"She said you were called Yeerks."

"Yes. We are - little slugs, about this long." He shows her with his hands. "We lived in pools, on our home planet, and in our natural bodies we have very limited senses, and are defenceless. But - we communicate between ourselves with electrical signals, and at some point in our evolutionary history, we formed a symbiotic relationship with another species, the Gedds. We would slip in through their ears and interface with their brains, borrow their senses and bodies. They were not very intelligent, by themselves, and they benefited vastly from our presence, so they came back to the pools for us. It was - it was good, we were helping them, but the Andalites came and they were horrified at the concept of a slug that could enter someone's head and take over their body. We have so little without that, though, we have no eyes to see the stars with, no hands to build with..."

He shakes his head. "But when we spoke of going elsewhere to find hosts, they did not think any other species in the galaxy would voluntarily choose that. And -" a flicker of pain, regret, "and I will admit some of my fellows did - not really understand why the host's consent mattered, our culture lacked the concepts for it, we were so young and new. I - think I understood, even then, but evidently I failed to communicate that clearly enough. And so Seerow, who I thought was my friend, became alarmed. He had said he was concerned. We had debated it. I thought we were allies who could communicate our positions in words, and listen... Until he attacked us. And we fought back, because, what else were we supposed to do, give up and die?" 

"I told Carissa that it is almost never the Good thing to do, to give up and die, because then you will not be able to do any other things and there are a lot of other things to get done."

Mhalir's breath catches. He looks up into her eyes, startled, maybe relieved. "- Yes. That is what I thought." 

"Also because if all the people trying to do the right thing give up and die then the people who are not trying to do the right thing will end up in charge. And because people who are undecided about whether they should try to do the right thing will find the case for it pretty unpersuasive."

"That makes sense. I - I have tried many times to push our Council toward - plans that are less evil in the short run. And I think I have sometimes succeeded, on the margin, when it did not trade off much against other things, but...it was hard to make a case that those plans were otherwise equally good, when it seemed that the best-case scenario for us losing the war was being denied technology and confined to our home planet indefinitely, and the worst case was the annihilation of our entire species. I could not make a very persuasive case." He seems kind of upset about it, but mostly confused. 

"I am curious what you mean by 'less evil.'"

"Offering alliance to planets rather than conquering them because we could and enslaving their people. We did this successfully with the Taxxons. They have an intense biological drive of constant hunger that they often cannot control, sometimes they eat each other, it was immensely limiting to their civilization and we can help. I - think it was demoralizing, for the Council, that the Andalites knew the Taxxons had chosen it voluntarily, and were not at all inclined to de-escalate the war as a result. I also pushed to talk to the Andalites rather than fighting. Repeatedly. On the Hork-Bajir world I was in charge of an operation and - I unilaterally decided to open communications with the Andalite forces there. Arguably I did not actually have authority to do that without advance permission from our Council. Alloran - my host who I left in Nirvana - used the comms instructions we shared to target attacks instead. And then - triggered a bioweapon and slaughtered all the Hork-Bajir remaining on the planet, rather than let them fall into our hands."

Mhalir's face clenches. "He gave us no warning. I - am not sure I would have backed down if he had, it is in a sense not a good strategy to do that, your enemies will know you can be coerced into surrender if they are willing to be more ruthless than you... But I might have. Anyway. We captured him. I - was facing the disapproval of the Council, for being too pro-Andalite, I was close to losing their trust entirely. I took him as my host as a political move to counter that. I know that was Evil, just..." Helpless shrug. "I felt very constrained." 

"Do you think that was a mistake?"

"I am not sure. I think it would have been a mistake if I had - lived in your world. Where there are gods on the side of Good. I...do not think our world is like that. I think we have no greater power trying to fix all the problems, or else things would look very different. But... I do feel very confused about it." 

"I am not sure the gods are the decisive thing. I think the strongest argument for Good - means, rather than Good ends - is the world being very strange, very confusing, containing lots of actors and factions whose aims you can't necessarily anticipate....and perhaps this is the same thing from another angle but being likely to make mistakes. People who have never fought a war before are likely to make mistakes related to how to fight wars. People who have never had contact with other civilizations before are likely to make mistakes related to contact with other civilizations. Good tactics are in general tactics that are robust about being wrong about what kind of world you're in. Not - infinitely wrong, no one has a tactic that will work just as well if it turns out that the exact opposite of everything they believed was true, but - 

- Golarion has gods. Maybe your universe does not have gods. But it has lots of peoples in it, right? Even if none of the ones you'd met so far were aligned with you, or powerful enough to defend you -"

...Nod. 

