And The Rat Laughed (11 page)

You have to admit though that, despite my heretical thoughts, I never questioned your authority. I publicly announced I was dropping my own research project, but still, secretly, without admitting it even to myself at first, I kept collecting information, bit by bit. I couldn’t get
Girl & Rat
out of my mind. It fermented within me, demanding something to latch on to. When you discovered that I was still obsessed with that “trivial hobby” of mine, you tried to persuade me that every fact that could possibly be checked or verified had already been stored, so that my research would be of no interest to the brain-beaming community. Later you tried to rationalize that even if the roots of the legend were out there waiting for me, they were hopelessly banal and couldn’t offer any new insight worth the effort. I haven’t forgotten your studies of the representation of evil in late-twentieth century computer games, the ones that you later disavowed as your scientific career progressed. Maybe that’s why you dismissed
Girl & Rat
with such contempt, and why you judge it as nothing more than a primordial fear of light – a final effort of civilization to make way for darkness before it completely disappears.

What is fear, Stash? My genetic card reads “Repaired”.

A hole-child

Is running out of skin

The dream...

I feel as if I’m nursing you – a rare ritual practised by only a few remote tribes on earth.

You’re not ready to give yourself over yet, but my implachip senses how your flashes of resistance are growing weaker.

I’m not trying to undermine the authority of the Anthropological Institute, Stash. On the contrary: I have great respect for the pioneers who paved the way for me. Into your dream I’m beaming a study by Professor Reiner Marcellus Schwartz, who tried to prove that the creatures in
Girl & Rat
are not really from the twenty-first century at all. He pointed out the pagan and Christian motifs that appear throughout the legend, and mapped out its course from its days as a popular legend towards the end of the Roman Empire until its incorporation into the Digital Age. I want to tell you about the theory of my supervisor, Professor Mammuna Shanti: she believes that the work was originally written in Gujerati, and that it contains echoes of the Great Earthquake of Gujarat in 2001. Among other things, Professor Shanti makes recourse to the literature which tried, none too successfully, to link
Girl & Rat
to the Temple of the Rats – the Karni Mata Temple in the town of Deshnok in Rajasthan. Even though it hasn’t been used for worship for almost seven decades, the shrine is still intact. Over the years, it has housed thousands of rats, and they’ve received the daily offerings of believers and priests. Various myths surrounding the shrine establish a clear link between a feminine, maternal divinity and rats as the reincarnation of human-cubs.

Your implachip is not responding.

You’re still fighting me.

All of the studies before mine led to a dead end. Even Professor Mammuna Shanti ultimately retracted her original theory, and in our final exchanges, she sided vehemently with your interpretation of the poem as the outpouring of a subversive entity that had been taking advantage of the electronic networks in their earlier days to gain maximum circulation within a short period.

All of the experts have dropped
Girl & Rat,
but I...

An amazing discovery...

Because if I stop being afraid

I’ll no longer be...

Your REMaker is trying to throw me out. Don’t fight it, Stash. It is competing against
Girl & Rat
and I’m spitting out broken lines. What a shame that the original collection has not been found. Jews are mentioned in only a single poem from an earlier version, a very fragmentary one.

Stuck inside the brain...

An undo command is needed...

Can’t get rid of...

A little girl is treading on the outstretched tail of a rat in the volcanic mouth of Mount Egmont in New Zealand. It was a circus act performed only once in 2024, a few months before the Great Ecological Disaster, which is why it was never documented. I have no choice but visualize it for you.

According to my genetic card, that was when the process of my conception began. That’s when my fetal cells started to link.

We are watching the circus act together now. Down below is the abyss. A total void. The little girl’s eyes are shut, and she’s moving forward slowly. The rat’s tail is sweeping wildly from side to side like in a circus...

A volcanic eruption...

She’s falling, or maybe flying.

My powers of visualization aren’t strong enough to produce the ending for you.

