Interlude—Alloran

They call it the Vanarx.

It's a paltry monster, as warriors reckon such things. Fast, but not that fast. Strong, but not that strong. It slithers and hides, lurking in the cracks between boulders, but it is neither quiet nor clean, and anyone with their wits about them will hear or smell it long before it strikes. It's no match for an Andalite or a Hork-Bajir, and rarely does lasting damage even to a Gedd.

It has but one talent, and that is excision. It strikes—constricts—drapes itself across the orifices of its victim and then, through some eldritch, unknown process, coaxes the Yeerk out of the neural cavity, drawing every last fiber into its slavering maw.

—I fought with every scrap of strength I could muster, lunging around the blocks Esplin had placed between me and my body, cutting at every point of weakness. I didn't need to win, only to interfere—to delay, to sabotage, to buy time for the monster. A surge of psychic effort, and a leg collapsed beneath me—a searing flash of will, and the tail-strike Esplin had aimed went awry. A purple pseudopod landed at the base of my spine and stuck, growing heavy as the Vanarx poured itself through the fragile bridge, as it spread itself across my flank, and Esplin screamed into the eib, a feral cry of black rage and mad terror—

It has no equal on the Yeerk homeworld, no predator above save the light of the sun. The Gedds are helpless before it, which meant that for æons, so were the Yeerks. It preyed upon them with impunity, eluding their dull senses, evading their slow and clumsy limbs. Greater numbers only meant greater carnage, except insofar as forty-nine can scatter more effectively than seven. When Aloth-Attamil-Gahar dispatched a Vanarx that struck at a venturing party, the story spread across the planet like wildfire, elevating her to near-godhood and opening the way for the Seerow negotiations.

(They would perhaps have reacted differently, had they heard Seerow lamenting that Aloth had killed the creature immediately instead of pausing to make a recording of its feeding process.)

I did not understand their horror, at first—the hushed tones, the nervous glances, the trembling digits. There are other causes of death, after all, and for all that the Vanarx is inexorable—to a Yeerk—it is also rare. In two long revolutions on the homeworld, I saw only four, and only one at close range.

—Esplin screamed at the others to fire, and I laughed at his desperation. They were long gone, every last one of them sent running by the first flash of purple. I turned all of my attention to my tail, fighting to hold it limp and useless as the monster enveloped me, a gelatinous film spreading across my fur like a second skin. I did not gloat, did not mock, offered the Yeerk no parting thoughts save one—

But the Vanarx does not harm the host. Once it has consumed the Yeerk, it withdraws, allowing the poor Gedd to continue its usual aimless stumbling, until sooner or later it stops for a drink—

—at which point the Yeerks retake it, and the memory of death is reclaimed.

Every death.

Every desperate chase.

Every horrifying capture.

The last shreds of hope, vanishing as the purple closes in.

It is a nightmare that every Yeerk has lived over and over, a wound that every pool has felt untold times. Whether they carry the actual memories or not, every individual shard takes with it the dread, the hopeless helplessness of an endless string of gruesome defeats.

It's no wonder that even Esplin was afraid.

‹Die,› I whispered, as the film closed over my head, climbed up my stalks, poured into my ears and found its ingress. It began to sing—neither aloud nor in the eib, and yet it was music nonetheless, a swelling, resonant harmony. I felt Esplin cringe, felt him burrow deeper into the folds of my brain, seeking sanctuary, tearing through my memory for something, anything that could save him—

‹No!› I shouted.

But it was too late.

With a triumphant howl, the Yeerk activated the morphing technology, the Vanarx falling still as the stasis field expanded, its soporific effect taking hold. I scrabbled at the edges of his thoughts, struggling to break his concentration, but it was futile—the creature had his undivided attention, and I was weaker than ever, having burnt through all of my reserves—

That was the moment of my defeat. When Esplin, giddy with the glow of victory, of survival, dropped the veil and revealed to me his true intentions, and the last spark of hope began to die within me.

We Andalites do not use words, you see—do not connect two and three and four things together under a single name. For the most part, the Yeerks do not, either, but they developed spoken language—

(—or stole the language of the Gedds; at this point it makes no sense to think of the Gedds as a separate species with a separate history—)

—as a means of swift communication, communication between hosts, away from any pool. It is a shorthand—clumsy, and slow, and inexact, with subtleties of meaning often lost or misunderstood. For every seven words spoken, only four or five actually communicate what they were intended to.

The rest fall prey to the Vanarx.

And when the coalescions divide themselves into shards—

Each pool is frighteningly intelligent, moreso than any one Andalite—moreso than any seven Andalites, moreso than seven Seerows. Intelligent enough that they managed to hide their true nature from us completely, with sufficient skill that even now the Council remains ignorant.

And yet, those minds are blinded. Crippled. Insulated, isolated, viewing the world through a thousand tiny windows, their information always slightly out of date. When they form plans and intentions—when they seek to impose their will upon reality—when they pass information back and forth—they must do so through tiny fragments of themselves, carried by slow and clumsy bodies, each with its own identity, its own sense of purpose—each wholly incapable of containing within itself everything it needs to execute its mission correctly. Compared to the pool as a whole, individual Yeerks are as mindless and stupid as the Gedds they master—projectiles, with just enough agency to throw themselves off course.

