Treasure Of The Stars

Chapter 9

They made love three more times that day. They would have made love a fourth time, except that Riyannah finally admitted her left ankle was hurting her. Blade carefully examined it and decided she'd only pulled a couple of muscles. He laid cold cloths on it to reduce the swelling, then bound it tightly in strips of bark.

«Stay off it for a couple of days and you'll be able to walk again without any trouble. That's good, because I have a feeling we may have to move out of here before long.»

«The bat-cats?»

«Yes. They aren't the most pleasant neighbors.»

«Where do you think we should go? Do you have-a spaceship of your own?»

Blade was pleasantly tired after so much lovemaking, but his mental reflexes were still fast. He could recognize a leading question when he heard one.

«Not any more. What about you?»

«I hope I still do. If I do, it will be in the mountains to the north. I was going to take you to it. Then we saw the battle between the Targans and the Menel.» She was silent for a moment, shutting her eyes as if trying to shut out the memory of the battle. Then she went on.

«You did come to Targa in a spaceship, I suppose?»

Blade smiled. «What else? Do you think I walked?»

Riyannah laughed. «No. Not that. But your people seem to have so many gifts, and they look so much like the Targans-«

«Riyannah,» Blade said. «Once you complained I was trying to teach you too many new words too quickly. Now I say the same to you. What is Targa? Who are the Menel? Where will we go in your spaceship when we find it?» He stroked her hair. «Riyannah, you say I am from a people with many gifts. This may be so. But I don't have the gift of being able to see what is in your mind and understand everything you say, whether you explain it or not. I think it is time you did what you promised-tell me about your world, and what you are doing here. Then I will tell you about my world and my people.»

Riyannah smiled and kissed him. «That is only fair.»

That was the last time either of them smiled or laughed for a couple of days. For Riyannah, it was too much of a strain, learning hundreds of new words in English while she told of the crisis facing her people and their allies the Menel.

For Blade, what he was hearing was simply too awesome to leave him feeling like laughing.

Riyannah came from a planet called Kanan, revolving around a yellow star very much like Blade's own sun. After a little comparing of units of measurement, Blade knew that Kanan's star must be at least thirty light-years away from wherever he was now.

«I will show you Ba-Kanan-the Father of Kanan-when we reach my spaceship. The telescope is powerful enough.»

The Kananites also had faster-than-light travel. Riyannah came to this planet Targa in a spaceship which crossed the thirty light-years in three weeks. She'd planned to be back home on Kanan in less than a year of that planet's time.

As Riyannah described it, Kanan sounded like a paradise based on a technology centuries beyond Home Dimension's wildest dreams. The Kananites could generate, control, transmit, and store almost any amount of energy more or less at will. They derived most of what they needed at home from the sun, since it was the cheapest. Their crimson-beamed hurd-ray projectors could burn through armor plate, but their power came from storage cells no larger than a flashlight battery.

«We use guns firing solid shot only when we go into the wilderness,» said Riyannah. «They are not so powerful as the Targan rifles.» She paused. «Richard-forgive me if this is a question you cannot answer. But-you seemed very familiar with guns like the Targans'. Do your people use the same sort of weapon?»

Blade nodded. «We have found them good enough, as long as we do not go far from the ammunition supply.»

«Ah, that explains it. We travel so far among the stars that we would have to take a whole factory with us if we or the Menel used weapons like yours.»

Blade nodded again. «Yes. We do not yet travel among the stars as much as you or the Menel.» That was perfectly true, as far as it went. «Now I have a question for you. You speak of going into the wilderness on Kanan. Yet you act like someone who has never been in wild country in her life. You're strong and brave and you learn quickly. But I had to teach you much you should already have known if you'd really spent much time in a true wilderness. What do you have on Kanan?»

Riyannah looked at the ground for a moment and Blade saw the slow darkening of her cheeks which was her blush. Then she said. «I suppose there is no reason not to tell you the truth. It will perhaps make you think badly of the Kananites, but there is no help for that.»

«If the Kananites can travel among the stars and are all as brave as you are, I will never think badly of them,» said Blade. «So what is the awful truth about Kanan?»

The Kananites made most of their discoveries about energy more than a thousand years before. Since that time they'd abolished war and poverty, controlled their population, and shaped their whole planet to suit their tastes.