"I think I was wrong about the Andalites," he says after a very long pause. "I am not sure how wrong. Or - whether it was enough to actually produce different predictions of their actions, or whether there is any path I could have taken from where I was that would have de-escalated the war once it began. But - maybe." 

"People are - usually wrong about how their enemies think and feel. It is a known place where it takes extraordinary skill to be right."

He nods, slowly. "...I think I took Alloran's beliefs too much at face value. As an indicator of the Andalite political consensus on Yeerks, rather than - well, while one is being enslaved and tortured is not exactly the best time for them to express nuanced beliefs. And I did notice that, I tried to take it into account, but - probably that is something else where it takes extraordinary skill to be right. I was surprised, when Alloran spoke to Carissa and to the cleric of Sarenrae, and I should not have been, I had been in his head for fifteen years." 

"Did he - have the chance to speak to other people, during that time?"

"- I tried to suggest it, early on. He had no interest in talking to voluntary Taxxon Controllers, even when they were demonstrably Yeerk-free because he had just watched the Yeerk exit into the pool, and the adult Hork-Bajir all have an induced intellectual disability, the creators of their species made them that way. I...did not think to offer it again once there were humans in the picture. I suppose I had stopped trying by then." 

"It was confusing to Carissa that you did not kill him when you were done with him. It was one of the examples she thought of, of Good people doing unstrategic things in order to be Good."

"He would have gone to an Evil afterlife, here! I was not willing to subject him to that after decades of enslaving him. And...I promised myself, at the beginning, that I would free him someday, when we had won, and - maybe by then it would be too late for him to ever be all right but at least I could try."

He shakes his head. "I am not really sure either why I did it when I did, though, we had demonstrably not won yet and it was unstrategic. I - just - I noticed that the considerations for keeping him as a host no longer applied, wizards were just as smart and would be even more impressive to the Council, and - I told myself maybe the Good gods would try to fight me if I kept him but not if I freed him - and then suddenly it was intolerable to be in his head listening to him scream." 

"Another argument for Good means as opposed to Good ends which should probably get some credit is that it is very bad for people to employ Evil means. That's more Sarenrae's domain of concern than ours, but I think it's probably true."

"Mmm." He isn't sure what else to say. 

She does not seem bothered by them not talking for a little while.

Mhalir tries to think. 

He wants to live in the world she's describing to him. It's a better world. Maybe that in itself is making it harder to trust her, because of course this is the sort of argument someone would make, to be very convincing to someone shaped like Mhalir, and the old man is a wizard with Detect Thoughts, this woman is here on his orders and Mhalir has no way of even verifying that she works for a god at all... 

He can't take for granted that Iomedae's values are what the woman says at all, anyway, rather than something more incomprehensibly alien, which can be approximated in human language by what she said, but isn't really that. 

Fighting Hell makes sense to him, though, there's a stark beautiful simplicity in it. 

And there's a kind of simplicity in his current situation, awful as it is. He's a prisoner, held by a ninth-circle wizard. His options have narrowed to almost nothing. But for some reason this woman is here, right now, sitting in front of him, and maybe he can't trust her but he can still say words to her. 

"Iomedae is Lawful," he says, finally. "She keeps agreements. I - am wondering if She would be interested in making a deal. I could contribute our technology to fight Hell, if she helps us end the war." He carefully doesn't say 'win', because - maybe that's not the best path, from here. 

She is very still, for a little while. "It is - hard for gods to make agreements with mortals in a fashion verifiable to the mortals. But - something in that spirit, I think, we would want very much. 

Yeerks would have to stop taking unwilling hosts."

"Of course." He meets her eyes levelly. "I - would be very relieved, actually, to have such a strong and compelling reason for us to do that. I think I can convince the rest of our leadership easily, if the incentive is that clear." 

"Will they want us to send people who they can - look at, to understand Iomedae and Hell and what Lawful Good is?"