Rat’s Tongue by Sing Fan, translated by Judith Huang,1 (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) opens with Ding Jie arriving at the planet Yan: he is there to get a delicacy for the Emperor, the tongue of the Silver Rat. Jie is surprised to discover that a close friend, Chen Guang, is in charge of this bleak outpost. Then, after they catch up (at length) with each other’s news, Guang tells Jie that the Silver Rat’s tongues are now black and poisonous. Guang has one edible tongue left, however, and he gives Jie a taste:
He opened his mouth and bit into the tip of the tongue.
Suddenly, the whole busy world before his eyes grew dim.
The taste skated across his consciousness and melted a little in his stomach.
He was overwhelmed with the feeling that nothing he could remember that came before this amounted to anything, and his very life appeared barren and meaningless, reduced to something absurd. He thought back to the magnificent fireworks bursting over the roof of the Royal Palace, the most splendid of skies he had ever seen, and they all those memories seemed strangely leached of color. Even the most complex, most spectacular and intricate architecture he had seen in the Afang palace, dating from the Qin dynasty, its exquisite beauty beyond anyone’s imagination, now seemed boring and monotonous in comparison.
Every single taste bud in his mouth exploded simultaneously, like a singularity bursting and expanding into infinity.
This extraordinary taste had flown beyond all description.
Could this thing still be considered food? Or was it rather, a vast epic rushing through the tongue and vaulting past the stomach walls, a mighty poem redolent of ancient song. pp. 46-47
The rest of the story sees the implantation of a mind-reading device into one of the rats, which later reveals that, when the rats meet each other in the wild, their tongues entwine—this is the way they communicate.
After this discovery Jie suspects the Silver Rats are sentient and he decides to decipher their language, a process that leads to the Silver Rat he has implanted eventually meeting the Grand Rat. When the Grand Rat then offers the implanted rat some dried tongue, the latter appears to gain access to all the Grand Rat’s memories.
Eventually Jie discovers that (spoiler) the rat’s memories and souls are contained in tongues, and the hatred they feel for humans—who have been hunting them—has made them poisonous. Guang subsequently hatches a plan to kill the Emperor by supplying him with a poisoned tongue, but what actually happens is that the Emperor falls ill (the rats have learned human language and made a taste that makes him feel nauseous every time he feels anger).
This story didn’t work for me, probably due to the strange (and barely) science fictional ideas which have been dropped into what feels like an oddly plotted fantasy. I think this would have worked slightly better if it had junked the SF furniture and been a fantasy.
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words. Story link.
1. There are unnecessary translation notes at the start of the story, mostly about the references to Chinese history: these could have easily been put at the back of the story, and then I wouldn’t have had to plough through them in case they were required to understand the story (they aren’t). Also, there are, for a story that is told in otherwise neutral fantasy language, a few odd colloquialisms: “nothing would have induced him to leg it” on p. 40; “it became super popular to eat Silver Rat meat”; “When their tongues met and entangled, the Silver Rats were, in fact, talking, not making out” on p. 51, etc. Jarring.