Thy Vain Worlds

This story was born of a—Brazilian—song about heartbreak and abandoned women. I started thinking how some women and men are more vulnerable, more likely to fall for someone who’ll mistreat them or leave them behind. And then I thought that, even if we were masters of the universe, some of us would remain just as vulnerable.


At three p.m. the wind blew, lifting up the endless, red sands of the desert that surrounded the Earth-styled landscaped grounds of the recuperation home.

The ponderosa pines, planted eight deep in a ring around the gardens helped attempted in vain to protect the terran haven. But an attenuated breeze always made it past the trees, carrying sprays of sand that nestled on the manicured branches of the apple trees. Custodians at the home swept up buckets of the sand daily. Not even the tightly shut windows and magnetic screen doors could protect the shiny marble floors and the expensive wood furniture.

The custodians never complained. Gentle, faithful Sherzys, one of the first alien races discovered and contacted, they remained grateful to the humans who’d brought them civilization and science. They knew that every job, not matter how menial, brought them one rung closer to technology.

Kratrina Cryssa never complained, either. A high-strung blonde beauty of pure human extraction, she wore the exhausted look of one having her worst nightmares confirmed. Sitting under the apple tree outside the side door to the home, she pulled her yellow cotton dress away from her sweat-drenched body.

As the wind started and the sand fell like soft rain on the wicker table at which she sat and the three unoccupied chairs beside her, she wondered—not for the first time—why anyone would want to set a rest and recovery home in this desolate, nameless planet.

She swept the sand from her embroidery, held taut in a delicate wooden frame.

Why go through terraforming a useless piece of dirt to set on it a rest home for the emotionally fragile, when hundreds, thousands of habitable planets lay at the disposal of the few billion humans in the endless universe?

Other sentient races existed, but they didn’t measure up to humans. Not in civilization, not in science, not even in administrative capacity. Humans were the Lords of the Universe, so why set their therapeutic facility here? It was an old question, and Kratrina didn’t expect an answer. No one answered her questions any more. From the administrator of the home to her own father, every human she knew coddled Kratrina with comforting, meaningless pap.

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 all: 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.”

She almost ran away from the nurse and into the shower where bio-mechanic appliances showered and groomed her. Back again in her room, she selected a long white cotton lace dress and slipped it on, under the approving eyes of the nurse.

Breakfast was an ordeal gone through, as was the weighing and the clinical procedures of which these homes made a fetish.

But then she was in the garden, threading her pink floss through the silk, working still on the same almond blossom she’d started more than a month ago.

He came before she could complete three stitches.

She stood up, let go of the embroidery frame, turned to meet him, to be enveloped in his powerful arms, his strong body. His lips came down to cover her own and stifled her little cry of excitement and pleasure.

The nurses said she was better. She should hope so. She hadn’t felt so alive, so vibrant since those days in her home world, those days she couldn’t fully remember. After her honeymoon. Just as she and her new husband had settled in their home, started their life together.

She shook her head and turned her mind and body to her friend, her lover.

Later, after they’d made love, while their passion-warmed nude bodies lay side by side on the carefully groomed grass, he spun his dreams to her.

One day, he said, they’d both be released. They’d marry and have their home in some pleasant world. Perhaps they’d have children.

“Released?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, grey eyes laughing quietly. “Surely. My nurse says I’m improving. And I hear so are you….”

“How do you hear of me?” she asked, because she’d never heard his name and had assumed that since they let him out to another garden, he must be in the west wing, under different supervisors, in a separate meal and recreation group.

“I have my ways.” He smiled, a beguiling smile that lit up his perhaps-too-delicate features.

She had to be contented with that, happy to let him have his secret, if it pleased him so.

But from that day on, and through another week of passionate meetings in the garden, she thought about being released. She thought about it day and night. She’d never before heard that it could happen, that the gates to the rest home could open to lead anywhere but to another rest home. Maybe it was because her mental health had remained fragile for so long. Now, she thought about it, about the many worlds out there, about their pleasures opening to her again. The canals of Tiddar, the flower domes of Minnus. She remembered them from her honeymoon. She thought of sharing them with Ryv. She saw them strolling together everywhere through New Paris, visiting the hallowed precincts of old Earth. In her dreams they strolled together the ageless ruins of Rome, the carefully preserved remnants of twenty-first century London.

Ryv must be wealthy. Very few humans were less than well to do, and none of those in these homes were less than fabulously rich. She thought their honeymoon would surpass her first, clouded marriage.

