XIV: “Now Will You Talk?” explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Reality and Illusion

  The inversion of objects and the Maintainer hidden in plain sight as a sculpture explore the theme of deceptive appearances and hidden truths.

• Love and Connection

  Lili's act of inverting the glove for Bruce is driven by love, and Greta's deduction is motivated by her concern for the group.

Characters to notice

• Kaby

  Cold-bloodedly interrogates Lili, slapping her and threatening to use the Invertor to torture her.

• Lili Foster

  Subjected to Kaby's interrogation; she had previously inverted the left-hand glove into a right-hand glove and hidden the Major Maintainer as a sculpture.

• Greta Forzane

  Narrator who deduces the truth about the inverted glove and the Maintainer, then sneaks into Surgery to invert the sculpture back.

• Doc

  Referenced as having tried to communicate the idea of inverting the box to disarm the bomb.

• Bruce Marchant

  Referenced in connection with the glove Lili inverted for him.

Key passages

• “Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.”

  We are shaped and refined by the very things that come from us or that we create.

  Opening epigraph reflecting the theme of self-destruction or self-creation through one's own actions.

• “I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.”

  I can comprehend anger or even a calculated rage, but Kaby's detached cruelty is deeply disturbing.

  Greta's reaction to Kaby's methodical interrogation of Lili.

• “It turns the big parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin—your eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it—becoming the lining of a little hole that's half-filled with your hair.”

  The Invertor exposes your internal organs by turning your body inside out, leaving your skin as the lining of a cavity.

  Kaby's description of the Invertor's effect, used to threaten Lili.

• “I once heard Doc say your liver is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or learn to point to it instinctively”

  Doc once remarked that your liver is more alien and remote than the stars, since you coexist with it but never perceive it directly.

  Greta's reflection on the horror of having one's internal organs exposed.

• “Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science boys call it; I’ve heard of it being used in surgery on the highly asymmetric Martians”

  Scientists call it rotation through the fourth dimension; it has been used surgically on asymmetrical Martians.

  Greta's explanation of the inversion process, linking it to science fiction concepts.