ne 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," reali