"Stop it, for God's sake, stop it!" Piacentelli shouted, his unamplified voice coming from a smoke-filled alley. Hartford plunged into the dark smoke—a tear-gas grenade had set afire some of the sun-flower-paper room dividers, and kindled with them a row of wooden houses—and shouted for Piacentelli. A blabrigar, as blind in the smoke as the men, blundered against Hartford's helmet. "Yuke! Yuke!" the bird screamed, grabbing hold of the transceiver-antenna that horned up from the helmet. Hartford grabbed the blabrigar and tossed it up above the melee. He heard it flying in circles, searching for its Stinker owners, chanting the last words they'd said to it: "Yuke! Yuke! Yuke!"—"Go!"
Everything was burning. Even through the safety-suit Hartford suffered from the heat. He retracted his i-r goggles, useless in all this smoke. Nef called. "I'm coming in, Mister." Hartford acknowledged. Great. One more blind man wandering in the smoke was what he needed.
He tongued his bitcher loud and shouted; "Gabe! Come this way. Gabe! Gabe!" The heat was intolerable. He positive-pressured his suit, ballooning the fabric away from his skin. How hot, he wondered, would the rounds packed into the butt of his Dardick-pistol have to get before they exploded?
As though in answer, a snap of gunfire sounded from the fog ahead. Some meat-head had spooked. There were more shots as other troopers fired at their fantasies. "Cease fire, damn it!" Nef shouted over the command-circuit. "If anyone was hurt by you idiots, I'll court-martial every man with smoke in his gun barrel." Hartford hurried on. Ahead of him in the alley he heard Colonel Nef's voice, uncharacteristically soft. "Hartford, join me. I've found Piacentelli." Ahead in the smoke was a pinkness: the scarlet-suited commander kneeling above a body on the bricks.
Here in the open of planetary air, available to all the microscopic beasts of Kansas, Piacentelli was wearing only Class B's; his sneakers, shorts and tee-shirt. The center of the shirt sopped blood from the bullet-hole that funneled into Axenite Lieutenant Piacentelli's chest.
Nef stood. "The Decontamination Vehicle should be standing by," he said. "Get Piacentelli outside. We may be able to save him." He sounded unhopeful.
Hartford draped his friend's body across his shoulder. The smoke was bad, but he'd memorized his course through it. The air sucked in through his filter was clean, but hot. His helmet steamed opaque. As he stumbled out, blind, but guided by the colonel's voice, two men came forward to take Piacentelli over to the Decontamination Vehicle parked by the village gate. In the cooler air Hartford's helmet cleared. A girl gnotobiotician from the Decontamination Squad pressed the pickup of her helmet's "ears" against Piacentelli's bloody chest.
She looked up. "He's dead, sir," she said.
Nef's voice boomed from his bitcher. "Burn the Stinker village!" he shouted. "These Gooks will pay for Piacentelli's death with their homes."
Hartford felt imminent danger of vomiting, bad business in a safety-suit. He fought it as he looked around. The column of smoke rising from the buildings already fired was sweeping around, carried by the morning wind that poured off the plateau. Everything within the walls of the rammed-earth houses would be incinerated. Kansannamura was destroyed. "Regroup by the vehicles," Hartford spoke to his troopers. He walked back to his jeep, the village flaming behind him.
The Decontamination Squad checked Hartford's safety-suit, and found it sound despite its roasting. Piacentelli they cocooned in plastic: he was contaminated and dangerous. As the five trucks rolled back toward the Barracks, they met families of Indigenous Hominids, smoke-stained, who retreated back into the sunflower-fields as the troopers drew near them. The Stinkers seemed to have salvaged little from the flames beyond an occasional blabrigar, perched on an old man's shoulder, or now and then a camelopard, fitted with a saddle and carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle of clothing and cooking-pots.
V
Hartford had to see Piacentelli's body placed in the Barracks morgue, where a necropsy would be performed by a safety-suited gnotobiotician. It was seldom that an Axenite was contaminated. Rarer yet was the death of a trooper who'd been exposed to bacteria. Information held in Pia's body might someday save lives.
Hartford, directing the sealing-off of the morgue from the rest of the Barracks, was not comforted by these reflections. He unsuited, shaved and showered, and put on fresh Class B's to finish what remained of this O.G. tour. On his way back up to the Board Room he had to pass the morgue again. Colonel Nef, in the midst of a cluster of lesser ranks, was there. On a wheeled cart, covered by a sheet, was a second body.
Hartford stopped. "What happened, sir?" he demanded. "Who is it?"
