Surprisingly – at least to Toloth, who had always regarded the Book of Balances as just so much pseudo-scientific hokum – Elskir seemed, by the time the three of them arrived at their station beneath the seventh of the LED screens, to have recovered a good deal of her usual vitality. She was clearly still tense and distrait, but there was no longer any question of her being unable to function or liable to imminent collapse, as there had seemed to be only a few minutes before. Indeed, when Penjoth offered to take her console for her, she actually laughed as she waved him away, and began setting up the dials for the first Experience display with all wonted vigor.
Penjoth shrugged, and turned to head back to Iniss's side – but Iniss had already finished dimming the lights, and was even now ascending the platform to take his place as the Experiential master of ceremonies. Penjoth scowled faintly at thus finding himself temporarily a third wheel, and Toloth, having completed his own preparations, decided to offer him a distraction in the form of some idle conversation.
"How's Jake?" he said.
Penjoth glanced back at him vaguely. "Hmm?"
"Your host's brother," said Toloth. (He felt safe speaking thus, as the Wagnerian music that Iniss had selected for the Experience was already beginning to resound from the speakers, preventing even Teresa's rather carrying soprano voice from reaching the ears of the nearby non-Controllers.) "That's his name, right? Jake? I didn't see him with your other shelfatt [7] in the audience, and I was just wondering what was up. Is he sick, or otherwise engaged, or what?"
Penjoth snorted. "He's Jake," he said.
Toloth hesitated, and checked Teresa's memories to see if this ought to mean something to her Controller. Finding nothing, he felt himself safe in saying, "So?"
"Jake's been willing to attend a grand total of one Sharing event in his whole life," said Penjoth. "He came to the bonfire last June, and Temrash One-One-Four, on whom be peace, et cetera, started laying the full-membership spiel on him just heavy enough that Tom thought it was worth trying to take control and warn his brother against us. He only managed to seize a couple of the major facial muscles, but evidently that was enough to creep Jake out permanently; the kid hasn't gone near the Sharing since. Says he doesn't want to be absorbed into a greater whole, or some excuse like that." He rolled Tom Berenson's eyes. "De mortuit nil nisi bonum, I'm sure, but how my predecessor ever got the assignment to Control this area's governor is more than I can figure out."
Toloth shrugged. "Spawn privilege," he said. "Connections. Gift of gab. All the usual substitutes for competence in the Visserarchical promotion game."
"Yeah, probably," Penjoth agreed, and exhaled thoughtfully. "You know, I wonder sometimes whether making us an Empire was really the best move on old Akdor's part."
It was exceedingly fortunate for Toloth that Elskir didn't remark on his momentary failure to respond to this. Had she realized that such a comment would certainly provoke an instantaneous reaction from the Malcar she knew, his entire masquerade would have been placed in dire peril. But her attention, during the crucial quarter-second or so, was otherwise occupied – and then Toloth caught himself, remembered whom he was impersonating, and said, with all the outraged shock he could muster on such short notice, "Excuse me?"
"Oh, not that I don't intend to die serving it," said Penjoth easily. "Got to be loyal to your people – and, anyway, it's not like any other cause would much want our service. But, now and then, I think that maybe we'd have been better off if we'd just stayed on the homeworld and minded our own business, instead of trying to remake ourselves into the rulers of the galaxy. I mean, we're not exactly the most efficient of races, we'd barely ever gone to war before – and as for physical qualifications, heck, we can't even live on other planets without carrying around these huge artificial replicas of our sun. It's like fate was trying to scream at us, 'Stay at home, you fools, and let other people do the voyaging and conquering.'"
"Penjoth Nought-One-Six," said Toloth, icily, "have you been talking to the Old Kandronists lately?"
Penjoth kept his host's face cool, but the momentary flaring of its nostrils made it clear that this reference to the Empire's most despised reactionary party had touched his pride. "No, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said, archly emphasizing the numerals. "I have not."
"Well, you could have fooled me," said Toloth. "So our race is unequipped for galactic conquest, is it? We're doomed by our biology to stay huddled on our own world, while the Andalites, with their strong and beautiful bodies, leap gaily from star to star? I expect that kind of slave mentality from Indor Nine-Eight-One and his gaggle of Gedd-wearing crackpots, but I never thought I'd hear it from the assistant of a Sharing chapter head."
"I never said…" Penjoth began.
But Toloth, having tapped into Malcar Seven-Four-Five's zeal for Empire, was not to be silenced so lightly. "Let me tell you something, Penjoth Nought-One-Six," he said. "If you think that universal mastery can ever be based on the mandate of Nature, you're deluding yourself. Nature is as much the master race's enemy as any rival race can be; when Akdor Eleven-Five-Four declared Yeerk dominion over the stars, it would have meant nothing if it hadn't been a defiance of the stars themselves. That's why we cleanse each world as we conquer it, letting nothing survive that doesn't directly serve our ends: because we are the rulers, not the mindless forces that formed the worlds for us to rule."
