| Visser |
Detailed Plot: Visser One, whose host body is Marco's mother, tells her story of finding the human species for Yeerks to infest. In the past, she departed from her host's family staging her own death in a boating accident, but in the present, she stands trial for crimes against the Yeerk Empire--most notably, treason. She must defend herself from Visser Three's accusations while telling her story to the Council of Thirteen; through her testimony, the reader gets to hear about how Yeerks discovered humans. When Visser One was just a sub-visser, she was on a team looking for a so-called Class Five species to infest, and it was Visser Three who issued the report that drew her attention to it. In a previous book, the details were given of Andalite cadets Elfangor and Arbron under War-Prince Alloran meeting kidnapped humans Chapman and Loren. Visser One repeats what she knows of this encounter. Before launching too far into her story, Visser One discusses Visser Three's suspicious behavior and makes her own accusations, making it clear that the Council should be evaluating him too. Because of his violent reaction, they seem very interested in the counter-accusations, and her host, Marco's mother Eva, seems pessimistic about the outcome, suggesting that she will die and Marco will dance on her grave. Visser One will never admit what she knows about the so-called Andalite bandits, because she doesn't want Visser Three to get the credit. She goes on with her trial and explains that a Skrit Na ship was followed by an Andalite ship over to the Taxxon homeworld, and in order to find humans, they needed to figure out the coordinates of Earth from the trail left by the Skrit Na ship. It took Visser One a year to narrow down which system might contain the humans' homeworld, and during that time one of her superiors assigned her to report to the Taxxon homeworld and get a Taxxon host. She felt this was a demotion from the Hork-Bajir host she had, and also felt that someone was trying to HIDE the human species. Turns out Visser One decided to disobey her orders, suggesting someone above her had it out for her (implying it was Visser Three), and she chose to pursue the human world for the sake of her people. When Visser Three points out to the Council that stealing the ship was a death penalty offense, they remind him that she was pardoned for it and initiate a review of the memory dump she made of this time in her life. (Neither of them have made memory recordings since becoming Vissers, since it isn't required and both would be shown to have committed death penalty offenses, but Visser One bluffs that she will do it when Visser Three agrees to do the same. Of course, he won't.) They access her memory recording and "watch" what she did with a subordinate while looking for Earth. After searching for a long time and getting close to running out of supplies, Visser One and her subordinate Essam find Earth and land, finding the atmosphere acceptable but ending up in the middle of a war zone. They realize humans actually fight each other. Visser One enlists the help of her subordinate to come out of her Hork-Bajir host and infest a captured human. She discovers that because of humans' brain hemispheres, their minds have a feeling of being at war with themselves. Visser One learns that the human she's infested is a soldier who prays to Allah and has three children, and his care for his children confuses her. Since the host human believes that America is the strongest opponent in the war he is fighting, she realizes she needs to go to America to begin their conquest there. During a break from the memory feed, Visser Three pretends he wishes Visser One would ally with him to take Earth and start a new Yeerk Empire. But of course he is saying this with thought-speak and it can't be recorded, and he's hoping she'll say something treasonous. She's not that stupid, and can't believe he ever became a visser. The memory viewing continues. After getting rid of the human host from the Middle East, the Yeerks try to figure out where America is, and decide based on how often cities are mentioned that Hollywood must be the most important place in America. They land there. They find human hosts and Visser One takes the female one while Essam takes the male. They kill their Hork-Bajir hosts and effectively "burn their bridges." From her new human host--a female actress and drug addict--Visser One learned very little, except that humans sometimes submit willingly to addictions or authority or charismatic leaders because they're lonely or directionless, and that's how she gets the idea for The Sharing. She was afraid that trying to take a population that big by force would be difficult without first infiltrating and getting willing hosts, and she underestimated how many would fight. And then, when the memory log ends, they suddenly get attacked by supposed Andalite bandits. Visser One hopes the Council will see how incompetent Visser Three is. But then she notices that the attacking group contains only four--two Hork-Bajir, one tiger, and one bear. There's no Andalite, and no explanation of why the whole group isn't there. Visser One begins to suspect that something fishy is going on. Especially since Visser Three lops the head off the tiger and blows up the bear, and the others don't really react. Visser One figures they aren't the Andalite bandits at all. They're just two real Hork-Bajir and two starved animals. And Visser Three manages to kill the Hork-Bajir before