Empire of the Ants (16 page)

Superintendent Bilsheim sighed. It was appalling. What was this scrap of a kid going to turn into when he grew up? An alcoholic at the very least. At last Inspector Galin arrived with the fire brigade. Bilsheim looked at him with pride. He was a dab hand, was Galin. A bit of a pervert, too. He actually got a kick out of cases involving nutters. The weirder, the better.

The understanding Bilsheim and the enthusiastic Galin together made up the unofficial squad which dealt with the 'nutty cases no-one else wanted'. They had already been sent out on the case of the little old lady who got eaten by her cats', 'the prostitute who stifled her clients with her tongue', and the 'pork-butchers' head shrinker'.

'Right then,' said Galin, 'you stay here, Chief. We'll dive in and bring them back for you on inflatable stretchers.'

In her nuptial chamber, Mother had stopped laying. She raised a single antenna and asked to be left alone. Her servants disappeared.

Belo-kiu-kiuni, the living genitals of the city, was disturbed.

No, she was not afraid of war. She had already won and lost a good fifty of them. It was something else that was worrying her, the affair of the secret weapon. The turning acacia branch that had ripped off the dome. And she had not forgotten, either, the 327th male's eye-witness account of the twenty-eight warriors who had died without even having taken up the firing position. Could she risk not taking that extraordinary information into account?

Not any more.

But what was she to do?

Belo-kiu-kiuni remembered another occasion when she had had to confront an 'incomprehensible secret weapon'. It had been during the wars against the termites of the south. One. fine day they had announced to her that a squadron of a hundred and twenty soldiers had been 'immobilized', if not destroyed.

There had been utter panic. They had thought that they would never again be able to vanquish the termites and that their enemies had taken a decisive technological lead.

They had sent out spies and discovered that the termites had come up with a caste of glue-throwing gunners, the nasutiter-mes, capable of hurling a sticky substance that gummed up the legs and jaws of soldiers two hundred heads away.

The Federation had given it great thought and come up with a means of countering them by advancing under the cover of dead leaves. That led to the famous Battle of Dead Leaves, which the Belokanian troops had won.

This time, however, the adversaries were no longer lumbering termites but dwarves whose vivacity and intelligence had already caught them out on several occasions. Besides, the secret weapon seemed to be particularly destructive.

She fiddled nervously with her antennae.

What exactly did she know about the dwarves?

A great deal and very little.

They had arrived in the region a hundred years before. In the beginning, there had been just a few scouts so small they did not seem to be a cause for concern. Then the caravans of dwarves had arrived, bringing their eggs and food reserves with them. They had spent their first night under the root of the big pine.

In the morning, half of them had been wiped out by a starving hedgehog. The survivors had gone away to the north, where they had set up a bivouac not far from the black ants.

In the Federation, they had told themselves it was between the black ants and them. Some of them had even felt guilty about leaving the puny creatures to act as fodder for the big black ants.

However, the dwarf ants had not been massacred. They could be seen up there daily, carrying twigs and little beetles. What could no longer be seen, on the other hand, were the big black ants.

They still did not know what had happened but the Belokanian scouts reported that the dwarves now occupied the whole of the black ant nest. The news was received with fatalism and even humour.
It serves those black ants right for being so pretentious,
went the scent in the corridors. And anyway, such trifling little ants were not about to worry the powerful Federation.

However, after the black ants, it was one of the beehives in the dog-rose that was occupied by the dwarves. Then the last termite hill of the north and the red stinging ants' nest in turn passed under the dwarves' banner.

The refugees who flooded into Bel-o-kan and swelled the throng of mercenaries related that the dwarves had avant-garde combat strategies. For example, they infected water supply points by pouring poison from rare flowers into them.

They were still not seriously alarmed, though. And it had taken the fall of the city of Niziu-ni-kan the previous year in 2°-time to make them realize at last that they were dealing with formidable adversaries.

But if the russet ants had underestimated the dwarves, the dwarves had not judged the russet ants at their full worth. Niziu-ni-kan was a very small city but it had links with the entire Federation. The day after the dwarf victory, two hundred and forty legions of one thousand two hundred soldiers each came to wake them up with a fanfare. The outcome of the
battle was cer
tain but that did not prevent the dwarves from fighting fiercely and it took the federal troops a whole day to enter the liberated city.

They then discovered that the dwarves had installed not one but two hundred queens in Niziu-ni-kan. It came as quite a shock.

army of aggression
: Ants are the only social insects to maintain an army of aggression.

Termites and bees, two less refined royalist and loyalist species, only use their soldiers to defend the city or protect workers far from the nest. It is relatively rare for a termite hill or beehive to set out on a territorial conquest but it is not unknown.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The dwarf queens who had been taken prisoner recounted the history and customs of the dwarves. It was an extraordinary tale.

Many years before, according to them, the dwarves lived in another country, billions of heads away.

That country was very different from the Federation forest. Sweet-tasting, brightly coloured fruit grew to an enormous size and there was no winter and no hibernation. It was a land of plenty, where the dwarves had built the 'old' Shi-gae-pou, a city itself stemming from a very old dynasty. The nest was built at the foot of an oleander bush.

One day, both the oleander and the surrounding sand were torn from the ground and laid in a wooden box. The dwarves tried to escape from the box but it had been placed inside something gigantic and very hard. When they reached the structure's frontiers, they found only water, salt water stretching as far as the eye could see.

