The Rats That Didn't Sing

by Ekaterina Sedia

Michael tried not to look away as his father's strong fingers pried open the baby rat's jaws and stuck a metal plate of the stereotaxic apparatus between them. The baby rat, mercifully unconscious, did not twitch when the long steel rods entered its ears, fixing its head in place. The scalpel traced a thin pink line along the ratling's head, parting the pale skin and revealing the translucent skull underneath. A metal probe pried apart the celluloid of the baby bones, exposing the brain wrapped in bright red blood vessels.

Michael looked away then.

"How do you expect to learn if you don't watch?" his father said, shooting Michael an irritated look.

"Sorry," Michael said. I don't want this job, he wanted to add, but kept quiet. He did not want to be ungrateful to his father for hiring him; besides, no orchestra he knew of was looking for a recorder player. He stayed.

It was simple, really – sever a part of the brain away from the rest, when the rat is still young, and learn what that part does. Run a rat through a maze, and see what it has learned. Thrust a thick needle into the still-beating heart, pump it full of formaldehyde, slice the pellucid brain to know what the rat thought just before it died.

These simple things occupied Michael's attention, as he shuffled between the animal room and the stainless steel slab of the surgery room, his recorder tucked away in his lab coat pocket, and it had not occurred to him to ask what his father's research was about. But father was not the man to wait for questions – he answered them, whether asked or not.

"Acoustics," he told Michael one day. "You should be interested in it, of all people. Sound processing. Did you know that rats communicate by sound?"

Michael shook his head. "I don't know rats."

"Well, learn." His father sat down by the gleaming stainless steel sink; a rare moment of rest for him. He belonged among the surgical paraphernalia and microtomes, the glass slides, the rat mazes. "Rats actually sing – as part of their courtship, mostly. Kind of like birds. Want to hear a recording?"

Michael nodded. His father dug through the drawers of the file cabinet, and extracted a small, hand-held tape recorder. He pressed the button, and twittering and chirping poured out of it. Not unlike a warbler, the rat on the tape carried a simple melody, swirling with repeating patterns and high-pitched squeaks.

His father turned the tape recorder off. "It was slowed down for a human ear, obviously." Everything was obvious to him; Michael envied him his rational world of clarity and certainty. "Now, remember the experimental group?"

Michael did. Little ratlings who had their brains scrambled and their testicles removed as soon as they were born. Little rats who always huddled close to each other, the cement that held their skulls together as pink as their eyes and strangely human hands. Little rats that Michael always slipped a bit of fruit in addition to their dry chow – as an apology. His little rats.

"We're trying to determine whether this behavior is genetic, and if yes, whether it's regulated by hormones. Now, they won't produce much testosterone, but they were producing it in the womb. If it's a developmental phenomenon, the ones with auditory cortexes intact will exhibit it, but the ones in which we severed the connections won't. If it is genetic…"

Michael stopped listening, trying to imagine what it would be like to be deprived of music. He snapped back to attention when his father said, "Do you understand?"

"Yes," Michael said. He did.