And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,39

a Star of David, symbol of the Jews.

Theologians claim this is a people that has succeeded in refining memory into the ultimate means of spiritual survival, by systematically handing down hundreds of commandments and prohibitions through the chain of the generations.

You can’t imagine how relieved I was to discover a new and legal direction for continuing my research.

Using ultra-refined sensors to move in all directions...

My mind crosses borders...

Believe me, Stash, I too wanted this voyage not to be necessary.

I beamed myself to The Israel – a tiny political entity along the Mediterranean Sea that still insists on retaining its sovereignty. I couldn’t find any traces of the source of Girl & Rat there. The local guards greeted me warmly and allowed me free access to all the mindline libraries, except one that they insisted on classifying as secret.

It was surprisingly easy for me to break into it. I have no idea what the secret is.

My findings in TheIsrael puzzled me. We have at least one version of Girl & Rat in Hebrew that’s considered authentic, and it’s dated to early 2011. But even though TheIsrael is the only society that still speaks some Hebrew – that ancient Semitic language written in Latin characters – this version is not mentioned in any of the local libraries that I had access to. The local anthropologists couldn’t track it down either. Whatever versions of Girl & Rat that I found were all later adaptations or translations from English or from Arabic, mostly from the past twenty years.

Following a quick mythological mapping of all the b-data, I realized that the repudiation of the ancient Hebrew version was no coincidence. It reflected a basic position that rules out any link to tradition.

I know you’re categorically opposed to any study of societies that still insist on retaining their sovereignty, Stash, but if you ever do decide to be beamed to TheIsrael you can look forward to a fascinating anthropological adventure that could shed new light on your Anthropology of the Future project. I’m convinced you’d like the people there, Stash. It’s a society addicted to the present, alienated from anything that preceded its establishment as a sovereign state and determined to focus exclusively on whatever will serve to justify its future existence. You’ll have to admit that this society’s selective memory has led to an amazingly vibrant culture. They change values and icons at a dizzying pace and they always prefer the new to the old, or the not-quite-yet-old. You’ll be glad to know that TheIsrael became caught up in the digital revolution with near-theological fervor, maybe because of how it filled the void left when they obliterated their past, including their Zionist ideology and Jewish religion. But it seems like the obliteration of the past has led to a pathological distortion in the way they perceive the future: almost every mythological representation of the future is short-term, and includes a cataclysm. This misperception of time is one that people in TheIsrael refuse to acknowledge, and every one of the local anthropologists became impatient, almost hostile, when I mentioned my theories.

After that wild goose chase in TheIsrael I instructed the implachip to beam me to Ju-Ideah. It’s a separatist self-contained entity, a network of autonomous religious enclaves spread over the geographical area surrounding the sovereignties of TheIsrael and ThePalestine, among others.

At first, I was optimistic. In complete contrast to TheIsrael, Ju-Ideah does not obliterate the past. In fact, it regards the past as sacrosanct. Their motivation for separatism isn’t that they want to forget, but rather that they’re intent on avoiding anything that’s new or different. It’s really surprising to discover such a striking contrast between two entities with the same historical parents. Even the way they dress in Ju-Ideah is old-fashioned, and my quick investigation revealed that it originated in seventeenth-century Poland – the same geographical space where the Madonna of the Rat Church is located.

The digital guards instructed me to extinguish every trace of physical presence and to cover everything but my eyes. They directed me to two of the community elders who agreed to tell me some nostalgic legends and gave me free access to some of the libraries where these legends are kept. To my delight, I discovered that many of the stories took place in Europe in recent centuries, but I found no trace of any Girl & Rat motif.

Still, I honestly believed that Ju-Ideah of all places was bound to offer some mythological representation of that little Jewish girl from