Last time on The Host, brainslug girl relived human girl’s memories and also human girl talks to her slightly, which is apparently super weird.

Now she’s done and waking up.

“I’m afraid it’s too much for her,” one said. The voice was soft but deep, male. “Too much for anyone. Such violence!” The tone spoke of revulsion.
“She screamed only once,” said a higher, reedy, female voice, pointing this out with a hint of glee, as if she were winning an argument.

Oh book. Two female brain slugs, and for some reason you’re desperate the reader hate the second one.

Soft and deep are nice adjectives. Reedy and, to a lesser but still disappointing extent, high are negative ones. A hint of glee, especially with female characters, translates to the idea they shouldn’t be feeling this way and are trying to sneakily hide their evil. They are never allowed to have non-evil hints of glee.

Anyway, healer guy keeps being a dick to the seeker – how dare she hold opinions about if the soul is okay! This is particularly annoying because while healer guy may have healer guy credentials, seeker is apparently the more dangerous job, so she’d have the best first-hand experience with trauma.

“I sometimes wonder if the infection of humanity touches those in your profession,” the man mused, his voice still sour with annoyance. “Violence is part of your life choice. Does enough of your body’s native temperament linger to give you enjoyment of the horror?”
I was surprised at his accusation, at his tone. This discussion was almost like… an argument.
Something my host was familiar with but that I’d never experienced.
The woman was defensive. “We do not choose violence. We face it when we must. And it’s a good thing for the rest of you that some of us are strong enough for the unpleasantness. Your peace would be shattered without our work.”

It sure sounds like healer guy is the one infected, what with his bitching and moaning. While I have very little tolerance for the usual soldier thing of RESPECT US BECAUSE WE PROTECT YOU, where you are in fact relying on other people to protect you, sneering at them for doing their job and risking their lives so you don’t have to while suggesting they’re lesser people for doing it is really pretty horrible.

He then proceeds to try to insult her by saying her job will be gone soon because…she’s doing such a good job?

“The error of that statement lies on the bed there.”
“One human girl, alone and unarmed! Yes, quite a threat to our peace.”
The woman breathed out heavily. A sigh. “But where did she come from? How did she appear in the middle of Chicago, a city long since civilized, hundreds of miles from any trace of rebel activity? Did she manage it alone?”
She listed the questions without seeming to seek an answer, as if she had already voiced them many times.
“That’s your problem, not mine,” the man said.

I don’t have much hope about the author, but this is making me feel slightly optimistic that maybe this is intended. She’s doing nothing but raise good points, and he’s just swinging wildly at her because he feels like being an asshole and changing the subject every time she answers him.

Anyway, he then gets into a snit because his job is to help and she’s interfering by, I guess, wanting to ask questions? Except this is all dumb because she had to go through the trauma of her host’s near death either way, quizzing her afterward doesn’t sound like it’s going to hurt.

Our main character thinks about how apparently, they take on a different word to go with their hosts.

Soul. I suppose it was an apt description. The unseen force that guides the body.

I…guess? I was hoping there was some deep meaning in their thinking about consciousness vs physical body, since we’ve got their weird setup where they don’t want the hosts to suffer but are functionally killing them. If it’s just a matter of language, we already have parasite, plus as I’ve been illustrating, the first that comes to mind is brainslug and yeerk. And how does this work across languages? Not only do we have more than one, but different languages are tied to different beliefs, and not everyone has a strong soul concept.

Imagine the shock of her awakening–inside a rebel host injured to the point of death in the escape attempt! No one should have to endure such trauma in times of peace!” His voice rose with the increase of emotion.

Uh…that really seems to have nothing to do with the seeker’s fault. It’s just that there are still rebel hosts who are willing to commit suicide. If anything it’s proof that you should let her do her job so she can get this peace up to snuff.

The seeker repeats, yet again, that shut up the soul can manage it and is giving every sign she can do so. Healer dickbrain just keeps bleating about but why should she have to do it? The seeker repeats again that seriously the info is important, then he starts arguing with her further because while obviously she should shut up and not give her opinion about healing, he is totally qualified to tell her how to do her job and oh my god I just realized this is straight up mansplaining. Brain slugs still mansplain. Seriously, healer, the one infected by humanity? Not her.

