Toloth, at this point, glanced up at the blazing phosphor-screen and frowned. "Beams of Kandrona, have we been here that long?" he muttered. (Teresa had no idea how he could tell time from the visual revel – unless maybe this was some famous composition that he had seen a hundred times, and knew the exact intervals between any two bits of it.) "I will be missed fairly soon if I don't get moving."
"So you're going to return me to Malcar now?" said Teresa, trying to keep her voice free of any note of disappointment. After all, she had known it was going to happen eventually, and if Gef could have a good attitude about being re-Controlled, surely she ought to be able to do the same.
"It would seem so," said Toloth. "Unless there is something else you feel it important to tell me about your religion."
Teresa shook her head. "No, that's probably enough for one day," she said. "I suppose you can..." Then a thought struck her. "Oh, wait a minute!"
"Yes?" said Toloth.
"What about the other Yeerk?"
Toloth blinked. "What other Yeerk?"
"The one in the pool," said Teresa. "The one who didn't have a host body, and was going to infest me so he didn't miss Esiln Kalkat."
Toloth stared at her. "Teresa Sickles," he said, "do you not understand the concept of a ruse? Nothing Lissim told your Controller was true. You were not brought here to play host to an izcot; you were brought here to appease Gef, so that he didn't get himself killed trying to meet with you."
"Yes, I know that," said Teresa impatiently. "But that doesn't mean the other is a bad idea, does it? I mean, he was right about there being a whole bunch of Yeerks still in the pool who are missing this big, important, once-in-a-lifetime holiday; if I'm not being used by anybody at the moment, don't I sort of have an obligation to help one of them out?"
Slowly, Toloth wrapped his mind around this idea. "Do you mean to say," he said, "that you are volunteering to let yourself be infested, solely to gratify someone about whom you know nothing save that it is a member of the race attempting to subjugate your planet?"
"Basically, yeah," said Teresa.
Christian charity can be an unsettling thing to one unused to it. For a moment, Toloth couldn't quite bring himself to believe that Teresa actually meant what she was saying – just as, perhaps, the Lagerführer of Auschwitz felt when confronted with Maximilian Kolbe.
Next moment, however, he rallied. Why, he asked himself reasonably, should he continue to let anything that Teresa Sickles did surprise him? The trick to handling this creature was to recognize that she might do absolutely anything, and roll with the punches wherever possible – and he certainly couldn't think of any reason why he ought not to let her be randomly infested, if she wished it. True, her Controller probably wouldn't approve (most Controllers didn't like the notion of other Yeerks infesting their hosts, since there were so many things one's host knew that one didn't want becoming public knowledge), but, as he had said to Teresa earlier, he cared not a straw for anything Malcar Seven-Four-Five might do to him.
"Very well," he said. "But you must be quick about it: five minutes, no more."
He rose and strode from the visual theater, and returned in a minute or two with a bowl from the pool kitchens, in which a smallish Yeerk was swimming about frantically in a small puddle of sulp niar.
"Stupid thing," he muttered. "Can't it tell when a person is trying to do it a favor?" Brusquely, he grabbed his co-racialist with one hand, held Teresa's head still with the other, and smashed the hostless Yeerk against her left ear.
The sensation of being infested by a Yeerk is never a pleasant one, even when it is done, as it ought to be, with the head immersed in sulp niar so that the infesting Yeerk can swim in freely. When the Yeerk is being squashed against the side of your head by a member of the Imperial military, and is wriggling its palps across your temple in a frantic effort to find your auditory canal before it dies of desiccation, the process is that much less comfortable. Teresa felt her stomach beginning to lurch, and she clapped her right hand over her mouth before she could embarrass herself all over Toloth's feet.
It seemed an interminable length of time (though it was really only about twenty seconds) before the Yeerk managed to locate her ear, and she felt the familiar stiffness of the infestation paralysis as it slithered into her brain. She waited until it had plugged itself into her cerebral cortex, and then thought, «Hello.»
She could feel the Yeerk start: evidently it hadn't expected to be addressed in this way. «Um... hello,» it said. «Are you my new host?»
«Well, not really,» said Teresa. «I'm already taken, unfortunately. But my Controller's busy right now, so we decided to let you have a spin. It's all there in my memories, if you want to check.»
«Oh,» the Yeerk murmured, dazed. «Okay, then.»
«I'm Teresa, by the way,» Teresa added – superfluously, of course, since this was also in her memories, but it seemed the polite thing to do.
«Oliss,» said the Yeerk. «Oliss Three-Eight-Three.»
