Chapter 19
Once they'd made up their minds to act, the Kananites showed they could move fast enough. Like a boulder pried loose after many hours' hard work; events now went rolling and crashing along.
Blade spent three days having his brain intensively probed. It left him with the worst headaches he'd ever had in his life, as if somebody was hitting him over the skull with a dull ax. He didn't have the vaguest memories of what he might have revealed. Kananite doctors watched him carefully, the Menel ambassador watched the doctors, and after two days in bed he was fully recovered.
He recovered just in time to have the technical data planted in his body. The doctors placed the films along the inside of his thigh, under a layer of tough but completely natural-looking artificial skin. It didn't restrict his movements at all, even in bed with Riyannah, but it gave complete protection to the films. Any time he wanted to, he could dissolve the skin with a special spray, let someone look at the films, then put them back and apply more skin. Blade was rather sorry he hadn't known about this artificial skin before and had information about it put on the films. Back in Home Dimension it would be a blessing to people with severe burns or skin diseases.
After that Blade started collecting the load of gear he would be taking to Targa for his mission: hurd-ray projectors, power cells, explosives, electronic devices, everything else he'd need to make fifty Targans into super-soldiers. Much of the equipment was Menel-manufactured. Blade detected the ambassador's fine claw in this and wondered why. Was the ambassador simply trying to save time? Or was he trying to hint to the Targan underground that the Menel might be better friends than the Kananites? Blade didn't really care. All he cared about now was getting back to Targa and starting to work on the project of blowing Loyun Chard's great starship into the smallest possible pieces.
Before he boarded the ship for Targa, Blade had one other discussion. In many ways it was the most useful hour he'd spent in this Dimension, and he spent it with a Menel.
The Menel was short, less than seven feet tall, and elderly, his arms stiff and his skin turning brown like an autumn leaf. He also was one of the most brilliant scientists of his people and head of the scientific section of the Menel embassy here on Kanan.
The Mendel stooped in a way that made him seem almost hunched and he spoke rapidly, in an unusually high-pitched voice and with many gestures. There were times during the conversation when Blade could have closed his eyes and sworn he was talking to Lord Leighton. Certainly he was talking to the same type of mind and personality, even if it was housed in a body like a giant stalk of asparagus. It was a pity that Lord Leighton and the Menel scientist would never meet.
The discussion was mostly about Blade's previous meetings with the Menel and what they implied. «The ones who made the Ice Dragons-I do not think it is needed, to worry about them,» said the Menel. «As you describe the explosion, they could not have survived it.»
«I thought so,» said Blade. «But why did they make the Ice Dragons in the first place?»
The scientist's gesture was the Menel equivalent of a shrug. «Who is to be certain, now they are dead. It is known that the leaders of Menel expeditions sometimes go mad. One out of a thousand, no more, but it has happened. Sometimes they even find the crew is behind them, not fighting them. We try to find ways that it will not happen again, and the Kananites help us. So far-no success.» Another shrug.
The discussion turned to Blade's other meeting with the Menel, where they'd been sending the birds and sea beasts against the human inhabitants of a Dimension slowly vanishing under a rising sea. The scientist agreed with Blade's guess that it was a case of a shipwrecked expedition trying to do the best it could with limited resources.
«I do not say what they did to the people or even the animals is good,» he said. «Yet-we Menel cannot live well too close to water, with air too wet. They needed land on the continents, not just on their island. The people you have described-they would not make peace with those shaped like us. Or do you think otherwise?»
Blade had to admit the scientist was right. Even highly civilized people could fly into a panic over minor differences of skin color. Tribes of barbarians seeing a Menel would shoot first and not ask questions at all.
«When they have some land of their own, they will try to make peace with the humans and help them. Otherwise they could only sit down on their island and die.»
The scientist hesitated, then went on in a tone Blade recognized even through the electronic translation of the Speaker. It was the tone of a scientist who will not pretend to knowledge he doesn't have.
«At least-these things I have said would be so, if the Menel you met were the Menel of this Dimension. I do not think both of them were. I would say that the Menel who made the Ice Dragons were of a Dimension in which they were rulers and conquerors of space and stars. Perhaps there never were Kananites, or perhaps the Menel were the masters.»
Blade swallowed. «And the Menel of the water world?»
«It is not impossible they were my people. They seem to be very much like them. Certainly starships disappear at times. Who knows if they do not pass into another Dimension, where the world they seek is not as they expect? But I think they also are a different Menel, less different than those of the Ice Dragons but still not my people.»
The scientist went on, painting a mind-freezing picture of a reality consisting of an infinite number of Dimensions, each of which might be infinite in space. The idea had occurred to Blade, but he found it hard to sit calmly and hear someone else discuss it as a real possibility.
«I don't reject this,» he said finally. «In fact it's much the simplest explanation. Among other things, it means I haven't been getting bounced around in space as well as in Dimension. But if there is this infinity of infinities, why did I end up three times in Dimensions with Menel in them?»
«If I knew that answer, I would be much closer to that Dimension X secret you would be happy we did not have,» said the scientist. «I do not. I have only the theory, that Dimensions which have things in common-«
«Such as Menel?»
«Yes. Or your race, which you have always found in Dimension X. These Dimensions with things in common-they are closer together than Dimensions which have other life or no life at all. I think the Dimension where you met the Wizard of Rentoro must have been the closest one of all, so close he could pass into it by his mind strength alone.»
Blade laughed. The Menel scientist's words gave him a picture of reality as a huge vinyard, with each grape a Dimension and each bunch of grapes a cluster of Dimensions with something in common. In some bunches the link was the Menel, in others humans, in others Kananites, in others beings who breathed hydrogen, saw by infrared, and had twelve tentacles, in still others things beyond imagining.
It was a weird picture, but then any picture of a reality that was infinite in several different ways at once couldn't be anything else. Once again Blade was glad he hadn't tried to become a scientist. He simply didn't have whatever was needed to make a person able to deal with this sort of concept day after day. His talents ran more to dealing with the practical problems of one Dimension at a time.
Lord Leighton, on the other hand, was going to have fun with this picture. Perhaps «fun» wasn't the right word. It raised an ugly question: was any reliable sort of inter-Dimension travel ever going to be possible? If it wasn't, what would be left to justify Project Dimension X? It was far too expensive to keep going as a pure research project, although Lord Leighton would still fight for it like a mother bear for her cubs.