Venus Rising (14 page)

She stood up suddenly, coming out of the
water in a surge of bubbles and laughter, flinging her hair back to
get it out of her eyes, holding out her arms to Tarik, who stood
close to her. His concerned, searching expression lightened at
once.

“’Thus,’“ he declaimed, laughing back at her,
“‘did Venus rise from out the sea.’“

“Poetry again! I recognize it now.” She threw
her arms around his neck and bore him down into the water, her
sudden assault unbalancing him. But not completely. The next thing
she knew, she was lifted high into his arms and he was carrying her
ashore.

“Who was Venus?” she asked, nibbling at his
ear lobe.

“An ancient goddess of love,” he answered,
holding her so that her body slid down his wet frame until they
stood pressed tightly together from toe to forehead. “She was born
of the sea. She was beautiful beyond all imagining. Like you.”

“Did she have a lover?” Narisa murmured, her
lips touching his.

“Many lovers.”

“Then I am not like her, for I shall have
only one. Only you.”

The look in his eyes when she said that was
so deep, so glowing and warm and tender, that she knew she could
not tell him yet about the message she had sent. Instead, she told
him about the depths of the lake and her theory that it must be of
volcanic origin. She talked on and on until he stopped her very
reasonable scientific speculations with a shower of kisses that
left her knees weak and her head spinning, and made her postpone
the telling until later still.

But she did not tell him later when, bathed
and clothed again, they worked together at the
computer-communicator, learning as much as they could of the
planet’s history and of the knowledge of Dulan and Tula and their
friends. They walked along the shore at sunset, hand in hand,
watching the birds fishing, and Tarik’s love for her was so open
and so precious to her that she could not spoil the moment. She
would tell him the next day, she promised herself, after another
rapturous night spent in his arms, learning more of the ways of
love.

She put it off again while they ate in the
morning. The day was gray and misty, with a steady rain, and Tarik
decreed they would spend all of it at the
computer-communicator.

“With appropriate pauses,” he teased, kissing
her nose. “Aren’t you glad we haven’t tried to call the Capital? We
can explore the planet ourselves, without interference, now that we
have all the information in here.” He gave the console a little pat
and moved to turn the machinery on. “Afterward we’ll decide what we
want to do, whether to attempt to communicate with the Capital or
not. This machine is so old, the rescue signal from it might not
reach that far. It might be more dangerous to use it than for the
two of us to just live here. I have an idea about modifications, if
we decide we do want to call, though I confess I wouldn’t mind at
all spending the rest of my life alone with you.”

The time to tell him had come, and Narisa
knew it. Her mind did not register all he was saying; she
recognized only that she could wait no longer. He was making plans
for their future, and a rescue ship might appear at any moment.

“I have already sent a message,” she said,
and waited for the explosion she was certain would come.

He did not react at once. He went on working
at the console a little longer, as though he hadn’t heard her. She
watched as his hands went perfectly still over the buttons. He
turned slowly, drawing himself up stiffly to his full height and
facing her with a curiously blank expression.

“You did what?” His voice was almost a
whisper, yet hard, a travesty of his gentle tones when making love
to her.

“The first night we were here,” she told him,
the words tumbling over each other.

Now that she had started her confession, she
wanted to have it all out and be done with it. “While you were
bathing, I sent out a rescue call. You had left the machine
on.”

“I trusted you.” He took a step toward her,
clenching his hands. He balled them into fists and held them at his
sides as if he were trying to keep himself from using them on her.
The pain on his face, the cold fury in his eyes, tore at her heart.
“How could you do such a stupid thing? And how could you not tell
me about it?”

“I thought it was best,” she said, trying to
placate him. “You know the regulations, Tarik. I know you are angry
now, but in time you will see it was the right thing to do.”

“Regulations? Very well, if you want
regulations,
Lieutenant Navigator
Narisa, I’ll give them to
you. You deliberately disobeyed your superior officer’s expressed
washes. You are a candidate for court-martial.”

“Tarik, my dear, don’t you see why -”

“
Commander
Tarik!” he thundered.
“Listen to me,
lieutenant.
Not only have you disobeyed me on
a vital matter, but you may have killed us both. Weren’t you paying
attention to what Dulan told us? The Cetans found this planet once.
They may find it again. And didn’t you hear what I said just now?
One reason I haven’t sent out a rescue call was because I wasn’t
certain this communicator could send a signal strong enough to
reach the Capital, or even a Service spaceship. I wanted to explore
this planet to find the original settlement, where the other
computer-communicator is located. I had thought if it is still in
existence, it’s just possible we might use parts from that machine
and couple them with this one to produce the strong signal we need.
That is the modification I was talking about.”

“I didn’t know that,” Narisa faltered. “You
hadn’t told me. I didn’t think.”

“No, you didn’t think,
lieutenant.”

“Please don’t call me that. Please call me
Narisa.”

He ignored her plea and went on, showing his
hurt now, and growing more and more angry as he spoke.

“While I made love to you, and poured out my
heart and soul to you in complete trust, you lay there, knowing you
had betrayed me, and you never had the decency to tell me what you
had done.”

“I haven’t betrayed you. I was trying to help
us both. Tarik, I love you.”

“How glad I would have been,” he said, “to
hear you say that last night, or even an hour ago. Now I don’t know
whether to believe you or not. How can I trust anything you say
when you have been lying to me for days?”

“I’m sorry.” She was utterly miserable. She
ought to have known he would have some good reason for wanting to
delay the rescue signal. She ought to have trusted him, as he had
trusted her. She was afraid she had, by her own act, killed his
love for her. She could see in his cold face nothing of tenderness,
only contempt and dislike. At that moment Narisa would have given
her soul, her life, anything, to have back those moments when she
had sent the rescue signal. And she would gladly spend the rest of
her life on this lost planet, if only Tarik would love her
again.