they can be asked about it. This is bad for Visser One because she believes Visser Three's reputation for incompetence rests mainly on his inability to defeat the Andalite bandits, and then he just did so so conveniently in front of the Council. The spokesperson on the Council does appear to be suspicious about this, but it still looks bad for her. And then it gets worse. Visser Three says it's suspicious that Visser One made no memory dumps for fourteen months, and to prove that it's because of something suspicious, he calls a witness: Essam. But since Essam is dead, Visser One has no idea how that could be possible. Turns out what Visser Three has is Hildy Gervais, a man who was Essam's host--a man who fathered children with Visser One's last host, Allison Kim. They had twins--a boy and a girl--and somehow Visser Three found out about it. Visser One is allowed to continue her story after she admits this is true. She explains how she went from her drug-addicted human host to another female host--Allison--and how she killed her last host by making her breathe in a swimming pool. In her new host body, she pretended to try to revive the old host, but it didn't work. She goes on to live Allison's life, while Essam adopted a man named Hildy Gervais. Visser One is coerced into submitting to a live memory dump so the Council can interpret her reasons for disappearing from contact for so long. (She'll be excused of any secondary crimes if the dump proves she isn't lying about being a traitor.) She maintains that she just had children with Essam's host because she wanted to understand this parenthood thing that was so central to human life, but they don't really buy it. The memory dump goes on to detail her life as Allison Kim and her relationship with her intelligent, scientific-minded host. The host is absolutely confident that the Yeerks will never take Earth, and also thinks she can show the Visser what human love is about and "turn" her. The Council member reading her memory gets to see that she developed a relationship with Hildy/Essam, that they dated and mated and had twins, and that Visser One had become "addicted" to humans--because they were more alive than the Yeerks ever were. In the memory dump, Visser One and Essam agree that their human children must survive, and she tries to justify to the Council that she had not been prepared for how emotional it is to have children. And for her part, Visser One's current host, Eva, is shocked to see this in her past. She never knew that the cruel Visser loved her children. This makes Eva a bit more sympathetic, as she knows Visser One wants the kids to survive, and so she silently helps her figure out what to say when the Council asks her what happened to the kids. Her instinct had been to say she had them killed, but Eva thinks Visser Three might have her kids, and she knows that would doom her if such a lie came out. For reasons the Visser doesn't know, the Council member who read her memories does not reveal the treason to the others, and allows for a bathroom and food break. During this break, Visser One manages to steal a cell phone from another human-Controller and makes a call to Marco while in the bathroom. She begins to talk to the answering machine, but Marco picks up. She explains that she needs Marco and his friends to attack, and explains where. Marco's response says it all: he totally understands that this is about a personality conflict between the two Vissers, and that he's only being asked to help because she hates Visser Three more than she hates the Andalites. She gives him some clues about how to attack. He speaks directly to his mom, knowing she can hear, and reminds her that he'll do what he has to do. Visser One tries to tell Marco that his mother loves him, and he replies that he already knows that but there's no deal between him and the Visser. He swears to kill the Yeerk for what she's done, then hangs up on her. Visser One is both offended and impressed by his courage. Back at the trial, Visser One continues to explain, this time going into detail about what happened to her host, Allison Kim. She tells them that their Kandrona was weakening, so out of desperation she contacted the Yeerk Empire again and told them about the Class Five species. She started The Sharing and paved the way for the invasion. But Essam found out about it, became emotional, and decided to face death rather than be a part of the enslavement of the human race. He intended to release his host and die of Kandrona starvation, but he would be taking the children, and even though Visser One believed her new rank would enable her to protect their children, Essam didn't think so. Essam decided to take the Allison Kim host with him because the children needed their mother, and he left her alternate host for her to use before he split. When Visser One took possession of the male alternate host, she tried to follow Essam, and tells the Council she was planning to kill him. She believed the children would be adopted and didn't need to be killed because they were only infants and knew nothing. Visser Three continues to accuse Visser One of sympathizing with the enemy, and she denies it, so Visser Three asks for a demonstration. He brings in her nine-year-old son, whom she hasn't seen since he was a baby, and asks her to shoot him. She stalls because she sees a flea growing behind him. Soon enough, it grows into Ax and he attacks. And the Animorphs pile in and attack. The Council gets to see what the real "Andalite