Treasure Of The Stars

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.