DO YOU MIND if I don't describe that trip back home? If you really want to know what it felt like, perhaps therapy could help you.
No, wait, some parts were worth remembering. A fireman's carry doesn't work when you're dressed for Nova Scotia outdoors, she kept slipping off my shoulder, so I carried her most of the way in my arms, the way you carry a bride over the threshold. I could feel the warmth of her groin against my right arm through four layers of thick clothing, and in looking down to pick my footing I spent a lot of time watching those splendid breasts jiggle. Snowflakes seemed to melt and then evaporate instantly as they struck her, soft white kisses that left no mark. Her horrid moaning had stopped. In repose her features were beautiful. Perhaps there was a little of that ozone effect left in the air. By the time I emerged from the trees and sighted my home, windows glowing invitingly, twin streamers of smoke being torn from the chimneys, I suppose that I was feeling about as good as possible for a man in extreme physical distress. Better than you might suspect . . .
I don't remember covering the last hundred meters. I don't know how I got the outer and inner doors open and sealed again without dropping her. Instinctively I headed for the living room, the warmest room on the ground floor since it held the big Ashley firebox. I vaguely recall a dopey confusion once I got there. I wanted her on the couch, but I wanted her closer to the fire than that. So It was necessary to move the couch. Hmmm, I was going to have to put her down first. Where? Say, how about on the couch? Minimize the number of trips I'd have to make back and forth. Brilliant. Very important to conserve energy. Set her down carefully. Oof. Oh well. Circle couch, tacking like a sailboat, wedge self between it and wall. Final convulsive effort: heave! Good. Circle couch again. More difficult against the wind. Oh shit, we're going to capsize, try not to hit the Ashley—
Someone whacked me across both kneecaps with padded hammers, and then someone else with a naked sledge stove in the side of my head.
Two large beasts were fighting nearby. The nearer roared and growled deep in his throat, like King Kong in his wrath, or a dragon who has been told that this is the no-smoking section. The other had a high eldritch scream that rose and fell wildly, a banshee or a berserk unicorn. It sounded like they were tearing each other to pieces, destroying the entire soundstage in their fury.
Damn, it was hot here on Kong Island. Funny smell, like toasting mildew. Swimming in perspiration. Jungle so close it fit you like—
—a coat. A big heavy furry wet overcoat, and soggy hat and scarf and gloves and many sweat-saturated layers of undergarments. The shrieking unicorn was the storm outside, and mighty Kong was my Ashley stove . . . about a meter away! I rolled away quickly, and cracked my head on the couch. But for the cushioning of hat and hair, I'd have knocked myself out again.
If things would only slow down for a minute, maybe I could get something done! Menstruating Christ, me head's broke. . . .
I made it to my hands and knees. The dark naked woman on the couch caught my attention. So it was that kind of party, eh? Then I remembered. Oh, hell yeah, that's just the dying time traveler I found up on the Mountain. Is she done yet?
No, she was still working at it. Taking her time, too. She was asleep or unconscious, breathing in deep slow draughts. They called my attention to the fact that her nipples had finally detumesced. Fair enough. If I couldn't stand up, why should they? I began the long but familiar crawl to the kitchen, shedding wet clothes like a snake as I went until I got down to my Stanfields.
Fortunately there was always coffee on my kitchen stove, and I had overproof Navy grog in my pantry, and whipped cream from Mona's cow Daisy in my fridge; halfway though the second mug of Sassenach Coffee I had managed to become a shadow of my former self. I set the mug on the stove to keep warm and put my attention on first aid for my houseguest.
And screeched to a mental halt. What sort of first aid is indicated for someone who doesn't mind subzero temperature? What is the quick-cure for Time Traveler's Syndrome, for mal de temps?
It occurred to me to wonder if I had harmed her by bringing her into a warm environment. It didn't seem likely, but nothing about her seemed likely. I had only had a glimpse of her before crawling from the room. I forced myself up onto my weary feet and headed for the living room, cursing as my socks soaked up some of the ice water I had tracked indoors.
Her metabolism seemed to mind warmth no more than it had subarctic cold. Her pulse seemed unusually fast and unusually strong—for a human being. The skin of her wrist was soft and warm and smooth. So was her forehead. Somehow I was not surprised that it was not feverish.
The back of my hand brushed that silly golden crown perched high on her bald head—and failed to dislodge it, which did surprise me. I nudged it, found it firmly affixed. I investigated. There were three little protuberances around its circumference, barely big enough to grasp, one at each temple and one around behind. I tugged the one at her right temple experimentally and it slid outward about ten centimeters on a slender shaft. There was an increasing resistance, like spring-tension, but at its full extension it locked into place. So did the other. I cradled her head with one palm and pulled out the third, and the crown fell off onto the couch. I examined the frontal two holes, the skin around them horny as callus, and confirmed that the three locking pins had been socketed directly into her skull.
There was no apparent change in her condition. She did not seem to need the crown to survive—at least, not in this friendly environment.
