As Toloth and Teresa slipped out of the visual theater amid the crowd of departing revelers, Toloth caught sight of Lissim Seven-One-Three standing beside one of the empty cages, munching on a chunk of pine bark thickly coated with resin and spices. With remarkable deftness for a being so large and blade-covered, he extricated himself and Teresa from the crowd and went over to his comrade-in-arms.
Lissim glanced up as the two of them approached. "Is it time, Toloth?" he said.
"It is," said Toloth. "You have the human's Controller?"
For answer, Lissim reached a hand into the cage and pulled out the flask containing Malcar Seven-Four-Five. "I didn't think it was a good idea to be carrying it around," he said. "Someone might start asking awkward questions."
Toloth nodded his approval. "Return her," he said.
Lissim took Teresa's head in his hands (his touch was gentler than Toloth's had been, and subtly more impersonal) and pressed the mouth of the flask to her ear. Malcar squirmed forward, squeezing herself through the flask's narrow neck, and for the second time in less than fifteen minutes Teresa felt the touch of a Yeerk's palps against her ear. From the standpoint of physical comfort, it was a drastic improvement on her last infestation, but Oliss Three-Eight-Three had made almost as deep an impression on Teresa as Teresa had made on Oliss: she remembered the touch of that diffident, innocent, almost humble mind, and she realized that she couldn't bear returning to Malcar Seven-Four-Five's control after that.
"No," she cried. "No, wait... Toloth, please..."
Then the infestation paralysis set in, and she said no more.
Malcar Seven-Four-Five was fit to be tied. For nearly an hour, as Esiln Kalkat had raged about her, she had sat in Lissim's flask, waiting to be interrogated. At first she had been terrified, but, as time went by and nothing happened except the occasional shifting of the flask (and even that had ceased after fifteen minutes or so), her fear had given way to annoyance. What was the Sub-Visser waiting for? If he wanted to find out where she had been on the morning of the 14th, why didn't he plug her into the shirak-board and get it over with? And if not, why didn't he put her back in Teresa and let her get on with her one day of sensory abandon?
Then, just as her ire had reached boiling point, she felt the flask rise into the air and tilt forward, and her olfactory palps picked up the unmistakable scent of her host. Without a second's hesitation, she slithered toward Teresa's ear, anxious to have a mouth again so she could start chewing somebody out.
When she plugged herself into Teresa's brain, however, she was caught off guard by the sudden influx of grief that hit her. She was accustomed to a fairly broad range of emotions from Teresa during reinfestation – tension, surliness, obnoxiously serene acceptance – but she wasn't used to having her blubber like the Madonna of Syracuse. If Malcar hadn't known better, she would have thought her host had just lost her best friend.
«Oh, for pity's sake, Tessie, stop bawling,» she snapped, using Teresa's hated childhood nickname in hopes that this would irritate her into silence. «I don't know what they've been doing to you, but it can't be that bad.»
But this only seemed to make matters worse. Her host seemed to be caught in a vicious cycle: the very act of trying to pull herself together made her think of what Malcar would do if she didn't, which seemed to be the trigger for another attack of uncontrollable mental sobs. Malcar, bewildered, decided that the safest thing to do was just tune her out and focus on the routine tasks of regaining muscular control and checking recent memories.
It was this latter, of course, that proved to be the shocker. Malcar, despite her very real fears that the rise of Christianity would mean the downfall of the Yeerk Empire, had managed, over the course of the past couple weeks, to convince herself that Toloth Two-Nine-Four's regular interrogations of her host on the subject were of no particular importance. In part, this was simply because she didn't want to seek an audience with the Sub-Visser unless she absolutely had to (which, given the nature of the Visserarchy at this time, was only sensible), but there was also a stubborn streak of Yeerk parochialism in her, which made it all but impossible for her to believe that so anthropocentric a religion as Christianity could ever make serious inroads among the various races of the Imperial dominion. Now, however, as she scanned Teresa's perceptions of the past hour, she concluded with horror that she had been far too sanguine.
