And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,37
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.
Madonna of the Rat...
The implachip is so rattled that it discharged. I wasn’t sure at first, but soon the idea caught up with me. I was facing the earliest evidence of the myth: sixty-five years before it first appeared on the ancient internet.
You dream – I give birth to your dream.
The