The remainder of the Mass was a blur to Toloth; he was vaguely conscious of hearing the bishop say things, and of checking Teresa's mind for the answers, but only as one might be who were somehow doing these things in dulot. Even the uncanny moment in the Communion line, when he felt his Control over Teresa fail for the briefest of instants as the Host touched her tongue, seemed unrelated to him: one extra humiliation, nothing more. (Though it did move him to bypass the chalice – and, thereby, to expose himself to some chaff in the car from Mrs. Sickles about whether her daughter was turning into a little Lefebvrist on her.)
Nor did this psychic numbness abate after the service had ended. For the rest of the evening, the expectant silence continued to saturate his being like a sulp-niar sea, with only a scattered archipelago of moments when the outer world succeeded in impressing itself on his consciousness. It was a dreary and tedious few hours, all in all; still, for the sake of completeness, some portions of it ought to be recorded.
"No, I just didn't feel like it," said Toloth, doing his best to sound no more annoyed than Teresa would have. "I don't need more of a reason than that, do I? What's the point of reception under both species being optional, if you can't switch between one usage and the other without it being some kind of gesture?"
"Oh, I'm not disputing that," said Mrs. Sickles. "I'm just saying it's a slippery slope, that's all. You start off innocently using Septuagint psalm numberings and giving prayers their Latin names, and before long you're decrying Lumen Gentium as a crypto-Protestant subversion engineered by Freemasons."
"You're saying it isn't?" said Mrs. Chiodini sweetly.
Mrs. Sickles gave her a long-suffering look. "Mother," she said, "I am trying to keep my daughter on the strait and narrow here; a little cooperation wouldn't be…"
"Hello," said Mr. Sickles suddenly.
His wife glanced at him. "What?"
Mr. Sickles pointed out the windshield; Mrs. Chiodini craned her neck to follow his finger, and Toloth craned Teresa's – and then, for roughly a minute, there was an awestruck hush within the little car. Directly ahead of them, glowing like golden lava in the setting sun, the sky above the little street they had just turned down was filled with a cloudscape of such vivid and intricate beauty that it might have been painted directly on the air in the oils of Canaletto.
There appeared to be three distinct clouds involved in the tableau: a vast, smooth nimbostratus that served as canvas for the image, and two smaller clouds of a fleecier cumulus type. The larger of these latter extended horizontally along the bottom of the glowing canopy, forming a sort of foundational mass like a roiling sea or a boxwood hedge; from the center of this region, like a column of smoke, the third cloud surged upward almost to the darkened edge of the golden backcloth. As it rose, its right-hand side, facing west, caught the full force of the setting sun's light, so that it shone against the darker red-gold behind with the bright yellow of undiluted daylight, as though some radiant entity of power and joy were housed within its crisp-edged vapors. (For crisp-edged they certainly were; in the still clearness of the evening air, every least curling wisp of the billowing column showed forth as starkly as though it were carved in wood upon the sky.)
Mr. Sickles slowed the car to a crawl, and four pairs of eyes and five souls set themselves to drink in the resplendence before them. It didn't last long, for sunset is fleeting in southern California; in less than five minutes, the encroaching night had wiped away the vital brightness from the scene, leaving only a shapeless mass of accreted water vapor looming ponderously overhead. But it had lasted long enough to engrave itself indelibly in the memories of every one of its beholders.
"A pillar of cloud," Mrs. Sickles murmured.
Toloth winced internally; he had been hoping, somewhat desperately, than no-one would make this comparison. (Teresa, notably, had not, though he could tell she had wanted to.) But, yes, indeed: a pillar of cloud – and also, as one might say, of fire. A beacon of guidance to the well-disposed soul, leading the way to liberty and the land of promise. Yes. Of course. Certainly.
And the silence abode.
"Teresa?" Mrs. Sickles called. "Telephone for you."
"Who is it?" said Toloth.
"Mrs. Alling."
Toloth blinked. "As in… Kati's mom?"
"That's the one," said Mrs. Sickles. "Apparently she just got back from the hospital where they took Kati, and she wanted to call and let you know how things were going."
"Oh," said Toloth, firmly telling Teresa's skin to stop crawling. "Okay. I'll pick it up in here, then."
He went over to the table at the far end of the den, laid a hand on the receiver, and took a deep breath. Kati's mother: certainly a Controller by now, possibly a special operative of the Sub-Visser – or, then again, possibly just whatever random Yeerk Iniss Two-Two-Six had happened to grab out of the pool. In any case, not somebody to converse with casually; caution was emphatically indicated.
He lifted the receiver, and pressed it to Teresa's ear. "Hello?"
