Year's Best SF 17

of itching, this time on the balls of my feet. Couldn’t quite keep myself from doing a circular Sufi dance across the coarse black fur that serves as a carpet, letting the friction of skin against wiry hair turn the prickling heat into definite inflammation.

The cold enamel tooth-tiles on the kitchen floor calmed it down some but there was no denying the fact that I was having some kind of allergic reaction. To what? There was no nylon in the house. No plastic of any kind. No paint. No fragrance. No synthetic anything. That’s the whole point of a Bi’Ome. Everything is totally organic and completely familiar to me, or at least to my immune system.

Nervously, I checked my fingers. When I get the hives, it shows up first in my hands. I get ugly red blotches (what doctors call urticaria). Then my fingers swell up like stubby pink sausages. My lips, too. I start looking like a Ubangi, except there’s no clay saucer stretching my mouth out of shape. Just oedema. Good old Mother Nature. And when it gets bad, well, my throat closes up. Or I pass out. Then my throat closes up. Where had all my EpiPens gone?

I reached out, grabbed the edge of a pouch underneath the nearest kitchen counter, and felt my fingers slide across half a dozen small hard bumps. Like Braille, only bigger.

I looked down. The rash was an odd one, the bumps looking weirdly transparent and delicate rather than small, hard, and red. Whatever. It speckled half the cabinets, the walls, the ceiling, and most of the pouches I use for drawers.

I spat, “Son of a bug-eater!”

It wasn’t me that had the rash. It was my house.

It took them five hours to send me an EMT—three solid hours to find the clown and another two to get his sorry ass up the mountain. You know how long that is, when you’re fighting a desperate need to scratch where it itches?

Then, when he did show up, he didn’t even have a truck. What he had was all these piercings and implants and crap. He even had a LoJack locked into his skull right behind his left ear. Swear to God, the guy looked like a Borg who’d mated with a mess of fishing tackle. Worse than that, he had a uniform on, a polyester mix. I could tell as soon as the tech climbed off his freakin’ motorcycle. Worse than that, even. Aftershave.

Oh my God. One whiff and my throat closed up.

Not that he noticed. The goof came rambling up to my front door just like some demented encyclopedia salesman, all smiling, eyebrow-beringed, and happy-faced.

I met him with a loaded crossbow.

Seeing that, he stopped dead. Both hands flew up, aerating armpits awash with some kind of deodorant. Fresh Scent, Extra Dry something or other. I started wheezing, fell to my knees, and found myself aiming at the point directly in front of me, which happened to be his crotch.

He definitely noticed that.

“Hey, take it easy.” He turned his hips sideways, acting like he didn’t know he’d just threatened my life.

“Don’t you come any closer,” I gasped.

“I won’t! But you … you called for a tech, right?”

I stared up at him over the length of the quarrel. “You’re it? Where’s Chen? Or Fredo? Or Saylah?”

I got a sheepish smile this time, along with a shrug. “All the regular guys are tied up. If you wanna wait —”

“No! I can’t!”

“Okay, then.” He gathered up some confidence and pulled out a business card, which I did not even think of accepting. After a moment’s embarrassment, he let his hand drop. He introduced himself. “I’m Rey Fox. R-E-Y. Short for Reynard. It’s kind of a joke. See, Moms was French.”

My crossbow wobbled a bit but I did my best to keep it centered on his private parts while I checked his company ID card. Reynard, indeed.

“ ‘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.