Doc groaned. Ginny bent low over the rat on her lap. “Otherness without subject is not-being, and this sort of not-being is omnipresent like Melene’s tail . . .”
The rat suddenly sat bolt upright, with his eyes wide and unfocussed. “Siobhan! Look out!”
Then he keeled over sideways, muttering, “Necessarily utterly capricious . . . that’s rat-girls.”
His audience didn’t hold it against him. Melene appeared too worried to take it out on him anyway, and far too relieved that he was showing more signs of regaining consciousness. The smallest of the rats had been untowardly silent since Chip had emerged carrying Doc in his arms. She simply patted him gently.
Other than that, only O’Niel was near at hand, as all the others had gone to explore the huge brood-chamber. The bat was busy rigging demolition charges and a webwork of expedient mines around the iris-door. Opening it was going to have devastating effects on whatever came through.
Ginny and Melene waited for more words or movement, but Doc had slipped back into unconsciousness.
* * *
“There is no way out of here.” Chip flopped gloomily down next to Melene, Ginny and the still unconscious Doc. “Look, Ginny. I’ve got say something. I’m really sorry about what I said . . . and did . . . back there. I just didn’t want you to get killed.”
She started to ease her frozen expression. Then he duffed it again. But he’d been brooding on it. Brooding on apologies when you don’t think you’re wrong is really a poor idea.
“It was that stupid Crotchet’s fault.”
* * *
Her face twitched and she assumed the expression of a perfect ice maiden. Her aristocratic nose came up. She surveyed the scruffy Vat as one might the discovery of a cockroach at the bottom of a milkshake. The worst of it was that a small part of her mind said that he might be right.
Chip proceeded to make a bad matter worse. “I don’t understand why you can’t see that Pricklepuss was bad news. I mean I daresay all of these guys with ‘Crotchet-made’ chips in their heads can’t see anything wrong with the Korozhet, but you’re so bright . . .”
“GO AWAY!” she said fiercely.
He got up, his resentment plainly burning with a thousand-candlepower flame.
She saw him kick a towering Maggot grub-rack. And heard him swear and clutch his foot.
A bat swooped down from the roof. It spoke briefly to Chip, and then fluttered away upward. It kept going up and up and up until it was joined by the other two. She watched them head for a corner. And then they disappeared.
* * *
Bronstein was sure that it was a ventilation gap. It was only desperation that had gotten them to try sonar on the roof. There was certainly no other obvious way out, except for a long narrow chute that spiraled down from the center of the roof. There was a problem with going up that way . . . a steady stream of what could only be Maggot-eggs was coming down it. The eggs, of course were overflowing the ramp. Obviously their tenders had been summoned away.
Getting in hadn’t been easy. And getting along was at first worse for the bats, who did not find themselves well designed for this rough crawling.
“Indade. These walls will be having the wings off me. Then what will I be?” complained O’Niel, who was distinctly the fattest of the bats. Eamon was larger, but not around the waist.
“To be sure, you’d be a rat, which is what you’ve been behaving like,” snapped Bronstein. She did not like crawling, and what they were doing made her feel uncomfortable. They had talked about it often enough before, and she’d always resisted or avoided it. But her party was a minority back on the other side of the lines, and it was a minority here. A minority of one, now her dear Siobhan was dead. Bronstein was a committed Demobat. Eamon’s Batty party policy on this was clear: Humans were the enemy and the interests of bats would be best served by getting rid of them.