Author's note: This chapter, and several that follow, are less effective than they ought to be on this site, because of Fanfiction-dot-net's automatic "correction" feature. Apparently it is impossible to double-space between words without the site software "fixing" it for you, so the speech of the adult Andalites, as Garatron reports it, doesn't quite suggest the Ent-like ponderousness that I intended. I apologize for this, and I will keep my eye out for an alternative site that doesn't have this problem, so you can see the text as it was originally intended. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what I did manage to retain here.
Andalite legend, I understand, suggests that I hated the Selicar Refuge as soon as I laid eyes on it, but this is quite untrue. When my parents took me to my new home on my third birthday, my immediate reaction was one of sheer wonder. I had never realized that such places existed; my parents had kept me in small, walled-off spaces for most of my early life, and the Selicar Refuge was my first glimpse of that vastness and openness that is so deeply rooted in every grazing creature's hearts.
Selicar, my grandfather said, was located on a part of the Northern Continent over which great sheets of ice had traveled in the distant past, during the age of the Voiceless People. That was why it contained such an odd mixture of rocks and minerals: the ice-sheets had gathered up pieces of all the lands they had covered, and had deposited it wherever they had happened to melt. There was even one region, he told me (though this was far to the south of the Refuge proper), where a boulder the size of a small hill had been laid to rest on an otherwise perfectly flat valley.
This, of course, was exactly the sort of notion that enchants a young male. «I,» I would tell myself, as I ran across the rolling valleys during my morning feeding, «am absorbing the soil of a multitude of lands, gathered together by wandering mountains at the very dawn of time.» (2) It was a pleasing thought, and I frequently found myself pitying the healthy Andalites who could not share it. Let their tails have three blades each, I was still richer than they.
Indeed, life in the Selicar Refuge offered many opportunities for pitying those Andalites who lived in the southern grasslands. What did those poor, benighted throngs (nearly 100 people in a single square mile in some places, they said) know of cool mornings in early spring, with the mist draping the hillocks like a wedding hood, and not even the scampering of a morrimil to disturb the silence – a silence so vast and immense that it seemed to have existed from the beginning of the world? Or of late autumn afternoons spent reclining beneath my Guide Tree, the jamblyha that I called Inmalfet, which unlike the southern therants and quilfins did not go dormant in the later parts of the year, so that even on the last day of the Frost Month I could lie underneath it and bask in its silent, solemn affection? And all this had been given to me and me alone – as though I were the son of one of the ancient kings, and my father had set aside a chunk of his realm as my own private playground.
Not, of course, that I was the only young vecol who was destined to spend his youth in the Selicar Refuge. The notion of a vast area where their offspring could grow up together was one that the parents of the other mutated Andalites found quite attractive, and many of them exerted all their efforts to secure a place there for their misbegotten sons or daughters. None of them were as well-connected as my grandfather, of course, and so for a number of months I had the Refuge to myself, but eventually there came a day in the early summer when I was summoned to the edge of the stream Nithra to meet the first of my new companions.
« Gar - a - tron, » said my father, in the slow, ponderous way that the healthy Andalites thought-spoke, « this is Li - milt - Zal - a - ran - He - ge - ti. He will be liv - ing in the Ref - uge with you from now on. »
I looked critically at the young male who was standing beneath a nearby zimar tree, leaning against its trunk with an air of studied indifference to everything around him. The first thing I noticed about him was his size: I had thought that I represented the limit of Andalite dwarfism, but Limilt-Zalaran-Hegeti was half a head again smaller than I was. Yet he bore himself with the pride of a war-prince, as though the grotesque deficiencies of his body were merely a temporary inconvenience, or an enchantment out of an old story. So must Prince Gamatol have looked when the Ellimists bound his soul to that of the djabala.
I decided that I liked this Limilt – but he was still intruding on my private sanctuary, and I felt obligated to make some pro forma complaint. «Why does he have to live here?» I appealed to my mother. «Isn't there some other place where he could be away from the others?»
« This is the place that the Coun - cil has ap - poin - ted for all the mis - born ju - ve - niles, Gar - a - tron, » said my mother. « It is his as much as yours. Be - sides, sure - ly the Sel - i - car Ref - uge is big e - nough for both of you to live in with - out nick - ing each oth - er's tail - blades. »
I decided not to point out that we couldn't very well nick each other's tail-blades if neither of us had one. «Well, maybe,» I said, «but still, it just won't be the same if there's someone else here.»
