Limilt and Kirinar were, of course, informed of the great secret as soon as they woke the next morning. The reactions of both were similar: at first, their eyes lit up with wonder and fierce joy; then, upon reflection, their faces became troubled, and, when they spoke, it was to express their doubts about the plan.
The joy surprised me in neither case. Limilt was a poet's son, and the notion of dwelling among the stars is almost the essence of poetry embodied. As for Kirinar, I had no need to learn about the Orniya Quest to know in what mystic regard Green Andalites held the stars. The Andalites of the Mainland form their constellations (with a few exceptions, such as the Kneeling Widow) into shapes taken from Nature – animals, plants, and features of landscapes; on the Southernmost Island, in contrast, they have peopled the night sky with the figures of great heroes, whom they say the Bodiless Powers have placed there as a reward for their magnificent virtues. To tread the plains where such mighty ones dwell could not but be an enticing prospect to a young elder's daughter.
Their doubts were another matter. Kirinar was the first to speak. «This is a great thing you tell us, Shisken,» she said, «but I fail to see how it solves my difficulty. Do you suggest that, somewhere among the stars, there is a replica of the Southernmost Island that the Mainland has never conquered?»
«Who can say what lies among the stars?» said Shisken. «The point is that something must – and, whatever it is, it is more truly our country than anywhere on this world. Here, we are exiles and outcasts; there, we may be explorers and colonists.»
«But I have no wish to be an explorer or a colonist,» said Kirinar, with a slight quiver in her thought-speak. «The only place I wish to dwell is the country where I was born. How can Scholar Falkrith's vessel deliver that to me?»
It seemed that Shisken did not know the answer to that question. She fell silent and kicked at the ground with her hoof, as was her habit when frustrated by her own inarticulateness. I, however, hearing the distress in Kirinar's voice, could not restrain myself from speaking.
«Kirinar,» I said, «is there nothing, short of a restoration of your childhood's surroundings, that can bring you happiness?»
Kirinar turned to me, and I thought my hearts would break as her pain-filled eyes met mine. «How can I explain to you, Garatron?» she said. «The Southernmost Island is not merely a region; it is a promise. On my first birthday, I was bound to the soil of the Island in a ceremony I am not permitted to describe; from that day until the day of my exile, every breath I took was a covenantal act, deepening and strengthening my bond with the land of my ancestors. The grass, the trees, the rivers, the very stars in the sky, all served to remind me of what I was, and what was commanded of me.»
«But –» I began.
Kirinar raised her hand. «I know. You are going to tell me that there is nothing about the grass, rivers, and stars of the Southernmost Island that differs substantially from the grass, rivers, and stars of the Mainland. And I cannot explain, because I cannot cease to see the difference long enough to make you see it yourself.
«But look at this stone,» she continued, kneeling down and picking up a quartzite rock from off the ground. «To you, there is nothing special about it; it is merely one of many stones that litter the floor of the Selicar. But suppose you were told that your grandmother had received this stone as a wedding token; would you willingly let it be lost among the till piles?»
I considered that. «I see,» I said. «And the Southernmost Island is your own grandmother's wedding token; is that it?»
«The Southernmost Island is the setting of my people's history,» said Kirinar. «Even if I have been taken from it, I dare not abandon it, lest I abandon myself as well.»
«But, Kirinar,» Shisken broke in, «if we of the Selicar are, as Berel suggests, a people unto ourselves, then the worlds we discover will be the setting of our own history. Does that not at least partially compensate for having lost the Island?»
«I have addressed that already, Shisken,» said Kirinar wearily. «The four of you may be part of a separate, non-Andalite race. I am not. My people did not reject me; they were simply robbed of me.»
«It comes to the same thing,» said Shisken impatiently.
«No, Shisken, it does not,» said Kirinar. «I have not ceased to be one of the People. Therefore, I have not ceased to be an Andalite.»
«Perhaps not,» I said. «But you have become one of us.»
There was a moment's silence.
«Or am I too precipitous?» I said. «If so, forgive me. But I had hoped…»
I could not finish. What had I hoped? That Kirinar had, after all, found a home in the Selicar Refuge? That she had come to identify herself with a group of misborn Mainlanders to the extent that she would follow wherever they led? Or perhaps – fool, Garatron, you utter, abysmal fool – that her destiny might be intertwined with mine, as the leaves of an alaksha? Better to absorb a poisonous rucap nut than to say such things to her.
«I had hoped that you might be our friend,» was all I could think to say. The words had no sooner escaped me than I wished not to have spoken them; they sounded so bitter, so petty, compared to what I had desired to say.
But Kirinar seemed not to hear this – or, if she did, there was no trace of it in her reply. «And I am, Garatron,» she said earnestly. «Truly, I am. It would be inexcusable in me not to be, after the kindness the four of you have shown me. And I confess that I would indeed rather sojourn on unknown worlds than spend the rest of my life in the Selicar Refuge.
«But I beg of you, Garatron, if I on my part have in any way earned your friendship: do not require me to oppose my love for you to my love of my people. I cannot say which would prevail, but I know that neither would be the better for the conflict.»
There was little I could say after that. A silence fell on our gathering, broken only when Limilt, who had been pacing in thoughtful silence behind me all the while, stepped forward. «Well, then,» he said, «if you have quite finished torturing an innocent maiden with hypothetical dilemmas, perhaps we can address a rather more practical matter.»
I sighed, and turned to him. «What do you mean, Limilt?»
