"All set, honey?" said Mrs. Sickles. "Do you want the light left on so you can read for a little bit?"
Toloth shook Teresa's head. "No, thanks, Mom," he said. "Like I said, I'm pretty tired – and there's the fête tomorrow, too."
Mrs. Sickles nodded. "All right, then," she said. "Sleep tight, angel."
"You too, Mom."
Mrs. Sickles switched off the lamp and slipped out of the room, plunging it into darkness as she shut the door behind her. Toloth rolled over, buried Teresa's face in the pillow, and listened for a moment to the sounds of a human house at night – the sloshing of water in the pipes, the occasional car driving past outside, the voice of Teresa's father as he continued his phone conversation with his sister – Chris's barking, Mrs. Chiodini's shuffling footsteps, and the gentle pulsing of his own host's heart.
A renewed sense of the strangeness of his situation came over him. Here he was, a soldier of the Yeerk Imperial Army, the apple of the Sub-Visser's eye who administered Earth's Sulp Niar pool, committing half a dozen capital crimes at once so he could peek into the mind of an utterly unimportant human girl. Objectively considered, he was probably in greater danger than any Yeerk of his spawn had ever been – and yet, somehow, he felt safer and more at peace than he ever had in his life.
Partly, he reflected, this was no doubt because of the emotional influence of Teresa's mind. She was exactly where she belonged, and knew it, and that sense of belonging was so strong that anyone who touched her mind couldn't help but be affected by it. But there was more to it than that. He wasn't merely feeling Teresa's sense of belonging; he was feeling as though he belonged, and, for the life of him, he didn't know why.
Or, rather, he did. He belonged in Teresa's house because Teresa welcomed him there – cautiously but definitely welcomed him, as she had never welcomed Malcar. And she welcomed him – him, a Yeerk, the sworn enemy of her race – because, in some strange way, she had assurance that his heart was true. The phrase was ludicrous, but Toloth could find no better description of the state of Teresa's consciousness. She still didn't know his purpose in infesting her, but she had intuited, somehow or other, that she needn't regret being used in the way that he wanted to use her. (And this, of course, fed into the overwhelming sense of relief and ease that had been illuminating her mind all afternoon. To know that her body's every movement wasn't motivated by hatred of all that she held dear was, to Teresa, a rare and precious thing.)
So he was welcomed. He had come as an invader, and Teresa, by her faith, had made him something like a guest. And this was a new experience to him, for, in the Yeerk Empire, nobody was a guest. Hospitality, the taking of another person into one's own life, was not among the Yeerk virtues.
It was, perhaps, significant that, faced with this particular contrast between life in the Empire and life with Teresa Sickles, Toloth did not firmly remind himself that humans were lesser and Yeerks greater. He merely did what he had resolved to do some minutes before: he put his host's consciousness to sleep with a swift depression of the appropriate neurons, and then commanded her memories to appear before him, that he might find out who this person was that called herself Teresa Sickles.
The substance of what he found has, of course, been preserved in the Vita that he submitted to the Congregation of Saints shortly after Teresa's cause was opened. But that text – written by a Yeerk ex-soldier of no great literary gifts, to satisfy a group of Vatican bureaucrats – gives little sense of what it was like for Toloth to truly meet the girl who had so beguiled and bewildered him for so many feeding cycles.
He saw her earliest, jumbled memories of childhood, when the cars on the street outside were still exotic jungle beasts, and the shadows in her bedroom concealed soul-stealing monstrosities. He saw her later childhood, with all its usual milestones: first day at school, first Communion – and, somewhat later, first genuine religious experience. He saw the pall cast on her pre-teen years by the conflicts that tore apart her father's law firm, forcing her family to economize drastically while he reestablished himself on his own, and the consequent emotional insecurity that had rendered her uncharacteristically vulnerable to the Sharing's blandishments. And, of course, he saw all the wretchedness and sorrow that had made up her teenage years as an involuntary host.
What most surprised him, however, was not what he saw, but what he didn't see. There was one element that he had casually assumed would be in Teresa's mind – had assumed so casually, in fact, that he hadn't even been aware of making the assumption – and his inability to find it unnerved him perhaps more deeply than anything else had hitherto done.
It was, in a word, exceptionalism. Here was a creature who had changed Gef Makkil's whole outlook on life with a word, who had roused the Sulp Niar pool's izcot population to the point where official measures had to be taken, and who had driven at least two host-bearing Yeerks – himself and Malcar Seven-Four-Five – to extremes of behavior utterly incompatible with true Yeerkish dignity. Surely, such a creature concealed some mysterious greatness beneath her unassuming bipedal form.
But no. The mind of Teresa Sickles, when observed directly, proved to be stunningly ordinary. She was perceptive, but not overly cunning; though intelligent and well-read for her age, she was hardly a great scholar; and, far from possessing the emotional coolness and self-sufficiency that, to a Yeerk, was the true measure of a great soul, she was as filled with violently conflicting passions and dependences as any other teen-aged human female. In fact, the only thing that obviously distinguished her from any of a dozen of her peers was the intensity of her devotion to Jesus.
But how could mere devotion to an imaginary deity have such effects? Even if a human called Jesus really had lived some two millennia before, he could only be a human like any other – a mere phenomenon of Nature, transfigured and distorted by the sentient mind's perverse need to put a face on the unknowable. The Kandrona, the Hork-Bajir's Deep, and a thousand other natural phenomena had received the same treatment – and then their hierophants, having scratched that psychic itch, had gone on and done what they had been going to do anyway. Religion, in the long run, was just one more appetite, to be satisfied and then forgotten about until the next time it struck; to make it the guiding principle of one's life was idiotic and craven.
