Chapter 19
"Um, if I may be so bold," I said, "why do I have to morph an Andalite?"
*In truth, it may be wise that all of you acquire my genetic pattern. I think the five of you may find having an Andalite morph to be prudent.*
Well, that did make some kind of sense, I guessed. Maybe. "Yes, okay, I'm not opposed to the morphing part of the equation. I mean what exactly are you going to do to me once I'm… you?"
*I will teach you to broadcast thoughts and emotions. It is… a complicated process. It will take practice and we may have to invest some time in developing the skill, but I am confident that I could help you extract and share your memories of the Yeerk facility.*
"This seems like a fun day," Marco said sarcastically. "I could be at home studying for my calc final, but no, instead I'm going to watch live brain theatre."
"Well," Tobias said, "you gotta admit that life is much more interesting than it was a week ago."
"God, you can say that again," Cassie said.
"Okay," I said, "but before we get to that I do want to bring up another point."
"Sure you're not just stalling?" Rachel asked.
"Fifty-fifty," I said honestly. "I'm not in a huge rush for the memory theatre, no. But I am curious what to do about Elfangor's brother."
Elfangor seemed surprised by this statement. *Aximili is safe for now.*
"Yeah," I said, "so you've said. A few times, actually. But I am getting a little curious what the plan is for getting him. It's not like the Pacific is going to be any less deep in a week."
"That is a good point," Cassie said. "I mean do we even know where the ship landed?"
Elfangor made an expression I didn't understand. If I had to guess, I'd assume maybe annoyance. *In your units, Aximili is approximately four hundred fifty miles southwest of this location. The Dome Ship came to rest near a seamount, at a depth exceeding four hundred meters.*
None of us said a word. There was something hanging there in the silence, something not quite tangible. "You're not sure you can help him, are you?" Tobias said.
*The distance alone creates a significant challenge. Then there is the depth to consider.*
"You don't have any ideas?" I asked.
*In all truth, my only practical idea was to somehow obtain a Bug Fighter.*
"That doesn't very practical," Rachel said.
*No, admittedly, it does not. But it is the only option I haven't completely dismissed out of hand.*
"Well that explains why you haven't wanted to talk about it, I guess," Marco said.
"We'll try to help you with that later, but I guess I need to try this Andalite thing, don't I?" I really wasn't sure what this experience was going to entail. But the first part was to morph and stalling wasn't going help any further.
*Yes, Jake, let us begin.*
The five of us gathered around him once again. It was weird seeing us doing this again. There had been that first meeting, when he had staggered out his wrecked pod. Then we'd done it again when he'd offered the cube. Just five kids crowded around an alien, something we had found so impossible days ago, and this was already the third time we'd done this.
If we felt awkward, then I'm certain Elfangor definitely was. Each of us placed a hand on him, and I cannot imagine how it must have felt for him as we acquired his DNA. He seemed to flutter a bit like we'd doped him up on animal tranquilizers. But he shook himself awake and seemed to recover quickly,
"Do we all need to morph to Andalite for this?" Cassie asked.
*Not strictly, no,* Elfangor said. *It may enhance the experience, but the rest of you can remain human.*
Well, I guess that was my cue. It stripped down to my boxers again, conscious that everyone was watching. I tossed my shirt, jeans, and shoes to Cassie, and she set them aside for me on the log where I'd been sitting earlier. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and let the change run through me.
It was actually a little easier to morph into Elfangor than I thought it would be. I guess because I was looking at him while I was doing it, so it was pretty easy to concentrate on the alien features. I felt my body elongate, my torso increasing in length. Then my neck followed, stretching to more than double its original size.
The morphing process on the outside was one thing, but the inside parts were incredibly weird. I felt the rush of blood in my ears as my heart increased in size, growing and swelling and finally dividing. I couldn't actually feel the heart split, but I could suddenly hear two distinct rhythms in my ears. Elfangor told me later that Andalites actually have three hearts, so that's weird. There was a strange pressure as my lungs shifted upward. I felt the bulge of tissue growing in my chest and then two new pairs of legs grew out just below my pectoral muscles. The ends of the almost fetal looking deer legs hardened as the hoof tips emerged, and they rapidly grew out.
