by Laird Barron
The girls in bikinis exchange glances; this is outside of their training.
“Look, honey. Honeys. Let me explain something to you. Super-villains pay crap. And there’s no such thing as an Evil League of Evil healthcare plan.”
One of the women takes a questioning step forward. Starlight holds up a hand.
“I won’t make some grandiose speech about the fate of the world, or doing it for the children you’ll probably never have, but I will say this – killing bad guys is a heck of a lot of fun. And we pay overtime.”
And the forces of might and justice and looking damned fine in knee-high high heels swells to fifteen.
M is the one to find Doctor Blood, deep in his underground lair.
He stands at a curved control panel, raised on a catwalk above an artificial canal, which more likely than not is filled with genetically enhanced Martian piranhas.
He screams profanities, his voice just as high-pitched with mania as you might imagine. He’s wearing a lab coat, shredded and scorched, as though he has just this moment stepped out of the fire that destroyed his sanity and nearly ended his life. To his credit, the scars covering half his face are pink and shiny, stretched tight, weeping clear fluid tinged pale red when he screams. His finger hovers over a big red button, the kind that ends the world.
M approaches with measured steps. The profanities roll off the leather; the imprecation and threats don’t penetrate between the thick, jagged stitches. Doctor Blood runs out of words and breath. He looks at M, wild-eyed, and meets only curiosity in the leather-framed stare. Oddly, he can’t tell what color the eyes looking back at him are. They might be every color at once, or just one color that no one has though up a name for yet.
His voice turns harsh, broken, raw. The weeping sores are joined by real tears—salt in the wound.
“I’ll make you pay. All of you. Nobody ever believed in me. I’ll show them all. They’ll love me now. Everyone will.”
It comes out as one long barely distinguished string of words.
M puts a hand on the sobbing scientist’s shoulder. M understands pain, every kind there is. M understands when someone needs to be hurt, to be pushed to the very edge before they can come out on the other side of whatever darkness they’ve blundered into. And M knows when someone has had enough, too. When there’s no pain in the world greater than simply living inside their own skin, and all the hurting in the world won’t bring them anything.
Doctor Blood’s words trail off, incoherent for the sobs. “Daddy never . . . I’m sorry mommy . . .”
“I know,” M says softly. “Shh, I know.”
And M does an unexpected thing, a thing M has never done before. M steps close and folds the doctor in leather clad arms, patting his back and letting him cry.
Sixteen bodies crowd the rocket ship hurtling back toward earth—just like Bunny promised, home in time for tea.
Starlight fogs the window with her breath, looking out at all that glittering black. Esmerelda discusses wardrobe options with the women in bikinis.
The others talk among themselves, comparing notes, telling stories of battles won, the tales growing with each new telling. Ruby and Sapphire, the twins who aren’t twins and couldn’t look more opposite if they tried, single-handedly took down an entire legion of Martian Lizardmen, to hear them tell the tale. Mistress Minerva knocked out a guard with her clever killer perfume spray and rescued a bevy of Martian Princes who couldn’t wait to express their gratitude. Empress Zatar, who was born for this mission and didn’t even get a single moment of screen time, fought off three Grons and a Torlac with nothing more than a hairpin.
And so the stories go.
Penny cleans her guns and her blades, humming softly to herself as she does, an old military tune.
Bunny uses an honest to goodness pen, and makes notes in a real paper journal.
Doctor Blood’s head is bowed. His shoulders hitch every now and then.
M sits straight and silent, staring ahead with leather framed eyes, and holds Doctor Blood’s hand.
All together, they tumble through the fabulous, glittering dark.
They are heading back home to claim their hero’s welcome, even though every one of them knows this moment, right here, surrounded by so many glorious stars it hurts, is all the thanks they will ever get for saving the world. Again.
Chen Qiufan
Translated by Ken Liu
* * *
THE YEAR OF THE RAT
Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province. Chan is a science fiction writer, columnist, and online advertising strategist. Since 2004, he has published over thirty stories in venues such as Science Fiction World, Esquire, Chutzpah!, many of which are collected in Thin Code (2012). His debut novel, The Waste Tide, was published in January 2013 and was praised by Liu Cixin as “the pinnacle of near-future SF writing.” The novel is currently being translated into English by Ken Liu.
Chan is the most widely translated young writer of science fiction in China, with his short works translated into English, Italian, Swedish and Polish and published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Interzone, and F&SF, among other places. He has won Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award, China’s Galaxy and Nebula Awards, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award along with Ken Liu. He lives in Beijing and works for Baidu.
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.
It’s getting dark again. We’ve been in this hellhole for two days but we haven’t even seen a single rat’s hair.
My socks feel like greasy dishrags, so irritating that I want to punch someone. My stomach is cramping up from hunger, but I force my feet to keep moving. Wet leaves slap me in the face like open hands. It hurts.