Nef raised the corner of the sheet with a hand that seemed infinitely weary. The body was Paula Piacentelli. "Another accident," the Colonel grunted.
A hydroponics corporal, S.C., spoke up. "She was relieved of duty as soon as she heard about her husband's death, sir. Someone should have stayed with her. She went up to Level Eight to be alone. There are only two of us on duty there through the night. She must have blundered off the walkway, blinded by her tears. However it happened, she caught hold of a lighting-cable where the insulation was frayed, and was electrocuted the moment she touched the wet seeding-bed. Colonel Nef found her there."
"I was going to console her on Gabriel Piacentelli's death," Nef said. "Leave the body here and clear out, all of you." No refrigeration was needed for Paula's corpse, of course. An uncontaminated Axenite was preserved by purity. The body might dry a bit, the integrity of the internal organs suffer somewhat from the corrosive effects of their own juices: but Paula's corpse would otherwise remain uncorrupted until taken outside and buried in bug-dirt. "Hartford," Nef said, "I'd like to have a talk with you."
"I'm still on O.G., sir," Hartford said.
"And I relieve you of that duty," Nef snapped. "Come up to my quarters."
Nasty Nef's sitting-room had the only window in the Barracks, a skylight through which poured the brilliance of Kansas's pyrotechnic flood of stars. "Rest, Hartford. Sit down. Brandy?"
Hartford allowed that he could use some.
"What do you think of tonight's adventure, Lee?" Nef asked. "Don't look startled. I know the first name of every officer and non-com in the Regiment."
"What happened, sir, was horrible," Hartford said.
"I understand your feelings," Nef said. "Two tragic accidents, killing your two closest friends the same night. I am certain that the loss of these comrades will fire your zeal for getting the Stinkers under control. Isn't that right, Lee?" Nef took a cigar from the humidor next his chair.
"With all respect, sir," Hartford said, placing his empty brandy-glass on the table to his right, "I can hardly see how the events tonight were caused by the Indigenous Hominids."
"You must use the official name for the Gooks, mustn't you?" Nef mused. His voice turned harsh: "Someone stripped the safety-suit off Piacentelli, Mister."
Hartford nodded, his face pale. The "A" of the Axenite's alphabet was Apprehension. As a germ-free—axenic, gnotobiotic—human being, he is superior in most ways to ordinary men. He's usually larger and stronger. He never has dental caries, pimples, appendicitis, the common cold or certain cancers. No matter how much or how long he sweats, the Axenite doesn't stink; nor do his other excretions. On a contaminated world, however, the Axenite is a tender flower indeed. A baby's breath can be death to him, if that baby be a "normal" human; for no microbe is benign to the man without antibodies. To him a drop of rain may reek with pestilence, the scent of evening may be a lethal gas. "I can't understand their stripping Pia, sir," he said. "Why would they do such a terrible thing?"
"Because they're Stinkers!" Nef said. "Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of them? Every inch of your skin a-crawl with living filth, your guts packed with foulness, your whole frame a compromise with rottenness? Do you wonder that they'd delight to make us as unwholesome as they are themselves?" Colonel Nef lighted the cigar he'd been mulling. "Lee, do you think one Stinkerville destroyed is too high a price for them to pay for having murdered two Axenite troopers? For Piacentelli's wife is as much their victim as her husband."
Hartford shook his head. "I'm not sure, sir. What bothers me more than anything else is that it's my fault Pia went out last night. He asked me to arrange for him to replace the scheduled picket officer, and I did."
"Lee, why was Piacentelli so anxious to pull this extra duty?" Nef asked.
Hartford tried unobtrusively to squirm his chair out of the jet-stream from Nef's cigar. "He told me he wanted to work on the language, sir," he said. "Pia really had such a project. He'd never had contact with anyone with a speech other than Standard before, and the problem of transducing one language into another fascinated him. The Kansans call their speechNihon-go. Pia taught me to understand some of it."
"A waste of your time, Lee," Nef said. "You'll never have occasion to speak it. Be that as it may, unless Piacentelli was attempting to coax a course in Bedroom Kansan from a Stinker maiden, I can hardly understand why his lexigraphical labors should require him to unsuit himself. No, Piacentelli was deliberately murdered."
"I'm puzzled, sir," Hartford admitted. "When we tossed those smoke-candles, I heard Pia shouting for us to stop it. Would he have done so if the Indigenous Hominids had him captive? Why did none of the natives lift a hand against us, though we were burning their homes? Why did Paula Piacentelli seem to know why Pia was going outside tonight? Why did he take a microscope with him? Why did Paula kill herself?"