The one billion Kananites lived in twenty gigantic cities of mile-high towers, enjoying every possible luxury. Around the cities were the spaceports and the factories which made everything the Kananites needed, including their food.

The rest of the planet was nearly uninhabited. Part of it was real wilderness, like the land where Blade and Riyannah were now. The wild animals roamed there, the glaciers crunched down the mountainsides, the snow fell and the flowers bloomed as if there wasn't a single intelligent being on the planet

The Kananites never went into the true wilderness. They hiked and swam and hunted in areas closer to the cities, equipped with shelters, free of wild animals-in short a «tame» wilderness. Few Kananites ever spent a night in the open, picked berries for food, or built their own shelters. Their «wilderness» was fine for getting healthy exercise, fresh air, and sunshine, but not for learning to survive outdoors.

The Kananites were not decadent. They understood both the pleasure and the need for the outdoor life. At the same time they weren't willing to give up the comforts they'd known all their long lives.

Kananite medicine was as advanced as the rest of their science. Riyannah was over a hundred Home Dimension years old and she could expect to live to nearly three hundred. That made Blade think even more highly of her courage. She'd been willing to give up two hundred years of life for whatever cause brought her here. It also made him realize why most Kananites were so cautious and conservative. How had they managed to build an empire among the stars in spite of this?

«An empire?» said Riyannah when Blade raised the question. «You mean-many planets settled by Kananites?»

«Something like that, yes.»

She laughed. «Why should we want to do that when we have everything we could hope to need at home? Besides, some of the other planets might someday have their own people. So we should leave those planets alone.» Her face hardened. «The Targans think differently. They would take Kanan itself if they could.»

The Kananites traveled, explored, studied the geology and wildlife of the planets they discovered, but seldom stayed for more than a few years. When a planet was settled for longer than that, it was usually the Menel who settled it.

The asparagus-shaped Menel were the only other advanced race the Kananites had discovered in their star-traveling. Although the Menel were more warlike than the Kananites, it turned out to be possible to win their friendship and support.

«We gave them some of our solar-energy converters and power cells,» Riyannah said. «They quickly learned how to make more themselves. After that they would not fight us, we gave them the hurd-ray projectors and other weapons.»

That was more than five hundred years ago. Since then the Menel worked with the Kananites as scouts, explorers, and sometimes guards or soldiers. The Kananites hadn't met any other space-traveling races, but they'd met several primitive ones. Not all of these were friendly, and sometimes the hurd-ray in the claws of the Menel had to be turned loose.

The Menel were ingenious, handy with machinery, physically rugged, brave, and loyal to both their own people and the Kananites. «We have never had a serious fight with them,» said Riyannah. «Sometimes a Menel leader will go mad and try to make his followers turn against the Kananites. But other Menel will always stop him before much harm is done. They know that a war between our two peoples would cripple or destroy both. And you know how bravely they fight.»

«Yes. The Menel in the two ships were very brave» This wasn't the time to ask too many questions about the Menel. Riyannah was sharp enough to suspect he'd encountered the Menel before, and then she might be asking more questions about his travels than he could safely answer. She appeared to assume he'd come to Targa in another starship. Very good. As long as she went on assuming that, the Dimension X secret was safe.

«Life seemed good for all the people of all the stars,» said Riyannah. «We and the Menel were at peace with each other and wished no one else any harm.

«Then we discovered Targa and Loyun Chard.»

Targa was also a planet very much like Home Dimension Earth. Many centuries ago its civilization reached the point of nearly exhausting the planet's resources. A series of small conflicts grew into a thermonuclear war which killed half the people of Targa. Many of the survivors died of famine and disease. Civilization collapsed completely for over a century.

The Targans were tough, though. Enough of them survived to start up civilization again. Generation after generation, as the radioactivity died away, they rebuilt the cities, rediscovered lost science and technology, resettled the waste lands.

The one thing they could not do was recreate the resources the old civilization had used up. So the cities remained small and dependent on the countryside for food. The city people grew to hate this dependence and the farmers grew to exploit it, ruling the cities like tyrants. It was a situation which could only end in another war.

«At least there would have been another war, except for Loyun Chard,» said Riyannah. «He was good luck for the Targans.»

