“ ‘Fox’ Fox?” I couldn’t help asking, though I didn’t have much air to spare.
The doofus nodded, his smile spreading out like my getting the stupid joke made everything okay between us.
“You see the signs?” I demanded. Hack. Wheeze.
“Uh … signs?”
I rolled my eyes, which were nearly as itchy as everything else. “The No Trespassing signs. I have them posted all over the place.”
“Oh. Um, I didn’t look. On the bike, I get kinda … well. …” He gave me that same silly shrug again. “Curvy mountain roads and me, I kind of get into it.”
Great. Just great.
“Well, what about your work order? Didn’t that say anything?”
“About what?”
Oh, Lord. I started coughing up a lung. I guess it sounded pretty bad. He peered at me, and in the process he took a step nearer.
I nearly shot him, right then and there.
“About hyperallergic syndrome!” I wheezed, as soon as the coughing jag eased up. Waving the point of the quarrel at three of the signs, I read them for him. “Do not approach if you are wearing any kind of perfume or fragrance. NO PLASTIC! NO NYLON!”
His dark eyes flicked back and forth.
“Why d’you think I live up here on the mountain?” I asked him. “Why do you think I bought a Bi’Ome? You idiot! I’m allergic. To practically everything.”
“But I—”
“You’re wearing plastic,” I told him. “If I let you into my house, if I touch your shirt, I could go into anaphylactic shock.” Pant. Wheeze. “I could die.”
His mouth fell open. His lower lip flapped in the breeze, amid a faint jangle of the six chromed rings looping around its middle reaches.
“All that stinkum on you—Good God, I’m that close to choking on that shit alone. From here. What on Earth were you thinking?”
He shook his head, the lower lip still flapping. “They, uh, they said it was an emergency.”
“It is, you moron! Just look at my house!”
Only then did I let go of the crossbow with one hand and wave at the pink skin/wall behind me, the rosy expanse that would normally be turning golden green this time of year, as the sunshine of early spring spurred tanning as well as some serious photosynthetic power generation. Instead, the whole eastern side was covered with spots. I could barely restrain myself from reaching out to touch them, to rub them … to scratch.
Again, he took a step forward. I brought the crossbow back up to bear on his family jewels.
He raised a hand, Indian powwow style, but he didn’t say, “How.” Instead, he quietly told me, “Ma’am, I need a closer look.”
Ma’am. That made me feel older than shit, on top of everything else. But I was the one who’d yelled for help, wasn’t I? Sourly, congested and starting to wheeze again, I backed off and closed the door. Then I watched through the corneal window set into it while Reynard the Fox peered and poked at my wall. While he fetched a small med kit out of the bike’s saddlebags and took swabs off the affected surfaces. While he stuck a giant hypodermic into my siding. That gave me a twinge, so I turned away rather than watch him take his biopsy samples. When he was done, he knocked on the door and backed away a careful ten paces.
“How long will it take?” I demanded as soon as I’d opened the door, still on the defensive although I’d left the crossbow sitting on the kitchen table.
“I’m not done yet. I need to see what’s going on inside.”
“The hell you say!”
He won, of course. But he also went back to the bike and pulled on a cleansuit—a pure white cotton and silk blend with breathing apparatus, a full hood, gloves and booties, the outfit he should have been wearing before he came anywhere near me.
Grudgingly, still trying hard not to inhale when a breeze wafted past him, I let Fox enter.
By now, the whole living room, ceiling and walls and a patch of the floor, was adorned with the rash. The inflamed bit of flooring intrigued him the most. He stroked the wiry black hair with a gloved hand, and smiled when nearly half the room developed goose bumps in response. “Living carpet,” he said. “That’s so cool. But it’s not scalp hair, is it? Too dark.” He glanced up at my dirty-blond mane.
I was already breathless and frozen in place by my own sudden onslaught of gooseflesh. But then, catching up with his question, I flushed a hot scarlet that would have put a full-blown case of strep A to shame. Wheezing, wide-eyed, I sputtered, “No! No, it’s, uh, pubic. It stands up better … to wear and tear.”
To my surprise, he did not bust a gut over that one. Just nodded at me, looking owlish. “Yeah, that makes sense. As long as your hair growth is dense enough.”
Density, I thought, just might be the problem here. But not with the carpet.
“Is that itching too?” he asked, pointing at a hair-free slightly swollen strip of bare floor that served as a threshold, a lip between the inner and outer surfaces of the house.
Just thinking about it set off a furious prickling in the corresponding reaches of my anatomy. “Yes!” I snapped, forbidding my hands to go anywhere near the relevant body part. “What is it? And why is it making me itch? I don’t have the freakin’ rash!”
“A sympathetic reaction. Your nervous system is picking up on the symptoms affecting your better half.”
“My what?”
“The house.”
I planted my fists on my hips. “I think you’d better explain yourself, mister. I’m not married to this house.”
He grinned. “Oh, no. Your relationship is way closer than that.” Then, as he took in my unhappy reaction, he sobered up. “Look, you do know that this house was grown from your own stem cells, right?”
I nodded.
“We had to tweak the growth and development genes pretty hard. But underneath all that … the house is your twin. The DNA is the same. The nervous system—all the same. So, yeah, there have been some cases where Bi’Omes and their, uh, sources, have turned out to be just a little too sympatico.”
“That was not disclosed,” I told him. “Not when I bought mine.”
“Well, there’s still a big hairy argument. …” He broke off, flushing, trying real hard not to look at the carpet while his brain caught up with his mouth. “Uh, begging your pardon, ma’am, no pun intended—”
Impatience swept over me like a tidal wave. “Get on with it!” I nearly shouted. “What argument?!”
“Um, well, about whether the side effects are, ah, real, or, uh, psychosomatic.”
I glared at him, then barely managed to whisper the word, I was so stinking mad. “Psychosomatic?”
He nodded, bobbing his head up and down like a fifties-style hula girl off somebody’s dashboard.
“Are you aware that hyperallergic syndrome has, itself, been called psychosomatic?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, after all, you people do have … a lot of … neuroses.”
It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion—him realizing what he was about to say, and yet not quite able to stop himself.
“ ‘You people,’ ” I repeated, feeling dangerous. “Neuroses?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.
“Didn’t you? Listen, I think you’d better leave.”
He didn’t argue, just gathered up all his stuff and walked out the door. I slammed it behind him, threw the lock, and went to check on my supply of oatmeal soap. A soothing bath might calm my skin down enough to let me think.
I was lolling in the tub, enjoying some blessed relief from the itching while I used a deep-breathing exercise to try and get my lungs back under control. I was just getting into the zone when I heard a knock on the front door. For Christ’s sake. He’d only been gone half an hour, so now what?
Pulling a robe on, I padded out to the foyer to confront Fox. “Yes?” I inquired.