"Don't noise that last 'why' around the Barracks, Mister," Nef growled. "Officially, she died in tear-blinded grief, an accident." He smiled. "Whatever our reason for burning out Stinkerville, Lee, we got it done. The fact that those half-humans down the hill bred and sweat and poisoned the soil within half an hour's walk has been a stench in my nostrils ever since we got here. Now they're gone. I'm as sorry as you that the Piacentellis are dead. But the manner of their dying was such as to assure Axenic mankind a new home."
"I'm not sure I understand you, sir."
Nef poured them each a second brandy. He raised his; Hartford of necessity followed suit. "To Brotherhood," the colonel said. He stared into Hartford's eyes. "TotheBrotherhood," he amended.
Hartford was tired, confused and in awe of Nef's rank; otherwise he might have ventured protest. Nef sipped his drink. "I must emphasize, Lee, that what I say is my opinion only, not Axenite policy. You see my point."
"I do, sir," Hartford said.
"Forgive me, then, for prefacing my remarks with a bit of truism," Nef said. "In all history before gnotobiotic man was cut from his mother through cellophane, the human being was never pure organism. Before us, every man who ever lived was, in fact, one mammal plus the sum of millions of viruses, rickettsia, bacteria, fungi and molds. When the old philosophers asked, 'What is man?' the answer could only be: 'Foul smell and blood in a bag.' We're the first men beyond that, Lee. The first real men, True Men, members of the winner-species.Homo gnotobioticus.
"We must destroy the bridge that led to us. We must destroy the Stinkers. Not just these quasi-human natives here on Kansas, but the Stinkers on Earth, and on every other planet where bug-laden man has followed Axenite. What chance hasHomo sapiensto match his sapiency againstHomo gnotobioticus, when he is a bifurcate septic tank, a polyculture of a thousand kinds of living dirt?"
Hartford finished his brandy, wishing he were anywhere else than in Nasty Nef's quarters, tired, ill at ease and a little drunk from the two brandies. "What do you propose, sir?" he asked with Academy politeness.
"Aha!" Nef rejoiced, pouring them each another drink. "You justify my trust, Lee. You perceive that I speak not merely if-ly, philosophically, but as a man of action, leashed only by temporary practicality." He leaned back in his chair and regarded Hartford more as a sculptor might regard a recent product than a father a son, with uncritical approval. "Where were you born, Lee?"
"On Titan, sir."
"I thought so. You have the mark of natal excellence," Nef said. "You're a second or third-generation Axenite, then?"
"Third, sir," Hartford said.
"Splendid. Your grandparents were from their mothers' wombs untimely ripp'd; your parents and yourself born normally, in germ-free ambience. How fortunate we are, you and I! Third-generation Axenites. Eff-two of a new race." Nef paused in his recital. "There is one fact that chafes us, though. We, perforce the Columbuses of tomorrow, explorers of the planets beyond even the stars we see here on the frontier, are held back by our Stinker cousins. They have the proper feeling, that only pure man might pioneer the alien worlds, for fear of destroying what he finds there. But who will inherit those planets when we've finished our explorations? Who will at the last till the fields of Kansas?"
"Colonists from Earth, sir," Hartford said. "From Eurus, Tinkle, Westside, Unashamed, T'ang, Williams's World and Hope. From all the planets normal man has colonized."
"Doesn't that annoy you, Lee?" Nef asked. "That our work's fruit is to be enjoyed by shiploads of Stinkers?"
"They're as human as we, sir," Hartford said. He smiled. "You might say they just haven't had our advantages."
"You're tender-minded, Lee," Nef said. "We garrison a hundred worlds on the Frontier, planets our Stinker masters mustn't visit yet, least Man contaminate some life-form yet unmet. We pioneer, clear planets as safe, and move on. For reward, we Axenites have three worlds of our own in the M'Bwene System, axenized for our use; we have the Academies on Luna and Titan, and a dome on Pluto.It's not enough.We are the new men, the next-comers to humanity. We must have worlds of our own. I, and the Brotherhood whose hand here I am, intend that Kansas shall be ours."
"What about the Stinkers?" Hartford asked. "What will happen to them if we decide to axenize Kansas?"
"Maybe they'll leave," Colonel Nef said, smiling in the manner that had won him the name "Nasty." "A few more punitive expeditions like tonight's—an incendiary grenade was thrown at Kansannamura, did you know that, Lee? I threw it—and we'll have no Stinkers underfoot. We soon will be able to mop and polish this world to our own high standards. We'll walk this lovely world without safety-suits and breathe unfiltered air. We'll enter into our birthright, Lee." Nef gazed at his cigar admiringly, though it had gone out. "So much for the moment, Brother Hartford," he said. "Perhaps we'd both do well to get some sleep."
Hartford jumped to attention and formally requested permission to withdraw. Nef nodded. Hartford about-faced and left the room.
VI
The things the colonel had told him hadn't fallen into place in his mind yet. Hartford was numb of thought.
Back in his own room in B.O.Q. the numbness cleared a bit. He poured himself a drink. Somehow, he thought, he'd become fairhaired boy to an Attila the Hun, an Alaric the Goth, a Hitler, a Haman; an Ashurbanipal I, a Rameses II. For Nef was equally with these a servant of Siva the Destroyer, with his plan to make Man pure.
His purification would involve the destruction of all non-axenic men and women all the way from the Home World to the newest beach-head on the Frontier; the sterilization of a hundred worlds as culture media for the new race; and the planting on the newly axenized soil of colonies ofHomo gnotobioticus, the feeder-on-hydroponic-greens, the inodorous, the thin-gutted, the strong toothed Superman.
Nef's pogrom had begun with the raid on the village, Hartford mused, his arms behind his head as he lay on his bunk. Nef had decided that this green and pleasant world belonged to the silver men, the true men, the new men. Us, Hartford thought. Earth's Stinkers, ordinary humanity with its common cold and its caries, would follow the Kansan Indigenous Hominid, and the Great Auk, into history.
The double funeral of the Lieutenants Piacentelli was to be held at Retreat, outside the Barracks. Hartford wondered a bit at the haste with which the two bodies were to be consigned to the earth of Kansas. Perhaps haste was necessary because of the micro-organisms with which poor Pia's corpse was necessarily contaminated.
Hartford grimaced. Contaminated humans must lead disgusting lives. They smelled of ferments, were bloated with bacterially elaborated gases, suffered rot in their very teeth. Their corpses—poor forefathers!—suffered corruption that would never touch an Axenite, whose unembalmed cadaver would last longer than the best-mummified Pharaoh.
Whatever mysterious errand it had been that had taken Piacentelli outside the Barracks, it had killed him. It was over.
Hartford marched the Terrible Third into position facing the graves, cut into the soil at the base of the hundred-foot flagpole. The entire regiment, less only the handful of men and women necessary to secure the Barracks, was on the Parade Ground. Colonel Nef, his scarlet safety-suit brilliant in the light of the setting sun, stood beside the graves, a finger of his right gauntlet inserted to mark his place in the blackBook of Honors and Ceremonies.
The regiment stood at parade-rest as a truck brought the bodies of two comrades through its ranks. As the improvised hearse halted and twelve blue-suited casket-bearers stepped forward to lift the flag-draped boxes, Nef called the regiment to attention. The bearers slow-marched the caskets to the graves and placed them on the lowering-devices.
Nef's words of funeral were few. He spoke of the dedication of the two Axenites being laid to rest and bitterly accused the Stinkers—this word seemed rude, in so formal a setting—of having murdered the young couple. He spoke of condign justice, and of revenge.
This done, he called: "Escort, less firing-party. Present, HAHMS! Firing-party, FIRE THREE VOLLEYS!"
The shots of the Dardick-rifles echoed down the plateau to the smoldering village below. The Regimental Bugler, standing between the heads of the graves, flicked on his instrument. As the last volley spat from the muzzles of the rifles, the bugler playedTaps.
Four men stepped forward to recover and fold the green-silk Pioneer colors, and the caskets were lowered to corruption in alien earth. The banner crept down the flagstaff, and the funeral was over.
Bone-weary, Hartford went from the Syphon to the refresher-room, where he checked his safety-suit and hung it.
Another officer was there, still in his blue safety-suit. Hartford wondered sleepily why he'd so long postponed unsuiting. Even the fellow's helmet was sealed. "Our first deaths on Kansas," Hartford remarked, wanting to coax the man into conversation and learn who he was. "I'd never realized till now that we're really soldiers, subject to violent death and formal burying." The man must be a replacement, come in on the supply ship a month ago, Hartford thought. Black hair, crewcut. Tanned. Must be from one of the M'Bwene Worlds, where an Axenite's naked skin can bear unfiltered sunlight. "Both the Piacentellis were my friends," Hartford said, determined to coax speech from the stranger.
The man's bitcher boomed, evidently set on full volume. "Mattaku shirazu," he said. "Excuse. Pia not teach entire use of Standard tongue."
Hartford's right hand tore through the plastic pellicle over his Dardick-pistol and brought the weapon to bear on the figure before him. "You're a Stinker!" he said. "Pia's safety-suit—that's the suit you're wearing."
"Tonshu," the Indigenous Hominid said, bowing his head. He indicated the empty holster at his side: he was unarmed. "I come ontaku, here to your honored precincts, to speak of things done and of future things. You are Hartford?"
Hartford thought quickly. His responsibility was to the Garrison. This stranger was above all else a possible source of contamination, a carrier of the micro-bugs that could kill every Axenite on Kansas. Shooting him would rupture the safety-suit he wore. As it was, his exterior surface was clean; he could have entered the Barracks only by marching in from Retreat with the rest of the regiment, through the sterilizing Syphon. "I am Hartford. Lee Hartford."
"Pia said you are a good man," the stranger said, bowing.
"What is your name?"
"Renkei. As you say, I take Pia'suwa-zutsumi, this smooth garment." Renkei indicated the safety-suit by slicking his hands over it. "I must enter here to talk with Hartford. To enter, I must have garment. Pia, my brother, is dead. I borrowed his garment. Can I, with you, stop the ugly thing that began last night in Kansannamura?Kuwashiku wa zonzezu; I do not know. I can but try."
What a perfect disguise a safety-suit made, Hartford thought. Besides, it was the only passport a man needed to enter the Barracks. He stared at the stranger. He looked no different to men Hartford had met before, Axenites whose grandparents had been born by aseptic Caesarian section in Nagoya or Canton, two of the great gnotobiotic centers of fifty years ago. Renkei was a Stinker, a Kansan, an Indigenous Hominid (ignominious name!); he was also, Hartford felt, a man.
"Tell me why you made the dangerous journey here, into the midst of your enemies," he said.
"The death of our friend Pia. The burning of Kansannamura. The war between my people and you who wear smooth garments," he said. "This isaru-majiki koto."
"A thing that ought not to be," Hartford said, translating. He was glad for the practice he'd gotten with Pia, speaking the native tongue. "Sit down," he said. "You must explain, Renkei."
The refresher-room, a hall filled with lockers and the machinery that automatically tested and refitted the safety-suits each time they returned to the Barracks, had a dozen entrances and exits. As Renkei, still completely sealed in Pia's safety-suit, sat on the bench beside Hartford, the doors all closed at once. They hissed as the pneumatic seals were set in their frames.
Contamination Alert! Someone, most likely the Service girl on watch at the Status Board, had discovered that there was one more person in the Barracks than could be accounted for. A crash-priority head-count had been made. Each room and compartment had doubtless been eavesdropped through the built-in TV eyes and microphone ears.
One door at the far end of the hall burst open. A squad of safety-suited Service Police spilled in. At the point of their wedge was the scarlet uniform of Colonel Nef. Dardick-pistol in hand, he ran toward Renkei. "Don't shoot!" Hartford shouted, springing up.
"Get back, Mister," the colonel yelled. He dropped to one knee and squeezed all twelve rounds into the seated figure to Hartford's right. Service Police swooped down to pull Hartford away from the shattered body of Renkei. The lieutenant's tee-shirt was stained, however, by flecks of blood splashed up as the SPs' bullets chewed into the Kansan. Hartford was contaminated.
For the next hour, Hartford had no more to say about his disposition than an angry bullock being dipped and scrubbed against an epidemic of cattle ticks.
His purification consisted in a sudsing with antiseptic soaps, this administered by a team of three Service Company gnotobioticians who were completely indifferent to his modesty and who seemed determined to peel off the outer surface of his skin. The women, safety-suited against being themselves contaminated, shaved off all his hair and ostentatiously packaged-up the shavings to be burned. They administered parenteral and enteric doses of broad-spectrum antibiotics. By the time the gnoto girls were finished, Hartford was as bald all over as a six-weeks foetus, as sore as though he'd been sand-blasted, slightly feverish as a result of the injections and madder than hell.
Ignoring his demands to see Colonel Nef at once, the Service Company troopers helped him into his safety-suit. Hartford would have to live inside the suit for a week's quarantine, watched carefully to see whether a missed microbe would breed within him in spite of all the measures taken.
Hartford's company commander refused him permission to speak to the colonel. The lieutenant was to speak to no one concerning Renkei's invasion of the Barracks. He would remain safety-suited inside the Barracks or out; but would otherwise continue with his regular duties.
