Venus Rising

by Speer, Flora

  Narisa turned toward Tank, looking at him through the deepening dusk. “What do we do now?”

  Chapter Four

  What they did was sit upon the soft white sand and eat one wafer each out of their dwindling supply of compressed food, washing down the inadequate meal with water from the stream.

  “Half rations,” Tarik said, measuring each bite of his meal carefully to make it last as long as possible. “We will continue in this way, one wafer at every meal for each of us tomorrow, and again the next day until evening, when we divide the last wafer in half and try to sleep hungry. In the meantime, we will look for something edible.”

  “How will we know what is safe to eat?” Narisa wondered. “We have no equipment to test possible food sources.”

  “We couldn’t test the water, either, but that hasn’t harmed us so far. We’ll just have to take our chances with the food, too.”

  “Perhaps,” Narisa began, scooping sand into a mound to serve as a pillow, “just possibly, what the birds eat might be safe for us, too. If we could discover what they eat.”

  “Why, Narisa, are you becoming flexible about regulations?” he teased.

  “I see no reason to starve to death if there is food nearby,” she replied stiffly. “Will you take the first watch, or shall I?”

  “There’s little point in standing watch,” he said. “We are defenseless. But on the chance that danger might come, I’ll stay awake first.”

  Narisa lay down on the sand, and Tarik moved to sit beside her, his knees drawn up with his arms resting on them. He was so close to her that she could feel the warmth of his body. She repressed the desire to touch him. There was no need for physical assurance, she told herself. She could be quite certain he would remain exactly where he was until it was time for him to waken her so he could sleep. Tarik had always been a dependable first officer.

  “It’s not so very dark,” she murmured, letting her mind drift toward slumber. “There are two moons. That’s what the computer said back on the pod. Two moons around this planet.”

  “How romantic.” There was lazy humor in Tarik’s voice. “But there are very few stars. Have you noticed? ‘The night has a thousand stars, and the day but one.’ From where we are, that appears to be precisely the case. Only a thousand.”

  “Clouds of hydrogen gas blocking the light from the others.” Narisa heard his low laugh mocking her matter-of-fact response just before she gave herself up completely to sleep….

  She was on Belta, and the silver river, edged with gently drooping trees, flowed before her, just as she remembered it. The sun was warm, the breeze soft, and she could hear her parents talking. Her little sister was laughing, playing at some childish game. She could not see any of them. There was only the river and the trees and the sound of their beloved voices.

  The silver-gold Beltan sun disappeared behind a cloud, and suddenly there were other voices, loud Cetan words destroying the peaceful day. Then came the screams, over and over again. The very air grew darker, and thunder rumbled across the sky. Narisa knew she had to find her parents and her sister, had to help them. She could not, could not, let the Cetans kill them again. Not again. She almost found them this time. She was so close. She heard a last loud shriek.

  “Mother! Father! Laria! No! Wait for me. Wait!” She was on her knees, struggling with some tall creature. “Let me go, you Cetan pig. I must find them. Let me go, I say!”

  “Narisa, it’s me, it’s Tarik.” Strong hands held her, pinning her flailing arms to her sides, shaking her hard. “Wake up. You’ve been dreaming. Narisa!”

  She fell against him, breathing hard as though she had been running for a long time, clutching at him to reassure herself he was real and not part of her nightmare. They knelt together in close embrace while she tried to compose herself. Tarik pulled her head onto his shoulder and stroked her hair until her tearless cries had quieted and her breathing was normal again. After a while he eased her gently down onto the sand and lay beside her, still holding her.

  “If you tell me about it,” he said softly, “you will chase the dream away faster and be able to sleep again sooner.”

