Venus Rising by Flora Speer Page A

Assembly made were sometimes wrong or
even unnecessarily cruel had occurred to her before and had been
rejected. She could not reject that possibility now. And if one law
was wrong, others could be, too. She frowned, feeling that such
ideas were disloyal to all her training.
    Tarik’s slightly raised voice broke into her
troubled thoughts. She realized he had been speaking to her for a
while and had apparently taken her lengthening silence tor
indifference.
    “Have you no curiosity, Narisa? Wouldn’t you
like to see the main settlement Dulan’s people built?”
    “Yes, I would,” she admitted, glad to discuss
a neutral subject. “I admire their courage, Tarik. They could not
help being born telepaths, and I don’t doubt they suffered terribly
for their talents. They must have built a remarkable settlement,
but wouldn’t it have been destroyed to its foundations by the
Cetans? It’s probably covered with forest after so many centuries.
Why don’t we investigate the information stored in the computer
before we start exploring? Dulan said the main settlement was half
the planet away from here.” The thought of setting out on foot for
another long journey through thick forest or across dry, stony
desert was too much for her to deal with after the last few days.
She had not realized just how worn out she was. She couldn’t help
drooping in her chair.
    Tarik noticed. “We both need a rest before
doing any more traveling,’ he conceded. “This is the best place to
do that. You are right about searching the computer’s memory banks.
However, I think the first thing we should do is bury Dulan, as he,
or she, wanted. He glanced upward toward the round window in the
high dome. “It has stopped raining. I’ll go look for the burial
ground.”
    “I’m going with you,” Narisa said.
    “As you wish. But sit where you are and eat
that wafer while I try to find whatever Dulan used to dig the other
graves.”
    Narisa was content to do just that. She even
put her feet up on the second chair, and was half asleep when Tarik
came out of one of the storerooms with a shovel in his hand.
    “Isn’t it interesting,” he remarked, “that
there are some things that don’t change? In spite of all our
technological advances, Dulan’s shovel is basically the same as the
ones we use today, and it is probably not so different from the
shovels used a million years ago. Every Race with hands has
something similar.”
    “You look remarkably happy for a man who’s
about to dig a grave,” she noted.
    “I prefer this to sending ashes into space
the way we do, and we know a grave here on the island is what Dulan
wanted,” he replied.
    They had trouble finding the ancient grave
site. The island was larger than they had thought, and Dulan had
written only that it was on the side nearest the cliffs.
    “What we need,” Narisa remarked after they
had tramped back and forth for a while, unsuccessful in their
efforts, “is a bird with a long memory to help us.”
    “Call one.” Tarik was testing the ground
around an oddly shaped stone that he thought might have been used
as a marker for the graveyard, and thus he answered her
absently.
    “I don’t know how.” Narisa wondered whether
Dulan had called aloud or had some instrument to bring the birds
when they were needed.
    Dulan used the powers of the mind. That long-dead person had been telepathic, after all. Narisa,
lacking that power, could not summon them. She wished she could.
How lovely it would be simply to think of a bird, the blue one with
the scratched beak for instance, and have it come. She could
imagine it, blue wings spread, gliding in to land beside her.
    “Chon. Chon-chon. Chon.”
    Narisa spun around. The blue bird folded its
wings and stood watching her. Behind her, Tarik laughed aloud.
    “Did you call it?” he asked.
    “No, I only thought how nice it would be if
it came to help us. I’m not a telepath, Tarik,” she added
defensively.
    “You are not, but the