The Andalite Chronicles, page 15
Clearly I had used the Time Matrix to carry me through time and space. Without experiencing any passage of time, I was home. But home when? Was this a hundred years ago? A thousand? The Garibah had been alive for seven thousand years. It could be anywhere in that time span.
I remembered trying to turn the Time Matrix to my own visions. And I guess I had succeeded. All these trees, all this lush grass, the kafit bird that fluttered by overhead, the little hoobers that jumped on springy tendrils and stared at me from their comical bulging eyes, all this was home. My home.
And across that stream, and over that next rise, I would see my family home. Just ahead! I broke into a run. I leaped the stream, like I always did, and suddenly I had to be home. I didn’t care what anyone said. I didn’t care. I wanted my mother and father. I wanted to lie down in the deep grass of the scoop and find my old toys and be a child again.
I ran, flat-out, and yes, the slopes were so familiar! And yes, every tree was where it should be. I ran to the top of the rise, ready to look down into our neat, oval-shaped family scoop, and —
I stopped.
There it was: the scoop. The bowl dug out of the ground by my great-great-grandparents and planted with every delicious variety of grass and flowers. And there was the lodge, the blue-plex awning that covered the south quarter of the scoop and kept our things out of the rain.
But just behind the scoop, in a place it could not possibly be, was a waterfall.
It was an incredible waterfall. It fell hundreds of feet from the edge of a cliff. A cliff that simply stood there. No mountains on either side. Just a cliff that rose sharply up from the grass.
I felt a sick queasiness in my stomach.
I was seeing something I had seen before. It was the picture from what Loren had called a cigarette ad. But it was in a place it should not be. In a place it could not be. It was violating the very laws of physics.
This was not home.
I tore my gaze away from the impossible waterfall, and looked around. From the top of the rise I could see fairly far.
What I saw was impossibility piled on impossibility.
But what I focused on first was the sky.
It was a deep red and gold, like the red and gold of my own world. It was also light blue, with fluffy white clouds. And it was green.
Stretching over my head was a sky broken into jigsaw-puzzle fragments. Here a patch of Andalite sky. There a lighter blue. And over there, a shocking green torn by ragged bolts of electricity. Clouds drifted through the paler blue segments and then disappeared when they reached a different segment. Lightning in the green sky disappeared when it reached one of the other patches.
I had never known what the sky of Earth looked like, but now I could guess. It was pale blue, with fluffy white clouds.
And I had never known the sky of the Yeerk world, but now I could guess that, too. It was green and torn by bolts of electricity.
What have we done? I wondered.
And I remembered the laughter of that vast and strange being I had glimpsed.
I wandered, amazed and appalled, through a world that made no sense. The parts that were familiar just made other parts seem stranger.
My scoop was there, right where it should be. But no one was around. Not a single other Andalite. Not my father or my mother.
Why? Where was I? If this wasn’t home, where was it?
I wandered through woods and across open fields that were familiar. But then, across a field I’d known all my life, I found a sharp line drawn. The grasses of home stopped abruptly. And on the other side everything turned brown and muddy gray and a red so dark it was almost black.
On one side of the line, my own world. On the other side of the line, wild, tall, spiky grass and trees that rose only a foot tall before spreading out horizontally for thirty or forty feet. If you could even call something like that a tree.
I was startled by something that reached up out of the ground with a soft SHLOOP! It was like a Taxxon tongue, almost. Ten feet long and dark red, it shot up from a hole in the ground. It seemed to lick the air in a slow, circular pattern, as if it was searching blindly for something. Then, after a few seconds, it SHLOOPED! back into the ground.
Ten feet away, another such tongue. This time it reached for a beast that walked past, hunched over. The beast had four thick legs toward the back and two turned-in legs forward, with no discernable head.
This lumbering creature wandered straight toward the flickering tongue and suddenly, fast as a tail, the tongue reached out and wrapped around the beast’s hind legs. The beast let out a groan, although where that sound came from, since it seemed not to have a head, was a mystery to me.
The tongue drew the beast toward its hole. But it could not suck the animal down, so it simply held it prisoner as the beast groaned.
The sky directly over that dark, unnerving landscape was dirty green and veined with silent lightning. It looked altogether like one of the fantasy-monster lands in fables that Andalite parents tell their little children about.
