In the portion of Jake Berenson's memoirs entitled "The Capture", he records a conversation he had with Temrash One-One-Four of the Sulp Niar pool shortly before the latter's death. According to Berenson, Temrash told him that the ancient Yeerks used innumerable species as hosts, over the course of millennia, before the Gedds evolved. Each of them had their strengths and weaknesses, but all of them provided Yeerks with senses and mobility, and that was the important thing.
Scholars are not yet agreed as to what Temrash was referring to, any more than they are sure about the identity of the "Ssstram" and "Mak" races that he said the Yeerks had conquered. (Indeed, this whole section of Berenson's memoirs is such a puzzle to historians that the human archaeologist Joanna Whitney once jokingly suggested that the Animorphs should be prosecuted for killing Temrash One-One-Four. "Here they have someone who can scarcely open his mouth without revealing something that nobody else has ever guessed at, and they just wipe him out to save their own skins. It's like crushing the Rosetta Stone for fear that it contains radon.") Suffice it to say that the Temrashean version of Yeerk antiquity is not the version that Yeerks learn in school – and that, if it were, there would be little point in celebrating the festival of Esiln Kalkat.
For Esiln Kalkat (the words are Yeerkish for "let us acclaim the proto-conqueror") is the commemoration of Jimur Three-Four-Five, the semi-legendary figure who, one day during the mid-cycle of Generation 243 (later renumbered as Generation 1), swam curiously into the ear of a Gedd that had fallen into the deep area of his home pool, and thereby discovered the tremendous gift of which his entire race had hitherto been oblivious. Under his leadership, the Yeerk race conquered and tamed the Gedds, instituted the Council of Thirteen (with Jimur himself serving as the first Emperor), and generally began the transition from a community of intelligent slugs that swam in sulp niar and had a language based on clicks to the ancient and sophisticated civilization that so impressed Seerow-Iskillion-Atamis.
So much is recorded in the Yeerk chronicles, and generally confirmed by independent scholarship. What is less clear is when the idea arose of commemorating his great discovery with a night and a day of unbroken sensual revelry. Many historians, basing their theses on suggestions in certain ancient ballads and engravings, argue that the tradition is nearly as old as Gedd-based civilization itself, but no certain reference to it appears until the early-cycle of Generation 23, when Polip One-Three-Six, who then held the post of Council Member Five, issued a decretal condemning the excesses with which the festival had become intertwined.
"This festivity, known as Esiln Kalkat," she wrote, "was not instituted so that proud Yeerks might become debased through wanton appeasement of their hosts' appetites. Rather, its purpose is to bring them, through an extended immersion in the pleasures of the five senses, to a fuller appreciation of the great privileges that were hidden from our ancestors until the time of Jimur Three-Four-Five, that the reverence due to this great pioneer may never perish from the hearts of the Yeerk people."
It is probably safe to say that few modern Yeerks, even on the Council, think of Esiln Kalkat in quite those terms. Nonetheless, Polip's attitude is still reflected in the traditional air of solemnity that still hangs about the festival, and keeps it from being merely twenty-six hours of music, feasting, exotic baths, and stunning light displays, all tinged with a certain grandiose awareness of the Yeerk race's superiority to all vertebrate life. (Of course, for some aliens, this last is still all that is visible about the event. One of Prince Seerow's lieutenants, upon observing an Esiln Kalkat revel shortly after his arrival on the Yeerk homeworld, expressed his disgust with the practice by dubbing the holiday "Parasites' Eve". This was the first of many words and actions by which Alloran-Semitur-Corrass made himself noxious to the Yeerk people.)
