Empire of the Ants (12 page)

The nurses were concentrating hard, sparing neither antibiotic saliva nor attention. Not a speck of dirt must be allowed to sully the larvae. They were so fragile. Even conversational pheromones were kept to the strict minimum.

Help me carry them into the corner. . . Look out, your pile's going to fall over. . .

A nurse was moving a larva twice her length, a gunner for sure. She put the 'weapon' down in a corner and licked it.

At the centre of this vast incubator were heaps of larvae on whose bodies the ten segments were beginning to show. They were howling to be fed, waving their heads and legs about and stretching their necks until
the nurses let them have a littl
e honeydew or insect meat.

After three weeks, when they had 'matured' nicely, the larvae stopped eating and moving. They used this lethargic phase to prepare for the coming effort, gathering their energies to secrete the cocoons which would transform them into nymphs.

The nurses then carted the big bundles off to a nearby room filled with dry sand to absorb the moisture from the air. 'Moist heat for eggs, dry heat for cocoons' could never be repeated often enough.

Inside this incubator, the cocoons turned from bluish-white to yellow to grey to brown, like the philosopher's stone but in reverse, while a miracle took place inside the shells. Everything changed, the nervous system, respiratory and digestive apparatus, sense organs and shell.

Once inside the incubator, the nymphs swelled within a few days as the eggs cooked and the big moment drew near. When a nymph was on the point of hatching, it was pulled aside, along with others in the same state. Nurses carefully pierced the veil of the cocoon, releasing an antenna or leg, until a kind of white ant was freed to tremble and sway. Its soft, clear chitin turned red after a few days, like that of all the Belokanians.

In the midst of this whirlwind of activity, 327th was unsure whom to address. He threw out a little scent to a nurse who was helping a new-born ant take its first steps.

Something serious is happening.
The nurse did not even turn her head in his direction. She gave off a barely perceptible scent sentence:

Hush. Nothing is more serious than birth.

A gunner jostled him, hitting him gently with the clubs at the end of her antennae.
Tap, tap, tap. Stop bothering people. Move on.

His energy level was all wrong, the messages he emitted unconvincing. If only he had 56th s gift for communication! He tried again anyway with other nurses but they ignored him completely. He ended up wondering whether his mission was really as important as he thought. Perhaps Mother was right. Other tasks had priority. Perpetuating life rather than starting a war, for example.

While he was thinking this strange thought, a jet of formic acid grazed his antennae. A nurse had dropped the cocoon she was carrying and fired at him. Fortunately, she had not aimed properly.

He rushed to catch up with the terrorist but she had already darted off into the first nursery, knocking over a pile of eggs to block his way. The shells broke, letting out a transparent liquid.

She had destroyed some eggs! What had got into her? There was panic, with nurses running in all directions, anxious to protect the gestating generation.

Realizing he could not catch up with the fugitive, the 327th male tipped his abdomen under his thorax and took aim but before he could fire she was struck down by a gunner who had seen her knock over the eggs.

A crowd formed round the charred body. When 327th bent his antennae over it, he was no longer in any doubt. It smelt of rock.

sociability
: In ants, as in human beings, sociability is predetermined. A new-born ant is too weak on its own to break the cocoon in which it is imprisoned. A human baby cannot even walk or feed itself on its own.

Ants and human beings are species designed to be assisted by those around them and cannot or will not learn on their own. This dependence on adults is certainly a weakness but it sets in motion another process, the quest for knowledge. If adults can survive while the young cannot, the latter are obliged to ask their elders for knowledge from the start.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

On the twentieth floor of the basement the 56th female had not yet got as far as discussing the dwarves' secret weapon with the farmers. She was far too interested in what she could see to be able to emit anything whatsoever.

As the caste of females was especially precious, the latter spent their entire childhood in the princesses' quarters. All they knew of the world was often only a hundred or so corridors, and few of them had ventured below the tenth floor of the basement or above the tenth floor above ground level.

56th had once tried to go and see the Great Outside her nurses had told her so much about, but sentries had turned her back. You could more or less camouflage your scents but not your long wings. The guards had warned her then that there were gigantic monsters outside. They ate little princesses who wanted to go out before the Festival of Rebirth. 56th had been torn between curiosity and dread ever since.

When she went down to the twentieth floor of the basement, she realized that before moving around in the Great, wild Outside, she still had lots of wonderful things to discover in her own city. She was now seeing the mushroom beds for the first time.

According to Belokanian mythology, the first mushroom beds were discovered during the Cereal War in the fifty thousandth millennium. An artillery commando had just laid seige to a termite city. They suddenly came to a room of colossal proportions. In the centre, an enormous, white cake was being endlessly polished by about a hundred termite workers.

They tasted it and found it delicious. It was like an entirely edible village. Prisoners confessed it was made of mushroom. Termites actually live only on cellulose but they cannot digest it without the help of mushrooms.

Ants, on the other hand, can digest cellulose perfectly well and do not need to have recourse to mushrooms. They nevertheless grasped the advantage of growing crops inside their cities: it would allow them to hold out during sieges and famines.

Nowadays, selected strains were grown in the big rooms on the twentieth floor of the basement of Bel-o-kan. Ants no longer used the same mushrooms as termites and, in Bel-o-kan, they mostly grew agarics. A whole new technology based on agricultural activities had developed.