Then she asks what he called the other soul, and he saws “Wanderer” unwillingly because the seeker needs to get back into the kitchen I guess. Not sure how this works? I thought they had stable names but translated them upon arrival and sometimes picked new ones afterward.

Anyway, the seeker explains to us that this is fitting, because apparently the soul unusual for having so many hosts. Hm. I was assuming the brain slugs were super into conquest, but now it’s sounding like they actually want to settle down. Maybe their conquest is based around their population expanding? It doesn’t sound like they die naturally and being so creeped out by violence suggests they have effectively no mortality rate, so even if their reproduction is incredibly slow it should still be on an exponential curve.

The seeker also says she might end up picking the host name, which the seeker naturally doesn’t know because this is a wild human.

“She won’t take the human name,” the man muttered.
Her response was conciliatory. “Everyone finds comfort their own way.”
“This Wanderer will need more comfort than most, thanks to your style of Seeking.”

Good god this guy is just such an asshole. And we even know what her style of seeking involved! It was desperately begging the girl not to hurt herself.

“You would have reacted poorly to the early days of this occupation,” she said.
“Perhaps you react poorly to peace.”
The woman laughed, but the sound was false–there was no real amusement.

So while the actual content of this sure seems to be saying he’s the one being an asshole, it worries me that the narration keeps framing her negatively anyway.

She then goes on to tell him that seeking is 99% desk work, he says BUT YOU USED GUNS TO GET THIS BODY WHICH I ALREADY SAID IS SUPER RARE THEREFORE YOU ARE ALWAYS GUNNING PEOPLE DOWN YOU CRAZED PSYCHOS and she points out that the free humans gun down everyone they can when they get the chance and her job is to stop that.

Those whose lives have been touched by the hostility see us as heroes.”
“You speak as if a war were raging.”

STOP TRYING TO TELL HER HOW TO DO HER JOB YOU ASSHOLE

She says that yeah, that is exactly how the humans see it. He says that don’t humans know they should give up and therefore they must have, he is so sure. HER JOB NOT YOURS REMEMBER?

They are outnumbered by what? A million to one? I imagine you would know.”
“We estimate the odds are quite a bit higher in our favor,” she admitted grudgingly.

WHY? THAT’S HER VICTORY! HER PEOPLE DID THAT! WHY WOULD SHE BE GRUDGING THAT HER CURRENT METHODS ARE WINNING?

Anyway this apparently means healer guy wins the argument so he’s willing to stop.

Back to the main character brain slug.

I was sure the body that hosted me had been fully healed before it was given to me. A damaged host would have been disposed of.

Huh, and here I thought they were all sanctity of life. The healer’s oh poor injured baby stuff in the first chapter sounded like he wouldn’t be too happy with just killing them.

I considered the conflicting opinions of the Healer and the Seeker. According to the information I had been given before making the choice to come here, the Healer had the right of it. Hostilities with the few remaining pockets of humans were all but over. The planet called Earth was as peaceful and serene as it looked from space, invitingly green and blue, wreathed in its harmless white vapors. As was the way of the soul, harmony was universal now.
The verbal dissension between the Healer and the Seeker was out of character. Strangely aggressive for our kind. It made me wonder. Could they be true, the whispered rumors

Please please please let that mean the seeker is actually right and healer asshole’s viewpoint is just the official standpoint.

Anyway, she then realizes she doesn’t remember the name of her last species, because apparently they don’t seem to actually learn language so much as piggyback off the host’s. That seems like it’d make keeping an organized government going extremely difficult. How do you even report back how things are going? Especially when they apparently have no language at all in their default brain slug form, so it’s not even like they can pop out and commune with each other.

I guess invasion must first involve one of their existing hosts arriving and studying the planet to learn the language(s), maybe abducting people for study? I wonder if languages actually learned in this manner are retained by the brain slug or if it’s the host’s brain holding the information. She certainly seems to have memories of her experiences, just not the words.

