Part 4

The crunching of the jeep over the narrow track, the whipping of the plants against the vehicle and his singing all combined to drown out whatever noise it was the girl might have made. Hartford didn't see her till the jeep, rearing like a startled pony, climbing the flank of the camelopard the girl rode, tossed him into a tangle of green stalks and golden flowers.

VII

The riding camelopard bleated only a moment and was dead, its great neck broken by the jeep's charge. The girl, thrown clear, was up before Hartford.

A scarlet bird circled the scene of the wreck, the dead beast, the stalled jeep, the man and the woman sprawled by the side of the path. "_Miyo! Miyo! Miyo!_" cried the blabrigar: "See! See! See!"

Hartford rose and went to the girl, who was rubbing the shoulder she'd landed on. She stared, but didn't back away. "_Kinodoku semban_," he said very carefully: _a thousand-myriad pardons_. His bitcher, unfortunately, was set on full volume; his words of comfort blatted at the girl with parade-ground force. She put her hands over her ears.

The blabrigar above them, impressed by Hartford's stentorian voice, circled repeating "_Kinodoku semban_" over and over, till the girl called it down to rest quietly on her shoulder. The girl spoke to the bird, which stared at her lips with his head cocked to one side, an attentive student. She repeated four times the same message. The bird nodded, and repeated the phrase to her. "Yuke!" the girl said. The blabrigar spread its scarlet wings and flew up. It circled twice, then headed north, up into the mountains. Of the girl's message Hartford had understood only the native word for camelopard: _giraffu_. His Kansan was inadequate. He could understand it only if it were slowly spoken.

Hartford tongued his bitcher's controls to a conversational level. "_Kinodoku semban_," he repeated, bowing.

The girl knelt beside the dead camelopard and stroked its head, over the central, vestigal horn. She looked up at Hartford with tears in her eyes. "_Tonshu_," Hartford said: I bow my head.

"_Anata we dare desu ka?_" she asked.

"Lee Hartford," he replied.

The girl spoke slowly. "I am named Take." She knit her hands before her and bowed. "Forgive my bad actions," she said.

"The fault is entirely mine, Takeko," Hartford replied. He was sorry, of course, to have killed the girl's steed and to have subjected her to danger; he was very glad to have met her. Takeko wore what must have been the Kansan riding costume: short trousers and a jacket woven of floss from retted sunflower stalk, dyed a golden brown. Most curious, he thought, was her perfume; mild, flowerlike, slightly pungent. The smell of this lovely Stinker belied the trooper epithet.

Then it hit him.

The filters of a safety-suit remove, together with all the dust of the ambient air, all its character, including odor. The clean, characteristic smells of the Barracks, together with the bland spit-and-sweat odors of a long-worn safety-suit, were all an Axenite came in contact with.

If he were able to smell the outside world, it could only be because his gnotobiotic security was compromised.

Hartford inspected his safety-suit, peering where he could and twisting and feeling the surfaces he couldn't see. Takeko laughed. She reached across his shoulder and lifted a flap of torn fabric, ripped loose when Hartford had flown from his jeep.

* * * * *

His panic would have been unmanly in a normal human; but Hartford all his life had been impressed with the horror of contamination. He ran blindly, though he knew that his deepened breathing was drawing the germ-laden air of Kansas deeper into his lungs. He ran through lanes of sunflowers, flailing his arms, into the darkness, away from the alien girl, away from the fear of going septic. He ran and stumbled and fell and ran again. All his life he'd been warned of the consequences of becoming infected with the bacteria against which he had no defenses. Now he was so infected.

When Hartford fell the last time it was for sheer lack of wind.

He opened his helmet and tossed it aside. Dead already, he could lose nothing by making himself comfortable for dying. He shivered. The chill of infection? No, the night was cool. He looked about him in the light of the sky of stars. The fields were below him, rustling in a million private conversations as the breeze filtered through them. It was a lovely place to die, here on the crest of a hill.

Hartford lay back and stared into the curtain of stars that rippled above him. Perhaps he wouldn't wake, he thought. With this thought he slept.

The sunlight stung his eyes. He sprang to his feet, then bent and groaned. Sore. He'd slept on naked soil, packed hard by the hillcrest winds. He stretched his hard-bedded muscles. For a dead man, he felt good. The alien bacteria and viruses within him were establishing beachheads, multiplying their platoons to companies, their companies to battalions. By the time they'd reached division-strength, he thought, he'd be well aware of the invasion.

