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.
