:I know you did not mean to. It was just an awkward situation: Leareth lets out his breath. :I did not think to find it surprising at the time, but I was very angry about your arrest, when I lacked context on the reasons for it. I think I would have judged it worthwhile to reach the ship anyway, since we knew so little and I think it was reasonable to fear you might be in danger, but...I may have reacted faster and more drastically than I would have because I was angry and very worried about your safety. Which, on reflection, is not obviously how I would feel in other similar situations not involving you. It was more upsetting because I feel considerable warmth toward you as a person, specifically, and so I am invested in your wellbeing, apart from the strategic considerations: 

<Oh. Yfandes pointed that out to me, but I didn't have much occasion to mention it because everything happened very quickly. I think your actions were very reasonable, for what it is worth. I told Nerefir that I expected you to come after me if we were in orbit, but that I thought you couldn't if we were far away.>

:I am very good at Gates, I invented a modified search-spell that let me do the interplanar style of Gate that routes through various planes to cut the distance to something manageable, and let it find such a route to your Thoughtsensing talisman: He looks thoughtful. :I agree my actions were reasonable; I think this also explains why I seemed stressed to you. Anyway, I had - not really noticed I had this level of investment, because I have been very distracted: 

And because, on some level, he hadn't wanted to notice. Since then if he concluded it was an unhelpful feeling he would have to stop. But, of course, it's his own head, and he can separate out the feelings he has and the levers that affect his actual decisions. 

:I was unsure if feeling warmth toward you is - unhelpful, for being able to make strategic judgements, which might sometimes involve risk to you. I do think that I trust you more than I trust almost anyone, and that part is helpful. I trust you to be competent and to care about the tradeoffs I do, and to update your world-model based on evidence. It saves significantly on mental resources, if I can model that giving you more resources results in more of my goals being achieved, instead of needing to carefully track all of your incentives and goals separately from mine. Which I think is true, at least approximately, and that is much further than I trust almost anyone. And...maybe it is not possible to have that without also caring about you as an individual. I think the caring need not be unstrategic, as long as I am aware of it and do not let it bias my decisions without my realizing it. That is why I expected it not to be relevant to your predictions of my future actions, but - it still seemed helpful for you to understand why I was stressed, so that you have an accurate model of whether or not to worry about it: 

<...that is how I do all trusting people? Is it unusual for you as a way of doing trusting people?>

Leareth has to pause and think about that for a while. 

:I think I mostly do not trust people. Or - no, that is not exactly right. Most people I predict by knowing their goals and incentives and information-state, rather than - expecting them to be right, and then putting weight on that directly. Separately, in Velgarth it was - maladaptive, usually, to feel closeness with people. Everybody except for me dies, sooner or later, and - those who worked closely with me would often become targets of the gods. I have strategic allies, though not as many as I would like, Velgarth is difficult given the god situation. I - have rarely felt, in recent centuries, that I could afford to have close friends: 

<Huh. I don't think I could function like that. It sounds very lonely.>

:That is what Melody said. She seemed to disapprove. When I - thought it might be unhelpful to care about you personally, and maybe I should stop, she made such a face about it: 

<I don't know anything about humans. Andalites are herd animals, it seems like the kind of thing where you'd expect a great deal of variance...but certainly I think it is possible to care about people and also - keep going when they constantly die. It does hurt a lot.>

Possible but so hard, Leareth is thinking, when you have to keep going for millennia, slowly widening the gulf between how you think and how most people do...

:Yes. I thought about it and decided it would not compromise my - ability to keep going, if you die, and so this seems fine. Though I also wish to avoid making any unnecessary demands of you. I - think I have needed reassurance much more than usual, due to recent events, and I am not in the habit of going to my people for that, so instead I was going to you. And - your reassurance went further, I think, because I trust you. Nayoki is loyal to me; you are aligned with the same things I care about, that is meaningfully different: Shrug. :I do not necessarily want to keep asking that of you, though, given that we are both very busy and may end up on different planets as the war progresses: 

<I like talking to people. There is no amount of talking to people where I start to feel...annoyed that I am talking to people instead of doing other things.>

Huh. There's absolutely an amount of talking to people where Leareth gets fed up that he's doing that instead of, say, magic research. 

:Good: he says, more certainly than he feels. :I will not worry about that, then. ...I did find it unexpectedly distressing, leaving right away when I had just read your thoughts to confirm you were not being coerced, and knew you were - upset, about the Yeerk thing. Which is not necessarily any of my business, but - are you all right, now?: 

<I don't like Yeerks. I - know it's our job to fit them in somewhere anyway.> A tail-gesture that translates as a headshake, sort of.

Leareth nods. Wishes he could think of something more reassuring to say. :Fitting them in somewhere that is definitely not inside your head entirely reasonable: he says after a few beats. :I am sorry you had to do an unpleasant thing: 

Tail-nod. <I think highly of Nerefir, for what it is worth. He is a reasonable person and is pleased about the prospects for the alliance here. Which is good, because he outranks me and could make this very awkward if he thought it was a bad idea.

...I should give you the full analysis of Andalite politics that I promised to get to in a month or so.>

:Yes, I think so. I obtained a very short explanation from Cayaldwin but I doubt it was unbiased: 

<- oh, gods. Cayaldwin is - not very reasonable on anything that touches on our father. 