The 56th female circulated between the beds of the white garden. On one side, workers were preparing a 'bed' in which mushrooms would grow. They were cutting leaves into small squares, which were then scraped, ground, kneaded and turned into patties. The leaf patties were arranged on a compost made from ant excrement (which was collected in basins kept for the purpose), then moistened with saliva and left for time to do the work of germinating the mushrooms.

Patties which had already fermented were surrounded by balls of edible white filaments. Workers then watered them with their disinfectant saliva and cut away any bits that stuck out of the little white cones. If they had let the mushrooms grow, they would soon have split the room apart. From the filaments harvested by flat-mandibled workers, a tasty, nourishing flour was obtained.

Here, too, the workers' concentration was at its height. Not a single weed or parasitic fungus must be allowed to take advantage of the care they were lavishing.

It was in this rather unfavourable context that 56th tried to establish antenna contact with a gardener meticulously cutting up one of the white cones.

A grave danger is threatening the city. We need help. Will you join our work cell?

What kind of danger?

The dwarves have discovered a secret weapon with devastating effects. We must do something as quickly as possible.

The gardener placidly asked her what she thought of her mushroom, a fine agaric. 56th complimented her on it and the gardener offered her a taste. The female bit into the white dough and immediately felt as if her oesophagus had been set on fire.

The agaric had been impregnated with myrmicacin, a deadly poison usually used in diluted form as a weed-killer. 56th coughed and spat out the toxic food in time. The gardener let go of the mushroom and leapt at her thorax with her mandibles bared.

They rolled in the compost and dealt each other short, sharp blows on the head with their club antennae, trying to beat each other's brains out.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Farmers separated them.

What's got into the pair of you?

The gardener managed to get away but 56th opened her wings, gave a tremendous leap and flattened her to the ground. It was then that she identified a faint smell of rock. There was no doubt about it; it was her turn to stumble on a member of the incredible band of assassins.

She pinched her antennae.

Who are you? Why did you try to kill me? What's that smell of rock?

The other remained silent so she twisted her antennae. The ant writhed in agony but did not answer. 56th was not the kind to hurt a sister cell but she twisted the antennae still more.

The rock-scented ant stopped moving and entered into voluntary catalepsy. Her heart had almost stopped beating and she would die before long. 56th cut off both her antennae in frustration but she was only wasting her energy on a corpse.

The workers surrounded her once more.

What's happening? Wh
at have you done to her?

56th thought now was not the time to justify herself, it was better to get away, which she did by beating her wings. 327th was right. Something mind-boggling was going on. Some Tribe cells had gone mad.

DEEPER AND DEEPER

On the forty-fifth floor of the basement, the 103,683rd asexual ant made her way into the wrestling halls; low-ceilinged rooms where the soldiers exercised in readiness for the spring wars.

All around, warriors were fighting duels. The opponents first felt each other over to assess build and leg size, then circled, tested each others flanks, pulled each others hairs, threw each other scent challenges and provoked each other with the club ends of their antennae.

Finally, they flung themselves together with a clash of their shells. Each of them
tried to grab hold of the other’
s thoracic joints. As soon as one of them managed it, the other tried to bite her knees. Their movements were jerky. They reared up on their hind legs, collapsed in a heap and rolled about furiously.

They usually held their grip, then suddenly struck another limb. They were careful, though. It was only a training exercise. Nothing got broken, no blood was spilt. The fight ended as soon as an ant was turned over and laid back its antennae in submission. The duels were quite realistic all the same. The combatants often stuck their claws in each other
’
s eyes to get a grip and snapped their jaws on empty air.

Some way off, gunners seated on their abdomens were aiming and firing at bits of gravel five hundred heads away. The jets of acid often hit their targets.

An old warrior was teaching a novice that the outcome of the battle was decided before contact was made. The mandible or jet of acid only ratified a situation of dominance already recognized by the two opponents. Before the fray, there was inevitably one who had decided to win and one who consented to be beaten. It was simply a question of sharing out the roles. Once they had been allocated, the winner could shoot a jet of acid and hit the

bull's-eye without aiming while the loser could go all out with her mandibles without even succeeding in injuring her opponent. Only one piece of advice was worth giving: accept victory. It was all in the mind. Accept victory and nothing could withstand you.

Two duellists jostled the 103,683rd soldier. She shoved them away vigorously and went on her way. She was looking for the mercenaries' quarters, which had been set up below the arena where the fights took place. Soon she caught sight of the passage leading to it.

Their hall was even more vast than that of the legionaries. Admittedly, the mercenaries spent all their time in their exercise area. Their only reason for being there was war. All the peoples of the region, both subject and allied, rubbed shoulders there: yellow ants, red ants, black ants, glue-spitting ants, primitive ants with poisonous stings and even dwarves.

Yet again, it was the termites who had thought up the idea of feeding foreign populations so that they would fight beside them during invasions. The subtleties of diplomacy had led the ant cities to enter into alliances with termites against other ants. This had led the termites to an arresting thought: why not hire ant legions outright to live permanently in the termite hills? It was a revolutionary idea and the ant armies had quite a surprise when they had to confront sisters of the same species fighting for the termites. The Myrmician civilization, so quick to adapt, had overplayed its hand this time.

The ants would gladly have responded by imitating their enemies and taking termite legions into their pay to fight the termites. But there was one major obstacle to their plan: the termites were absolute royalists. Their loyalty was flawless and they were incapable of fighting their own kind. Only ants, whose political regimes were as varied as their physiology, were capable of coming to terms with all the perverse implications of fighting as mercenaries.