* * *

A week later, at her vanity table, she sat while the tentacles of the bio-mechanic groomer on the table top administered a facial. She inspected her smooth features. She’d been eighteen when they’d first sent her away to a rest home. Her twenty-eight-year-old features might be somewhat sharper, the outlines harder. But she retained her beautiful cheekbones, her straight nose. She’d still be an impressive wife to display at embassy parties in other worlds, for the admiration of natives. And perhaps she could resume the study of native languages that she’d started just before

She tried to reach for it. The memory squirmed and twisted away from her touch, writhed and crawled on dark nebulous tentacles, away from her rational mind.

Nothing left but a shiver down her back, and a feeling as of something cold and clammy that had dragged up the back of her neck.

She gave her blonde hair a last tug, looked at the flawless make-up applied by the groomer, turned the groomer off, hurried down the broad stairs to the garden.

However, all that day she waited in vain. She finished the almond blossom and several others, started on the brown of the embroidered tree trunk. She looked up at any small sound, always distracted, always waiting. Where could Ryv be?

She told herself that he must have been detained, somehow. Perhaps he had a visitor. She remembered a visit from her own parents, almost a year ago.

They couldn’t visit more often, of course. Her father was an experienced ambassador, that being the polite term for the men who administered alien worlds and wrung from them their wealth for the benefit of Earth. Of course, they also brought the natives culture, civilization and science, so that was all right.

And her mother’s duties as a linguist and a hostess kept her fully occupied. Even when Kratrina had lived in their home, she hadn’t seen them more than twice a month. Not that she’d missed them. They’d made sure she was surrounded by a bevy of alien nurses and nannies, friends and teachers.

The wind started up at three, as always, but Ryv didn’t come. She wondered if he was well, and for a frightening moment her throat tightened. She thought that perhaps he had been released before her, perhaps he had already forgotten her, perhaps

The cold shiver traveled up her back.

At nightfall, she folded her embroidery frame, went inside.

That night, she tossed and turned, unable to sleep in her comfortable, temperature controlled bed. When she fell asleep, close to dawn, she dreamed she was a child in her parents’ home. She’d been left alone by the nannies and had gone in search of her mom. But, no matter how many doors she opened and how many rooms she searched, all she found was a likeness of Ryv, hastily drawn on the walls of a hall through which a red wind blew.

“Your emotional readings are up a little, dear,” the nurse said, staring at a screen. “Anything wrong? Any… memories?”

Kratrina shook her head, hurried to the fresher.

Emerging groomed, she chose a figure-molding red dress. Today Ryv would come. She thought how he would appreciate the dress, the joy he would take in undressing her. She thought of his muscular body, his perfect, flawless features and, clutching her embroidery frame, she danced her way to the garden.

That day she finished the tree trunk and started on the other shadowy trunks behind it.

That night she cried into her soft pillow and dreamed of something cold and dark, something whose touch left you slimed.

“We should, perhaps, give you some relaxants?” the nurse asked the next morning.

But Kratrina forced a smile on her tired features and told the nurse that it was nothing. Just something having to do with her cycle, something mysterious and female and human.

If they gave her medication, she would have to stay inside. And then she wouldn’t see Ryv. There would be no chance of seeing Ryv.

* * *

Kratrina sat up with a cry, as the lights in her room came on full force.

Her dream fled from the bright illumination. She’d dreamed of Ryv, but not Ryv. A Ryv that was something cold and dark, something alien that slithered upon its belly and left yellow slime in its trail. Something that came to you in the dark of night and—AndShe grasped for it, but couldn’t find what scared her so. She shook her head.

She was letting herself feel this dream too much. After all, Ryv had only been absent for a week. Perhaps someone had caught him trying to walk between the gardens and he’d lost his outdoor privileges. Perhaps he had got worse and was being medicated. Perhaps he was trying to be good, attempting to defray attention from his activities, so he could continue seeing her.

Her pulse slowed. The fine sweat that covered her body dried, in a shiver of coolness.

Her link crackled. The hologram of the nurse’s face floated above it, “Lady Cryssa? Is anything wrong? Do you wish me to schedule an appointment with a doctor?”

“No, no,” she said, hurriedly. “Everything is fine. Just fine. I’m sure.” An appointment with a doctor would mean drugs and drugs would mean no going outside and that would mean that perhaps just as Ryv managed to elude vigilance, he wouldn’t find her. She didn’t want to hurt him.

The next morning in the garden, she’d just completed the third trunk and started on the green leaves of the clustered trees, when she heard his step behind her.

Turning, she saw him, tall and muscular and perfect. She stood up, her heart beating fast, fast, fast, her breath coming in gasps, joy in seeing Ryv again joining with relief at his still being there, with curiosity about his absence, with pride at his still wanting her, all tied up with her dreams of release, her dreams of a future.

They didn’t speak. Winged feet closed the distance between them.

