Venus Rising (10 page)

Narisa was lost in a sea of glorious
sensation. Tarik’s near-nakedness against her own flesh was sweeter
than she had ever imagined a man might be. She pressed closer,
wanting every inch of her body to touch his, wanting to feel the
warmth of him, and the sweetness. He responded by tightening his
arms until she could hardly breathe. She reveled in the sudden
unleashing of his need, and thrust her tongue against his
repeatedly, feeling the moist heat of his inner mouth. He caressed
her lower back, then moved lower still, pulling her nearer so his
manhood rubbed against her. She could have screamed with the
exquisite agony of that touch through two thin layers of wet
clothing.

She wanted him. She wanted to offer to him
that part of herself no one had ever possessed, and see in his eyes
his joyful acceptance of the gift.

But he loves Suria,
her better sense
reminded her.
Suria, not you. He would not value what you would
give him.

She felt as though she had been tossed onto a
cold, rocky shore after nearly drowning in rapture. She fought
valiantly to recover her drugged senses. It took all her willpower
and self-control, but she succeeded. She had begun to pull away
from him before the sudden lightning flash and crack of thunder
made him raise his head and loosen his arms.

“We had better get under cover,” he said,
giving her a last quick kiss before pushing her gently toward the
door.

She fled to the anteroom, picked up their
uniforms and boots, and continued into the main room, while he
closed both sets of doors. Here the sound of the storm was muffled
into a distant murmur. Tarik came toward her across the white stone
floor, and from the flaming desire in his purple-blue eyes she knew
what he intended to do.

“Here.” She held out his uniform and boots
with a hand that shook almost as much as her voice. “I’ll dress in
one of the personal rooms. You choose another room and do the
same.”

She did not wait to hear his reply or see his
angry face. She was thoroughly unnerved by her own conflicting
emotions. The only thing she was capable of doing just then was
reverting to formal manners and treating him as she had on board
ship. She ran into the first room she came to, swung the door shut
and sank down on one of the beds, her damp uniform clutched against
her chest.

She had never experienced anything like this.
Her body had betrayed her mind. She wanted Tarik to come crashing
through the door and pull her into his arms and tell her he wanted
her and only her, and then take her until he had released the
painful burning ache that still held her in its grip. But he did
not come to her. There was complete silence on the other side of
the door.

It took her a long time to pull herself
together. When she could stand without trembling, she found a
garment in one of the drawers, and dried herself with it, toweling
her hair hard. There was a comb in another drawer, and she used it.
Then she put on her uniform, and her professional demeanor with it,
and went out to the round central room.

Tarik, fully dressed, sat in one of the two
chairs by the computer-communicator console, reading the notebook
he had found. The second chair had been pulled up to face him. Next
to it on the console were one food wafer and the water container.
Narisa slid into the chair. Tarik did not look up.

“Tarik,” she began, leaning toward him, not
certain how to explain the way she felt, “I’m sorry.”

“Stow it,” he said harshly, and added a
spaceman’s crude epithet to the ancient phrase. This was the
cold-blooded first officer of the
Reliance,
who did not
deign to look at her when he spoke to her. “My mistake. I
misunderstood you.
Again.”
He went back to the book.

The silence between them deepened. Narisa
looked at the food and water. If she tried to swallow, she would
choke. She wanted Tarik to kiss her again, tenderly this time, and
listen to her explanation. She wanted him to care about her, but he
did not. He loved Suria. She sighed.

Tarik did look up at that, his eyebrows
raised, and she believed what she saw in his face was contempt for
her timidity in a matter that meant little to most people. She did
not know another woman who would have refused him.

“I have begun to translate,” he said, his
voice cool and businesslike. “I deciphered the date. This book was
written not quite six hundred years ago.”

“Will you read what it says out loud?” she
asked.

He nodded, his gaze falling to the book
again. Narisa settled back in her chair, relaxing a little, and
Tarik began to read.

“
My name,”
Tarik read,
“is Dulan,
though that hardly matters to the story I must tell. There were one
hundred and two of us originally, eighty humans and the rest of
mixed Races, all driven from our home planets in the Jurisdiction
after all telepaths were banished. We were a difficult group, and
sometimes quarrelsome, for our customs and needs were too diverse
for easy friendship, but we were firmly united in one purpose - to
find a place outside the Jurisdiction where we could live without
fear.

“
During the Time of Dread immediately
following the Act of Banishment, when so many telepaths were being
killed or hounded to the very edges of the galaxy and beyond, we.
maintained contact with each other, and finally assembled at a
chosen place on a neutral planet whose ruler turned a benign eye
upon our presence. Her own mother had been a telepath. She herself
lacked the Power, but for her late mother’s sake she would make no
move against us, daring punishment by the Assembly if her kindness
were discovered. From such acts of conscience is freedom
born.

“
Through means best not recorded here, we
commandeered a spaceship large enough to accommodate all of us and
our considerable belongings. There was not one soul who was not a
telepath who dared to go with us on that perilous journey. Families
were broken, and hearts, too, mine among them, for my lover
deserted me.

“
There was good cause for such trepidation
on the part of those not actually banished. We had taken a vote and
had agreed that the safest place for us to settle would be the
Empty Sector. Jurisdiction ships were unlikely to pursue us into
that forbidden part of the galaxy, though we knew we would be
tracked until we reached it. When we disappeared, as we planned to
do, we would leave debris and a last transmission pleading for
help. The Empty Sector has such a bad reputation that we believed
the Assembly would assume ours was one of the many ships
mysteriously destroyed there, and would promptly forget about us.
So far as I know, that is what happened.

