Teresa's bedroom did not, in fact, require much straightening in order to be a presentable sleeping area for her grandmother. This was largely due to Malcar's influence; left to her own devices, Teresa would have let all manner of clutter accumulate on her floor, but Yeerks, for all their weaknesses, are not a people that readily embrace disorder. (This, it may be mentioned in passing, was one of the Sharing's great strengths among parents of teenagers; the Sickleses were not the only couple to notice their child becoming quietly but noticeably tidier after achieving Inner membership.)
Consequently, after replacing a few books on their shelves and tossing various articles of clothing into the laundry basket, Toloth was free to change into a nightgown, leave the room, and settle himself in the Sickles family's den. This, as he had seen while helping Teresa's father set it up for the night, was a cozy and comforting room, filled with books (as many rooms and minds in the Sickles household seemed to be) and miscellaneous curios, with a time-worn teal sofa against the north wall that concealed a folding bed beneath its cushions. All the same, he was reluctant to take up residence there; once he did, he knew, he would be spending the rest of the night alone with his thoughts and The Imitation of Christ.
To delay this outcome, he lingered as long as possible over Teresa's undressing. This, however, came with its own form of peril – as a more experienced human-Controller might have known, but Toloth, having only infested a Gedd and a Hork-Bajir, was still an innocent where clothing was concerned. He had noticed, of course, that humans invariably decorated their bodies with elaborate coverings of woven fibers, but this had left no particular impression on his mind except that human ideas of decoration left a great deal to be desired. Nor had Teresa's thoughts on the custom heightened his respect for it; when she thought of clothing at all, it was as an expression of modesty and femininity, both of which concerns Toloth found insipid. Why should humans, who already had a wide and unmistakable array of sexual indicators, feel the need to emphasize their differentiation with clothing? And as for discouraging the mating impulse, it seemed to Toloth that, if a male human were in the mood to mate, a few millimeters of fabric would make little difference to a female's eligibility.
What he hadn't expected to discover, as he slowly and painstakingly removed Teresa's socks, skirt, cardigan, and camisole, was that the human custom of vesture, whatever one thought of its formal purposes, gave a definite and remarkable mystique to the human body itself. With each garment that fell away, Toloth had the queer sensation that he was digging to the heart of a secret, as though the body beneath all this fabric was of so delicate a dignity that it couldn't be lightly exposed to the harsh, indifferent light of day. It reminded him of something Prince Seerow was said to have told his wife: «The Emperor doesn't conceal himself because he fears attack. He conceals himself because that's the only way that a mere individual can maintain the reverence due an Emperor.»
It was absurd, of course. On Esiln Kalkat, he had seen this very body with no coverings at all, and nothing about it had suggested a member of nature's royalty. If it felt different from inside, that was merely an indication of how dramatically cultural conditioning could shape a creature's emotions. For that was all it was – a mere host emotion, of no more importance than the Hork-Bajir battle-urge. It had caught him off guard, that was all. It was nothing worth getting excited about.
And yet… he couldn't help thinking of the Baibul passage he had read, that night in the Bug fighter. Something about the first humans, after they had transgressed, knowing themselves to be "revealed", and making coverings for themselves out of leaves. He had vaguely thought of camouflage at the time (not bothering, in his haste to get to the parts about Jesus, to read the long, rambling, typically Skrit-Na footnote to the verse), but now he realized what it had really meant. Clearly, the human who had told that story had also felt this obscure, reverential shame in human nakedness, and had traced it back to the moment when, in his cosmology, the human body had ceased to be the deathless thing it had been made to be. Only a myth, doubtless – but, still, it was rather unnerving how one kept finding sound observations mixed with even the most fantastic notions of the Jesus-worshippers.
And there was another thing to consider. Why was it only the humans that had this custom? Why did the Skrit Na, for instance, not wear clothes? If it came to practical considerations, their bodies were just as poorly equipped for cold weather or harsh treatment, yet they had never developed a rule of continual covering. Why should the human body be singled out for such reverence?
Without thinking, Toloth went over to Teresa's closet, and gazed at his host body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. Yes, it was just as he remembered it from Esiln Kalkat: small, rounded, pink, plain, strictly utilitarian. The Arn, with their biological dilettantism, would have found it prosaic in the extreme – yet this was the form that six billion sellthee rigorously hid from each other, lest it grow too mundane a sight.
