Treasure Of The Stars rb-29 Read online

  Now he'd felt the exact same sensation as the Menel ship made its Transition across the light-years. Like the geography of Targa, it was hard to believe this was a coincidence. Never mind that the Transition needed a Zin Field generator and the passage between Dimensions used Lord Leighton's computer linked to Blade's mind. There was something the two had in common.

  What? Blade realized that the one little word was perhaps the most important question he'd ever faced in the whole history of Project Dimension X. It was also the one he was least likely to have answered.

  Did the shift into Dimension X involve a shift in space as well? Blade had often wondered. Did the Transition through space also involve at least a brief passage through another Dimension? Or was it something else entirely, perhaps simpler, perhaps more complicated, certainly beyond Blade's ability to even guess?

  Lord Leighton's computer might not be just a flawed, narrow, irregularly open door to other Dimensions. It could become a door to interstellar space, the settlement of other worlds, contact with other intelligent races, the immortality of humanity as it spread out from Earth-

  Blade found himself sweating and stopped letting his mind run so far and so fast ahead of the facts. The questions his experiences here raised were nothing less than awesome. He still couldn't hope to answer any of them without the cooperation of the Kananites, and he wasn't even on Kanan yet. Even after he reached the planet, he suspected that getting Kananite cooperation would be a chancy business. And if all the people who could help him were scientists, whose basic language was some completely alien system of mathematics-

  Blade realized that for once he was faced with problems which might simply be more than his mind could grasp. For all his gifts he was a practical man of action, not a theoretical scientist. If Lord Leighton were here, he could undoubtedly draw far more conclusions from the same amount of data than Blade could ever hope to. He'd also probably have less trouble getting more information out of the Kananites. Lord Leighton had been hammering appropriations out of boards and committees for nearly fifty years. He could take the Council of Kanan in his stride!

  Except that Lord Leighton was now not only Dimensions but light-years away. Blade would have to do the best he could with what he knew and hope that would be enough.

  Chapter 15

  The starship made four more Transitions on its way to Kanan. Blade got used to the effects so quickly that on the last two he didn't even lose consciousness. He still felt the old familiar sensation of wrenched, disrupted space, and talking with Riyannah revealed she felt something very similar. He wasn't particularly surprised, since the Kananites were so humanoid. He wondered what the Menel felt in the moment of a Transition.

  In ship's time it took nearly three weeks to complete all five Transitions. They came out of the last Transition on the edge of Kanan's system, thirty light-years from Targa. Then at a leisurely forty-five thousand miles a second they cruised in toward Kanan.

  The trip took seven days. Kanan's star was a yellow type G, like Targa's star and like the Sun itself, but rather more massive. So its gravity field was stronger and a starship needed to make its last Transition farther out. Blade found himself growing impatient to reach Kanan, whatever waited for him there, and bored with life aboard ship.

  They came into orbit around Kanan from the planet's night side. On the screen Blade saw an immense shadowy globe hanging against the darkness of space. The bluish light of its two moons left shimmering paths on the oceans, but the land masses were black pits.

  In each of those pits glowed huge jewels, with a hundred faces in as many different colors-the Cities of Kanan, each holding forty or fifty million people. Around each of them spread a faint dusting of glowing powder-the lights of farms and country retreats. Other dots of light moved swiftly across the face of the darkness-spaceships and space stations in low orbits around the planet.

  It was breathtaking, and Riyannah nearly had to drag Blade away from the screen to start packing their bags for landing. He moved about the cabin with only half his mind on the job. The other half was turning over memories of that jewel-studded globe.

  For the first time in weeks, Blade felt strongly the knowledge that he was only one man facing a whole planet which might not be friendly or even cooperative. He also felt something else, just as strong and far less pleasant.

  What a magnificent target Kanan made, seen from space!

