And while in principle I agree, the Yeerks are a galaxy-wide threat. The Andalites lose the war and the galaxy are slaves. That's about the only case where the rules stop applying.
EDIT: also, for clarity, when I said ELFANGOR WAS WRONG I was specifically meaning about knocking out Alloran.
Also i could have sworn I remembered them shooting each other and Elfangor being partially paralyzed, but no... he just shoots misses then goes welp guess I better not use this weapon thats in my hand
I know you think that. I still don't believe it (and neither at this point do the Andalites, or Alloran wouldn't be in disgrace and the Andalite government wouldn't be trying to cover up the fact that he used WMDs). There was somebody who said that governments and militaries don't have codes of conduct and rules of war for the enemy's sake, but for their own; for their own honor and their own morality. There has to be some point where you say, "We've decided as a society that X is just too horrible to do to the enemy." If you start making exceptions, if you start saying "Well, this time it's ok", then that's where stuff falls apart and your society falls apart.
I think the Andalite leadership almost certainly support what he did but threw him under the bus to sate the public; we've already seen there's a cultural divide between the civilians and the military. Though of course this is just part of a much older and broader literary argument about war and violence and what "needs to be done." (I've never actually seen A Few Good Men but always thought it weird that such a movie was made in the '90s, rather than the Cold War or post-9/11.)
I think the Andalite leadership almost certainly support what he did but threw him under the bus to sate the public; we've already seen there's a cultural divide between the civilians and the military. Though of course this is just part of a much older and broader literary argument about war and violence and what "needs to be done." (I've never actually seen A Few Good Men but always thought it weird that such a movie was made in the '90s, rather than the Cold War or post-9/11.)
Well, it was based on a play that was based on an actual event that happened at Gitmo in 1986. It doesn't really surprise me that it came out in the 90s, though. There was a lot of debate that decade over the role of the military in a post-Soviet world. This was happening at the same time there were debates over women in combat roles, over gays in the military, and over the role of the military as "world police".
I took the war for the Hork-Bajir homeworld to be a Vietnam allegory myself, given that Vietnam was already explicitly brought up in this book and Alloran sympathizes with Loren's Vietnam vet father. The 90s was when American culture was starting to seriously reexamine the Vietnam War and realize just how fucked up America's position and actions there were.
The Andalite Chronicles-Chapter 27
quote:
I raised my shredder and pointed it at Alloran ... no, at Sub-Visser Seven.
<You made Chapman a Controller. You were in his head. That Hork-Bajir I thought was you ...just a trick.>
<Of course. And another of my people made Loren one of us,> he sneered. <And while you so considerately worked to clear away the Time Matrix, I revived Alloran and transferred myself into him. The first and only Andalite-Controller! It was so kind of you to knock the old warrior out for me. I didn't know how I was ever going to take him. He was a wily creature. A bit mad, of course, but he knew war. You saw how ruthless he was in tossing out the poor Hork-Bajir who played the role of me. Yes, Alloran was a warrior.>
There's the explanation.
quote:
The truth hit me like a brick wall. It was true! I had made it possible for the sub-visser to take control of Alloran! I had created the abomination!
<Chapman told us about the Time Matrix, of course. But we needed you to show us where it was. The attack by the Mountain Taxxons could have disrupted everything, but you know, in the end it was convenient. It kept you from growing suspicious. You were too busy worrying about your fellow aristh. You didn't even have time to wonder how the two humans just happened to be waiting for you. You didn't wonder why my troops let you escape.>
I had done this! I had created this abomination! I had delivered the Time Matrix into the hands of this vile creature!
<But you know the best part?> The sub-visser laughed. <I really couldn't have let you burn that transport ship full of my people. Chapman didn't know about the Yeerks in that transport, so neither did I. And if you'd gone along with Alloran I'd have had to try to stop you. So would my brother Yeerk in the human girl. It was one thing to sacrifice the poor fool who played the role of me. But ten thousand Yeerks? No, I'd have had to act, and then you and Alloran together would have most likely made short work of me.>
I couldn't breathe. I had failed. Failed so enormously that the entire Andalite species was at risk!
<But no, Elfangor is one of those good Andalites,> Sub-Visser Seven sneered. <You don't go in for slaughtering the helpless, do you? Hah-hah! Wonderful! Your qualms delivered Alloran to me. Alloran and the Time Matrix. Mine!>
<Really?> I said faintly. <I seem to be the one holding the shredder.>
<There are a dozen Bug fighters closing in right now. You've lost, little one.>
<You'll be a cinder by the time they get here,> I threatened.
<No, you won't kill a helpless foe,> he sneered. <I have no weapon! I am your prisoner! Hahhah! I surrender to you, Elfangor. I surrender!>
He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness as he laughed at me. Laughed.
<You're right, Sub-Visser. I won't kill you.> I squeezed the trigger. The stun-setting knocked the foul Andalite-Controller to the ground.
See, he did shoot him.
quote:
I ran to Loren. I dragged her unconscious body up the ramp into the Jahar. Then, after a second's hesitation, I dragged Chapman aboard, too.
I was just beginning to try dragging the sub-visser to the ship when the first wave of Bug fighters blew by overhead. They shot past, then began to inscribe tight circles, coming back toward us.
Two more Bug fighters. Then two more. The sky was filling with Bug fighters. I would never get the Jahar off the planet.
Unless ...
Had Sub-Visser Seven informed his people that he might be in an Andalite body? Surely. Surely he would have. He would have had to, just to avoid being accidentally shot by his own people. But could the Yeerks tell one Andalite from another?
I raced to the ship, tore open the medical kit and yanked out a stimulant hypo. I ran back to the unconscious sub-visser and I emptied the stimulant into his bloodstream. It would revive him in less than a minute.
Bug fighters were hovering overhead now, some preparing to land. I ran back to the Jahar, closed the hatch, and punched up the ship-to-ship communication.
The face of a Hork-Bajir-Controller appeared on my communications screen. It stared at me with the fury and distaste Yeerks always show for Andalites.
I stared straight back. And in loud, arrogant, harsh thought-speak I said, <What? You don't recognize your sub-visser? Hah-hah! I have done it, you fool! As I said I would. I have acquired an Andalite body!>
The Hork-Bajir eyes wavered, uncertain.
If I showed any hesitation, I was lost. If I was to pass as a Yeerk sub-visser, I could not show any doubt. <You see the Andalite down on the ground?>
"Yes ... Sub-Visser Seven."
<Good, you're not blind as well as stupid. I want to see him run. Do you understand me! As soon as I have lifted off, make him run! And then, when he is good and tired, when his knees buckle with exhaustion, make him dead. Dead! And if you fail me, I will feed you to the Taxxons. Sub-Visser Seven, out.>
I switched off the screen without waiting for an answer. Maybe it would work. Maybe not.
I keyed the controls, lifting the Jahar gently from the ground. I switched on an exterior view and panned the viewfinder till I framed the sub-visser. He was just climbing to his feet.
I'll give the sub-visser credit for one thing: He was not an idiot. He knew instantly what was happening. He broke into a run, just as a hovering Bug fighter fired a Dracon beam near him.
I let the Jahar drift casually over the Skrit Na wreck. Focusing all my attention, I powered the Jahar's tractor beam and latched it onto the white sphere of the Time Matrix.
Sub-Visser Seven was running at full Andalite speed across the sand, pursued by teasing, taunting Bug fighters that seemed to enjoy shooting within inches of him.
The Jahar rose, with the Time Matrix in tow. I pulled the machine closer and closer, snugged it up into the Jahar's belly, and lashed it in place with energy ropes. We rose up through the atmosphere of the Taxxon world. Up through the weird, bright clouds.
Only then did it begin to dawn on the Yeerks.
The ship-to-ship snapped on. An ugly, suspicious Hork-Bajir face glared at me. "Sub-Visser Seven, planet control respectfully directs you to land."
I tried bluffing some more. But when I refused to immediately turn back and land, they knew.
Tactical showed a swarm of Bug fighters rising up from the surface of the planet. But it was too late.
I punched up a hard burn and prepared to lose myself in Zero-space.
So, see, the answers to the questions from last chapter are all revealed.
Chapter 28
quote:
"So, this is Zero-space," Loren said, looking out through the viewport. "We've been in it for a full day and I still don't understand what it is."
I directed my stalk eyes to the viewport. I saw blank white. Empty, whiteness. <Zero-space isn't anything, really,> I said quietly. <It's antispace. You know, like antimatter and antigravity? Well, Zero-space is antispace.>
I had explained this at least twice during the last day. But I guess she was trying to make conversation.
She'd been through one of the worst experiences any creature can endure: She had been made a Controller. I couldn't believe she was even managing to talk without weeping.
Fortunately, the Yeerk in Loren's head had been at the end of its feeding cycle. Yeerks feed on Kandrona rays. Every three days they must drain out of their host and return to the Yeerk pool to absorb Kandrona rays.
So I made a deal with the hungry Yeerk. I could keep Loren tied up and wait for the Yeerk to starve to death. Or the Yeerk could come out willingly. I agreed to put it in deep hibernation. To freeze it. The Yeerk decided hibernation was better than death by Kandrona ray starvation.
I kept my word to the Yeerk. After it crawled out of Loren's ear, I froze it. And then I ejected it from the ship into the vacuum of real space. Someday it might be found and revived. More likely it would sink into the gravity well of a star and be incinerated.
Especially since I made sure to eject it close to a sun.
Maybe that wasn't living up to the spirit of my deal with the Yeerk. But somehow, I just didn't care. My notions of proper behavior had brought disaster.
I was a fool. A silly child living out storybook notions of decency and fairness.
There was no decency in war. Alloran had tried to teach me that. I'd learned it too late.
He's turning cynical.
quote:
"Have you decided where we're going, Elfangor?" Loren asked gently.
"He doesn't know," Chapman said. He spent his time now sitting in a corner, glaring darkly at the two of us. Sub-Visser Seven had been inside Chapman's head. If that had taught the foolish human a lesson, it sure didn't show. "Elfangor is confused. Isn't that right? He screwed up bad ... Arbron trapped in one of those centipede bodies, Alloran made into the first-ever Andalite-Controller. Almost lost the Time Matrix. Gonna be tough explaining all this to the folks back home, eh?"
