The Zen moved away from the rock, but not away from me. It came a little
closer, actually, and peered up at my helmeted, mirror-glassed
head--unmistakably the seat of intelligence, it appears, of any race
anywhere. Its mouth, almost human-shaped, worked; finally words came. It
hadn't spoken, except to itself, for three thousand years.
"You ... are not Zen," it said. "Why--how do you speak Zennacai?"
It took me a couple of seconds to untangle the squeaking syllables and
get any sense out of them. What I had already said to it were stock
phrases that Yurt had taught me; I knew still more, but I couldn't
speak Zennacai fluently by any means. Keep this in mind, by the way: I
barely knew the language, and the Zen could barely remember it. To save
space, the following dialogue is reproduced without bumblings, blank
stares and _What-did-you-says_? In reality, our talk lasted over an
hour.
"I am an Earthman," I said. Through my earphones, when I spoke, I could
faintly hear my own voice as the Zen must have heard it in Vesta's all
but nonexistent atmosphere: tiny, metallic, cricket-like.
"Eert ... mn?"
I pointed at the sky, the incredible sky. "From out there. From another
world."
It thought about that for a while. I waited. We already knew that the
Zens had been better astronomers at their peak than we were right now,
even though they'd never mastered space travel; so I didn't expect this
one to boggle at the notion of creatures from another world. It didn't.
Finally it nodded, and I thought, as I had often before, how curious it
was that this gesture should be common to Earthmen and Zen.
"So. Eert-mn," it said. "And you know what I am?"
When I understood, I nodded, too. Then I said, "Yes," realizing that the
nod wasn't visible through the one-way glass of my helmet.
"I am--last of Zen," it said.
I said nothing. I was studying it closely, looking for the features
which Yurt had described to us: the lighter red fur of arms and neck,
the peculiar formation of flesh and horn on the lower abdomen. They were
there. From the coloring, I knew this Zen was a female.
The mouth worked again--not with emotion, I knew, but with the
unfamiliar act of speaking. "I have been here for--for--" she
hesitated--"I don't know. For five hundred of my years."
"For about three thousand of mine," I told her.
* * * * *
And then blank astonishment sank home in me--astonishment at the last
two words of her remark. I was already familiar with the Zens' enormous
intelligence, knowing Yurt as I did ... but imagine thinking to qualify
_years_ with _my_ when just out of nowhere a visitor from another
planetary orbit pops up! And there had been no special stress given the
distinction, just clear, precise thinking, like Yurt's.