  She would never have breathed a word of her family tragedy to the cold and arrogantly superior Commander Tarik she had so despised aboard the Reliance, the man who had harshly criticized the most minor details of her work. But this was a different Tarik from the one she had known then; or rather, she had not known him at all until they had been forced together during the last three days. His peculiar ideas constantly threw her off balance, but he had been genuinely afraid for her when the snake might have killed her. He had kissed her, not once, but twice. And just that morning he had put his hand on her bare breast and held it there. She grew warm again at the memory, and snuggled against him. She felt his lips brush across her brow. They were lying so close, almost like lovers, their legs entangled. She thought if he kissed her brow again, she would raise her face and his lips might touch her mouth. What would he do then? Would he put his hands on her as he had before? What was it like to be loved by Tarik?

  “Tell me the dream, Narisa,” he urged, recalling her from her foolish imaginings. She began to talk, and before she was done she had told him not only the dream, but the terrible story of the Cetan raid on Belta, and the extermination of her family along with so many others, the unbelievably cruel deed that caused the planet to remain devastated and nearly unpopulated for long years afterward.

  “I was at the Capital at the time of the attack,” she continued. “I was in the second year of training for the Service, and my superior officer would not let me return to Belta. As you know, recruits are never allowed to leave the Capital, not for any reason, until the training is over and they are assigned to a spaceship. When I insisted I had to go, they told me Belta was too far away, which was true enough, and they gave me extra duty to punish me for my insubordination. I have never been back to Belta since then. I’ve never seen the ruins of my old home.”

  “So, not having seen the material evidence, you find it hard to believe your loved ones are really dead, and you keep searching for them in your dreams, as though you could change what has happened.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, though I know full well in my mind that they are gone forever. It’s my heart that won’t believe it. I loved them so.” She knew he was right. She had understood what was happening to her when she dreamed, and thus had never spoken of the nightmares to anyone until now.

  “I often wondered why you cried out in your sleep,” Tarik said. “Your cabin on the Reliance was next to mine, you recall, and I would hear you.”

  It was Suria’s cabin she had occupied. There had been a door connecting them. Narisa had kept it locked, sealed with her own private combination so she would have one place on the ship where he could not come. She should have realized sound would carry through the door. She ought to have been quieter.

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” she said stiffly.

  “It doesn’t matter now.” He gave her a quick hug. “You lost more of your family on the Reliance, didn’t you?”

  “How typical of Cetans,” she burst out, “to attack and destroy a ship on a diplomatic mission of peace. Yes, the Beltan ambassador and his senior assistant were both distant cousins of mine. I didn’t know them very well, but they were kin and all I had left. Now there is no one at all.”

  No one, she thought, who remembers when Laria and I were little girls, or how happy a family we were. I have lost all of my past. The self-pity lasted only a moment before her usual control reasserted itself. She would have pulled away from Tarik, but he held her firmly, and she sensed a tender purpose in his next words.

  “Narisa, have you considered that we may be all alone on this world? Just the two of us.”

  “I have thought of it, but I can’t believe it’s true. We have to get back to the Capital.”

  “Ah, the Capital. I almost forgot your dedication to Service regulations.” He opened his arms, moving apart from h
er, leaving her feeling oddly bereft. “Sleep if you can, Narisa. It’s still my watch.”

  But she lay a long time on the sand, staring up at the few stars, before she slept again. And she wondered what would happen if she were forced to spend the rest of her life alone with Commander Tarik Gibal.

  He woke her when the night was half gone, and she saw by the distance the two moons had moved across the sky that he had timed his watch precisely. She went to the stream to splash water on her face to wake herself to full alertness. She did not quite trust the lake water, not knowing what else flowed into it, so, cautious as always, she preferred to use the water that had not harmed her. Not yet, she reminded herself. There might be long-term effects. Nothing was certain on any unknown world.

  When she returned to the spot where Tarik lay, she sensed he was sleeping. She could see his pale bearded face and smooth black hair in the moonlight.

  Narisa sat staring into the night, thinking about the events of the last three days. So much had happened. She still felt disoriented, not least by her constantly shifting reactions to Tarik. She was honest enough to admit to herself that she felt a strong physical attraction to him, but she was afraid of that attraction.

