"Peace be with you."
"And also with you."
Curse active participation, anyway. If it hadn't been for a few meddling liturgical reformers, I could have spent this whole hour just silently observing. Instead, here I am having to mouth all the responses personally – and, because it's Teresa, mouth them with some attempt at actual fervor. What a pestiferous nuisance.
"…in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…"
Still, it's just as well that it happened, I suppose. After all, my whole purpose here is to discover the secret of this religion's appeal, and, if a direct experience of its central ritual can't tell me that, I can't imagine what will. So I may as well shelve my complaints and start attending as best I may.
"…through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit…"
No, stupid, I said attending, not silently flinching and grumbling every time a human in a purple skullcap asserts one of his things he happens to believe about the universe. What's the matter with you, anyway? Why should you take every reminder of Christian delusion as an assault on your own person? It isn't as though it matters to you, after all…
"Yes, He is coming, says the Lord of Hosts – but who will endure the day of His coming?"
Oh, dapsen, what's the point of keeping up the pretense any longer? It's all very well to say that one isn't equipped to face the thing one fears, but that doesn't excuse one from at least being Yeerk enough to admit what that fear is. And the fact of the matter, Toloth Two-Nine-Four of the Sulp Niar pool, is that what you fear is no longer the loss of spawn status or even the wrath of the Visserarchy, but the very real likelihood that everything Teresa Sickles has ever told you about Jesus is crudely, literally, and quite universally true. You've felt its force as an idea; you've directly palpated its power in two vastly different minds, and observed it firsthand in several more; you've seen and despised the thing into which conscious enmity to it has turned Malcar Seven-Four-Five; and you've watched the cultural premises that kept you from seriously entertaining it crumble into dust upon the snows of Althematwi. Rave and curse as much as you please, but the brute fact remains that you have no good reason, now, to deny that there was indeed a human who was also the unoriginate Maker of the universe; that he did indeed bring relief from evil and perdition through his slow death on a pinewood gibbet; and that he is indeed actively anxious to bestow that relief on any who trust in him. Call it absurd, if you like, but it's no more absurd than the rest of reality – and there's no reason why it should be any less real.
"To You, O Lord, I lift my soul, to You I lift my soul…"
But there's a problem with believing that, isn't there, Toloth Two-Nine-Four? A problem that sweet little Teresa could never understand, because it's never occurred to her to be afraid of the truth. I can hear her now: "How could I be, Toloth? Truth is what I am, what we all are; the more of it we know, and the more we act in accord with it, the fuller and stronger and freer we become. How could anyone be afraid of that?" And it's no good trying to explain; she wouldn't understand, any more than Gef could. Perhaps no alien could understand it – that dark little voice that oozes through the sulp niar to whisper in one's ear, "What are you to the truth, after all? A mere fragment, if that; too likely only an accidental excrescence. How can you dare to open yourself to truth, to embrace it unconditionally? As soon might a boil love the organism that seeks to have it lanced."
"Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia…"
Yes, that's the conclusion of the whole matter. Alethiolatry may be a seemly enough pastime for humans and Hork-Bajir, but a Yeerk daren't seek such comfort in the ultimate font of reality. Not that one Yeerk, at least, might not be glad if he could, but…
"Shavarith zet ugilku."
Wait… what?
"And also with you."
"Orzashiss snaav larmiedu geleek Luuk-taktak."
WHAT?
"Thanks be to God."
Thunderstruck, Toloth double-checked Teresa's memory and sensory inputs. No, she hadn't heard anything unusual; as far as she was concerned, the deacon at the lectern had simply said A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke, just as was prescribed. And so, indeed, Toloth had heard him say as well – except that he had heard it in the purest High Yeerkish. (Pure to the point of pedantry, in fact; the ancient Yeerkish orzashiss was indeed a remarkably precise parallel to the Roman evangelium.)
