Seerow's True Lesson

Disclaimer: I do not own Animorphs.

Despite what we'd all assured Ax, we were having a little bit of trouble coming to grips with his story…or at least Marco was. And not even necessarily for the reasons that Ax would have thought.

Personally, I had mostly forgiven him for everything that had happened since the day we took him to school with us which, in hindsight, hadn't been the best idea we'd ever had. See, the fact that it was getting blatantly obvious that he never told us anything should have been the main reason that I was upset but it wasn't. Oh, it still bothered me a lot but what had really got to me was the fact that Ax had seemed to think that my brother being a controller made it a valid worry that if I had known that the Yeerks might kill hosts if the Yeerks died in public then I wouldn't have destroyed the Kandrona. This concern was the kind of thing that I didn't want happening (and why I had hesitated so much about confessing my fears about Tom when we were facing the hosptital project) but I had thought that the fact that I was willing to sabotage the Yeerks' hospital plans despite knowing it could get Tom killed would have convinced them that I wasn't about to give the Yeerks a major victory just to protect my brother.

"I mean, I can respect the guy's motives," Marco was saying as we slowly made our way to his house. His dad would probably still be there because of his sprained ankle but as we were fairly certain he wasn't a controller it felt safer than being at my house even though we weren't about to start talking about the war where anyone could hear us. "But I am really questioning his basic judgment here."

"It's not really fair to look at the way things happened and use hindsight to call him an idiot," I pointed out.

"No, I agree but that's not my only reason," Marco insisted.

I raised my eyebrows. "Really."

"Yes, really. All I'm saying is that there were some very basic indicators that maybe he wasn't making the best decision and that he either didn't notice them or outright ignored them is kind of unbelievable," Marco declared.

I laughed. "Marco, we know almost nothing about the situation. All Ax said was that Seerow went to the Yeerk Homeworld, saw the Yeerks were intelligent, felt sorry for them, and gave them technology. At some point the Andalites stopped watching closely enough or something and the Yeerks went out to terrorize the galaxy. I guess you could say that the Andalites should have been paying more attention but who knows how long it had been since they had first made contact? Maybe the Yeerks appeared trustworthy for years on end and it was only after, I don't know, a few decades that they started conquering people."

"I'll give you that one," Marco said easily. "But we really don't need to know any more to see the problems here and the fact that even without all the details I can see why that was probably going to end badly means that Seerow and his boys – who had all the facts – have really no excuse for not seeing it."

When Marco got going like this, I never knew when, exactly, he was going to get to the point. We only had so long a walk to his house and so I decided to speed him along. "Just spit it out, Marco."

Marco rolled his eyes. "Why do you always have to ruin all my fun, Jake?"

"Because your fun is dragging on so long that I wouldn't be surprised if we were literally the forty-year-olds you always accuse me of being by the time you're done," I said tolerantly.

"Would you say that the fact that the Yeerks were a parasitic race was some great secret that the Andalites were not privy to?" Marco asked rhetorically. "Because Ax made it sound like part of the reason Seerow felt sorry for them was because they were so intelligent and the Gedds they controlled weren't very good hosts." He paused. "What is a Gedd, anyway?"

This I could help him out with. "They're those monkey-like creatures we saw on the Yeerk mother ship. Or whatever it's really called."

Marco was quiet for a moment and I knew why. I'd just broken two unspoken taboos. We didn't talk about the fact that his mother was Visser One which we had found out on the Yeerk mother ship and we certainly didn't talk about that time I was infested which Marco probably realized was how I knew what a Gedd was. Sometimes I think the others are more eager to pretend that that never happened than I am. If them seeing me like that was anything like what seeing Tom is like for me then I don't blame them.

"Right," he finally said uncomfortably before quickly moving away from those forbidden topics. "Well think about it. The Yeerks have the ability to control other species. The Yeerks are controlling the Gedds. They meet the Andalites who, by all accounts, would be much better to be than a Gedd. What did they think was going to happen?"

I took a guess. "That they were all going to live in peace and harmony and travel the stars together forever?"

"I mean, let's take the specifics out of it. Let's just assume that this is a sci-fi movie. There is a race of parasites who each need someone else's body. They all have a really crappy body and then they meet a race of people with much better bodies. What is the plot of this movie?"

"How the parasites try to steal the bodies of the better species," I said reluctantly.

"Exactly! Any bad sci-fi movie can tell you that that's just a disaster waiting to happen. And even on the off chance that it wouldn't happen for once, why take that risk and let down your guard?" Marco demanded.

