Black Squirrels

 

 

JEDAO AND RUO had set up shop at the edge of one of the campus gardens, the one with the carp pond and the carefully maintained trees. Rumor had it that some of the carp were, in addition to being over a hundred years old, outfitted with surveillance gear. Like most Shuos cadets, Jedao and Ruo would, if questioned, laugh off the rumors while secretly believing them wholeheartedly—at least the bit about surveillance gear. Jedao had argued that the best place to hide what they were doing was in plain sight. After all, who would be so daft as to run a prank right next to surveillance?

“Lovely day, isn’t it?” Ruo said brightly.

Jedao winced. “Not so loud,” he said. His head was still pounding after last night’s excesses, and the sunlight, unfiltered by any cloud cover, wasn’t helping. Why did he keep letting Ruo talk him into things? It wasn’t just that Ruo was really good in bed. He had this way of making incredibly risky things sound fun. Going out drinking? In itself, not that bad. Playing a drinking game with unlabeled bottles of possibly-alcohol-possibly-something-else stolen from Security’s hoard of contraband? Risky. Some of those hallucinations had been to die for, though, especially when he started seeing giant robots in the shape of geese.

Fortunately, this latest idea wasn’t that risky. Probably. Besides, of the many things that other cadets had accused Jedao of, low risk tolerance wasn’t one of them.

“Not my fault you can’t hold your drink,” Ruo said, even more brightly.

“I’m going to get you one of these days,” Jedao muttered.

Ruo’s grin flashed in his dark brown face. “More like you’ll lose the latest bet, and—” He started describing what he’d do to Jedao in ear-burning detail.

At last one of the other first-years, puzzled by what Jedao and Ruo were doing by the carp pond with a pair of fishing poles, approached. Jedao recognized them: Meurran, who was good at fixing guns despite their terrible aim, and who had a glorious head of wildly curling hair.

“Security’s not going to approve of you poaching the carp,” Meurran said.

“Oh, this isn’t for the carp,” Ruo said. He flicked his fishing pole, and the line with its enticing nut snaked out toward one of the trees.

Meurran gave Ruo a funny look. “Ruo,” they said, “the fish are in the opposite direction.”

“Please,” Jedao said, “who cares about the fish? No one has anything to fear from the fish. That’s just nonsense.”

“All right,” Meurran said, sounding distinctly unimpressed, “then what?”

Come on, Jedao thought, the nut is right there...

As if on cue, a black squirrel darted down from the tree, then made for the nut.

Ruo tugged the nut just out of reach.

The black squirrel looked around, then headed for the nut again.

“Oh, isn’t that adorable?” Meurran said.

“Don’t be fooled!” Ruo said as he guided the squirrel in a figure-eight through the grass. “Why would the commandant be so stupid as to implant surveillance devices in the carp, which can’t even leave their pond?”

Meurran glanced involuntarily at the pond, where two enormous carp were lazily circling near the surface, as if the carp, in fact, had a habit of oozing out onto the land and spying on lazy cadets. “You’re saying the squirrels—?”

Ruo continued to tease the squirrel with the nut. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Everyone thinks the black squirrels are the cutest. They’re even featured in the recruitment literature. Damnably clever piece of social engineering, if you ask me.”

Meurran was starting to look persuaded in spite of themself.

Meanwhile, as Ruo made his case, Jedao leaned back and studied the squirrel with a frown. The local population of black squirrels was mostly tame and had proven to be easy to train with the aid of treats. (Ruo had made Jedao do most of this, “because you’re the farm boy.”) But while Ruo and Meurran argued about squirrel population dynamics, Jedao caught a slight flash from behind the squirrel’s eyes—almost like that of a camera?

He opened his mouth to interrupt.

The squirrel made an odd convulsing motion, and the light flashed again, this time directly into Jedao’s eyes.

Jedao closed his mouth and kept his thoughts to himself.

 

 

Author’s Note

 

This story is the result of a few separate things. I read a webpage on “squirrel-fishing” when I was at Cornell University some twenty years ago; I don’t think the site is still up, but it provided me with much-needed laughs during finals week. Later I attended Stanford University for grad school, which is known for its population of black squirrels. My sister, who attended Stanford as an undergrad (we overlapped for one year), later told me that the black squirrel population is self-reinforcing as people feed them preferentially for being so darn cute.

Finally, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I ran a Legends of the Five Rings tabletop roleplaying campaign in which the Emperor’s carp were both ancient and smarter than any of the PCs.  I don’t remember why the joke was so funny. Possibly it wasn’t, but even ridiculous things look funny when you’re trying not to freak out over your prelims.