I want to return the biology textbook in my backpack to Pea and tell him this stupid book has 872 pages. I also want to give him back his pair of glasses, even though it’s not heavy, not heavy at all.
Pea is dead.
The Drill Instructor said that the insurance company would pay his parents something. He didn’t say how much.
Pea’s parents would want something to remember him by. So I had taken the glasses out of his pocket, and that goddamned book out of his waterproof backpack. Maybe this way his parents would remember how their son was a good student, unlike the rest of us.
Pea’s real name was Meng Xian. But we all called him “Pea” because, one, he was short and skinny, like a pea sprout; and two, he was always joking that the friar who experimented with peas, Gregor “Meng-De-Er” Mendel, was his ancestor.
Here’s what they said happened: When the platoon was marching across the top of the dam of the abandoned reservoir, Pea noticed a rare plant growing out of the cracks in the muddy concrete at the edge of the dam. He broke formation to collect it.
Maybe it was his bad eyesight, or maybe that heavy book threw him off balance. Anyway, the last thing everyone saw was Pea, looking really like a green pea, rolling, bouncing down the curved slope of the side of the dam for a hundred meters and more, until finally his body abruptly stopped, impaled on a sharp branch sticking out of the water.
The Drill Instructor directed us to retrieve his body and wrap it in a body bag. His lips moved for a bit, then stopped. I knew what he wanted to say—we’d all heard him say it often enough—but he restrained himself. Actually, I kind of wanted to hear him say it.
You college kids are idiots. You d
on’t even know how to stay alive.
He’s right.
Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s Black Cannon. He smiles at me apologetically. “Time to eat.”
I’m surprised at how friendly Black Cannon is toward me. Maybe it’s because when Pea died, Black Cannon was walking right by him. And now he feels sorry that he didn’t grab Pea in time.
I sit next to the bonfire to dry my socks. The rice tastes like crap, mixed with the smell from wet socks baking by the fire.
Goddamn it. I’m actually crying.
The first time I spoke to Pea was at the end of last year, at the university’s mobilization meeting. A bright red banner hung across the front of the auditorium: “It’s honorable to love the country and support the army; it’s glorious to protect the people and kill rats.” An endless stream of school administrators took turns at the podium to give speeches.
I sat next to Pea by coincidence. I was an undergraduate majoring in Chinese Literature; he was a graduate student in the Biology Department. We had nothing in common except neither of us could find jobs after graduation. Our files had to stay with the school while we hung around for another year, or maybe even longer.
In my case, I had deliberately failed my Classical Chinese exam so I could stay in school. I hated the thought of looking for a job, renting an apartment, getting to work at nine a.m. just so I could look forward to five p.m., dealing with office politics, etc., etc. School was much more agreeable: I got to download music and movies for free; the cafeteria was cheap (ten yuan guaranteed a full stomach); I slept until afternoon every day and then played some basketball. There were also pretty girls all around—of course, I could only look, not touch.
To be honest, given the job market right now and my lack of employable skills, staying in school was not really my “choice.” But I wasn’t going to admit that to my parents.
As for Pea, because of the trade war with the Western Alliance, he couldn’t get a visa. A biology student who couldn’t leave the country had no job prospects domestically, especially since he was clearly the sort who was better at reading books than hustling.
I had no interest in joining the Rodent-Control Force. As they continued the propaganda onstage, I muttered under my breath, “Why not send the army?”
But Pea turned to me and started to lecture: “Don’t you know that the situation on the border is very tense right now? The army’s role is to protect the country against hostile foreign nations, not to fight rats.”
Who talks like that? I decided to troll him a bit. “Why not send the local peasants then?”
“Don’t you know that grain supplies are tight right now? The work of the peasantry is to grow food, not to fight rats.”
“Why not use rat poison? It’s cheap and fast.”
“These are not common rats, but Neorats™. Common poisons are useless.”
“Then make genetic weapons, the kind that will kill all the rats after a few generations.”
“Don’t you know that genetic weapons are incredibly expensive? Their mission is to act as a strategic deterrent against hostile foreign nations, not to fight rats.”
I sighed. This guy was like one of those telephone voice menus, with only a few phrases that he used all the time. Trolling him wasn’t any fun.
“So you think the job of college graduates is to fight rats?” I said, smiling at him.
Pea seemed to choke and his face turned red. For a while, he couldn’t say anything in response. Then he turned to clichés like “the country’s fate rests on every man’s shoulders.” But finally, he did give a good reason: “Members of the Rodent-Control Force are given food and shelter, with guaranteed jobs to be assigned after discharge.”
The platoon has returned to the town to resupply.
In order to discourage desertion, all the students in the Rodent-Control Force are assigned to units operating far from their homes. We can’t even understand each other’s dialects, so everyone has to curl his tongue to speak Modern Standard Mandarin.
