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