When the world turns upside down on you, it can sometimes be hard to find an appropriate response. Malcar, on this occasion, did not even try: she merely gaped at the Sub-Visserial guardsman, as the Gauls might have gaped at St. Martin after the miracle of the pine tree, and it was left to Elskir to lodge a hesitant protest.
"Excuse me, Lissim Seven-One-Three," she said, "but I think you must have made a mistake."
"No mistake," said Lissim briefly. "My orders were quite clear: locate Malcar Seven-Four-Five, Controller of the human Teresa Sickles, and bring her to the Sub-Visser for loyalty examination."
"But, see here, Lissim Seven-One-Three," said Elskir, "if you knew Malcar... I mean, the things she's said about her host over the years..."
"I don't recall ever asserting that she was accused of sympathy with her own host," said Lissim.
"What, then?" said Elskir, with a strained attempt at a laugh. "You think she's a closet Taxxon-lover?"
"I neither know nor care in the slightest what she is," said Lissim. "The Sub-Visser did not confide his suspicions to me. He merely expressed his desire for an audience with her, and that audience I intend to provide." And he returned his gaze to Malcar, and fixed her with a stare that compelled obedience.
Malcar swallowed, and nodded. "All right," she said. "I'm ready."
"Good," said Lissim. "In here, please." And he withdrew from his belt a wide, long-necked bottle, the mouth of which was just wide enough for an average-sized Yeerk to slither through.
Malcar blinked. "What?"
"Did you suppose that the Sub-Visser would let you remain in your own host while you were questioned?" said Lissim. "Today, on Esiln Kalkat?" He jerked a clawed thumb toward the pool. "Even with all the immature Gedds being pressed into early use for the festival, there are still over five hundred hostless Yeerks in that pool. Five hundred Yeerks who are missing the only Esiln Kalkat revels that will occur in their lifetimes, simply because we lack sufficient hosts to accommodate them all. Can you explain to me why a suspected criminal should not be expected to forfeit her host body to one of them until her innocence can be satisfactorily demonstrated?"
Put that way, it did seem reasonable. It also eased Malcar's mind on one important point: if the Sub-Visser planned to interrogate her in her hostless state, he was presumably not planning on using the gnielza, or the shrikiigi, or any of the other preferred torture devices of the Visserarchy. All of those required a host body's sophisticated nervous system for the victim to properly appreciate the amount of pain that they inflicted.
"Very well," she said. "Make sure, though, that, once my host is free, she doesn't talk you out of letting your chosen izcot (1) reinfest her. She can be quite insidiously persuasive when she wants to be."
"I thank you for the warning," said Lissim, in a voice that contained no hint of gratitude.
Suitably chastened, Malcar slid herself over and leaned Teresa's ear over the outstretched bottle. There was a brief schluppp sound, and the next moment the puddle of sulp niar at the bottom of the bottle was occupied by the gray, limacine form of Malcar Seven-Four-Five.
As Teresa came out of the post-infestation paralysis and looked up at the massive Hork-Bajir form towering over her (so like, yet so different from, the Hork-Bajir-Controller to whom she had quoted the Athanasian Creed three days before), her mind was a mass of conflicting emotions. On the one hand, any respite from the soul-wearying overlordship of Malcar Seven-Four-Five was to her a cause for rejoicing, and it pleased her to think that some disadvantaged Yeerk's life might be brightened through her agency – but she was also confused (she understood the accusation of host sympathy even less than Malcar and Elskir did), apprehensive (did she really want a second strange person crawling through her mind?), and, foremost and most simply, afraid. A member of a host species can never be truly comfortable with the prospect of walking around a Yeerk pool uninfested; still less, that of being chaperoned on such a walk by an unfamiliar Hork-Bajir-Controller roughly twice her size.
The Hork-Bajir-Controller in question clicked his tongue. "Gishimk-ith, n'kee," he said. "Aolua uie uyerioa the visual theater."
