to form an inverted U. She’d been working on the thirteenth hole—the Stonehenge hole—of her miniature golf course/sculpture garden for a week straight.

  Grinning, he surveyed the other twelve: Graceland, with its canted roof and velvet curtains; Area 51, complete with spaceship and alien; Venice, with its harrowing waterways; Fenway Park, where balls rolled partway up a velvet green monster on their approach. From Peter’s vantage point the course was framed by a skyful of stratocumulus undulatus, set in vertical rows, a blue sky peeking between them.

  Peter watched the clouds drift, like frozen white breakers on the beach. When he was young and his parents were dragging him from one trash-strewn neighborhood to another, he’d discovered the sky, always bright and clean and beautiful. The uglier the landscape, the more time he’d spend with his face upturned. In grad school, when his ideas felt splintered in a million directions, they clicked into place most easily when he was watching clouds. While searching for cloud books online, he’d stumbled upon the Cloud Appreciation Society. Their Web site had been his home page ever since.

  His phone rang just as he was turning back to his computer. It was Harry.

  “Are you watching the news?”

  Peter grabbed the remote on the desk. “You never want to hear someone open a conversation with that. What’s happening?”

  “They’re bombing the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline.”

  “What? Who is?” The TV’s picture came on, showing thick black smoke billowing from an oil refinery.

  “The Russians. We’re at war, Peter. I think World War Three just began.”

  Peter turned and saw Melissa squatting in her miniature Stonehenge, phone to her ear, head down. He thought she might be crying.

  “I have to go. I’ll call you back.” He tossed his phone on the sofa and rushed outside.

  She was crying so hard she seemed to be having trouble breathing. Peter squatted beside her, wrapped his arms around her. “We’ll get through this. The country’s been through wars before.”

  Melissa lifted her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “The war. Isn’t that—”

  “Izabella has Peterson-Jantz.”

  Peter fought an urge to clap his hands over his ears, to curl up into a ball.

  Bella? Bella was dying? “How could she have contracted it?”

  Melissa wiped her nose with her fist. “Everyone who took the trip to Mumbai got it. They think Pakistani agents sabotaged their food.” She wrapped her arms around Peter’s neck, pressed her face into his chest. “I can’t do this. I can’t watch her die. I just can’t.”

  Peter hugged Melissa tight, his thoughts a howling storm. He wanted to say something comforting, but what could comfort her at this moment?

  “I’m so sorry. I’m here for you. We’ll face it together.” It sounded so inadequate; a handful of sand to stop a tidal wave. “Ugo’s been working night and day on his cure. He’ll come through.”

  Melissa nodded, sniffed. “He will. We can’t lose Bella. We just can’t.” She relaxed her grip on him, leaned back, looking at the ground. “What were you talking about, that we’ll get through the war?”

  Peter had completely forgotten Harry’s call in the wake of Melissa’s news. “Russia just dragged us into the war.”

  Melissa squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh, shit.”

  The two worst pieces of news they’d ever received, and they’d come at the same time. “Where’s Bella now?”

  “Home, I think,” Melissa said.

  “I’ll get my keys.”

  12

  A SPASM of terror pulled Faller from a semidream. It had been an image more than a dream: his lifeless body, plunging like a sack of meat in the endless sky. He tried to banish the image, but it hung there, tormenting him.

  Would his body rot? Did you have to be on the ground, or under it, to rot? He saw himself as a skeleton, his jumpsuit flapping loosely.

  His throat hurt. He had sores from the constant rubbing of his jumpsuit. There was nothing to do about any of it. In that one important respect dying was easier than staying alive had been.

  There was a blot on his eye, one of those visual mosquitoes that sometimes danced in his vision. Only this one wasn’t dancing. It was stationary, planted in the steel-blue dawn beneath his feet.

  Faller touched his eyelids, to make sure they were open. They were. He looked again.

  It was a pea-sized blot, slightly darker than the early morning sky. Faller rubbed his eyes, lightly slapped his face to make sure he was awake, and looked a third time.

