And The Rat Laughed

by Nava Semel

  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.

  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 punishment imposed on trespassers of consciousness...

  I’m ready to pay the price.

  Unless there’s a malfunction, you’ll feel almost nothing when you wake up. Just a few slivers. Even an internal memory scan will show nothing but an obscure, incomprehensible nightmare, and you’ll cancel it out, the way you defuse the stress of heavy responsibility in a job like yours. But when you finally realize that the slivers of the dream add up to something real, when you’re told that I no longer belong to any corporation, and when you see sufficient proof that I’ve set out on a voyage into No-Net-Land, the Bohu – an unknown world beyond the net – Girl & Rat will begin to cruise through your bloodstream, to be absorbed spontaneously into every cell and every neuron of your being.

  Stash in the conch of sleep.

  The girl in the dark...

  If only I knew what really happened in the pit.

  I need to make you understand why my body needs to be included in the imminent voyage. If you do, maybe you’ll try to make your peace with the dream I imposed on you, instead of eradicating it.

  The visit to the Madonna of the Rat Church site shook me so hard, not only because of the incredible discovery, but because it was my very first experience with the limits of remote perception. An invisible barrier between me and my sensations. I just couldn’t cross it. I fingered objects, yet I couldn’t touch them. I focused my gaze, and the sight decomposed into an illusion. I stomped my feet, but there didn’t seem to be a connection between my stomping and the sound waves from the floor. I sank my teeth into the potatoes, but there was no sensation of taste.

  Even the smells...

&nb
sp; My nostrils dilated...

  I was so desperate to...

  A kind of revelation grabbed me in that church.

  What is a revelation?

  Shutting down, turning out the lights – that’s a familiar activity...

  The most routine one of all.

  My REMaker is unsettled. Who is dreaming whom? I really don’t know, any more.

  Your attempts to shut down my tyrannical consciousness won’t work.

  I didn’t give in right away to the urge to cut myself free of the net and to move into No-Net-Land.

  At first, I tried to use more conventional research methods like the one you distrust so much – the New Séance technology. The discovery of a possible physical source to the myth thrilled me. A breakthrough. I truly believed that now I’ll be able to communicate with the dead at the Madonna of the Rat Church, and solve the enigma. I had been hoping to reach some remainders of consciousness in whoever had been living in that forgotten site. But all my efforts failed.

  Once, though, something did flicker. I found myself inside a sealed space, not much different from my usual environment. For a moment everything grew completely dim, and I dove through the darkness, but I couldn’t decide whether it was just a glitch or whether it really meant something. My implachip picked up some strange signals and I had a feeling that they were words in an unfamiliar language, but the automatic interpreter could not even recognize what it was.

  I’ve reached an impasse, Stash. The only way out is to go on a physical voyage. I know it’s an impulse that doesn’t seem to make any sense, and that choosing an ordeal that nobody has taken for years may cost me my life.

  Exile in The Bohu of No-Net-Land...

  I’m ready to pay the price.

  I am hocking this dream in the pawnshop in your head, in the hope that some night you will redeem the flicker of that ancient memory...

  Why me?

  K-0005275-149...

  Forever in a pit...

  Stash, never again will you be able to pretend that you “do not know”.

  You are my future, Stash. Maybe this argument will convince you to let me go. Something is waiting at the end of the voyage.

  If not for me, then maybe for you.

  ***

  Ten days ago, following another unsuccessful séance, I paid my last b-visit to the Church. On the neck of the painted Madonna I recognized something. For a moment I thought it was nothing more than a digital hoax. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?

  A tiny object stuck to the wall. I could feel it with all of my senses, but I wasn’t able to touch it.

  The implachip analyzed the materials. Extra-fine pegs. Twigs of birch. Dating: a hundred and fifty-five years old.

  You’re fingering the object now. I visualize how soft your fingers are. Do you recognize the object, Stash?

  It’s 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 the past, but it soon turned out that all of the mythical heroes are male spiritual shepherds known as rabbis, and that most of the mythological material I found centered on their graves. They’re the ones who are assumed to bestow immediate remedy to every distress. One of the elders was convinced that the true reason for my query was my desire to use one of these graves to be blessed with a mate and with offspring, and he insisted on referring me to the grave of a famous rabbi, Nachman, from the village of Uman in a place once called the Ukraine. When he discovered that I am not family-programmed, he referred me to a grave in North Africa, and promised that if I visited there I would be blessed with longevity.

  Just to give you an idea of the type of ritual practiced in Ju-Ideah, I’m sending you an object
for your simulatorium. Think of it as my farewell gift. It’s a lucky charm they’ve been nailing to the doorposts of their homes for thousands of years. It contains a tiny piece of parchment with an ancient secret inscription that they would not show me because I admitted that I didn’t believe in any particular religion. Some say that the technique used for inscribing the parchment, an ancient craft known as handwriting, is also used to spell out a mysterious ancient name.

  For a moment I thought...

  The little girl...

  She doesn’t have a name in any other version either.

  When I recounted the Girl & Rat legend, the idea of some link between a Polish-born Jewish girl and the Christian faith was categorically rejected, and the JuIdeah elders’ initial politeness suddenly disappeared. The beaming was interrupted, and my access to the public sources of information was blocked. My apologies were rejected. When I tried to break into the blocked data stores, I discovered that, despite its longstanding separatism, or perhaps precisely because of it, their data security technology is state-of-the-art. It may even be more advanced than ours. I would never have succeeded in breaking into their REMaker – if they even use REMakers there...

  The exile of memory...

  What submemoryfolder did they banish the little girl to?

  Trapped somewhere...

  The implachip is working at full capacity now.

  Unbearable...

  Have to break loose...

  No. You don’t have to. I hear your voice clearly, Stash. Let go. Y-mee Prana. Your thought is crashing against my implachip. You’re hurting me.

  Resign yourself to it, K-0005275-149: human memory doesn’t have the capacity to contain ... And yet...

  Like the tailbone...

  Who has a tail?...

  Stash, you’ve been through every genetic repair, and you’re disappointed that the bone is still lodged in the lower part of the spine. According to your plan, man was destined to be rid of this reminder. A reminder of what?