See what I mean about Chapman in this book?
quote:
I ignored him. Back home. What was home anymore? Was I supposed to return home? Home to my parents? Run free on my old, familiar grass? Spend my days with my old childhood friends?
I wasn't a child anymore. My home was still there, but I would never belong there again.
Loren came over to me. "Elfangor. Snap out of it. We're going in circles in Zero-space."
<Yes. I know.>
"You did the best you could. You're just a kid, like me."
<I am an aristh in the Andalite military. I disobeyed my prince and caused him to be enslaved by the Yeerks. The Yeerks will now learn everything Alloran knows about our defenses. Everything he knows about the capabilities of our weapons. Everything he knows about the locations of our ships. At least he wasn't a scientist, so he can't give them morphing technology or computer software. But he will still be the greatest intelligence victory in Yeerk history.>
Chapman shook his head. "Guess I was right to throw in with the Yeerks, eh? You Andalites are going down. Unless ..."
Loren glared at him. "Why don't you shut up?"
Chapman just grinned. "Unless you Andalites use the Time Matrix thing. Go back in time, find that first little tribe of Yeerk slugs. Kill 'em and the entire Yeerk species is gone. Gone and never even existed. What do they call that? Oh yeah, genocide. You up for a little genocide, Elfangor?"
I just shook my head wearily. <Don't waste your time taunting me, Chapman. It won't work.>
Loren looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"
<He's trying to goad me into using the Time Matrix. Remember, he's been a Controller, however briefly. Sub-Visser Seven left him instructions, just in case something went wrong. Chapman knows that to use the Time Matrix I'd have to return to real space. My guess is that the Yeerks placed a homing beacon on the Jahar. If we return to normal space, we'll light up every Yeerk sensor within a million light years.>
I could see from the dark rage on Chapman's face that I had guessed correctly.
At least I'd gotten one thing right. I wasn't fool enough to fall for -
Suddenly, it was as if a light had gone on in my head. Wherever the Jahar emerged into real space, the Yeerks would go tearing after it.
No matter where.
A trap! I could spring a trap!
But where? Where should I draw the Yeerk fleet?
To the StarSword! My old ship. She was off pursuing a Yeerk task force near the Graysha Nebula. She'd been hoping to meet a second Dome ship there.
Two Dome ships. Plus the Jahar. Enough firepower to handle just about anything the Yeerks could muster.
I went to the control panel and entered the coordinates.
"You have a plan?" Loren asked.
<More or less,> I muttered. I was already having doubts. <There's a place called the Graysha Nebula. We don't know much about it. But there are rumors of a sentient species living in that area. And there are rumors that the Yeerks are exploring the nebula. My old ship, the StarSword, went there to see if it could locate a Yeerk task force we were pursuing.>
"So we're going there to meet up with your old ship. Is ... is this nebula place closer to Earth?"
<No.>
"Elfangor ... am I ever going to get back home?"
<Loren, I will do my best.>
Chapman snorted. "And you've seen how good Elfangor's best is. You might as well kiss Earth goodbye. "
At least Chapman is staying positive. I mean, he shouldn't be so scornful. He's on the ship with them too.
I'm expecting Chapman to get his memory wiped or history reset with the time matrix, he never really read like an early collaborator in the other books. I have 0 memory of where things go for the most part so it's exciting getting this all over again.
I don't know if the rest of the book will invalidate this, but I feel like Chapman in this story was not originally Chapman. Like, the publishers disliked the idea of so many new characters being introduced, and wanted another link to earlier books.
I don't know if the rest of the book will invalidate this, but I feel like Chapman in this story was not originally Chapman. Like, the publishers disliked the idea of so many new characters being introduced, and wanted another link to earlier books.
Yeah, because of his behavior I was wondering if this character wasn't renamed Chapman, too.
I don't know that they were forced to, though. I saw a recent interview with Grant and he said the amount of executive meddling in the content of the Animorphs books was basically nil. He got the feeling almost none of the books were ever read by anyone in Scholastic (with the sole exception of their editor), which might be one reason they got away with so much.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who practice it. I want to give thanks for the fact that we have two more chapters of the Andalite Chronicles tonight.
The Andalite Chronicles-Chapter 29
quote:
<We will emerge into real space,> I explained. <If we're lucky, we won't be far from the StarSword. If we're even luckier, there will be additional Andalite ships close by. From that point it will only take the Yeerks an hour or so to start showing up.>
"And then?" Loren asked.
<Space battle, I suppose. Andalite fighters and Yeerk Bug fighters going at it. Us, too, of course.>
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
<Yes. Show me the best way to tie up a human,> I said, looking at Chapman. <I don't want any distractions.>
We tied the human around his feet and hands using spare conduit hose. Then we tied the hands to the feet behind his back.
"One last thing," Loren said. She took a short length of the hose and wrapped it around Chapman's face, covering his mouth. "Now we won't have to listen to him."
It took me a few seconds to understand. Many species communicate by making sounds with their mouths. But it had never occurred to me you could silence someone with a piece of hose.
<To silence an Andalite you'd have to knock him out,> I said. <This won't hurt him?>
"No. Unfortunately." She smiled to show she had been joking.
After all she had been through, from being kidnapped by Skrit Na to being made a Controller, she could still laugh. I wondered if I'd been wrong to think humor was a weakness. I wondered if Arbron could still laugh.
"Elfangor ... aren't you tempted by what Chapman said? I mean, if it were me, I might want to use that Time machine thing to change things. You know?"
<Like maybe go back in time and avoid getting kidnapped by the Skrit Na to begin with?>
She laughed. "No. Not that. Look, my life was pretty dull before all this. I know when you take me back to Earth you'll have to erase all my memories of this. But still, even though it was horrible sometimes, I don't think I'd want to never have met you. If it wasn't for my mom worrying and all ..."
I was surprised. And pleased, too. <In the Skrit Na ship, where I found the Mustang, I also found pictures of Earth. It looked very beautiful. Wonderful, delicious-looking grass and tall trees and streams of water that bubbled across stones. Is your home like that?>
"We do have places like that," Loren said, smiling sadly. "There's a place we went once, back when I was little and my dad was still with us. Before he went to the war. It's a place called Yosemite. We camped out in a tent. Yosemite is like that."
<And did you stick small white cylinders in your mouth and smile at the beauty of it all?>
"Small white cylinders?" Loren looked puzzled. Then she laughed her strange but delightful human laugh. "You were looking at cigarette ads! Those white cylinders are called cigarettes. They're bad for you, actually. Very bad for you. They make you sick."
<So ... so humans go to beautiful places and use sickening cylinders? Why?>
But Loren was laughing too hard to answer. And pretty soon, even though I had no idea what was so funny, I was laughing, too. Although my laugh could only be heard by Loren inside her own head.
"So," she said after a while. "Why don't you want to use this Time Matrix thing?"
I waved my stalks forward and back in a gesture of uncertainty. <You can't just go messing around with time. They say it's insanely complicated. Sure, maybe I could go back, like Chapman said, and stomp out the first Yeerks who evolved. But who knows how many other things that might affect? Besides, to be honest, I guess I'm scared of the Ellimists.>
"The what?"
<Supposedly they're the race that built the Time Matrix. Thousands and thousands of years ago. They built it, and then, suddenly, as far as anyone can tell, they vanished. The entire species of Ellimists just vanished.>
"You think it was because they used the Time Matrix?"
<No one knows. Some people say the Ellimists still exist, but they've moved beyond the normalspace-time dimensions we know. There are some who say the Ellimists are almost all-powerful.> I shrugged. <Of course, there are others who say they're gone forever. Or even that they never did exist. Now Andalite parents tell their children stories about the Ellimists.>
"Fairy tales."
<Are fairies magical beings in human mythology?>
"Not just fairies. We have elves and leprechauns and Santa Claus and hobbits and werewolves and vampires ... . We even have aliens from outer space."
Despite myself, I laughed. <Yes, those outer space aliens are quite troublesome.>
"Doesn't the Time Matrix prove that these Ellimists are real?"
<Well ... I don't know. But if Ellimists are real, if they really do live in dimensions beyond our own, then they have powers we could not imagine. Pretend ... never mind.>
"No, tell me," Loren urged. "Unless you have something else to do."
<Okay, well, you know that space-time has ten dimensions. There are the normal dimensions of up/down, left/right, and forward/back. Then there is the fourth dimension, which is time. Then, there are six other dimensions, but they are curled up into themselves, so we don't see or feel them. All we
feel are three space dimensions, plus time.>
Loren nodded her head. I wondered what this meant. But she didn't ask me to stop, so I went on.
<Imagine if, instead of three normal space dimensions, we only had two. Imagine we were flat, and we couldn't go up or down, just in the other two directions. Call us the Flatties. See?>
"Like if we lived on a piece of paper," Loren said.
<Exactly. It would be like we were drawings on a piece of paper. And if someone came along and drew a box around us, we could never get out. Because the lines of the box would be walls. But what if a three-dimensional person came along? A three-dimensional person could lift that Flattie right up out of that box. The Flattie wouldn't even know what was happening, because he's never gone up or down before. He doesn't even know up and down exist.>
"You're saying we're like the Flatties. Except we're in three dimensions, not just two. So we're like Cubies or something."
<Yes. So if some creature came along who existed in more dimensions than us, he'd be able to do things that would be impossible for us.>
Elfangor knows the way to a woman's heart is through dimensional theory.
quote:
"Ellimists. That's what they are?"
<Maybe. Like I say, no one knows. But someone built the Time Matrix. Someone real. Someone who isn't around anymore.>
"Whew."
<So maybe we could use the Time Matrix and pop in and out of time. Or maybe we'd disappear, like the Ellimists may have.>
"Or maybe we'd just make these Ellimists mad," Loren said.
<Exactly.>
"But if you give the Time Matrix to your people, won't they use it, anyway? Even with all the risks?"
<A week ago I'd have said absolutely not. I'd have said we Andalites don't do things like that. Not even in war.>
"But now ... whatever Alloran did on that Hork-Bajir planet, it was wrong, wasn't it?"
I stared at her with my main eyes. <Loren, I don't know what's right or wrong anymore. I just don't.>
The computer signaled that we were nearing the translation point.
<We're going back to normal space,> I said. <And by the way ... if we do survive all this, and get you back to Earth, could you show me this place with the grass and trees and tall waterfalls?>
"It's a date," Loren said.