bandits" are like, and see that Visser Three lied. Visser One gets knocked out by Marco in gorilla form, and he escapes with her. She comes to in a Taxxon tunnel, and Marco tells her that she has to leave his mother or die. He even offers to toss her into the pool to let her live a little longer. But he insists he will be able to kill his mother if she refuses to agree. Eva privately tells Visser One that she needs to talk to her son to get them out of this. Accepting the bargain, she disengages from Eva and lets her talk to Marco, only finding the memories later. She sees that Eva pleaded for Visser One's life--that she should be the one in charge of the Earth invasion because she favors the nonviolent approach--and they have to make it look like she was attacked and left for dead. Visser One also notices him consulting Cassie--the polar bear--for advice on whether she's lying, and consulting the tiger--Jake--for impressions on the deal. Visser One believes Jake to be an actual Andalite at first, then realizes he's a human. Marco puts out the terms and gives the Yeerk back to Eva. She lets herself be reinfested. But she's knocked to a semiconscious state, just lying in the tunnel waiting. Visser One reflects on how she created The Sharing and how she got her first willing human host. She thinks of herself as part human because of her identification with human wants and needs and her having children. But she still wants to be in control and be a visser. She reflects on how she'd misled the Council about how the rift between Hildy and herself (as Allison) had really occurred. She'd needed to spend more time as the spokesman for The Sharing, and so she intended to kill Allison, which didn't sit well with Hildy or Essam. That was when he overpowered her, took the children, and left. She followed him because she wanted them back. When the children got sick and she found Essam having checked them into a hospital, she confronts him. Essam dies of Kandrona starvation and she pulls him out of Hildy's head, but not all of him comes out and there's still dead Yeerk tissue in Hildy's brain. He becomes slightly mad and is institutionalized, while Visser One uses the body she stole to start The Sharing to chase down Allison Kim and kill her. She tells this story to the Council, and thinks about her children getting abandoned in the hospital and given up for adoption. Visser One and Visser Three finally get to listen to their verdict, and they are both sentenced to death by Kandrona starvation; however, they're both given a reprieve because they're needed to carry out important missions. Visser Three is left to Earth, and Visser One is sent to planet Anati. They believe the Andalites are going to come to one of the two worlds and attack, and Visser One is needed to prepare the Anati world to fight the Andalites while Visser Three is told not to start a big war or it will attract attention, maybe diverting the Andalites' attention, which they can't handle right now. Visser One is triumphant, and excited about getting a whole new world to enslave. She thinks about her children, and how one of them is a slave already and the other, if she isn't already infested, would one day come to know her--and she'd infest her and make her love her "mother" if she didn't do it on her own. It's clear by the end of the book that though she's had a taste of real human emotions, she is still much more a power-hungry Yeerk than anything. Narrator: Visser One/Edriss-Five-Six-Two New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: The Yeerk Empire identifies five "classes" of alien. Those are the following: Class One are unfit, physically, for infestation; Class Two are infestable but have physical issues that are difficult for the Yeerk to manage; Class Three are infestable but exist only in small quantities; Class Four are perfect for infestation but cannot be challenged because of military excellence; and Class Five are perfect for infestation and aren't strong enough to resist. Yeerks, of course, hoped to find a Class Five species . . . and found it in humans. In this book, Visser One mentions while in a Hork-Bajir body that her "heart" leaped. Hork-Bajir have more than one heart, so this was a poor description. The Animorphs books seem to point out regularly that it's so bizarre and backward for humans to make war on each other. But considering the Andalites clearly have a high respect for tail-fighting and the Yeerks don't seem at all shy about sacrificing and killing each other for status, it seems a bit hypocritical of them to be judging humans for fighting among themselves. Marco's family's answering machine has this outgoing message: "Hi, we're not at home, or maybe we just don't feel like answering the phone, so leave a message, you know the drill." Best lines: Eva: "You created human children to be enslaved by Yeerks? If there's a hell you'll be there soon!" Visser One: "Humans have fought thousands of wars. Thousands! We as a race have fought a mere handful. They run straight into the bullets, Visser Three, again and again. Did you know that? They attack against insane odds. They defend what can't be defended. Outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, hopeless, they will still fight, fight, fight till they are each and every one dead. Something you might know if you stopped posturing long enough to learn something!"
Visser One: Did the child think he could frighten me? It was laughable.
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