NATURALLY, MAGGOT-MOUND construction played havoc with existing watercourses. And stripping the ground bare did not make for gentle runoff. Whatever the Maggot equivalents of civil engineers were, they had got it wrong in this space between their tunnel-mounds. Dry gullies turned to raging watercourses. True, thought Chip, it was probably a temporary situation. The tunnel-mounds were obviously still being built, and getting wider. Eventually the Maggot engineers would just use up the wasteland altogether and join one tunnel-mound to the next. Chip had once seen an orbital photograph of the Magh' scorpiaries. They looked like red cow patties with spiralling arms.
Chip had been glad when the rain started. His water bottle had been nearly dry. For food he was down to an "energy bar," which took more energy to chew than it provided. But he supposed if the worst came to the worst he could eat Maggot too, like the rats and bats. He was sure that if he could have cooked it, he could have made it edible—even tasty. A little garlic, some spices and a fire and it would have probably fetched four hundred dollars a portion at Chez Henri-Pierre, especially if called Navarin de Magh' au poivre vert. At present, however, Raw Maggot was the only choice on the menu. And that did not appeal, no matter what Fal said about it. Not even calling it Magh' Sushi de elementare could have sold it.
But it hadn't been a brief shower, and Chip was growing tired of being a one-man tent to a bunch of bickering rats and bats. His issue poncho had kept them all dry. Well, sort of dry. Like most raingear it had a seam around the neck ensuring a slow Chinese water-torture drip. For near on two hours they sat there, until the rain lifted in the late afternoon.
The rain was not welcomed by the Maggots, either. The minute it stopped, Maggots appeared on the outside of the tunnel-mounds, doing repairs. Clinging as they did to the outside of the tunnels, the Maggots had a wonderful vantage point. The bats flew off to disable them . . . and flew back. "They're blind. They don't have eyes. We can press on."
Unfortunately that wasn't true either. Between the hill slope of the wasteland and the scorpiary walls was a lovely new lake of muddy water.
"We'd better get swimming," said Chip, not happy with the idea. He hadn't swum much. Trips to the coast were for Shareholders. Part of his Company-sponsored education had included "swimming." But it had stopped at the level of "drown-proofing." Chip couldn't even see the other side of this body of water. It was lost around the corner of the Maggot-mound spiral.
"The water looks cold," said Melene. Gingerly, she touched it with her tail tip. "Freezing!"
"One must be philosophical about this," said Doc, looking as if this he'd rather be anything but.
"Water's not good for you," pronounced Fal, edging away. "Shrinks the skin. As pleasingly rotund as I am, I can't afford that."
Fal eyed the bats. "Can't you give us a lift?"
"You're far too heavy," said Eamon, sizing him up.
"We could sit on Chip's head," said Phylla hopefully. "He could ferry us across, one by one."
"I'm not sure I can swim that far," replied Chip. "Not even once, let alone six times." He sighed heavily. "But it's swim or die, I'm afraid."
"We bats can fly," stated Eamon. "I do not really know why we've stuck together so long anyway."
"Eamon," protested Siobhan, "we cannot just be leaving them!" She was plainly incensed, to dare to challenge the big bat directly. Normally, only Bronstein would do that.
"Be easy, Siobhan," said Bronstein, perching on Chip's shoulder. She wrinkled her face in that exquisitely grotesque manner by which bats expressed a sneer. "Eamon can leave if he has not the stomach for this."
The big bat rose to that fly beautifully. "I can fight with the best, and certainly long after you've decided to wing your way hence!"
"To be sure, you can fight," said Bronstein, dismissively. "But can you die well?"
"I can fight and die as well and as nobly as any son of the revolution! I can die with both courage and dignity." The bat spread his wings, assuming what he apparently considered a dramatic and heroic stance. To Chip, he looked like Dracula suffering from hemorrhoids.
"It's eating too much Maggot," snickered Pistol, mimicking the stance. "It's made me constipated too. Got any laxatives for us, Doc?"
Chip suddenly hooked on. "Die artistically." That's what she'd said. "Shut up, Pistol." He winked hastily at the one-eyed rat. Then he turned on the affronted-looking bat, and said "You can die with courage. But can you die with drama?"