<Could we have a Mustang there, too?>
She put her arm around my waist and looked deep into my eyes with her two tiny blue human eyes. "Anything you want, Elfangor. Just no white cylinders."
So, you could read this as interspecies love or something, and I don't know if you'd be wrong. But I think it's just as much that Elfangor is tired and disillusioned and shaken from what he saw and experienced, and he just wants to run away to a planet that seems pleasant with good food and be with somebody, where he doesn't have to worry about the war or what he's seen and experienced. So, as much as anything else, this is escapist talk for him.
Chapter 30
quote:
<Coming out of Zero-space ... now!>
Zero-space is dead white. Normal space is usually deep black, dotted with stars that burn in bright white and pale red and cold blue.
But this space was not like that.
"Jeez! Amazing!"
<You've never been close to a nebula,> I observed. But the truth was, even I was awed.
The nebula was a dust cloud so large that a dozen solar systems the size of Earth's could have been lost in it with room to spare. It was like a weird, twisted cloud. A cloud of purple and orange that seemed to envelop brilliant stars.
"It's so beautiful!"
<Yes. And if the StarSword is out there somewhere, it'll really be beautiful.>
I glanced over at Chapman. He lay trussed up and gagged. He glared back at me.
<Right now Yeerk ships are hearing the transponder they attached to us. They'll be on us in a very short time. I'm conducting a sensor sweep, looking for any Andalite vessels. But it's hard with the nebula around us. The dust confuses the sensors.>
"Are we a long way from Earth?"
<Yes. Even by the standards of space. We are hundreds of light-years away.>
Loren stared out at the nebula. She bit her lip a little with her teeth and took her arm away from my waist.
Humans like to use touch. It seems odd at first. But I had gotten used to it.
<I'm going to try calling the StarSword,> I said.
I made the thought-speak link with the communications system. <Any Andalite ship this sector, any Andalite ship this sector. This is Jahar.>
I expected to have to wait. I was shocked when I heard the voice of Captain Feyorn. <Jahar! Jahar! Alloran, is that you? We are under attack. Say again, under attack. Can you ->
<StarSword, I lost you! StarSword!> I checked the display. Yes, we had a location fix! I punched in the new heading.
<Loren, get down on the ground. Back against the bulkhead. I'm going to Maximum Burn!>
She ran and threw herself down on the ground, just as I punched in the burn. But the acceleration was barely noticeable. The Jahar had amazingly good compensators. But even though there was no feeling of acceleration, the ship blew through space.
"Elfangor, what's going on?"
<I don't know. But I'm powering up all weapons.>
At Maximum Burn it took less than ten minutes for us to be able to spot the great Dome ship. She came up on my view screen at high magnification. She looked like a glowing steel stick with a bright half-ball on one end. Her engines were off. In the space around her were a dozen or more of our
fighters.
But what caught my attention were the asteroids - rough, dark tumbling rocks. The StarSword seemed to be in the middle of an asteroid field. Only that was unlikely. Asteroids orbited stars. There was no star close enough to hold an asteroid field in its gravity.
"Hey! It moved!" Loren said.
<What are you talking about?> I demanded. I sounded rude because I was busy trying to figure out what was going on. And I didn't think a human was going to be very helpful, really.
"Those rocks. Those asteroids. Look! Look at them!"
I turned one stalk eye to watch the asteroids. Then, in a flash, I focused all four eyes.
<They're moving! They are under power!>
As we stared, transfixed, one of the asteroids seemed to sprout a tail. It was a plume of hot plasma! The asteroid turned! It changed course, and shot toward one of the StarSword's fighters.
The fighter fired a full-power shredder blast at the asteroid. The green beam zapped through the vacuum. The asteroid glowed where the shredder blast hit, and then it increased speed.
The fighter turned to run. But to my amazement, the asteroid accelerated. It stayed on the fighter's tail, twisting, turning, accelerating and then ...
"Oh! Elfangor, look!"
<No! It's impossible!>
A pillar of living rock extended from the asteroid like some primitive arm. It struck the fighter. I saw a tiny puff as the air was squeezed from the ship.
And then the rock simply grew over the doomed ship. It grew swift, unstoppable, until, within seconds, the entire fighter was covered by living rock.
The asteroid had eaten a fighter.
In case you're curious, asteroids aren't supposed to do that.
Speaking of two-dimensional critters, there's a marvelous book written in the 80's called "Planiverse" about a bunch of computer scientists who accidentally open communication with a 2D world. It goes into insane detail regarding 2-dimensional machines, digestion, nerves, gravity, electricity, engines, rockets, eyes, ecology, urban design and more. The human conversations with the 2D beings remind me very much of Elfangor and the Flatties.
Come to think of it, the names- Arda, Yendred, Bes Sallur- wouldn't be out of place in an animorphs book either.
(I could post a few of the crazier images if anyone's interested.)
The original book dealing with that sort of thing is Edwin Abbott's 1884 book "Flatland", where he imagines an inhabitant of a two dimensional world being visited by a being with three dimensions.
The original book dealing with that sort of thing is Edwin Abbott's 1884 book "Flatland", where he imagines an inhabitant of a two dimensional world being visited by a being with three dimensions.
My introduction to Flatland was at about the same time I was reading Animorphs through a book called
The Boy Who Reversed Himself by William Sleator. I read a lot of stuff by him at that time, the whole library's worth as far as I know. It was good sci-fi horror that I would recommend to any kid who likes the psychological aspect of Animorphs. Now I kind of wonder how his books hold up as an adult...
We dealt with parts of Flatland when I was in an AP Geometry class as a sophomore in high school. Math was something I struggled with insanely from elementary to high school, but since I'd taken Excel/AP classes, the "regular" math classes didn't fit in to my schedules
I didn't fully grasp all that stuff til I was taking AP Calculus as a senior and one day, the teacher said something. I don't remember exactly what it was, but 12 years of math classes suddenly just clicked and math has been very easy for me since
I didn't fully grasp all that stuff til I was taking AP Calculus as a senior and one day, the teacher said something. I don't remember exactly what it was, but 12 years of math classes suddenly just clicked and math has been very easy for me since
For me it was "the things on either side of an equals sign are the same, they're different ways of saying the same thing." Which is kind of embarrassing.
My introduction to Flatland was at about the same time I was reading Animorphs through a book called The Boy Who Reversed Himself by William Sleator. I read a lot of stuff by him at that time, the whole library's worth as far as I know. It was good sci-fi horror that I would recommend to any kid who likes the psychological aspect of Animorphs. Now I kind of wonder how his books hold up as an adult...
Those books were awesome. I'm pretty sure I basically went from Animorphs to those books in middle school.
My introduction to Flatland was at about the same time I was reading Animorphs through a book called The Boy Who Reversed Himself by William Sleator. I read a lot of stuff by him at that time, the whole library's worth as far as I know. It was good sci-fi horror that I would recommend to any kid who likes the psychological aspect of Animorphs. Now I kind of wonder how his books hold up as an adult...
I think
Interstellar Pig was the only thing I read by Sleator.
The Andalite Chronicles-Chapter 31
quote:
"What are those things?" Loren asked in horror.
<I don't know. I've never seen or heard of anything like them. I mean, they are impossible!>
"They're like living asteroids or something."
<I think that's exactly what they are. But that's impossible.>
As I watched in horror, a second fighter was caught and swallowed up by a living rock.
<The StarSword will start shooting now,> I said confidently. <A Dome ship's shredders can blow chunks off a planet. They'll wipe these things out!>
TSEEEEWWWWW! TSEEEEWWWWW!
I had never seen the StarSword's main shredders fire before. It was awesome. The beams of green light looked as thick as tree trunks as they blasted through space and hit one of the asteroids with enough power to punch a hole through a moon.
The asteroid glowed brightly. But it did not explode. It did not disintegrate. It did not melt.
It turned!
<It's going after the StarSword!>
Dozens of the asteroids seemed to be swarming the space around the StarSword. Close by, notthree hundred miles away, I saw another fighter, twisting and turning, trying to lose one of the rocks.
<Go to Zero-space!> I yelled. <Whatever these things are, they can't have Zero-space flight!>
I guess the fighter pilot thought the same thing. I saw his engines glow bright as he powered up for a Zero-space jump. Suddenly, three more asteroids closed in on the fighter. They blocked its path.
A massive arm of rock shot out and punched right into the fighter.
The pilot was blown clear. Out into empty space. He kicked his hooves for a few seconds. Then he stopped moving.
"Oh, God!"
<No! No! Noooo!>
The StarSword fired all shredders, lighting up black space with brilliant beams of light. But it
didn't work. In fact, it seemed to draw more asteroids.
"Hey! That's just attracting them," Loren cried. "The engines and the weapons - they attract them!"
<You're right!> I don't know which shocked me more. That these asteroids were drawn to energy discharges. Or that it was the human girl who had figured it out.
I punched up communications. <StarSword, StarSword, this is Jahar. The asteroids are attracted by energy discharge! You're drawing them to you!>
I don't know if my message got through or not. But just then, I realized we had a whole new set of problems. Behind us, two Yeerk ships materialized, entering real space! They were no more than five thousand miles away.
A Pool ship, like a fat, awkward, three-legged spider. As soon as it appeared in real space, it began launching Bug fighters.
And beside the Pool ship, something I had never seen before. It was jet black so that it was barely visible. It was smaller than the Pool ship, but bigger than a Bug fighter. What seemed to be the bridge was a hard-edged diamond attached by a long triangular shaft to twin engines. The engines were a strange shape, like the blades of a two-headed ax.
The entire thing looked like some ancient weapon - a battle ax. It was like some flying HorkBajir.
A Blade ship.
There's our introduction to the Blade ship.
quote:
Don't ask me how I knew. I don't believe in psychic things, although some Andalites do. But still, I knew who was in that Blade ship.
I felt cold hatred. Hatred of that black ship. Hatred of the abomination I had helped to create.
<So. He's still alive,> I whispered. <This time, no mercy.>
Space was filling up quickly. Yeerk ships, Andalite ships, and the deadly, impossible asteroids. But the Yeerks were thousands of miles behind me, and I was thousands of miles from the Andalite fleet. If I was lucky, the Yeerks would not be able to see the Dome ship on their sensors yet.
And they would not even be looking for murderous asteroids.
