"NOW I FINALLY UNDERSTAND what Hegel really meant," Doc said quietly. He adjusted his pince-nez and then, in a slight singsong, recited: " `Spirit conceived in the element of pure thought is meaningless unless it also becomes manifest in something other than its pure self and returns to itself out of such otherness. The Absolute is a relation of pure love in which the sides we distinguish are not really distinct. But it is of the essence of Spirit not to be a mere thing of thought, but to be concrete and actual.' "
He began to adjust his pince-nez again; but, instead, simply took them off and wiped his snout wearily. "It was too late. Without surgery it was always too late. Even with it, too late by hours."
The group standing around Phylla's still body were all silent.
Then Nym sighed. "Out, out, brief candle. Well, I suppose I'd better go and fetch some brandy. Or would anyone prefer some wine?"
"You're going to get drunk?" Siobhan's voice rose to a squawk of outrage.
Doc nodded. "Of course. The observance of rites for the dead are what set us apart from the animals."
"But that is to behave like animals, indade!" Eamon sounded genuinely appalled.
"Methinks if we behaved like the animals we came from, we'd eat her," replied Fal reasonably. "Besides, I thought you'd be in favor of a wake. It is a fine Irish tradition."
"It is?" This obviously made a strong impression on a bat who felt himself to be, among other things, heir to the mantle of De Valera.
Fal nodded vigorously. "You don't have to attend, but not to do so is a mark of scanty respect for the dead."
Even Bronstein was caught half-cocked. "But is not our custom . . ."
"It is ours," said Pistol with finality. "And our Phylla was first and foremost a rat."
Virginia sidled up to Chip. "What are they doing to that dead rat?" she whispered, staring in fascinated horror.
"Laying her out. Maybe not the way we humans would understand it, but the way a rat would." Chip's tone was very dry. "Phylla would have appreciated it. Sort of a rat joke."
"What do I do?" she whispered, unable to stop looking at the bizarre rite.
"Well, you can behave like a typical good little Shareholder, look disgusted at the antics of the proles and go off and sleep somewhere. Or you can stay and pay your respects. She only died because she went to rescue you and that smelly Pricklepuss." Chip walked away, leaving her between anger and tears.
"Are you sure I have to drink this filthy stuff?" Eamon eyed the glass of colorless brandy with extreme suspicion.
Nym nodded. "Phylla would have appreciated it. Some with each toast. It's tradition."
The bat looked wary. "Toast? Are you going to cook her . . ." the bat shuddered, "and then eat her? Or do you mean drink a toast? And since when is it tradition?"
"As far back as anyone can remember," came the sententious reply from Fal.
"About six months," added Nym. "We didn't have soft-cyber implants before that, so no clear memories. And now hush. Pistol is about to start the toasts."
The one-eyed rat raised his glass to the dead. "Phylla was as near to a wife to me as we rats have. I chose her because she was the best screw in boot camp 301. Ask anyone in Alpha Company."
"To the best bonk in boot camp!" The rats raised their glasses and drank. Except for the one-eyed rat. He took his glass and poured some into the mouth of the deceased.
Eamon watched in horror. " 'Tis debauched and debased you rats all are. Just like that rat was in life!"
"Hear, hear! Well said! What a fine eulogy! Go and give her a drink then."
The big bat looked stunned. They weren't joking. He flapped over to the corpse. "To the rat that propositioned even me." He poured some of the firewater into her mouth. At least it got him out of drinking some of the stuff. All round the circle rats cheered and drank. "To the rat-girl that even propositioned a bat!"
Standing next to Eamon, Pistol sniffed. Wiped his long nose with a paw and said, thickly, "Thank you, bat. I'd forgotten about that. You know, you're not a bad fellow for a bat." He sighed. "Such a lovely corpse did you ever see!"
Fal began to tell a story about Phylla, which, were it true, would have frightened Casanova and Don Juan into early retirement and made Dicey Riley look like a temperance union member.
Chip looked at the late-Chairman's daughter. She was still standing there. Red as a beetroot, with eyes nearly as wide as her Fluff's. But she'd stayed. And she managed to take a small sip from the glass with each toast. Well. She had more steel in her than he'd thought. He walked over to her. "Have you got your toast ready?"
"Me?" she squeaked.
"Yes, you, Miss Chairman's daughter. They'll be very insulted if you don't. I notice Pricklepuss has sloped off."
"Will you stop calling me that! I can't help who my father was. And I'd better go and see that the Professor is all right."
