Catherine Sickles glanced up from the counter she was wiping at the sound of her daughter's tread on the kitchen linoleum. "Oh, there you are, Teresa," she said, with an arch of her eyebrow. "We were beginning to wonder if we would have to call out the gendarmes."
Toloth didn't answer immediately, though he knew he ought to. The lapse was excusable; he had never been trained for racial infiltration, and consequently had never learned the knack of instantly locating and reproducing the appropriate response-pattern for any situation. And, to do him justice, he was hardly the first being to be unmanned by his first encounter with human cooking.
It was the smell that got him. He knew, of course, what gnocchi Romana smelled like while it was baking: he had at his disposal all of Teresa's quite vivid memories on the subject, which was how he had recognized it through the door. But memory is a poor substitute for direct experience, and smelling something through a closed door is nothing like being in the same room with it. The air around him was filled with an aroma at once rich, sharp, and beguiling, like nothing else he had ever known; he found himself wishing that he still had Gef's nose, so that he could do it justice.
Then he changed his mind. A Hork-Bajir body would have been inadequate to this experience. Hork-Bajir were herbivores, and highly specialized herbivores at that; the smell of warm animal fat would have no magic for them. Until now, Toloth, having never really encountered carnivorous races other than the Taxxons, had thought of the predatory instinct as a crude, coarsening thing; he had never imagined that the meat-eaters of the universe had such sublime pleasures reserved for them.
Mrs. Sickles's laughter broke into his thoughts. "Well, I can see I'll have satisfied one person tonight, anyway," she said. "It's so nice to have a daughter who appreciates your work."
The comment roused Toloth from his reverie, and he realized that he needed to get into character quickly before Mrs. Sickles started wondering what was wrong with her daughter. Hastily, he dipped into Teresa's superego and extracted the first appropriate response he could find. "Well, I'm glad I could brighten your day, Mom. I just wish it didn't show up on me the way it does."
Mrs. Sickles's eyes narrowed. "Now, Teresa," she said sternly, "there are more important things in this world than looking like an underwear model."
"Oh, sure, I know that," said Toloth, striving to put just the right amount of indifference to the fact into Teresa's voice. "But it's still not much fun, being stuck in a body like this." (The irony of the words didn't strike him until much later.) "I mean, what do people see when they look at me? What do they…"
"They see a beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous young woman," said Mrs. Sickles. "Not perfect, maybe, but with a truer heart and a more sincere love of Our Lord than 99% of the other people they're likely to meet. And that's what's important, not your waist measurement."
Her intensity left Toloth momentarily stunned. He recognized that he was seeing another instance of what the Jesus-worshippers called love, but this was quite a different thing from Teresa's gentle solicitude. It was a fiercer, more aggressive form of the impulse; anything that could harm her daughter had to be opposed, even if it was only her daughter's own self-denigration. (Toloth wondered what she would have done to Malcar, had she known of her existence. Probably it was best not to speculate.)
For lack of a better response, he smiled sheepishly and flushed some extra blood into Teresa's cheeks. "Well, thanks, Mom," he murmured. "I love you, too."
Mrs. Sickles's expression relaxed, and she leaned over and planted a kiss on her daughter's forehead. "So what have you been up to today?" she said.
Toloth had to check that; what was Teresa supposed to have been doing all afternoon? Ah, there it was.
"Oh, you know," he said, waving a vague hand. "Setting up the rink for the fête tomorrow."
"Oh, yes, your Sharing thing," said Mrs. Sickles. "I wanted to talk to you about that, actually…"
But before she could get any further, a timer on the counter began to beep, and she interrupted herself to turn it off, sweep over to the stove and remove the lid from a pan that Toloth hadn't hitherto noticed.
Instantly, the room began to fill with another scent entirely – a scent that set the seal on Toloth's newfound conviction that carnivores were favored beings. There had been a note of it in the air before, but the strong tang of the gnocchi Romana had overpowered it; now, with the lid no longer in the way, the rich savor of frying meat came into its own. The juices that had once been life to some brute animal now filled the air as steam; as Toloth breathed them in, they sang to his borrowed body of strength and vigor, and invited him to make that strength his own. And in its train came other aromas, of garlic and thyme and salt and fish and (faintly) wine, each with its own wealth of associations to set the human mouth a-water.
He checked Teresa's memories, which supplied the odor with a name – and some other details that seemed to call for some comment, which Toloth accordingly made. "Mom!" he said. "Pan-fried lamb and Roman gnocchi? Today, with Advent still going on? What's gotten into you?"
Mrs. Sickles affected a wounded expression. "Don't you like it?" she said. "I thought you'd be excited."
"Of course I'm excited," said Toloth. "I'm thrilled, but… why? The Pope didn't move Christmas to today when I wasn't looking, did he?"
"Not that I heard," said Mrs. Sickles.
"Well, then, what's the occasion?"
