For Pete’s sake! This is a meaningless “mystery.” It’s no mystery at all, in fact. Recall, back near the beginning of the novel, Trigger’s first introduction to Repulsive:
Trigger looked at the little item with some revulsion. Dark green, marbled with pink streakings, it lay on the table between them, rather like a plump leech a foot and a half long. It was motionless except that the end nearest her shifted in a short arc from side to side, as if the thing suffered from a very slow twitch.
Of course Trigger finds plasmoids repulsive! They look like big leeches. Who doesn’t find leeches repulsive?
What’s happened is that Trigger’s reaction — common to 99% of the human race — has been over-explained by Schmitz. Way over-explained. And the reason he did it is simply because he was too close to the story. He’d spent so much time and effort thinking through the logic of Trigger’s behavior (and Repulsive’s) that he simply lost sight of the fact that a lot of it was now unnecessary stage-setting intruding into the play.
The only way this would not be true would be if the material interjected was somehow relevant in a different manner. But in fact it isn’t. There might be an interesting tale to be told — somewhere else — about Trigger’s childhood, and her father’s girlfriend, and her feelings about kittens and horses. But it’s completely irrelevant to this novel and just gets in the way.
Okay. That’s the end of my commentary on the editing which I did for the 4-volume Hub series. I’m not going to have any comments on the fourth volume of the series, because Guy and I did no editing in that volume beyond assembling the stories, proof-reading them, and (probably — I don’t honestly remember) removing excessive exclamation points and making a few other such minor changes.
Eric Flint