Loyun Chard began as an officer in the air force of one of the cities. He overthrew the city's government, then led a brilliant airborne campaign against the farmers around the city. The farmers were routed, their lands were confiscated, and the city became truly independent.

With the prestige of his victory and his battle-hardened fighting men behind him, Loyun Chard was well launched on a career of conquest. One city after another came over to him and snatched its croplands from the men who farmed them. In ten years the farmers and country people were broken and Loyun Chard ruled most of Targa.

He was not only a conqueror, he was a farsighted statesman-at least from Targa's point of view. He gathered the most brilliant scientists and engineers, then turned them loose. Within a few years they discovered or invented practically everything necessary for spaceflight, including antigravity. Then someone playing around with the theories behind antigravity went on to discover the faster-than-light drive.

Suddenly the galaxy and all its resources lay open to Targa-and the Loyun Chard. «If he hadn't already been ambitious for further conquest, he certainly would have become so now,» said Riyannah. «No one in the history of the old civilization had even conquered as much of Targa as he had. Now he could go on and make both his people and his name immortal.»

Now there was a real prospect of unlimited resources and prosperity for all, or at least of new and rich planets to settle. It was obvious that no one who continued to fight against Loyun Chard would share in any of this. So opposition to Chard rapidly shrank. Within a few years he was able to disband much of his military strength and devote the resources to building his space fleet.

To be sure, he still kept some men under arms. An air force of jets patrolled the skies. Soldiers kept order in the conquered farmlands and occasionally rode the troop carriers into the wilderness on lightning raids.

The air force had only a few hundred planes, since oil to make fuel for the jets was rare and expensive. The antigravity devices which drove the spaceships were much too big and heavy to put into combat aircraft.

The soldiers had good weapons, but most of them were people who couldn't get any other job. They got little training, so they were heavy-footed and sometimes half-witted in the field. Without their air support, they would be much less of a menace.

In spite of these flaws, Chard's armed forces were strong enough to harry what was left of his opponents. Defections and defeats had driven them underground until Chard could probably have left the survivors to starve in the wilderness.

«He will not do this,» said Riyannah. «He keeps the planes and men raiding to train them for the conquest of Kanan.»

Blade frowned. Loyun Chard sounded like an ambitious, ruthless man, but hardly a raving maniac. It would take a maniac to plan the conquest of Kanan, if Riyannah's home planet was as she'd described it.

«Are you sure you aren't worrying unnecessarily?» he asked Riyannah. «How do you know he's planning to attack your world?»

Riyannah's voice was level. «He told us so himself.»

Loyun Chard was getting his space program nicely underway when the Kananites and the Menel discovered Targa. The Targans reacted quite calmly to the arrival of visitors from outer space, and the Kananites couldn't help wondering why.

«The Menel flew into a panic when we first appeared in their skies,» said Riyannah. «So why weren't the Targans doing the same? We soon found out. Loyun Chard was telling them that the conquest of Kanan would be an easy way to win the riches they hoped for.»

«Did you make the same offer of scientific help you'd made to the Menel?» asked Blade.

«Yes. The Targans rejected it. Loyun Chard said that we were wretched, cowardly creatures who could not defend what we had. We were making our offer only out of fear, and perhaps in the hope of making Targa dependent on us. The true Targans, the destined master people, would never permit themselves to be dependent upon anyone. They would stride like giants across the stars, taking whatever they wanted from whoever held it.»

«You're quoting him?» Loyun Chard's rhetoric had an unpleasantly familiar ring. It reminded Blade of Adolf Hitler's ravings. The ravings of a madman-but Hitler had developed the resources to make those ravings into a terrible reality. Apparently Loyun Chard was doing the same.

Once Chard was sure he had his people behind him, Targan policy was shoot first and ask any necessary questions afterward. The two ships in orbit around Targa were captured, the Menel killed, and the Kananites taken down to the planet. They were tortured into revealing the location of Kanan, then publicly executed, and that was just the beginning.

The Kananites hadn't faced anything like this crisis since the first contact with the Menel, two hundred years before the oldest living Kananite was born. They not only didn't have any real knowledge of war, they weren't even sure how to go about acquiring that knowledge.

