I was flabbergasted at my tremendous luck! Of course, I'd known for some time that Heller was doing something with spores to clean up the planet's air, but I hadn't realized he was going away so soon. I just sat there gaping. The Gods had decided to smile upon me at last!
We're about a fifth of the way into Book Six and we still have learned nothing about the Voltarian pantheon, beside that there's a god of voyages, whossname. Let's call him Jeff.
Bang-Bang I could discount. Without Heller to direct him, he was nothing.
Bang-Bang, the guy who Gris saw rig a parking garage to explode, wiping out three cars of federal agents. Bang-Bang, the guy who killed Gris' snipers right in front of him during Heller's race, the reason why Gris is getting stuck with a necrophiliac hitman.
Oh, he's nothing.
I could hardly believe it. I was actually going to be able to get the Countess Krak killed without any trouble at all!
Gris has evidently forgotten how terrified he was of Krak before she teamed up with Heller.
Not only killed but her dead body raped!
Why is this important?
So that's the first paragraph. Now let's spend the remaining four pages of the chapter on what's really important: Gris curing "lesbians" of their misguided sexual preference with the power of his penis.
Pinchy calls him into the living room, Gris lets his clients watch him disrobe, and on with the show - seriously, Miss Pinch and Candy are hanging around to watch, Candy "eagerly nodding in rhythm." Unfortunately Gris has some difficulty with the lesbian "husband" Ralph, who passes out with her eyes open and staring. This throws Gris off enough that he "off-loaded quick" and goes to sit in the garden, feeling vaguely horrified with himself. Pinch gives him some champagne as a pick-me-up and orders him to finish the job. The first thing he does is check that Ralph has a pulse (after Ralph talks to him when he returns - he checks the pulse of an animate, speaking woman!).
I walked around to the other side of the bed. The lesbian wife, Butter, was lying there sort of panting and eyeing me.
The girl said, "I'm no virgin. I let a goat do it to me once up on a farm. It wasn't much good but he got my maidenhead.
Why does the author think it's important that Gris properly deflower these deluded "lesbians?" Why is he taking a moment to explain why it won't be the case with Miss Butter here? And why did he choose bestiality to justify this?
So shove away but I don't think I'll (bleep) like Ralph did."
Miss Pinch laughed.
Candy grinned.
Ralph, watching, began to bob her head knowingly.
Butter screamed and convulsed. Then her eyes rolled straight up in her head and she stiffened out like a poker.
I was staring at blank, sightless eyes in a perfectly still face on a rigid body..
My stomach turned over.
I pulled off
Wait, "off?" Not "out?"
and raced away.
I got to the bathroom. I began to throw up in the toilet bowl. I threw up everything I'd eaten for days and still tried.
So Gris, a certified murderer and rapist, is feeling nauseated after a bit of consensual sex. Now he must put his towering intellect to work at figuring out why. It's not the champagne, because he was feeling strange before he drank it. He knows that Prahd's enhancements must have warped his mind, since Freud insists that everything is based on sex, but Gris does a mental check and concludes that no, he still likes shooting songbirds and spitting on the riffraff. So gee, could anything else be putting him off?
I got to thinking about Torpedo Fiaccola. His psychologist had recommended becoming a necrophile. So obviously, from this evidence and much other psychology reading I had done, it was quite a normal thing to have coitus with a corpse. So that could not be the basis of this strange reaction.
I just couldn't get to the bottom of it.
Phew! Thought we might get some character development with Gris having second thoughts about psychology, maybe even questioning some of its assumptions. Then the author could make a big deal about how even Soltan Gris finds such a warped field of pseudoscience to be distasteful. Glad we dodged that bullet.
When Miss Pinch retrieves Gris from the bathroom for his nightly duties, he asks if Butters survived the night. Then he asks the walking, talking woman "Are you a live girl?"
We're supposed to feel suspense over whether or not the good guys can overcome Gris' machinations, remember. The bad guy is asking clearly animate people whether they're dead or not, and we're supposed to view him as a credible threat.
Pinch sends Gris to take a shower, and the Apparatus agent has another out-of-character moment when he takes care to wash up properly.
Miss Pinch finally came into the bathroom again. "For Christ's sake, Inkswitch, come on!"
She got me out and towelled me and got me into the other room.
"No," I said. "Wait a moment." I found my hands were very shaky.
"Look," I begged, "promise me you'll keep moving."
And so the author of what the Literary Guild called "an extraordinary ten-volume epic rich with intergalactic intrigue and wry social commentary" ends the chapter with a necrophilia joke.
Back to Chapter Three
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