The stated priorities of the elected Andalite government are to protect people throughout the galaxy from being enslaved by Yeerks - and otherwise from conquest but we're not picking any other fights right now because we're overwhelmed enough with this one - and to bring the war against the Yeerks to an end and defend our homeworld. This is the strategy we pursued, I think without much internal division, for the first two decades of the war. It didn't work. We mostly lost ground. In response to that, the High Command started embracing much more ruthless tactics. They did this mostly without the approval of our civilian elected government, and mostly - without direct approval internally, either. The bioweapon on the Hork Bajir homeworld was deployed against orders and everyone involved was court-martialled. But also it was widely understood to be necessary if we weren't going to lose the war and no one was obstructed in accessing the resources they needed for it. 

This is - hypocritical, I guess, but also I believe that it is basically good. We have managed to fight a war that we were not going to win by hewing to our endorsed values and principles, without ceasing to endorse those, which means every single person I need to convince to support peaceful coexistence with the Yeerks once they've stopped enslaving people is on the record saying how much they want to peacefully coexist with Yeerks once they stop enslaving people - did they believe it, no, but they were preserving a state from which we can make it true ->

Leareth nods, slowly. :I understand. I - do not prefer politics that require saying one thing while believing another, but it sounds as though it may have been one of the best tradeoffs to make, in a bad situation: He looks expectantly at Matirin, waiting for more. 

<We did not have the resources to take Earth back in a direct attack. We didn't have detailed intelligence on Earth but we knew that Visser Three was there, that the Yeerks had been there for nearly a decade, that there were likely already hundreds of thousands maybe millions of Controllers and that it was possible we were already at the point where - if forced to switch to open war the Yeerks were prepared to take the whole planet quite quickly.

The judgment of the Andalite High Command - informally, of course, no one ever said this directly - was that we were too late, we couldn't win on Earth no matter what we did, we should focus our resources elsewhere, save Anati which doesn't look as bad and is not as well-commanded, let the Yeerks sink more resources into Earth - and then destroy it, and Visser Three with it. This was - divisive, obviously. I was opposed. Not to destroying Earth if it was in fact hopeless, but ->

:But to assuming it was and thus not even trying? Is - this related to why your father's command left the home planet under fraught circumstances, and why your father gave incorrect coordinations to Nerefir's ships?: 

<Yes. I arranged a transfer to my father's ship, because he is - very bad at politics and I thought I could talk him down and bring everyone around on, at minimum, substantially expanded intelligence operations on Earth. We were making some progress on that. There was a proposal that looked likely to be approved. Nerefir backed it, except - he wanted my father nowhere near it because my father is - was - Cayaldwin is very like him. He wanted to support expanded intelligence operations on Earth by building a better version of morph - not just removing the time limit, he thought he could also make it possible to non-lethally sever the link to the morph-construct and pick up another link elsewhere, which would mean we could hang out shielded in hyperspace while running the whole effort on Earth. Also he is stubborn and has no patience for anyone he considers stupid and doesn't take criticism well and - was in many respects the wrong person for this. 

My father would have done extraordinarily well heading a research team with no other authority but - he didn't trust that anyone else was going to make the right call on Earth, so he was reluctant to relinquish his authority, and I thought I could make it work. Then our grandfather was killed in action outside Berettet and he got - much harder to reason with -

- anyway. Nerefir supported operations on Earth, didn't want my father involved. My father had a really good plan for operations on Earth, a plan that sort of looked like our only winning plan, and didn't want Nerefir involved. Our orders were six months out of date and they said no one could go to Earth unless acting on substantial new evidence - you have to build in some discretion, when you're that far across the galaxy - my father decided that he had good enough evidence, and that he was going, and left in the middle of the night, having disabled some sentry ships and the entire sensor system on that planet so no one could stop him. And he gave Nerefir dangerously wrong coordinates, which I am still having trouble making sense of.>

Leareth blinks at him, absorbing that. :That sounds incredibly complicated. I - also have trouble making sense of the wrong coordinates. ...If this were a world with gods like Velgarth's, I might wonder if They were involved, They often are when very unlucky coincidences occur. But this is not Velgarth: Sigh. :All of that happened when you had already been away from the homeworld for six months or more? Would they have any updated information on your location and activities?: 

<Word will reach them in about another month that we left for Earth. I should probably send a followup announcing our victory but Nerefir has only one jump-capable courier ship remaining with his forces so I want to think carefully first. It will take three months once we send it. Earth is very far from both Andalite and Yeerk space. ...if you can get around that, somehow, it'd be very valuable in making sure we can present the first account of what happened to the High Command.>

:Right. You have the hyperspace coordinates? I - can probably figure out a multi-planar routing for a Gate that will cut the power requirement to something feasible for a mage or team of mages, since I could do that for Velgarth. It will take some research time, of course, but I estimate much less than three months. And even if it proves to be less accessible than Velgarth, it might still be feasible to do a small, brief Gate to send through a message or a morphed Andalite: 

They still have no idea where Velgarth is in physical space relative to Earth, and Leareth is honestly unsure if it's in the same 'material plane' at all, it doesn't behave that obviously differently but none of the other planets known to the Andalites have discovered Velgarth's magic. Or have similar species on two apparently-unrelated worlds, or...weird alternate copies of the same person... The metaphysics of the entire situation is baffling to him. 

<We have the hyperspace coordinates. If you could figure that out it simplifies the messaging substantially. I think I can get everybody not just pleased about this deal but also thinking of it as exactly what they wanted all along, but it would help a lot to be able to talk face to face with them.>

:I will work on it. Higher priority than the morph reversal research?: