Chapter 6
It took a little over an hour to find everybody and get them to Ax's scoop. Normally, I can have everybody rounded up and assembled in forty-five minutes, but it was Saturday and they were scattered around town. I found Jake and Marco at the new laser tag place off of Westwood Avenue. Cassie was trying to catch up on homework in the barn while simultaneously observing a few of her dad's post-op patients. I almost freaked out when I couldn't find Rachel at the normal places – her house, the mall, the Chinese restaurant down the street from her house that she liked. By chance, I'd spotted her walking home from the Y with a gym bag; apparently, she was going to try to give gymnastics another try. Good. The more normal Rachel's life was, the better I slept.
Rachel and I were the last of the Animorphs to arrive. Ax was standing off to the side, the definition of the word 'aloof.' He looked upset, the way he'd been ever since Erek had suggested that the Yeerks might actually be tech-savvier than his own people in the near future. Cassie and Jake were quietly sitting beside each other, trying to not make it obvious the backs of their hands were touching. Marco, being Marco, was trying to berate Erek into telling him what was going on. Patience is not Marco's strong suit.
"This doesn't make sense, man," he was complaining loudly as Erek's hologram grinned at him. "So, right when I'm kicking Jake's butt at laser tag by about a thousand points, I have to come to Ax's house to stop the Yeerks. Only, for once, the Yeerks aren't terrorizing innocents; they're stealing jewelry. Jewelry. They're looking to get iced out. Blinged up, Diddy-style. What's next? They gonna put rims on their Bug fighters? Dracon drive-bys? Let me guess; we're going to have a wave of dentist infestations, so the Yeerks can all get grills."
"Marco, shut up," Jake said conversationally as Rachel finished demorphing. He stood only reluctantly, leaving Cassie sitting alone on the bench inside of the scoop. Without even realizing it, he walked to where he could see everybody at once. Once he was in this position of power and had everyone's attention, he looked to Erek. "Well? Tobias says you've got a story to tell, and here we are to listen."
Erek nodded amicably. "Believe me, this story plays a huge part in what's going on with the Yeerks right now." He deactivated his hologram and stood in front of us, looking like a humanoid dog. A robot, humanoid dog. "Hundreds of thousands of years ago, before the Howlers came and wiped out the Pemalites, we knew of another race." His hologram started showing moving pictures, like a movie montage that went along with the words Erek was saying.
The hologram showed one of the dog-like Pemalites interacting with a weird-looking creature; it almost looked like they were playing patty cake, no kidding. The other creature almost looked like an opaque version of the blob – arms randomly grew out of and then reabsorbed into the widely-grinning mass. I realized that they were laughing as they played.
"The Klakk were our friends. They were everybody's friends. That's all they wanted out of life – friends to play with. As soon as they were able, they took to the stars on a single, self-appointed mission – to make friends. That was the long and short of it. They went out into the galaxy looking for friends."
The holographic picture show switched to a view of space. It showed hundreds and hundreds of organic-looking spacecraft leaving a planet that really didn't look all that different from Earth. It showed them all breaking away, each one going into Z-space pointed in a different direction.
"Most species they came across were primitive – too primitive. As you know, the more backward a species is, the more warlike it's tendencies – that's not a solid rule, but it's a pretty reliable guideline." Quick images of the Klakk trying to land on other planets flashed in front of us; in one image, bird-like creatures threw rocks at the spaceship before the Klakk could even get out. In another, creatures that looked like a cross between lizards and porcupines fired things that looked like cannons at them.
"The Klakk were sad. They began to take a different approach – instead of finding new friends, they would make them. They concentrated on finding uninhabited, but habitable, systems." All of a sudden, the unmistakable image of Earth as seen from space dominated the scoop. "Earth was one of the first planets the Klakk seeded."
"Seeded?" Marco asked, caught up in the story. Erek shushed him with one ivory-and-metal finger to his nonexistent lips.
"Seeded – that's what the Klakk called it when they…prepared…a planet, like Earth. The Klakk planted materials at strategic points throughout the planets crust, so that their future friends would have the means to go to the stars with them." Cross-section views of the Earth's crust were shown, and even before it zoomed in, you could see the diamonds in huge clusters beneath the surface. You could see the deep, uniform, beautiful veins of gold that ran through the crust, like a network of arteries.
"The Klakk would not leave it to chance that these planets they seeded would produce intelligent life. They were good geneticists, but they didn't want to simply create a race to play with. They saw the relationship between Pemalite and Chee as fun, but a little odd. There was an inequality about it in their eyes; creator and created, not true friends."
Suddenly, we were looking at prehistoric Earth creatures drawn up into Klakk ships by what looked like an honest-to-God tractor beam. A wooly mammoth cub first, then a whale-like creature, then some sort of flying mammal. Finally, Erek showed us the inside view of a Klakk ship in which they were doing gentle experiments on an ape-like creature. "Instead of just creating something out of genetic material, they simply gave evolution a boost. They saw that the primates were going to be the rulers of this planet, and the Klakk encoded rapid mutation into their genome." Another Earth-from-space view, only this time it was fast-forwarded. It was a time-lapse video that covered fifty-thousand years in about ten seconds. The continents moved. Ice receded. And then, looking more human than primate, Erek showed us a tribe of what would soon become humans. He showed them making fire and using tools to make other tools. We watched as they built first villages, then cities.
All of a sudden, he powered down his projection and drew the hologram back in to just cover his android body with a human one. Nobody said anything for a while. Finally, Rachel broke the silence. "So you're saying that humans are just…toys…that these Klakk built to play with?" She sounded sick.
Erek shook his head. "No. Humans would have evolved on this planet without the Klakk's interference – they just sped up the process. They had every intention of coming back to Earth before now to befriend the humans and take them to the stars."
"Let me guess," Marco said. "The Klakk went the way of the Pemalites before they could come back to Earth." He sounded mad about it.
Erek nodded. "Yes. The Klakk, like the Pemalites, had no weapons. When they encountered the Howlers, they never had a chance. They didn't even run when the Howlers opened fire; they thought it would be rude to interrupt their new friends' game." Now it was Erek himself who sounded sick.
Ax just stared. (So with the Klakk gone, this planet was left to evolve naturally. The humans have no idea how precious their planet is; out of a billion billion planets, Earth is one of only a few which has these extremely pure samples of metals and minerals. And the Yeerks accidentally stumbled upon it.)
"In the way that you mean, Aximili, it was an accident. Until very recently, the Yeerks did not know how precious the actual planet itself was. At first, they were only interested in the bodies." The hologram dropped, and Erek reached into a compartment built into his chest. He handed Rachel something; she opened her hand, and three large diamonds, uncut, rested in her palm. "Now that they've discovered that Earth itself can give them a technological advantage over the Andalites…" He looked us all in the eye as he let that hang. "I am afraid that they will forget about invasion and focus on conquest, regardless of the host body situation." For some reason, he looked directly at me. "The only thing keeping humans safe is the Yeerks' need for hosts. If the Yeerks decide that the planet is more important than the hosts, I fear the worst."
Ax said it so Erek didn't have to. (They will sterilize this planet by killing every living thing. Every plant, every tree, every creature that draws breath. They'll burn them all.)