She saw Toloth's admission of subservience to his host's desires, and that appalled her. She saw Oliss's fascinated wonder at Teresa's sense of charity, and that unnerved her. But what truly terrified her was the simplest image of all: Gef Makkil crouching on the floor of the visual theater like a dragon dormant, and Teresa holding her hair over him and squeezing out its moisture onto his head. She knew what that meant; she knew what it could do if left unchecked.
She raised her head and stared into her abductor's Hork-Bajir eyes. "What have you done, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?" she whispered.
Toloth, secure in his certainty that the eighth-century peon before him could do him no harm, permitted himself a smirk. "You have, I think, full access to your host's recent memories, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said. "In which case, you know quite well what I have done."
"Yes," said Malcar in a strange tone. "But do you know what you have done, Toloth Two-Nine-Four?"
Toloth frowned, but did not reply.
"I will tell you what you have done," Malcar continued. "You have permitted my host to make that Hork-Bajir you wear an initiate in the mysteries of her religion. Which is to say, you have unleashed an ideological pestilence that may well corrupt the very heart of the Empire before it runs its course."
At this, Toloth laughed aloud. "My dear base-born pool-mate," he said, "I think you have been infesting Teresa Sickles longer than is good for you. I know that some Andalite thinkers like to discuss the prevalence of certain ideas on the model of the spread of pathogens, but I had thought that the Yeerk intellect was beyond such tedious fallacies."
"Oh?" said Malcar. "You think the comparison fallacious, do you?"
"Self-evidently so," said Toloth. "Disease germs proliferate through cellular reproduction, and they infect an organism by feeding on it in some fashion. In other words, their potency is due to the fact that they are living things. Now, an idea may be a powerful thing, but it is not living."
Malcar stared darkly at him for a long moment; then she said, softly, "This one is."
Toloth glanced at Lissim, and the two soldiers burst into loud guffaws, startling a passing Gedd-Controller. Despite their confidence in their influence with the Sub-Visser, both of them had had a lingering suspicion that Malcar Seven-Four-Five might prove a more formidable adversary than they had counted upon. To find that she was clearly mad was not only a marvelous joke, but a great relief as well.
"Laugh if you will, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," said Malcar, raising her voice, "but I have Controlled this host for three years, and I have seen and heard things that would make Visser Three himself fear this thing the humans call Christianity. It is a subtle, sinister poison; it paints itself as mild, innocent, even friendly to one's own aims, until a person welcomes it into his mind – and then it changes him so dramatically that his own spawn-mates would not know him.
"It has toppled empires before now. When the current Visser One first arrived on this planet, there was a state called the Soviet Union that controlled more territory than any other on Earth. For nearly three-quarters of a century it had been one of the most feared and respected players in the human game of nations, swallowing dozens of other states and turning dozens more into tools to do its will – and yet, when Edriss Five-Six-Two arrived, it was in its death throes. And would you like to know why, Toloth Two-Nine-Four? Would you like to know what the spirit was that made the subject peoples of the Soviet Union itch to topple their masters, and that all the forces of that globe-bestriding power could not ultimately keep at bay? I will tell you. It was the same spirit that you have let Teresa instill in your host.
"Nor was this an isolated incident. The whole history of the Christian Church is studded with similar events: with friends of kings who, upon being entrusted with authority in the Church, have turned into their enemies; with emperors who have repented of their statecraft when threatened with endless perdition; with girls little older than Teresa who have turned the tides of wars, believing themselves to be acting on messages from angels. Mere theories, however elegant or compelling they may be, do not inspire this kind of behavior.
"Yes, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, Christianity is a living thing."
Toloth waved a hand and nodded indulgently. "Yes, yes, of course, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said. "But, all the same, I think it unlikely that Gef Makkil will be able to duplicate those extraordinary feats you describe." And he turned and walked away without waiting for a reply, and Lissim, after a moment's hesitation, followed behind him.
Malcar stared after their retreating tails. "I hope not, Toloth Two-Nine-Four," she whispered. "For the sake of the Empire, I hope not."