She nestled in his arms, her head on his strong chest, against the black silk tunic he wore, feeling his warm, warm flesh, hearing his heart beat.

His mouth came down to meet hers.

She realized she heard three heart beats, three much-too fast hearts, beneath the fabric against which her face rested. That fabric changed, shifted, its pleasant coolness becoming cold, cold, colder, till the cold burned her skin, the cold penetrated her lips through those sensuous lips that rested on them.

Opening her eyes, she saw Ryv’s eyes fill with unholy mirth, and she knew that if she could only pull back from that cold, cold mouth that devoured her, she would hear him laughing.

She pushed away with futile effort, against his powerful arms that suddenly appeared not to have any joints.

Memory shattered walls carefully built over the several years of her therapy and she remembered. She remembered that this had happened before.

Her heart thudding, her sight blurring, she remembered where she’d met Ryv. He was the young ambassador who’d come for a visit her father. His impeccable credentials and romantic appearance had won her heart, his obvious wealth had won her hand.

After their honeymoon, they’d set up a home near her father’s house. Her father had promised to speed up Ryv’s appointment to his own world.

But Ryv had disappeared for a month. And when he’d come back, he’d shifted in her welcoming arms. He’d become

The boneless, slug-like creature holding her contorted, so that more of its skin touched her body and held her in an impossibly tight embrace.

Yellow slime oozed from the grey skin, covering Kratrina’s dress, freezing her.

She fought and screamed, as much against what held her as against the memories of its other appearances. She remembered the other homes, and how it had always managed to find her, and how it always came to this wrenching scene, and how this had happened before, so many times, so many other

* * *

Two hours later, when Kratrina didn’t come in, two of the alien caretakers came and found her unconscious.

They knew, by the trail of yellowish slime around her, that their security had been breached. And they knew, too, upon interviewing Kratrina under deep hypnosis, that the creature had disappeared for a week. Long enough to lay its eggs. Somewhere.

When they found it, beneath the loose sand outside the ponderosa pines, and killed it, they knew they were too late.

Though Kratrina was kept sedated, but even that, they knew, was late. The creature’s body, autospied, confirmed their suspicions that Kratrina’s anguish during the week of the creature’s apparent disappearance had caused it to spawn and her surge of emotion at the obscene embrace of the sluglike alien, had allowed the larvae to become spaceborn and to hatch in the cold void.

The administrator of the house took it upon himself to order the sponging of Kratrina’s memories to prevent any residual emotion from seeping out, to feed those creatures. Or rather, that creature, since they were born by gemiparition each a replica of its parent.

The administrator also undertook to write to Kratrina’s father. He wrote on old fashioned paper and with pen, communication between planets still depending on such messages carried by spaceships.

After an elaborate salutation, the Kelter elder who ran the home, gave the ambassador Cryssa bad news about his daughter, and proceeded to attempt to exculpate his establishment, “Though humans are undoubtedly the most advanced species in all the worlds,” he wrote with slavish abandonment. “Yet, the Ortroden seem to have latched onto humans—or a certain type of emotionally needy human—as the perfect host. And, once latched, it is hard to prevent another contact, by the descendants/clones, of the original Ortrode, that the emotional distress of the human subject has helped hatch. We, for all our wish to serve and help the human race, find ourselves unable to prevent the Ortroden approach. Being shape-changers, they always seem to get everywhere, somehow, and the best we can do is delay them. Their ability to make themselves invisible to surveillance equipment makes even that task arduous.

“This one, having got its fangs into your eminence’s daughter, can, somehow, follow her everywhere and it is our opinion that only her death or human success in wiping out every Ortrode’s litter will release your daughter from her emotional torture-chamber.

“Though we erased as much as possible of her memory, I fear that we were late and that the spawned larvae had already received enough emotional energy from her shock and horror, to survive to functional adulthood.

“This Ortrode came in disguised as a nurse, to be exact the nurse who was supposed to be watching your daughter secretly during her carefully controlled moments of solitude.” The administrator sighed, looked ahead for a moment. “Nurses will, of course, be better examined from now on. However, it is too late for your daughter. For her security Lady Cryssa should not remain with us. She will be moved to the rest home in Drivas. Perhaps the icy climate will manage to keep the creature away as the heat didn’t. But it is to be feared that with their shape-shifting ability, the Ortroden will adapt.”

* * *

Kratrina sat in the little conservatory, shivering in her white fur cloak. Outside, a snow storm raged. She held her embroidery frame and worked on a detailed picture of a fairy-tale palace, done all in pastels and metallic thread.

“Lady, do you wish me to bring you a warm drink?” someone asked, just behind and to the side of her.

She turned. He didn’t look like any of the male patients she’d met in this place.

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