Zen
Jerome Bixby
Because they were so likable and intelligent and adaptable—they were
vastly dangerous!
It's difficult, when you're on
one of the asteroids, to keep from tripping, because it's almost impossible to
keep your eyes on the ground. They never got around to putting portholes in
spaceships, you know—unnecessary when you're flying by GB, and psychologically inadvisable,
besides—so an asteroid is about the only place, apart from Luna, where you can
really see the stars.
There are so many stars in an
asteroid sky that they look like clouds; like massive, heaped-up silver clouds
floating slowly around the inner surface of the vast ebony sphere that
surrounds you and your tiny foothold. They are near enough to touch, and you
want to touch them, but they are so frighteningly far away...and so beautiful:
there's nothing in creation half so beautiful as an asteroid sky.
You don't want to look down,
naturally.
***
I had left the Lucky Pierre to search for fossils (I'm
David Koontz, the Lucky Pierre's
paleontologist). Somewhere off in the darkness on either side of me were Joe
Hargraves, gadgeting for mineral deposits, and Ed Reiss, hopefully on the
lookout for anything alive. The Lucky Pierre
was back of us, her body out of sight behind a low black ridge, only her
gleaming nose poking above like a porpoise coming up for air. When I looked
back, I could see, along the jagged rim of the ridge, the busy reflected
flickerings of the bubble-camp the techs were throwing together. Otherwise all
was black, except for our blue-white torch beams that darted here and there
over the gritty, rocky surface.
The twenty-nine of us were E.T.I.
Team 17, whose assignment was the asteroids. We were four years and three
months out of Terra, and we'd reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes
after landing, we had known that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X—or
Sorn, to give it its right name—one of the few such parts that hadn't been
blown clean out of the Solar System.
That made Vesta extra-special. It
meant settling down for a while. It meant a careful, months-long scrutiny of
Vesta's every square inch and a lot of her cubic ones, especially by the
life-scientists. Fossils, artifacts, animate life...a surface chunk of Sorn
might harbor any of these, or all. Some we'd tackled already had a few.
In a day or so, of course, we'd
have the one-man beetles and crew-boats out, and the floodlights orbiting
overhead, and Vesta would be as exposed to us as a molecule on a microscreen.
Then work would start in earnest. But in the meantime—and as usual—Hargraves,
Reiss and I were out prowling, our weighted boots clomping along in darkness.
Captain Feldman had long ago given up trying to keep his science-minded charges
from galloping off alone like this. In spite of being a military man, Feld's a
nice guy; he just shrugs and says, ‘Scientists!’ when we appear brightly at the
airlock, waiting to be let out.
***
So the three of us went our
separate ways, and soon were out of sight of one another. Ed Reiss, the
biologist, was looking hardest for animate life, naturally.
But I found it.
***
I had crossed a long, rounded
expanse of rock—lava, wonderfully colored—and was descending into a
boulder-cluttered pocket. I was nearing the “bottom” of the chunk, the part
that had been the deepest beneath Sorn's surface before the blow-up. It was the
likeliest place to look for fossils.
But instead of looking for
fossils, my eyes kept rising to those incredible stars. You get that way
particularly after several weeks of living in steel; and it was lucky that I
got that way this time, or I might have missed the Zen.
My feet tangled with a rock. I
started a slow, light-gravity fall, and looked down to catch my balance. My
torch beam flickered across a small, red-furred teddy-bear shape. The light
passed on. I brought it sharply back to target.
My hair did not stand on end, regardless of what you've heard me quoted as
saying. Why should it have, when I already knew Yurt so well—considered him, in
fact, one of my closest friends?
The Zen was standing by a rock,
one paw resting on it, ears cocked forward, its stubby hind legs braced ready
to launch it into flight. Big yellow eyes blinked unemotionally at the glare of
the torch, and I cut down its brilliance with a twist of the polarizer lens.
The creature stared at me,
looking ready to jump halfway to Mars or straight at me if I made a wrong move.
I addressed it in its own
language, clucking my tongue and whistling through my teeth: “Suh, Zen—”
In the blue-white light of the
torch, the Zen shivered. It didn't say anything. I thought I knew why. Three
thousand years of darkness and silence...
I said, “I won't hurt you,” again
speaking in its own language.
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.
I added, still a little awed: “We
know how long ago your world died.”
“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 mid-space, 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.
I tried shakily, “Hell, no. Wait
here.” Then I had to translate it.
***
I went back to the Lucky Pierre and got Yurt. We could do
without him, even though he had been a big help. We'd taught him a lot—he'd
been a child at the blow-up, too—and he'd taught us a lot. But this was more important,
of course.
When I told him what had
happened, he was very quiet; crying, perhaps, just like a human being, with
happiness.
Cap Feldman asked me what was up,
and I told him, and he said, “Well, I'll be blessed!”
I said, “Yurt, are you sure you
want us to keep hands off...just go off and leave you?”
“Yes, please.”
Feldman said, “Well, I'll be
blessed.”
Yurt, who spoke excellent
English, said, “Bless you all.”
I took him back to where the
female waited. From the ridge, I knew, the entire crew was watching through
binocs. I set him down, and he fell to studying her intently.
“I am not a Zen,” I told her,
giving my torch full brilliance for the crew's sake. “But Yurt here is. Do you
see...I mean, do you know what you look like?”
She said, “I can see enough of my
own body to—and—yes...”
“Yurt,” I said, “here's the
female we thought we might find. Take over.”
Yurt's eyes were fastened on the
girl.
“What—do I do now?” she whispered
worriedly.
“I'm afraid that's something only
a Zen would know,” I told her, smiling inside my helmet. “I'm not a Zen. Yurt
is.”
She turned to him. “You will tell
me?”
“If it becomes necessary.” He
moved closer to her, not even looking back to talk to me. “Give us some time to
get acquainted, will you, Dave? And you might leave some supplies and a bubble
at the camp when you move on, just to make things pleasanter.”
By this time he had reached the
female. They were as still as space, not a sound, not a motion. I wanted to
hang around, but I knew how I'd feel if a Zen, say, wouldn't go away if I were
the last man alive and had just met the last woman.
I moved my torch off them and
headed back for the Lucky Pierre. We
all had a drink to the saving of a great race that might have become extinct.
Ed Reiss, though, had to do some worrying before he could down his drink.
“What if they don't like each
other?” he asked anxiously.
“They don't have much choice,”
Captain Feldman said, always the realist. “Why do homely women fight for jobs
on the most isolated space outposts?”
Reiss grinned. “That's right.
They look awful good after a year or two in space.”
“Make that twenty-five by Zen
standards or three thousand by ours,” said Joe Hargraves. “I'll bet they look
beautiful to each other.”
We decided to drop our
investigation of Vesta for the time being, and come back to it after the
honeymoon.
Six months later, when we
returned, there were twelve hundred Zen on Vesta!
Captain Feldman was a realist but
he was also a deeply moral man. He went to Yurt and said, “It's indecent!
Couldn't the two of you control yourselves at least a little? Twelve hundred kids!”
“We were rather surprised
ourselves,” Yurt said complacently. “But this seems to be how Zen reproduce.
Can you have only half a child?”
Naturally, Feld got the
authorities to quarantine Vesta. Good God, the Zen could push us clear out of
the Solar System in a couple of generations!
I don't think they would, but you
can't take such chances, can you?
End
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