Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 Read Online Free Page B
Author: Mike Resnick [Editor]
world on the run! Any biologist will tell you that. The most successful order of mammals ever known—the rodents. And the rats were the most successful of the rodents.”
Another sneering twitch of the whiskers.
“Humans are so stupid! Always worrying about lions and sharks and crocodiles. Ha! Between the diseases we spread around and the famine we caused by gobbling up your food, we rats bumped off a thousand times more of you monkeys-with-delusions-of-grandeur than all the predators in the world put together. Kings of creation, the rats. Think we lost any sleep worrying over cats and owls? Ha! Sure, they’d catch one of us now and again. So what? The way we breed?”
He finished off his beer. “I mean, look at them!” He gestured with his snout toward the corner where a handful of mutated felines were sitting at a table. One of the cats caught Corporal Lad’s eye, and he chittered at him. The cat looked away, hunching his shoulders.
“Make love, not war—that’s the ratly road to triumph.” He emitted a great belch and chittered for more beer. The falconoid running the bar stumped over with another pitcher. The big bird avoided the corporal’s eyes. I hate to admit it, but the truth is that once the rats arrived they terrorized the cats and the birds to the point where all the predators are good for is being mess orderlies.
“The rats don’t fight fair.” That’s the complaint you always hear from predators. “They gang up on you.”
And what can you say? It’s true. That’s why rats make such good soldiers and predators don’t. You put a cat or a raptor on a battlefield and the silly bastards right off start trying to engage the insects in honorable single combat. An insect’s idea of single combat is let’s you and my swarm fight. God only knows what their notion of honor is. Doubt if they have one, actually. The universe’s great pragmatists, the bugs.
It’s odd, really, how the whole thing turned out. When the bugs invaded the earth (they started in Poland, naturally—do those people ever get a break?), and after the Umpires of the Galaxy intervened and explained that weapons were forbidden in ecological warfare for bizarre theological reasons that nobody’s ever been able to figure out (but there’s no point arguing about it, as the Umpires made clear when they nuked Paris and Butte, Montana—and why Butte, anyway? Paris I can understand), the genetic engineers right away charged out and mutated cats and dogs and bears and owls and falcons.
Disaster followed upon disaster. The bugs made mincemeat out of the mutated predators in no time. Oh, sure, the predators look great. But the simple truth is that they make worthless soldiers. No discipline. No sense of teamwork. And talk about lazy! A cat’ll kill one bug and sleep the rest of the day. And the raptors are so disgruntled over the fact that they can’t fly because they’re too big that they don’t do much except sulk and write letters to the editor.
Yeah, things were looking bad for the home team until Professor Whitfield finally convinced SACRECOEUR (Supreme Allied Command, Reunified, Ecowar Europe—the French insisted on the acronym; like I said, I can understand nuking Paris) that they were approaching the whole problem upside down.
In his words, which have become as famous as e=mc 2 : “To kill bugs, breed bugkillers.”
Naturally, the idiot geneticists started off by engineering giant intelligent frogs. “Intelligent frog” is an oxymoron. Not only do the amphibious dopes stay in one place waiting for a bug to come within reach of their tongues (which they never do, because there’s nothing wrong with their brains, which you’d expect from a collection of species that mastered interstellar travel), but the frogs can only fight when it’s warm. And since the bugs aren’t really bugs, but a group of species which descended on some far distant planet from a rootstock of warm-blooded arthropods, they just waited until
Another sneering twitch of the whiskers.
“Humans are so stupid! Always worrying about lions and sharks and crocodiles. Ha! Between the diseases we spread around and the famine we caused by gobbling up your food, we rats bumped off a thousand times more of you monkeys-with-delusions-of-grandeur than all the predators in the world put together. Kings of creation, the rats. Think we lost any sleep worrying over cats and owls? Ha! Sure, they’d catch one of us now and again. So what? The way we breed?”
He finished off his beer. “I mean, look at them!” He gestured with his snout toward the corner where a handful of mutated felines were sitting at a table. One of the cats caught Corporal Lad’s eye, and he chittered at him. The cat looked away, hunching his shoulders.
“Make love, not war—that’s the ratly road to triumph.” He emitted a great belch and chittered for more beer. The falconoid running the bar stumped over with another pitcher. The big bird avoided the corporal’s eyes. I hate to admit it, but the truth is that once the rats arrived they terrorized the cats and the birds to the point where all the predators are good for is being mess orderlies.
“The rats don’t fight fair.” That’s the complaint you always hear from predators. “They gang up on you.”
And what can you say? It’s true. That’s why rats make such good soldiers and predators don’t. You put a cat or a raptor on a battlefield and the silly bastards right off start trying to engage the insects in honorable single combat. An insect’s idea of single combat is let’s you and my swarm fight. God only knows what their notion of honor is. Doubt if they have one, actually. The universe’s great pragmatists, the bugs.
It’s odd, really, how the whole thing turned out. When the bugs invaded the earth (they started in Poland, naturally—do those people ever get a break?), and after the Umpires of the Galaxy intervened and explained that weapons were forbidden in ecological warfare for bizarre theological reasons that nobody’s ever been able to figure out (but there’s no point arguing about it, as the Umpires made clear when they nuked Paris and Butte, Montana—and why Butte, anyway? Paris I can understand), the genetic engineers right away charged out and mutated cats and dogs and bears and owls and falcons.
Disaster followed upon disaster. The bugs made mincemeat out of the mutated predators in no time. Oh, sure, the predators look great. But the simple truth is that they make worthless soldiers. No discipline. No sense of teamwork. And talk about lazy! A cat’ll kill one bug and sleep the rest of the day. And the raptors are so disgruntled over the fact that they can’t fly because they’re too big that they don’t do much except sulk and write letters to the editor.
Yeah, things were looking bad for the home team until Professor Whitfield finally convinced SACRECOEUR (Supreme Allied Command, Reunified, Ecowar Europe—the French insisted on the acronym; like I said, I can understand nuking Paris) that they were approaching the whole problem upside down.
In his words, which have become as famous as e=mc 2 : “To kill bugs, breed bugkillers.”
Naturally, the idiot geneticists started off by engineering giant intelligent frogs. “Intelligent frog” is an oxymoron. Not only do the amphibious dopes stay in one place waiting for a bug to come within reach of their tongues (which they never do, because there’s nothing wrong with their brains, which you’d expect from a collection of species that mastered interstellar travel), but the frogs can only fight when it’s warm. And since the bugs aren’t really bugs, but a group of species which descended on some far distant planet from a rootstock of warm-blooded arthropods, they just waited until
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