The realization hit him like a sledgehammer. He wasn’t going to be telling Dermott anything. She was dead for sure, by now.
He was a bit shocked at how hard that knowledge hit him. It wasn’t as if Dermott had had a dazzling personality or been any kind of a beauty queen. Not too bright, really, with a broad Vat face on a big workhorse body. But a nice girl all the same. A very nice girl. A girl with a dream . . . One more indebted conscript the Company wouldn’t be collecting from.
Still, he had to make sure. Maybe—
He got up and began digging into the rubble.
“You’re not going to get out that way, Connolly,” said Siobhan.
“I’m looking for someone,” he replied stubbornly.
“Nobody would still be alive.”
“I know. But I can’t just leave her. There’s a chance.”
“Dermott’s dead,” said the bat quietly. “A scorp got her, in the middle of cave-in. I saw.”
Chip swallowed. He supposed that it had been an open secret. A private life in the trenches was a wild dream. “Are you sure?”
“Sure as breath. It was quick and painless, Connolly.”
That was a lie. Scorp poison wasn’t. But Siobhan had seen her die. That was plain enough. Poor kid. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and swore quietly to himself.
He sighed, and started to haul clods away behind the digging rats. Every single time you said, “Don’t get involved, or, if you’re gonna get involved, just keep it physical.” But you always ended up exchanging dreams. Dermott had wanted a farm. Huh. A Vat-born indentured girl who wanted a farm! Fat chance. Farm laborer was the closest vatbrats could get. Well. The kid had bought one. And the Company wouldn’t be screwing her any more, either. Yep, the only way out of the Shareholders’ clutches . . . die. And then, rumor had it, they’d bill your clone for the burial charges.
“Responsible socialism,” the New Fabian Society Shareholders called the system they’d set up on the colony planet of Harmony And Reason. HAR—or, as vatbrats called it, Har-de-har-har. When they weren’t just calling it the Company Town.
Chip had been born here—grown here, rather—in one of the New Fabian Society’s genetic production plants. Grown in a Company Vat, raised in a Company Nursery, and educated in a Company School. His “parents” were shreds of cryo-preserved tissue some long-dead dreamers had sent off on a slowship to this new “Utopia” among the stars.
Utopia—ha! Even the Shareholders, so far as Chip could tell, didn’t believe that crap. At least, he’d heard them whine enough about Harmony And Reason in the haute cuisine restaurant where he’d worked before the war. Not that he’d had much opportunity to listen. He’d been an apprentice sous-chef after finishing Company school, and he hadn’t had a lot to do with the clientele.
Still, he’d noticed that the Shareholders seemed to be especially grumpy about the sunlight. To Chip, the sunlight was not too blue, nor too hot. But the older Shareholders weren’t local Vat-born clone kids like him. No, they’d been wealthy adults back on Old Earth—philanthropists, they called themselves—and had come along in cryo-suspension. The windows of Chez Henri-Pierre had been specially tinted to yellow the sunlight for them. According to them Earth light had been sweeter and better . . .
A rude voice interrupted his musing.
“Pull your finger out and move the damn stuff out of the way, Connolly.”
Chip shook himself. He’d been falling asleep, he realized. Air . . .
“Dig us an air hole, Pistol.”
“So that we can breath Maggot pong? And they can smell us?”
“We need oxygen, you . . .”
“Better make us some human oxygen out of your own air hole, you muddy rascal! I feel tired and I’ve got a headache. I don’t feel like digging.”
“Intercranial pressure because of vasodilation in the brain from oxygen deprivation,” said Doc. “The lethargy is caused by raised CO2 levels.”
For a moment, Chip was startled by the assurance in the bespectacled rat’s voice. But then he reminded himself that Doc had proven, more than once, that he was an excellent medic. At least, when he wasn’t droning on about epistemology and ontology and the whichness-of-what.