  He let out a croak that rose at the end, taking the form of a question.

  A cloud passed in front of the blot. He waited, heart hammering.

  When it reappeared, it was larger, its edges more distinct.

  It grew larger. Faller tried to guess what it could be. A bird that had strayed far, far from the world? Birds moved, though. This wasn’t moving; it just hung there in the sky. Maybe it was something light dropped from the world that he was catching up to?

  When it was so large he couldn’t block it out with his thumb, he knew what it was.

  It was a place—a world.

  His heart was too weak to pound, but it fluttered as his dried-out mind tried to grasp the notion of another world. His lip split in two places as he smiled, then laughed, although the laugh sounded like little more than a dry croak to his ears. The universe had saved a stunning surprise for his final hours.

  Maybe the universe was nothing but a giant circle, and if you fell long enough you ended up back at the world?

  The place kept growing until it was bigger than his fist, then a big roundish plate like a manhole cover in the sky. His vision was blurry, but eventually he made out some details. Clumps of rectangles all over that he guessed were roofs. Patches of green here and there. A bluish stripe and a few sundry bluish circles that must have been water.

  The closer he fell, the surer he became that it wasn’t his world. It was another place.

  It was divided into sections. Two lines running roughly parallel from one end of the world to the other created a band down the center. The two remaining sides were further divided into uneven parts.

  He wondered if he should get the world under him and slam into it to end this. Maybe that was best. What would the people down there make of him and his parachute when they found his body? He glanced up at the chute, that traitor, that faulty bastard that had been snapping impotently above him for days.

  As he was silently cursing it, it occurred to him that he could try to fix it.

  Faller reached up and grabbed the lines. It felt as if he were trying to reel in a whale instead of a chute, a task that wouldn’t have even winded him a few days ago. When he got the chute in his hands he rested, periodically glancing at the world he was fast approaching.

  With trembling fingers, squinting eyes dried from dehydration, he struggled to tie off each of the broken suspension lines—doubling, tripling, quadrupling the knots, hoping they’d hold this time. Then he reattached the clamps. He kept snapping the clamps into thin air, his vision doubled. Finally he shut his eyes and clamped them by feel.

  He couldn’t get the chute into the backpack. Reaching behind him with the wind tearing a
t the chute quickly turned his arms to jelly. Unstrapping the pack from his back was out of the question—the wind would yank it from his hands. He twisted onto his stomach and clutched the bunched chute to his chest. Stretching one arm and his legs and holding them stiff against the battering wind was agony. He inched toward the world with a drunken wobble, gasping at the effort.

  By the time he was over it, he was close enough to see vehicles in the roads. He swung the parachute clear and let it go.

  The parachute crept out tentatively, flapping like a wounded bird. Too exhausted to be afraid, Faller wondered if there was some top velocity beyond which parachutes just didn’t work.

  The chute surged upward and opened with a pop. Faller’s head snapped back, sending shooting pain down his neck and shoulders; his vision burst with pinwheels and the harness bit into his chest and back.

  The world went utterly silent. The wind, which had been with him so long it seemed a part of him, was gone. Faller looked down. Here and there he could see the outline of buildings, roads, vehicles in the creeping dawn. The buildings were squat, the streets narrower, but it didn’t seem too different from home.

  He was dropping toward them surprisingly fast. Faller looked up, saw that one of his knots had failed. One section of the parachute was flapping, spilling air.

  Spinning in a tight circle, Faller plunged onto the roof of a long building. His legs crumpled when he hit; he landed hard on his ass. For a moment he was able to see the roof, then the chute settled over him, blotting out everything. He tried to pull it off, but it seemed to go on and on, a mile of fabric. He gave up and collapsed onto his back.

  A door creaked open.

  “There he is.” A child’s hushed but urgent voice, and it was followed by fierce whispering that edged closer.

  “Water,” Faller rasped. “Please get me water.”

  “Where did you come from?” a second child’s voice called, this one a girl.

  How could he possibly answer that? “I don’t know. I’m dying. Water. Please.”