“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.”