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15 - Zen · Famous Sci-Fi Stories Collection

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  Speaker 1: Zen by Jerome Bixby. This is a LibriVox recording. All
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
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  Speaker 1: or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by
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  Speaker 1: Tommy hersunt Zen by Jerome bixspy. It's difficult when you're
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  Speaker 1: on one of the asteroids to keep from tripping, because
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  Speaker 1: it's almost impossible to keep your eyes on the ground.
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  Speaker 1: They never got around to putting portholes in spaceships, you know,
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: unnecessary when you're flying by GB and psychologically inadvisable. Besides,
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  Speaker 1: so an asteroid is about the only place, apart from Luna,
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  Speaker 1: where you can really see the stars. There are so
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  Speaker 1: many stars in an asteroid sky that they look like clouds,
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  Speaker 1: like massive, heaped up silver clouds, floating slowly around the
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  Speaker 1: inner surface of the vast ebony sphere that surrounds you
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  Speaker 1: in your tiny foothold. They are near enough to touch,
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  Speaker 1: and you want to touch them, but they are so
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  Speaker 1: frightenedly far away and so beautiful. There's nothing in creation
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  Speaker 1: half so beautiful as an asteroid sky. You don't want
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  Speaker 1: to look down. Naturally, I had left the Lucky Pierre
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  Speaker 1: to search for fossils. I'm David Koontz, the Lucky Pierre's paleontologist,
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  Speaker 1: somewhere often the darkness. On either side of me were
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  Speaker 1: Joe Hargraves, gadgeting for mineral deposits, and Ed Rice, hopefully
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  Speaker 1: on the lookout for anything alive. Lucky Pierre was back
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  Speaker 1: of us, her body out of sight behind a low
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  Speaker 1: black ridge, only her gleamy nose poking above, like a
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  Speaker 1: porpoise coming out for air. When I looked back, I
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  Speaker 1: could see along the jagged rim of the ridge, the
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  Speaker 1: busy reflected flickerings of the bubble camp the texts were
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  Speaker 1: throwing together. Otherwise, all was black except for our blue
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  Speaker 1: white torch beams that darted here and there over the gritty,
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  Speaker 1: rocky surface. The twenty nine of us were ETI Team seventeen,
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  Speaker 1: whose assignment was the asteroids. We were four years and
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  Speaker 1: three months out of Terra, and we'd reached Vesta right
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  Speaker 1: on schedule ten minutes after landing. We had known that
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  Speaker 1: the clod was part of the crust of planet x
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  Speaker 1: or Sorn to give it its right name, one of
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  Speaker 1: the few such parts that had been blown clean out
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  Speaker 1: of the Solar System that made Vesta extra special. It
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  Speaker 1: meant settling down for a while. It meant a careful,
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  Speaker 1: months long scrutiny of Vesta's every square inch and a
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  Speaker 1: lot of her qubic ones, especially by the life scientists. Fossils, artifacts,
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  Speaker 1: animate life. A surface chunk of sorn might harbor any
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  Speaker 1: of these or all. Some we tackled already had a few.
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  Speaker 1: In a day or two, of course, we'd have the
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  Speaker 1: one man beetles and the crew boats out, and the
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  Speaker 1: floodlights orbiting overhead, and Vesta would be as exposed to
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  Speaker 1: us as a molecule on a microscreen. Then work would
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  Speaker 1: start in earnest. But in the meantime, and as usual,
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  Speaker 1: high graves, Rice and Eye were out prowling our weighted boots,
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  Speaker 1: clumping along in darkness. Captain Feldman had long ago given
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  Speaker 1: up trying to keep us science minded charges from galloping
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  Speaker 1: off alone like this. In spite of being a military man,
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  Speaker 1: Felds a nice guy. He just shrugs and says scientists
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  Speaker 1: when we appear brightly at the air lock waiting to
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  Speaker 1: be let out. So the three of us went our
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  Speaker 1: separate ways and soon were out of sight of one another.