I felt sick twisting inside me. I had never been to the Yeerk world, of course. But already I was beginning to guess what had happened. And I was sure that this blasted, vile, and empty landscape was the Yeerk home world.
Or at least the Yeerk home world as Visser Thirty-two saw it.
I looked up at the sky and saw the patches of lighter, paler blue. The blue of Earth’s sky. She would be beneath one of those patches of Earth blue. I was confident of that.
But which patch?
The waterfall. That was the place to start. It was the tallest thing around.
I turned my back on that depressing Yeerk vision and ran back toward the empty mockery of my home scoop. It was hard to look at that familiar area and accept the fact that it wasn’t really my home.
Visser Thirty-two! It hit me like a shock from one of those Yeerk lightning bolts. If I was here, and perhaps even Loren was here, then so was he. Somewhere. Maybe within the confines of his Yeerk world, but maybe not!
If I could go looking for Loren, so could he. And if he found her first …
I saw the towering cliff from which the waterfall dropped and raced toward it, desperate now to find Loren. I ran flat-out. As I ran, I ate. It felt so good. Whatever else might be strange and unreal, the grass was good and familiar. And as it traveled up my legs from my hooves, I felt my strength growing.
I reached the pool where the water crashed in a huge white explosion. As I drew closer, I saw that the woods surrounding that pool were split into three different sections. The familiar Andalite trees filled a third or so. And different, but still lovely trees and green grass, covered another third. Around still another third was more of the dark Yeerk landscape.
It was all utterly impossible, of course. But still, standing beneath that massive waterfall, feeling the cold spray on my face, it was beautiful, too.
“Elfangor!”
I turned my stalk eyes and saw her. Relief flooded through me.
“Yeah. I’m here, all right. But where is here?”
I went toward her, threading my way around bushes and trees. And she came running toward me. She threw her strong human arms around my shoulders. And even though touching is more of a human thing than an Andalite thing, it wasn’t so bad.
“Man, I thought I was all alone here,” Loren said.
“I would swear this was Earth, only look at the sky. It’s all in patches. And some of those patches are very weird.”
She released her hold on me, and after a second or two, I realized I should do the same.
She shook her head. It’s something humans do to answer no. “I woke up over there, a few hundred feet back in the woods. Elfangor, it’s exactly like this area of the park back home. There’s a park where I play softball.”
She cocked her head sideways and looked at me. “You’re still worried, aren’t you?”
She twisted her human lips into a grimace. Then she looked skyward. “Those patches of green sky with the lightning. That’s because of him, isn’t it? Somehow, we made this place. The three of us. We created this place.”
I stared at her in astonishment. There was no way she could begin to know about the physics of the Time Matrix. And yet she had reached the same conclusion as I had.
I laughed. Maybe Loren didn’t understand the physics of the Time Matrix. But then again, neither did I. Neither did any Andalite, as far as I knew. Compared to the creatures who had created the Time Matrix, humans and Andalites were equally primitive.
She smiled. “You’re asking me?” She shrugged. “Well, that time machine — the Time Matrix, or whatever you call it — is not just like some car you drive through time. I think to steer it you have to imagine the place and time where you want to go. I think with three of us each having different ideas of where we wanted to go, well, this is the result: part me, part you, part … part him.”
I saw that her eyes were staring past me. I adjusted my stalk eyes to follow the direction of her gaze.
There, standing on the far side of the pool, was Visser Thirty-two. The abomination.
But Visser Thirty-two was not standing alone.
Visser Thirty-two stood on the bank of the pool in the Yeerk zone, under his own green sky.
And on either side of him stood a creature like nothing I had ever seen or imagined. They were each about three feet tall and four and a half feet long. They were mostly a dark, dirty yellow with irregular black spots. But the head and shoulders were the deep red of the Yeerk plants.
The heads were tiny for the bodies, elongated, almost needle-sharp. The mouths were long and narrow. Hundreds of tiny, bright red teeth stuck out, jagged and wildly different in length and shape.
But what struck me as strangest was that the creatures did not have legs in the usual sense. They had wheels.
Yes, wheels. Four of them, to be exact.
The wheels were located where legs should be. Each was sloppy and irregular in shape, not perfectly round. But it was easy to see that the wheels were for real. There was mud and dirt all around them, and when I strained my stalk eyes I could even see where the creatures had left tracks in the dirt. Wheel tracks.
“Elfangor, what are those things?”
Visser Thirty-two actually gave a jaunty wave of his hand.
Loren looked at me. In a voice Visser Thirty-two was sure to hear, she muttered, “You know, Elfangor, I’m beginning to see why you Andalites really dislike Yeerks. Whatever body they may be in, they still have the manners of slugs.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Loren said.
I had no idea what that meant. Neither did the visser.
“You do a lot of talking for a slug,” Loren clarified. “You think I’m scared of you?”
For a moment Loren said nothing, but her lower lip was trembling slightly. Then, she knelt quickly, plunged her hand into the water, and withdrew it. She was holding a rock. She drew her arm back, swept her arm in a big loop, and released the rock with precise timing. The rock flew through the air at an impressive speed.
And the aim wasn’t bad, either.
BONK!
I don’t know who was more amazed, me or the visser.
“That? We call that softball. I pitch for Frank’s Pro Shop Twins back home. All-city two years in a row.”
“It’s a game we play.”
“Not usually.”
I was impressed by the human ability to throw things with such force. I was sure that Andalite scientists would enjoy studying humans someday. They appeared more frail and ridiculous than they were.
The visser was not impressed. He was just angry.
The situation stopped being amusing very quickly. The twin beasts turned their wheels, sluggishly at first. But then picked up speed.
I almost didn’t move, I was so fascinated seeing the biological wheels turn. It was truly incredible.
All the while the visser talked — or “blah, blah, blahed,” as Loren had said — the Mortrons gathered speed and raced around the circumference of the pool.
They made a strange sound. A HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF. Faster and faster.
HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF!
The wheels spun faster, and the ungainly yellow and black monstrosities were nearly to the edge of the Yeerk portion of the pool. I watched carefully to see whether they could move from the Yeerk area into the human area.
Unfortunately, the answer was yes.
HUF-HUF-HUF-HUF-SCRINK-SHWOOOP!
Suddenly the creatures each split into two parts! The bottom portion, the yellow part with the wheels, swerved away. The dark red upper portion simply rose from the body, unfolded leathery wings I’d never even suspected, and flew straight at me!
“Elfangor!” Loren cried.
The first Mortron — I don’t know if it was Jarex or Larex — opened its mouth and showed its rows of uneven but brutally unpleasant teeth. It powered through the air like a rocket.
I dodged left and struck with my tail blade!
FWAPP!
SPLEET! FLUMP. FLUMP.
My tail blade sliced the Mortron into two chunks. The two separate pieces fell to the ground with a wet splat.
“Elfangor, the other one!”
The second Mortron used the distraction provided by his brother to swoop wide, then arch in behind me. A tactic that would have worked on most opponents. But not on an Andalite who can see in all directions at once.
His toothy mouth was inches from my neck when I struck.
FWAPP!
SPLEET! FLUMP. FLUMP.
And the second Mortron bird-portion fell in pieces to the ground.
I was feeling pretty good, until I looked at the visser and saw the amusement in his eyes.
“Elfangor, look. Look!” Loren cried.
I turned my stalk eyes toward the ground. With amazing speed, the two bloody halves of each Mortron were growing. One piece of each was growing to become a complete bird-portion again. And the other piece was going even further — growing into a complete, two-piece, yellow and black, four-wheeled Mortron.
I had sliced both Mortrons in half. And now they were becoming four Mortrons.
I stared in horror as the Mortron pieces grew and grew. In seconds they would be ready to attack again. And anything I did to destroy them would merely make more of them!
“Can you outrun them?”
“You won’t have to. Maybe. How strong is your back? Never mind, it must be strong enough. Elfangor, don’t be offended, okay?”
“Hold still. I’m gonna try something.”
She came to me and placed one hand on the back of my neck. She placed another hand on my rump, right at the base of my tail. And suddenly, she leaned her weight on me, swung one leg up and over, and came to rest straddling my back. She sat there with one human leg hanging off either side of my back and held her hands clasped around my neck.
I turned my stalk eyes around and found myself staring directly into her small blue human eyes.
“Now let’s run,” she said.
But even while I was standing there in blank astonishment, I saw a fully formed Mortron rise from the dirt. It was just a few feet away and it launched its bird-part. Leather wings propelled jagged razor-sharp teeth straight for my throat.
