by Ralph Bowden
*****
When I woke again, the light was weird. I couldn’t tell if it was moonlight or first daylight, but in either case something wasn’t right because the light was coming from below instead of above. Then I realized the snow was reflecting up whatever ambient light there was, moon or morning.
I also realized it was cold in the van. The heater was not on. I reached over to run up the setting, but it didn’t turn on. Power must be off. How was my guest doing? I raised up enough to look at the lump of blankets.
“Hey,” the blanket lump said. “Cold. No heater?” I could hear the shiver in her voice.
“Power’s off,” I said. “The breaker may have tripped from all the wet. Maybe I could run the motor, though it would take a while.”
After a minute, she said, “How is it in your sleeping bag?”
“Not too bad.”
“You got room?”
I was a little shocked, but our communication so far had been on the most basic level of immediate human need. That’s what this was too. It would be the quickest and simplest solution to our problem.
“Come on,” I said, unzipping the bag.
The blanket pile squirmed up alongside. The body inside wriggled out like a moth from a cocoon, and slipped in beside me. I zipped us up and pulled the blankets over us. She was small, and there was plenty of room. She was cold, though, and shivering violently.
“Sorry,” she said.
She passed some of her shivers to me, but within a few minutes we had pretty much equalized and could wrap around each other without recoiling. Our mutual shivering wound down to isolated spasms, and then stopped. I felt her body relax and her breathing sink into sleep.
Well. So much for solitude. Would we be able to recreate it in the morning? Or would all kinds of cultural complications interfere? I tried the spinning whirl visualization again. The last thing I remember was being surprised that it worked almost immediately.