Perhaps the secret lay in the generative organs. Those seemed to be particularly carefully concealed – and Toloth remembered what Teresa had said, three days before, about the human fixation on sexual intercourse. He lowered the small, pale-pink garment that still lay about Teresa's loins, and examined critically the thing it had covered.
As he did so, he felt Teresa's mind flinch beneath his own, but this he ignored. Teresa was irrelevant now; what mattered was unearthing the secret of this human peculiarity. Teresa herself, it was plain, didn't know what the secret was; perhaps no human now alive did. But the essence of the thing still had to be discoverable, if one only probed deeply enough into the body that was its focal point.
He continued to gaze at the organ he had uncovered. Like the rest of Teresa's body, it was, in appearance, nothing special: a mere opening for the young to pass through, just like that of his old Gedd body except for the lack of a protective sphincter. But that was to be expected; Teresa was, after all, a female, and it was the essence of the female role to take into oneself what the male provided. Externals counted for little or nothing in such a case: what mattered, inevitably, lay within.
He extended two fingers on Teresa's right hand, and drew the hand towards her thigh…
«Don't!»
Teresa's desperate, reflexive cry thrust itself like a dagger into the midst of Toloth's reverie, and a sudden flood of her memories burst unbidden upon his consciousness. They were memories of Malcar Seven-Four-Five, on occasions when she deemed her host's spirit to be insufficiently abject, forcing Teresa's body to perform actions that, by Teresa's belief, were not merely evil, but so vile and degrading as to be practically unmentionable.
It was as though a spell had been broken. Toloth jerked Teresa's hand away like one who touches acid, and looked around the room in a sort of daze. What had he been thinking of all this time? What did it matter to him why humans wore clothes? And how in the galaxy had he expected to find the answer through an untoward inspection of Teresa's reproductive organs?
With a sudden wave of nausea, he realized what he had been about to do. There was a certain class of Yeerk unmentionables – flakthee was the most polite name – who took macabre delight in misdirecting the functions of their host bodies. They would cause the wrinkles of their Gedd skin to grow in grotesque knots and loops, and cut off their Taxxon legs for the mere pleasure of wiggling the tender stumps that grew in their place. (Distortion of Hork-Bajir bodies was less common, mostly because such Yeerks rarely got promoted to Hork-Bajir level.) Toloth had always held them in utter contempt, considering them little better than witless animals; now he realized that, had it not been for Teresa's intervention, he would at that moment have been taking the first step toward becoming one of them.
He shuddered, pulled up Teresa's underwear, and reached hastily into the closet for her nightgown. As he threw it over her body, he told himself firmly that it was all right, that this incident couldn't be considered characteristic of him; it was merely an abnormal reaction to his undeniably abnormal circumstances, and therefore perfectly normal.
A small part of him, though, suggested that this begged the question. Was it not possible – though he had never considered it before – that the flakthee themselves had begun in much the same way: that they had not emerged from their parents' corpses already corrupted, but had merely developed abnormal habits in response to their own abnormal experiences? Was there, perhaps, a dark schoolmaster in the mind of every sellith, who was merely waiting for the right opportunity to teach even the proudest Yeerk the vilest of practices?
With an effort, he thrust the thought from his mind. Flakthee were one thing, and he was another; he would not indulge in wild fantasies about a court of absolute law before which he and they were one. To be sure, the incident proved something, but it wasn't that all sentient beings were equally subject to corruption; it was merely that he needed to get a grip on himself before the strain of living as Teresa drove him to a nervous breakdown.
The problem, he reflected, was that he had allowed his premonition at the door too much significance. He had spent the past few hours, against all common sense, attempting to avoid contact with his host's mind as much as possible – carefully filtering her thoughts, leaving large sections of her memories unprobed, even reacting with horror to the notion that she desired his good – all out of a mere superstitious fear that, if he let Teresa's mind influence his, he would be somehow "transformed". But it was beginning to look as though that very tactic of evasion, by leaving him vulnerable to surprise emotional cross-currents such as the one he had just experienced, was what was likely to transform him – and quite deleteriously, at that. It was high time, he decided, that he started treating Teresa Sickles as a host like any other; as soon as he was settled into the den for the night, he would make a thorough and detailed inspection of her entire mind, as he would already have done for any other creature of which he was the temporary master.
And having thus resolved, he felt his confidence and self-respect begin to revive for the first time in more days than he cared to contemplate. With a deep, satisfied breath, he tossed back Teresa's head, squared her shoulders, and headed with a brisk, Yeerkly stride toward the nocturnal resting-place that her father had prepared for him.