The Andalite Chronicles, page 16
“Elfangor, this is not the time to think,” Loren yelled. “Run! Ruuuuun!”
So I did. With the human girl actually on my back, I ran.
We ran. Or I ran, and Loren rode lightly on my back. And we quickly outran the visser’s beasts. Those biological wheels were swift, but not as swift as an Andalite’s hooves.
As for the visser, he chose not to give chase. At least not just then. But I knew I had not seen the end of him.
We left the “Andalite” portion of this new universe and ran through an increasingly strange environment.
The sky overhead was blue, but darkening just a bit.
The woods gave way to a cluttered landscape filled up with manufactured things. The grass under my hooves became a hard, gray-black substance. White stripes lined the middle.
“It’s a street,” Loren said.
“Well, remember that Mustang you were driving around on the Taxxon world? Streets are what Mustangs travel on.”
As soon as she said it I could see how sensible it was. Of course. This way the human “cars” — which is how, Loran informed me, humans commonly refer to these machines — would not damage tasty grass.
On both sides of the street there were cars sitting. Beyond the cars, further back from the street were rectangular boxy structures. They were quite large and decorated with small squares and rectangles of transparent material. The tops were angled and covered in reddish-orange or dark gray scales.
“Yep. These are houses. That’s what we live in.”
“Um, well … I mean, you go in through the front door. See? The tall rectangles on the front of each house? You go in through those.”
“Yes, inside.”
“Of course they’re hollow. Pretty soon we’ll be to my house. Then I’ll show you. You’ll meet my mom. You can see my room.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. My own home scoop had been empty. My mother and father had not been there. I doubted that Loren’s mother would be in her house. But I wasn’t sure.
“She’ll be there,” Loren said forcefully. “Next house. The one with the bushes out front.”
I had very little experience understanding the expression of human voices, but I sensed fear in Loren’s voice. Uncertainty.
I stopped before her house. There was a very attractive patch of grass in the front. Obviously, humans grow their own food in neatly cultivated squares in front of each house.
“What?” Loren asked.
She frowned and I let the matter drop. I was sure now that she was worried. She slid from my back.
“No. Come with me, Elfangor. Hold my hand.”
I held her hand and she walked up a series of four steps. I wondered about the steps. Were they a way to slow down any approaching enemy, so that no one could charge directly inside the hollow house?
With her free hand Loren twisted a metallic ball. The door opened a little and Loren pushed it open all the way.
She was correct. The house was hollow inside. In fact, now I could see that the outer walls were no more than a few inches thick. But inside the hollowness were other walls, with other doors. It was like a maze!
Lights glowed from the flat covering above us. Other lights were hung on the walls. The floor was covered with a sort of very short, pale tan grass. I tried to taste some of it, but my hooves could not eat it.
“Mom?” Loren said in a loud, quavering voice.
“I’m in here, honey.”
I felt Loren’s hand jerk in surprise. Then she let go of my hand and ran along the strange inedible tan grass and turned out of sight through a rectangular opening.
I followed slowly, unsure of myself. I did not know any human rituals. I knew what I would have said when first meeting an Andalite friend’s parents, but I’d never met a human’s parents.
I heard Loren sob. “Mommy!”
I turned the corner and looked into another of the mazelike rooms. This room had metallic devices against one wall, all rectangular and white. Humans are very partial to rectangles. The floor was smooth here, and slippery for my hooves.
Loren was wrapped in the arms of another human. This new human was also female, as far as I could tell. She had hair the same color as Loren’s, but dark brown eyes. Perhaps that was a sign of age. Perhaps humans have blue eyes till a certain age. Or until they reproduce and have children.
I wanted to ask Loren if my guess was correct, but Loren’s mother was looking at me with her brown eyes.
“Loren, honey, shouldn’t you introduce your friend?”
Loren frowned. She looked at me, then back at her mother. “Mom, this is Elfangor. Don’t be afraid, okay? He’s my friend.”
The human woman smiled. “Now, why would I be afraid? I like meeting your friends. You know that.”
“But … Mom … Elfangor’s not exactly one of my school friends.”
“I like meeting your friends.”