Hartford returned to the refresher-room where the murder had taken place. Renkei's macerated body had been removed for burning. The room had been carefully decontaminated, to the extent of hosing it down with detergent steam and individually re-refreshing each safety-suit in the huge hall's rows of lockers.
There was nothing to be done against Nef's madness, Hartford thought. He sat on the bench where Renkei had sat. The ultimate breakdown in communication is silencing one side of the dialogue, he thought. That's why killing a man is the ultimate sin; it removes forever the hope of understanding him. It ends for all time the conversation by which brothers may touch one another's mind.
What crap to find in a soldier's thoughts, Hartford told himself. He was an Axenite trooper, a Pioneer, a pistol-packing officer of infantry, commander of the Terrible Third Platoon. He was an Axenite, dedicated by the immaculacy of his birth to the conquest of Man's frontiers.
Hartford snapped his plastic-sheathed Dardick-pistol, death in a supermarket wrapper, from his belt and placed it on the shelf of his locker. He'd seen the village of Kansannamura burned. Pia had died across his shoulder. Paula lay buried, too. Renkei's life had been splashed out on a stream of bullets. Enough of death.
Hartford picked up a pack of field-ration squeeze-tubes and walked down the hallway toward the Syphon.
His leaving would show on the Status Board, of course, but that didn't matter any more. He was deserting the regiment.
He walked through the valley of desert that was the Hot Gut, and down into the birth-canal that was the Wet Gut, to emerge in the evening air of Kansas. The motor sergeant, stationed outside to guard the vehicles, saluted. "Going for a walk, sir?" he asked.
"If you'll lend me a jeep, I'll go for a ride," Hartford said. "I'd like to see how things look, down in the village."
"It's against regulations, but if you'll have the truck back by dark I can let it go, sir."
"Thank you, Sergeant." Hartford returned the salute and drove off downhill, toward Kansannamura.
What would happen to Hartford-the-deserter? he wondered. At best, he'd be booted out of the troopers and grounded on Titan, or Luna or one of the M'Bwene planets, to serve the rest of his life as a paper-pusher, the bureaucratic equivalent of an endless Kitchen Police. At worst, he'd be exiled to Earth.
That meant exposure to bacteria, a gradual contamination till he'd been exposed to the full dirtiness in which earthlings daily lived, till he'd equipped himself with antibodies and a Stinker's immune-response.
The Service Police would be after him soon. Once out of sight of the Barracks, he turned his jeep off the road, onto one of the numberless paths used by camelopard riders on their trips between Stinker villages. He was headed upgrade, now, toward the mountains. On either side of the jeep were the fields of sunflowers, silent in the twilight calm. In a few moments the cool winds from the sea would flow into the land, stirring the billions of heart-shaped sunflower-leaves into the whisper that filled the evening and early-morning hours of Kansas.
His heart filled with hope and hopelessness, feeling like a happy suicide, Hartford sang to himself as the sunflower heads and leaves tattooed against his windshield.Pioneers! O Pioneershe sang, the anthem of the Axenites, the fellowship he was leaving forever:
Lo, the darting bowling orb!Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!
Lo, the darting bowling orb!Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!
Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams, Pioneers! O pioneers!
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 agiraffu," 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 yourjeepu-kurumahit mygiraffu, 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 comegiraffuto 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 thegiraffucome," 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 withdaikon, 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 goldengiraffu, with thetake-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 usHominids? Is that a name to give a brother?"
"It is better thanStinker," 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 ourgiraffusoon," 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 twogiraffuhe'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 hergiraffuand, 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 hergiraffu, 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 anhikoki—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 thegiraffunow, 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 theirgiraffuand 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. Thegiraffu, 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 ourDaibutsu," Takeko said. "It is theAmida 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, silkkimonoof 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 thetenugitowel 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 theseo-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 unfamiliargetaand 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 istakuwan," 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-smellingtakuwan," 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 silktenugui. 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-smellingtakuwan-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."
IX
Hartford knelt over the microscope in the yoga-posture called for by its being so near the floor and tried to adjust the instrument as he remembered having seen it done. He focused the coarse adjustment of the 'scope till he saw spots darting about the fluid Takeko had placed on the slide. He nailed the spots down with a gentle hand on the fine adjustment.
The juice of the pickled turnip was aswim with tiny bodies that looked like tadpoles. "What are they?" he asked, peering into the micro-world below him.