Meanwhile, breakfast.

He opened a package of field-rations, squeeze-tube beans. He inserted the nozzle of the tube into his mouth and fed himself a dollop of the stuff. It felt strange to eat directly from the tube, not having inserted the adjutage into his helmet-opening to be sterilized first. Being septic saved a lot of time.

He finished the squeeze-tube beans and was thirsty. Down at the base of his hill was a little stream. Hartford thoughtfully peeled off his safety-suit. Dressed only in his shorts, shirtless, barefoot and tender, he made his way down to the water.

It was delicious.

Did bacteria impart that brisk taste? Hartford wondered. So far committed to contamination that nothing mattered, he shed his shorts and dived into the stream. It was chilly, delightful. He returned to shore and lay on the grass for the sun to toast him dry. He began to relax.... The girl giggled.

* * * * *

Hartford snatched up his shorts and pulled them on. It was Takeko. She was afoot, wearing the costume he'd last seen her with; but she had strapped on her back a leather wallet. A blabrigar sat on Takeko's shoulder. She spoke to it, repeating her message four times and listening to the bird repeat once. Then she shooed the scarlet bird away, to carry north the message that Hartford had been found.

"I laugh. Excuse me," she said. "But you funny." Takeko patted her head. Hartford understood. Shaved by the Decontamination Squad, he was bald and eyebrowless, entirely lacking in body hair. He smiled. "_Hai._"

"Your skin is like the hide of a _giraffu_," she said.

Hartford looked down at his freckled arm. True, the pattern of brown against pink was very like the reticulations of a camelopard. "Where did you learn to speak Standard, Takeko?"

"Pia-san talked to my cousin, and I listened," she said. "Kansannamura was my home. Pia often visited us." Hartford, who after Nasty Nef was the man most responsible for the burning of Takeko's village, was silent. "When your _jeepu-kuruma_ hit my _giraffu_, I think you are Renkei," the Kansan girl said. "Renkei is my cousin. He go to see what can be done."

"Renkei is dead," Hartford told her.

"_Iie!_" Takeko pressed her hands against her face. "You strangers are quick to kill, to burn, to sweep away."

"I did not wish him harmed," Hartford said.

"You pink folk will not be happy until all our people are dead and under the ground," Takeko moaned. "You will not be pleased until you can march across our graves."

"That is not so."

"Pia-san said it," Takeko said. "He said that your Nef is a master of the Brotherhood, which wishes death to all people who do not wear glass heads."

"If that is true, I am no longer a part of it, Takeko-san," Hartford said. "I have left Nef and his Barracks. I am a dead man."

"You will come with me," Takeko said. "You will not be dead for many years, unless Nef and his Brotherhood kill you." She looked into the sky, where a red bird was circling. It hawked down to her shoulder and sat there, its head tilted to her. "Takeko," the girl said to the bird. With this key to unlock its message the blabrigar spilled its rote. Hartford recognized a word or two of the bird-o-gram, but not the full sense of the message.

Takeko reached into the pocket of her short trousers for a few zebra-striped sunflower-seeds. The blabrigar picked these daintily from her hand, using its beak like a pair of precise tweezers, pinching up one seed at a time and cracking it. "There will soon come _giraffu_ to take us to a further village," Takeko said. "You are to speak to our chief men there, to tell them what happened to Renkei, why he was killed in the Stone House."

"I may not live through this day," Hartford said. "It is not easy to explain. We wear the 'glass head' to keep out your air. It is deadly, _doku_, to us. Do you understand, Takeko?"

* * * * *

"You may be tired, having slept on the old bones of the hill," she said. "You may be hungry, having eaten only the squeezings of your metal sausages. But you are not hurt badly, nor are you old, Lee-san. Why should you die?"

"You cannot understand," Hartford said. He spoke more to himself than to the girl. "The medicine here is certainly primitive. You have no concept of the biological nature of disease. Tell me, Takeko-san, do you Kansans know anything of the very, very small...."

"Microscopic?" Takeko asked.

