My dear mantis, re your NRA-type questions about the ballistics table and Marsch not needing it:
Yes, he is a good shot. Once he makes adjustments--as Dr. Deadeye notes, in talking about the alien sun, "the sun-shimmer reinfor[ces] the deceptive and fantastic quality extension has in the green landscape under this black sky."
This is why, when he shoots at the "tire-tiger" (actually VRT's 'myopi-ized' abo catgirl), his bullet goes high, but then "everything snapped back into perspective; my 'scrub trees' were bushes, and the distance at which I had thought at least 250 yards was less than a third of that."
Victor, being native, probably wouldn't need to make the same
adjustments--provided he'd just keep his eyes open.
In other words the tables are devised to help Marsch draw a bead through alien ether on dinner a deux for him and his little would-be exo-catamite.
BUT there is this additional mystery. Marsch/VRT brings the book with the flyleaf-scrawled ballistics tables--A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ANIMALS OF SAINTE ANNE-- with him to Sainte Croix, despite the still prohibitively high cost of doing so (the cost is specifically mentioned). Why? If anybody is not going to need a guidebook about Annese fauna, it's Victor--so why does he have it and why does he bring it? To make him appear more genuinely non-familiar with the animals of his world and help him pass as relocated Terran Dr. JV Marsch? Dunno.
Also no closer to solving the bronzed viscera-guts-for-tots puzzle, but still thinking...
Robert Borski