Chapter 11

It took me long minutes to recover, if recovering is even what you can call it.

As my eyes cleared I became aware of that flattened noseless face against his skull, the face I remembered from my dream. And when I lifted the towel the rest of him was the same, too. His largely hairless underbelly showed the clear evidence of the great cut I'd made, but it wasn't even oozing, and the covering towel was dry and supple. When I could bring myself to look more closely I could see that the flesh had already begun to knit around the stitches. He'd have a scar from the cauterizing burn I'd inflicted with the soldering iron, I guessed. Or maybe he wouldn't even have that, how could I know with a creature such as this?

And the tail on my wrist once again revealed itself as a long tendril from his mane, or whatever you might care to call it. As I stood there scrutinizing him it flopped away, back onto the towel-covered table, but it twitched a little and I knew that life remained, however tenuous.

Something told me that another dollop of alcohol was indicated. The liquor bottle, now seriously depleted, was still on the table; I reached over to open the drawer and take out a coffee spoon, poured a little vodka and coaxed it into his mouth. It seemed to slide down his throat without any need for visible swallowing. Then I did it a second time, but I figured that was enough for now.

Vaguely I looked around me, orienting myself to my otherwise familiar cabin. It all looked normal, it was still home. Except— I looked back down at the table and shuddered. He still wasn't frightening any more than he had been in my dream that wasn't a dream, but he was ... out of place. Not just here in my home, I realized, anywhere on Earth.

Eventually I pulled myself together enough to make myself a cup of coffee. I doctored it with cream and just the smallest bit of sugar to counter the slightly bitter aftertaste and then carried it with me to the couch while I tried to assimilate what had happened here.

The first thing I had to eliminate was that the whole thing was just one huge hallucination. I mean, the last two days had been the strangest I'd ever experienced, had they even been real?

That worry went away quickly, though, when I looked across the room and saw Camil­la's Tosca score, on the entry table where I'd left it when I'd come in the night before. It was tangible proof that at least some of what I remembered as happening really had. And if some of it had and I hadn't been living in a fantasy world, then maybe all of it had. I looked back at the table to see the ... well, he clearly wasn't a cat, but I still thought of him that way ... still lying there, breathing very slowly but perceptibly taking in air.

But what was he?

It took me a while, and more than a few false starts, to reach the only rational conclusion. He certainly wasn't a creature of this world, I was no naturalist but I knew enough for that. This was a true alien, an E.T.—an extraterrestrial, a being from another world entirely. That was an awful lot to swallow, and it was a long time before I could gulp the thought down.

Once I got that far, however, I could extrapolate kind of a lot from there. He'd apparently made some sort of unexpected landing (or crash) in whatever craft had brought him here. His ... ship? ... had evidently malfunctioned or somehow been damaged or destroyed, otherwise he'd have been able to contact his fellows for rescue.

Because he clearly wasn't alone; there were others of his kind somewhere near, who presumably either thought him dead or for some other reason weren't disposed to investigate his landing site closely. Otherwise he'd have waited for them where he was. But they'd come if he could signal them, that had to be the purpose of the beacon he'd got me to design. I went back to the schematic I'd drawn and looked it over with fresh eyes. It all made sense of a sort, but it wasn't anything I could ever remember seeing. I couldn't even be quite sure what kind of signal it'd send—something at the really high end of the electromagnetic spectrum, it looked like. But presumably it'd call his friends to him.

Somehow or other, though, he'd been fairly badly injured between when he'd come to ground and when I met him. His encounter with the bear seemed the most likely cause, though that was guesswork; it could have happened in half a dozen other ways I could think of, and still more that were beyond what I could even speculate. The injury wasn't too bad initially—I thought of the broken bone-seeming object—and he could soldier on for a while, but each movement cost him a little more as the bone fragments tore at softer flesh and organs inside. He'd seemed to have a lot more specific awareness than a human would of what damage had been done; his instructions to me in my semi-sleep had been astonishingly detailed and even more astonishingly accurate, I remembered. And he knew enough to be aware he was closing in on death.