"Piacentelli did a splendid job of teaching you the Standard language," Hartford said. He looked up and down Takeko's trim, just post-adolescent figure in frank appraisal, jealously wondering whether Gabe could have achieved his remarkable pedagogical results by means of the pillow-book method of linguistic instruction so popular with soldiers of occupation in every time and climate. That thought, he rebuked himself, was unworthy of Pia's memory. In any case, his friend had conducted his researches wearing that guarantee of chastity, a safety-suit.

"We'll have to wait an hour or so until the _giraffu_ come," Takeko said.

She unstrapped the wallet from her back and unpacked it on the grass at the edge of the little stream. The Kansan girl took out a coil of line, spun from the stalk of the sunflower, and a bronze hook. "We will feed the gentleman from the Stone House," she said. Hartford watched with amusement as she baited the hook with a bit of the bread from her knapsack, twirled the line about her head and dropped it into the center of the stream. "This place has many fish," she said. "We will not wait long before we eat."

It took Takeko only ten minutes to have three seven-inch fish, so plump and meaty-looking that not even a xenologist would have wasted time studying them, lying on the grass.

Hartford demanded equal time with the fishline, and discovered to his gratification that the dough he pinched off the chapattis and molded to the hook took the fancy of Kansas fish as well as Takeko's offerings. With a sense of at last participating in the affairs of the universe, he de-capitated and decaudated the six fish they ended with, and gutted them with a rich delight in the juicy messiness of the task.

Hartford and Takeko scissored the fillets in split twigs and roasted them, like aquatic weenies, over a fire built from the pithy stalks of dead sunflowers. The firepit, a saucer of scooped-out dirt, had buried beneath it half a dozen of the swollen roots of sunflowers, each wrapped in the cordiform, sharkskin-surfaced leaf of the parent plant, to roast beneath the coals.

* * * * *

They seasoned their fish with _daikon_, a kind of horseradish; and their plates were the fresh-baked, flat, un-leavened chappattis Takeko had brought in her pack. The tubers, eaten from a fresh leaf-plate, needed only butter. Takeko had this, too, churned of camelopard-milk cream. Buds or flower-heads of the sunflower were eaten with sunflower oil, like artichokes. "Your people have a good friend in the sunflower;" Hartford remarked, wiping his lips.

"With the golden flower and the golden _giraffu_, with the _take_-grass and the good soil, we had a rich life here before you glass-headed men came," Takeko said. "Now we are treated in our own villages like rats to be driven out, in our fields as gnawing vermin. Why is your Brotherhood so angry with us, Lee-san, who live in only a few places on a wide world? Is there no law among the light-skinned people? We have lived here, on the world you call Kansas, for many generations. We were once of Earth, as were your grandfathers."

"All humans were once of Earth," Hartford said.

"If we are as much human as you," she said, "why does your Nef call us _Hominids_? Is that a name to give a brother?"

"It is better than _Stinker_," Hartford suggested.

"_Hai!_ I tell you, Lee-san why you must re-name us. It is because men do not kill men until they give their brother-enemy a monstrous name. Why do you wish to kill us all?" she asked.

"I'm not a member of the Brotherhood," Hartford said. "I'm only a man who was born on Axenite. That means, until your beast and my jeep collided, tearing my safety-suit, I was an animal uncontaminated by microscopic life. These microscopic animals, Takeko, are deadly to an Axenite."

"You are not dead, though," Takeko suggested. "_Ne?_"

"I've been breathing contaminated air for twelve hours," Hartford said. "It's true. I cannot understand why I have no fever, no malaise, no symptoms of pneumonia."

Takeko giggled. "Forgive me," she said. "_Kinodoku semban_; but you seem to be sorry to be alive." She was silent for a moment, listening. She pointed north. "My father will appear with our _giraffu_ soon," she said. "I can hear them."

Takeko's father rode up a moment later, an unbent man of seventy. He sat astride his camelopard, a comic quadruped little better designed as a beast of burden than an ostrich, with as much dignity as though his steed were an Arabian stallion. His name, Takeko said, was Kiwa-san. The old man bowed from his saddle when his daughter introduced Hartford.

* * * * *

At Kiwa-san's command the two _giraffu_ he'd brought along on lead-reins spread their legs to bring their down-sloping backs a scant four feet from the ground. The saddles, with dangling, boot-like gambadoes in place of ordinary stirrups, seemed inaccessible to Hartford. "Watch me," Takeko told him. She took a short run up behind her _giraffu_ and, with a movement like a leap-frog hurdle, flipped herself up into the saddle.