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  Speaker 1: At Rice, the biologist was looking hardest for animate life, naturally,
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  Speaker 1: but I found it. I had crossed a long, rounded
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  Speaker 1: expanse of rock lava wonderfully colored, and was descending into
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  Speaker 1: a bolder, cluttered pocket. I was nearing the bottom of
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  Speaker 1: the chunk, the part that had been the deepest beneath
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  Speaker 1: Soren's surface before the blow up. It was the likeliest
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  Speaker 1: place to look for fossils, But instead looking for fossils,
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  Speaker 1: my eyes kept rising to those incredible stars. You get
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  Speaker 1: that way, particularly after several weeks of living in steel,
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  Speaker 1: And it was lucky that I got that way this time,
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  Speaker 1: or I might have missed the Zen. My feet tangled
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  Speaker 1: with a rock. I started a slow, light gravity fall
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  Speaker 1: and looked down to catch my balance. My torch beam
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  Speaker 1: flickered across a small, red furred teddy bear shape. The
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  Speaker 1: light passed on, I bought it sharply back to target.
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  Speaker 1: My hair did not stand on end, Regardless of what
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  Speaker 1: you've heard me quoted as saying, why should it have,
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  Speaker 1: when I already knew Yurt so well considered him, in fact,
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  Speaker 1: one of my closest friends, the Zen, was standing by
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  Speaker 1: a rock, one paw resting on it, ears cocked forward,
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  Speaker 1: its stubby hind legs braced ready to launch it into flight.
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  Speaker 1: Big yellow eyes blinked unemotionally at the glare of the torch,
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  Speaker 1: and I cut it down its brilliance with a twist
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  Speaker 1: of the polarizer lens. The creature stared at me, looking
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  Speaker 1: ready to jump halfway to Mars or straight at me
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  Speaker 1: if I made a wrong move. I addressed it in
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  Speaker 1: its own language, clucking my tongue and whistling through my teeth, Shuzen.
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  Speaker 1: In the blue white light of the torch. The Zen shivered,
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  Speaker 1: It didn't say anything. I thought, I knew why three
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  Speaker 1: thousand years of darkness and silence. I said, I won't
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  Speaker 1: hurt you again. Speaking in its own language, The Zen
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  Speaker 1: moved away from the rock, but not away from me.
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  Speaker 1: It came a little closer, actually, and peered up at
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  Speaker 1: my helmeted mirror glass head, unmistakably the seat of intelligence.
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  Speaker 1: It appears of any race anywhere. Its mouth, almost human
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  Speaker 1: shape worked. Finally words came. It hadn't spoken except to
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  Speaker 1: itself for three thousand years.
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  Speaker 2: You are not the sin, it said, right now, do
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  Speaker 2: you speak Zen.
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  Speaker 1: It took me a couple of seconds to untangle the
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  Speaker 1: squeaking syllables and get any sense out of it. What
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  Speaker 1: I had already said to it were stock phrases that
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  Speaker 1: Yurt had taught to me. I knew still more, but
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  Speaker 1: I couldn't speak Zenechi fluently by any means. Keep this
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  Speaker 1: in mind, by the way, I barely knew the language,
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  Speaker 1: and the Zen could barely remember it. To save space,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: the following dialogue is reproduced without bumblings, blank stares, and
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  Speaker 1: what did you say? Is? In reality? Our talk lasted
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  Speaker 1: over an hour. I am an earth man, I said
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: through my earphones. When I spoke, I could faintly hear
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  Speaker 1: my own voice, as the Zen must have heard. It
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: invests all but nonexistent atmosphere, tiny metallic cricket like I
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  Speaker 1: pointed at the sky, the incredible sky from out there,
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  Speaker 1: from another world. It thought about that for a while.
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  Speaker 1: I waited. We already knew that the Zen had been
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  Speaker 1: better astronomers at their peak than we were right now,
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  Speaker 1: even though they had never mastered space travel. So I
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  Speaker 1: didn't expect this one to boggle at the notion of
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  Speaker 1: creatures from another world. It didn't. Finally, it nodded, and
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  Speaker 1: I thought, as I had often before, how curious it
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  Speaker 1: was that this gesture should be common to earth men
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  Speaker 1: and sin so hurt, it said, And you know what,
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  Speaker 1: I him. When I understood, I nodded too. Then I
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  Speaker 1: said yes, realizing that the nod wasn't visible through the
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  Speaker 1: one way glass of my helmet.