"Pia-san named them monads," said the carpenter, white-bearded Togo. "We all have them in our bodies. You have them now in yours. Our soil is alive with them. They chew the chaff of our fields into black loam; they turn to dust the flesh of our fathers. They cause turnips to becometakuwan."
Hartford rocked back from the microscope to sit again on his heels. "You have no disease, no benign bacterial flora and of course no bacterial antibodies. Instead you have this whip-tailed animalcule, this monad. Is this correct?"
"So Pia-san said," Takeko agreed. "He said that the monad is a jealous beast. It is a tiger among the pygmies, he said. No little nuisance-makers can exist on Kansas; the monad would eat them in a rage."
"The ultimate antibiotic," Hartford said. "A micro-organism that functions as a saprophyte, a soil-former and a scavenger. Besides all this, it's a universal phagocyte, policing up the human environment inside and out, to keep it clean of any other microscopic organisms. The monad fills every niche in the micro-ecology of the planet."
"This is what Pia-san and hisokusama, poor dead girl, discovered," Takeko said. "Renkei entered the Stone House to tell you that we do not stink, that we are not dangerous. Three people have died to tell this—and Nef still does not know."
"I think he may know it after all," Hartford said. "He knows about the monad, and fears it. This little bug means that every member of the human race can join his damned Brotherhood. A crew of monads in his gut would make every man on Stinker Earth a dignotobiote, germ-free except for his housekeeping protozoa."
"Until Pia-san told us," Yamata said, "we knew nothing except that we lived longer than our ancestors had. We knew that we did not suffer from the strange tirednesses the books told of, ills caused by the little animals. We did not know that the smallest natives of this planet had made of us their fortresses."
"If I could only get past Nasty Nef to tell this to the Axenites," Hartford said.
"Ron yori shoko," Kiwa-san said. Takeko translated for her father. "He says, Proof is stronger than argument."
"Indeed," Hartford agreed. "But how do I prove to the troopers that the monad sweeps Kansas cleaner than their Barracks floors?"
"As Pia-san tried to," Takeko said. "He removed his glasshead and his silken suit. He breathed our air and ate our food. He wanted to prove that he could live, but he was killed before he could. Now you have made that proof. Your brothers of the Stone House must undress of their silken suits and come among us, Lee-san."
"That they will not," Hartford said. "They are certain they will die if they inhale a breath of Kansas air, chew a bite of Kansas food, drink your clear stream water. I was certain I would die when my safety-suit was torn: remember our meeting, Takeko-san? It will not be easy to persuade my brothers and sisters in the Barracks to forget their fears. We are so sure, we Axenites, that contamination will kill us that we'd rather dance with lightning and eat stones than walk this world unprotected and eat its fruits."
When Takeko had respoken these words to her father, the old man said again: "Ron yori shoko." Proof is greater than argument.
"Proof?" Hartford asked. "I am not proof enough to have a Regiment of Axenites shed their safety-suits and declare the Kansans their brothers. It would take years of lab work before the first of them would walk suitless onto bug-dirt. We'd have to knock down the walls of the Barracks and burn two thousand-odd safety-suits, before we'd have the Axenite troopers here trapped into being guinea-pigs."
"Each trooper carries the Stone House with him when he walks our roads," the calligrapher remarked. "We have but to break through the silken suit he wears to make a trooper know the garment isn't needed here."
"He'd die of fright," Hartford said. "I very nearly did. Besides, each column of troopers, a squad or the Regiment, goes out with a Decontamination Team. If a man becomes septic through some sort of accident, he's hustled by a cleanup squad into a Decontamination Vehicle for his shower, shave and shots. I know the process well," he said, running his palm over his naked head.
"Ano ne," Kiwa said. "Will this Decontamination-kurumahouse two thousand men? Two hundred? Twenty?"
"It will hold two or three troopers at once," Hartford answered. "We have several of them, though."
"So ... ka?" white-bearded Togo exclaimed. He leaned over to whisper into the ear of Takeko's father, who nodded and smiled.
Old Kiwa spoke, and Takeko interpreted. "We must surprise a group of troopers," he said. "We must cause all their silken suits to be torn, or all their glass heads shattered, at one time. It is so simple as that."
"Simple in all but the doing," said Yamata the calligrapher. He picked up a brush and sketched on the mat before him a line of trooper-silhouettes, a platoon, marching single-file. "How do we break into all those Stone Houses at once?" he asked.
Hartford's face was pale. "We could use grenades, perhaps," he said. "Or bombs. After all, these troopers we speak of are no more than my family, my village, my people. I may of course be expected to cooperate in their destruction."
