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."