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  Speaker 3: I less of sin, it said.
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  Speaker 1: I said nothing. I was studying it closely, looking for
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  Speaker 1: the features which Yurt had described to us, the lighter
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  Speaker 1: red fur of arms and neck, the peculiar formation of
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  Speaker 1: flesh and horn on the lower abdomen. They were there.
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  Speaker 1: From the coloring. I knew this zen was a female.
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  Speaker 1: The mouth worked again, not with emotion, I knew, but
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  Speaker 1: with the unfamiliar act of speaking. I have been here
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  Speaker 1: for for she hesitated.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know for five hundred chi my ear sh.
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  Speaker 1: For about three thousand of mine, I told her, and
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: then blank astonishment sank home in me. Astonished at the
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: last two words of her remark. I was already familiar
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  Speaker 1: with a zen's enormous intelligence, knowing Urt as I did,
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  Speaker 1: but imagine thinking to qualify years with my when just
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: out of nowhere a visitor from another planetary orbit pops up.
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  Speaker 1: And there had been no special stress given the distinction,
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  Speaker 1: just clear, precise, thinking like Yurtz, I added, still a
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  Speaker 1: little odd. We know how long ago your world died?
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  Speaker 1: I was child on Then she said.
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  Speaker 3: I don't know what happened. I have wondered.
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  Speaker 1: She looked up at my steel and glass face. I
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  Speaker 1: must have seemed like a giant. Well I suppose I was.
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  Speaker 3: This, for we are on course part of Sorn. I
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  Speaker 3: know was shit?
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  Speaker 1: She fumbled for a word. Who is it?
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  Speaker 3: At them explosion?
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  Speaker 1: I told her how Soren had gotten careless with its
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  Speaker 1: hydrogen atoms and had blown itself over half of creation.
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  Speaker 1: This the ETI teams had surmised from scientific records found
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  Speaker 1: on eros, as well as from geophysical evidence scattered throughout
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  Speaker 1: the other bodies. I was schidled, she said again, after
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  Speaker 1: a moment.
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  Speaker 2: But I remember, I remember things different from.
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  Speaker 3: This hair heat, like how do I live here?
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  Speaker 1: Again? I felt amazement at its intelligence, and it suddenly
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  Speaker 1: occurred to me that astronomy and nuclear physics must have
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  Speaker 1: been taught in Sorn's elementary schools. Else that my years
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  Speaker 1: and atom explosion would have been all but impossible. And
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  Speaker 1: now this old old creature, remembering back three thousand years
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  Speaker 1: to childhood, probably to those elementary schools, remembering and defining
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  Speaker 1: the differences in environment between then and now, and more
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  Speaker 1: wondering at its existence in the different now. And then
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  Speaker 1: I got my own thinking straightened out. I recalled some
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  Speaker 1: of the things we had learned about the Zen. Their
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  Speaker 1: average lifespan had been twelve thousand years or a little over,
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  Speaker 1: so the Zen before me was, by our standards, about
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  Speaker 1: twenty five years old. Nothing at all strange about remembering
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  Speaker 1: when you are twenty five the things that happened to
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  Speaker 1: you when you were seven. But the Zen's question, even
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  Speaker 1: my rationalization of my reaction to it, had given me
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  Speaker 1: a chill. Here was no cuddly teddy bear. This creature
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  Speaker 1: had been born before Christ. She had been alone for
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  Speaker 1: three thousand years on a chip of bone from her
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  Speaker 1: dead world, beneath a sepulcher of stars. The last and
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  Speaker 1: greatest Martian civilization, the Lahai, had risen and fallen in
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  Speaker 1: her lifetime, and she was twenty five years old.
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  Speaker 3: How do I live here?
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  Speaker 1: She asked again. I got back into my own framework
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  Speaker 1: of temporal reference, so to speak, and began explaining to
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  Speaker 1: a Zen what a Zen was. I found out later
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: from Yurt that biology for the reasons which follow was
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  Speaker 1: one of the most difficult studies, so difficult that nuclear
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  Speaker 1: physics actually preceded it. I told her that the Zen
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  Speaker 1: had been all evidence indicated the toughest, hardest, longest lived
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  Speaker 1: creatures God had ever cooked up, practically independent of their environment.