  Blade and Riyannah rode down to the planet's surface aboard an arrow-slim shuttle not much larger than a Home Dimension jet fighter. The shuttle flight took them halfway around the planet and gave Blade a good view of its geography. It had two large continental masses, both in the northern hemisphere, and an Australia sized island occupying most of the north polar region. From the southern end of the larger continent a string of islands trailed off across four thousand miles of ocean. Some of those islands were larger than Britain. Kanan seemed to have a little more water than Earth, but not enough more to crowd the billion Kananites.

  Blade also counted at least a dozen large starships in orbit around Kanan, half of them Menel. If he'd still been inclined to distrust the Menel, he would have changed his mind now. One Menel ship with half a dozen hydrogen bombs aboard could slaughter fifty million Kananites in a surprise attack. Yet the Kananites let Menel ships orbit the planet as if they were totally harmless. The Kananites were willing to trust the Menel with the safety of their home planet, and they'd had five hundred years of experience with the walking asparagus stalks. The Kananites might be slow to react to a crisis, but they weren't fools. The Menel were safe.

  The shuttle landed on top of a cylindrical building a mile high and three blocks thick, completely covered with shimmering glass. Blade recognized the giant solar collectors which supplied most of the daily energy needs of Kanan. Power cells in the basement kept the building going when the sun wasn't shining and basins on the roof caught and purified rainwater.

  Not that the rainwater on Kanan would need much purification, Blade realized. His first few breaths of Kanan's air told him something he should have expected. Kanan's air was completely unpolluted, as clean and sweet as if the planet had never supported a single factory. Blade found it hard to get used to breathing such air with the gleaming buildings of a super-civilization towering in every direction.

  The building where they landed was near the center of Mestar, Riyannah's home city. The top half held apartments and a few shops and stores to serve their residents. The lower half housed the laboratories and offices of Mestar's university. Since Riyannah was a teacher at the university, this building was the ideal place for her. All the «commuting» she had to do was climb into an elevator in the central core of the building, drop three thousand feet, then walk a block to her office.

  «About half the Kananites who work at all live in the same building as their workplace,» she said. «Others work at home, linked to their fellow workers by screens and computer circuits.»

  That explained another part of Kanan's prosperity. They didn't need to use up energy and other resources moving people from their homes to their work and back again. This had the disadvantage that Kananites spent a large part of their lives in a protected environment, and perhaps explained why they needed «tame» wilderness even when they got outdoors.

  After the first weeks in Mestar Blade wasn't sure that anyone except Riyannah in the whole city or on the whole planet knew of his existence. This bothered him. After all, he did represent a whole new race of intelligent space-traveling beings. How could the Kananites take his appearance so casually? If they'd all been furiously at work preparing to face the Targan menace, ignoring him this way would have made sense. Unfortunately Blade saw nothing like that sort of work, although he saw a good deal of Kanan.

  Riyannah seemed to have nothing to do except play hostess, guide, and sometimes translator. They traveled all over Mestar on foot, on bicycles, on powered roller skates, in three-wheeled electric cars, and on the high-speed monorails linking all the clusters
of buildings.

  For longer trips to other cities, the seashore, and the wilderness, they used Riyannah's flyer. It resembled a huge egg, with a transparent large end facing forward and the tail sprouting a large propeller. An antigravity generator kept the flyer in the air while the propeller drove it forward. Both ran off power cells under the cabin floor. The flyer was no faster than a Home Dimension helicopter, but it could fly several hundred miles and land as gently as a soap bubble deep in the wilderness.

  The controls of the flyer were so simple that a child could have operated it. After the second week Riyannah taught Blade but never let him take the flyer out alone. She seemed embarrassed at having to refuse, so Blade was careful never to ask her why. He didn't really have to know right now and his distrust would hurt her unnecessarily.

  The seats of the flyer were soft and could be folded down to make a bed. Sometimes they would set the automatic pilot, fold down the seats, and make love as the flyer purred along ten thousand feet up. Other times they would fly deep into the wilderness, unpack sleeping gear and food, then spend the night in the open air.