The computer blinked to show an incoming communication. It was visual as well as thoughtspeak.
The image that appeared on the screen was Andalite.
The familiar face of Alloran-Semitur-Corrass. But from that familiar face shone an evil that I cannot describe.
<Ah, Elfangor, I believe,> Sub-Visser Seven said. <Still have the Time Matrix, I hope? I'm here to take it from you.>
I had not yet switched on my own image for him to see. I had to think fast. I grabbed a handheld shredder and carefully set it for lowest power.
<Loren? Listen! The sub-visser doesn't know you aren't still a Controller. Take this. Stand behind me, where he can see you when I switch on my screen. Give me a few seconds to talk, then fire this. But miss me, okay?>
"Got it," she said.
I switched on my screen. <So, Sub-Visser Seven. You survived. Too bad.>
<I did survive. But you almost got me there, you really did. And by the way, it's no longer Sub- Visser Seven. I'm the first Yeerk to capture an Andalite body. I have already delivered more intelligence on Andalite fleet deployments than a century of spying could have yielded. So it's not Sub-Visser anything anymore. You are addressing Visser Thirty-Two.>
<You're still just a slug as far as I'm concerned. You want the Time Matrix?> I asked. <Come and take it from me. I promise you ->
TSSSSEEEEWWWW!
Loren fired the shredder on low power. I jerked suddenly, and slumped forward, turning off the screen as I fell.
I jumped back up.
"You want this back?" Loren asked, holding the shredder toward me.
<No. Keep it. You did well. Perfect timing. The visser will think you're still a Controller. He'll think you stunned me. I'm killing all power. We'll just wait for the sub-visser to come to us.>
"Is this going to work?" Loren asked anxiously.
<If it doesn't, neither of us is going to the Yosemite,> I said.
"You picked a great time to learn how to joke, Elfangor."
We didn't have to wait long. The Blade ship fired up its engines and leaped forward. It ate up the few thousand miles in seconds.
<Come to me, Visser whatever-your-number-is-now. Come to me,> I muttered to myself.
I targeted the shredders on the belly of the Blade ship. I was perfectly calm. Despite the battle I knew was raging around the StarSword. Despite the approach of the visser's ship. One shot was all I needed. I would wait till he was practically on me. And then -
WHAPPP!
"Ahhhh!"
Chapman! He had freed his legs and kicked Loren's feet. She went down hard. The shredder skittered across the floor.
The human was slower than me. But he was closer. His bound hands closed around the shredder seconds before I reached him.
TSSEEEEEWW!
He fired!
I dodged.
The Blade ship closed in.
TSSEEEEWWW!
<Arrrrggghhh!> A glancing hit. The beam struck my left arm and left foreleg. Pain shot through me like shards of glass. My left arm was as numb as stone. My left front leg was useless. I could stand, but I could barely move.
"How do you like it, Andalite?" Chapman crowed as he rose to a standing position. He leveled the shredder at me.
"Oh, I have so had it with you!" Loren yelled. Still lying on the deck, she drew her legs up and kicked upward. Both her artificial hooves hit Chapman right where his legs joined his body.
"Ooooofff" Chapman gasped. He grabbed himself with both hands, still clutching the shredder.
I believe the kick was painful to him.
"Oof this!" Loren said. She jumped up off the deck and delivered an impossibly high kick that caught Chapman under the chin. His head snapped back. Loren snatched the shredder from him.
"You know, Chapman, you are really making the human race look bad," she said. "You are seriously embarrassing me."
"Who's side are you on?" Chapman grated.
"Not yours," Loren said. She fired the shredder and Chapman jerked and went limp.
BUMP! BUMP!
The Jahar shook from a slow impact. The Blade ship had latched on! They were boarding us! As I watched, half-paralyzed, the hatch began to open.
So, who predicted this chapter would start with aggressive living asteroids and end with Chapman getting kicked in the crotch? Anyone?
Chapter 32
quote:
The hatch opened. <Loren! The shredder ... . Shoot!>
The hatch door flew open with a boom. Loren fired!
TSSSEEEEWWW!
A Hork-Bajir warrior fell back. An arm appeared, reaching past the collapsed Controller and aiming a Dracon beam.
An Andalite arm!
TSSSSEEEEWWWW!
The Dracon beam fired. The shot missed me but hit Loren and knocked her, already unconscious, into me. With only three good legs, I fell hard to the deck on my numb arm. Loren landed on top of me.
The evil Yeerk creature who had stolen Alloran's body pushed past the Hork-Bajir as I struggled desperately to get out from under Loren.
The visser was in! He was aboard the Jahar!
I had one chance. One. And then let the Yeerk kill me! I swung my tail, aiming blind. The visser jerked back reflexively. But I wasn't aiming for him.
The tip of my blade hit the console. And to my great pleasure I heard -
TSSSSWWWWEEEWW!
The Jahar fired her shredders. Point-blank range. Point-blank range into the belly of the Blade ship.
<Noooooo!> the visser screamed.
Kuh-BOOOOOOOM! The Blade ship tore loose of the Jahar.
FWWOOOOOSSSH! The hatch was open to space. Air blew from the ship, sending it into a spin. Everything that wasn't bolted down flew toward the open hatch.
The unconscious Hork-Bajir was thrown into space. Chapman's unconscious body slid toward the opening. The visser was knocked down.
But even as he lay there, the Yeerk visser aimed his Dracon beam at me. <You're a real source of agitation, Elfangor. Now, die!>
In despair I whipped my tail.
WHUMPF! Something hit us hard, just as the Yeerk squeezed the trigger.
TSSEEEEWWW! The Dracon blast missed me!
I was gasping for air. The oxygen was gone. The Jahar was spinning out of control through space. The visser slammed against the walls as we spun wildly. Loren's body rolled away toward the hatch, but now the automatic safety devices of the ship were slowly closing the door.
We spun, and through the window I saw flashes of Andalite fighters half-covered with living rock. And Yeerk Bug fighters now suffering the same fate.
I saw, in a wild, spinning flash, the Blade ship, one blade shot away.
And then ... coming at us ... rushing toward us ... an asteroid!
FFWWWUUUMMMPPP!
The asteroid latched onto the poor, dying Jahar. And in wild, crazily pitching flashes as I was tossed helplessly, I saw the window going dark. Half-covered now. Half-covered by living rock!
The asteroid had us!
I was slammed violently by acceleration as the asteroid moved away from the battlefield, holding the Jahar in its death grip.
The Jahar's compensators were off now. The ship was dead. Half-swooning from lack of air, I staggered up, fighting the insane force of acceleration.
Air! We needed air!
The emergency environmental power unit should have come on. But the ship's power was dead, drained away by the energy-eating asteroid.
Air!
My lungs screamed. My hearts hammered madly, circulating useless blood. The manual emergency tanks, I had to ... to ...
But maybe it didn't matter ... . Maybe it was pointless to fight. Arbron ... gone. Alloran ... worse than gone. Terrible things ... terrible sights ...
Let it all end. It was fine without air. Fine to suck with your lungs and feel nothing. I was sinking, down, down, down.
No need to worry. Nothing to be afraid of.
Let it end, Elfangor.
Just let it end ... .
No spoilers here, but the beginning of the third book, coming up tomorrow, is "An Alien Dies".....Not very hopeful given this chapter.
"I don't believe in any of that psychic mumbo jumbo" says the man who communicates through telepathy.
"Any sufficiently advanced biology is indistinguishable from magic"
I completely forgot about the living rocks.
I completely forgot about the living rocks.
Me too, and it reminds me of a sort of Alastair Reynolds space opera where the galaxy is full of horrifying and unexplained alien things
My introduction to Flatland was at about the same time I was reading Animorphs through a book called The Boy Who Reversed Himself by William Sleator. I read a lot of stuff by him at that time, the whole library's worth as far as I know. It was good sci-fi horror that I would recommend to any kid who likes the psychological aspect of Animorphs. Now I kind of wonder how his books hold up as an adult...
I've been on a kick of re-reading things I read as a child, and I was sure I'd read
House of Stairs, but I read it this year and had no recollection of any aspect of it (As opposed to Animorphs, which I read when I was a kid, re-read at 19, and it now still throws up a bunch of stuff I'd forgotten but immediately remember as soon as I see it). It's about a bunch of different kids who wake up in an Escher-like labyrinth of staircases and have to work together to escape... it was fine.
I think my actual real strong memory of Sleator's fiction is a short story about a kid who repeatedly gets stuck in an elevator with a fat woman. Something about the deep yet inexplicable anxieties of a child.
I completely forgot about the living rocks.
Same. Apparently I didn't remember anything that happened in this book, except the last few chapters before the end.
Me too, and it reminds me of a sort of Alastair Reynolds space opera where the galaxy is full of horrifying and unexplained alien things
I read one of his when I was off work sick and on the edge of fever and nausea. Baaaaaad decision
I read one of his when I was off work sick and on the edge of fever and nausea. Baaaaaad decision
I made that mistake last summer with Chernobyl. I was home laid up in bed ping ponging between there and the toilet after contracting norovirus from a friend's newborn baby and with nothing but time and a smart TV hooked up to various streaming services I made the mistake of watching a miniseries where people spend most of their time violently vomiting, sweating, and writhing in the worst agony they've ever felt in their life.
Fun times. I finished the series a few days later when I was feeling better, however.
The Andalite Chronicles:An Alien Dies-Chapter 33
quote:
Air!
My lungs burned. My hearts pounded desperately. My mind was shutting down from lack of oxygen. As I faded out, a deadly weariness took the place of terror.
The ship's artificial gravity was gone. I floated, weightless, as the floor and walls and ceiling all spun wildly around me.
Why should I care? Why should I resist? Why not just let it all end, here, now, as the Jahar fell into the monstrous black hole?
My life was a disaster. I had failed in so many ways ... . Failed to save Arbron from being trapped forever in Taxxon morph. Failed to stop the Yeerk called Visser Thirty-two from stealing the body of my prince, Alloran-Semitur-Corrass. Failed to defeat the surprise attack of the living asteroids. Failed even to protect the two humans I was supposed to take care of.
And worst of all, I had failed to deliver the Time Matrix to my people. The Time Matrix: power beyond imagination.
Airless! My head swam with disconnected thoughts and images. Airless! In a ship that spun powerless, dead, through space.
