"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?"