My neck swelled like a balloon, accommodating the shift in my lung placement. For a second I couldn't breathe, and there was a spark of panic as I realized I had no nose or mouth. My teeth melted. My goddamn teeth melted like candle wax, and I could feel the bones in my skull and jaw fusing and rearranging. A second later, I could breathe. Man, could I breathe. The weird face slits worked to pull in air like the intake of a fighter jet. Breathing became effortless, just a constant availability of air.
My legs were finishing their transition into hindlimbs, my toes congealing into shiny black hooves. The front hooves met the ground and pushed me up so that I was in the same weird mantis shrimp centaur posture as Elfangor. I felt the bones in my hands dissolve, my fingers felt like liquid rubber. My arm muscles withered considerably. I probably couldn't have won an arm wrestling contest with my twelve-year-old cousin, Jordan, at that point.
I felt my ears extending, widening. I could definitely hear better than a human. Suddenly, I could sense a fuzzy glow in my forehead. Two dime-sized patches of skin were suddenly photosensitive. The skin bubbled and blistered, becoming the lenses of the stalk eyes before they grew out of my forehead. There was a bizarre tingling as the bone in the front of my face dissolved so the muscular tubes of the stalks could grow through.
I was almost entirely Andalite, save for a few last details. My skin tingled and itched and then the blue fur grew over my body in a ripple, starting at my hands and flowing up my arms, down my back, across my chest.
The last thing to come was the tail. My tailbone extended, and the tissue just extruded almost endlessly, extending to its full impressive length. And then the scythe blade emerged from the end, sharp and deadly.
I was an Andalite.
It was very disorienting to adjust to the new eyes. His hearing was appreciably better than a human, his color perception was a little different, and while my arms felt frail in comparison to a human being, the muscles in my body and tail were powerful.
"Jake?" Marco asked. "You okay, dude?"
*I'm okay,* I said. *Just adjusting. This tail has a lot of muscle control and I have extra legs.*
It's easy to take your legs for granted. We master walking at a fairly young age. Okay, maybe toddlers aren't masters, precisely, but my point is once we learn to do it, it becomes effortless and totally automatic. We spend no conscious thought on our mobility unless we're trying to do something specific or new. Like learning to swim, or dance, or running drills for the football team. This was similar. Until I got used to having a tail and four legs, I was very conscious of how weird it was just to walk.
I probably looked like a newborn giraffe taking my first few steps. It was a little distracting having the extra eyes, but it did make it easier to keep track of my surroundings. It must be nearly impossible to sneak up on an Andalite. I could taste the grass beneath me as the bizarre mouthparts housed within my hooves instinctively clipped the grass as I moved.
*Okay,* I said, trying to sound confident, *how does this memory projection work?*
*The principle is rather simple. Concentrate on an image and try to push it out in thought-speech. Once we all can see the picture, the link will be established, and from there you can revisit your memories.*
"That does sound simple," Tobias said.
*It is and yet it can be difficult. It is easier to establish connections with familiar minds. The more you communicate through thought-speech, the easier it becomes.*
"So the limited telepathy we have in morph can send photo and video attachments?" Marco asked.
*I'm about to find out, I guess. Can I have some quiet for this, please.*
Marco made the zipper gesture across his mouth. I closed all four of my eyes, which actually took some mental gymnastics to figure out all the muscles and nerves in the stalk eyes.
The Andalite mind had the normal instincts that most animals have. Food, water, et cetera. But the Andalite instincts didn't like having all eyes shut at the same time. There was an almost compulsive urge to maintain a constant visual form. I snapped up a little startled.
Elfangor seemed amused. *Why did you close your eyes?*
*Umm… it helps me think.*
He cocked his head, puzzled. *Why?*
*I… I can't tell you why. Marco? Why do we humans close our eyes to concentrate?"