Through the still-clear window I saw the huge swirl of dust and debris that marked the approaches to the black hole. But at the center of that swirl, nothing the eye could see. It was a collapsed star so dense that its gravity trapped light itself.
Yes, Elfangor, my dying mind said, let it end.
I saw the abomination, Visser Thirty-two, the only Andalite-Controller in the galaxy. The only Yeerk ever to gain control of an Andalite body. He was swooning from the lack of oxygen. He was slammed by the spinning floor and knocked, weightless, into the ceiling, four legs flailing, arms and tail all tangled around.
I held on to a protrusion in the control panel. But as the ship twirled, with all gravity gone, I felt something large and soft bump into me.
It was Loren. The female human. Unconscious. Never to be conscious again, if I didn't reach the emergency air supply and use the manual release.
And then it came to me, in a moment of clarity: I had no choice. When Arbron had been in utter despair and had wanted to die, I stopped him. Because without life there is no despair, but without life there can also never be hope.
That's a good quote, right there.
quote:
I had no right to erase Loren's hope, no matter how bad I felt.
I searched my crazy, swirling, nightmare world with all my eyes and found the panel I was searching for. I focused on it with my stalk eyes, striving blearily to keep them focused.
But it was so hard. So hard to know up from down, left from right, with all the world spinning, and my own poor oxygen-deprived brain all but extinguished.
Had to reach that panel.
I would have one chance. One only. Too far gone to try a second time.
I aimed and kicked and flew weightless across the cabin. Missed! I grabbed. Missed! I floated helplessly away.
Suddenly, a hand reached up and shoved me back toward the panel. A human hand! Impossible!
Loren had regained consciousness. In a near vacuum. Without air. With temperatures already dropping toward absolute zero!
She had regained consciousness. And seen what I was trying to do. She had propelled me back toward the panel. This time I reached and grabbed. I ripped the panel open, and turned the stiff mechanical release knob.
You cannot see air, of course. You don't really feel it on your skin, most of the time. But when it is gone, you notice it.
My lungs sucked and drew nothing in. Nothing!
My lungs gasped again, and this time, I sensed just the faintest wisp of something.
I sucked again and <aaaahhh!> A sharp pain as my collapsed lungs filled with air.
Air! I drew deep breath after deep breath, each breath hurting, but hurting less than the one before. It was not a pain I minded.
I clung to the panel with my left hand, my hooves floating free, my tail drifting behind me. And for a while I just breathed, and thanked the entire universe for letting me feel air in my lungs again.
<Are you all right?> I asked Loren.
She smiled a human smile, the characteristic upturning of the corners of her mouth. It was a weak, shaky smile. But I was glad to see it.
"I thought we were done for," she said.
<Done for? Oh. Dead. Yes, we almost were. But you humans don't give up easily, do you?>
"Neither do you Andalites," she said. "Now what?"
I surveyed the situation. The visser appeared to be just regaining consciousness. The other human, Chapman, was still unconscious, drifting lazily against the far wall like a rag doll.
<Well, we have air, but no power. The living asteroids drained the ship of power. We are falling toward a black hole.>
"Oh. That's not good," she said.
<If we fall into the black hole it will crush us down to the size of a carbon atom. The ship, all of us, crushed to the size of a single atom.>
"Yeah, we learned about black holes in school."
I was surprised that humans knew about such things.
<There is only one way out, Andalite.>
Visser Thirty-two. The very sound of his thought-speak voice in my head filled me with rage. He sounded exactly like Alloran. But I knew that Alloran's mind was a prisoner in his own head now. He could watch, listen, feel, but not control. The Yeerk in his brain controlled him now. The Yeerk moved his arms and legs and tail. The Yeerk decided when each breath would be drawn. The Yeerk aimed his eyes and formed his thought-speech.
I turned myself to face him. I had no idea which of us would win a tail fight. He had Alloran's experience. But I had seen that I was faster than Alloran.
<Don't be a fool, Elfangor,> the visser sneered. <What will be gained by you and me slashing each other up with these excellent Andalite tails?>
<You have a better idea?> I asked. <Because I can think of a lot of good reasons to go tail-to-tail with you.>
The visser laughed. <You blame me for all your own failings? I'm not the one who left his friend back on the Taxxon world, trapped in that vile worm's body. I'm not the one who disobeyed his prince's orders and let ten thousand Yeerks escape. A bit of disobedience that helped cause poor old
Alloran's downfall.>
I wanted to shrug off his words. But there was truth in them. And it is hard to ignore the truth.
And pointless, as well.
<You have something to say, Yeerk?>
<Yes. We are falling toward a black hole in a dead ship. But we have a way out. The Time Matrix.>
I stared at him with my main eyes. But my stalk eyes saw Loren look at me with fresh hope.
<In case you haven't noticed, Visser, the Time Matrix is strapped to the outside of the ship. The outside. In fact, it's probably drifting free. It was held in place with energy ropes. Those are gone.>
<Gravity,> the Yeerk said. <There should be just enough attraction between the ship and the Time Matrix to keep it close.>
I did the familiar calculations in my head. He was right. The Time Matrix was probably still just outside the ship.
<How do you propose getting to it?> I asked.
<We would have to work together, Andalite. And quickly.>
So you like stories where two enemies have to team up? We're getting that story!
Chapter 34
quote:
<Work together?>
<One of us will have to be reeled outside. On a rope or cable. Someone will have to hold that rope. And someone else will have to be on the end of that rope.>
<And do what? Pull the Time Matrix in through the hatch? That will mean losing all our air again. We don't have force fields anymore.>
<Yes. It will be do-or-die,> the visser said. <We can use the air hoods for an emergency five minutes.>
I stared blankly at him. <What air hoods?>
<You forget I control Alloran. And this was his ship. I know all the ship's secrets. There is a small supply of emergency hoods. Alloran kept them for just such an occasion.>
I thought about that for a few seconds. It made me sick to cooperate with the Yeerk. But what other choice did I have? <Here are my terms: I will go outside. You hold the rope.>
The Yeerk laughed. <And when you reach the Time Matrix you'll activate it and disappear, leaving me behind.>
<No. I would not leave Loren ... I mean, the humans. Search Alloran's mind. He knows. You'll see it's true.>
Visser Thirty-two considered for a moment. <Yes, it seems you are correct. Alloran decided you had formed some pathetic feelings for this human female. But just in case you decide to betray me anyway, I remind you that I still have my tail. I can finish your human friend slowly as we sink toward that black hole.>
It took a few minutes to tear enough cable loose from the controls to form a long lifeline. Even though I wouldn't weigh anything, I would still have mass enough to break a too-weak line.
True to his claim, Visser Thirty-two found four air hoods. They had been stashed in each of the individual quarters. They were simple but effective models. Basically, they were just clear plastic bags that slipped over your head and tied at the neck. There was a small oxygen bottle. Very small. The hoods were rated for five minutes. The mix of oxygen and other gases, as well as subtler ingredients, would keep my body from depressurizing in the vacuum of space.
But after five minutes my air would run out. The oxygen inside my body would expand, bursting every blood vessel, rupturing my eyes. A painful death.
I had not explained these details to Loren.
I tied the hood in place and helped Loren put hers on. We tied one on the still-unconscious Chapman. Then I carefully tied the cable around my tail.
<Ready?> the visser asked me.
<I'm ready,> I said. <You just worry about yourself, Yeerk.>
The visser laughed. <Alloran is so right about you. You're a moralizing, arrogant, weak-willed little fool.>
<Loren?> I said. <We're going to open the hatch. Air will rush out but we'll do it more slowly than before. Still, keep an eye on your fellow human. We don't want him sucked out into space.>
"We don't?" Loren asked.
I looked at her, puzzled.
"Sarcasm," she explained. "A type of humor."
I would have laughed, but I was just too scared. I lifted the hood and filled my lungs with cabin air. Then I replaced the hood, turned on the oxygen, and nodded to Visser Thirty-two.
The hatch began to open. Everything that could have been sucked out into space already had been, so nothing much happened. There was a sort of breeze, then nothing, as the hatch finished opening. But the cold was like a fist. Cold like nothing any planet dweller could imagine.
I stood in the doorway and stared out at space. Below me, huge beyond imagining, was the swirl of dust, feeding the black hole. At the far edge of the swirl was a star. The star was being drained by the black hole. A huge, long, arced plume of hot gas was being drawn from the star into the black hole.
I hoped there had not been planets around that star. I hoped no sentient species had met its fate this way, torn apart by the space-warping might of the black hole.
I had a vision of myself, falling away free. Falling and falling into the black monster. I shook my head to clear the image.
<Focus, Elfangor,> I muttered to myself. <Worry about the black hole if you fail. Not till then.>
I looked back along the axis of the Jahar. Her elongated oval and three rakish engines and wonderfully long shredder spike still looked so potent.
The ship spun in space. Around and around in a wobbly loop. It's disorienting, even if you've been through all the training for things like that. The swirl of dust and hot gases would be overhead one second, beneath me the next. Stars sped by overhead.
I searched back along the ship for the Time Matrix. But it wasn't there. Had it drifted entirely away? Had the living asteroids taken it?
Steadying myself as well as I could, I pushed off into space. I aimed to counter the spin of the ship. The result was that the ship now spun slowly beneath me. And there, rising from the far side of the ship, like a moon coming up over a planet, was the Time Matrix.
<I see it!> I reported. <It's wedged in place by the engine pylons. Going after it.>
If you have never tried to move in zero gravity, you have no idea how utterly impossible it can be. You're floating weightless, with no up or down. Nothing to push off against. If the cable were to break I could float forever, just a few feet away from the ship, and yet never be able to move back across that tiny distance.
But I had been well-trained in zero-gravity movement. I yanked lightly on the cable with my tail, drawing myself back toward the ship. I timed the impact carefully and tapped two hooves on the hull.
Just enough to change my direction.
I floated back toward the engines. Back toward the Time Matrix. It lay there like the egg of some unimaginably huge bird. Ten feet across, it fit neatly into the cradle formed by the engine pylon.
I drifted toward it, stretching out hands stiff and numb with cold. I touched it! Touched it and stopped my momentum carefully so that I wouldn't bounce off it.
My bare, frozen hands touched the hard, smooth surface. And somehow, the Time Matrix seemed to warm me. I felt heat glow up through my stiff fingers and up my awkward arms.
