Kratrina chose a pale pink embroidery floss and threaded her needle, squinting against the mirage caused by her sweat-soaked eyelashes against the glare of the merciless sun and the reddish tone of the sand-scourged air.
She remembered the history lessons her alien tutor had drummed into her, long ago and worlds away in her father’s airy mansion. How he’d made her read all the literature of fear about what might await humans outside the atmosphere of Earth. Those fantasies, those childish nightmares had kept humans earthbound for centuries before they’d dared venture forth… only to discover that they were Lords and Masters of the endless galaxies, that the universe was their playground all habitable worlds their welcome mat.
So why, Kratrina asked herself, why put this home on a world that hadn’t been habitable before humans had changed it? Why not in some pleasant, verdant paradise where restless feelings could be soothed and lackadaisical minds stimulated to work again?
She pulled her needle through the silk fabric held taut by her tambour embroidery frame. She worked at embroidering the bud of an almond blossom. Nothing to read here. They let her have no entertainment. No music, no sensies. Nothing. How could she recuperate when her mind walked, like a tiger jailed, the tight confines of one’s own imprisonment?
“Evening, Lady Cryssa,” a smooth, gentle voice said, behind her.
She turned and stifled a gasp of surprise at the man who stood behind her. He was a stranger to this place. Of that, she was sure, and not the type of man that ended in this home. Those tended to be pale, fragile, colorless creatures, as helpless-looking as she’d felt that day, almost ten years ago, when she’d been sent from her home and husband and packed away to her first rest home.
Her mind flinched away from the memory she couldn’t quite pin beneath her conscious mind.
She put her embroidery frame down on the table in front of her chair, pulled at her sweat-soaked dress, and turned her best smile on the stranger.
A tall, broad shouldered, dark haired man, he looked powerful enough, well enough, not to be here at all. Except, perhaps, for his too-sensitive features, the pain etched in his expression, the haunted look in his dark grey eyes.
He walked towards her quickly, in easy strides of his long silk-encased legs.
She let go of the cotton and proffered her hand to him, the right hand, as she’d been taught by her nursemaid. She expected him to shake it, or perhaps to hold it.
Instead, he dropped to one knee, took her hand in his and rested his lips on her skin.
The tingle of it made her breathless. “Oh. And who are you…. Sir?”
He stood up, a smooth movement that barely disturbed the glossy perfection of dark curls that framed his oval face and emphasized the haunted look in his eyes. His dark grey silk tunic, exactly matched to his eye color, fell smoothly, without a wrinkle, outlining the muscles on his broad chest. “I’ve just arrived. It’s been ten years, but, surely you still remember me? Ryv Endall. We met in Miccar, was it not? At your debutante ball?”
Kratrina’s mind skidded away from any memory of her debutante ball the brightly lit crystal halls, and flawlessly attired gentlemen who’d traveled there for the occasion. Beneath the thin ice of her forgetfulness something deep twisted within the icy waters of memory.
She sucked in breath, and turned her charming, social smile on the young man. “One forgets. I mean, it’s been so long and one has been here and there and everywhere and seen so much.” Mostly the interior of euphemistically named rest and recuperation homes, and the puzzled faces of doctors and nurses, and the shiny needles penetrating her clear white skin, and the screaming, screaming, screaming that overtook her when the memories broke through their barriers. But she wasn’t about to tell handsome Ryv that. And never mind if he was a fellow sufferer.
Pulling back straight blonde hair, that she thought compared not unfavorably to his coal-black locks, she moistened her lips and gestured vaguely to one of the other chairs, beneath the tree. After he obeyed the gesture and sat down, a handbreadth from her, she asked, “A new arrival? But then, how come outside? I thought they only allowed outside those of us who are… composed?”
He tilted his head sideways. “Oh, but I’ve been elsewhere first,” he said. “So many worlds. So many different worlds.” Tiredness veiled his grey eyes. His smooth white skin wrinkled over his perfect, broad forehead.
She reached for his hand, touched her fingertips to his in sympathy.
He looked up. His eyes cleared. An almost-smile tugged the corners of his lips upwards. “But let’s not talk of that,” he said. “Let’s talk of pleasant things.”
“Yes, let’s.” She allowed her mind to drift to her pleasant childhood, the adoration of her father, the unfailing attention of her nannies, the green meadows and shaded woods of her native Miccar.
He talked very little, but he was a good listener and watched with avid, hungry stare as she described the frock she’d worn for her sixth birthday party, and her little friends crowding around her. So many friends, none of them human, because human families were thinly spread through the universe.
Time went by quickly. Shadows of impending night surprised them in the garden.
He rose, hastily, bowed to her. “We should go in.” He chuckled, the giggle of a child who has evaded too-strict a guardian. “Before we are sent for. Only…” He smiled. “Perhaps you should go in alone? You know how they are about patients fraternizing unsupervised.”
Kratrina nodded. The medical personnel of the rest home, members of a stolid and empathetic but unimaginative humanoid race who called itself Kelter, were as obsessed with getting humans to fraternize under their benevolent eyes as they were about keeping humans away from each other when unsupervised.
“I was naughty, otherwise we wouldn’t have met at all.” He winked. “They put me in the side garden and I walked around.”
“Around?” she said. “But you’d have to cross the desert, I mean, the non-terraformed area between” She thought of the area she had glimpsed on the few occasions she had ventured beyond the edge of the ponderosa pines. What looked like an endless stretch of scorched red sand, and the trees beyond it, in the distance. It would take at least ten minutes to cross between a small garden and the next and the sun would be intense, yet here he was, his suit unruffled, his hair innocent of red sand.
He bowed. “I had heard you were here. And the memory of your beauty made it worth to cross that island of hell.” He reached for her hand and kissed it again.
She remained, with her hand pressed to her own lips, reliving the tingle of his touch, as he walked away amid the apple trees, until the glimmering, silk-clad shape vanished through the ponderosa pines.
“Well, dear,” the nurse said, smiling, as she opened the curtains of the room. “You sure are looking better.”
Colloquial Glaish sounded funny in the lips of the humanoid, with her perfect ovoid of a face and the features that were no features at alclass="underline" expressionless black eyes, slits for nostrils, a lipless mouth that no doubt did what mouths were supposed to do but no more.
Kratrina turned her head away from that caricature of humanity, made all the more grotesque by the starched nurse’s uniform on the limber, featureless body. Those smooth, rope-like limbs protruding from the sleeves and beneath the skirt didn’t look at all like arms and legs, and could twist in any direction.
“I mean,” the nurse said. “We can tell you’re feeling better. You’re getting up without the help of drugs and dressing by yourself. You do want to dress by yourself, right?”
A secret smile on her lips, Kratrina said, “Oh, yes. Of course. And then I want to go outside.”