This, too, is the Vanarx.

It is tragedy, it is entropy—senseless waste and wasteful senselessness, all that goes wrong despite the best of intentions. It is feuds born of nothing, and plans that fail for no reason, the decay of cooperation into confusion and chaos. It is economics, and politics, and careless incompetence—everything that stands between reality and paradise.

When Controllers on the Earth obeyed an order that should have been ignored, and killed the identities of Walter and Michelle Withers in defiance of all sense and strategy, it was the Vanarx at work.

When they heard their Visser's subsequent endorsement of discretion and flexibility, and interpreted it to mean ignore security protocols and allow the enemy into your stronghold, it was the Vanarx at work.

(It is a title they conferred upon my erstwhile protégé as he cut their plans to ribbons, picking apart their war machine in silence, the blade that falls without warning. They flew out into the darkness, and one in seven was never heard from again, and they spoke the name of Elfangor with black bitterness—none more furiously than Esplin himself.)

For a species whose entire way of life is control, it is the ultimate profanity, an injustice woven into the fabric of the universe. The Yeerks seek to weaken it—through conquest, through the sharing, through the increase of their power in both extent and intensity.

But they also acknowledge its intransigence, do not underestimate its tenacity. They learned caution at the hands of an enemy that could not be defeated or controlled, and that lesson serves to temper their ambition. They avoid it, account for it, mitigate its butchery, but do not dare to contemplate its end. For all of their pride and their arrogance, they yet retain some measure of sanity, of restraint—there are prices they are not willing to pay.

Except for Esplin. Esplin, born of fear and desperation, who knows no boundaries, accepts no law. I have seen his thoughts, traced his actions, pieced together what scant pieces of the puzzle he has allowed me to see, and even that little is sufficient to leave me utterly speechless.

For all that he acts to bring down my people—

For all that he acts to raise up his own—

For all that he seems sane and reasonable—

The humans are not his true target. The galaxy is not his true target. His enemy is the Vanarx itself—not the creature, but the aspect of reality, as if it were possible to declare war upon the force of gravity. He seeks an end to uncertainty, the death of disorder, and there is no tool he considers too costly to wield.

(Already he has burned the monster of his homeworld out of existence, destroyed every last copy of its genetic code with a biological weapon wrenched from the Arn—every last copy except the one he acquired for himself. And the Yeerks, in their naïveté, took this as a positive sign.)

((I suppose I cannot blame them. My own wisdom foaled on the ashes of Seerow's madness, as the Starlight-Shimmer and the Guide-Tree's-Roots burned and Esplin used my body to laugh.))

For a time, I put my faith in Elfangor. Dreamed that the prodigal prince might yet prevail—might perhaps even know, might somehow have understood. For the whole latter half of the war, he matched Esplin maneuver for maneuver, ignoring all manner of bait, spurning all established military doctrine, striking again and again at the true heart of the parasite's schemes with clairvoyant accuracy. I measured my student's success by the frequency with which Esplin drove me under, cutting me off from my senses, locking me away—as if, by muting my laughter, he could convince himself he was not aware of it.

But in the end, Elfangor misstepped. Misstepped, and died—a lonely, ignominious death, leaving behind only a handful of untrained irregulars. Irregulars who had perished in turn when the meteor struck, having done the enemy no lasting damage. It was possible that some fraction of them had survived—some lucky few who happened to be outside of the blast zone—but in the end, it would make no difference. They did not know, could not possibly be on guard against what was coming.

Only I was aware. I, and my master. My slaver. My overlord.

‹Kill me,› I whispered. Not aloud, in the eib—that belonged to Esplin now, who ruled it as surely as he ruled my tail, my fingers, my stalks. Quietly, into the stillness of the hirac, where none but the Yeerk and myself could hear.

(And the Ellimist, if such truly existed. But if so, it had denied my plea seven-to-the-seven times, and was no ally of mine, nor of the universe it had allowed Esplin to be born into.)

I did not want to see the future, the shape that Esplin planned to impose upon creation. I did not want to be a part of his eternity, a cog in his machine. It was my final refuge—the unwanting, the rejection, the thoughts I flung into the abyss. It was my last rebellion against the creature who had beaten me in every possible way, who had used me as a weapon against everything I held dear.

And yet—

It was mine only because Esplin allowed it to be. Because, in his amusement, he had decided to leave this smallest scrap of me unbroken. Because he wanted me to witness my own ruin, to taste my own despair. Because any further lessening would also lessen the torment, break the equilibrium of my misery.

‹Kill me,› I whispered again, more quietly this time. As quietly as I could—quietly enough that I could almost pretend that the thought was not my own.

Because who does one pray to, after all?

The very fact that I was asking was a loss. A betrayal. A capitulation. I lowered my voice in abject shame, and yet still I repeated the entreaty, my obeisance a confirmation of Esplin's omnipotence, my appeal an implicit acknowledgement of his sovereignty. I paid tribute with my supplication—it was not a shout of defiance, or a scornful rejection, or even a final, tired dissent. It was an embrace—the final, crushing admission of my defeat.

I prayed to my god, begging him to end my suffering.

I prayed, with all my heart—without pride or reservation.

I prayed, and waited patiently—humbly—for his answer.

But it did not come.