  A faint breeze sprang up, ruffling her hair and rippling the surface of the lake. It was growing cooler, both moons had set, and it was so quiet, except for the soothing noises of the water. Narisa leaned back, bracing herself on both arms, to look at the night sky. The stars glittering brilliantly through the thin atmosphere were unfamiliar to her, and for all her training she could not tell from them where she and Tarik were.

  Her training had been strictly in the sciences, and none of it had taught her to appreciate the natural beauty of any world, but Tarik’s injunction to open her eyes and look had induced her to do just that. She watched the sky until it began to lighten into lavender and pale orange, as behind her the sun rose slowly above the forest in orange-gold splendor. The peak of the lofty mountain in the distance changed from gold to rose to pure white, and the mauve-gray mist lying over the lake dissipated into the clear air. While she looked, marveling at the loveliness of the landscape spread before her, the sky gradually turned to its daytime hue of deep purple-blue.

  Far out on the lake she saw birds, six of them, flying high up, then diving straight down into the water and out again, trailing sparkling silver drops of moisture behind them. So they did eat fish, Narisa observed. Fishing was the only activity she could think of to account for what they were doing. It occurred to her that she knew nothing about animal behavior in any species. It had been one of the deliberate limitations of her training. She might have learned on her own, but she had not cared enough to do so, not after her family was gone. After that, she had adhered strictly to duty and regulations.

  As the morning light grew brighter, she realized that she had been right about the island in the lake. It lay directly in front of her, near the cliffs. It appeared to be quite large. She could see the birds diving on the far side of it, the water dripping off their wings when they rose again, so the lake must extend completely around that spot of land. An island, edged in pale sand and covered with luxuriant vegetation.

  The sun rose still higher, its rays gleaming on something white and smooth, set back among the trees along the island’s shore. A building. She squinted to see better. It had to be a building. They would find intelligent life there. She knew it.

  Before she could shake Tarik awake to tell him of her discovery, something else caught her eye. High in the steepest cliffs overlooking the lake there were holes, niches, caves, and deep folds in the rock, and the birds were flying in and out of most of them, some carrying fish in their beaks. They must have brought Narisa and Tarik to their home.

  Beside her, Tarik stirred, yawning and stretching, then sat up and rubbed his eyes. Narisa smiled, thinking how unkempt a man looked with three days’ growth of beard. She liked him better for it. It made him less intimidating. She probably looked almost as bad, though she had tried to comb her hair with her fingers and keep her face and hands clean.

  “You were right,” Narisa informed Tarik, dispensing with any morning greeting. She told him about the birds and then pointed out the building on the island.

  Tarik leapt to his feet, completely awake now, and ran to the water’s edge to get a better view. Narisa joined him.

  “If there is communication equipment there,” she said excitedly, “we can call the Capital, and they will send a ship for us.”

  “Don’t get too excited, Narisa. We don’t know yet what we’ll find. Can you swim that far?”

  “I am Beltan-born,” she replied proudly. “I can swim anywhere. Can you?”

  “Easily.” He frowned a little, his eyes on the island. “I see no sign of life, nothing moving over there.”

  Narisa’s hope would not be dashed, not until she had seen for herself.

  “Let’s go at once,” she urged.

  “Not before food and a little preparation. I thought you were the cautious one of our expedition, Narisa.”

  “I suppose I am,” she admitted. “Usually. It’s just that I want to return to civilization. I’m not accustomed to wild places like this.”

  “Nor am I, but I find I like it, certainly more than I like the Capital.”

  They broke the night’s fast with a single compressed wafer for each. Then they returned to the forest to pick up what fallen branches they could find and break off a few from living trees. Tarik climbed a tree to pull down several thick vines, while Narisa watched him fearfully, shivering at the memory of the vine that had proved to be a snake.

