Part Twenty, Chapter Six - Goldilocks and the Three Commissars

Gris spends the next day in a despondent funk, thinking only of the woman he purchased as his personal property.  He hangs around her section of the villa, spying on her through a hole in the fence around her private gardens, catching a brief glimpse of her popping outside for some fresh air.  He sits in the salon all night hoping she'll return to him, to no avail.  He has fitful nightmares that leave him wondering if Utanc was just a dream.

Just a reminder, this is not a crappy romance novel, and Gris is an extraterrestrial agent supervising (and attempting to sabotage) a mission to prepare planet Earth for an alien invasion.

The day after that, Gris sleeps until noon and returns to his stalking.  He spies Utanc in the garden with those two little boys she took as servants, having tea and telling stories.  She relates the tale of Goldilocks, an unscrupulous pig-woman whose capitalist tendencies led her to break into a house and eat all of the porridge, only to learn that the homeowners were a trio of hardened commissars.  They tracked her, and, well...

 The two small boys strained forward.  "Yes?"  "Yes?"

Utanc smiled dreamily.  Then she said, "So they caught her and (bleeped) her and everybody had a lot of fun."

The two small boys began to laugh.  They laughed and laughed and so did Utanc.  The little boys got to laughing so hard they were rolling around on the grass, holding their stomachs.

D'aww, stories involving rape are always such hits with the kiddies.  Especially when told by a simple, shy peasant girl who barely escaped rape at the hands of a mob of soldiers and now has a pathological fear of menfolk.

Honestly?  I can't say with any confidence whether this is more of Hubbard's lousy writing or him foreshadowing a big reveal that Utanc is some sort of spy.  As for why Utanc would need to be a spy, or why she even exists in this narrative in the first place, see "lousy writing" above.

Gris gets a glimpse of Utanc's naked armpit and nearly has a seizure, so let's hope he never gets into the Touhou fandom.  But that night, one of the little boys delivers a message from Utanc, requesting that Gris bathe, put on his turban, and wait in the salon.

Only my stubborn sense of duty compels me to cover the next chapter.  That and pettiness - I had to read it, so you get to hurt too.


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