Hartford stepped back, ran and leaped. He succeeded only in banging his shoes into the right sifle-joint of his mount and in flipping himself to the ground. In the interest of haste, grace was abandoned. Hartford monkey-crawled up a sturdy cane of bamboo growing nearby and, as Kiwa-san maneuvered his beast, stepped over into the saddle.

"I'd better take my safety-suit and helmet," he said. "If the troopers should find it, they could follow our trail."

"_Hai!_" Takeko said, agreeing. She leaped from her _giraffu_, packed the safety-suit and helmet onto the beast, and remounted. "We will now go to Yamamura," she said. Old Kiwa spoke, and she translated: "We must move quickly and with care," she said. "My father heard an _hikoki_--how do you say?" she asked, raising and lowering her hand.

"A veeto-platform," Hartford said. "I mustn't be seen, Takeko. Colonel Nef would use my presence as an excuse to kill any of your people around me."

The ride, though cautious, was indeed demanding. Hartford felt tendons stretch he didn't know he had. Muscles were bruised from his instep to his upper back, and the skin was chafed away from his inner thighs as though he'd been riding an unplaned plank. He understood, well before the journey to the mountain village was over, the importance of that lifetime exercise, best begun by riding young, known to generations of horsemen as "stretching the crutch." He swore to himself that his future transportation, if he had a future through which to transport himself, would be by boots or wheeled vehicle.

The three of them were following no clear path. Kiwa led. Hartford noted that their course took them along the contours of streams, on the borders of fields, through contrasting background that would make their presence less obvious from the air.

They were in a thicket of bamboo when the veeto-platform did appear.

The instant they heard its whistle, Kiwa spoke a sharp word. He and his daughter slipped from their mounts, loosed the brow-bands of their camelopards and unlocked their girths, tossed off the saddles and dangling gambadoes and gave the animals each a sharp slap on the rump that sent them crashing through the bamboo. They helped Hartford unsaddle and send his beast off in another direction, and lay down in the direction the late-morning sun dialed the shadows of the bamboo stems.

If the veeto-pilot saw the _giraffu_ now, they were saddleless and innocent.

The downdraft of the veeto-platform puffed dust up from the ground around them, and pressed down the leafy tops of the bamboo like a great hand stroking across the thicket. Hartford, aware of the way his bald head and pink face would stand out, dusted his hands with the soil and laced his dusty fingers over his scalp.

The platform passed almost directly over them, shooting fragments of dust and bamboo-duff into every particle of clothing, into ears and eyes and nostrils, with the whirl-wind of its passage.

VIII

It took them half an hour to recover their _giraffu_ and saddle up again, but Hartford did not regret the delay.

Aboard the grotesque mount again, he groaned. To mask the misery of his unaccustomed pounding he paid scientific attention to the landscape, the gait of the camelopards, the leather of the saddles, and the posture and person of Takeko--this last by far the most effective of his analgesic thoughts.

They rode on an ancient piedmont, among the foothills of a worn-down mountain-range. The leather of their saddles and gambadoes was, by its pattern, obviously tanned camelopard-hide. Hartford was certain that this pattern would by the end of their journey be an indelible part of his own hide. The _giraffu_, remarkably swift and easy-moving over the rugged, heavily grown terrain, ambled, moving both legs on the same side together. And Takeko was lovely.

Hartford decided to essay his Kansan. He practiced his question: "Is Yamamura far from here?" mentally, moving his lips, until he was sure he'd mastered the phrasing. Then he addressed Old Kiwa. "_Yamamura wa koko kara toi desu ka?_"

Kiwa smiled, and rattled off an answer much too brisk for Hartford to catch. He pointed ahead and up. "He says we must go through the pass, under the Great Buddha," Takeko explained. "We have only an hour to go."

"_Arigato_," Hartford said, suppressing a moan. Another hour!

The pass Kiwa had spoken of loomed ahead. It was quite narrow, and walled on either side by the almost perpendicular flanks of mountains, shoulder to shoulder. Kiwa went first, for the cleft could only be negotiated in single file. Takeko followed her father, and Hartford took up the rear. In the ravine it was dark. The camelopards, sensing their mangers up ahead, paced more quickly. Suddenly the canyon was light, the walls spreading further apart here.