  They carried their findings to the beach. There, under Tarik’s instruction, they wove the vines around the branches to make a small, leaky raft. They lashed to it the watertight containers of tools and food, arid the water container, now full of water they had taken from the stream. Next they took off their boots and uniforms and fastened them on top of the containers, using the safety harness from the pod, which Tarik insisted on unwrapping from his ribs, saying he felt certain they were completely healed. Narisa privately doubted that, but she was so eager to get to the island she did not want to waste precious time arguing with him.

  “Our clothes will get damp,” Tarik said, “but if we push the raft carefully, we shouldn’t have to walk in boots that are completely soaked, and the uniforms will dry quickly.”

  He glanced at Narisa, his eyes glowing with appreciation. She wore only her close-fitting undershirt and the regulation lower undergarment, which was cut high on her thighs. Her long legs were bare, her frame slim yet strong and healthy.

  Tarik wore a similar lower garment and nothing else. He had a fine, supple body, so well proportioned and sleek with taut muscles that he looked much taller than he was. He was not short for a man; it was just that Narisa was so tall he topped her by only two inches. There was a light furring of smooth black hair on his chest and forearms.

  They stood looking at each other, each frankly enjoying the sight of a handsome specimen of the opposite sex. Fearing she would embarrass herself by blushing again, Narisa turned away and went to the stream to drink. She knew his eyes never left her. She could almost feel them caressing her shoulders and back, buttocks and legs, down to her slender ankles and narrow feet.

  She wanted him to look at her, but she wanted him to touch her also, and to kiss her again. Her thoughts frightened her. She had looked at other men, boys really, on Belta, and they had looked at her, and there had been a pleasure in the looking, and in the touching, too, but never this kind of tension, this shameless urge to throw herself into a man’s arms and let him bear her down to the sand and do whatever he wanted with her. She knew what it was she felt. She had heard other women talk of it, and she had felt it herself once or twice before, though never so strongly. It was desire.

  “Not Tarik,” she whispered to herself, splashing cold water on her burning cheeks. “I can’t want him, not for my first man.”

  “Are you ready?”
Tarik called across the beach. She got off her knees and left the stream and went to help him launch their little raft.

  The lake was cold. Narisa did not quibble about the possible composition of the water, or the possibly dangerous animals that might be living in it, as she ought to have done. She was too eager to get to the island.

  She was glad to have the coolness swirling about her ankles, then her knees and hips, until she was shoulder deep and began to swim and help Tarik push the raft along. She let the chill water wash away the unhealthy desire she felt, leaving only a residual warmth deep inside her that she could easily control.

  By the time they pulled the raft up onto the island beach, she was in complete possession of herself. She was not even daunted by the realization that their uniforms and boots were much wetter than they had expected and would have to be spread out on the sand to dry. After they had let themselves dry off a bit in the hot sun, they started to explore, wearing only damp underclothes.

  They had come ashore a little beyond the spot where they had seen the white building. However, directly before them was an opening between the trees, and Tarik headed for this. Once they were off the sand the ground was covered with thick, soft moss. Narisa stepped carefully.

  “It’s a road,” Tarik said, showing her the ancient stones set into the ground and disguised by the green-gold moss. “It looks unused for a long, long time, Narisa.”

  They went on, until she estimated they had reached the center of the island.

  “Where is the building?” she asked.

  “Right here.” Tarik pulled back a branch that obscured her vision, and let her walk past him.

  They came into a circular clearing. A knee-high stone wall, broken in places and overgrown, was evidence that the clearing had been made deliberately. Narisa could see the entire space had once been paved with smooth white stones. Moss lay on most of them, while plants had sprung up in cracks between the stones. In the exact center of the clearing stood a white stone building. It was round, with a domed roof and a row of columns all around the outside. Behind the columns the facade of the building was broken only by a carved double door at the terminus of the road they had been following.