The Message-Chapters 11-12
Note, I'm combining these two chapters.
quote:
<He's going to die if we don't do something,> Rachel cried.
<Cassie?> Jake asked. <What do we do?>
< I...I don't know!>
<Cassie, you're the closest thing we have to an animal expert,> Jake said urgently.
But I wasn't feeling at all like an expert. I was feeling like a fool. This was all my fault. It had been my decision to go ahead. I was the one.
<Aaaahhh,> Marco moaned. < Oh , man. That's a major ouchie. Ahh, ahh!>
<What's happening?> Tobias called down. <Marco sounds hurt.>
<He is,> Jake answered tersely.
< Oh , man, I don't want to die as some fish,> Marco cried. <l don't want to die out here. My mom drowned. I'm going to die just like she did. My dad . . .>
Other people in the thread have summed up Marco's problem...seriously, probably mortally wounded, in the middle of the ocean, mentally in a place where h'es reliving his mother's draowning.
quote:
<Morph!> I yelled. <l think I know what to do. Morph back to human.>
<lf he morphs to human, he'll just drown,> Rachel argued.
<No. Morphing uses DNA, right? The basic pattern of the animal. Marco morphs back to human. I don't think the injury will affect him, because it doesn't affect his human DNA. Then, as soon as he can, he morphs back to dolphin. The dolphin body was injured, but the dolphin DNA should be the same. He should be a healthy, normal dolphin again.>
<What if you're wrong?> Rachel asked bluntly.
<There's no other choice,> Jake said. <Marco? You have to morph back to human. We'll keep you from drowning.>
<Jake . . . buddy . . . You know I can't swim.>
<l know, Marco. But we'll take care of you.>
< Okay . Yeah, okay. Might as well die in my own body. Ahh. Ahhhh! Maybe it won't hurt as much. Maybe . . .>
He was drifting off. <He's losing blood,> I said. <He may pass out. Marco. Morph. Now!>
We formed a circle around him, the three of us, with Tobias drifting overhead and the big humpback resting alongside.
Then Marco began to change. Arms sprouted from his flippers. His face flattened down, with his wide, grinning dolphin mouth shortening to form
Marco's own lips. His skin turned pink and his morphing suit appeared.
His shattered, injured tail split in two. Legs formed from the halves, toes appeared. Human toes. At the end of human legs.
<He did it!>
"Yeah, I did it. And now I'm drowning!"
<Here,> I said, swimming beside him. <Grab onto me.>
He wrapped his arms over my back, and I held him up to the air.
So, Marco is, at least physically, saved. Who knows what that's going to do to his psyche, though.
quote:
Then I noticed something strange. It was like the ocean floor was rising to meet me.
No. It was the humpback. He had dived beneath us, and was rising slowly, slowly to the sur face.
<Look out! The whale!> Rachel yelled.
But at that moment the most incredible part of an incredible day happened.
My mind, human, dolphin, both minds, opened up like a flower opening to the sun.
And a silent, but somehow huge, voice filled my head, it spoke no words. It simply filled every corner of my mind with a simple emotion.
Gratitude.
The whale was telling me that it was grateful. We had saved it. Now it would save our schoolmate.
<Back away,> I told Rachel and Jake. < It's okay.>
<Yeah,> Rachel agreed, sounding amazed. <l hear it, too. Or feel it. Or whatever.>
The humpback rose beneath a sputtering Marco. The broad leathery back lifted him up. And when I looked again, I saw Marco, sitting nervously on what could have been a small island, high and dry above the choppy waves.
Tobias fluttered down and rested beside him.
The whale called me to him.
Listen, little one, he commanded, in a silent voice that seemed to fill the universe.
I listened. I listened to his wordless voice in my head. I felt like it went on forever.
Tobias said later it was only ten minutes. But during that ten minutes, I was lost to the world. I was being shown a small part of the whale's thoughts.
He had lived eighty migrations. He had many mates, many mothers, who had died in their turn. His children traveled the oceans of the world.
He had survived many battles, traveled to the far southern ice and the far northern ice. He remembered the days when men hunted his kind from ships that belched smoke.
He remembered the songs of the many fathers who had gone before. As others would remember his song.
But in all he had seen and all he had known, he had never seen one of the little ones become a human.
Marco, I realized. He means Marco. And little ones? Is that what the whales call dolphins?
We are not truly. . . little ones.
No. You are something new in the sea. But not the only new thing.
I wasn't sure what he was telling me. He spoke only in feelings, in a sort of poetry of emotion, without words. Part of it was in song. Part of it I could only sense the same way I could sense echolocation.
Something new?
He showed me a picture, a memory. It was a broad, grassy plain, with trees and a small stream. All of it underwater. And across the grass ran an animal that was part deer, part scorpion, part almost human.
Where is it? I asked him in a language of squeaks and clicks and mind-to-mind feeling.
And he told me.
Suddenly I woke up. That's how it felt, any way. The whale released me. It was like coming out of a dream.
<Are you okay?> Jake asked. <You were starting to worry us, but we had this feeling maybe the whale didn't want us to interferes
< I'm fine,> I said. < I'm beyond fine.>
<Marco's ready to try remorphing,> Jake reported.
<Uh-huh,> I said, still lost in images from a mind larger and older and so utterly strange.
<Guys? You have about twenty-five minutes,> Tobias reported. <And it's a long way back to shore.>
I heard Marco say something, but he was speaking normally now, not in thought-speak, so it was hard to make it out with my ears under the water.
I stuck my head up and saw him begin to resume his dolphin shape.
Halfway through, he slipped off the side of the whale and back into the water. His fins formed. His beak.
And his tail. Perfect and healthy and undamaged.
We headed for shore, tired but alive.
I felt strange, leaving the whale. But when we were a mile away, I heard his song - slow, mournful, haunting notes.
<Why didn't he sing more when we were with him?> Jake wondered.
I smiled inwardly. And of course, since I was a dolphin at the moment, I smiled outwardly, too.
<He doesn't sing for the little ones,> I explained. <He sings for the mothers.>
<What?> Marco asked.
<He sings for a mate.>
<Ahh. Cruising for chicks. Got it. I wonder if the big old guy even realizes that he helped save my life.>
<Marco, that big old guy realizes things you and I will never even be able to guess.>
So, this is it. The is the part of the series about a blue centaur alien who gives teenagers the power to change into animals so they can defend the world from parasitic mind controlling slugs and their dinosaur-men slaves where I lose my suspension of disbelief. A reviewer/rereader of the animorph books called this "whale Jesus", and I think it fits.
So why does this part bug me so much, given that this is a science fiction series and that the entire premise of the books is a pretty fantastic one? I've been thinking about it, and I think I came up with the answer. For all of the weirdness of the series, Applegate has gotten the animals right...or at least realistic. While I probably can never get into a lizard's mind, I could believe that when Jake turned into a lizard in the first book he'd think and act like that.Sure, she doesn't get everything right. We know that cats can see color better than she thought they could, but at the time she wrote the book, we didn't know that about cats. And she shies away from the fact that dolphins seem to be murderous rapists, but, you know, children's book. She's been good at researching animals and animal behavior....from Rachel's bravado as a cat to Cassie's constant state of panic as a squirrel to the fact that Tobias as a hawk killed and ate a rat just out of instinct.
So when we get to the idea that dolphins instinctively worship whales as gods and that whales are psychic fonts of oceanic wisdom, it just feels like this section isn't as well researched as the rest of the animal parts of the books. It's a kind of mystical spiritual woo that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the series.
But maybe i'm being too harsh on it. What do you all think? Are you fans of whale Jesus? Will you accept the Cetacean Messiah into your hearts?