Now how do I move you back to the hatch? I wondered.
It was far too big to get my arms around. I would have to use the cable to fashion a sling. And I had exactly three minutes before the hood ran empty and all of us - the visser, Loren, Chapman, and I - were done for.
I worked quickly, untying the cable from my tail, forming it into two big loops with a crossbrace.
It wasn't much. It wasn't secure. But it was all I could do.
<Okay,> I said. <Pull!>
The visser pulled, and slowly the Time Matrix, with me holding onto one of the cable ends, began to move toward the hatch.
It's going to work, I told myself. It's going to work. We are going to use the Time Matrix.
The first living creatures to have used the dread machine for thousands and thousands of years.
I can't speak to the physics of any of this, but it seems right to me.
This is a good chapter, but I just cannot wait for what comes next. It's so wonderfully insane.
Yeah, I remember the third act of this book being really great.
I'm catching up with this thread and I'm near the end of the book where they go into the rainforest. I like the scene where Jake freaks out from the pressure. I feel like that book does a very good job of showing the strain gradually building up in Jake, and the moment he couldn't deal with it anymore felt very "natural." Like as the reader you sort of feel the same pressure he does.
I liked this part in particular:
quote:
I felt like my head was swimming. Somehow I'd just hoped there would be an answer at the end. But there wasn't.
It's easy to imagine how, due to being completely exhausted, he'd just sort of feel no choice but to make these decisions with faith that things will work out, so the minute they finally reach their destination and he has time to think again he's suddenly forced to confront the fact that he doesn't know what to do and no one else is going to give him an answer.
edit: Also lol at the part in the next book where the crocodile prevents Rachel from killing a young child
edit2: This segment reinforces what people were saying earlier about Andalites not being drawn correctly:
quote:
Since we were safe inside the barn, Ax was back in his own body now. His body is a strange but cool-looking mix of bluish deer body, humanlike arms and shoulders, and definitely alien head.
Note the absence of mentioning a torso/chest; it specifically only mentions arms/shoulders and head, which isn't how most people would describe something like a deer-centaur.
That's awesome. Totally and completely awesome.
Wait, did the NIN ="Nice is Neat" thing originate in Animorphs? I vividly remember that and for some reason thought it was some sort of more wide-spread joke thing.
Wait, did the NIN ="Nice is Neat" thing originate in Animorphs? I vividly remember that and for some reason thought it was some sort of more wide-spread joke thing.
Animorphs was the first I came across it, but I'm not big on that type of music.
The Andalite Chronicles-Chapter 35
quote:
We snugged the Time Matrix up against the hatch, with air and time running out.
Once more inside the Jahar, I could see the suffering that Loren had endured. The blend of gases from the hoods was adjusted for Andalite bodies, not humans. She was in pain from gradual decompression. She could barely stand.
The visser, though, still stood. Or at least floated.
<Well done, Andalite,> he said. <Thirty seconds left to activate this thing.>
<Go ahead, Yeerk,> I sneered. <Make your move.>
I saw the coldness in his eyes. Colder even than the freezing cold of space. I knew I had guessed right. He had intended to eliminate me. One slash of his Andalite tail to finish me off.
But I was prepared and he knew it. Which of us would win a tail fight in zero gravity? He didn't know, and neither did I. And there was no time left for mistakes.
How does one turn this thing on? I wondered, looking at the white globe half crammed into the hatchway. No visible instruments or control panels. Has to be direct mind-link using a physical interface. Loren moved her lips as though speaking. But in the vacuum no sound could be heard. I saw through the plastic hood that her lips had turned blue. Her eyes were fluttering.
<Touch,> I said. <The Matrix responds to touch. I think if we touch and form a mental link, we can ->
The visser moved. Not to attack, but to press his hand against the Time Matrix. He was trying to gain control over it before I could!
I pressed my hand against the Matrix and searched desperately in my mind for a link.
What happened next is almost impossible to describe. And surely impossible for anyone to understand who has not experienced it himself.
As I touched the Time Matrix, and searched for it with my mind, the entire universe simply opened up. Opened up like a piece of fruit that has been exploded into its segments. But that's not telling a millionth of it.
Everything changed. Everything! The ship around me, the familiar Jahar, was suddenly not a vessel anymore, but an amazing array of fragments, each twisted inside out and outside in. Each piece was connected to every other piece in insane ways that no rational mind could make sense of.
And from each piece of the ship there stretched lines that curled and twirled through space, connecting back to the Taxxon world and back to the StarSword and back to a thousand other places,
all somehow visible to me. I could see every place the ship had been. It was as if each of those places were right here and a billion miles away at once! But all the lines of the ship were dim and dull compared to the spectacle of the living bodies around me. I saw the Andalite body of Alloran opened up and split apart, transparent, twisted so that every part could be seen from every angle at once. I saw the living, beating hearts! I saw the muscles
of the tail. I saw the ways the eyes were attached to the brain, and not just from outside, but from inside. And to my horror, I saw the Yeerk slug. It was wrapped around Alloran's brain, sinking into every wrinkle and crevice, sinking deep between the four segments. I could literally see the flow of
thoughts and emotions. I saw inside the slug that was Visser Thirty-two. I saw the way the Yeerk mind drew memories from Alloran and sent back orders. I saw and felt the impotent rage of Alloran as he lay helpless in the Yeerk's grasp.
I know how impossible it is to really grasp this. But I saw in and through and around everything at once. I saw time lines stretching back from the Yeerk and back from Alloran. I saw their pasts. And I saw the horrible moment when those time lines became entwined, becoming one.
I could see Alloran's past in flashes of wild action and wild emotion. I saw the terrible moment when Alloran stood amidst battlefield slaughter on the Hork-Bajir home world. I saw the ground piled high with Hork-Bajir and Andalite dead.
And I saw the actual decision deep in Alloran's despairing brain, the decision to release the forbidden Quantum virus.
I felt his bitterness when even that evil measure failed, and the Hork-Bajir were lost to the Yeerks. I saw the retreat of the shattered, beaten Andalite force.
I was almost drowning from this assault of data. It was as if I had been plugged directly into every computer ever built and all of them were dumping information into my brain.
I even saw the time line of the black hole itself. I saw it form from the explosive moment of the universe's birth, and watched it condense and burn, bright as a huge star. I saw it die and collapse, digging a hole in space itself.
But then, amidst all the swarm of information, among all the insides and outsides, all the pasts and all the connections, I felt the will of Visser Thirty-two.
I felt him take hold of the Time Matrix. And I felt the Matrix respond, felt it turn to him. In the visser's Yeerk brain I saw the image of the Yeerk home world. He was forming it, clear and detailed. I saw the awful pools where the Yeerks were born. I felt the Kandrona rays that beat down from
the Yeerks' own strange sun.
He was directing the Time Matrix! Aiming it! Telling it to take him there, to the Yeerk home world!
NO!
I focused my will, and in the weird universe I inhabited, I saw my own living brain as it focused, concentrated, bringing more and more mental power to bear.
It was insane! I could watch my own brain work. Watch my own brain watching my own brain watching my own brain.
I had to take control of the Time Matrix. I had to fight, to resist the visser. I summoned up an image in my head. But it was a confused picture. I saw the part of the Andalite world where I had grown up. The trees, the grass, the sky ... . But mixed in with that image were others. I saw them float up out of my own brain. I saw them skim by, three-dimensional pictures looking so flat and strange in this multidimensional universe.
I saw my own Andalite world, but mixed in with it were images of Earth - the pictures I had seen.
Somewhere far off, I realized I could see my own body beginning to freeze. Systems were shutting down. I could see inside fingers that were frozen stiff. I could see a tail that hung limp, all tension gone. My hearts were beating sluggishly.
I was watching my own body die. I was weakening. The visser, too, was hurt by the cold, but the Yeerk himself, down inside Alloran's head, was still alert and strong.
Slowly the balance shifted to him. The images were more and more of the Yeerk home world. His images were coming in over mine, like a tide. I was losing. I was failing as the cold shut down my body and reached tendrils into my mind.
And then ... a new mind. Alien, but familiar in a way. I saw the Yeerk jerk in alarm and surprise.
This new force, this new mind was strong. Stronger than he could have expected.
Loren!
I saw inside her and through her. I saw her thoughts. And I saw her push back the visser's own images. Not defeating him, but keeping him at bay.
I realized something else had changed. The black hole was further away now. The Jahar could still be seen, but it, too, was further away.
We were moving! The Time Matrix had been programmed, and we were moving through time.
The last memory I had, as the cold collapsed my consciousness, was of someone vast and incredible. A being like nothing I could have imagined. It saw me. It saw us all.
And it laughed.
I didn't want to say anything during the chapter to interrupt the flow, but this is one of the most ambitious word images I've read in young adult literature, especially modern young adult literature. It's pretty trippy as well.
Chapter 36
quote:
I woke up with that laughter still ringing in my head.
I opened my main eyes and found to my surprise that I was standing. I opened my stalk eyes and looked around in all directions.
Trees. Grass. A stream running close by. A gentle breeze.
<Home? Am I home?>
I stared at a therant tree. The trunk. The branches. The vines. Impossible! It was Hala Fala! The oldest of the therant trees in the woods near my home. My father had shown me this tree when I was just a very small child. It was my Garibah. My Guide Tree.
I ground my hooves into the grass, taking a sample taste. Yes! It was the grass I had grown up on. The grass of home.
<How did I get here?> I wondered aloud. I reached out with both hands and placed them on the smooth bark of Hala Fala. And I heard the "voice" of the tree, deep and simple and powerful. It did not speak in words, of course. Only a handful of trees have ever used words, and even then, it could take them hours to say a single word. But Hala Fala spoke to me, as it usually did, letting me know that it felt my presence. Letting me feel its own strange, slow mind.
<I'm home,> I whispered to Hala Fala.
I just want to point out that the Andalites have sentient trees. I think we talked before how Applegate is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and a lot of the names and things in this series come from LoTR....Elfangor is pretty obviously named for Fangorn/Fangorn Forest. "Yeerk" is comes from the Elven word for Orcs, yrch. Obviously, this is another reference. Hala Fala is a therant tree, which is close to the Ents of Tolkien, the walking, talking tree creatures, and while the therant can't walk or talk, it can think and communicate after a fashion.
quote:
And then, after all that had happened, I broke down. I sobbed. I cried. I told my guide tree everything in a rush of disjointed emotion. Of course, not even a Garibah can understand stories of space travel, of aliens, of wars and terrible decisions.
