"I was child then," she said, "I don't know--what happened. I have
wondered." She looked up at my steel-and-glass face; I must have seemed
like a giant. Well, I suppose I was. "This--what we are on--was part of
Sorn, I know. Was it--" She fumbled for a word--"was it atom explosion?"
I told her how Sorn had gotten careless with its hydrogen atoms and had
blown itself over half of creation. (This the E.T.I. Teams had surmised
from scientific records found on Eros, as well as from geophysical
evidence scattered throughout the other bodies.)
"I was child," she said again after a moment. "But I remember--I
remember things _different_ from this. Air ... heat ... light ... how do
I live here?"
Again I felt amazement at its intelligence; (and it suddenly occurred to
me that astronomy and nuclear physics must have been taught in Sorn's
"elementary schools"--else that _my years_ and _atom explosion_ would
have been all but impossible). And now this old, old creature,
remembering back three thousand years to childhood--probably to those
"elementary schools"--remembering, and defining the differences in
environment between _then_ and _now_; and more, wondering at its
existence in the different _now_--
And then I got my own thinking straightened out. I recalled some of the
things we had learned about the Zen.
Their average lifespan had been 12,000 years or a little over. So the
Zen before me was, by our standards, about twenty-five years old.
Nothing at all strange about remembering, when you are twenty-five, the
things that happened to you when you were seven ...
But the Zen's question, even my rationalization of my reaction to it,
had given me a chill. Here was no cuddly teddy bear.
This creature had been born before Christ!
She had been alone for three thousand years, on a chip of bone from her
dead world beneath a sepulchre of stars. The last and greatest Martian
civilization, the _L'hrai_, had risen and fallen in her lifetime. And
she was twenty-five years old.
"How do I live here?" she asked again.
I got back into my own framework of temporal reference, so to speak, and
began explaining to a Zen what a Zen was. (I found out later from Yurt
that biology, for the reasons which follow, was one of the most
difficult studies; so difficult that nuclear physics actually _preceded_
it!) I told her that the Zen had been, all evidence indicated, the
toughest, hardest, longest-lived creatures God had ever cooked up:
practically independent of their environment, no special ecological
niche; just raw, stubborn, tenacious life, developed to a fantastic
extreme--a greater force of life than any other known, one that could
exist almost anywhere under practically any conditions--even floating in
midspace, which, asteroid or no, this Zen was doing right now.
The Zens breathed, all right, but it was nothing they'd had to do in
order to live. It gave them nothing their incredible metabolism couldn't
scrounge up out of rock or cosmic rays or interstellar gas or simply do
without for a few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace, then
the Zen body is a feeder pile. Maybe that, I thought, was what evolution
always worked toward.
"Please, will you kill me?" the Zen said.
* * * * *
I'd been expecting that. Two years ago, on the bleak surface of Eros,
Yurt had asked Engstrom to do the same thing. But I asked, "Why?"
although I knew what the answer would be, too.
The Zen looked up at me. She was exhibiting every ounce of emotion a Zen
is capable of, which is a lot; and I could recognize it, but not in any
familiar terms. A tiny motion here, a quiver there, but very quiet and
still for the most part. And _that_ was the violent expression:
restraint. Yurt, after two years of living with us, still couldn't
understand why we found this confusing.
Difficult, aliens--or being alien.
"I've tried so often to do it myself," the Zen said softly. "But I
can't. I can't even hurt myself. Why do I want you to kill me?" She was
even quieter. Maybe she was crying. "I'm alone. Five hundred years,
Eert-mn--not too long. I'm still young. But what good is it--life--when
there are no other Zen?"
"How do you know there are no other Zen?"
"There are no others," she said almost inaudibly. I suppose a human girl
might have shrieked it.
_A child_, I thought, _when your world blew up. And you survived. Now
you're a young three-thousand-year-old woman ... uneducated, afraid,
probably crawling with neuroses. Even so, in your thousand-year terms,
young lady, you're not too old to change._
"Will you kill me?" she asked again.
And suddenly I was having one of those eye-popping third-row-center
views of the whole scene: the enormous, beautiful sky; the dead clod,
Vesta; the little creature who stood there staring at me--the
brilliant-ignorant, humanlike-alien, old-young creature who was asking
me to kill her.
For a moment the human quality of her thinking terrified me ... the
feeling you might have waking up some night and finding your pet puppy
sitting on your chest, looking at you with wise eyes and white fangs
gleaming ...
Then I thought of Yurt--smart, friendly Yurt, who had learned to laugh
and wisecrack--and I came out of the jeebies. I realized that here was
only a sick girl, no tiny monster. And if she were as resilient as Yurt
... well, it was his problem. He'd probably pull her through.
But I didn't pick her up. I made no attempt to take her back to the
ship. Her tiny white teeth and tiny yellow claws were harder than steel;
and she was, I knew, unbelievably strong for her size. If she got
suspicious or decided to throw a phobic tizzy, she could scatter shreds
of me over a square acre of Vesta in less time than it would take me to
yelp.
"Will you--" she began again.