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