The blankets were outside and the needles and leaves on the floor dry and stiff. Neither of them cared. Blade sat down. Riyannah put both hands against his chest and pushed. He let her push him over, then reached up and cupped her breasts with his hands. She moaned as his fingers played with her nipples. Then she was straddling him and lowering herself onto him.

Her cry held both pain and pleasure as he entered her. Then she was swaying back and forth, with small movements which grew quickly wilder. Her hair whipped about her shoulders like windblown leaves, her face tightened bit by bit into a mask, and once again Blade felt agony and delirious pleasure at the same time. Now it only started in his groin, then spread swiftly through his whole body. He could not think, he could not see or hear, he could barely breathe. Riyannah was drawing all his senses into her, as she'd already drawn his swollen flesh.

Then Riyannah's body arched backward, until her hair flowed down to brush Blade's ankles and her eyes stared blankly up at the ceiling of the but. She jerked convulsively once, twice, three times, mouth open but not a sound coming out. Waves of color came and went across her skin and tears flowed down her cheeks. Then Blade stopped noticing what was happening to Riyannah. His breath went out of him in a thick, choking cry as the agony went out of him in a series off fierce hot spurtings. He drove his hips upward as Riyannah clamped her thighs about him, and they heaved and tossed and thrashed about.

The magnificent moments passed. Blade heard his breathing and Riyannah's, felt the needles and leaves sandpapering his bare skin, smelled the cool mustiness of the shelter and the sharper odor of burning cloth-

Blade started and slapped Riyannah on the buttocks. «Let me up-quick!» He sprang to his feet so violently his head crashed into the roof of the shelter, bringing down a shower of twigs and needles. Then he dashed out into the open.

The blanket where he'd laid the parts of the rifle was sending up a haze of gray-brown smoke. As he watched, one edge began to turn black and little flames danced up. Blade clutched the other edge and yanked hard. Several parts rolled off into the dirt. Blade snatched up a log of firewood and hammered at the burning edge of the blanket as if he was pounding the life out of a deadly enemy.

At last the fire was out. Blade gathered up the scattered parts, blew the dirt off them, and was putting them back on the blanket when he heard Riyannah laughing.

«Blade, are you-is this a thing your people do after sex? Pounding on the ground with a piece of wood?» Her laugh became a giggle.

Blade shook his head. «No. My people do many odd things, but this is not one of them.»

«Will you tell me more about your people, if I tell you about mine? I do not know who or what your people are, but they must be quite interesting.»

Now Blade felt like jumping up and down or running around the camp several times, shouting at the top of his lungs. The door to Riyannah's secrets was opening at last, opened by trust, shared danger, and shared passion.

«I do not know if you will call my people interesting or not. I will tell you about them, though.»

«Good. But you can do that after you come to me again. Unless-you cannot-?»

«No, Riyannah, I am not old and feeble yet.» The mere thought of having her in his arms again, was enough to revive him.

«Very good. Then come back to me. This shelter is warmer when there are two in it.»

«True.» He was barely inside before Riyannah's slim arms locked themselves around his waist.

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?»