Marco shrugged. "If I had to guess, I'd say it's because humans are a very visual species. We get distracted easily by visual stimuli, so closing our eyes helps us hear our own thoughts a little easier."
Elfangor seemed to consider that for a beat. *In an earlier stage of our evolution, we were a prey species. We instinctively fear darkness.*
*Yeah,* I said, *I kinda noticed.*
I tried again. I closed three eyes this time, turning one stalk eye on a tree branch above me. I needed to have a mental image to send anyway, so I concentrated on the way the light filtered green through the leaves, the way they shivered in the Pacific breeze.
Nothing happened.
I tried to visualize the ball of information, tried sending it out like Elfangor had said, but it was to no avail. Mentally, it was gruelling.
But to everyone else, it was boring as fuck.
They were just sitting there, patiently waiting for me to send this message. Or more likely they were all daydreaming. I wish I was sympathetic to their point of view, but I was doing the telepathic version of the shot put here and their boredom and imagined impatience wasn't helping my concentration. I tried to tune it out.
It took fifteen minutes, but then it happened.
"I see it!" Cassie said. "I can see the tree!"
Everyone looked around suddenly. I opened my other eyes but kept the stalk eye still, maintaining my view of the tree branch.
"Cassie, we're surrounded by trees," Marco said.
"No, I mean I can see the one Jake is looking at."
"I see it too!" Rachel said excitedly.
"Oh, wow," Marco said. "This is trippy."
Tobias was the last one of us to get it. In retrospect that made sense. Cassie and I had recently established an emotional connection, Rachel and I were related, and Marco and I were practically inseparable. But Tobias was always a little distant. Like he always felt he didn't belong. He looked sad for a few minutes, but I suddenly flashed to the scene in my head from the other night. He was my little brother. That's how I saw him. Okay, so he was only four months younger than me, and we'd always been in the same grade, but he was still one of my closest friends. Even if we weren't as close now as we had been years ago, he was still Tobias, and he was my bud.
"Okay, I'm getting it," he said finally.
*Elfangor?* I asked.
*I have been able to see it since the beginning, Jake.*
*You could have said something ,* I said. *I thought I was doing it wrong.*
*Are you ready to revisit your memories?* he asked, apparently ignoring my complaint.
*Yeah, okay, here we go.*
Sending the memory via thought-speech was fairly simple. Like Elfangor had said, once all of us were connected, the challenge of it was over. The problem wasn't in sending the message. The problem was that all of them successfully received the message.
"God fucking Christ!" Marco blurted. He bolted to his feet, hands clutching his head, and began pacing. Eventually he settled into a rocking motion with his head in his hands.
Tobias threw up. He was able to turn to the side, stagger into the weeds, and let loose. He just stayed like that for a minute, on all fours in the grass, panting
Cassie was crying. She sat silently on the log, hugging her knees, tears running down her face. The face she made broke my heart into pieces.
Rachel was shaking, but she wasn't crying, didn't make a sound. She was the first one to find words after Marco's outburst. "So that's a Taxxon…" she said softly, her voice wavering.
*Yeah,* I said lamely, unsure what to do. *That's a Taxxon.*
"H-How?" Cassie asked. "How did you come out of that okay?"
*It helped that I was a lizard at the time,* I said. God, I should've seen this coming. I knew I would have had a far more violently visceral reaction to the Taxxons as a human, but I guess I just assumed the emotional detachment would just carry over. That the reptile indifference would blunt the horror of the experience.
I was wrong.
None of them wanted to talk, and the silence made me claustrophobic. I was overwhelmed with the desire to demorph back to human. I have no idea why I thought it would help, but I was desperate for my own skin right then and I didn't see any percentage in staying in the Andalite morph more than I needed to.
The silence was unbroken as the blue fur faded. I think I was more than halfway back to human before anyone even noticed I was coming out of the morph, the extra Andalite legs almost completely reabsorbed into my torso. The muscles of my arms and chest swelled back to their previous definitions, and for just a second I felt like a bodybuilder. I rolled my shoulders a few times, savoring the muscle movement in my back and shoulders.