"Yet we were also formed by those mindless forces," Penjoth said mildly.
It was an obvious riposte, but it nonetheless took Toloth aback for a moment, just as it would have done Malcar. The next moment, though, he rallied – just as Malcar would have. "Well, and what of that?" he said. "Are we to fall down in gratitude before them for making us what we are? For taking a slug out of the sulp-niar pits and giving it the necessary neural complexity to know what its slughood means? For giving us a world where acid-filled clouds hide the stars, and daylight is perverted by a stain in the sun?" He shook Teresa's head. "No, poolmate, let's not kid ourselves. If there were a will and a purpose behind our origin, it could only be one of entire hostility – like someone forming his rival's image in zabnel foam so he can watch it dissolve in the rain, or a human storyteller making the monsters as horrible as possible so that everyone's sure to cheer when the heroes at last exterminate them. And that is not acceptable, Penjoth Nought-One-Six," he whispered, leaning in toward his companion with a fire in his borrowed eyes that was not entirely feigned. "Do you understand me? That the universe should be that way – that we should have been made in contempt, and doomed by a hostile omnipotence to inescapable ignominy – that thought can never be tolerated."
Penjoth, at this sudden flash of embittered passion, took an involuntary step backward, and it took him a moment to recover the laconic nonchalance native to his host. "Well, that's a charming picture you've painted there, Malcar Seven-Four-Five," he said. "So let me see if I have this right. An Andalite, say, is free to believe or disbelieve that there is a purpose in Nature, because his dignity as an Andalite isn't involved either way – but if one of us believes that the universe is something other than a gigantic accident, he can only be implying that we're the despised villains of a cosmic pulp novel, and therefore are bound to fail spectacularly in the end. In other words, believing in the supernatural makes a Yeerk a traitor to his race… Wait a second, let me finish," he added, as Toloth opened Teresa's mouth to reply. "I don't mind being accused of treason by my lower-ranking compeers, because I know everyone needs a way to feel superior to his boss – and I also know that not everyone's boss makes that as easy as mine does." (Here he spared a patronizing look toward the stage for Iniss Two-Two-Six, who was still intoning the interminable prelude he'd written for the Experience, accompanied by the apparently endless melody that continued to issue from the speakers.) "But what I do mind, just a little, is when someone claims to be upholding the dignity and power of the Yeerk race, when what she's really doing is denying a power to Yeerks that she allows to every other race in the galaxy. After all, if we're only allowed to think one thing about the universe when everyone else can think whatever they please, doesn't that make them the powerful ones, and us the cosmic weaklings?"
"Oh, certainly," said Toloth, with as much of a sneer as Teresa's face would make for him. "If, that is, you regard it as a strength to be free to believe a comforting lie. But what I say, Penjoth Nought-One-Six, is that true power belongs to the one who cannot but see the universe as it is. I say that we will surely subjugate the galaxy, precisely because we, as the meanest and most contemptible of its peoples, are alone entirely prevented from having any illusions about its workings. The Andalites, the humans, the Twelk and the Korla and the Hawjabrans – all these may be foolish enough to think themselves loved by destiny, and thus may slacken their striving at times, trusting in their lucky stars to see them through. But the one who knows, without the least flicker of doubt, that there is no love in Nature – that reality is a blind and witless thing, dealing life and death at the purest of hazards – that one has no reason ever to cease from imposing his will on the material contingencies that surround him. What he chooses to want, nothing can ever keep him from taking; what he chooses to despise, he cannot fail to destroy. That's what cosmic dominion means: to be sure, in the very depths of your being, that your strength, and nothing else, is the law of justice. And now, if you'll excuse me," he added, with a little toss of his borrowed head, "I think I choose to want one of the Hogan woman's fruit cups."
"Ooh, could you bring me one, too, Malcar?" said Elskir eagerly.
"Sure."
It wasn't a very long walk to the nearest refreshment table, but, as Toloth headed towards it, he found his stride unconsciously slowing. The reason, of course, was that he was no longer exerting himself to think as Malcar Seven-Four-Five would, and, as his own character regained its sovereignty over his thoughts, he couldn't help but look back at the speech he had just given with some dismay – not so much at its ruthlessness as at the sheer, bloody grimness of the worldview he had just professed with such fervor.
Most Yeerks, of course, when they have passionately said something that they didn't think they really believed, can say that they were merely impersonating their hosts, whose emotions, being immediately present to them, are bound to carry them away somewhat. Toloth, though, could hardly tell himself this (Teresa having reacted, all through his Malcarean diatribe, with a mixture of alarm and quiet pity) – and he wasn't nearly enough of a method actor to claim that Malcar's personality could so utterly dominate his own through sheer imaginative sympathy. Some of what he had said, loath as he was to think it, must have reflected his own sentiments; the question was, how much?