Far up on Hartford's right, seated on a shelf left from some ancient avalanche, was a gigantic figure cast of a coppery metal, green now against the granite wall. "Who is that?" Hartford called to Takeko.

"It is our _Daibutsu_," Takeko said. "It is the _Amida Buddha_, the Lord of Boundless Light."

"Do you worship him?"

Takeko smiled and shook her head. "We worship not any man, but a Way," she said. "_Butsudo_--the Way of the Buddha. We are nearly to the village now, Lee-san."

"I thank the Lord Buddha for that," Hartford said, bowing from his saddle toward the great bronze image.

* * * * *

Yamamura nestled in a fold of the high mountains. The fields that supported the village, its population now doubled by the refugees from Kansannamura, were tucked here and there on narrow ledges, watered by bamboo flumes that stole water from the mountain streams. The crop of greatest importance was the ubiquitous sunflower, supplier of bread and soap ash, of cloth and bath oil, birdseed and writing paper. Bamboo grew in clefts and shelves too slight for cultivation. This was the wood for tools, the water pipe, the house wattles and, in its youth, the salad of the people, the only wood eaten in its native state. There were also carrots, beets and tiny plum-trees, and the horseradish, _daikon_. Yamamura was a lovely place, Hartford decided.

It was twenty hours from the moment of his contamination that Hartford dismounted. He moved into the house Kiwa invited him to with as much tenderness as though he'd been carefully bastinadoed and flayed. He was, nonetheless, free of febrile symptoms. He had breathed Kansan air, had eaten its fish and drunk its water; he'd spoken with a Kansan native and had lain with his face in Kansan dust. He was still as healthy as any Axenite, never before in the saddle, would be after a five-hour ride.

Kiwa's wife and Takeko's mother was a little woman named Toyomi-san, dressed in brightly patterned garments a good deal more formal than her daughter's jacket and shorts. Toyomi-san spoke no Standard, but she made quite clear to Hartford his welcome. She led him into a large, steam-filled room, where she indicated he was first to wash himself then soak, then dry and dress in the clean clothing she'd laid out for his use.

The soaking water was very hot, and very welcome. Hartford sat in the copper-bottomed tub, his muscles hard and sore, until he felt the very marrow of his bones had cooked. He stepped from the tub then and dried gently, easy on his chafed back and legs.

"The oil will help," Takeko said, slipping a screen shut behind her. She had bathed and brushed her black hair free of the bamboo-thicket dust, and wore now a brilliant, silk _kimono_ of the sort her mother was wearing.

Hartford held the towel at his waist.

"Excuse me," he said.

Takeko giggled. "Are you unique, Lee-san, that you must hide yourself? Lie down on the cot, and I will make you comfortable."

Wondering greatly at the folkways of Kansas, but determined to commit no gaffe that would imperil his relations with this girl, Hartford lay face down on the mat-covered cot. Takeko removed the _tenugi_ towel with which he'd modestly draped himself and gently stroked sweet-scented sunflower-seed oil into his macerated skin. Using the radical border of her hands, which were remarkably strong, Takeko coaxed the muscles to relax with effleurage; and she further softened the clonic hardness with a kneading motion. "This is," she said, working her thumb-knuckles up his spinal-column as though telling the beads of his vertebrae, "one of the good things my ancestors brought from earth."

"_Yoroshiku soro_," Hartford grunted agreement. "It is good."

* * * * *

Half an hour later, his skin soothed with oil and his muscles suppled by Takeko's massage, Hartford joined the family for supper. The Kansans used paired sticks for eating. Hartford, who'd not yet been introduced to the skill of using these _o-hashi_, and who was too hungry to practice now, was given a metal spoon with which to eat.

When they'd finished their meal, several elder Kansans entered Kiwa-san's house. Each bowed to Hartford, who, bald-headed, his feet socked into unfamiliar _geta_ and wearing mitten-toed stockings, bowed in return. The newcomers each spoke some Standard, but it was obvious that Takeko was the most fluent of them all. "Pia-san taught Renkei; Renkei taught me," the girl explained. "I was the second-best speaker. It would be better if Renkei were here."