The creatures were a rare breed of intelligent rats. None of them knew how long the ship had been at sea, or who had built it. They had theories, but they had little time or energy to debate them. Most of their shipmates lived below decks, uninterested in doing battle with the ocean. The ship's hull had thick walls made of dense, dark, tasty chocolate. The rats below the deck were eating them.
The scene below the decks was one of squalor and splendor, elegance and decadence. Countless rats ambled slowly about, stuffing themselves with chocolate. When they were not eating, they spent much time grooming themselves, trying to conceal the results of their lifetimes of inactivity. They spent their idle hours dreaming up new ways to squander their chocolate in conspicuous displays to impress each other. Most of them had never seen the ship's deck and rigging.
One of the chocolate eaters was growing unhappy with his lot. Sure, he enjoyed the taste of chocolate as much as anyone, but he also felt confined in his sticky-sweet prison. He had heard rumors about the world above, but nobody seemed to know exactly how to get there. They did have strong ideas of how miserable life was supposed to be on the deck. When he spoke of trying to reach it, his friends reacted in derision and horror. They told him about how the air was cold and wet, how rats had to work and get dirty to survive, how they sometimes died up there. They urged him to eat some more chocolate and forget all about it. He took some at their urging, but it no longer tasted sweet to him. He felt disgusted at his life as a chocolate-eater. His neglected muscles cried out to him for challenge. His mind was growing numb from disuse. He had to go to the deck, feel the cold and wet, and defeat it. The rat's name was Ysncom (pronounced: Yis-n-com).
If what he had heard about going topside was true, he would have to prepare himself for the challenge. He began exercising regularly. Slowly his formerly limp muscles began to harden, and with them his resolve hardened as well. His friends noted the change and either publicly ridiculed or quietly respected him. The she-rats largely avoided him. While something in their dim past made these changes vaguely appealing, years of cultural adaptation had made chocolate an indispensible part of their mating rituals. Ysncom was refusing to use any more than the absolute minimum chocolate he needed to survive, and this was more than most of the she-rats could handle.
Ysncom began wandering about the ship's hold, trying to find someone who knew the way up. He chanced upon an old rat with a faraway look in his eyes. The old rat kept to himself much of the time, and unlike the other chocolate-eaters, he was almost skeletal in appearance. Ysncom knew this meant the old rat hated to eat chocolate. Ysncom greeted him and told him of his quest. The old rat smiled crookedly and said he could show Ysncom the way up. They left the other rats just as they were beginning another well-organized chocolate orgy. The pair ran along a twisting maze of corridors. They stopped before a vent with a pried-open screen. The old rat told Ysncom that this was an opening to a ventilation shaft that led to the deck. Salt air drifted from the vent, and it was unlike the smell Ysncom was accustomed to. He shook hands with the old rat, bid him farewell, and clambered up the ventilation shaft.
The climb was tough, but so was Ysncom. He emerged onto the deck in the middle of a moderate storm. His senses reeled at the combined impact of wind, spray, and the view of the enormous, raging sea. He was paralyzed by the sight, but soon began to find his way. He climbed onto the ship's rigging and met a motley crew of deck rats. He told them of his quest, and they happily put him to work. They taught him about life on the deck, how to tie knots, how to catch fish, how to survive in the storms. They told him how they were trying to repair the ship's rigging so they could pilot her. He asked them where they planned to take the ship. They told him of the legends of "land"---living spaces so large a rat could run for days in one direction. Ysncom wanted to go there.
After some time, Ysncom became an expert deck-rat. His discovered that the entire ship was a hull of chocolate, and he had seen deck-rats drowning. His calculations showed that the chocolate-eaters were threatening the ship. He also knew that the deck-rats were too few to repair the rigging in time and guide the ship. He decided that he would have to go below again and try to persuade more chocolate-eaters to come to the deck. His fellow deck-rats were divided. Some agreed with Ysncom, while others did not believe the ship was really in danger. "Let the chocolate eaters bask in their sloth," they said. "We can have our lives up here and ignore them." Several of the deck-rats decided to join Ysncom as he took his message below.
They crawled down the ventilation shaft and into the ship's hold. Ysncom's eyes were not accustomed to the darkness, and he took time to adjust. When he surveyed the scene before him, he was shocked. His time on the deck gave him eyes to see the chocolate-eaters' way of life for what it was. He steeled himself for his task, and began to speak to his former hold-mates.
Predictably most of them derided him as an insane idealist. They pointed to the walls of chocolate and asked Ysncom mockingly if he really did think great danger lay in eating them. Some listened carefully to his message, and replied that the ideas made sense, but that chocolate-eaters had no choice but to continue eating chocolate. Life on the deck sounded too harsh, too difficult, a good idea for someone else. Besides, the chocolate-eaters had built a whole culture around chocolate, and they couldn't simply turn their backs on it. So Ysncom took his message to other groups of chocolate-eaters. Gradually, he attracted a small handful of followers, but before he had time to reach everyone he yearned for life on the deck again, so he left.
The deck-rats welcomed their new members and began training them. Ysncom continued to go below periodically to reason with the chocolate eaters, with the usual modest results. The deck-rats made progress. They managed to repair one small sail, and they discovered how to steer with the rudder. They built instruments to let them keep the ship pointed in one direction by observing the sun and the stars. They had no reason to prefer any direction over another, but they knew that aimless circling would not get them anywhere. So they picked a direction at random and tried to keep the ship headed that way. Some nights, the wind would stop and the waves would still. The deck-rats could then hear the revelry below decks, and they knew they didn't have much time to save themselves.
The deck-rats finished another sail, and the ship began to move as though it had a purpose, slowly plowing through the waves. Then one day, it happened. A lookout rat in the crows-nest saw something on the horizon that was not ocean. It was wide, low, and green. Dark jagged things with white tops rose above it. Judging from its apparent distance, it must have been huge, as big as the ocean itself. The lookout rat began shouting to the other deck-rats.
Several of them climbed to the crows-nest to observe, including Ysncom. They concluded that this must be the fabled "land." They relayed the news to the rest of the deck-rats, and a mighty shout went up. Just then, however, the chocolate-eaters breached the ship's hull. She filled with water and sank, drowning all the rats.
The End.