But it could hear my shame. It could hear despair for poor, doomed Arbron. It could hear my cries of pain for all I had seen. It heard my fear.
The Garibah could not change what had happened. And it could not tell me that I was forgiven, or that all would be well now. I knew the ritual of forgiveness. <I have made right everything that can be made right, I have learned everything that can be learned, I have sworn not to repeat my error, and
now I claim forgiveness.>
But I had not yet made right everything that could be made right. I had not yet learned to understand my own mistakes. I was not ready to swear I would not repeat those mistakes. Forgiveness for all my terrible failings was still a long way off.
But the Garibah, the tree named Hala Fala, heard me, heard my shame and rage. And being heard helped.
My sobbing quieted. I took my hands away from the tree's smooth bark.
I walked slowly away, crunching up the sweet grass of home and trying, with my exhausted mind, to make sense of what had happened.
Clearly I had used the Time Matrix to carry me through time and space. Without experiencing any passage of time, I was home. But home when? Was this a hundred years ago? A thousand? The Garibah had been alive for seven thousand years. It could be anywhere in that time span.
I remembered trying to turn the Time Matrix to my own visions. And I guess I had succeeded. All these trees, all this lush grass, the kafit bird that fluttered by overhead, the little hoobers that jumped on springy tendrils and stared at me from their comical bulging eyes, all this was home. My home.
And across that stream, and over that next rise, I would see my family home. Just ahead! I broke into a run. I leaped the stream, like I always did, and suddenly I had to be home. I didn't care what anyone said. I didn't care. I wanted my mother and father. I wanted to lie down in the deep grass of the scoop and find my old toys and be a child again.
I ran, flat-out, and yes, the slopes were so familiar! And yes, every tree was where it should be. I ran to the top of the rise, ready to look down into our neat, oval-shaped family scoop, and - I stopped.
There it was: the scoop. The bowl dug out of the ground by my great-great-grandparents and planted with every delicious variety of grass and flowers. And there was the lodge, the blue-plex awning that covered the south quarter of the scoop and kept our things out of the rain.
But just behind the scoop, in a place it could not possibly be, was a waterfall.
It was an incredible waterfall. It fell hundreds of feet from the edge of a cliff. A cliff that simply stood there. No mountains on either side. Just a cliff that rose sharply up from the grass.
I felt a sick queasiness in my stomach.
I was seeing something I had seen before. It was the picture from what Loren had called a cigarette ad. But it was in a place it should not be. In a place it could not be. It was violating the very laws of physics.
This was not home.
I tore my gaze away from the impossible waterfall, and looked around. From the top of the rise I could see fairly far.
What I saw was impossibility piled on impossibility.
But what I focused on first was the sky.
It was a deep red and gold, like the red and gold of my own world. It was also light blue, with fluffy white clouds. And it was green.
Stretching over my head was a sky broken into jigsaw-puzzle fragments. Here a patch of Andalite sky. There a lighter blue. And over there, a shocking green torn by ragged bolts of electricity. Clouds drifted through the paler blue segments and then disappeared when they reached a different segment.
Lightning in the green sky disappeared when it reached one of the other patches.
I had never known what the sky of Earth looked like, but now I could guess. It was pale blue, with fluffy white clouds .And I had never known the sky of the Yeerk world, but now I could guess that, too. It was green and torn by bolts of electricity.
What have we done? I wondered.
And I remembered the laughter of that vast and strange being I had glimpsed.
Oh dear. And to be fair, he doesn't know that it's not Earth's sky that's green and lightning filled.
Honestly, the Yeerk homeworld seems like one of the worst places in the galaxy. I'd be tempted to enslave the galaxy just to live anywhere else.
Also, if you didn't notice from the description, the Andalites don't have enclosed houses....they live in bowls/craters with awning put up over part of it to protect them and their possessions from the weather, which makes a lot of sense for a grazing prey species.
This book is so fucking good.
I figured he would just stay in place, embedded around the brain as it changes. That would make small morphs awkward, though, since theoretically the whole z-space magic wouldn't apply to parasites. But then Visser Three never morphs small, does he? He only goes for the big flashy ones.
You kind of have to suppress disbelief with a variety of aspects to morphing, like how it would work with an organism's microbiome.
The Andalites invented magic, which made everything a lot easier to explain
I don't think I saw anyone comment on (future) Visser 3 essentially saying that he would have been willing to sacrifice his life to save the 10,000 Yeerks. There's not really any reason for him to lie to Elfangor about that.
edit: Chapman's characterization is so bizarre. It's like they felt a need to make him a villain as a human just because he's a villain as a Controller in the main series, except that's also strange because the brief glimpse we get of real-Chapman seems to imply he's not a bad person.
I can't speak to the physics of any of this, but it seems right to me.
I don't intimately know the physics of decompression, but apparently skin exposure to the vacuum of space causes huge bloating as the gases and liquids in your body start to expand, plus immediate bad sunburn from direct sunlight (and radiation damage generally). It's not just the lack of air that kills you; that's why astronauts wear pressurized full-body suits on spacewalks, and even high-altitude pilots need to wear compression, if not fully pressurized, suits as well. I don't believe an oxygen hood alone would be safe.
I didn't want to say anything during the chapter to interrupt the flow, but this is one of the most ambitious word images I've read in young adult literature, especially modern young adult literature. It's pretty trippy as well.
It reminds me of Frank Herbert's metaphorical descriptions of prescience in Dune, and something of the water of life sequence later on in the book. But even though I read that long before I read this series, I admittedly wouldn't call it YA.
You kind of have to suppress disbelief with a variety of aspects to morphing, like how it would work with an organism's microbiome.
Or how the healing works. If you break your arm and morph, your arm's healed, so it's clearly not just reconstituting you how you were back when you morphed, but at some point in the past, say when you first touched the cube. So, wouldn't that just render everyone who morphs immune to disease, injury, and aging?
But it keeps Marco's haircut, and the morphing clothes.
The Andalite Chronicles-Chapter 37
quote:
I wandered, amazed and appalled, through a world that made no sense. The parts that were familiar just made other parts seem stranger.
My scoop was there, right where it should be. But no one was around. Not a single other Andalite. Not my father or my mother.
Why? Where was I? If this wasn't home, where was it?
I wandered through woods and across open fields that were familiar. But then, across a field I'd known all my life, I found a sharp line drawn. The grasses of home stopped abruptly. And on the other side everything turned brown and muddy gray and a red so dark it was almost black.
On one side of the line, my own world. On the other side of the line, wild, tall, spiky grass and trees that rose only a foot tall before spreading out horizontally for thirty or forty feet. If you could even call something like that a tree.
I was startled by something that reached up out of the ground with a soft SHLOOP! It was like a Taxxon tongue, almost. Ten feet long and dark red, it shot up from a hole in the ground. It seemed to lick the air in a slow, circular pattern, as if it was searching blindly for something. Then, after a few seconds, it SHLOOPED! back into the ground.
Ten feet away, another such tongue. This time it reached for a beast that walked past, hunched over. The beast had four thick legs toward the back and two turned-in legs forward, with no discernable head.
This lumbering creature wandered straight toward the flickering tongue and suddenly, fast as a tail, the tongue reached out and wrapped around the beast's hind legs. The beast let out a groan, although where that sound came from, since it seemed not to have a head, was a mystery to me.
The tongue drew the beast toward its hole. But it could not suck the animal down, so it simply held it prisoner as the beast groaned.
The sky directly over that dark, unnerving landscape was dirty green and veined with silent
lightning. It looked altogether like one of the fantasy-monster lands in fables that Andalite parents tell their little children about.
I felt sick twisting inside me. I had never been to the Yeerk world, of course. But already I was beginning to guess what had happened. And I was sure that this blasted, vile, and empty landscape was the Yeerk home world.
Or at least the Yeerk home world as Visser Thirty-two saw it.
<The Time Matrix! Where is the Time Matrix?> I asked myself. It was the key. The Matrix had caused all this. The Matrix had created this awful place without logic or reason. And only through the Matrix could I escape.
<Loren. Where is she?>
I looked up at the sky and saw the patches of lighter, paler blue. The blue of Earth's sky. She would be beneath one of those patches of Earth blue. I was confident of that. But which patch?
The waterfall. That was the place to start. It was the tallest thing around.
I turned my back on that depressing Yeerk vision and ran back toward the empty mockery of my home scoop. It was hard to look at that familiar area and accept the fact that it wasn't really my home.
Visser Thirty-two! It hit me like a shock from one of those Yeerk lightning bolts. If I was here, and perhaps even Loren was here, then so was he. Somewhere. Maybe within the confines of his Yeerk world, but maybe not!
If I could go looking for Loren, so could he. And if he found her first ...
I saw the towering cliff from which the waterfall dropped and raced toward it, desperate now to find Loren. I ran flat-out. As I ran, I ate. It felt so good. Whatever else might be strange and unreal, the grass was good and familiar. And as it traveled up my legs from my hooves, I felt my strength growing.
I reached the pool where the water crashed in a huge white explosion. As I drew closer, I saw that the woods surrounding that pool were split into three different sections. The familiar Andalite trees filled a third or so. And different, but still lovely trees and green grass, covered another third. Around still another third was more of the dark Yeerk landscape.
It was all utterly impossible, of course. But still, standing beneath that massive waterfall, feeling the cold spray on my face, it was beautiful, too.
"Elfangor!"
I turned my stalk eyes and saw her. Relief flooded through me. <Loren! You're here!>
"Yeah. I'm here, all right. But where is here?"
<Wait. I'll come to you.>
I went toward her, threading my way around bushes and trees. And she came running toward me. She threw her strong human arms around my shoulders. And even though touching is more of a human thing than an Andalite thing, it wasn't so bad.
"Man, I thought I was all alone here," Loren said.
<No. I am here.>
"I would swear this was Earth, only look at the sky. It's all in patches. And some of those patches are very weird."
She released her hold on me, and after a second or two, I realized I should do the same.
<Have you looked around at all?>
She shook her head. It's something humans do to answer no. "I woke up over there, a few hundred feet back in the woods. Elfangor, it's exactly like this area of the park back home. There's a park where I play softball."
