And here was Rove, dining at one end of a long table he’d had them build. The rats were good at making things to his order. They’d had enough access to Earth media that Rove could pick products as though ordering them bespoke. The rats were giving him every luxury. More than that, in fact. Lucas had been told that if a rat worked in the factories, the hydroponics vats or the reclamation plants, its life expectancy was very poor indeed. They had just enough time to pop out some offspring then work themselves to toxic death. One upshot was that Rat-Earth medicine was, Rove informed him, nothing short of miraculous by human standards. They had gene therapy, blanket cures for cancer, rapid screen-and-clean treatments for your blood, spinal fluid and every other damn part of you. It wasn’t as though they were backwards, scientifically, was the point here. It wasn’t like they weren’t trying. And yet it wasn’t enough to stop 99.999 per cent of the population dying from pollution, malnutrition or frustration-bred violence before they had a chance to see the grandkids.

The rat kings themselves lived for three times the length of a rat’s natural life. They hadn’t quite defeated Death, but they’d thrown enough obstacles under his bony feet to earn them that much. That was the prize Rove coveted. He’d already repaired his ageing genetic material, cleaned up his cells, all that biotech stuff. He was now looking forward to a few centuries of hale heartiness with which to dominate the multiverse. With his rodent allies, for now, but Lucas imagined they wouldn’t share a throne comfortably for long. Still, big world out there. Big worlds. Room for more than one god-king, surely.

It had taken him a while to work out what the rats were getting out of it. Eventually he discovered that Rove had given them Earth, human Earth, with all its prime real estate. Not exactly something Rove had the right to sign away. However, the rat kings lived at the pinnacle of a vast, interlocking machine of social interactions. Perhaps they valued the appearance of legitimacy as much as the information Rove was trading about humanity’s defences. And Lucas reckoned the locals who sold Manhattan Island to the Dutch probably hadn’t had the right to do that either. That was how this sort of thing went down.

Beyond that, though, and despite the limitations of human tech, Rove had brought new things to the rats’ table. For example, a stock market venture—featuring an interdimensional computer—was how he’d made contact with the rat kings. It remained his best bargaining counter, his ante for the big game.