I remember only too well the condescending b-mail where you insisted that nobody is capable any more of separating Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf that swallowed her, or of finding out if Oedipus was really a king or just a lunatic fantasizing about sleeping with his own mother.

You were right, of course. But precisely because
Girl & Rat
is less than a hundred years old, we can still discover its roots.

A young myth...

A thin slough, a shell...

Precisely because a myth is an encrypted historical memory, it’s my duty to discover the truth hiding underneath it, with all the stir it’s generated.
Girl & Rat
has been dug out, and is part of the public domain now, a free-for-all that anyone can jostle with. I’ll break off the shell and find the nucleus of truth. I must. This is the girl that once was. This is darkness. No other exists.

I hear a scream...

Somewhere deep inside me...

Not from any recognizable part of myself...

The little-girl-who-once-was existed. The pit-that-once-was existed. Darkness. Nothing more.

And the Stefan...

Why is he the only one in the myth who bears a name?

I think I know where ... it all happened.

The pit...

The little girl...

My discovery...

I must hurry.

Before it’ll be forever buried.

I wasn’t beamed to
Girl & Rat
when I was a child. I didn’t have a mother who would put me to sleep with lullabies and bedtime stories about
Girl & Rat.
I had a perfect parental voice, made by state-of-the-art processors. And Girl & Rat weren’t part of an anthropological development plan. I have no offspring, so I didn’t have a chance to transmit the lullabies and the bedtime stories to the next generation either. But ever since I discovered them as a youngster,
Girl & Rat
have fascinated me as much as they’ve terrified me. The poems keep spinning through my head, over and over, almost on their own. I have no idea why they move through me so freely, or why I feel as if they possess me. They seem to be taking over every cell and every neuron...

I have a friend with a tail and he has four legs.

The Stefan also has a tail...

I’m trying to retrieve...

When did I hear it for the first...

Shuddering...

What’s this?

A glitch...

I’m trying to fix it.

Y-mee, that’s my name.

Why me?

At last, you’re responding. There was bound to be a clash between my brain and yours. Not everything operates the way it should in our perfect world.

That’s just as well...

The implachip is blipping retrievals from our previous b-mails. You often used to suggest that I undergo an external memory scan, to see if my fascination with
Girl & Rat
doesn’t have something to do with a hidden recess in my memory, or something that went wrong in an earlier, uncontrolled stage of my development. You hinted that simple surgery might help solve the problem and fix me for good.

I’ve got to admit that I couldn’t help feeling that way myself. Maybe there was something wrong with my brain in the first place, which is why I contacted the diagnoscope, to rule out any medical condition. I’ve been given a clean bill of health, Stash. My implachip is fine too. Otherwise, how could I have broken into your REMaker?

Once, years ago, in some private part of your past that you’ve managed to delete, I guess, you left me a personal message in my brain box. You asked me to recommend a dream. You said you’d exhausted everything in your own dreamertory.

I had nothing to lend you, Stash. The dream I call up every night, the one that’s been tailor-made for me, has always left me...

Something’s missing.

Y-mee

Why me

A little girl and the Stefan...

The other figure...

In black...

Missing...

Who is this black figure who looks like an angel?

Angels?

They do not exist, only in dreams.

***

Come with me to the last day of the year 2029. We’re in the agricultural reserve in Pan-America. The Art Corporations Festival. Thousands of artists from all over the world are scribbling away and ad-libbing scenes from the
Girl & Rat
poems on the giant plain. Among their props are potatoes brought in specially from the emergency supplies deep in the Antarctic. This was also the first experiment in multimind beaming, which meant that every beamer in the world, even the ones at Hybrid Space Station, were active participants.

I haven’t taken part in the live event yet, of course, and this was my first-ever retrieved cruise. Where were you then, Stash? I never did discover who paired us up...

A contemporary version...

The most up-to-date...

Billions in this world and beyond are being beamed into the game at this very moment.

