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Oh, yeah, this is a really good chapter. It clears up a lot of the confusion that I had in the book. The chapter starts off with a couple of the gods in the CC being murdered. One is poisoned and the other is bludgeoned. All of the likely suspects are rounded up and given a brain-scan..... and the killer isn't found! Duh-duh-DUH! Can you guess who the killer is? Can you? Let me give you a hint: if this chapter had a name, it would be called either Sparkling Cyanide or Ten Little Indians or And Then There Were None. Yup, the murderer is none other than Sam! But how can that be, he was killed in Chapter 5? Well, it seems that there was a bit of trickeration on his part. He swapped bodies with some other dude after he was caught an eviscerated (for the life of me, I can't remember the name. It begins with a K.). His demon buddy Taraka saved his bacon as he was being killed. So he's still alive, and is intent on getting revenge and killing all of his enemies, like in all the movies you've seen where the guy who's killed by the baddies in the opening scene really isn't killed, then he comes back and gets his revenge.
One of the gods that Sam kills is Brahma. Apparently, Brahma is mucho importante, so Vishnu et. al. must replace him without anyone being the wiser. They snuff the two mortals who know that he's dead. Brahma was a big-time anti-accelerationist, so they decide that Kali must be the replacement. Yama is pissed big time, because once she swaps bodies, she's got a big ole Ding-Dong, and apparently Yama don't swing that way, eternal love or not. So he decides to join up with Sam and kick some ass as well. Sam and Yama join forces with Niritti, who as it turns out is some sort of priest (sounds like greek orthodox from his garb). Niritti has an army of golems or androids or something like that. They also join forces with some sort of elemental woman who controls the flow of a river-they use her to set a trap for the gods' army. There's a big-ass battle at Keenset, where the gods are mostly devastated, but Sam and Yama are defeated. Yama manages to kill his body with an explosive device that also beams himself into another hidden body. Sam is captured, and instead of being killed, he gets beamed up into the electromagnetic shield surrounding the planet, where he stays for 50 years until Yama recovers him, as told in chapter 1.
Sam and Yama start the acceleration of the plebes. They teach them a lot of advanced science (engineering, physics, and of course, the coolest research field of all, chemistry). The knowledge sticks, and the people begin to go through a renaissance. I've been wondering for a while what this book reminded me of. Certainly there are a lot of sci-fi stories like this. It's got a post-apocalyptic feel to it, and is a lot like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or sort of like Berserker Planet. But the more I think of it, it's a helluva lot like The Wounded Land, where the Clave play the exact same role as the gods.
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Danlo felt the growling emptiness of his belly and the terrible screaming hunger of every cell of his body. He remembered a word, then, waashkelay, which meant simply "meat hunger." He realized that on some deep level, the grains and pulses and other vegetable foods that he had eaten for so many years had never truly satisfied him. Always, buried in the tissues of his heart and belly, there had burned a deep desire to consume the meat of another animal and to taste the marvelous tang of blood once more. War in Heaven, p. 387.
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