"What?!"
"With great agonized howls and much flip-flopping before you are finally still," said Chip.
Eamon was affronted. "I? Die like some coward slave! Have you lost your wits, primate?"
"I knew he couldn't do it," Chip said to Bronstein in a stage whisper. Bronstein furled her wings with her own dramatic, dismissive flair. "Yes," she sniffed. "Clear enough, 'tis beyond him."
"Yeah, we rats will show you how it's done. Leave it to us!" Pistol hadn't figured out what was going on. But he could play along as well as the next rat.
"Bah!" hissed Eamon. "Anything you rats can do we bats can do better."
"Anything?"
"Anything!" Eamon paused. "Except drink and fornicate."
"We always master the important things," pronounced Fal.
It was, Chip decided, the finest dramatic production ever to grace the planet of Harmony And Reason. Perhaps it was the nature of the rats' downloads. Whatever the reason, the rodents were actors par excellence. The fight between Fal, Nym and Pistol was worthy of the Globe Theater itself. Chip was glad he managed to land himself a brief cameo appearance, "dying" quickly, so he could watch the rest, peeping as he lay still on the muddy shore.
They had a captive audience. It was certainly the best show the two surviving Maggots of the patrol would see for the rest of their lives. At the rate the water around the barbed-wire bound Maggots was rising . . . "the rest of their lives" was about three minutes off. He hoped that Eamon had finished dying by then. Even the fat lady in that opera that the Company had bussed the Vats off to watch as part of their "cultural education" had died quicker, and with less histrionics. With less noise, even.
Finally Eamon, with a last despairing shriek, flopped over backwards with Chip's knife apparently protruding from his chest. The water was rising steadily. Eamon should have chosen to die a bit higher up. If Bronstein and Doc were right, the audience was far larger than the two victims. It wouldn't do to have the late leading bat get to his feet, just because his ears were getting wet. But Eamon lay and allowed the water to creep higher and higher. The Maggot eyes were lost in the muddy water. Only Eamon's nose protruded when the rest of the rest of the dramatic company got to their feet.
"I' faith. Do you think he really did it?" whispered Doll in a hushed voice.
Chip was one of the three who ran into the water's edge to see.
Eamon sat up. Spat water. "Here's your knife, Connolly. I cut myself on the damned thing. Bah. I hate getting wet, indade. Well, could you rats have done better?"
He got the standing ovation he deserved.
Still wearing their chitin "shoes" they retreated from the scene, in case another Maggot patrol came to check on the previous one. The rats, nature's own looters, had carted away two of the Maggot patrol killed before the "command performance."
Well . . .
They carried them about thirty yards, before begging Chip to give them a hand. He did, simply because hungry rats are dangerous rats. The shrew genes gave them phenomenal metabolic rates. They hid out on the hillock, amid a slabby tumble of rocks. They chose a good high spot, but it proved unnecessary. At about midnight the Magh' engineers must have arranged some essential drainage, and the huge dam's level began going down.
And not one Maggot came looking for them.
"Now that we have shaken our pursuit," said Bronstein, "we can rest, recuperate and plan."
One of the rats burped. "Got another bit of Maggot going spare there, anyone?" asked fat Fal.
"Do you rats never think of anything but your stomachs?" snapped Bronstein.
"Hur. Of course. Are you offering, sweetie?" Pistol gave her a lewd wink.
"Nice legs," opined Nym. "Shame about the face." Bronstein swiveled her face and gave the huge rat a look that combined irritation with wariness. The trouble with Nym was that it was hard to tell when he was being serious.
"Stop teasing Bronstein, you guys," said Chip. He was little low on humor with the guzzling rats himself. Half an energy bar had provided a challenge for his teeth, and precious little for his stomach.
Suddenly Bronstein's face broke into a nasty, toothy smile. "I hope the gluttons are enjoying their Maggot-feast. It is their last one, to be sure. You do realize, rats, that we can't kill any more Maggots."
"Why not, Bronstein?" demanded Fal. "Do you have a conscience suddenly? I will not stop for that!" His nose twitched. "Maggot's not a patch on a fine grasshopper, mind you, but it is still better than that muck the Company fed us in the trenches. And there is plenty of it."
