"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."

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