And yet… whatever faults she might have, Teresa was clearly neither a craven nor an idiot – and neither, by Hork-Bajir standards, was Gef. If their religion was an appetite, it was an appetite that was disciplined and restrained by its own object – as though Kandrona particles themselves could keep one from absorbing too many of them. Which was absurd, unless… well, unless the object was real, and living, and personal, and actively concerned for the welfare of those who hungered after it.
Toloth sighed, and ran a weary hand over Teresa's brow. Nonsense, all of it. The strangeness of his surroundings was getting to him again; it was making the universe seem more mysterious and incalculable than it really was. The truth of the matter, no doubt, was that Christianity was precisely the minor human superstition that common sense would have it, and that any power that Teresa seemed to draw from it was, in fact, merely a reflection of the greatness of other Christians. For, after all, there had to be some primal greatness in Christianity at its origins; so long as the lesser Christians continued to derive strength from that greatness, the superstition could remain powerful indefinitely.
Can it, now? said a mocking voice inside his head. Does anything remain powerful indefinitely? Do not all powers, and especially the power to move hearts, fade and dwindle as the centuries pass? Even the Empire, ancient though it is, is truly a succession of Empires; go back five generations, and see how much kinship you have with the Yeerks of that time. Yet this human girl calls herself sister to creatures four times as ancient.
And this was true. When Simon Cephas and Paul of Tarsus had been working to "build the Kingdom" on Earth, it had been Generation 657 on the Yeerk homeworld, and Saxol Five-Three-Five had been setting the Empire aflame – literally, in some places – with accusations that the Council had desecrated the great athletic tournament known as Bastinekk. Now it was Generation 686, and the very idea of Bastinekk was a joke among Saxol's own descendants – and Teresa Sickles was still busy building.
But, then, might Christianity not also be a series of Christianities? Perhaps the myth of the executed God was the only real continuity, and, beneath that surface, the specific teachings were continually being altered to fit the needs of the moment, just as the form of the Council had been retained while a hundred different theories of government had come and gone.
It was an attractive idea, but, when Toloth looked for evidence of it in Teresa's knowledge, he found himself coming up worse than empty. There were, indeed, groups of Christians who believed in thus altering the content of their religion while retaining its forms – but it was precisely these Christian groups that were unable to preserve this world-altering devotion in their members. Indeed, it seemed that Teresa's own sect had, a few decades before, formally committed itself to updating certain of its rituals and practices, and, insofar as this had been interpreted as a license to alter the sect's historic teaching, it had dramatically weakened the fundamental commitment to Jesus; if it hadn't been for the zeal of their current high priest, who seemed to interpret the update precisely as an opportunity to communicate ancient ideas to modern humans, it was likely enough that Teresa's missionary impulse would have died of malnutrition long before her capture. (Toloth, whose life would have been much simpler had this in fact happened, took a moment at this point to curse the name of John Paul II.) It seemed, in general, that Christianity, so far from being a shrewdly adaptive survivor among religions, could only summon the will to survive by refusing to adapt – by being faithful, in the face of all logic, to the obscure enthusiasm of a few long-dead Jews. And, when it was thus faithful, it not only survived, but prevailed.
"Ridiculous," Toloth muttered aloud. "There must be a trick somewhere."
"How's that, Teresa?" came Mr. Sickles's voice from the other side of the door.
Toloth jumped; he hadn't realized that anyone was near enough to hear him. "Um, nothing, Dad," he said, struggling to make Teresa's functionally-asleep tongue form clear syllables. "Just talking to myself."
"Well, try telling yourself that it's time to be asleep," said Mr. Sickles. "I was just telling your aunt how exhausted you were; are you going to make me into a liar by staying up till midnight holding a one-girl symposium?"
"Uh… no," said Toloth, now completely wrong-footed. "No, I… I'm… no, I'm not."
Mr. Sickles chuckled. "Well, all right, then," he said, and walked away from the door again. Toloth could hear him talking on the telephone as he left: "No, I'm still here, Missy. Just had to get in my daily dose of offspring-needling. –No, I don't think it does, actually. From what I've seen, I'd say Teresa's growing up as well-adjusted as anyone could ask for. And frankly, I'm not sure that you have a whole lot of room to talk, under the circumstances…"
His voice faded into the distance, and Toloth let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. Yes, clearly it was time to be asleep – or a-dulot, anyway. It had been an exceptionally long day, and a bit of unthinking semi-awareness was just what he needed to refresh his mind. Doubtless, in the clear light of morning, all these absurd fancies would be dispelled, and he would be able to get on properly with the business of unraveling Teresa's secret.
The mocking internal voice laughed outright at that. Her secret? it said. Come now, Toloth Two-Nine-Four. The girl is your host; she can have no secrets from you. If you don't understand her yet, it is because you do not wish to.
But Toloth ignored this. With a single contortion of his lower body, he detached himself from all but the most automatic areas of host control, and surrendered himself to dulot. As he did so, he got one last glimpse of Teresa's consciousness, and noted with amusement that she was dreaming of being in a steam-filled laboratory, confronted with three bottles of colored seltzer that would turn her into a Taxxon if she drank from them in the wrong order.
These poor humans, he thought. When they fall unconscious, not only do they not escape their thoughts, but they become the hopeless thralls of their most absurd and confused imaginings. How fortunate I am to be a Yeerk.
And, as he thought this, the torpor of dulot caught up with him, and he slid into that state where there are no dreams.