Three years later …

I ran away from the great war of Yeerk against Andalite.

I ran away and hid on the planet called Earth. I buried the Time Matrix in a patch of woods. I performed a Frolis Maneuver: the mixing of different DNA to form a single morph. I found ways to come in contact with humans and absorb bits of several DNA patterns. And when I had enough, I morphed a human for the first time.

And for the last time. You see, I was done with the fight. I had done all I could, and I had made a mess of things. My people would be better off without me. And there was no way to hide over the long term. I had to become a human. And stay a human.

I attended a human college. I majored in physics. It was hard. Hard to pretend not to know all the answers instantly. I had to pretend to struggle with equations I had known perfectly since childhood.

And it was hard being a human. I missed my stalk eyes. I missed my tail terribly. But I didn’t want to fight anymore. I was done with the war. Sick to death of it.

Besides, there were good things about being a human. The human sense of taste is wonderful. Almost overpowering.

And then there was Loren. She had recreated her own life to deal with the fact that she had aged several years. She went back to a mother who never knew she had been gone. Back to friends and family who all expected her to be the age she now was.

The power of the Time Matrix is awesome. I had seen what it could do, and I was more convinced than ever that it could not be given to either side in a terrible, bloody war. Desperate people do desperate, evil things.

I finished college at an accelerated rate. Not surprising, since I was a century or two ahead of all the professors. I began graduate school. But I was bored there, too.

I had a job writing software for primitive human computers. It was the 1980s on Earth and humans were just beginning to understand computers.

I met a lot of humans who were working in the computer field. My human friend Bill used to come over to my room and we would exchange ideas. It was hard for me to simplify my knowledge enough for him to follow. Everything had to be explained in simple human terms, using words like “window” to explain a childishly simple concept.

And my human friend Steve thought it was a huge breakthrough to use symbolic icons and a simple pointer rather than a lot of complex language.

One day I got a terrible shock. I saw Chapman at the college. I was with Loren at the time. Chapman did not recognize her. He did not know her at all.

It made no sense. We had left Chapman back on the Jahar, tumbling toward a black hole. He should have been swallowed by the black hole, crushed and annihilated.

Loren tested him. She went up to him and said, “Hello, Chapman. Heard from your old friend Visser Thirty-two lately?”

He’d stared at her like she was confused. This Chapman recalled nothing. His memory had been erased.

I tried to put it out of my mind. I told myself Chapman had a twin, or that it was some unknown physics of black holes. But it nagged at me. From then on I felt a sense of being watched. And I wondered if, or when, the power that had rewritten Chapman’s memory would make itself known.

But the most important thing I did as a human was to marry Loren.

We had come to care about each other on our adventure. And when she was ready by human standards, I married her.

And I really thought that I had left everything behind me. I thought that I was a human now. That Earth would be my home. That I would remain far, far away from the terrible space battles that raged across the galaxy, around stars so distant I could not even find them in Earth’s night sky.

I left my own people. My own species. And I was human … except in the dreams where I would run across the open grass and speak to the trees and whip my tail around for the simple joy of it.

We got a house. What I used to call a hollow house. Now I understood human things.

I drove a car. A yellow Mustang like the one I’d driven on the Taxxon world. And I only thought of my own people, and my own family, and my own world some of the time. Not every minute.

Not every minute.

I even took a human name. Alan Fangor. It was Loren’s idea. See, humans shorten their names, just as Andalites do. So most people called me Al Fangor.

One day I drove my car home from my job and parked it in the driveway. I could see that Loren was not home. Her own car was not in the driveway. She had gone to see a doctor. Although human doctors were practically barbarians who could not even eliminate a simple tumor without cutting holes in a person!

I stepped out of the car on my two human legs. It turned out, much to my surprise, that I seldom fell over, even with just two legs.

I walked up the driveway to the door and opened it, as I had done a thousand times before. Only this time someone was standing in my living room.

He was a man. A human. Or so I thought.

“What are you doing in here?” I demanded in angry mouth sounds.

The man looked at me with amusement. I was good at reading human expressions now. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”

“I live here. This is my home.” I was a little fearful. Human arms are strong and can be used for fighting. But whenever I sensed danger, I missed my tail. And I felt vulnerable, being unable to see behind me.

The man shook his head sadly. “Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, this is not your home.”

My knees weakened and I almost collapsed. I made it to the couch and sat down heavily. “What are you?” I asked.

He laughed. “You don’t ask who I am. You ask what. You are still wise enough to know I am not human.”

“Just tell me what you want,” I snapped.

“I don’t want anything. We don’t want anything. We do not interfere in the problems of other species.”

“We? Who is we?”

“The ‘we’ whose machine you have used to alter the direction of time and space.”

“Ellimist?” I whispered fearfully.

“Yes. I am one of those creatures you call Ellimists.”