He was speaking the same linguistic bouillabaisse in which he had delivered the Sub-Visser's summons, but Teresa, unlike Malcar and Elskir, had never been a Hork-Bajir-Controller, and their creole was to her simply a mélange of meaningless words with an occasional English phrase thrown in. She gathered, however, that she was expected to accompany Lissim to the closed-off room at the far end of the pool, where the visual revel was being conducted. (She also gathered, from Lissim's tone, that "n'kee" was not a form of address that one used to one's social equals, but at that moment she was not in a position to take umbrage.)
She sent up a silent prayer for courage and clambered out of the vat of illutilagh, shivering as she did so at the coldness of the subterranean air against her wet skin. She wished that she could have gone back to the small room by the pool entrance where Malcar had left her clothes, so that she could have dried herself off and gotten dressed before going to be reinfested, but she knew better than to ask for that. Even a human-Controller would have been unlikely to grant such a request, and a Hork-Bajir-Controller, whose host had waterproof skin and no concept of clothing, would probably give her a low-powered Dracon beam in the leg for being so presumptuous as to make it.
It was, therefore, a wet, naked, shivering Teresa Sickles whom Lissim led by the shoulder to the visual theater. This, of course, only made her feel more vulnerable, although none of the human- or Hork-Bajir-Controllers they passed paid her the slightest heed. (Several Taxxons, however, did flick their tongues longingly in her direction, as though regretting that so tender and succulent a morsel should be set aside for other purposes. Teresa shuddered, and forced her thoughts in a more constructive direction.)
"Abba, Father, I put my life in Your hands," she whispered. (She had never much cared for David Haas's rendering of Psalm 30, but it seemed appropriate just then.) "In You, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. In Your justice rescue me, into Your hands I commend my..."
"Gish'koth!" Lissim barked suddenly.
Teresa blinked. "What?"
"Halt!"
Teresa looked up, and realized that they had reached the door of the visual theater. She must have closed her eyes without realizing it; if Lissim hadn't stopped her, she would have run right into the iron barrier, and probably broken her nose.
And, Heaven knows, the Sub-Visser wouldn't want that, she thought, with a slight reassertion of her native refractoriness. All the cattle must be kept in perfect health, so that the ranchers can properly exploit them. Even an izcot has to have his well-tended pound of flesh to crawl around in.
She was just working herself up into a nice froth of righteous indignation when Lissim reached out and slid the door open, and a sudden, dazzling burst of green light blasted every coherent thought out of her mind. Because of their homeworld's unique nocturnal climate, the Yeerks had never invented fireworks (not that they could have shot off fireworks in the pool in any case); they had had to make do with relatively feeble phosphorescent displays, and, as a result, the tendency of their visual artists throughout history had been to focus on increasing the intensity of a display, without necessarily bothering about its objective beauty. After a few hundred generations of this, they had reached a point where any visual revel that didn't come within an ace of burning out a host's retinas was considered hopelessly inadequate for Kalkat purposes.
Actually burning out a host's retinas, however, remained as inadvisable as ever, so Teresa's vision returned fairly quickly after the initial shock. She still couldn't see much in the darkened theater, of course, but she could make out the silhouettes of two Hork-Bajir-Controllers (one of whom, judging by his voice, was Lissim) crouching in a corner to her immediate left, whispering to each other in their interplanetary patois. What they were saying, she couldn't begin to guess, although the word "Sub-Visser" was repeated frequently, and at one point Lissim used a Galard phrase that she thought meant something like "You owe me big-time". This seemed to her an odd thing to say to someone you were just turning a host over to, but, before she could spend too much time pondering it, Lissim rose and strode out of the visual theater.
The other Hork-Bajir-Controller turned to her, and grinned. "So, Teresa Sickles," he whispered in English. "We meet again."
Teresa froze. Like most humans, she couldn't tell one Hork-Bajir from another merely by his profile, but she could distinguish their voices – and this particular voice had been burned into her memory over the course of the past week.
"Toloth?" she whispered.
(1) Izcot: Vaguely contemptuous Yeerkish word for a Yeerk too low-ranking to merit a host.