"Siobhan had a word with him, I mean her, on her way out. She'll have told him, her, it, not to go too far because of the booby traps. The alien'll be fine here. This place is safe enough. And at least you had a father."
"If you could call him that! I would have given anything for a real father, a father who loved me. Even after—" She fell silent, not wanting Chip to know about her own soft-cyber implant. The bitter thought never passed her lips. A real father would have cared for me even after a horse-riding accident left me brain damaged. My father might have had all the means in this world, but he didn't give me the only thing I wanted in those blurred days.
"All of us Vat-kids wanted that too," Chip said sourly.
"You had that! You had fathers or mothers who cared enough, dreamed enough to send their children twenty-four light-years to found a new utopia, away from the interference and bureaucracy of Earth." Even as she said it she realized she was echoing her father.
"The tissue donor wasn't my father. He was myself. And if this is Utopia for anyone but Shareholders, then I'm a rat's backside."
She pinched her lips together. Then she said, "Anyone can become a Shareholder, Connolly."
He snorted. "Not in my lifetime. Now pay attention. Melene is about to finish her toast. I reckon Pistol will call on you or Bronstein to say something next."
"But I don't know what to say!"
"How gutless and ineffectual can you be?" snapped Chip, cutting her to the core. "Think of something. She died to keep your Professor alive."
"—on the bar counter in the enlisted-rats pub. Three of them!"
The rats cheered. Even a few of the bats did.
"I'll just ask Don Fluffy to say a few words," said Pistol.
The tiny galago rose magnificently to the occasion. "She was a symbol so sexy! And also of an appetite the most insatiable—magnifico! too magnifico!—and a tail so enticing and enchanting." Fluff planted one little hand over his heart and waved the other about dramatically. "Yet! She was a heroine—of courage the most great!—and her heart was as big as a lion! In my dreams she will dance for me, the dance of the extreme privacy. My machogalagohood is rampant at the very thought—but my heart is rent! Torn in my breast!" He began plucking at the fur on his chest. "Ai! Woe is me!"
"Well shed, little one," O'Niel said thickly. "As foine as a bat she were in that last fight." Hiccup. "Calls for shong, me boyos! `Wrap the bat-wing round me boys . . .' " He fell off the perch he hung from. Brandy was something the bat had never met before. But nonetheless the bats began to sing, "Wrap the bat-flag round me boys, to die is far more sweet, with batdom's noble emblem, boys to be my winding sheet. . . ."
The bats couldn't sing very well. But they sang with feeling. The rats even joined in. And sang along with "We shall Overcome," "The Rifles of the IRA," "Solidarity Forever," "A Nation Once Again," and their own version of an old Scots favorite:
"We were bought and sold for Company gold,
Such a parcel of rogues is a nation . . ."
Virginia found herself sobbing quietly, and joining in the chorus of songs she'd never heard before. Outside of books this was her first encounter with the emotions of real—people. She found herself singing the words with fervor, even though she barely understood them. When Pistol called on her it was not hard at all to go forward, and simply embrace the dead rat, tears streaming down her face. The fiery brandy was a libation freely given and a prayer for forgiveness.
"We should give her a send-off fitting of a bat," said Eamon thickly to Pistol and Chip.
"She was a rat, all rat. Not a bat."
"Indade, 'twould have to be some thing a rat could appreciate too. A low joke. But she died like a true bat even if she was a rat."
"I'd like to have buried her under a pile of dead Maggots, to take with her for travel-food," growled Chip. "And good bottle or two for the road."
"Why don't we do just that?" mused Bronstein slowly. "What would you say if we gave her the explosive send-off of a bat, with a booby trap rigged so she takes a fair number of Maggots with her. With a couple of quarts of alcohol so she burns along with them."
Melene, swaying slightly, joined them. "I'd say it would be a fine and fitting send-off!"
Pistol nodded. "Heh. She'd have loved it. And it would take a fair number of the blue-bottle rogues with her. Where are we going to do it?"
Bronstein, as always, had been thinking ahead. "On the other side of the mound. That'll help the Maggots to believe we're heading in the opposite direction. We'll fly her body over. If you can rig us some kind of harness, Chip? Somehow we can spread the load between all of us."
Chip looked across at a plumpish bat sitting on the floor with a wing around Doll's shoulders, a glass in the other wing-claw and the bat version of "The West's Awake" on his lips. "Do you think O'Niel is fit to fly?"
Midmorning, and Chip's sleep was disturbed by a distant explosion. So. Phylla had some Maggots for the road on that long staircase to Valhalla. The way those bats used explosives she was probably a fair way up that road already. And it would buy them some time.