As it turned out, this was not really a problem. The Sub-Visser and his guards had all taken it for granted that negotiating with a Skrit Na would be a surreal experience for any rational being; the suggestion that the captain had sold Toloth a crateful of chawkwa seeds in exchange for a fragment of Hork-Bajir claw struck them as simply par for the course. It never occurred to them to wonder whether there might be a logical reason for such behavior, and Toloth was in no way eager to suggest the notion to them.
Besides, no sooner had the Bug fighter lifted off from the desert ground than a dispute broke out between two of the Sub-Visser's attendants over whether the Esiln-Kalkat illutilagh ought to be prepared in the classical style or according to the recipe of Prince Kokimmin. They were both very forceful in defense of their preferences (it occurred to Toloth that, had Hawjabrans been infestable, these two would have been in more danger of treason by sympathy with a subject species than he was), and, as the Sub-Visser declined to give an opinion one way or the other, the argument was allowed to continue until the ship arrived back at the Sulp Niar pool, at which point nobody on board wanted to so much as think about chawkwa seeds anymore. Toloth was later to think of this as the third positive grace of God he received that day (the first two being the Na's two-sentient-beings requirement and the captain's happening to be a Christian), but at the time he merely noted his good fortune and put the matter out of his mind. Thus is gratitude, along with the other virtues, subtly quenched in the unbelieving soul.
Later that evening, as the Sub-Visser and the other guards began to lapse into dulot – that curious state of semi-awareness by which Yeerks refresh their host bodies – Toloth discreetly slipped away to a deserted corner of the Bug fighter, and, taking his new Baibul from its carrying dimension, began to read the Word of God.
He himself, looking back on this, was never quite clear as to what exactly he expected to find. The idea of something like a catechism, beginning with the most basic first principles and leading in logical progression to the more abstruse doctrines, was perhaps vaguely in his mind. Whatever his preconceptions, however, he quickly discovered that the Christian Scriptures fulfilled none of them.
The book began with an account of the creation of the universe. This was, of course, no novelty to Toloth, who was familiar with the traditional creation myths of both the Hork-Bajir and the Kandronist Yeerks. What surprised him about this particular account, however, was how – well, how dull it was. There was no hint of the lavish imagination that had made Lasra a protected citadel of the children of Kandrona, or the Hork-Bajir homeworld a gift from Father Deep to Mother Sky. Instead, there was simply a dry recitation, almost a checklist: God made light and found it good, and then He made Earth's atmosphere and found it good, and so on. It was almost as though the human who had written the account had been trying simply to establish that God had made the world and that the world was good, and had done his best to discourage his readers from bothering themselves about the details. Once again, Toloth found himself feeling uncomfortably like a barbarian intruding on a conference of philosophers.
He read on. The next few chapters seemed rather more like the sort of thing he was used to in religious texts, although even here the purely mythic elements seemed curiously subordinate to the philosophical and ethical ideas with which they were interwoven. He learned the details of Teresa's story involving the first two humans and the forbidden tree (apparently there had been a second sentient species on Earth at some point); he learned that the refraction of light was a symbol of God's mercy (or at least it was on Earth); he learned that linguistic barriers were a divinely instituted penalty for arrogance (then why didn't Andalites have any?). What he did not find, however – and what, after a while, began to puzzle him by its absence – was any reference to the name of Jesus.
After reading some seventeen chapters without learning anything about the figure who particularly interested his host, it occurred to him that perhaps the Skrit Na publishers had provided the Baibul with an index, and he turned to the end of the book. There he found, not an index (for a Skrit Na index appears at the front of a book, and looks so much like a table of contents that an alien might easily mistake it for one), but a collection of Scriptural commentaries by various illustrious Skrit Na exegetes. These, however, mentioned Jesus quite frequently, and Toloth concluded that they would meet his need equally well. With a sigh of satisfaction, he turned back the pages until he came to the beginning of this section, then settled back and began to read afresh.
By the time he had finished the fourth treatise, only his desire not to rouse his shipmates from their dulot was preventing him from screaming aloud. If the Baibul proper had not told him enough about Jesus, the Skrit Na commentators were telling him a good deal too much – and none of it consistent from one author to the next. According to Maliudrip, Jesus was a human into whom God had infused a substance like His own; according to Birnakolless, he was a purely transcendent deity who merely seemed to be living the life of a human; and Ishmapurzel, as near as Toloth could make out, seemed to be saying that Jesus was a human whom God controlled the way a Yeerk controlled a host. Whether any of these was what Teresa believed, Toloth had no idea, but he was fairly certain that she couldn't possibly believe all of them.
The truth of the matter was that the Great Persecution had done more damage to the Skrit Na race than even the Skrit Na realized. Because of their inbred mistrust of aliens, they were all but incapable of submitting themselves to the guidance of a human teacher; after their 5th-century acquisition of a Constantine Bible, therefore, they had been left to their own devices in interpreting its teachings. As a result, they had, in a little under a thousand years, reinvented every major heresy in Earthly Christian history, as well as a few that their human brethren had never thought of. And, because their desire for concord between the faithful was greater than their desire for doctrinal purity, they cheerfully embraced mutually exclusive interpretations of Scripture with no more mental confusion than came naturally to their species.
Toloth, of course, knew nothing of this, but he saw well enough that neither the unsupplemented Bible, nor the Bible as interpreted by the ancient Skrit Na masters, was going to satisfy Gef Makkil's desire for saving truth – which left him with precisely the dilemma he had had before. Despite the apparent impossibility of the thing, if he wanted to preserve his chances of ever attaining to the Visserarchy, he would have to speak to Teresa Sickles on Esiln Kalkat. He had no other alternative.
He sighed. Well, he had three days to work out a plan; hopefully he'd be able to come up with something. In the meantime, he needed to get some rest.
With a weary gesture, he slipped the Baibul back into its carrying dimension; then he snuck cautiously back into the guards' chamber, slipped into his resting-slot between Lissim Seven-One-Three and Inmit Two-Three-One, and joined his fellow Yeerks in dulot.