It - feels nice? Does he enjoy massages, or delicious food, or sunsets, or anything in that genre. - possibly they should have this conversation while not in tense negotiations with the not-Klingons.

Maybe they can come back to it. 

:He has a setup for it: Leareth confirms to Matirin in carefully-shielded private Mindspeech. :A couple, in fact, though one is nonfunctional now and the other is incomplete. I asked him to think about my - suggestion, from earlier, he seemed shocked but I think he will consider it carefully: 

<Thank you.

I think it will go over well if the announcement there are aliens is accompanied with technology sharing> Matirin says. <I would be burning a lot of bridges but you could release some things.>

Nod. Visser 3's body language in Amanda Norrell's body is quite different from her own. (The best way to describe it is 'closer to Leareth's'.) "Yes, that makes sense and we can do that." A flicker of something in my eyes. "It - pained me, not to do so much sooner. There are humans dead now who would be alive if we had not been so nervous of the Andalites noticing our activities on Earth." 

<I can hardly claim you were wrong to be nervous about that. But - if we could correct it now it would be good. Do you know how to grow meat that's not from animals?>

"Yes, although not to a very high quality standard, it satisfies Taxxons but I believe humans are fussier about their food." 

He nods. Tail swishes. <Maybe once the war's done with, then.>

"If some human scientific research output is directed at the problem, they may solve it on their own. They have a great deal of ingenuity, as a species." 

<I noticed. They've made it a long way in not very much time. It doesn't seem clear they would bother to research it? I suppose maybe if they know that the Andalites and the Yeerks and Leareth all disapprove.>

"There is a substantial faction of humans against factory farming. If there were more funding for such research I think it would happen." 

<Morph did a lot for interest in animal experiences in our world but I will be giving up a lot of other things if I share it. It is more likely to be worth it if our researchers finish their ongoing work on lifting morph limits, which makes it a cure for aging. But that is still at least a few years away, and might be out of reach.>

Mhalir nods. "I would not push for your people sharing morph at this time." 

<We can also use morph ourselves to make you construct-bodies, though it's very inconvenient and doesn't scale well. If you - needed to keep wearing Alloran for strategic purposes while we negotiate with the Council, or something, we could do it for that, but I don't think it's going to be a large-scale solution.  Which - leaves voluntary hosts as the likeliest short-term option for getting Yeerks something better than their current situation. I - notice that this does seem to be an area where human and Andalite psychology are quite different.>

"That has been my impression, yes. I think it is far from the majority of humans who would actively seek a Yeerk, and personality fit matters a great deal, but there are a subset of humans who are actively in favour, and many, many others who would not mind if, for example, they were paid for time when gave their Yeerk control and timeshared the body. I think the morph plan would be less than ideal for most Yeerks as a solution, also, it sounds - very lonely." 

<- huh. Yeerks would not want to have a body they weren't sharing?>

"It would be better than lacking senses entirely but I think many Yeerks would disprefer it, yes. Also I think a great many Yeerks would actively prefer letting their hosts steer a substantial fraction of the time, and just to ride along for the experiences and emotions - and the company. It was spoken of hopefully, for when the war was over." 

<That can be magically enforced with Leareth's magic - giving the host the power to decide what the Yeerk can control - and I have many fewer reservations about allowing it. Still not none...I want people who were initially taken involuntarily to get some time without a Yeerk and figure out whether it's still what they want, I want to track long-term consequences and we might enforce regular 'weekends' if there seem to be substantial long-term effects of being controlled even when it's voluntary. I want to screen people who want to sign up and make sure they have a good understanding of what they're signing up for and make sure that they're not signing up to solve a problem we can just...solve, some less invasive way. But - I expect you'll still get millions of hosts, that way, since humans are very numerous. 

It might at some point make sense to offer the same thing on Velgarth, though Gifts and gods are substantial complications.>

"Velgarth has a much smaller total population than Earth, so would offer fewer potential hosts, and Gifts are a complication, yes. I - am entirely unsure how our gods would react to it. There did not seem to be any blatant interventions against your presence or even strings of bad luck, though perhaps They just did not have time to react before you departed." 

Tail swish that conveys uncertainty. <Anyway, there are lots of details that need hammering out, but - that is approximately where our thinking is at. Are we - missing anything? Important considerations for Yeerks that haven't been brought up?>

"I think the others will be substantially more relaxed once there is a timeline here, so I will be relieved when we have that. - Also there is the question of what you will do about our leadership who participated in war atrocities, I expect many Yeerks who I, personally, do not consider very culpable are nonetheless terrified of being executed, so clear guidelines around that would help. Other than that, I think we have covered everything." 

<I am not looking to kill a lot of people, but I don't have the authority to promise anything constraining enough to be very reassuring. Maybe I could send you a list of things that loom particularly in Andalite memory as atrocities and you can send back either reasons to not consider them such or people to consider meaningfully responsible, and then people can at least get a sense for the broad categories of concern? Or I can throw all my energy at convincing everybody at home that the death penalty is barbaric - but my resources are limited and any particular difficult sell to my people trades off with getting permission to give out morph and getting permission to share tech and getting everybody to end the war from here in a non-stupid fashion.> 

"I think a sense of the broad categories would be much more reassuring than not having that." 

<I will send you that.> Sigh. <I wish this had never happened and - given that it did - I wish there was a nice clean way to put all the pieces back where they were before and try again. There isn't, and I do - think that you cost the world a lot of things you never learned about, but which were much much better than anything you could have won, but - I don't hate you, and I will try to preserve as much as I can.>