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.