Sandra pronounces them clear. Asks how it went. 

(Mardic is not going to venture an opinion; he glances at Matirin.) 

<I think productively. We are gambling on all the same things we were gambling on before but - he says he wants to help, and he has the resources to be very helpful, and he's going to go and get them.

I think we have much better odds on Earth than I expected to.>

"Well, that's something. Guess we should communicate it to Haven?" Donni frowns. "And - maybe if you're letting him bring a dozen people here anyway, there's not much point guarding the ship from him? It was nice of him to clean up Lineas for us given that he made that mess, but we still have Karse to deal with and now Vanyel is out and he's about half of our entire military firepower." 

<Yes, absolutely. I can get you back to Haven now.>

Sandra can stay; she'll know how to train Leareth's mages on the fixing-parts work, and she's less valuable to Valdemar's war effort right now because she's not Adept-level power and has been out for the last year anyway due to her war injuries. 

On the shuttle back to Haven, Mardic holds Donni's hand and is very quiet. 

:Do you think that he's making the right choice?: he sends privately, as they descend toward Haven. 

:I think he's found the person best at winning wars in the entire goddamned world. And - I think Leareth's going to do whatever he feels like doing, but - hopefully Melody's right, and the thing he feels like doing is saving everyone, for some reason: She makes a face. :You'd think he'd get bored of that after thousands of years: 

:- No. That part I get: 

Randi is glad to hear everything went well, and even gladder to have more of Valdemar's mages back. He's kind of dizzy with information overload right now, though, and maybe he'll go back to discussing potential invasion plans with Princess Karis. 

Leareth is back a candlemark later, politely Gating to the woods near the ship. He has a dozen people with him, Healers and Fetchers and a few mages. 

They will open the door to let them all in. Matirin has placed his bets and is not going to half place them, though he's not all the way to being happy about it. 

The engineers are happy about it! They hear they're supposed to teach hyperplane math to a human who was going to build an AGI on his own and this sounds like a lot of fun and also will maybe result in defeating the Yeerks with math, which is so much more fun than fighting the Yeerks with enormous ships that shoot their enormous ships until someone's shields are down and their ship is destroyed instantly.

Leareth is also pretty delighted about this; it's much more satisfying than drawing up codes of conduct for his mages, and also he's getting a peek at Andalite technology well before he expected to have Matirin convinced. He has all his reference notes with him, and is nonetheless prepared and expecting to spend a day being very frustrated because, while math is math, the route followed by aliens with a completely different background is likely to involve some conventions he'll have to learn to follow, especially given that they haven't just moved past pen and paper, they never had it in the first place. What kind of notation do they use, for one thing, does their tech include the ability to do visualizations and graphs so he can stare at it from more angles - if something seems close to an area of his own work he can show them his notes and visualizations with illusion-magic to compare and check if they think he's in fact on the right track... 

They can do visualizations and notes; they seem to do even incredibly complicated arithmetic in their head instantly and so subconsciously that it takes them a little while to realize humans wouldn't have the same ability, at which point they squabble among themselves for ten minutes and then present him with what they assure him is a very dumb computer, almost the dumbest computer it's possible to make and the first one civilizations come up with, and which does all arithmetic problems with less than 40 digits. 

The translation difficulties are still substantial and they spend most of the day clarifying notation. They have a lot of fun. Several of them are thinking that this is incredibly illegal but...probably all on Matirin? Maybe it's okay since humans have invented very dumb computers themselves on Earth and it's fine for Velgarth to catch up with Earth - that's a stretch, since they're literally helping the locals with interworld transit. One Andalite is very confident that your side does not convict you of treason if you win a war for them even if you win it, uh, treasonously. 

Leareth is having an excellent time despite the frustration. He's rather jealous of their arithmetic ability; he's far better than most humans, it's the kind of procedural memory that transfers well between lives so he's accumulated it, but it still takes conscious effort for anything beyond the operations he just has memorized. 

By the end of the day his head is spinning and he's going to have the weirdest dreams tonight, but he also thinks he's about eighty percent of the way to understanding their math in general, at which point he really hopes he's smart enough to get the hyperplane-travel-specific parts. It's pretty clear Andalites are smarter than humans especially on the math axis. 

Given that, he's not even yet at the part where he knows how to apply this knowledge, but he's revising his timeline on that down from 'months' to 'weeks'.

When he can't absorb any more math, he asks Matirin if it's all right for him to just sleep on site here rather than Gate back and in again in the morning. (He's very tired.) 

<Yes, that's fine.> He has been observing him and it looks like he's having an excellent time which - doesn't mean he won't betray them all but it's probably not totally unrelated. 

He reminds himself that face belonged to someone else, who probably also had things that brought them happiness. He doesn't want to forget these things just because it would make everything so much more frictionless. 

They're making faster progress repairing the crucial pieces of the ship, now. But if it's really weeks until interworld Gates that'd be better than the ship, Yeerks will detect the ship and might be able to destroy it before they reach Earth (probably not, but it still looms as the likeliest place where they lose, now that they're not definitely going to lose.)

In the morning Leareth spends a candlemark with his communications-artifact, checking in with the various plans to move mages and Healers to a departure point and onboard them to the terms of the alliance and write up several dozen different shapes of contingency plan, though really they're planning on very little information right now and he'll want to reassess all of it once they actually land on Earth. 

Then, properly awake, he dives back into math. 

Once there's enough common vocabulary Andalites can explain how hyperspace jumps work. It's complicated but lots of civilizations figure it out eventually, they expect humans can too.

It would take years to explain this to Vanyel, Leareth thinks, and Vanyel is an unusually smart human. Leareth is cheating a lot for a human, though, and he has to work very, very hard at it, but by the end of that day he thinks he understands the core elements of how the Andalites do it with technology.

Great! ...does that mean he can just reinvent it with magic? Without having been there first?

Leareth doesn't want to promise anything yet, he needs to spend all of tomorrow projecting his mind to various other planes so he can try to find 'where' their math even applies and if he can access it. But he would place nine of ten odds that he can get this within two weeks without having been there first. They gave him instructions! It was so helpful! 

....wow. (This is definitely treason.) (If anyone can finagle it not being treason it'd be Matirin.) (If anyone can finagle it not being treason it'd be Matirin before everything happened; he doesn't have a lot of levers anymore.)

They're so excited anyway. How does he project his mind to other planes, can anyone learn that?

Leareth thinks you need to be Gifted to do it, but since Andalites have an analogue of Mindspeech, he might be able to pull one of them into rapport and then take them with him? And then he can show them the various planes he can access, and they can help him recognize if anything looks related to what their science knows as hyperspace. In particular, he's curious how the Void relates here; it's sort of the energy-sink of all the other planes, and also can be used as a shortcut within the material plane, by folding material-plane space through it. And technically you can Gate to other planes near Velgarth but this is usually a dumb idea. 

Wow. They would love to come with him to look at the planes. The Void sounds...maybe like what Andalites call z-space in the relevant way? Much more like it than the other planes Velgarth knows of. 

They're working on morphing Gifts but they think it's going to need a tweak to how morphing works.

Well, tomorrow when he's rested he'll take a volunteer with him to the Void. He's also happy to keep giving them advice on morphing, to the extent that's helpful, although he suspects the transport is still the first priority.