"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.