"Hello, Teresa?" said Mrs. Alling's voice. "I just wanted to tell you that Kati got treated in time, and she's going to pull through after all. They're having her stay at the hospital overnight, just for safety's sake, but she should be home by tomorrow."
«Well, that's good,» said Teresa.
Toloth relayed this sentiment to Mrs. Alling – or, rather, to Nemo Blank-Dash-Chose of, presumably, the Sulp Niar pool. "She doesn't want visitors, does she?" he added impishly.
A wearily sardonic laugh came from the other end of the line. "No, I think she'll manage," said Nemo. "And, anyway, I don't think the hospital would welcome it just now; they seemed pretty harassed when I was there."
"Huh," said Toloth, wondering whether this was just an added touch of verisimilitude, or whether some sort of crisis really had broken out at the Yeerk pool that afternoon – perhaps another Andalite attack, or something. "Okay, then. Was there anything else?"
There was a long pause, then, as though the other speaker was screwing up her courage. "Yes, actually, there is something," said Nemo. "I don't know if it will matter to you; I hope it won't, but… well, while Chapman was heading to the… to the hospital, I wasn't in a very good place emotionally…"
"No, I suppose not," said Toloth.
"…and I said… some things about you that now I wish I hadn't," Nemo finished. "I'd take it back if I could, but it's not the sort of thing… well, anyway, I just hope you can forgive me."
Toloth could make nothing of this. What difference could it make to anyone what Kati's mother had said about Teresa en route to the Yeerk pool? Or was the "you" meant to be Malcar, and Nemo was somehow trying to indicate her own identity to the Yeerk she believed herself to be addressing? (He rummaged quickly through Teresa's memories, looking for some Yeerk known to her who habitually slandered her Controller, but came up empty.)
"No, that's… that's okay," he said. "I don't…"
"Because the fact is that Kati and I both owe you a great deal," said Nemo. "And I'd like to pay you back, if I could. Say tomorrow… of course, I know it's a busy time of year, and I understand if you have things to do with your family, but, if you could spare some time in the early afternoon, I'd appreciate it if you'd meet me at Lazaro's and let me buy you an ice-cream soda or something. Sound good?"
Now Toloth was truly at sea. He could understand, in the abstract, a new human-Controller wanting to get to know her colleagues in the neighborhood; he could also understand an operative of the Sub-Visser wanting to have a private talk with Malcar Seven-Four-Five – and the possibility of the Council representative from the fête having gotten to this particular Yeerk and playing some deep game with her was not beyond his intellective powers, either. There were all sorts of reasons why Nemo might want to arrange a meeting with Teresa's Controller at the local soda fountain, and, if she had led with that, Toloth wouldn't have thought twice about it – but to begin with this rigmarole about unjustified personal aspersions, and then to toss out the idea of a meeting as though it were some inspired afterthought… what went on here? Had Vivian Alling been infested by some grass-green neophyte whose ideas of intrigue all came out of Ishlok-of-the-Hills stories, and who had thought herself obliged to concoct a pretence for suggesting the meeting without realizing that the first job of a pretense was to make sense?
"Ice-cream soda," he repeated vaguely. "Sure, okay. Just a second. –Mom?" he called, covering the receiver mouthpiece with Teresa's hand. "Is it okay if I spin out to Lazaro's tomorrow afternoon so Mrs. Alling can pamper me for saving Kati?"
"Sure, that's fine," said Mrs. Sickles with a little laugh. "Just make sure you're back by dinnertime."
"Okay." Toloth uncovered the mouthpiece again. "Mom says it's fine. Will 1:30 do?"
"Certainly," said Nemo. "I'll see you then. Take care of yourself, Teresa." And she hung up without giving Toloth a chance to reply.
«What was that all about?» said Teresa.
«My dear Teresa, Toloth replied tartly, «if you were as ignorant of my people's affairs as every other member of your species in this house, your guess would still be as good as mine.»
And the silence abode.
«So tomorrow's the 23rd,» said Teresa, as Toloth curled her body up under the foldaway's covers. «And that'll be the second full day you've been in me, so the day after will be when you have to return to the pool.»
«Correct.»
«So I'll get Malcar back just in time for Christmas.» Teresa sighed in spirit. «I've decided I really don't like time, you know that?»
Toloth smothered a snort. «That must make things difficult for you,» he said. «To worship the Creator of the universe as wholly good, and to deem a fundamental aspect of the universe bad? Even an Andalite would find such mental gymnastics challenging.»
«That's the thing, though,» said Teresa. «It's not fundamental to the universe, not really.»
