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 

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