  This surprised hiking Kananites who stumbled across their camp. Riyannah answered their questions by explaining that camping was a medical treatment for Blade. As far as Blade could tell, the Kananites seemed to accept her explanation.

  By now Blade had taught himself a fair amount of spoken Kananite. He could follow many conversations well enough to have some idea of what they were about, and he could handle much of the business of daily living. He was also careful to leave Riyannah with the impression that he didn't understand a single word of her language. He was quite sure by now that his not being taught Kananite was part of a plan by somebody in power, somebody who could command Riyannah's cooperation in the plan. He was supposed to stay cut off from the rest of Kanan until the powers that be found it convenient to change the situation. Blade didn't particularly like this, but he was willing to live with it. Proving how much Kananite he knew would do little good. It would simply embarrass Riyannah and possibly provoke a crisis with her superiors.

  After two more weeks, Blade began to wonder if he ought to provoke that crisis, no matter how much it embarrassed Riyannah! The Kananites were too civilized to execute him, no matter how much uproar he made. They were also too civilized to do anything at all unless he kicked them as hard as he could in the shins!

  Blade didn't entirely blame them. They had a real Utopia on Kanan, with cheap and abundant energy, no pollution, every luxury one could ask for, education and travel available to all, universal good health and three-hundred year lifespans. It was a magnificent civilization, and under other circumstances Blade wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything against it. In fact he suspected he would have been quite happy to settle down with Riyannah and spend the rest of his life on Kanan.

  Unfortunately he had his duties to Project Dimension X, which meant returning to Targa as soon as possible. He wasn't going to gamble on Lord Leighton's computer being able to reach across thirty light-years of space as well as across the Dimensions. He'd learned far too much that he had to bring home if he could.

  He also had his duty to Kanan. He owed them all the help he could give them against the Targans, help they might badly need. He couldn't do-very much as long as they expected him to stay deaf and dumb.

  Yet they would go on expecting him to do just that, unless he gave them some good reason to do otherwise. Blade thought he now knew the Kananites' basic weakness. With their prosperity, their peace, and their long lives, they'd become afraid to take risks. They could still compete, as the gentle rivalry of the Cities proved, but only within narrow limits. Outside those narrow limits, all the Kananites saw was the risk of losing something they valued. Yet Loyun Chard and the Targans were going to have to be met outside those safe, comfortable limits.

  Blade started considering ways of pushing the Kananites into doing some hard thinking. Fortunately it wouldn't be quite as bloody a process as the war with the Targans. He'd need a weapon and a flyer, though, and it would be a good idea if Riyannah could be persuaded to stand clear. Accidents could happen, and even Kananites might get angry enough to shoot.

  There were a lot of details to be worked out. It took several days, and he had to deceive Riyannah every waking minute of those days. There were times when Blade wondered if it was worth the trouble.

  Then a week later they took Blade down to the university and put him under a Teacher Globe. It turned out his planning hadn't been wasted after all.

  Chapter 16

  Blade awoke with a pounding headache, a dry mouth, and several spots on his skin that itched uncomfortably. He awoke slowly, his thoughts sluggish and his senses blunted, but he still realized the moment he opened his eyes that he wasn't in his own room in Riyannah's apartment. This one had pale white walls, a dark green floor covering, no furniture except a bedside table, and no artwork on the walls or any place else. It looked rather like a hospital room, and Blade wondered if something had gone wrong with his language instruction.

  Trying to think seemed to make his headache worse. He relaxed and tried to breathe slowly and steadily. Gradually the headache faded. Now he could see a pitcher of water and a glass on the bedside table. He drank until he had the strength to sit up and look around more carefully.

  The room still looked depressingly plain. The itching spots on his skin turned out to be several minor burns, covered with a grayish ointment. There was one on each thigh, another on his right temple, and two more close together at the base of his spine. He was wearing heavy gray pajamas.