Mrs. Sickles smiled. "Ah, yes, the occasion," she said. "The occasion is waiting for you in the living room. Why don't you go and greet her?"
This coy response baffled Toloth, who had little feel as yet for the whimsicality of human converse. «"Her"?» he repeated, annoyed. «What does she mean, "her"? An occasion has no sex; it is an event, not a life-form.»
Teresa made a mental shrug. «That's my mom for you,» she said. «She loves to keep people guessing.»
«Ah,» said Toloth. «Well, that was to be expected. Such an incorrigibly enigmatic creature as you had to learn it from somewhere.»
Teresa laughed. «Coming from you, Toloth, I'll take that as a compliment,» she said.
She tried to be glib about it, but the silent thoughts that accompanied the remark told a different story. It was painfully clear to Toloth that she was in a state of relief bordering on elation, simply because she had been infested for nearly an hour and had yet to hear her Controller belittle either her person or her faith. For the host of Malcar Seven-Four-Five, such an experience was all but unprecedented.
It surprised Toloth how deeply this affected him. He had always, of course, detested Yeerks who tormented their hosts unnecessarily, believing (though he had never succeeded in putting it into practice) that hosts should be taught their place by firm and quiet mastery rather than petty maliciousness. It would, therefore, have been quite natural for him to feel outraged at Malcar's abuse of Teresa, just as a human horseman might be outraged at the mistreatment of a fine mare. What he actually felt, however, was something quite different. He found it distasteful that Teresa's feelings should be lightly hurt, not because she would thereby become less valuable (though that was likely true) or because it showed her Controller to be a person of vulgar feeling (though that was certainly true); rather, it seemed to him that his own dignity was thereby impugned.
As he then was, he could make no sense of this feeling. He still considered himself to be a believer in the policies of the Yeerk Empire, and of the philosophy of Yeerk superiority that underlay them. It was true that he had been somewhat shaken during his first encounter with Teresa, and that he had briefly doubted that the Yeerk mind was more subtle than the human, but he told himself that he had overcome that moment of weakness. He failed to recognize that he had, in fact, merely chosen to disregard it, and that this had caused the doubt to become all the greater, to the point where it was now dictating nearly all his actions. When one's basic assumptions are questioned, one must either defend them or abandon them; any other course ends in complete unreason.
Had Toloth admitted to himself that he was far from sure of human inferiority to Yeerks, he would have understood his emotions perfectly. For nearly a month, he had been coming to Teresa to acquire knowledge, and it is a universal law that the person who possesses knowledge is worthy of greater honor than the person who seeks it. It was therefore quite reasonable for Toloth (regarding Teresa as, in fact, a person, rather than as the mere tool he wished to think her) to feel that anyone who showed contempt for Teresa implicitly showed even greater contempt for him.
But he would see none of this, and dismissed the feeling as mere irrationality. It was vital that he keep his head; if he let the strangeness of his surroundings overwhelm his reason, he was done for. He remembered that strange, premonitory feeling he had had at the door; he had no intention of being transformed, in mind or in body, and he would see to it that he wasn't.
Remember why you have come, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, he told himself. You are here to determine the essence of Jesus's allure to host life-forms and izcots, not to be beguiled into going human yourself. Study them if you will, but never forget the difference between them and you. They are ruled; you are ruler. They are low; you are high. They are…
His thoughts were interrupted by a sudden squeal of glee from Teresa. All this while, without really reflecting on it, he had been heading towards the living room, in obedience to Mrs. Sickles's suggestion. Now, turning a corner, he found that he had arrived there – and a small, elderly woman was rising from the sofa, her wrinkled face split with a wide smile. "Well, now," she said, "how's my favorite granddaughter doing?"
Toloth had no need to search for the appropriate, Teresa-like response; it was written in every line of his host's cerebellum. "Nana!" he exclaimed, and rushed headlong into the living room to embrace the old lady.
"Now, now, duckling, easy does it," said Agnes Chiodini, working an arm free so she could tousle her granddaughter's hair. "Remember, I'm held together with wires these days. The joys of old age…"
"Sorry," said Toloth. "It's just… well, you know, I haven't seen you in ages, and now you're here all of a sudden, and… well, it's just nice to see you." For full effect, he sent an impulse to Teresa's lachrymal glands, causing her eyes to sparkle with a hint of unshed tears.
It seemed to do the trick. Mrs. Chiodini made that little popping noise with her tongue that Teresa was so familiar with, the import of which was I'm terribly pleased by your affection, but I'll be drummed out of the Crusty Old Ladies' Society if I say so directly.
"Well, it's nice to see you, too, Teresa Catherine," she said. "Still living up to that name, I trust?"
