The Fantastic Worlds of Yuri Vynnychuk

by Yuri Vynnychuk

  “We’ll manage, if we’re lucky, to kill 2-3 thousand,” I shook my head.

  “Yes, we won’t kill them all off, but we’ll kill the most aggressive ones, chase the blind mass into the cellars and sewers, then we can take charge of the situation.”

  “If there are enough weapons. Can you at least still get a carbine in the town?” “No. All the weapons were destroyed. The rats can’t use them and they don’t need them. It was a miracle that I saved some of them.”

  “Then what good is it if we release those people from the asylum? Will they have to chase the rats with stakes?” “Don’t forget that battle is tiring work, and that relief wouldn’t do us any harm. And then... Who knows whether we’ll get through without getting wounded, and then...”

  He didn’t quite finish the sentence, catching my glance.

  “...then again without anyone dying?” I completed it for him. “Pardon me... I shouldn’t say it that way. If somebody has to die here, then it should just be me. Because this is my business and my war. Though... why just mine? You can’t imagine what these rats threaten the whole world with! A civilization of rats! Yes, yes, they’ve decided to create their own civilization. And our town is just the first little swallow of the new civilization. But their plans have a considerably broader reach. Right now they’re preparing battle teams for an assault on other territories. Their emissaries travel constantly in every direction. They’re not even terrified of radiation. In fact, thanks to the radiation the rat mutants have begun to multiply. As you noticed, they’re all the size of a cat, and there are even bigger ones. Each succeeding generation produces even further developed rats. And this happened at the time when the generation that squeezed us out and grabbed power didn’t know a human word. Now they just don’t leave it at talking, they also publish books. True, they read them in their own way: eating them up. I estimate that in about ten years the rats will be as big as German Shepherds. And then you won’t cope with them in their numbers, especially if you add human intellect to their size. They’ll surpass us very quickly in intellect and strength. We’ll turn into rats ourselves, we’ll begin to scrounge in the cellars and devour their leftover crumbs. That kind of future doesn’t frighten you?

  At first I thought I was listening to a madman. This whole story of the rats didn’t appear so serious. That is, if I saw danger for anyone, then it was just for the inhabitants of the city and not for me. But for this danger to become worldwide? With current technology and the level of science?

  “To dispel your doubts, I suggest a very interesting thing for you. This is an original rat ‘Mein Kampf’.”

  The colonel extended a brochure to me, the cover of which was decorated with: “Where are You Going, Brother Rat!”

  “When you read this a lot will become clear. You’ll see that this isn’t a game, but a terrifying threat to all of humankind.”

  At this spot Marko turned off the tape recorder and said:

  “You’ll hardly believe me if I try to retell this whole dream in my words. I managed to take out a brochure from Ratburg.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “Yes. You can take a look at it. And in the meantime I’ll get the coffee ready.”

  When he left I put in a new cassette and, closing the door, began to read aloud.

  “When I shut my eyes I see a boundless gray sea of the backs of rats, I see mighty waves that run along it, I see the hot light of eyes, turned to the future, I hear the beating of brave hearts that rush to battle, and I know this is my nation ready for anything to sacrifice anything for the sake of happiness and peace on earth...

  So, the entire harnessed mass thirsts for peace, that mass that for so many centuries was denied the most elementary rights of a living being, that was chased into the catacombs, into the background, into obscure and dark corners, into the stinking sewer, into this horrible river of human foulness. We were doomed to a miserable existence, to a hungry existence, and the only thing that saved us—this was our thirst for life and the ability to multiply under any conditions, the ability to renew ourselves under the most terrifying cataclysms when thousands, when tens of thousands of our best sons and daughters died in terrible agony from burning poison, they placed their ferocious heads in steel traps, and often they died simply under boots and sticks.

  Are there other living beings on earth who were so despised and debased? And I myself will answer: there are none! The Lord has sent us to this earth for torments and death. Then, perhaps, we should rise against God and damn him, as he has damned us with the lips of his numerous prophets? Perhaps we should declare a war against him, as he declared one on us?

  And I will answer: no, my brothers! It is not proper for us to take up arms against the Lord, to reject his grace and will. Yes, namely his grace! It’s not a slip of the tongue. For thinking long in solitude about our pitiful existence, I suddenly came to the conclusion that the Lord in his actions was boundlessly good to us, perhaps even better than to any other living creations. Just look what fate awaited all those whom we envied for so many years, all those domestic creatures who seemed to bathe in God’s grace. They were all degraded, turned into a pile of meat that knows only how to eat and produce excrement. Whom did we envy, brothers! The pig whose intellect is sufficient equal to the needs of the stomach? Or a dog that licks the very hand that just beat its backside?

  Let us envy only ourselves! Just ourselves! For from all living creations on earth only we are worthy of envy! Constantly suffering from miseries and difficulties, never eating enough, risking our lives every minute, we have become strong and healthy, courageous and stubborn. Is there any such thing in the world that can frighten a rat? No! Is there an illness in the world that can knock a rat off its feet. No! Is there a creature in the world that is capable in just one year of giving birth to a hundred children? No! Only a rat can give birth to 20-25 rats four times a year!

