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."
"I regret his death more deeply than I can tell you," Hartford said.
"Renkei and Pia my friend are both dead now. This is what Renkei told
me: _aru-majiki koto_, a thing that ought not to be."
The Kansans, seated on the cushions about the room, nodded. "Do you
know, Lee-san, the greatest law of life?" Takeko asked.
"You said, beside the stream where we fished, that men do not kill
men," Hartford answered. "But they do."
"It is an ideal we have more nearly than the glass-heads," one of
the Kansan elders said. "In the past four days, Renkei has died, and
Pia-san. In the years before you Latecomers came to build the Stone
House and cut roads and practice making holes in paper at a distance,
no man died here at the hand of another."
"We cannot teach the glass-heads our way when they walk about only
with guns, when they live in the Stone House none of us can enter
without dying, when they look at us with glass bowls over their faces
and hate in their hearts," Takeko said.
"The hate is hardly needful," Hartford said. "But the helmets must
remain if Axenites are to live on Kansas."
"Do you live?" Takeko asked quietly.
"I do," Hartford said. "It puzzles me."
"Does it not puzzle you that none of us harbors open sores, or coughs
up phlegm, or dies of fever?" Kiwa asked, speaking through his
daughter's intermediation.
"I had not thought of that," Hartford admitted. "I have never before
lived so close to Stinkers." Embarrassed, he stopped short. "I'm
sorry," he said. "_Shitsurei shimashita_."
"You meant us no discourtesy," Takeko said. "Think, Lee, of the word
you used. Do we indeed stink?"
"No," Hartford said. "It's strange. I've been told all my life of the
rot and fermentation within ordinary mammals, and of the evil smells
elaborated by these processes. But you, and all of Kansas, stink no
more than Axenites do. You have, as we, the mulberry odor of saliva,
the wheat smell of thiamin, the faint musk oil of the hair. Even your
camelopards smell sweet."
* * * * *
The girl laughed. "If you think all Kansas a place of sweet perfumes,
smell this, Lee-san," she said. She took a covered dish and opened it.
"This is _takuwan_," she said. A smell strong as that of limburger
cheese made itself known in the room. "It is pickled turnip, made in
the old manner of our island forefathers on Earth."
"Whew!" Hartford said. "There is the true Stinker of Kansas."
"Pia-san learned much from the bad-smelling _takuwan_," Takeko said.
"His wife knew about the small stink-makers, these bacteria; she was
a user of microscopes. She looked for them in the air of Kansas, and
in our soil. Pia-san went even further. He took drops of our blood and
other things to test."
"Tell our guest, Take-chan, what Pia found," Old Kiwa told his daughter.
"_Hai, Otosan._" The girl turned to Hartford. "In our bodies there are
no mischief-makers of the sort Earth-people know. There are not even
those juices Pia-san called 'footprints of the bugs.'"
"He must have meant you have no bacterial antibodies," Hartford said.
"That explains the whole package," he went on, with growing excitement.
"Why I'm alive without my safety-suit. What Piacentelli went outside
to find. And, when he found it, why he unsuited himself, knowing
this world as pure as Titan. You're Axenites, you Kansans! You're as
germ-free as the troopers."
"The whole truth is less simple," said the lean old man who'd been
introduced to Hartford as Yamata, the calligrapher.
"Does the rubble of your forest-floors never turn to mould, then?"
Hartford asked. "Do the bodies of your buried fathers lie uncorrupted
in their graves?"
"Of course not," Takeko said. "If that happened, we would be buried
ourselves in unmouldered leaves. The bodies of our ancestors would be
stacked about us, unchanging, like logs for the charcoal-burners. Our
soil would die, and all men would die with it, if dead things did not
crumble to make new soil."
"Show our friend the hero of our epic," the calligrapher told her.
"_Hai._" Takeko stood and went to another room, going through the
ritual of kneeling to slide the door screen, standing, kneeling,
standing, with a grace that made the kimono she wore the loveliest of
garments. She brought to the small table at the center of the room a
heavy object wrapped in a yellow silk _tenugui_. Near this on the table
she placed a small lamp, fueled with sunflower-seed oil. She lighted
the lamp and uncovered the instrument she'd brought in.
It was the microscope Piacentelli had taken from the Barracks on his
fatal expedition.
Takeko dipped a chopstick into a dish and placed it beneath the
objective of the microscope. "We shall look at a spot of evil-smelling
_takuwan_-juice," she said. "There is light enough. Make it fit your
eyes, Lee-san; and you will know the secret of Jodo, this world you
call Kansas."