The frozen horror that now came over Toloth, such as a mouse might feel when finally cornered by an unusually persistent cat, arose from a confluence of several factors. Mainly, there was simple, sickening helplessness: when confronted with an adversary who could answer one's deepest objections so promptly and so elegantly, what was a Yeerk to do? But there was also a pang of numinous dread at being a first-hand witness to the miraculous power of Teresa's God – and another pang of more prosaic fear at the thought of what this might imply about his future fate. (His mnemonic palps were drawn irresistibly to a passage that Teresa had once read, though she couldn't remember where: Nothing, almost, sees miracles but misery.) And allied to these was a feeling of vague, prickly resentment: what had he done to Jesus, that the fool deity was so hell-bent on winning him over?
And, deeper than all these, only half-acknowledged even by Toloth himself, there was a faint but stubborn reluctance to abandon his long-held ontological pessimism. The idea of his race as the particular object of reality's hostility, a living witness to the caprice of some immense hanging judge at the center of all things, had scarcely been a pleasant one to hold, but there was about it a certain glamor, and even grandeur, which he was loath to exchange for a worldview in which his race was neither more nor less beloved of God than any other. About this, at least, he was in agreement with Malcar Seven-Four-Five; there ought to be something unique about being a Yeerk, whether it was uniquely glorious or uniquely horrible.
Well, maybe there is and maybe there isn't, said the part of his mind that spoke with Teresa's voice. If there is, then Jesus knows about it better than you do, and you'll learn more about it by following Him than otherwise. And if there isn't, what then? Would you rather cling to a self-aggrandizing fantasy forever than see the world clearly as it is? Which was very good sense, no doubt – but it was remarkable how unsatisfying good sense could sometimes be.
The deacon, as oblivious as Teresa and the other humans present (and most of the Yeerks) to the turmoil he was occasioning in Toloth's soul, continued to read ponderously aloud from the lectionary before him, and Toloth, willy-nilly, heard the Gospel of Christ proclaimed, line by line and word by word, in the perfect tongue of the Yeerk race. The specific passage had no special appropriateness, but that, perhaps, was just as well; had the Gospel for that particular day been Matthew 15:21-28, or something else equally apposite, he might well have steeled himself against grace forever out of sheer contempt for its heavy-handedness. As it was, St. Luke's matter-of-fact narrative of John the Baptist's birth and circumcision was sufficiently irrelevant to his own concerns for him to pay it no conscious heed, leaving his whole mind free to be relentlessly hammered, with every syllable that echoed in his papillary ears, with the bare fact of Jesus's refusal to indulge his fancy of racial irredeemability.
When it was over, he sank back into the pew behind him – only to be nudged back to Teresa's feet, so that the Bishop could give her some sort of blessing by tracing a cross in the air with the book of gospels. (And it was the mark of how utterly preoccupied he was that he didn't even spare a silent grumble for this apparently arbitrary and absurd human custom, for which even Teresa's memories couldn't supply a reason.) Sinking back again, he arranged Teresa's body to seem as deeply and reverently interested in the Bishop's homily as Teresa herself would have made every effort to be – as, indeed, her imprisoned consciousness was striving to be at that moment – and then proceeded to pay no attention whatsoever to a single word the Bishop said for the next ten minutes (save to verify that the first few were in English). The silence within was too deafening for him to hear mere sound.
For silence was very much what it was. His adversary had said his piece, and had nothing left to do but wait for Toloth's reply – and, if there were any other powers present that would have liked to make noise, they were being firmly restrained. Silence was all that remained – not the comfortably indifferent silence of deep space, but one redolent with an agonizing expectancy. Speak the word, Toloth Two-Nine-Four, it seemed to say. It may be yea or it may be nay, but some word you must speak, lest your spirit shrivel in the void.
Yes, I suppose I must, he thought bleakly. But, please, not now; not here.
Later, then, said the silence placidly. We will abide.
And abide it did; when the Bishop had finished preaching, there it remained, as momentous and imperturbable as when he had begun. It was a draining thing to endure, and it was with immense weariness (and more than a little trepidation) that Toloth rose to Teresa's feet and made her voice recite, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…"