  I’ve counted: from one pair over the course of four years 1,934,690 strong and healthy rats can be born. This is nearly two million!

  There’s a multitude of us! Millions upon millions of us! And there is just one problem, that we didn’t know about this for so long.

  Without knowing human language or their writing, we were ignorant and uneducated, the world tossed us around like tumbleweed, and we didn’t know anything that would give us the opportunity to feel ourselves to be a great nation and not just a gang of rodents.

  Our genealogy stretches back to the most distant times, and our great ancestor Rat, it turns out, was as big as a hippopotamus. And Herodotus described the disgraceful escape of the armies of Assyrian warrior Sennacherib who never knew defeat before the onrush of rats. On the eve of a battle with the Judeans they gnawed through the bowstrings of his soldiers, and of what value is the best bow in the hands of even the most knightly warrior without a bowstring? And who would know how the map of the Near East would look now if not for the rats, which have already saved Israel twice!

  In gratitude to us for this, the Judeans spread the rumor that we were unclean creatures and that to use us in food was not only a sin, but unsafe because of a horrible poison hidden in our bodies.

  But our enemies were not slumbering. There were those among them who sought death for us. One of them, a certain Robert Sauti, wrote that rat meat is really very tender, juicy and tasty. And that only by turning us into food for themselves could they defeat us.

  This was the most dangerous speculation on how to destroy rats in the entire history of our existence. But, fortunately, no one paid any particular attention to this idea.

  The Lord’s Providence protected us.

  And that’s why, my brothers, we will praise our Lord, the most holy Rat, whom vile people depicted in the image and likeness of themselves! Let us sing a chorale to him, let our singing reach his ears and let his heart rejoice!

  I just pointed out to you how the Lord’s grace turns into damnation for some, and for others how the Lord’s damnation turns into grace.
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br />   And now let us look to what degree those who their entire life were sure of the Lord’s love and knocked into their heads that only they were chosen on this earth became degraded and degenerated. Yes, I’m speaking about the vilest being, about the lyingest creature, the cruelest thing, the stupidest beast—man!

  It would seem that all possibilities, all paths to the future, are open only to him, it would seem that only he is capable of ruling the world, to pursue balance and to maintain the surrounding environment. But look! In reality they didn’t even think about doing this! In reality they were only shouting and pounding their chests and never really kept their own word. These so-called people didn’t have enough sewers under their buildings, and they turned the seas and rivers into sewers. They destroyed the earth itself on which they lived. They dirtied the air they breathe; they poisoned the food that they eat! Is there greater inanity than the actions of man?

  It has happened that rats have destroyed one another, but it has never reached such fantastic proportions as we see among people. For them, to grind a million or two similar to themselves into dust is a game! It’s even a necessity! Making countless numbers of people corpses, they then have food for their writings, they then are thrilled for years by the singing of their heroism, they suck the bones of tragedies and genocides clean, they swear solemnly not to repeat anything similar, but they repeat it anyway, they continue to repeat it, because in their baseness they don’t have any distraction other than death! They repeat it, for it is their nature, and they never will become better. They themselves have already become convinced that they’ve put a much too heavy burden on their shoulders. Their attempt to bring order into the world has admitted ruin, they have led this world to a terrifying crisis, and now we should come to take their place, in order to save at least something of what remains. If they had a sense of justice or at least were conscious of the fact that they are standing on the edge of an abyss, then they would give full power to the rats without any resistance. If they had at least a little bit of common sense and less arrogance, then they would enter into negotiations with us and would request for themselves a minimum of rights, which they need for normal existence and the continuation of their lineage.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t the way it is. And we must take power from their hands by the path of war and revolution. Onto the altar of the Homeland we must place thousands of heads, and these will be the most loyal, the most patriotic heads! Right now we have been preparing special detachments of kamikaze rats, which are infected with the plague, with cancer, with syphilis and cholera. An infinite number of illnesses that we will carry unto people will suddenly seize our enemy; epidemic after epidemic will cut down their ranks. At the same time, we’ll break our way into peoples’ living places; we’ll gnaw human children. We should carry death and fear everywhere!

  Having created the glorious city of Ratburg, we have now shown the world our ability to create a mighty civilization with a much more attractive future than the one promised by people. The rat mutants, having acquired human size, will differ little from people. Very soon they will lose their bristly hair and tails, and their faces will take on more regular features. Their intellect will go far beyond human intellect, and we will send our representatives to other planets, we will enter into contact with other worldly civilizations, propagandizing our ideas and our means of co-existing with humans everywhere.

  We will be magnanimous. Death does not await all people. We will leave part of them so that this particular form of mammal does not become extinct, we will create special People Parks, where they can live in conditions that are as close as possible to their natural living conditions.