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  Speaker 1: No special ecological niece, just raw, stubborn, tenacious life developed
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  Speaker 1: to a fantastic extreme, a greater force of life than
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  Speaker 1: any other known one, that could exist almost anywhere under
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  Speaker 1: practically any conditions, even floating in mid space, which asteroids
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  Speaker 1: or no, this Zen was doing right now. The Zen's
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  Speaker 1: breathed all right, but it was nothing they'd had to
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  Speaker 1: do in order to live. It gave them nothing. Their
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  Speaker 1: incredible metabolism couldn't scrunch up out of rock or cosmic
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  Speaker 1: rays or intersteltic gas, or simply do without for a
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  Speaker 1: few thousand years. If the human body is a furnace,
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  Speaker 1: then the Zen body is a feederer pile. Maybe that,
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  Speaker 1: I thought was what evolution always worked toward.
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  Speaker 3: Please, will you kill me.
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  Speaker 1: The Zen said, I'd been expecting that. Two years ago,
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  Speaker 1: on the bleak surface of eros, Yert had asked Engstrom
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  Speaker 1: to do the same thing. But I asked why, although
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  Speaker 1: I knew what the answer would be to the Zen
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  Speaker 1: looked up at me. She was exhibiting every ounce of
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  Speaker 1: emotion a zen is capable of, which is a lot.
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  Speaker 1: And I could recognize it, but not in any familiar terms.
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  Speaker 1: A tiny emotion here, a quivered there, but very quiet
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  Speaker 1: and still for the most part. And that was the
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  Speaker 1: violent expression restraint. Yert, after two years of living with us,
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  Speaker 1: still couldn't understand why we found this confusing difficult aliens
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  Speaker 1: or being alien.
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  Speaker 3: I've tried so often to do it myself.
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  Speaker 1: The Zen said softly.
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  Speaker 4: But I can't. I can't even hurt myself. Why do
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  Speaker 4: I want you to kill me?
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  Speaker 1: She was even quieter, Maybe she was crying.
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  Speaker 2: I'm alone, five hundred years hurt men, not too long,
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  Speaker 2: I'm still young. But what good is it life when
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  Speaker 2: there are no other's sin?
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  Speaker 1: How do you know there are no other zen? There noathers,
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  Speaker 1: she said, almost inaudibly. I suppose a human girl might
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  Speaker 1: have shrieked it a child, I thought, when your world
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  Speaker 1: blew up and you survived. Now you're a young three
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  Speaker 1: thousand year old woman, uneducated, afraid, probably crawling with neuroses.
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  Speaker 1: Even so, in your thousand year terms. Young lady, you're
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  Speaker 1: not too old to change.
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  Speaker 3: Well, you kill me, she.
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  Speaker 1: Asked again, And suddenly I was having one of those
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  Speaker 1: eye popping third row center views of the whole scene,
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  Speaker 1: the enormous, beautiful sky, the dead clod Vesta, the little
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  Speaker 1: creature who stood there staring at me, the brilliant, ignorant,
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  Speaker 1: human like alien, old young creature who was asking me
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  Speaker 1: to kill her. For a moment, the human quality of
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  Speaker 1: her thinking terrified me. The feeling you might have waking
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  Speaker 1: up some night and finding your pet puppy sitting on
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  Speaker 1: your chest looking at you with wise eyes and white
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  Speaker 1: fangs gleaming. Then I thought of Yurt, smart friendly Yurt,
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  Speaker 1: who had learned to laugh and wisecrack, and I came
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  Speaker 1: out of the gbis. I realized that here was only
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  Speaker 1: a sick girl, no tiny monster, and if she were
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  Speaker 1: as resilient as Yurt, well it was his problem. He'd
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  Speaker 1: probably pull her through. But I didn't pick her up.
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  Speaker 1: I made no attempt to take her back to the ship.