Eventually they decided to negotiate with the underground opposition to Chard, while Menel spaceships kept watch on the Targan space program. Not a bad plan, in theory. In practice, it ran into a few unexpected difficulties.

The opposition to Chard hated him as much as ever, since every one of them had friends and relatives to avenge. Unfortunately they were scattered and not well-armed. They were also more than a bit skeptical of the generosity of the Kananites with their technology.

«At times we thought we were still talking to Chard's men,» Riyannah said wearily. «They wanted to know why-why-why we were giving them anything?»

«What did you tell them?»

«We said that with the knowledge we could give them, there would be no need to go out into space and loot other planets. They could do anything they needed with the resources of their own system.»

«Perhaps that's true-«began Blade, but Riyannah interrupted him.

«Perhaps? You know it's true! Just for a start, they could make enough antigravity generators to put in all their planes, and then-«

«Yes, I know,» said Blade patiently. «But are you sure they don't share Loyun Chard's dream of going out to the stars, even if they don't share his plans for what to do out there?»

Riyannah ignored Blade as if he hadn't spoken the last words and rushed on with her list of complaints against the Targan underground. Blade sighed. The Kananites not only needed to learn about war, they needed to learn about the fears and hopes of people who'd been fighting one for a generation. The underground had to be hard bargainers, suspicious of treachery and reluctant to be treated as poor relations. It sounded as if the Kananites were off on the wrong foot with them.

In any case, the Targan underground agreed in principle to aid Kanan against Chard in return for Kanan's energy technology. Like most agreements made «in principle,» there were still a few dozen details to be worked out. Riyannah was a member of a delegation sent to cope with those details.

Meanwhile, Menel ships swooped low over Targa, trying to locate important targets. It quickly turned out that Menel spaceships couldn't survive against Chard's air force, let alone his spaceships. The Menel were brave enough and the hurd-ray was deadly, but Chard's pilots were far more skilled and their lasers and rockets more than good enough. At least twenty Menel ships were lost before the scouting flights stopped.

This was serious. The Kananites and the Menel only had about fifty armed spaceships, most of them small interplanetary patrol craft. All the rest of their ships were about as dangerous as a herd of dairy cows.

Eventually the Kananites and the Menel gave up trying to keep any sort of close watch on Targa. They set up a hidden base in the Targan system's asteroid belt and settled down to see what happened.

«I hope both your people and the Menel are at least building warships and training soldiers as fast as you can.»

«I think we are converting a few ships for war. The Menel are doing the same. I do not know how many, though. The Menel are divided into Gorani-I do not know what your word is. Each Goran has a special task, and only the War Goran can fight or fly armed ships.»

«Can't other Gorani of the Menel learn to fight?»

«No. It is not just a matter of law or custom. It is the way the Menel are raised from the time they are hatched. One who is hatched and raised in one Goran cannot learn to do the work of another.»

«I see.» Blade didn't like what he saw but there was no point in mentioning it to Riyannah, The Menel seemed to be divided into a series of rigid classes. They were going to be seriously handicapped in a war with the more adaptable Targans.

«As for soldiers,» Riyannah continued, «I cannot see how we will need them. If we can meet the Targans in space and keep them on their own planet, that will be enough. We don't need to conquer Targa. We don't even want to!» Her voice was almost shrill.

«I believe you, Riyannah,» said Blade. «But you seem to have a problem with making your Targan friends believe it.»

Riyannah sighed. «We certainly do.»

Everything that could go wrong went wrong when Riyannah and five other Kananites came to Targa to negotiate with the underground. They were attacked from the air soon after leaving their spaceship in its hiding place. The leader of the delegation was badly hurt. Two others, including Riyannah, suffered head injuries sufficient to destroy their implanted knowledge of the Targan language.

«The Teacher Globes will teach you almost anything, including a language,» she said. «But the knowledge does not go deeply into the brain. If you are drugged or hit on the head, you often forget what you've learned.»

So that was what lay behind the maddening language problem! Lord Leighton's computer did its usual job on his brain, and the Teacher Globe no doubt did just as well for Riyannah. But sheer bad luck drove every word of Targan out of Riyannah's battered head!

A few days later, more planes attacked the underground camp where Riyannah and her comrades were hiding, smashing it completely. One of the Kananites and many of the underground's fighters were killed. The survivors had to flee across country, taking the wounded Kananite leader with them.