«And, pray tell, how do you think I feel?» said Limilt suddenly. (He had heard this whole conversation, of course, since I was not yet at the age of mastering private thought-speak.) «Here my parents have been telling me for months that I will meet other youths of my own stature at this Selicar place, and then I get here and find no-one living here except this big galoot from the Island beyond the Warm Current.»
I turned and stared at him with my two good eyes. «What?»
«I mean, look at you,» said Limilt. «Just a big lump of undifferentiated muscle. I'll bet that when you cut your tail, it takes three days for the pain impulse to reach your brain.»
My first thought was that Limilt was mentally unhinged. Granted that I had five or six inches on him, I was still nowhere near being "a huge lump of undifferentiated muscle"; and the bit about my nerve impulses was absolutely ridiculous. Had his mutation somehow affected his mind – caused it to malform in the same way as his body, so that it exaggerated even the smallest difference into something absurd?
Then, suddenly, I realized. Limilt-Zalaran-Hegeti. Zalaran… Wasn't Mitubal-Zalaran-Ositak that famous poet who was always receiving accolades from the Artistic and Cultural Sub-Council? Limilt was probably her second child – which meant that he would have been raised with all the disciplines of the most avant-garde modern artists, particularly…
«Humor,» I said. «That was humor, wasn't it?»
«It was supposed to be,» said Limilt. «Why, is that a problem for you?»
«No, no,» I said hastily. «It's just… well, I've heard of humor, of course, but I'd never actually met anyone who practiced it.»
«Ah,» said Limilt. «No, I don't suppose you would have. Living out on that island, with nothing but botanists and kerrit vines within a thousand miles: you're probably as ignorant as a lumib about nine-tenths of the achievements of modern culture.»
«How do you do it?» I said, ignoring the jibe. «Does it just come over you, like a fit, at odd intervals? Or do you actually have to train your mind to see everything as not quite what it is?»
Limilt laughed. «It's not as hard as you think, Garatron-Sitek-Shaveer,» he said. «In a way, it's just the logical reaction to being me – or you.»
I must have looked puzzled, for he continued. «The idea behind humor is that a sufficiently absurd viewpoint can render even the most poignant situations emotionally innocuous. They did tell you that much, at least?»
I nodded.
«Okay, then,» said Limilt. «Now, maybe you never felt this, since I don't suppose there are all that many juveniles on the Island beyond the Warm Current, but when a person grows up among the herds that graze the Ilarda, he has a lot of opportunities to notice what a freak he is relative to his peers – and he can either spend the rest of his life feeling miserable about that, or he can find a way to make it not seem so important to him.»
I frowned. «And that's why you took up humor?» It was a strange idea to me; I had never thought that the literary theories of Sufet-Ilganor-Ofeel could serve as a school of courage.
Limilt flicked his tail in an Andalite shrug. «My mother likes to say that a person's life is like a fable,» he said. «It can either bring pleasure or grief, depending on how the person tells it.» His eyes twinkled. «And I never much cared for tragic fables, myself.»
I laughed aloud. Yes, I definitely liked this Limilt.
And thus began what I still think of as the golden period of my youth. I introduced Limilt to every corner of the Refuge, from the till piles at the northeastern edge to the freshwater spring that fed the Nithra from the south, and it was as though I was discovering it myself all over again. And no sooner had he become a full native of the Selicar than we were called back to the southern boundary to meet Shisken-Atomal-Breecai, a regional governor's daughter whose eyes blazed like fire from her dome-shaped face, and the adventure began again with her as the novice and Limilt as my co-master. Then came Berel-Thorondor-Suparit, a quiet, enigmatic young male with no parents in particular – and after him a dozen other juveniles whose names I could never remember all at once, but all of whom looked up to me as a sort of Dean-Alpha of the Selicar Herd. Every so often, I would hear one of them refer to himself and his fellows as "the People of Garatron", and I would blush with embarrassment mingled with pride.
No, certainly I did not start out by hating the Selicar Refuge. I had to learn to do that – and I doubt I would ever have done so, had it not been for Kirinar.
(2)
«You mean the dawn of man,» said Tobias. «Or the dawn of Andalite, or whatever.»
«No, "the dawn of time" is correct,» said Ax. «According to Andalite philosophy, time is a mode of existence that requires a sentient mind to perceive it, and therefore it did not exist before the first Andalites.»
«Oh.» Tobias sat for a long moment, digesting that. «Okay, then, go on.»