Or, no, perhaps that wasn't the question. There had really been only two elements in the viewpoint he had just expressed: viz., pessimistic nihilism and zeal for racial glory. The latter he knew he had consciously assumed, as being the dominant note of Malcar's thought and character; therefore, it must have been the former that was his own contribution. (And, indeed, when he came to think of it, he had entertained such thoughts often enough before; just the previous afternoon, in fact, one had underlain his dismissal of Teresa's devotion to Jesus.) No, the real question wasn't which parts he had believed, but whether, having heard them fitting so well into Malcar Seven-Four-Five's view of the universe, he wished to continue doing so.
Part of him wanted to dismiss the whole question as misconceived. If Malcar Seven-Four-Five chose to become a low-minded, host-tormenting jingo while holding such views (and, after all, he didn't strictly know that they were her views, but only that they could be made to sound like hers), that in no way compelled everyone else holding those views to do likewise. No doubt there were plenty of Yeerks who perceived that cosmic accident was the only satisfactory way to account for their existence, and still led decent lives and pursued seemly pleasures. –But that was hardly an adequate answer, since it left no room to say (as he certainly intended to continue saying) that those other Yeerks' lives and pleasures really were more decent and seemly than Malcar Seven-Four-Five's. On the theory of total cosmic purposelessness, one could certainly say that moderate and gracious living was no worse than manic power-hunger, but it was difficult to see how it could be called better – or even how better and worse could have meanings at all. (More and less conducive to happiness, perhaps? –But, in a purposeless world, weren't those happiest who were least offended by crudity and gracelessness?)
It was in the midst of such thoughts that Toloth arrived at the refreshment table. Mechanically, he picked up two of the Loaded Fruit Cups (taking care to select one without cashews for Elskir, as Teresa knew about Kati's allergies), and ran his gaze vaguely over the other items of the layout. The turkey wings had evidently been popular, as that platter lay empty except for a few scraps of skin, but every other category of foodstuff had at least a few specimens remaining; the seafood had barely been touched, the Gingerbread Fancies and cheese balls were amply represented, and the plate at the center of the table still bore about a half-dozen squares of the famous Hogan honey shortbread.
For no good reason, Toloth's gaze lingered over this last. As it did so, he remembered Penjoth's breathless description upon first seeing the luscious confection – and he remembered, as well, the oracle it had recalled to Teresa.
…that he may learn to do what is good, and to avoid…
For the briefest of moments, Toloth stood motionless, gazing unblinkingly at the golden squares of shortbread. Then, with just enough conscious volition for what would follow to be grace rather than magic, he reached out, removed one of them from the plate, and raised it to Teresa's mouth and took a bite.
Penjoth's protestations, in truth, had been exaggerated; the shortbread, though unquestionably less firm than most, was in no way fluid or gelatinous, or even unpleasantly squishy. It was more as though the not-quite-crisp center of a fresh tollhouse cookie had been converted into an entire bar of soft, rich, honeyed sweetness – which is to say that it was just the sort of confection to make Teresa Sickles feel that she had died and gone to Heaven. Nor was Toloth (who, it will be remembered, had never before tasted anything sweeter than loofar bark) prepared to quarrel with the sentiment.
In a matter of seconds, the piece of shortbread had vanished from mortal ken, leaving only a few stray crumbs on the tablecloth and a sense of radiant well-being in Teresa's heart. «Thanks, Toloth,» she said, with a contented little sigh. «I wondered what you were thinking, going for the fruit cups; I guess I should have trusted you better.»
Toloth said nothing; indeed, none of the many thoughts surging through his mind at that moment seemed readily reducible to words. It wasn't until he had picked up the two fruit cups again, headed back to his shared station, and handed the cashew-free cup to Elskir that he found speech – and that was merely to say, "The sentimentalist's left us, I see."
"Penjoth?" said Elskir, with a giggle. "Yeah, I guess he didn't want to give you another chance to attack him with your philosophy of life. I've got to hand it to you, Malcar; I've known you for three local years now, and I've never heard you so eloquent. If they ever come out with the Essential Malcar Seven-Four-Five in three volumes, that little speech of yours had better be right at the front of the book."
Toloth, once more, said nothing.
[7] Shelfatt: Literally, "prize stock" – a term used by professional Gedd ranchers to refer to their most valued breeding lines. Since such farmers typically took their own hosts from these lines, the word came to be used, among the Yeerks on Earth, as a collective term for the blood relatives of one's host, whether or not this strain was physically blue-ribbon material.