«I am referring to the problem of getting our hands on Scholar Falkrith's vessel,» said Limilt. «So far as I can see, we have two alternatives: we can either petition the Council to give it to us, or we can seize it by force. As to the former, I hardly think that a Council that refuses even to return a stolen juvenile to her homeland will be at all likely to turn the most expensive and revolutionary piece of technology in history over to her and her friends, no matter how eloquently Berel pleads the justice of our cause. As to the latter, how are five dozen undersized juveniles without tail-blades supposed to seize a starship from several hundred fully tailed Andalite adults?»
The question was a fair one. In retrospect, it rather surprises me that neither Shisken nor I had considered it before; perhaps we were deliberately avoiding it. Certainly, Limilt's calm assessment that we might have to seize the vessel by force unnerved me; I had not, till then, envisioned our quest for liberty as involving violence.
Still, the question, having been raised, needed answering. I considered. «Is there any way we can overcome their advantage of force? Are there any substitutes for tail-blades?»
«Many,» said Limilt. «There are the tusks of the sharbat, the coils of the uliarth, the toxic projectiles with which the reesi-al brings down its prey. Sadly, however, when Nature deprived us of our tail-blades, it failed to provide us with any of these substitutes.»
Kirinar laughed. «If only you had the Stone of Sadellun,» she commented. «Then you could charm all the beasts you needed into serving as your foot soldiers.» She held up the rock in her hand, and began to declaim in the tone that I had heard her use when she told me the story of her life. «"Forward, legions of sky and marshland! Forward, warriors feathered and scaled! Saprec's son holds your hearts in his hand; defend him, who grasps the artifact of your wildness!"»
Limilt glanced at her bemusedly. «Yes, that would doubtless solve a great many of our problems,» he agreed. «In the meantime, has anyone anything non-mythological to suggest?»
«We might be able to infiltrate the launch site unobserved…» Shisken suggested vaguely.
«No,» I said. «The region from which Falkrith's ship took off last night is the most wide-open grassland on the Northern Continent. The most slipshod Andalite security could not fail to notice us advancing on it – and I very much doubt that the security surrounding so revolutionary an invention will be at all slipshod.»
«There must be some way,» Shisken insisted. «The sentient mind, properly applied, can overcome all obstacles. Isn't that what we were always taught?»
«Not precisely,» said Limilt. «We were taught that, if a solution to a problem exists, it is the glory of the sentient mind that it can find it. But, if the problem of its very nature admits of no solution, the sentient mind is only glorious if it is willing to recognize that fact. Only a fool attempts to square the circle, and only a fool attempts to fight without weapons. And the essence of our problem is that we have no weapons.»
That seemed to summarize the matter to a nicety. No further words were spoken for some minutes; the silence was broken only by a sad laugh from Kirinar. «Well,» she said, «I see I shall have to acclimate myself to life in the Selicar after all. Well, doubtless there are worse fates.»
She cast a brief, winsome look up at the sky; perhaps she was bidding farewell to the infinite horizons that she had been so briefly offered. Then, with a gesture of stoic renunciation, she tossed aside the stone that she had been holding.
Too hard, perhaps. Instead of dropping unceremoniously to the ground, the way I believe she had intended, it tumbled through the air at a 60° angle and struck Limilt squarely on the right foreshin.
Limilt cried out in pain, and Kirinar started. «Oh!» she exclaimed. «Oh, Limilt, forgive me! My eye-hand coordination has always been wretched; I assure you, I didn't mean…»
But Limilt did not seem to be listening to her. He was staring at the commonplace lump of quartzite as though he had never seen such a wonder before; then, abruptly, he reached down, picked it up, and then threw it deliberately at his shin again, with twice the force that Kirinar had used.
«Limilt!» I exclaimed. «In the name of all the Powers, what are you doing?»
«He's gone mad,» said Shisken. «I knew it would happen eventually.»
Limilt raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were watering with pain, but there was a gleam in them that I had never seen before. «On the contrary, Shisken,» he said. «I was mad hitherto – or deluded, at least. I believe I owe you an apology; you were perfectly right in insisting that our dilemma was soluble by sentient ingenuity.»
«What do you mean?» said Shisken uncertainly.
«I said that we could not prevail over the Andalites because they bear weapons, and we do not,» said Limilt. «What I failed to consider was that a weapon need not be inborn. A weapon is simply a tool that is used to cause injury; if Andalites happen to bear theirs on their tails, that is no reason why we cannot carry ours in our hands.» He held up Kirinar's rock. «When Kirinar threw this and hit me, it was merely an accident. But then I threw it at myself, and it became a weapon.»
He looked into our staring faces one by one. «Do you not see? This is our equivalency with the Andalites. No, more: this is our advantage over the Andalites. The Andalites know nothing of this; because their tails are such effective weapons, they have never bothered to learn other ways of inflicting injury. It would never occur to them that one might wound or even kill an enemy without being anywhere near him – that a small force, equipped with the proper sort of tools, could lay an entire army low without ever getting within tail-blade range. That is our secret, and ours alone.»
«One moment, Limilt,» I broke in. «You are not suggesting, surely, that we are going to seize Scholar Falkrith's vessel by throwing rocks at the guards?»
«Of course not,» said Limilt easily.
That reassured me. I knew how frenzied Limilt was capable of getting once an idea was in his head; it was good to know that he was still willing to be rational about this one.
«We will throw tail-blades.»
My reassurance vanished.