* * * * *

For Narisa, the next day and a half were
absolutely wretched. Rain poured down, confining them to the
building. Tarik treated her with cold, silent disdain, and she was
not certain which was worse, her own heartbreak or the misery she
saw in his eyes and in his face when he did not know she was
watching him. They slept apart, Narisa in the room where she had
taken a nap their first day on the island and Tarik in the room
most distant from it. By unspoken consent they both avoided the
chamber where they had lain together in love.

Narisa could only hope his anger against her
would be dissipated by time and that he would come to understand
why she had done what she had, and eventually forgive her for it.
Except there might not be enough time. Every hour brought a rescue
ship nearer, and once they were aboard it, Tarik would most likely
remove himself permanently from her life. She could not bring
herself to accept the possibility of anything other than a Service
vessel answering her message. Tarik’s concerns about the Cetans
must be wrong. They had to be.

Midway through the second day, he called her
out of the storeroom where she had been selecting food for the
evening meal, a useless exercise since they most likely would be
unable to eat anything. Neither of them had any appetite.

“Sit there,” Tarik ordered, pointing to the
second chair before the computer-communicator. “Can you see this
screen? Good. I want you to be aware of the result of your foolish
action the other day. Look at this.”

It was the scanning screen to which he
pointed. Narisa noted the range and direction at which it was set.
A small green dot moved with astonishing speed along a line that
intercepted the planet.

“The Service rescue ship,” Narisa whispered.
How sorry she was to see it. Once they were aboard it, all chance
of inducing Tarik to love her again was lost.

“Do you really think that’s what it is?”
Tarik worked the many buttons and dials with long, slender fingers.
An image sprang up on the computer’s second screen, a diagram of
the ship approaching them and a list of its characteristics and
probable armament. Narisa recognized it at once with a shock.

“No,” she whispered in horror. “Please, no.
Not that.”

“You see what you have done, my dear,” Tarik
told her with grim humor. “You’ve brought the Cetans down on
us.”

“What are the Cetans doing in the Empty
Sector?” Narisa cried. “They stay away from it for the same reason
Jurisdiction ships do.”

“Unless,” Tarik told her coldly, “they
intercept a weak rescue signal and imagine they smell easy plunder.
They’d be greedy enough to risk it if they know there are no other
ships in the immediate area.”

“How can we defend ourselves against them? We
have no weapons.” Narisa had not really believed Cetans would find
them. Now she was trying to suppress the panic that threatened to
destroy her composure. She knew what Cetans were said to do to
their captives. Male or female, human or other Race, it made no
difference to them. The fortunate ones died promptly, as her family
had done. The captives who survived the brutal initiation were
taken as slaves to Cetan planets. There was no information on the
exact fate of those poor souls. No one had ever escaped to tell of
it. At the thought of what might happen to her, and to Tarik,
Narisa’s hands began to shake uncontrollably. She held them
together in her lap to hide the involuntary motion and tried to
speak calmly. “I would rather kill myself than be captured by
them.”

For the first time in a day and a half, Tarik
looked at her without bitter anger in his eyes. He reached toward
her as if he would touch her reassuringly. But he withdrew his hand
before he made contact with her flesh.

“I,” he said, “would rather die fighting
them. I do believe, Narisa, that I can trust you against the
Cetans, if in nothing else.”

She bore the insult without comment, loving
him hopelessly and aching with pain and guilt for what she had done
to them both. Then her practical nature asserted itself once more,
telling her there was no going back and no use wishing she could.
She took her usual refuge in a professional attitude and in words
that sounded calmer than she really felt.

“Tarik, if you have a plan of some kind, tell
me what it is.”

“There are weapons here, in a case in one of
the storerooms. They are listed on the inventory.”

“One case of weapons can’t be much, and they
will be very old. We need more than small arms to fight off a Cetan
ship.”

“Perhaps not. The Cetans are answering a
rescue call. They are likely to send a shuttle down to the planet’s
surface to investigate before they begin using major weapons. From
what I know of them, they wouldn’t want to destroy any valuable
loot. When they arrive at the planet, they will come directly here,
because this island is where the rescue call originated.

“And now, Narisa,” he went on, “you will see
the value of learning true history, the kind scorned in favor of
the carefully censored version the Jurisdiction teaches. The kind
of history written in a pile of rotting books I once found on a
seldom-visited planet, far from the center of Jurisdiction
authority, and took back to the Capitol to my old history teacher.
It was he who taught me it is possible to learn from the
experiences and the mistakes of ancient societies.”

“I am aware that citizens of the Jurisdiction
are not told everything they might want to know.” Narisa spoke
through stiff lips, determined to hide her barely leashed terror
and impatience. She did not want to alienate Tarik any more than
she had already done. If they were to have any hope against the
Cetans, they had to work together. “What is it you know that might
help us?”

“There is an ancient way of making war when
you are few and your opponents are many. We will use that method
now. We won’t face the Cetans in the open as Service officers are
taught to do. Instead, we will hide among the trees and kill them
one by one. When we are done, we will have the shuttle, and a
better chance of taking the main ship. If we find heavy weapons on
the shuttle, we might even destroy the main ship. It must be well
armed because the Cetans have no way of knowing what they will find
when they descend to the surface of an unknown planet.”

“I agree with the first part,” Narisa said
slowly. “I have never heard of fighting that way, but I think it
might work. We are more familiar with the island than they will be.
I have never had to use a weapon against any living being before,
but these are Cetans. I’m sure I can do what you want me to. But,
Tarik, are you really going to attack a spaceship with just a
shuttle and whatever weapons you can find?”

“Why not? It’s better than letting them take
us prisoner, which they will if we don’t fight back.”