"You fool. The minute we kill one they'll be after us again. And there are a million Maggots to every one of us."
She had the satisfaction of knowing she'd silenced them. Then, Doc spoke up. "Indeed there is more."
"What!"
"Well, imprimis there is eating. Then, as the ancient Pistol indicated, secundum, there is sex, and tertius—I said there was more—there is strong drink. These are the philosophical contentions of rats."
Bronstein buried her face in her wings.
Reason's moon was bigger than Earth's. Even the crescent sliver was enough for Chip to see the still-working construction-Maggots. The tunnel-mound was getting wider and higher.
"I still think it's a crazy plan," he said, looking at the dark bulk of the mound. In daylight, with ropes and things it would be hard enough to climb. They wanted him to undertake a six hundred foot climb . . . as soon as the moon was low enough to have this wall in darkness. And then, on the other side—six hundred feet down again. By that point the moon should be down.
"All right. Stay here forever then," hissed Eamon.
"Until you starve or get caught and eaten," Behan backed Eamon up.
"Until I lose my temper with you," said Bronstein, far more frighteningly. "Now climb!"
Chip climbed. So did the rats. It was easier for them as their paws were smaller, enabling them to use tiny pockmarks in the rock. Their strength to weight ratio was also much better than Chip's. The rats' problem was simply reach. A handhold Chip could grab, they had to do three extra moves to get to. Chip just had to face up to being too big and too wide and too heavy for the climb. He still had to do it though, feeling for handholds and footholds in the darkness. The rats could see better than he could in low light conditions, and of course the bats, to whom it mattered not at all, were at home in total darkness.
They'd chosen a zigzag Maggot construction ramp, which began perhaps thirty feet above ground level. Without that they really would have battled. The ramp was about eight inches wide and zigged and zagged its way at a forty-degree angle up nearly a third of the mound's height. For the rats it was a highway. An uphill highway so that they could complain, but a highway all the same. For Chip it was sweating terror and purgatory. He edged his way along, upwards, upwards, not daring to look down . . . again. He'd nearly plummeted off into the hungry darkness when he'd risked that first brief look. He'd gone all giddy and had to clutch frantically while Siobhan flapped around him like an annoying mosquito, telling him to "be climbing not shaking."
The rats, by now near the top of the ramp, were pretty full of their climbing ability. "Easy this. Methinks 'tis like a Sunday afternoon stroll, if it wasn't uphill," said Mel.
"The uphill will waste me away," grunted Fal. "I'm sweating my whoreson chops off."
"You've plenty to spare, before your waist's away," said Doll.
Then Eamon and O'Niel had fluttered up. "Over the side. And be quick about it! There is a builder-Maggot coming!"
"Uh. Over the side?"
"Now!" snapped the bat.
They had to cling there in the darkness, while just above them the Maggot click-sauntered past. By the time they got back onto the ledge, the rats were considerably chastened. There was nothing like hanging by your hands in the darkness over a huge drop to make you more appreciative of having something under your feet. At the top of the zigzag ramp, there was an entry into the Maggot-mound. They avoided this and had to traverse across a hundred yards or so to the next ramp.
From being near-vertical, where Chip had had to use tiny holds to hang on, the angle of the mound had eased off. He discovered that once he pushed away from clinging like a slime mold to the wall, he could actually stand on his feet on the tiny knobs. He was getting quite blasé about it when a knob of Magh' adobe decided it wasn't designed for a hundred and sixty pounds of human. He managed to jerk back. Overcorrected. He scrabbled for a real handhold . . . started to slide.
Claws dug viciously into his back. Several sets. "Get a hold, Connolly," huffed some bat behind him, obviously through clenched teeth. Whether by bat-lift or luck, his slipping foot found purchase and his hand one of the occasional Magh' adobe struts. Chip clung there, panting. From far below came the sharp sound of the knob hitting the bottom, and bouncing away.
"I nearly gave myself a hernia," grumbled Eamon, settling on the wall. "What did you go and do a silly thing like that for, Siobhan Illich-Hill?"
"You and Longfang O'Niel were already clinging to him when I joined in."
"O'Niel, for what did you do crazy like that!?"