"You seem to be forgetting the fact that the Yeerks didn't actually start trying to steal the Andalites' bodies," I pointed out.

Marco waved that off. "While we still don't have all the details on that, the fact that they're at war with the Andalites and really seem to prize the one body they did manage to take makes me think that that just wasn't practical at the time but they're still working on it."

"There's one problem with your sci-fi movie comparison," I told Marco.

He looked a little miffed at the thought of his analogy being in any way inadequate. "Oh? And what is that?"

"In a sci-fi movie, something has to go wrong or there won't be a plot," I said reasonably. "In real life, we don't have a plot. Conflicts don't have to have resolutions, questions don't have to be answered, and nothing exciting really needs to happen at all. That's why the parasites will always turn on the people helping them in the movies but it doesn't always have to be like that in real life."

Marco deflated a little. "You do have a point…but still. Sci-fi movies will teach you that if you ever do meet a race of parasites when you're a lot more appealing than their original hosts that you should be wary lest they decide to infest you instead."

"Do the Andalites even have sci-fi movies?" I wondered.

"If not then I think we all know what's to blame for all of this," Marco said grimly.

The thought that this entire intergalactic war could have been avoided if only the Andalites had watched sci-fi movies was too much for me and I started laughing. After a few seconds, Marco joined in.

Once we'd calmed down, I said, "You know, something that the Andalites didn't seem to think about is that while the Gedds may have been primitive they were still sentient. They could still be confused and scared by what was happening and the Yeerks were still enslaving them."

It's not like I could blame the Andalites, of course. If I hadn't seen the memories of a Gedd myself then I doubt it would have occurred to me, either.

Marco tactfully ignored the second allusion to my infestation. "See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. If they are already enslaving one species then that should be a warning sign that you need to be careful. Something tells me we're going to have to add snobbery to the list of reasons we're in this mess right now."

"Now we have a list?" I asked him.

Marco shrugged. "Well, we've got two things. That makes a list, right?"

I was getting a bad feeling about this. "Does this mean you're going to keep adding to this list?"

Marco smirked. "You know me too well. Hey, what do you think about the way the Andalites responded to the Yeerks betraying them? The whole law of 'Seerow's Kindness'?"

"I don't know. I guess they realized that they had to be more careful and are trying to make sure that that could never happen again," I said. "They go a little far, though. I mean, they can't even tell people why they aren't going to tell anybody anything?"

"I think that's more embarrassment than anything else," Marco decided. "After all, it makes them look really stupid. And they didn't even learn the right lesson from that, either."

I cocked my head. "Oh no?"

"They seem to have decided that they messed up one time – with admittedly disastrous results – and so they should just never tell anybody anything ever again. It will probably stop this kind of thing from ever happening again but it's a little extreme," Marco claimed.

"So what do you think they should have learned?" I challenged.

Marco clapped his hands together. "The lesson they should have learned is simple but eloquent: don't be a dumbass."

I snorted. "What?"

"Don't be a dumbass," Marco repeated. "Don't blindly trust a race that can enslave you so completely but also don't get all reactionary and don't even tell your own allies basic information about the Yeerks needed to fight them."

I shook my head in amusement. "So you think that the Andalites' problems would be solved if they just focused on not being dumbasses?"

Marco nodded seriously. "I think most problems would be solved that way. It's probably easier said than done, though, and if the Andalites truly don't have faith in their ability to act like rational people…"

"Oh, stop it. Besides, this whole 'Seerow's Kindness' thing is really working out for us," I mused. "The Yeerks probably know about it and so they know that if the Andalites won't even talk to other species then they're certainly not going to be sharing, say, morphing technology with them. That's why no one's seriously entertaining the possibility that we might be humans."

"That's the Yeerks not learning anything from Seerow either," Marco announced. "And Ax for that matter."

I frowned, puzzled. "What do you mean? Ax trusted us with the story of Seerow even if it did take awhile. You know that he's around our age so of course he doesn't want to break his peoples' most sacred laws lightly."

"I'm not talking about that," Marco assured me. "I was thinking more about the 'Who knows, one day you humans might be just like the Yeerks' part."

"Well, we do have a history of societal intolerance and conquering," I pointed out.

"And I could absolutely see us insisting on colonizing every habitable planet we discover exists," Marco agreed. "But come on, at our worst we could never trap people in their own heads while we read their every thoughts and control their every movement."

"Not yet," I acknowledged. "But who knows what technology we'll come up with one day?"

Marco glared at me. "Whose side are you even on?"

Review Please!