Takeko reached over and took his hand, then dropped it. "Ano ne!You do not understand! We can no more injure your brothers than you can, Lee-san. We may not harm any living person. Forgive us. You misunderstand us. We are bound, Lee-sensei, byButsudo: the Peaceful Path of the Lord Buddha." She bowed toward him, her hands clasped together, her head touching thetatami.
"It is my fault if I have misunderstood," Hartford said. The men were staring, Takeko's eyes were filled with tears, the room was silent. "I do not know you well. I did not know you do not kill."
"Let me tell you, then," Takeko said, rising to sit beside him. "Our people, who once lived on islands in the greater sea of Earth, were folk mighty in battle. Their pride was named the Way of the Warrior, which is calledBushido. Their loveliest flower, thesakuraor cherry-blossom, they made the symbol of the warrior, so highly did they hold his calling.
"After their villages had been crushed many times in war, our ancestors vowed forever to abandonBushido, the warrior's path, and to place their feet in the path of the Lord Buddha, calledButsudo. This was many years ago, before any man had ventured into space, before our ancestors found this world you call Kansas. When they came here, they came in peace. And they named this placeJodo, which we still call it. It means the Pure Land, where men are just. And all justice is built on a single law. No man shall take man's life."
"I spoke of the Axenite Brotherhood," Hartford said. "These men are a group of our leaders—Colonel Nef is one; he invited me to join him—who have decided that Stinker humanity must go. They're dedicated men, prepared to extinguish all the rest of mankind, to sterilize Earth and reseed it as a gnotobiotopic Paradise. Nef has, I fear, already killed three people to this end.
"You who cannot kill will face an enemy trained in killing," he went on. "Your camelopard-mounted messengers will meet veeto-platforms with machine-guns. Your peaceful words will be drowned out by the roar of Dardick-rifles. How can you hope to live if you will not kill?"
"If the choice were death or killing, Lee-san, we would gladly die," Takeko said. "We have a saying,Muriga toreba dori ga hikkomu. When might takes charge justice withdraws. We will not kill, and neither will we be defeated."
Yamata the calligrapher addressed Hartford. "How badly torn must a safety-suit be, to make necessary the wearer's going into the purification cart?" he asked.
"Only so much as the point of a pin would make would be enough," Hartford said.
"We have to drive pins into several dozens of men's clothing at one time," Yamata said. He smiled. "So phrased, the mountain does not seem too tall to be climbed."
"It would be difficult to puncture the safety-suits without hurting the wearers," Hartford said. "Few armies are so solicitous."
"Butsudoforbids us to kill men," Takeko said. "It does not deny us the right, in pointing them to the path of knowledge, to jab them a bit." She smiled at Hartford.
"How do you propose to do this jabbing?" he asked. "I remind you all, if you need reminding, that our troopers travel with Dardick-rifles and machine-guns, with rocket-mounted jeeps and veeto-platforms from which bombs can be dropped."
Kiwa spoke. "We are like a bear after honey," he said. "We are hungry, but do not wish to taste the stings of the guardians of the hive. We must surprise them."
Hartford, his knees stiff with kneeling, his backside sore from the camelopard-saddle despite the expert massage, got up to pace the floor. "We need a needle-gun of some sort," he said.
"No gun," insisted white-bearded Togo.
"It need have only slight power," Hartford said. "It would throw its projectile only forcefully enough to penetrate the fabric of a safety-suit."
"It has been so many generations since we have been soldiers, we know nothing of weapons," Yamata-san said. He wet a fine brush withsumi, Chinese ink, and sketched rapidly. "I remember seeing pictures ofBushicarrying a sort of throwing-sticks with pointed ends in pockets on their backs, and flinging them like little spears with a kind of one-stringed lute."
Hartford stared at the calligrapher's drawing, then exclaimed. "Of course! A bow and arrow."
Takeko inspected the sketch. "The man who threw the stick is standing," she said. "Could we stand against troopers?"
"A man would have to stand exposed to shoot an arrow," Hartford admitted. "The Dardick-guns would mow us down before we'd punctured a single safety-suit." He paced up and down the room, the only trained warrior there, trying to devise his unkilling weapon.
"We have wine, Lee-san," Takeko said. "Please sit and drink."
Hartford, bemused with his problem, folded his legs onto his cushion and lowered himself gently. Takeko's mother appeared with tiny cups of hot wine,sake. Hartford bowed with the others and sipped. The stuff was good, rather like a dry sherry.