«Oh, yes, I know,» said Toloth. «Your "place beyond time and space where the righteous go when they die". Grant it as a hypothesis, but…»
«No, I don't mean Heaven,» said Teresa. «Earth itself wasn't supposed to be in time – at least, I don't think it was. I read somewhere that the proper state of spiritual creatures is something called aeviternity, where things don't have to change, but can if they ought to – as opposed to time, where everything has to change whether it likes it or not. It's what the angels and saints are in – and the book didn't say that Adam and Eve were in it before the Fall, but it makes sense, doesn't it? If it's how spiritual creatures are supposed to be, then God wouldn't have made them another way – or the world they were supposed to rule, either.»
Toloth took a moment to wrap his mind around the conception. «Are you trying to say,» he said, «that, according to your religion, the decision of two humans to transgress a divine stricture altered the fundamental structure of the universe?»
«Well, like I said, I don't think it's defined doctrine or anything,» said Teresa. «It's just my own inference from what the Fathers and Doctors said about other things. But it fits, I think. And it explains a couple other things, too: the dinosaur problem, for instance…»
«The what?»
«Oh, you know. "If sin was how death came into the world, how come the dinosaurs died before anybody had sinned?" If Adam and Eve were in time, that's pretty much unanswerable as far as I can tell – but if the world was created aeviternal, and only acquired a past and a present after the Fall, then it doesn't prove anything. Whichever part of Earth's history a species wound up in, there would be death in all of it, and all of it would be the fruit of sin. So…»
«Just a moment,» said Toloth. «If all this is true, and your world was created to be without time, why does your sacred book divide its creation into days?»
«Because Genesis 1 has to use metaphors,» said Teresa. «The whole point of it is that God's giving us a peek at His drawing board; if He described it literally, it would mean less than nothing to us. As high as the heavens are above the earth, and all that.» (A slight edge seemed to creep into her mental voice, as though she was annoyed that a sophisticated alien should be asking such basic questions. Or perhaps it was just fatigue; the excitement of the day was beginning to catch up with her, and Toloth could see her energy dwindling.)
«And it wouldn't just be Earth, you know,» she added. «If this applies to humans, it applies to Yeerks, too – and Andalites, and Taxxons, and all the sellthee in the universe. You all would have been created aeviternal, and all your planets and suns and everything would have been thrust into space and time when your first parents sinned. Who knows, maybe there are other species out there who never did sin, and are in aeviternal space to this day – whole planets enjoying uninterrupted beatitude together with the saints and angels.»
«Do you think so?» said Toloth, hardly knowing whether he was mocking or sincere. «Is that what the Ellimists are, perhaps?»
Had Teresa had control of her limbs, she would have given a sleepy little shrug. «Could be,» she said. «I don't know, I never met one.»
«I see,» said Toloth. «Well, then, Teresa, I withdraw my earlier remarks; if you can justify it so ingeniously, you have my full permission to dislike time.»
«You're so generous,» Teresa murmured.
«I know.»
And the silence abode.
And it continued to abide, even after Teresa had drifted off to sleep and Toloth was left staring at the den ceiling, unwilling, as yet, to descend into dulot. Not only did it abide, but it seemed to take solid form in his mind: it was as though he sat within a great dome of lead, and all the wholesome and commonplace satisfactions of life, such as he had enjoyed with unconscious ease before Teresa Sickles came to trouble his mind, lay on the other side, barred from reaching him by the dull solidity in which he was immured.
There was a door, of course; that was the galling part. There was a door, and he knew exactly where it was – knew, too, that all he had to do was pass through it to regain the liberty of innocence – knew, finally, that, the longer he waited so to pass, the less strength he would have to do so later on. For the evasion of recognized truth, like any other attitude of constraint, deforms and cripples those who remain in it for long.
What, then, kept him from passing through? Hardly racial pride or Imperial loyalty; hardly mere apathetic sloth. What it was, he decided after some reflection, was simple willful resentment at the fate that had brought him to this point. He had not signed on for this; it was sheer chance that had made him Gef's Controller, and he certainly would never have followed up his host's chance encounter if he had known it would lead him here. If he was at the brink of transformation, it was because destiny had shanghaied him, and he refused to give it the satisfaction of taking the final step. That this was a wholly irrational attitude, he was scarcely concerned to deny; nonetheless, it was strong within him, and warred fiercely with his reason beneath the leaden dome.
And the silence abode.
And the battle raged.
And the silence abode…
An unutterable groan escaped Toloth's borrowed mouth, and he sat up abruptly in the foldaway cot. He applied a sharp sting to Teresa's main cognitive centers, and her consciousness was galvanized back into life. «What… what?» she mumbled hazily. «Toloth, what's up?»
«You are,» said Toloth.
«Yeah, I know… but why?»
«You'll see.»
Bare feet groped in the dark for Teresa's slippers; then her body was on its feet, and a grimly resolute Yeerk and a nervously bewildered human rode it toward the Sickles house's lone bathroom.