"Foin," said the normally taciturn O'Niel, "make it my fault then. When you know it was yourself who was first, Eamon."
"Whoever it was, I owe you," interrupted Chip.
"Well, if you owe me . . . then I have favor to ask," said Eamon.
"Ask away." Chip was feeling sick. Luckily, there was nothing much in his stomach to come up.
"Just don't tell everyone. The other Batties would expel me," muttered Eamon. He fluttered off into the darkness.
Chip stared after him. He'd known the bats were divided up into a jillion factions. They seemed to compensate for their infrequent mating by devoting their energies to political disputes. But he'd never once imagined that even the surly Eamon belonged to the extremist "Bat Bund."
"Ha," said Siobhan, landing on the strut. "He forgets I am not of the Bund. And I was here too—precisely because Bronstein didn't trust him alone with a human. And he was the first to try to hold you! All big talk, that Eamon. His mouth will get him into trouble his teeth can't get him out of, one day. Now, you must go on, Chip. Bronstein reckons that you and the rats must be off the mound by first light, and that is a bare four hours off."
Chip pressed on, somehow. As the angle eased, so did the climbing. He dislodged a few more fragments of Magh' adobe, but by now it was not enough to make him fall.
Eventually, Chip and the rats stood on the very top of the Maggot tunnel-mound. They had climbed the entire way in near total moonshadow. Now they could see a last moon-sliver poking its way into a shimmer of sea, perhaps thirty-five miles off. Thirty-five miles with many many stark folds of Maggot tunnel-mounds between them and it.
The bats hung in the air, twisting about them. "It's a long way to the sea, Bronstein," said one of the rats quietly. It was Fal. Obviously the distance, and perhaps the climbs that lay between them and it, had overawed the normally bumptious rat's nature.
"I' faith. A long and wearisome way." Doll looked at her paws, as if asking whether they were up to this.
"To be sure," agreed Bronstein. "It is a long way, for you earthbound creatures. And then we'll have to wait our chances for the force field to go down. Find driftwood. Make a raft. Do you rats have any other ideas? If not, you'd better get to climbing down."
Chip sighed, and began walking forward. "No other ideas, Michaela. We'd never get through the front lines. The sea is the only option. But it is a damned long shot."
"So is our surviving behind enemy lines. And what else can we do?"
"Nothing." Chip frowned. "But a length of rope and a grappling hook or even a few spikes would up my chances of making it."
"We'll look, then," stated Bronstein. "The forager-Maggots don't take metal away. Perhaps we can find something. But I think you are wishing for a great deal."
"Right now, all I'm wishing for is getting down from here fast, without getting down too fast," said Chip, looking nervously into the darkness ahead of him.
The climb down was the same again, but worse. It was also nearly the end of Melene. The rat-girl was the lightest and smallest of them, and had found the climb the easiest. Then, having paused to help Phylla, she missed her footing. Plunging headfirst past Fal she frantically tried to grab him. Fal's prehensile tail wrapped around her. The plump Fal stood as firm as a pylon as she found holds.
"I' faith, my hempseed lass, I know you like exotic positions. But this is a bit too bizarre a tail-twisting even for me. Besides I'm getting a little too fat for such athletic cliff-ledge frolics. Couldn't you have waited a few minutes? Was your desire for my body just too inflamed, to even hang on for another moment?"
Mel was too shaken to say anything at first. Then she started to swear. Chip was impressed by the extent of her vocabulary.
They headed on down. Chip fell-slithered the last five yards or so, but there were no bones broken, and no Maggot came storming out of the dark to see who was making such a racket. And besides, lying there, groaning, he made a softer landing for Doc.
"Uh! Did you have to land on me?"
"My apologies, Chip. When I heard you fall I came with all haste to see if I could render you any assistance. Alas, thesis became antithesis. As always, the unity of opposites is matched by their struggle."
As Doc said this, Phylla landed on Chip too. "Sorry. A bit steep that last bit," she apologized. "The handholds seem to have been rubbed smooth."
"Now, are you all right, Connolly?" asked Doc, as Phylla removed her feet from his midriff. "Can you move?"
"Ooh. Damn right I can move. And even if I can't, I'm going to, before fat Fal is the next to come tumbling down!"