«Mucho gusto,» said Teresa amiably, using one of two phrases she remembered from her fifth-grade Spanish class.
Oliss didn't bother to respond with the other. It (since Yeerks derive their gender identities from their hosts, a hostless Yeerk cannot properly be called "he" or "she") had accessed Teresa's memories, and was now staring dumbstruck at the series of events that had led to its being permitted to join in the Esiln Kalkat revels. It saw Teresa's first, impulsive word to Gef those two weeks before; it saw the three discussions with Toloth that had resulted therefrom; it saw Toloth and Lissim's elaborate scheme to arrange a fourth discussion; and, most astonishing of all, it saw Teresa's request to be given to it so that it might know, however briefly, the glories of Esiln Kalkat.
It also – not incidentally – saw all of Teresa's earlier life history: how she had been lured into the Yeerk pool by a Sharing official who had addressed her church's youth group, how she had passed through two Controllers' hands (so to speak) before being given officially to Malcar Seven-Four-Five, and all the petty cruelties that had made up her life ever since. It was not merely Teresa's uncomplaining submissiveness that impressed Oliss (though of course Oliss, like any Yeerk, could well admire stoic fortitude when it saw it); what amazed it was the notion that this human, who had been so badly hurt by the Yeerk race, still found it possible – indeed, necessary – to be kind to Yeerks when she could.
It was still trying to assimilate this thought when it felt Toloth nudge Teresa's – its – arm. "Well, shapluk (2)," he said, "do you intend to spend your few minutes of Kalkat staring at a darkened floor?"
Oliss roused itself. Yes, that was right, it had a revel to partake of. It could worry about Teresa Sickles's uncanny selflessness when it was back in the pool.
Slowly, hesitantly, it raised Teresa's head and turned her eyes toward the phosphor-screen – and then its breath caught in Teresa's throat.
Nor was this surprising. Teresa's surmise earlier had been correct: the visual revel at the Sulp Niar pool that day was indeed a classic of Yeerk phosphoric art. It was, in fact, Kakkana One-Five-Three's Vanarx Tulest ("Flouter of Yeerkbanes"), composed in the early-cycle of Generation 79 to commemorate the demise of the great vanarx hunter Jagag Three-Prime. Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three had selected this magnificent panegyric partly so that its air of proud defiance, as well as its celebration of Yeerk valor and cunning, might serve as a warning to any Andalite bandits who might be prowling around, but also because, being so ancient a piece, it belonged to an era when beauty still mattered on the phosphor-screen. (For Sub-Visser One Hundred and Sixty-Three, as the reader may have surmised from his concern for the illutilagh three days before, fancied himself something of an Arbiter of Elegance as well as a great statesman – though, in point of fact, he was not tremendously gifted in either role.) Its finale, in particular – that stunning cascade of violet, green, and crimson – is one of the finest moments in Yeerk art, prompting one human critic to observe that "you walk away from Vanarx Tulest blinded with tears, whereas you walk away from most other Yeerk phosphor-shows simply blind".
It was this finale that Oliss now beheld – though, of course, it was not the same finale of Vanarx Tulest that an expert in phosphoric art would have seen. Oliss knew nothing of the deeper significance, the somber sense of loss intertwined with a consciousness of ultimate victory, that so delighted the sympathetic aesthete. All it saw was a phantasmagoria of stunningly vivid colors fluctuating across a screen in highly complex geometric patterns – but, to a being who had never seen anything at all before except the inside of the Yeerk pool's host-training room (and that for only a few minutes, and with Gedd eyes), that was enough. Oliss had never suspected that the universe contained such beauty, and for nearly five minutes it sat motionless, gazing on the phosphor-screen with insatiable awe.
It might have stared (if the program had lasted so long) for five hours more, if it hadn't received a sharp poke in Teresa's ribs. "All right, shapluk, that's enough," said Toloth. "The revel will be over in a few minutes, and we don't want anyone asking awkward questions." And he held the bowl underneath Teresa's ear.
Oliss flirted with the notion of ignoring him, but then realized that it didn't know whether it would be implicated should Toloth's impropriety come to light. All things considered, perhaps it was better off following his instructions.
With a sigh, it released Teresa's neurons and slipped out of her mind – but, before it did so, it sent one last message to her. It was aware that saying anything of the sort to a host made it a bad Yeerk, but it would have felt worse if it had let it go unsaid.
«Thank you.»
«You're welcome.»
(2) A Yeerkish form of address to a social inferior, roughly equivalent to the English "sirrah".