«The Targans soon saw how little we knew about life in the woods. That did not make them trust us more. Then our leader Marocah died, and we buried him in the forest, far from home.» Riyannah was silent for a moment.

The fugitives eventually reached another underground camp, and were finally able to open negotiations with the underground's leaders. These negotiations didn't get far. Perhaps Chard's men had tracked the fugitives, perhaps they were just lucky. In any case, the second camp was also attacked, both from the air and on the ground. Riyannah and a handful of people escaped just before the camp fell, to run into more soldiers as they tried to get clear.

That was where Blade came in, and after that he and Riyannah were partners in their adventures.

«We'd radioed to the asteroid base, and the two Menel ships you saw were on their way to pick us up. After they were destroyed, I knew I would have to return to the ship in the mountains to the north. It is so well hidden that I do not think Chard's men have found it. I trusted you not to kill me on the way, and after that-«She shrugged.

«Yes,» said Blade. «And after that?»

«If I didn't think it was safe to take you to the asteroid base, I was going to kill you. I wasn't sure I could, but I knew I had to be ready to try. Even if I died, I could still send the ship to the asteroid on automatic control. What happened to us and what we'd learned had to get to the base.»

What they'd learned was an important development in Loyun Chard's strategy. He was pouring material and manpower into building a monstrous starship nearly a mile long, heavily armed and armored, able to serve as a warship, exploration ship, and transport for colonists all at once.

«What it will do first is attack the asteroid base. It will certainly win, and the base will be destroyed. So will many of our ships and the Menel's, hundreds of our fighting people, and any hope of keeping the Targans in their own system. We will have to meet them out among the stars. The war will be far longer and more terrible if we must do that, and we may not win.»

Loyun Chard no doubt knew that just as well as the Kananites. So he was building the great starship, Dark Warrior. The man was a formidable opponent, and peace would be in danger as long as he lived.

«If the two Menel ships hadn't fallen,» said Riyannah, «we'd already be on the asteroid base, or even on our way to Kanan. With Menel to help me, I wouldn't have needed to kill you, no matter what.»

«And now?»

Riyannah smiled and put her arms around him. «I think I can trust you to do nothing to help Loyun Chard. I do not know what else you may want to do, but if it is not dangerous to me or to Kanan, then it is your affair. I want to know more about you and your world, but you don't have to tell me if you don't want to.»

«How did you come to trust me?»

«I knew you could not be my enemy after you saved me from the bat-cats. Before that-you were still a mystery. You'd saved my life and killed Targan soldiers. Yet you looked like a Targan, spoke Targan well, and kept me from helping the Menel.»

«I did that to keep you from getting yourself killed, Riyannah.»

«I know that now. I didn't at the time. Also, you didn't seem to understand who the Menel were. That meant you could not be one of the Targan underground fighters.»

«And so I was a bigger mystery than before?» said Blade, stroking Riyannah's hair.

«Yes. Then the night after we came up the canyon, some of the mystery disappeared. I knew you could not be one of Loyun Chard's people.»

«How was that?»

Riyannah laughed. «I got you to take off your clothes, then watched you. All of Chard's men have a lightning bolt tattooed on their penis, and a triangle on the inside of the right or the left thigh.»

Blade stiffened, put both hands on Riyannah's shoulders, and held her at arm's length.

«A lightning bolt tattooed on the penis?»

«Yes. Down the middle. The officers have the triangle on the inside of the right thigh, the ordinary soldiers on the-«

«Riyannah, what are you-?»

«I'm telling you the truth, Blade. If you'd looked at the bodies of the soldiers, you'd have seen it for yourself.»

Blade nodded slowly. «A tattoo on the penis,» he said, half to himself. Then he threw his head back and roared with laughter until the echoes rolled around the forest.

«A tattoo on the penis,» he gasped, tears running down his cheeks. «A tattoo on the penis!» Then he reached out for Riyannah again, and she came into his arms. He felt her lips on his and her hands fumbling at his trousers. He thrust his hands inside the back of her trousers and cupped her buttocks. She laughed and tossed her head so that her hair brushed his face and neck.

Then all the delicious sensations of making love to Riyannah were coming so fast Blade could no longer sort them out.