One of creation’s great failures. The term encompasses a variety of deplorable rodents, unwelcome colonizers of the basements and back alleys of mankind, ranging in size from the four-ounce abalour “pocket-rat” to the hulking twenty-pound ghastlies of GRIIB. Science tasks us to suspend our instinctive judgments, but on this point the merchant traveler may take our word: the creatures have nothing to recommend them. Rats are vectors of disease; the WAX-EYE BLINDNESS itself is now known to have spread with the aid of these unclean detritivores (Chadfallow, Annals of Imperial Physic 2: 936). Rats kill infants and newborn animals, destroy food stocks, rampage in the henhouse, foul the common well.But it is the rat’s mind, not his habits, that reveals nature’s condemnation. Alone of beasts, the rat lives trapped in a state of pseudo-intelligence: too smart to be excused of his wrongdoing, too dull to resist the filthy orders of his gut. If (as the best minds in Arqual assure us) the WAKING PHENOMENON is an expression of the gods’ great scheme for Alifros, what must we make of the fact that not one of the teeming millions of rats has ever woken?