  Blade climbed out of bed and paced out the dimension's of the room. It was about twenty feet on a side and all the walls were padded with something like coarse fur. As he approached the center of the wall opposite the bed, a section of it slid open. Blade passed through the doorway and down three steps into a sunken room the same size as the bedroom. This room had pale red walls and a blue floor, both well padded. It was furnished with a long couch, a padded bench, and two chairs apparently built up out of threads of spun plastic. All the furniture was fastened immovably to the floor.

  Was this a hospital, or had the Kananites somehow got the idea he was dangerous or insane? The padded walls and furniture reminded Blade unpleasantly of the padded cells of Home Dimension asylums.

  On one side of the living room was a grayish patch the height of a man. Blade walked over to it. As he approached the gray patch it folded itself upward. Behind it was a glowing metal box, with several dials, two faucets, a large slot, and several knobs.

  Blade stepped up to the box, and suddenly the dials made sense! One of them was a temperature gauge, another a clock, a third showed pressure. A piece of plastic with printing on it lay in the slot. Blade picked it up and the printed words seemed to jump off the plastic into his brain. The metal box was a food-processing machine, and here were detailed instructions for its use.

  Blade's sigh of relief nearly blew the plastic sheet across the room. Whatever else might have happened, he'd learned Kananite. He retrieved the plastic sheet and tried reading the instructions out loud. His vocal cords, tongue, and lips combined to produced the clipped, high-pitched words of the Kananite language.

  It was an impressive achievement, implanting the whole language in his brain this way. The secret of the Teacher Globes would be something worth having. It would be an enormous blessing to a Home Dimension where education fought a desperate battle with rapidly-accumulating facts. It might even help Lord Leighton understand what happened to Blade's brain as he passed into Dimension X so that he could speak the local language. For the moment the most important thing was that Blade could talk freely with his hosts or captors. He wasn't sure which they were now, but at least he had some chance of finding out.

  Blade made another test of his new knowledge by dialing for a menu, then ordering a meal. It came out hot and steaming, spiced exactly as he'd ordered it, complete with a bottle of wine. Blade found he was both hungry and thirsty and mad
e a hearty meal. He obviously wasn't going to starve to death, even if he had to stay here until the Kananites made up their minds about him.

  Unfortunately good food wouldn't make any difference if the Kananites took as long to reach that decision as he expected. He could sit here in comfort for months or years, knowing nothing of the outside world, nothing about Riyannah, nothing about the crisis with Targa, cut off from Lord Leighton's computer by the light-years between Targa and Kanan. He might sit here until the outside world finally penetrated in the form of a Targan H-bomb bursting over Mestar.

  Blade finished his meal, put the dishes and bottle in the food machine's slot, and watched them vanish. Then he began to explore the living room, searching for other machines or a door.

  He found the second door the same way he'd found the first. Something in it sensed his presence and it quietly slid open. Blade looked out into a surprisingly normal Kananite hallway. The floor was pebbled metal with inlays of pastel mosaics. The walls were plain white, but carvings of veined bluish wood hung from golden brackets every few yards. With almost universal leisure, two-thirds of Kanan's people had at least one artistic hobby. Original paintings and sculptures were displayed in the local equivalent of hot dog stands and car washes.

  Blade stepped through the door and walked toward the bend in the hall about fifty feet away. He'd covered half the distance when a man and a woman came around the bend. Like most Kananites indoors, they were lightly dressed. The woman wore a short sleeveless dress, belted with a green sash, and was barefoot. The man wore a similar sash holding up bell-bottomed trousers. His chest was bare and painted in swirling abstract designs of green and purple. Both were also carrying pistol-sized hurd-rays in shoulder holsters. They were the first armed people Blade had seen on Kanan, and they confirmed his suspicions. Whether he was a guest or a prisoner, he was certainly under restraint now.