We’d used much simpler language than this, a silent language of thought that connected us all into one great mind. A necessary convenience when one was rooted forever into the wet black soil.
I could describe that species in my new human language. We lived on the floor of the great ocean that covered the entire surface of our world–a world that had a name, too, but that was also gone. We each had a hundred arms and on each arm a thousand eyes, so that, with our thoughts connected, not one sight in the vast waters went unseen.

This is cool enough I’m not going to ask why plants needed to see everything.

Then there’s some less well done stuff. She explains that souls don’t lie, which fits with their whole harmony thing, although of course seekers will lie in service of their job (the seeker is totally going to be evil) but between souls there was never reason for a lie. With my last species’ language of thought, it would have been impossible to lie, even had we wanted to.

But you just explained you never wanted to! How would you even know you couldn’t if souls never lie in the first place?

Then she goes on to say stories are totally different.

Sometimes, fact mixed with fiction so thoroughly that, though no lies were told, it was hard to remember what was strictly true.
When we thought of the new planet–Earth, so dry, so varied, and filled with such violent, destructive denizens we could barely imagine them–our horror was sometimes overshadowed by our excitement. Stories spun themselves quickly around the thrilling new subject.

Nope.

A species that doesn’t get lying would probably have some issues with fiction, but even if I was willing to give that one, a species that communicates in thought would not have the problems of fact and fiction getting confused. That’s something that happens when someone says a story and someone else doesn’t know it was a story.

Also, if this species did have storytelling, it would have a clear division, not run on embellishments which are basically a form of lying with no ill intent. Nothing with an anti-lying taboo would ever embellish things. If you’re going to tell stories at all, you’d just do that, not alter actual events.

Anyway, because of this she said she discounted the general chatter and just believed the official reports, but now she’s wondering if there’s something to the rumors:

Hosts whose minds could not be completely suppressed. Souls who took on the personality of the body, rather than the other way around.

Okay, so if your species can’t lie they would probably just say this stuff outright – it makes sense to us that the official reports would pretty things up because we’re a species that lies an awful lot.

Also, you can resolve this question very easily: ask them, because you just finished explaining that they can’t lie about it.

By the way, this whole time she’s pretending to still be asleep for some reason. Not sure how that fits with their whole no lying stuff.

Anyway, she decides that the healer is actually being a dick because he hates seekers like most people.

The more likely meaning of his censure was the distaste most of us felt for the Seeker’s Calling. Who would choose a life of conflict and pursuit? Who would be attracted to the chore of tracking down unwilling hosts and capturing them? Who would have the stomach to face the violence of this particular species, the hostile humans who killed so easily, so thoughtlessly? Here, on this planet, the Seekers had become practically a… militia–my new brain supplied the term for the unfamiliar concept. Most believed that only the least civilized souls, the least evolved, the lesser among us, would be drawn to the path of Seeker.

They’re the foundation of your entire society! You might as well hate healers because what sort of sick, sadistic monster would want to see injuries all day?

Apparently, Earth has caused seekers to get new respect, since apparently previous occupations haven’t been very violent but if they weren’t then why did the seekers have a reputation as a violent job only dumb thugs take?

The Seekers stood as a mighty shield, and the souls of this world were thrice-over indebted to them: for the safety they had carved out of the mayhem, for the risk of the final death that they faced willingly every day, and for the new bodies they continued to provide.
Now that the danger was virtually past, it appeared the gratitude was fading. And, for this Seeker at least, the change was not a pleasant one.

Well, yes, it’s not a pleasant one for any of them and not just this one seeker. Most people feel upset if you treat them as scum, then are nice while they’re in the process of actively saving you and getting killed doing so, then as soon as you’re halfway to safety you turn around and say that also, anyone who does what they do is unevolved scum.

Still, because the souls are so harmonious while they’re being judgmental assholes, our main character will totally do her best to help out the seeker.

I should not have been afraid. After all, I was called Wanderer now.

What? Seriously, why is she being named and taking strength from someone else naming her when everyone else appears to name themselves?

She learns that her body came there looking for other humans, specifically a cousin named Sharon. For some reason she finds this a real struggle to work out, and wonders if the brain was damaged, and this triggers fury from her host for some reason, and they realize she’s awake and the seeker welcomes her to the planet.

And we end!