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.