It seemed to be pure gold. It weighed enough, for all its slenderness. Examined closely, it seemed to be made up of thousands of infinitely thin threads of gold, interwoven in strange complicated ways that made me think of photos I'd seen of the IC chips they were just beginning to put in pocket calculators in those days. It didn't feel like it was carrying any current, or hum or blink or act electronically alive in any way I recognized. (Then again, neither did a chip.) There were no visible control surfaces or connections beyond the three locking pins—which did seem conductive.
Who knew what the thing was? Perhaps it was her time machine. Perhaps it made people obey you. Or not see you. From my point of view, there was nothing to be gained, and much to be risked, by replacing it. When she regained consciousness, she could tell me what it was. Or babble in some strange tongue, in which case I might decide to gamble on the crown being a translating device. For now, it was a distraction. I hid it in the kitchen, wishing I knew whether I was being crafty or stupid.
When I got back to the living room, she had rolled over in her sleep to toast the other side. It was the first completely human thing she had done, and for the first time I felt genuine empathy with her. With it came a rush of guilt at playing Mickey Mouse games, stealing gold from an unconscious woman—
In the harsh light of the bare bulb overhead, she looked somewhat less dark than she had outside, but not much. She definitely did not have the hyperextended back and high rump of a black woman, nor the slender hips and flat fanny of an Asian. She was muscled like an athlete, and much too thin for my taste—about what the rest of North America would have considered stunningly beautiful. Her face was turned toward me, and I studied it.
Outside in the dark in a snowstorm, I had guessed her age at forty. With better light and less distraction, I decided I could not guess her age. She might have been fourteen. The hasty impression I had gotten of intelligence and character was still there, but it did not express itself in the usual way, in number and placement of wrinkles. I could not pin down where it did reside.
Thai eyes, Japanese cheeks, Italian nose, Portuguese mouth. Skin medium dark, somehow more like a Mayan or a lightskinned Negro than a heavily tanned Caucasian, though I can't explain the difference. The net effect was stunning. One thing either marred or enhanced it, I could not decide. She was totally hairless—she had no eyebrows, and no eyelashes. Striking feature, in a face that didn't need it.
I didn't know what to do for her. Would a couple of blankets take some strain off her odd metabolism—or put more on? I felt her forehead and cheek. Just as they had been out in the snowstorm, they were skin temperature. She did not react to my touch. I thumbed back one eyelid, did a slight double-take. The pupil beneath that Asian eyelid was a blue so startlingly vivid and pure that it would have been improbable on any face. Paul Newman's eyes weren't that blue. I actually checked the other pupil to make sure it matched.
I decided, on no basis at all, that she was asleep rather than unconscious. I could think of nothing better for whatever it was that ailed her. I lit the kerosene lamp and dimmed the overhead electric light all the way down to darkness. I went back to the kitchen, picking up my discarded outdoor clothes as I went. I hung most of them by the kitchen stove to dry, put the mittens, gloves and outer pair of socks in the warming oven over the stove, put the boots on top of the warming oven. I finished the British coffee I had left on the stovetop. I went to a shelf by the back door, found a spare pair of socks among the mittens and scarves, swapped them for the wet pair I had on and put on my house-slippers. My Stanfields were still damp with sweat, so I got a fresh set of uppers and lowers from the shelf. I emptied the kettle into a basin, added the last ladle of cold water from the bucket behind the stove (the line to the sink pump would not unfreeze for weeks yet), and took a hasty sponge bath at the sink, then toweled off and changed into the clean Stanfields. The stove's firebox was almost down to coals—bad habit to get into; I hoped time travelers weren't going to be showing up every night—so I threw in a few sticks of softwood and a chunk of white birch from the woodbox behind the stove. I made a fast trip out to the drafty back hall for more wood, wedged the Ashley as full as possible, adjusted the thermostat and damper, closed her up and hung up the poker. The plastic was peeling up at one of the living room windows, farting icy drafts, so I got out the staple gun and fixed that. (I was not worried about waking her. People who need to sleep bad enough cannot be wakened. People who can be wakened can answer questions. Besides, it is impossible to load an Ashley quietly. In any case, she did not wake.) I went back to the kitchen, checked that the fire was rebuilding well, added a stick of maple.
The petty chores of living in the country are so neverending that if they don't send you gibbering back to the city they become a kind of hypnotic, a rhythmic ritual, encouraging you to adopt a meditative state of mind. I found that I was priming up the Kemac, the oil-fired burner which took over for woodfire while I slept, and that told me that I had decided what I wanted to do. So I went back to the living room.
I had two choices: carry her upstairs to the bedroom above the Kemac—the only room that would stay "warm" all night long without help—or keep feeding the Ashley at intervals of no more than three or four hours. No choice at all; I could never have gotten her to the bedroom (Heartbreak Hotel grew room by room over a hundred and twenty years, at the whims of very eccentric people; it's not an easy house to get around in). I readjusted the damper on the Ashley, got blankets from the spare bedroom, put one over her, curled up in The Chair, and watched her sleep until I was asleep too. Roughly every three hours I rebuilt the fire. I don't remember doing so even once, but we were alive in the morning—in the country you develop habits rather quickly.
My dreams were bad, though. My father kept trying to tell me that something or someplace was mined, and a baby kept crying without making any sound, and I couldn't seem to find my body anywhere. . . .