This time Toloth did have to search for the proper response. The reference was a complicated one; it involved the coincidence of Teresa's two given names with the names of the only two female humans (until about three months previous) to be officially honored as great explicators of Jesus's teachings. Apparently, this fact had not been in her parents' minds when they had given her these names, but it had gained a particular appositeness when, in the course of preparing for a certain initiation ceremony, she had developed such an intense interest in the why and how of her religion. Ever since, her family members had alternately teased and commended her for thus following in her namesakes' footsteps.
Knowing this, Toloth had no hesitation – indeed, he took a certain ironic satisfaction – in nodding Teresa's head and saying, "Oh, definitely."
"Good," said Mrs. Chiodini. "You keep it up. That's what the Church needs more of: smart, pious young women who don't spend all their time fussing because they can't be priests. Do you know what I heard Sister Anastasia say the other day? She said that even if the Pope did say ex cathedra that priests have to be men, she wouldn't listen, because God gave her the right to think for herself." She snorted. "I'd just like to know what she plans to think about, if she doesn't believe that anyone can tell her any facts."
Toloth ignored this. "What are you doing here, anyway?" he said. "Isn't Uncle John still taking good care of you, out in Sioux Falls?"
"Certainly he is," said Mrs. Chiodini. "Your Uncle John is a gift from Heaven. I've always said so, and I always will. But the other day I woke up and said to myself, 'You know, Agnes, you have five other children scattered all across the country, and one of them has that charming daughter who's going to redeem her generation someday. Why don't you get on a plane and give her a nice little Christmas surprise?' So I wheedled some funds out of your Aunt Lucy, telephoned your mother to make sure she didn't have any conflicts, and… well, here I am."
"So you'll be spending Christmas with us?" said Toloth. He tried to sound as eager and excited as Teresa would have been (and, in fact, was), but the truth was that all he felt was annoyance. The next three days were all the opportunity he had for getting at the hidden power of Christianity, and he was beginning to wonder whether even an hour of them would turn out as he had expected. Bad enough that he had apparently chosen to infest Teresa just before a major religious festival (though that might, perhaps, turn out to have its advantages); worse that she seemed committed to participating in a Sharing program the next day; and who could say what further complications this adored and clearly strong-minded kinswoman might introduce? Was all of Nature conspiring to derail his plans?
"That's right," said Mrs. Chiodini. "I finally get to see one of these 70-degree California winters of yours. Ought to make a refreshing change from having an ice rink on the sidewalk from Thanksgiving to Lent."
"And that was what I wanted to ask you about, Teresa," said Mrs. Sickles, appearing suddenly in the living-room doorway. "This fête of yours, or whatever you call it: you say anyone can just walk in, can't they? No cover charge?"
"That's right," said Toloth. "There's a suggested donation of $5 towards the Sharing's overseas projects, though."
"Well, I've been to enough church potlucks to know what that means," Mrs. Chiodini muttered. "I'll just have to call their bluff, I suppose. If anyone squawks about it, I'll tell them that my life savings is in a coffee can half a continent away, and after what happened seven years ago, I'm not about to bring it anywhere near Los Angeles."
"Oh, don't worry, Mama," said Mrs. Sickles. "We'll cover for you."
"You most certainly won't," said Mrs. Chiodini. "If they call it a suggestion, that's what it is. I'm not going to have my daughter and her husband $5 poorer on my account, not unless they actually come out and say that it's a fee."
«She's coming to the fête?» said Teresa, delighted. «Oh, Nana, I wish I had control of my body so I could kiss you.»
This seemed odd to Toloth. «If you care about her so deeply, why should you want her to attend a Sharing event?» he said. «Aren't you worried that we will lure her in?»
«Nana?» Teresa laughed. «Hardly. She's never joined anything smaller than the Church in her life; she won't even vote in primaries. If you capture her, it'll be because Visser Three's launched an open attack on South Dakota, not through the Sharing. See, that's why it's so special: she can't stand groups and activities like this, but she'll come to this one anyway, because it's important to me.»
«I see,» said Toloth. «And if she were willing to join the Sharing because that was important to you? Would that also be "special"?»
He saw sudden fear blaze up in Teresa's mind. «You don't mean you'd…»
«Just answer the question,» said Toloth coldly. He wasn't sure, himself, why he was asking; certainly it wasn't because he intended to make himself conspicuous by recruiting Agnes Chiodini for infestation. Perhaps he merely wished to convict Teresa of wishful thinking.
Teresa thought intensely for a moment or two. «Well,» she said slowly, «I'd be worried about her, of course, and I'd have to pray for her – actually, I should probably do that anyway – but I don't suppose that would change what it meant for her to do it. So yeah, I guess it would be special.»
It was as measured and realistic a response as any sentient being could have given. Toloth was vaguely annoyed.
There is nothing to be annoyed about, he reminded himself. Her capacity for judiciousness is not a threat to you. She is lesser; you are greater. She is subject; you are master.
And it was consoling, in its way. He had a feeling, though, that it would come to sound somewhat monotonous during the days ahead.