Many dwarves drowned trying to return to the land of their ancestors and the majority decided they would just have to survive inside the vast, hard structure surrounded by salt water. It went on for days and days.

Thanks to their Johnstonian organs, they could tell that they were moving at great speed over a phenomenal distance.

We crossed about a hundred of the Earth's magnetic barriers. Where was it leading us? Here. We were disembarked along with the oleander. We discovered this world and its exotic flora and fauna.

It turned out to be a disappointing change of scenery. The flowers, fruit and insects were smaller and less colourful. They had left behind a country of reds, yellows and blues for one of greens, blacks and browns. They had exchanged a fluorescent world for a pastel one.

Then there was the winter and the cold, which brought everything to a standstill. Before, they did not even know the cold existed and the only thing that obliged them to rest was the heat.

First, the dwarves devised various means of combatting the cold. Their two most effective methods were stuffing themselves with sugar and smearing themselves with snails' fatty slime.

For the sugar, they collected the fructose of strawberries, blackberries and cherries and, for the fat, they virtually exterminated the region's snails.

They had really surprising practices in other respects: they had no winged males and females and no nuptial flight. The females made love and laid their eggs at home, under the ground. So that each dwarf city possessed not one but several hundred laying queens. This gave them a real advantage: as well as having a much higher birth rate than the russet ants, they were far less vulnerable. For if killing the queen was sufficient to slay a russet ant city, a dwarf city could be resurrected as long as a single laying female remained.

And that was not all. The dwarves had a different approach to territorial conquest. On their nuptial flights, the russet ants landed as far as possible from their native nests and afterwards linked themselves to the dispersed Federation empire by trails. The dwarves, on the other hand, moved forward from their central cities centimetre by centimetre.

Even their small size was an advantage. They needed very few calories to achieve quite a high level of mental and physical activity. It had been possible to measure the speed of their reactions during a heavy rainfall. The russet ants were still having difficulty getting their herds of greenflies and the last of their eggs out of the flooded corridors several hours after the dwarves had finished building a nest in a crevice in the bark of the big pine tree, moving all their treasures into it.

Belo-kiu-kiuni shook herself to dispel her worried thoughts. She laid two eggs, the eggs of warriors. The nurses were not there to collect them and she felt hungry, so she ate them greedily. They were excellent protein.

She teased her carnivorous plant but her preoccupations were already uppermost in her mind again. The only means of countering the secret weapon would be to invent another even more powerful and terrible. The russet ants had discovered formic acid, the shield leaf and glue traps in succession. They just needed to think of something else. A weapon that would stupefy the dwarves, something even worse than their destructive branch.

She left her chamber, met some soldiers and spoke to them. She suggested setting up think-tanks on the topic of 'finding a secret weapon to combat their secret weapon'. The Tribe responded favourably to her stimulus. Small groups of three or five soldiers and workers formed on all sides. By linking their antennae in a triangle or pentagon, they took part in hundreds of absolute communications.

'Watch out, I'm stopping,' said Galin, anxious not to get shoved in the back by eight firemen.

'It's so dark in here. Pass me a more powerful torch.'

He turned round and someone handed him a big torch. The firemen looked apprehensive even though they were wearing leather jackets and helmets. If only he had thought of putting on something more suitable for an expedition of this kind than a town jacket.

The pencil of light from the torch swept across an inscription engraved at head height on the arched roof.

Examine yourself,

If you have not purified yourself assiduously The chemical wedding will harm you Woe betide those who linger there. Let the light-minded refrain.

Ars Magna

'Have you seen this?' asked a fireman.

'It's just an old inscription,' said Inspector Galin soothingly.

'It sounds like witchcraft.'

'It seems pretty deep, in any case.'

'The meaning of the sentence?'

'No, the staircase. It looks as if it goes down thousands of steps.'

They started to go down again. They must have been a hundred and fifty metres below street-level and still it was spiralling down. Like a spiral of DNA. It almost made them dizzy. Down they went, deeper and deeper.

'It could go on like this indefinitely,' grumbled a fireman. 'We didn't come prepared for potholing.'

'I thought we just had to get someone out of a cellar,' said another, who was carrying the inflatable stretcher. 'My wife was expecting me home for dinner at eight. It's after ten now. She must be really pleased.'

Galin took his troops in hand.

'Listen, men, we're closer to the
bottom than the top, now. Just
keep going a little longer. We're not going to give up halfway'

In actual fact, they had not gone a tenth of the way.

★
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After several hours of AC at a temperature of nearly 15°, a group of yellow mercenary ants came up with an idea that was soon recognized as the best by all the other nerve centres.

Bel-o-kan happened to have a large number of mercenaries of a rather special species, the 'seed-crushers'. They had large heads and long trenchant mandibles, which allowed them to crack open even the hardest seeds, but with their short legs under heavy bodies, they were not very effective in combat.

So what was the point in their dragging themselves with difficulty to the site of a confrontation if they could do little damage there? The russet ants had ended up confining them to household tasks, such as cutting up big twigs.

According to the yellow ants, there was a way in which these clumsy, great oafs could be transformed into superlative war machines. They just needed to be carried by six agile little workers.

Guiding their 'living legs' by smell, the seed-crushers could sweep down on their adversaries at high speed and cut them to pieces with their long mandibles.