  At the same time, I come out strongly against the theory of some of our Ratburg philosophers that the future of rats lies in the assimilation of people. With this theory, they greatly insult the rats themselves, in fact rejecting their ability to create a civilization with their own hands. The marriages of rat-mutants with people, if they will have a place, will not be definitive. One human mother is able to give birth just to a single child in the course of a year, or in very rare instances, two. What is this in comparison to the hundredfold rats that our average female rat gives birth to?! The number of rat-people who will appear in the world will become too sorry of a number even to count. At the same time, I am afraid of something else. Will not the appearance of rat-people lead to a certain segregation among our breed—of the true rats on the one hand, and of the rat-people on the other? Will not this minority, which has a good measure of human cunning and arrogance in its nature try to rule by rank and proclaim their race as a chosen one?... And this smells of a new revolution, and what is especially unpleasant, a civil war.

  In any case, we should not allow things to reach this point. At no time should our racial standard and stability ever suffer. Therefore, one of the first laws, which I would recommend that we introduce immediately after taking power, is the banning of marriages between rats and people. That is, illegal coitus will be permitted, but the progeny will be doomed to the status of a slave beforehand.

  And one more thing. I want to salute you, my dear citizens, with the great success that we have achieved in recent times. Our scientists have created and introduced a new virus, which has no hope for a cure. We have successfully tried this virus in Africa and right now are carrying it throughout the world. Yes, this is the AIDS virus!

  People, frightened by numerous epidemics, which are being strewn over their heads, are panicking and pushing those buttons from which our final victory hinges. A nuclear war will empty the earth, but, as is well known, the radiation is no more terrifying for rats than cold water. Just the opposite, radiation will stimulate our growth and our intellect. The belief of our eminent philosophers that nuclear war will bring countless sacrifices even for us should not scare us away and stuff our heads with pacifist ideas. There will be sacrifices, and there will be many of them, but once again I remind you—our unique ability for self-re-creation and reproduction, which, in fact, is stimulated by radiation, will save us from this disaster.

  In particular, during an explosion at the local nuclear power station here in Ratburg we became convinced that irradiated rat mothers would be capable of giving birth six times a year with thirty children each time. The explosion led to the fact that those very children grew and became capable of reproduction markedly quicker than was possible before that time. Besides this, the radiation stimulated the mental development of the rats, making them capable of completing various complex operations and even of speaking human languages. This immediately gave us the ability to come into contact with people, to occupy all posts and to take the next generation under control.

  Moreover—we synthesized an anti-radiation vaccine from our own blood, which gives immunity from radiation and introduced it to those humans who manifested trust in us. As a result of this endeavor of real genius, there arose among people an actual competition to become worthy of the vaccine. They began to send their children mainly to those schools where rats were in charge of classes, because they did inoculations in those places.

  In this way, we were able to take the entire city into our hands. And this says something about the boundless possibilities of rat civilization.

  Now we should specially train our agents and send them to all the nuclear power stations with the aim of creating a series of catastrophes and explosions. The panic and fear that will take over society will create boundless possibilities for our benevolent expansion.

  Cities similar to our Ratburg should cover the entire earth in a thick net.

  We will be victorious, for behind us is our Lord Rat and the truth.”

  Marko returned with the coffee when I already had finished reading and inserted the previous cassette.

  “Well, what do you think?” He asked, putting away the brochure into his knapsack.

  “It’s horrible! This is all so unreal that it comes off like a bad joke.”

  “But this is far from a joke.”


  “I don’t believe it, that an average rat could think all this up. Such plans!”

  “And all of this has its beginning in Ratburg, not somewhere beyond the oceans, but somewhere very close.”

  “Have you already shown anyone this treatise?”

  “No. That would be stupid. No one would take it seriously. I didn’t acknowledge it myself at first. Then afterward... when I saw everything with my own eyes... A person who hasn’t seen it will write it off as someone’s wild fantasy... You have to find some other way, some other way to convey this to the world... I don’t know how... Just not simply knock them over the head with it... maybe you can suggest something...”

  “But what... what did you see there? In that Ratburg?” “In Ratburg?” Marko asked again, with such revulsion to that name, to the point that his eyes were gleaming. “Oh, I’ve seen a lot there! You couldn’t dream this in your sickest dream.”

  His hand stretched to the tape recorder.

  “Well! Well! Tell me!” I wanted to cry out, but with great strength I controlled myself. God forbid that I showed I believed him. Better to play along as a skeptic. Then Marko will describe everything in much greater detail.

  Finally he pressed the “on” button.

  “The colonel waited for my reaction. I don’t want to say that even then I sensed trepidation. It was only a vague feeling of fear, the strange anxiety that takes over a person during a storm, when lightening is flashing above your head, but you’re in the house and nothing threatens you. But anyway, when the sky splits open, you sense that you’re a tiny bug.”

  “Wouldn’t it be more to the point, instead of an uncertain rebellion, to try to escape from here and tell people about the danger?” I asked.

  And suddenly I understood that I had blathered something stupid. Because it wasn’t fear that was speaking in me, but bad sense. Fear already had chased me far off from this damned place, somewhere far off from this idiocy.