625The bathroom was within eyeshot of Teresa's parents' bedroom, and Mrs. Sickles was extremely sensitive to stray gleams of light. Getting to the toilet late at night was therefore always a bit of an Olympic event, which, without Teresa's hard-won muscle memory to draw upon, Toloth wouldn't have ventured to attempt. (As it was, her ankle got a mild scrape that she probably wouldn't have given it herself.)
But eventually he made it, and got the door shut and the light switched on. Then he reached into the chifferobe and pulled out a plastic bucket colored to resemble a birthday cake (a memento of the summer when Teresa had turned five); having filled this with water, he lifted his gaze to the mirror above the sink. There was no practical reason for this; it merely seemed fitting to him, when speaking as he wished to speak, to look the person addressed in the eye.
«Teresa,» he said, «just how important is it to you that souls be saved?»
Teresa, still groggy from her sudden awakening, took a moment to process this question. «What do you mean?» she said cautiously.
«What I say,» said Toloth. «What price would you pay to ensure the salvation of a soul? Your life, your fortune, your sacred honor?» (He tossed off this allusion rather archly; having been a Soviet that morning, he took an ironic pleasure in being a Founding Father now.) «Or what about your freedom? Suppose that you had been somehow restored to the freedom of your own body, and that, in order to ensure that some random Hork-Bajir went to Heaven, it was necessary for you to submit to re-infestation. Would you do it?»
Teresa was silent for a long moment, and Toloth watched as her knowledge of her frailty wrestled with her will to love her Lord. «Yes,» she said at last, in the small, quick voice of one afraid of changing her mind if she said anything more.
«You would?» said Toloth.
«Yes.»
«You would lift a Yeerk back to your own ear, without any external compulsion, just because you had promised to do so in exchange for the chance to save one soul?»
«Yes.»
«Good.» Toloth lowered her ear to the bucket. «Then you will kindly promise now that, once I have left your head, you will do nothing to rouse any member of your family, and you will restore me after you have poured your water and said your words over me. I have no intention of being executed for treason merely because I am tired of resisting you and your God.»
A single, dazed sentence of reply; a distant, muted pain, like an ear shot full of Novocain; a small, barely audible splash – and Teresa Sickles, for the first time in three years, raised her own head in her own home. With a trembling hand, she brushed her hair away from her eyes, and looked around the small, dimly lit bathroom as though she couldn't believe it was really there. (Which, when she considered how similar this scenario was to so many of her most bittersweet dreams, she wasn't entirely sure she did.)
She felt a wild, jubilant yell welling up inside her, and bit down hard on her tongue to keep it from escaping. Whatever a promise to a Yeerk might be worth (and she wasn't ready to analyze that just yet), at any rate she didn't want to break it before she'd done what she'd made it in order to do. If she did, she was justly afraid (having lived in that rascal Teresa's skin so long) that she would never do the other at all – and, whatever else might be right or wrong, doing that, she knew, was right.
But it wasn't, she discovered, easy. To look into her old birthday bucket and see a slug from another star floating within; to know that such creatures had robbed her of hands, voice, eyes, and even the privacy of her own thoughts, and sought to do the same to everyone who shared her species – and then to reach out her hand and perform the deed that would say, yes, I want to share eternity with you as well… it was all very well to believe that Christ loved and gave Himself for all rational animals, but there are parts of the human soul that are unmoved by even the clearest intellectual conviction, and one of them was gripping Teresa's heart so hard that lifting a handful of water and pouring it over a half-submerged slug seemed to be utterly beyond her strength.
Queasy with shame at her spirit's weakness, she prayed silently but desperately for something that might fortify it – some word, or picture, or happy thought that could enable her to do her duty to her racial enemy. She thought of the Mass she had attended earlier that day, and tried to think of something in the Bishop's homily that might assist her; failing at that (for Isaac Perlmutter, though as wise and good a man as had ever reigned in San Diego, was quite phenomenally dull as a homilist), she proceeded to grope among the readings, and then the hymns – and then, for no apparent reason, her mind jumped to another hymn, which the music director at her own church was notorious for shoehorning into every Mass where it was even remotely appropriate. Teresa had never known why; there was nothing special about the melody, and, to someone raised in 1990s America, the lyrics seemed little more than mildly artful reiterations of the most commonplace platitudes imaginable. But one circumstance's platitude is another's shattering verity, and Teresa now realized, with a little shock, that Marty Haugen and flaky old Mrs. Boyle might have unwittingly provided her the lifeline she needed – if only she could once mean about Toloth Two-Nine-Four what she had mindlessly affirmed a thousand times about nobody in particular.
"Let us build a house where love can dwell…" she breathed as softly as she could, squeezing her eyes shut so tight that her head would have started to pain her if she had bothered to notice it.
…And all can safely live,
A place where saints and children tell
How hearts learn to forgive.
Her voice broke on the last word, and the thought shot through her that she had no business claiming such a thing for herself. After all, if her own heart, with all its advantages, hadn't learned to forgive by now, what right had she to suppose that it ever would? But she dismissed this, and soldiered on.
Built of hopes and dreams and visions,
Rock of faith and vault of grace,
Here the love of Christ shall end divisions…
She had to stop here for a moment, not only to swallow down an irrational feeling that she didn't want this particular division ended – that justice would, in some indefinable fashion, be frustrated if the Yeerks didn't have their Yeerkhood held against them unto all eternity – but also to brace herself for what came next. Simple almost to the point of banality, piercing almost to the point of drawing blood, the song's eponymous half-refrain loomed before her like Athens before Pheidippides: a final bourn, a prospect of duty done – and perhaps, for some leftover bit of Adam's likeness in her, a death-place as well.
She filled her lungs, and confessed:
All are welcome,
All are welcome,
All are welcome in this place.
And then, rather than give herself a chance to back-pedal, she immediately wrenched her eyes open, scooped up a handful of the water from the bucket, and dropped it with a splatter over the exposed dorsal region of the bucket's inhabitant, rattling off breathlessly as she did so, "Toloth Two-Nine-Four, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
It is said among the Christian Hork-Bajir that, when the first Yeerk was baptized, a hollow groan went up from the deepest pit of hell, as of one lamenting the downfall of his finest contrivance. Such fabulous legends, of course, have no place in modern hagiography, but this one is nonetheless mentioned here, as the chronicler – and, he hopes, the reader as well – regard it, for several reasons, as far from unfitting.