<Depends on the infrastructure for it? There are times and places in Velgarth history where Gifts went from extremely rare to one in ten people in not that many generations - I set up a breeding program for it - and that worked well. All at once with no planning would work less well. I suppose you could start with only giving out the old morph version that does not do Gifts?> 

<Yes, that's what I was thinking. Gifts are nice but if they make giving everybody morph a harder sell we can avoid that problem neatly enough.>

<That makes sense. And maybe we can try to sell giving some of the humans morph, later. They have some highly skilled scientists, if they had Gifts they could contribute a great deal.>

Leareth is kind of distracted, trying to poke at whatever emotion it is he's having around the thought of staying here while Matirin leaves, versus going with him. It seems like it's not at all about what's more strategic, which is annoying of it. He wants - to see Matirin, to be near him, tail-fight with him - the thought of Matirin being there in the herd as well tonight is a very pleasant one, but in a slightly confusing way - he remembers how bafflingly nice it was when Matirin twined his tail around Leareth's, he still doesn't totally understand that gesture, it's not one he sees often. Matirin does it with Finleran sometimes. Probably Mhalir knows but Leareth has not asked him. 

Matirin doesn't respond, observes him patiently.

<...What is it?>

<You seemed distracted. We can talk later if you'd rather?>

<No, now is good, I just - it is kind of silly, I am - distracted by being very happy to see you, I think.> 

<Finleran thought - that you'd invested a lot, emotionally, in our - in my personally - being someone you were right to trust with so much at stake ->

<Huh.> Leareth looks thoughtfully at him for a while. <Yes, that seems right, I think.> 

<I  am - very glad you were able to do that. I certainly don't think you were wrong to do so. I do worry a little bit that it'll - make things strange, for you, as I reorient towards doing civilian politics at home. Right now my job is to keep you happy and I am thinking about instead having a job of keeping a hundred million other people happy.>

Leareth gives him a very blank look. <I...did not think your job was ever to keep me happy. I thought it was to win a war.>

<Well, yes, by making sure our allies were able to get everything they needed to fight in it and remain confident it was a good idea to do so.>

Leareth is starting to feel like they're thinking about this in vastly different ways. <I mean, sure, that is generally a wise course of action when trying to fight a war with new and powerful allies. Just...you were not trying to persuade me that anything false was true, right? You were just - trying to be clever and do the right thing. And all along that included what would keep a hundred million people back home happy.> He thought so, anyway. <I - trust you because you are clever and trying to do the right thing and - paying attention to when you should change your mind. I would not expect that you are going to stop doing those things, now.> 

<Of course not! But...I think trying to win a war and trying to win an election are very different. I'm going to be doing different things from now on, if I decide to go home and try that. You are welcome to come with me, if that's what you want to do. But -> tail-swish. <I think we have different expectations somewhere.>

<I am getting that sense. I would like to try to figure out where, I think. Possibly there is some cultural difference here that is easy to not-notice from both sides, that can happen.> 

<Yes. I am - surprised that you were confused by the claim that I am considering - changing what my responsibilities are. I expected that claim to not be confusing.>

Leareth paces, mulling it over. 

<I think that maybe 'responsibilities' is a concept that combines many factors> he says eventually. <You are considering changing your tasks. What you actually spend most of your time doing and thinking about, day to day, which levers in the world you interact with. I find that claim unconfusing. I - would be surprised if you were changing your long-term goals?> 

<...I think I am certainly more likely to? During the war I was fairly confident in what my goals were. Now there are lots and lots of possibilities and I don't know which ones are right. I have guesses but I would be unsurprised to have to make new guesses.>

Tail-swish. The words are starting to feel slippery and confused in Leareth's head. He paces. 

<...I keep having the feeling we are defining our terms differently> he offers finally. <You will obtain new information about constraints and tradeoffs and resources, that seems right, and as a result you will have different instrumental goals. I...do not think you are going to - decide that actually Yeerk lives and Yeerk wellbeing do not matter because they are Yeerks. In my mind, the fundamental goal of 'allow all sentient beings in the universe to have good lives' is...not the kind of thing that is likely to change because you are doing politics instead of war.> 

<- I think that almost all of the hard bits of everything are figuring out which pieces of that sentence trade against other pieces in which ways? Everybody prefers good things to bad things, almost all politics is figuring out what the likeliest ways to get good things and not bad things actually are when implemented by peoples for other peoples very far away when no one really understands each other.>

<Well, yes, of course. Reality is inconvenient that way, everything is very complicated and messy and confusing to figure out. I am still not seeing the part where this will make things strange for me, if I accompany you to the Andalite homeworld.> 

<...for the last six months, we have been working on the same thing. All of my obligations - to my people at home, to the people in my command, to the people who surrendered to us, to you - pointed in the same direction. This was very valuable and I think it made us very close. Now all of those groups of people want different things, I think, and my obligations look very different, and I will be working to achieve very different things. It seems to me like you have valued our friendship, recently, specifically because we were working on the same thing and you have had very few chances to have that. So it seems important to clarify that I am proposing that I go work on something else, and not necessarily on the thing you are going to work on.>

<Hmm.> Tail-swish. <I - think - maybe I have communicated an incomplete sense of why I value our friendship, because it does not feel to me that you working on your comparative advantage of homeworld politics should in any way change that we are value-aligned in general.> 

<Maybe. Separately from that I think - I am doing a different thing when I go to work in politics than I think you would be doing if you decided to go work in politics.>

That feels like a promising path toward the centre of his confusion. <Oh?>