Loren’s face was growing pale. She darted worried eyes at me and back to her mother. “Mom, can’t you tell that Elfangor is not a normal friend from school? Can’t you tell that he’s different?”
“Oh, honey.” The woman laughed. “He’s just an Andalite like any other.”
Loren jumped back like she’d been slapped. I swept the room with my stalk eyes, ready for trouble. I cocked my tail and waited, tense and confined in the narrow room with the slippery floor.
“What do you mean, he’s an Andalite? You don’t know about Andalites! You can’t know about Andalites.”
Loren’s mother made a face. “You know, just because I’m your mother doesn’t mean I’m an antique! I do keep up with things, Miss Modern. Your generation thinks it invented everything. You think you kids invented Andalites? We had Andalites when I was your age, too.”
“How do you know about Andalites?!” Loren yelled. There was water leaking from her eyes. “Oh, God, you’re not real! You’re not real!”
“Now, Loren, if you are going to treat me disrespectfully, I am going to send you to your room.”
“You’re not my mother! You’re not real!”
I placed a hand on Loren’s shoulder. By now I had learned that humans like to be touched when they are upset.
But Loren did not want to be comforted. She threw off my hand. She turned to me with her face red, and water flowing from her blue eyes. And she screamed. “Get away from me! Get away from me! This is all your fault! Just leave me alone!”
She pushed past me and ran from the hollow house, sobbing loudly.
I was alone with the artificial mockery of a human woman.
“Would you like some pop and cookies?” the human woman asked.
“Up the stairs, on the right. But leave the door open a crack. That’s the rule in our house when Loren has Andalites over to play.”
I felt that Loren needed a little time alone. It was dangerous letting her walk around by herself. But I couldn’t force her to talk to me when she was angry and afraid.
I had to climb many stairs to reach Loren’s room. I still didn’t understand the point of stairs. I guess humans just love anything with straight edges and a rectangular shape. The stairs were definitely rectangular. And they allowed the humans to place a second level in their houses. This made the house a larger rectangle. And I suppose this is important in some way.
Inside Loren’s room was a long rectangle covered with artificial skin. I suspect she used it for sleeping. I had seen that when she slept, she lay flat and stretched out straight. There were two other flat rectangles, one mostly covered with bound papers. The bound papers were called books or magazines. Loren had explained them to me. A sort of extremely primitive computer file.
I opened one of them. There were words printed on the pages but the words stopped abruptly in the middle of the book. Of course. Loren had not finished the book. So she could not recreate it out of her memory.
There was a small picture of Loren with two other people. All were making human smiles. One was her mother. The other I believed was male. Perhaps her father.
I took this picture and held it in my hand. I looked around the room, trying to understand this alien girl. But alien things are hard to make sense of.
By the time I got out of the hollow house and back to the street, Loren was gone from sight. I worried about finding her. But after wandering the alien landscape for a while, I heard a far-off sound. A THWACK!
I ran at top speed to the sound and found Loren in a field of short grass and dirt. She stood with her back to a high wire cage. In her right hand she held a sort of long, shaped stick, wider at the far end. With her left she tossed a round white sphere up in the air. And then, quickly clasping the stick with both hands, she swung the stick till it struck the falling white sphere.
The result was fascinating. The sphere went flying through the air.
Loren watched the sphere until it fell to the grass, perhaps a hundred feet away. Then she reached down into a bucket by her feet, lifted out a second, identical sphere, and repeated the entire process.
She ignored my approach.
Toss … swing … THWACK!
The sphere flew over the grass and landed at the edge of a narrow band of trees.
Toss … swing … THWACK!
“See, this is softball,” she said, without looking at me. “See that high spot there? That’s the pitcher’s mound. The pitcher throws the ball across this plate. The batter swings and tries to knock the stitches off her.”
Toss … swing … THWACK!
“That was my last ball. I’d better go retrieve them. Our coach goes ape if we lose equipment.”
She started off across the field, still carrying her shaped stick.
“What was your first clue?”
“Bizarre? My neighborhood with no people in it? My mom sounding like a dimwit robot but knowing things she can’t possibly know? The sky in patches?”
“It’s sarcasm,” she said. We reached one of the white balls. She picked it up and used the stick to knock it back toward the tall wire cage.
I held the small picture out for her to see.
“That is not my house,” she said. But she took the picture and stared at it. Her face seemed to grow softer. Her mouth corners became more nearly level. Her forehead skin grew less wrinkled. “Elfangor, what is happening here?”
“I thought it was supposed to be a time machine.”
I sighed.
Loren resumed walking toward the far edge of the field. She stooped to pick up another ball and knocked it back in the direction we’d come from. “So my mom. My mother … she’s just made up out of my memories.”
Loren made a snorting sound. “Great universe, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. That was sarcasm, too.”
We had reached the trees. Loren plunged in. “Look how complete all the trees are. Why are the grass and the trees and the air all like they should be?”
I noticed that Loren was not looking at me. Instead she was staring alertly into the woods.
“No. I … I have a feeling, is all. I have to go look.”
I followed her through the woods. We traveled no more than fifty feet when we reached what Loren had sensed.
The trees stopped abruptly. The sky above us stopped, too. The ground and the grass all stopped. Just stopped. And beyond it was blank whiteness.
The pure, blank, white of Zero-space. Nothingness.
I felt awed and frightened all at once. We were standing at the edge of our tiny universe. Loren reached toward the whiteness, stretching her hand out beyond the edge of soil and vegetation, air and sky.
Her arm reached that edge and curved back on itself. It simply bent in a perfect arc, so that her hand was reaching back toward her own face.
“Noooooooo!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”
She turned to me, eyes wide and reddish now. “I want to go home, Elfangor. I want to go home! This place is wrong. It’s wrong!”
“We have to get out of here. This place can’t exist. Feel it. It’s wrong!”
She was still holding the shaped stick. The softball stick. She looked at me with cold fury in her blue human eyes. And I saw something there that almost scared me.
She clutched the stick tightly. “Let him try and stop us. Let him try.”
We wandered around the edge of our new universe, keeping the blank whiteness on our right as we went.
We traveled along the outer rim of the Earth portion of the universe. But even there at the outer rim, this new universe was not consistent. As we walked we came across small areas, sometimes no more than twenty feet across, where we’d suddenly find Andalite life-forms or Yeerk life-forms. The Andalite patches were harder to notice since they were not so different from the Earthlike areas. But the patches of Yeerk environment were like open sores.
We skirted around the Yeerk patches. Most of the Earth environment was made up of woods and grass fields. But here and there were human buildings as well. We saw the street where Loren lived. And we saw her school — a squat, ugly box made of thousands of small reddish-brown rectangles called bricks.
“I can’t believe I brought the school building into this universe, but I forgot to bring a grocery store.”
“A place to buy food.”
We walked along a street that appeared in the middle of a field. The street merely began, ran for a few hundred feet, and ended. It made Loren anxious, I could tell. She explained that the street didn’t belong there.
But then we saw a building decorated with two yellow arcs.
“Can’t be!” Loren gasped. “No way! It’s Mickey D’s! I brought a McDonald’s here!”
She broke into a run and I followed her. We entered the hollow building. Inside there was a single human. But he was not like any human I had ever seen.
“Oh, God, what did I do?” Loren cried. She placed her hand over her mouth.
I had never seen this human gesture, but I knew she was horrified. You see, the human looked like any normal human. Except that his face was covered with red splotches and pustules. And he had no eyes. No eyes at all.
But he could speak.
“Welcome to McDonald’s. May I take your order?”
“Oh, no. No,” Loren wailed.
“Would you like fries with that? Or a hot apple pie?”
“No. I mean, yes. He’s this guy who works at McDonald’s and he always waits on us when we go for burgers after a game. My friend Jennifer says he likes me. But all I ever notice is how bad his acne is. The poor guy. The poor guy.”
She seemed ready to run from the place. But in the end, hunger won out over horror. Loren steeled herself and walked back to the eyeless human.
“Welcome to McDonald’s. May I take your order?”
“Yes. I mean … yes. I’d like a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke.”
“That’ll be four dollars and nineteen cents.”
Loren hesitated. But then she reached into a flap of her artificial skin and pulled out some crumpled pieces of paper and some round metallic objects. She handed all this to the eyeless human.