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  Speaker 1: Her tiny white teeth and tiny yellow claws were harder
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  Speaker 1: than steel, and she was, I knew, unbelievably strong for
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  Speaker 1: her size. If she got suspicious or decided to throw
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: a phobic tizzy. She would scatter shreds of me over
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  Speaker 1: a square acre of Vesta in less time than it
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  Speaker 1: would take me to yelp.
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  Speaker 2: Will you?
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  Speaker 1: She began again. I tried shakily. Hell, no weight there.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: Then I had to translate it. I went back to
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  Speaker 1: the Lucky Pierre and got Yurt. We could do without him,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: even though he had been a big help. We taught
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  Speaker 1: him a lot. Been a child at the blow up too,
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  Speaker 1: and he'd taught us a lot. But this was more important.
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  Speaker 1: Of course. When I told him what had happened, he
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  Speaker 1: was very quiet, crying, perhaps just like a human being
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: with happiness. Captain Feldman asked me what was up, and
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  Speaker 1: I told him, and he said, well, I'll be blessed.
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  Speaker 1: I said, Yurt, are you sure you want us to
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  Speaker 1: keep hands off? Just go off and leave you? Yes? Please,
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  Speaker 1: Feldman said, will I'll be blessed. Yurt, who spoke excellent English,
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  Speaker 1: said bless you all. I took him back to where
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: the female waited from the ridge. I knew the entire
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: crew was watching through by knocks. I set him down
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  Speaker 1: and he fell to studying her intently. I am not
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  Speaker 1: a zen, I told her, giving my torch full brilliance
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: for the crew's sake. But Yert, here is do you
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  Speaker 1: see I mean, do you know what you look like?
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  Speaker 5: She said, I can see enough of my own body too,
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  Speaker 5: And yes.
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  Speaker 1: Yert, I said, here's the female we thought we might
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  Speaker 1: find take over. Yert's eyes were fastened on the girl.
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  Speaker 5: Oh what do hide do now.
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  Speaker 1: She whispered worriedly. I'm afraid that's something only a zen
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  Speaker 1: would know, I told her, smiling inside my helmet. I'm
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  Speaker 1: not a zen, yurt Is. She turned to him. You
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  Speaker 1: will tell me if it becomes necessary. He moved closer
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  Speaker 1: to her, not even looking back to talk to me.
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  Speaker 1: Give us some time to get acquainted, will you, Dave,
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: and you might leave some supplies and a bumble at
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: the camp when you move on, just to make things pleasanter.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: By this time he had reached the female. They were
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: as still as space, not a sound, not emotion. I
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: wanted to hang around, but I knew how I'd feel
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: if a zen, say wouldn't go away, if I were
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: the last man alive and had just met the last woman.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Moved my torch off them and headed back to the
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: lucky Pierre. We all had a drink to the saving
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: of a great race that might have become extinct ed. Rice, though,
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: had to do some worrying before he could down his drink.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: What if they don't like each other, he asked, anxiously.
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  Speaker 1: They don't have much choice, Captain Feldman said, always the realist.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: Why do homely women fight for jobs on the most
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: isolated space out posts? Rice grinned, that's right. They look
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: awful good after a year or two in space. Nick,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: that's twenty five by Zen standards, or three thousand by hours,
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: said Joe Hargraves, and all better. They look beautiful to
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: each other. We decided to drop our investigation of Vesta
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  Speaker 1: for the time being and come back to it after
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: the honeymoon. Six months later. When we returned, there were
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  Speaker 1: twelve hundred Zen on Vesta. Captain Felman was a realist,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: but he was also a deeply moral man. He went
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: to Yurt and said, it's indecent. Couldn't the two of
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: you will control yourselves at least a little twelve hundred kids.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: We were rather surprised ourselves, Yurt said, complacently, But this
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: seems to be how Zen reproduce.
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  Speaker 5: Can you have only half a child?
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Naturally, Feld got the authorities to quarantine VESTA good God.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: The Zen could push us clear out of the Solar
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  Speaker 1: system and a couple of generations. I don't think they would,
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  Speaker 1: but you can't take such chances, can you. End of
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Zen by Jerome Bixby read by Tommy Herssant, Carlsbad, California,