I mail Pea’s book and glasses to his parents. I try to write a heartfelt letter to them, but the words refuse to come. In the end, I write only “I’m sorry for your loss.”
But the postcard I write to Xiaoxia is filled with dense, tiny characters. I think about her long, long legs. This is probably my twenty-third letter to her already.
I find a store to recharge my phone and text my parents at home. When we’re operating in the field, most of the time we get no signal.
The shop owner takes my one yuan and grins at me. The people of this town have probably never seen so many college graduates (though right now we’re covered in dirt and not looking too sharp). A few old men and old women smile at us and give us thumbs-ups—but maybe only because they think we’re pumping extra money into the town’s economy. As I think about Pea, I want to give them my middle finger.
After the Drill Instructor takes care of Pea’s funeral arrangements, he takes us to a cheap restaurant.
“We’re still about twenty-four percent away from accomplishing our quota,” he says.
No one answers him. Everyone is busy shoveling rice into his mouth as quickly as possible.
“Work hard and let’s try to win the Golden Cat Award, okay?”
Still no one answers him. We all know that the award is linked to the bonus paid to the Drill Instructor.
The Drill Instructor slams the table and gets up. “You want to be a bunch of lazy bums all your life, is that it?”
I grab my rice bowl, thinking that he’s going to flip the table.
But he doesn’t. After a moment, he sits down and continues to eat.
Someone whispers, “Do you think our detector is broken?”
Now everyone starts talking. Most are in agreement with the sentiment. Someone offers a rumor that some platoon managed to use their detector to find deposits of rare earth metals and gas fields. They stopped hunting for rats and got into the mining business, solving the unemployment problem of the platoon in one stroke.
“That’s ridiculous,” the Drill Instructor says. “The detector follows the tracer elements in the blood of the rats. How can it find gas fields?” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “If we follow the flow of the water, I’m sure we’ll find them.”
The first time I saw the Drill Instructor, I knew I wanted to hit him.
As we lined up for the first day of boot camp, he paced before us, his face dour, and asked, “Who can tell me why you’re here?”
After a while, Pea hesitantly raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“To protect the motherland,” Pea said. Everyone burst out in laughter. Only I knew that he was serious.
The Drill Instructor didn’t change his expression. “You think you’re funny? I’m going to award you ten pushups.” Everyone laughed louder.
But that stopped soon enough. “For the rest of you, one hundred pushups!”
As we gasped and tried to complete the task, the Drill Instructor slowly paced among us, correcting our postures with his baton.
“You’re here because you’re all failures! You lived in the new dorms the taxpayers built, ate the rice the peasants grew, enjoyed every privilege the country could give you. Your parents spent their coffin money on your tuition. But in the end, you couldn’t even find a job, couldn’t even keep yourselves alive. You’re only good for catching rats! Actually, you’re even lower than rats. Rats can be exported for some foreign currency, but you? Why don’t you look in the mirror at your ugly mugs? What are your real skills? Let me see: chatting up girls, playing computer games, cheating on tests. Keep on pushing! You don’t get to eat unless you finish.”
I gritted my teeth as I did each pushup. I thought, if someone would just get a revolt started, I’m sure all of us together can whip him.
Everyone thought the exact same thing, so nothing happened.
Later, when
we were eating, I kept on hearing the sound of chopsticks knocking against bowls because our hands and arms were all trembling. One recruit, so sunburnt that his skin was like dark leather, couldn’t hold his chopsticks steady and dropped a piece of meat on the ground.
The Drill Instructor saw. “Pick it up and eat it.”
But the recruit was stubborn. He stared at the Drill Instructor and didn’t move.
“Where do you think your food comes from? Let me explain something to you: the budget for your food is squeezed out of the defense budget. So every grain of rice and every piece of meat you eat comes from a real solider going hungry.”
The recruit muttered, “Who cares?”
Pa-la! The Drill Instructor flipped over the table in front of me. Soup, vegetables, rice covered all of us.
“Then none of you gets to eat.” The Drill Instructor walked away.
From then on that recruit became known as Black Cannon.
The next day, they sent in the “good cop,” the district’s main administrator. He began with a political lesson. Starting with a quote from The Book of Songs (10th century, b.c.) (“rat, oh rat, don’t eat my millet”), he surveyed the three-thousand-year history of the dangers posed to the common people by rat infestations. Then, drawing on contemporary international macro-politico-economical developments, he analyzed the unique threat posed by the current infestation and the necessity of complete eradication. Finally, he offered us a vision of the hope and faith placed in us by the people: “It’s honorable to love the country and support the army; it’s glorious to protect the people and kill rats.”
We ate well that day. After alluding to the incident from the day before, the administrator criticized the Drill Instructor. He noted that we college graduates were “the best of the best, the future leaders of our country,” and that instruction must be “fair, civil, friendly” and emphasize “technique,” not merely rely on “simplistic violence.”