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He had called himself John on that first frightening day, alone and injured on this hostile world. He had seen the name in her mind and had chosen his likeness from the image she held in her heart from a Science Fiction comic.
He had chosen both well for she had found pity on him and had brought him into her home.
Sally Clarke had been an extraordinary human being; full of compassion and yet full of sadness too for a life that had not turned out the way she had hoped. But he had paid back her kindness with yet more sorrow, not understanding the strange sensations filling him until far too late.
In hindsight, he knew now that she had been his first love, and he had consummated that love with her on their last day together though, at the time, he thought he was still just a scientist embarking on a new experiment.
Was this how his people came to lose their objectivity, and their compassion? Had they fallen into the trap of denying the emotions that filled them, forgetting that for each negative emotion came an equal and opposite positive emotion?
Over the millennia they had bred out fear and anger... but also compassion and love, with emotions becoming as alien as the humans that walked this world.
Sally Clarke had changed all that for him. She had awakened feelings lying deep within him, allowing him to see the coldness of his own race for the first time -- and inadvertently supplying him with the answers to the questions they had been asking all these millennia.
Is there nothing more than this? What is missing?
The answer was compassion. Without compassion they had ceased to care about the worlds they found or the creatures walking upon those worlds. Without compassion they had ceased to care about each other, and so their numbers had dwindled with no young to replace those who finally submitted to the ravages of time.
It had not been noticeable at first for they were a long-lived race, but one of them had finally looked around and wondered why so few of them remained while other species prospered.
The humans were such a species, and until Sally Clarke showed him the truth through her love and compassion for him, his people had thought the answer lay in the physical rather than in the spirit. In truth, the answer had been the amalgamation of both, finally realized in the small form of his great-grandchild.
Although the others of his kind would see no logic in his actions, he had wanted the decision to be hers, allowing her to chose which world she would make her own. He owed her great-grandmother that much, for the gift she had bestowed upon him all those decades ago.
Now that choice had been made, and John found a new emotion filling him: joy.
From high above, he watched as the transportation beam caught her small frame, taking her away from the world that had been so instrumental in giving her life, and from the people who had taught her the greatest gift of all, a gift she would share with his people: compassion.
THE END