However, the Five Revels – auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory – are still at the heart of the festival, and no Yeerk pool in the galaxy would consider letting the hundred and thirtieth day of the fourteenth year of a generation's mid-cycle pass by without setting up the necessary equipment for all of them. If, therefore, an uninfested alien (an Animorph, perhaps, on a spy mission) had managed to infiltrate Earth's Sulp Niar pool on December 15, 1999, his eyes would have been met by a bewildering sight: a pool nearly empty of Yeerks, all the cages ostentatiously open, a closed-off room from which dazzling flashes of color continually emerged, a swarm of Gedd-Controllers scurrying around on their mismatched legs and offering various elaborate foodstuffs to the other Controllers (who would sometimes take them and eat them, and other times simply inhale their aromas for five or ten minutes), a deafening rendition of something that resembled a Handel concerto for didgeridoo echoing from unseen speakers, and – most striking of all – a number of enormous vats, not much taller than a standing human but nearly a third the length of the pool itself, in which a strange, brownish-yellow substance fizzed and bubbled in a strangely appealing fashion.
And, if he had looked at the far end of one of those vats, he would have seen a young, rather plump human female, with pale skin and light-brown hair, immersing herself in the fizzing substance with an expression of intense pleasure – though he would, of course, have had no way of knowing that he was looking at the future Saint Teresa Sickles.
Malcar Seven-Four-Five wriggled in the illutilagh bath, the better to make the tiny bubbles tingle against her soft human skin. She was in a state of mind that she rarely achieved, which was not so much a state of perfect serenity (though she herself mistook it for one) as a sort of conscious shelving of all other concerns so as to better enjoy the present moment. Her worries about Teresa's recent missionary activity, her schemes for capturing the boy in Teresa's class who had a crush on her, the nagging cloud of unfocused fear that hangs over every citizen of a police state: these things had not been abolished from her mind, but she was steadfastly refusing to think about them. This was the only day of her life that she would ever get to dedicate to wantonly satisfying the flesh, and she intended to milk it for all it was worth.
She extended a foot and touched her toes to those of her companion in the bath, Elskir Five-Oh-Seven. Elskir Controlled a girl named Kati Letton, who lived just down the street from Teresa, and she and Malcar were, if not exactly friends, at any rate close colleagues and co-conspirators.
"So what do you think, Malcar Seven-Four-Five?" Elskir murmured.
"About what?" said Malcar.
Elskir shrugged. "Life," she said. "Championship Gedd breeding. The true identity of the Andalite terrorists. I'm not really particular, just so long as you're thinking about something."
Malcar smiled. "I didn't know it was important to think on Esiln Kalkat," she said. "I thought you were supposed to turn off your cognitive centers for twenty-four hours and just let your animal side run riot."
"Well, I suppose that's one way to do it," said Elskir, with a touch of austerity that would have won her the thorough approval of Polip One-Three-Six, "but, personally, I've always thought that a pleasure you're not allowed to think about isn't really much of a pleasure at all."
"Well, that's because you're a little intellectual snot," said Malcar.
"And you're a semi-barbaric anachronism," Elskir replied.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome."
The two of them could have gone on like this for some time, had a low, rumbling sound from somewhere above Malcar's head not interrupted their badinage. "Forgive me for intruding," said a voice, "but is one of you Malcar Seven-Four-Five, the Controller of a human named Teresa Sickles?"
Malcar turned and raised her head, and saw an unfamiliar Hork-Bajir-Controller, wearing the tri-colored bands of a member of Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three's personal guard, looming over the illutilagh vat. Fighting down the instinctive surge of fear that nearly every Yeerk, at this period in history, felt in the presence of a Visserarchical envoy, she replied as calmly as possible, "Yes, that would be me."
The Hork-Bajir-Controller inclined his head. "My name is Lissim Seven-One-Three," he said. "I regret having to interfere with your Kalkat revels, but my duties require me to inform you that you are required to vacate your host and accompany me to the Sub-Visser's Bug fighter. If you refuse to do so, we will have no choice but to arraign you on charges of crimes against the Empire."
"Crimes?" Malcar repeated, trying to ignore the idiotic hammering of Teresa's heart. "What crimes?"
"Treason," said Lissim, "by sympathy with a host species."
Author's Note: Special thanks to AquaianGoddess for the title of this chapter. Her story "Project: PE01" was one of the first stories I read on this site, and, while I didn't much care for most of it, the phrase "Parasite Eve" has remained with me ever since. It was only a matter of time before it appeared in one of my own stories, albeit in a slightly altered form.