“
Everything we had heard about the Empty
Sector proved true. We had many remarkable adventures during which
we lost too many of our number. We searched more than a hundred
planets before agreeing to settle on this one. By then there were
only sixty-four of us left. We were weary of endless space travel,
and this world’s gravity and atmosphere were acceptable to all of
us. We explored the planet completely, mapped all of it, and chose
the location of our settlement with great care. Then we removed
from the ship all materials and equipment we could possibly use,
including the two computer-communicators that we had brought with
us. We set the self-destruct mechanism and sent our ship out of its
orbit around this world, heading toward the very center of the
Empty Sector. We believe it did explode on schedule, for we saw
brilliant flashes of light across the sky for three nights
afterward.

“
We cleared land and built our settlement.
We farmed the rich soil, and for the most part lived in harmony
with each other. We had endured so much together during our long
journey that unbreakable bonds had been forged that transcended
individual or Racial differences. After a few years some of us
wanted a quieter place where we could retreat into privacy or
solitude from time to time, and so this building was created, half
a world away from the main settlement.

“
I should speak about the flora and fauna
of our planet. Some of us were botanists, and they brought with
them familiar plants. Others brought beneficial insects, or small
mammals as pets, not knowing where we would settle, but wanting
some part of their old lives to survive in the new. Most of these
species flourished, adding to the lushness of the plant and animal
life we found here. There are no large predators, but there is one
species of extremely poisonous snake. I urge you to avoid it. Most
other fauna are small and harmless, and usually friendly.

“
I come now to the birds. We call them the
Chon, for their repeating cries. If you have seen them, you know of
their large size. They are blue or green, native to this planet,
and they are semi-intelligent. They have the ability to communicate
by a primitive kind of image transference, which is just short of
actual telepathy. Because of our own telepathic abilities, we have
been able to train them to help and protect us. They appear to pass
learned information on to the next generation, so each generation
is more intelligent, and therefore more useful to us, than the
last.

No coercion was used in this process of
learning. The birds themselves instigated it. They are curious and
friendly, and since they can fly and we cannot, they are able to
gather certain kinds of information more easily than we can.

“
Children were born to some of us. I
recovered from my broken heart and took a mate, and we had a son
and a daughter. For one hundred of this planet ‘s years we
flourished in peace.

“
That is not quite one hundred Official
Years, which is to say, time as it is kept at the Capital of the
Jurisdiction and which is by decree used on all Service spaceships,
whether it be the natural time of the spaceships’ crews or not.
Once we had landed here, we made our own calendars in keeping with
the rhythms of this world, and ours is a shorter year with a
slightly longer day.

“
All the same, we lived more than a
human‘s normal life span, and it was the same for the other Races
among us. We believed it was something in the soil or the water. It
scarcely mattered which. We were happy, most of us, and certain we
were entirely safe.

“
After one hundred of our years, we were
found by a Cetan ship that had gone off course. They came to rape
and pillage and loot, and we were defenseless against their
savagery. They took much of material value, and all that was
priceless - our young men and women. The old and the very young
they killed. Twelve of us, old folk all, survived by hiding, and
later made our way to this island, which the Cetans had not found.
We watched on the computer screen as the Cetans left our world, and
we saw their ship explode before it left orbit. We had received a
telepathic message from a young man aboard it. Our sons and
daughters, though captive, had found a way to sabotage the ship and
had chosen to blow it up and die rather than live in slavery. Thus
perished a people who wanted only to live in peace.

“
We twelve survivors lived on here. We had
no heart to return to the main settlement, and our friends the
birds were nearby. They make their homes in the cliffs next to the
island. Many of them were killed by the Cetans for cruel sport and
for their glorious plumage, or when they tried to protect us. Their
numbers are now badly diminished, but they will recover in time and
reproduce again.

“
We on the island were not so fortunate.
We were all too old to produce young ones. I am the last of our
group, and when I die, we will be extinct. The non-humans among us
went first, six of them, and then my dear mate and two more within
a day of each other. We remaining three lived on, adding the sum of
our individual knowledge to the computer’s memory banks. At last
there were only two of us. Ten days ago my dear friend Tula died,
who stood by me through heartache and joy for so many years, and I
dug the last grave in the burial plot on the side of the island
nearest the cliffs. The birds will watch over all of them.

“
For myself there will be no grave, unless
the one who reads this when I am gone will inter my remains. All is
in order here on the island. I have finished with the computer. Its
memory banks were filled with information about the planet and our
lives here. But I have never trusted machinery. I much prefer the
mind, human or other, and so I have turned off the power and have
handwritten this very brief account of our history. I do not know
if anyone will ever find it, but still I hope.

“
I grow tired. I will rest a while, and
for safety’s sake, I will lock the notebook and the key for the
computer into a drawer. The couch looks most inviting.”

Tarik closed the book, his face solemn.

“And so,” he said softly, “Dulan locked up
the book and the key, and went across the room to rest. And very
likely never rose again.”

“How lonely it must have been,” Narisa
whispered, “to be the last, with such memories and nothing to do
but wait for death. Tarik, we still don’t know if the writer was a
man or a woman.”

“I suppose,” he said reluctantly, “that
information is somewhere in the computer. Or there might be medical
information that would help us analyze the bones. I know men and
women have different pelvic bones, and there are other skeletal
differences. But I don’t think I want to disturb Dulan except to
bury the remains with proper respect. Does it really matter so
much? That person on the couch, of whatever gender, was a victim of
the Jurisdiction.”

“No, of the Cetans.” Narisa’s eyes narrowed,
her lips curled with the contempt and disgust she felt. “Always the
Cetans, those vile creatures.”