<Yes. It would be familiar to you. And there will probably be other familiar parts. Places you know. Maybe we could go and look around, now that we are together.>
She cocked her head sideways and looked at me. "You're still worried, aren't you?"
<There were three of us who made contact with the Time Matrix. You, me, and Visser Thirty-two.>
She twisted her human lips into a grimace. Then she looked skyward. "Those patches of green sky with the lightning. That's because of him, isn't it? Somehow, we made this place. The three of us.
We created this place."
I stared at her in astonishment. There was no way she could begin to know about the physics of the Time Matrix. And yet she had reached the same conclusion as I had.
I laughed. Maybe Loren didn't understand the physics of the Time Matrix. But then again, neither did I. Neither did any Andalite, as far as I knew. Compared to the creatures who had created the Time Matrix, humans and Andalites were equally primitive.
<What do you think happened?> I asked Loren.
She smiled. "You're asking me?" She shrugged. "Well, that time machine - the Time Matrix, or whatever you call it - is not just like some car you drive through time. I think to steer it you have to imagine the place and time where you want to go. I think with three of us each having different ideas of where we wanted to go, well, this is the result: part me, part you, part ... part him."
I saw that her eyes were staring past me. I adjusted my stalk eyes to follow the direction of her gaze.
There, standing on the far side of the pool, was Visser Thirty-two. The abomination.
But Visser Thirty-two was not standing alone
So, basically, since the Time Matrix was facing orders from all three of them to take them to their homes, it tried to compromise, and created a place that contained memories of all of their homes.
Chapter 38
quote:
Visser Thirty-two stood on the bank of the pool in the Yeerk zone, under his own green sky.
And on either side of him stood a creature like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. They were each about three feet tall and four and a half feet long. They were mostly a dark, dirty yellow with irregular black spots. But the head and shoulders were the deep red of the Yeerk plants. The heads were tiny for the bodies, elongated, almost needle-sharp. The mouths were long and narrow. Hundreds of tiny, bright red teeth stuck out, jagged and wildly different in length and shape. But what struck me as strangest was that the creatures did not have legs in the usual sense. They had wheels.
Yes, wheels. Four of them, to be exact.
The wheels were located where legs should be. Each was sloppy and irregular in shape, not perfectly round. But it was easy to see that the wheels were for real. There was mud and dirt all around them, and when I strained my stalk eyes I could even see where the creatures had left tracks in the dirt. Wheel tracks.
"Elfangor, what are those things?"
<I have no idea. I can't imagine what evolutionary path would conceivably have created a creature with wheels.>
Visser Thirty-two actually gave a jaunty wave of his hand. <So, young Elfangor, we meet again. As you see, I brought my pets: Jarex and Larex. And you brought your pet, too. Your pet human.>
Yet again, we see the Visser's love of pets.
quote:
Loren looked at me. In a voice Visser Thirty-two was sure to hear, she muttered, "You know, Elfangor, I'm beginning to see why you Andalites really dislike Yeerks. Whatever body they may be in, they still have the manners of slugs."
<Brave little human girl,> the Yeerk visser mocked. <Do you understand that even now my people are on their way to evaluate your primitive world? Do you understand that within a few years your people, you humans, will be slaves of the Yeerk Empire?>
"Blah, blah, blah," Loren said.
I had no idea what that meant. Neither did the visser.
"You do a lot of talking for a slug," Loren clarified. "You think I'm scared of you?"
<Yes. I know you're scared of me.>
For a moment Loren said nothing, but her lower lip was trembling slightly. Then, she knelt quickly, plunged her hand into the water, and withdrew it. She was holding a rock. She drew her arm back, swept her arm in a big loop, and released the rock with precise timing. The rock flew through the air at an impressive speed.
And the aim wasn't bad, either.
BONK!
<Ahhh!> the visser cried. The rock had struck him right in the face, just below his left main eye.
I don't know who was more amazed, me or the visser.
<What ... what do you call that?> I asked her.
"That? We call that softball. I pitch for Frank's Pro Shop Twins back home. All-city two years in a row."
<What is softball?>
"It's a game we play."
<And you hit people in the face with rocks?>
"Not usually."
I was impressed by the human ability to throw things with such force. I was sure that Andalite scientists would enjoy studying humans someday. They appeared more frail and ridiculous than they were.
Humans are surprisingly good at throwing. It's something we take for granted, but humans can throw things better than any other animal on earth. We're good at focusing our vision, and our arms have a very wide range of motion.
quote:
The visser was not impressed. He was just angry.
<So. You propel rocks at me! You'll be very sorry you ever propelled a rock at me, human. Jarex! Larex! Attack!>
The situation stopped being amusing very quickly. The twin beasts turned their wheels, sluggishly at first. But then picked up speed.
I almost didn't move, I was so fascinated seeing the biological wheels turn. It was truly incredible.
<You admire my pets, Andalite? They are a species called Mortrons. As a young lieutenant I went on a survey party to a world that was later destroyed when its sun went nova. We thought we might be able to make Controllers of these Mortrons, but that didn't work out. Their brains are simply too tiny to accommodate us. Instead, I brought two of them home as pets.>
All the while the visser talked - or "blah, blah, blahed," as Loren had said - the Mortrons gathered speed and raced around the circumference of the pool.
They made a strange sound. A HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF. Faster and faster.
<They have amazing capacities, my young friend Elfangor. As you will soon see.>
<What's the matter, Yeerk? Afraid to fight me tail-to-tail?> I taunted. I hoped the answer was yes, because I was not at all sure which of us would win a tail fight. While I was totally confident I could deal with these Mortrons.
HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF!
The wheels spun faster, and the ungainly yellow and black monstrosities were nearly to the edge of the Yeerk portion of the pool. I watched carefully to see whether they could move from the Yeerk area into the human area.
Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
<Don't worry,> I told Loren. <I can handle these two creatures.>
HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF-SCRINK-SHWOOOP!
Suddenly the creatures each split into two parts! The bottom portion, the yellow part with the wheels, swerved away. The dark red upper portion simply rose from the body, unfolded leathery wings I'd never even suspected, and flew straight at me!
"Elfangor!" Loren cried.
<Hah-hah! Kill, Jarex! Kill, Larex! Kill the Andalite!> Visser Thirty-two cackled gleefully.
The first Mortron - I don't know if it was Jarex or Larex - opened its mouth and showed its rows of uneven but brutally unpleasant teeth. It powered through the air like a rocket.
I dodged left and struck with my tail blade!
FWAPP!
SPLEET! FLUMP. FLUMP.
My tail blade sliced the Mortron into two chunks. The two separate pieces fell to the ground with a wet splat.
"Elfangor, the other one!"
The second Mortron used the distraction provided by his brother to swoop wide, then arch in behind me. A tactic that would have worked on most opponents. But not on an Andalite who can see in all directions at once.
His toothy mouth was inches from my neck when I struck.
FWAPP!
SPLEET! FLUMP. FLUMP.
And the second Mortron bird-portion fell in pieces to the ground.
I was feeling pretty good, until I looked at the visser and saw the amusement in his eyes.
"Elfangor, look. Look!" Loren cried.
I turned my stalk eyes toward the ground. With amazing speed, the two bloody halves of each Mortron were growing. One piece of each was growing to become a complete bird-portion again.
And the other piece was going even further - growing into a complete, two-piece, yellow and black, four-wheeled Mortron.
I had sliced both Mortrons in half. And now they were becoming four Mortrons.
<Are you doing the math in your head, Elfangor?> the visser jeered. <They regenerate! Cut an attacking Mortron in pieces and each piece grows again to become a complete Mortron. It's the killing frenzy. It gives them an enzyme boost that makes them regenerate! Try to kill these four and you'll have eight. Kill those eight and you'll have sixteen! Thirty-two! Sixty-four!>
I stared in horror as the Mortron pieces grew and grew. In seconds they would be ready to attack again. And anything I did to destroy them would merely make more of them!
<Loren, I don't know what to do. If only I had a shredder!>
"Can you outrun them?"
<Yes, I can. But you can't! They are faster than you are. And I won't leave you.>
"You won't have to. Maybe. How strong is your back? Never mind, it must be strong enough. Elfangor, don't be offended, okay?"
<Offended by what?>
"Hold still. I'm gonna try something."
She came to me and placed one hand on the back of my neck. She placed another hand on my rump, right at the base of my tail. And suddenly, she leaned her weight on me, swung one leg up and over, and came to rest straddling my back. She sat there with one human leg hanging off either side of
my back and held her hands clasped around my neck.
I turned my stalk eyes around and found myself staring directly into her small blue human eyes.
"Now let's run," she said.
<With you on my back?>
But even while I was standing there in blank astonishment, I saw a fully formed Mortron rise from the dirt. It was just a few feet away and it launched its bird-part. Leather wings propelled jagged razor-sharp teeth straight for my throat.
"Elfangor, this is not the time to think," Loren yelled. "Run! Ruuuuun!"
So I did. With the human girl actually on my back, I ran.
And so, as the villain watches, the beautiful young woman mounts our hero....wait, I probably phrased that wrong.
1: Visser 3's love of pets is just wonderful
2: the mortrons are bonkers, but really entertaining
3: "So. You propel rocks at me!" is now a contender for Best Animorphs line, tied with lobster-morphed Ax musing that "these pincers are most excellent"
4: I am not sure how 12-year-old me would have reacted to:
And so, as the villain watches, the beautiful young woman mounts our hero....wait, I probably phrased that wrong.
It's probably just me, but I always thought that the scientist lady in Amber Spyglass seeing the wheel-riders and thinking 'that's not possible because xyz' was a direct
to this.
I am extremely amused that Loren's first thought is that that the andalite will be offended to be ridden like a horse. Meanwhile, Elfangor has no analogue in his society to draw from, so it doesn't even occur to him that this could be a demeaning occurrence.
Edit: this isn't very relevant to the current situation in the books, but I'm wondering: we've had several points where human knowledge has been foreign to andalites or nonhuman controllers (but, of course, obvious to the viewer). Was there any point at which this was used for dramatic irony? In particular, I'm wondering if at any point in an Ax book, Visser 3 and Ax interact as humans, with one not realizing the other is an andalite because they make some obvious mistake that the audience recognizes but the characters don't?