I didn't even bother to get my shirt first. I just wrapped my arms around Cassie. I felt her fingers dig into my back, like she was trying to make sure I was real as she hugged me back.
The wave of reassurance that flowed through us was like fresh air and sunlight. Elfangor seemed to realize we needed a little hand-holding. At first, I was pissed. He could have done that minutes ago rather than let them all shake in their terror. But when I looked at him, I lost the venom.
His eyes met mine only briefly, then he seemed to whisper. *Alloran, what have they made of you?*
He was just as struck by this as they were, he'd just been focused on a different horror. We saw the Taxxons and the Hork-Bajir and we saw only monsters. But he saw that Andalite and he didn't see an alien. He didn't even see him as one of the myriad faces in the crowd like I had seen the innumerable human-Controllers. He saw his captain, someone he knew, and someone he had once respected.
Someone he had mourned already.
One by one, my friends recovered. It turned out it wasn't entirely just the visions of monsters that had freaked them out, though that had been a big part of it. It was just the way the human mind integrated the implanted memory. It took each of them a little time for my experiences to scion to their own memories, and while humans can receive thought-speech, memory transference is apparently a little more than our brains evolved to handle. Elfangor reassured me that they'd be fine soon, and all we could do was wait.
When the four of them were collected a little, Elfangor seemed to cast just a little touch of pride on all of us. *What Jake said before was true. I am used to the Taxxons. My first real mission in the military was on their planet. But I had forgotten what it was like to see them with fresh eyes. As cadets, many Andalites are often incapacitated by the revolting terror of the Taxxons. We are forced to face that fear so that we can know it, understand it, and overcome it. As you all have done now.*
"How could you ever feel sorry for something like that?" Rachel asked, her tone nearly accusing.
*Taxxons could be so much more in the galaxy could they ever contain their constant hunger. Instead of a race of metallurgists and engineers, they are all of them no more than butchers, not because they choose to be, but because evolution allows them no other recourse.*
"Christ, what kind of planet do you have to evolve on for that to happen?" Marco asked.
*A harsh one.*
Yeah, no shit, Elfangor.
"What's in those tanks they wear?" Tobias asked.
*Taxxons live in a world with a sulfur-rich atmosphere. They could likely tolerate Earth's atmospheric conditions for a day or two, but they would slowly succumb to oxygen toxicity.*
"You said those lizard monsters are friendly?" Cassie asked.
*They once were. To the best of our knowledge, not a single Hork-Bajir escaped the Yeerk conquest. We believe some forty thousand were infested and the rest of the species died in the aftermath of the war.*
"Forty thousand?" I asked.
*Many of the Hork-Bajir are stationed on other planets. Andalites often encounter them in battle across the galaxy. Current estimates indicate that no one planet has more than three thousand Hork-Bajir.*
"I'm going to assume you mean that as a good thing," Marco said. "Are the Taxxons an endangered species too?"
*The Yeerk Empire possesses in excess of three hundred thousand Taxxons at last estimate.*
"Peachy," he sighed.
My mind went straight to the pallets of scuba tanks I had seen the forklifts moving. Even if half of them had been empties on their way to some kind of recharging station, that still hinted at hundreds of Taxxons just in that section of the Pool facility. I shuddered to think how many of those worms were living on Earth. I didn't want to dwell on it.
"Look," I said, "this little Q&A session is educational, but what was your takeaway, here, Elfangor? Did you see any tactical options?"
*Actually, I have seen several. The Yeerks are making use of a considerably more efficient infestation method on this planet, and the tanks themselves may be more vulnerable to a series of smaller explosions rather than the larger device I had originally conceived.*
"You can do that without harming the human hosts?" I asked.
*Yes. We would not necessarily liberate any hosts, but we could harm the Yeerks without harming any humans.*
I looked at my friends. After absorbing an Andalite email attachment, I wasn't sure if they were going to be open to the idea of helping Elfangor smuggle explosives into an alien stronghold.
But before I could say anything, Rachel spoke.
"Let's do it."