The satanic little girl is going down into the pit. In the darkness, she hunts down the rat and makes it her slave. All the players use the rat to abuse the Stefan and win points every time the tormented victim cries out for help. The rat takes pity on the Stefan, and all the players are supposed to use the little girl to kill both of them.

End of game.

The players are drenched in fresh blood.

This role reversal horrifies me. The thought of the Stefan becoming an innocent victim and the little girl becoming a bloodthirsty murderer is unbearable. I need to recreate the right order and cleanse the girl’s name. You might be able to justify my voyage by pointing out that it will put an end to
Girl & Rat
once and for all. Or I may decide that forgetfulness is the preferred human condition, and then the two cubs will quietly disappear behind the curtains, and so will I.

Without a trace.

This voyage...

I must return to the pit...

Need to go deep down.

Two weeks ago, I went over my findings again, the way I do every night. I activated the location search engine. The implachip probes put me in Eastern Europe, and the database crossed me with the ruins of a forgotten church that was uncovered only recently, when laser micro-excavators were extending a subterranean residential habitat. After the protests of the Christian Preservation Society, the developers agreed not to touch the vestiges of the church, and to allow the construction of a tourist simulator site. In one of the side niches, behind the altar, was a scene from the Last Judgment Day, drawn with something solid, possibly a piece of charcoal. In the center was the Madonna cradling a gaping-mouthed rat. Next to her, the earth had opened wide and a long procession of people was emerging, led by a little girl, her face a blur.

Such strange iconography...

My implachip was deactivated for a long time.

Into your dream I beam the Madonna of the Rat Church, located where there used to be a small village before it was completely wiped out in the Great Ecological Disaster. The foundations remain, along with some fragments of tombstones in the nearby cemetery. Relics from the turn of the century indicate that the site was a Catholic farming village. Its inhabitants lived off their crops of potatoes and grain, which of course provide a natural habitat for rats.

That animal, which neither of us ever saw because it does not exist any more, is jabbing its teeth and claws into you right now.

Biting into your dream.

The rat comes from semi-arid open fields in Asia. It later wandered to Europe with the spread of farming, and became man’s most faithful companion. Wherever man went, the rat followed too – invariably sharing man’s bread and water, linked to man with chains more powerful than any digital web.

Or maybe not.

In your dream, you now stroke the grayish back of the rat, and its lumpy underbelly. Its torso is covered with a thin fur, and only its tail is hairless. You touch its claws, four on each front foot, five on each back one. Its digestive system was originally meant for seeds, but for some unknown reason, it began biting into human flesh, too. The female rat had up to a thousand young each year, using her sense of smell to tell them apart.

I haven’t been able to beam the mother to you. Or her offspring either, all of them born blind and naked.

The rat in your dream is completely real, gnawing and thrashing between your legs, but the real rats have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Following the Great Ecological Disaster, this species was suspected of being a carrier of lethal viruses. Stowaway rats were discovered on spaceships. They gnawed through cables, cut off information supplies and created digital chaos. As you remember, the Warsaw Conference adopted a unanimous decision to exterminate rats, and the de-infestation was completed in 2037, just before my own fetal cells were conceived. The archive at the Anthropological Institute still has an ancient silicon trap connected to a transmitter that activated a poison syringe as soon as a rat was detected.

This is not the dream you were expecting, I know. The effort it takes for the brain to forget is far greater than the effort it requires to remember.

Sometimes I think I am...

Who am I?

Y mee?

In the great wave of nostalgia that swept over us in the fifties, exactly when people were again caught up in
Girl & Rat,
the rodent lost some of its demonic overtones. Its persistent search for food and shelter is perceived as a heroic fight for survival, worthy of compassion and empathy. Over the past few years, there have been many attempts, in all the leading genetic laboratories, to clone foolproof rats, but no scientist has succeeded in creating one that will function as a proper pet in a beamed environment.