Empire of the Ants (24 page)

When the 56th female, recently turned queen, recovered consciousness, she found that she had been washed up on a huge gravel beach. She had probably only escaped the frogs thanks to a rapid current. She would have liked to take off but her wings were still wet. All she could do was wait.

She cleaned her antennae methodically, then sniffed the surrounding air. Where was she? She only hoped she had not ended up on the wrong side of the river.

She vibrated her antennae at 8,000 strokes a second and caught a few whiffs of familiar smells. By luck, she was on the west bank of the river. However, there were no trail pheromones whatsoever. She would need to move a little nearer the central city if she wanted to link her future city to the Federation.

She flew off westwards at last. She would not be able to go far for the time being. Her wing muscles were tired and she hedge-hopped.

They returned to the main hall of Guayei-Tyolot. Since 103,683rd had tried to enquire about the termites of the east, the ants there had avoided her as if she were infected with
alternaria.
She was completely absorbed in her mission and did not falter.

Around her, the Belokanians were taking part in trophallaxis with the Guayeityolotians, getting them to taste the new agaric harvest and savouring honeydew extracted from wild caterpillars in return.

After ranging far and wide, the conversation turned to the lizard hunt. The Guayeityolotians told them that three lizards had recently been spotted terrorizing the greenfly herds of Zoubi-zoubi-kan. They had destroyed two herds of a thousand beasts and all the accompanying shepherdesses.

There had been panic for a time. The shepherdesses had only moved their cattle about in the protected passages dug into the flesh of branches. But thanks to the acid artillery, they had managed to repulse the three dragons. Two had gone a long way away. The third had been wounded and had settled on a stone fifty thousand heads away. The Zoubizoubikanian legions had already cut off its tail. They had to seize the opportunity and finish it off before it recovered its strength.

Is it true that lizards' tails grow again?
asked one explorer. They replied that it was.

The tail that grows again isn't the same, though. As Mother says, you never get back exactly what you've lost. There are no vertebrae in the second tail, so it's much softer.

A Guayeityolotian supplied more information. Lizards were very sensitive to changes in the weather, far more so than ants. If they had stored up a lot of solar energy, they had incredibly quick reactions. When they were cold, on the other hand, all their movements slowed down. They would need to plan the next day's offensive on the basis of this. Ideally, they should charge the lizard at dawn. It would have cooled down during the night and would be lethargic.

But we'll have cooled down, too!
remarked one Belokanian pertinently.

Not if we use the dwarves' techniques for resisting the cold,
retorted a huntress.
We'll stuff ourselves with sugar and alcohol for energy and paint our shells with slime to stop the calories escaping too quickly from our bodies.

103,683rd listened to these words with a distracted antenna. She was thinking about the mystery of the termite hill and the unexplained disappearances related to her by the old warrior.

The first Guayeityolotian, the one who had shown her the trophies but refused to talk about the termites, came up to her again.

Have you talked to 4,000th?

103,683rd acquiesced.

Don't take any notice of what she said, then. You might just as well have been talking to a corpse. She got stung by an ichneumon wasp a few days ago.

An ichneumon wasp! 103,683rd shuddered in horror. The ichneumon wasp had a long proboscis with which it made holes in ants' nests in the night. When it came across a warm body, it pierced it and laid its eggs inside.

It was the ant larvae's worst nightmare: a syringe shot out of the ceiling and felt about for soft flesh into which to empty its young. These then grew quietly inside the host organism before changing into voracious larvae which gnawed away at the living animal from the inside.

That night, 103,683rd inevitably dreamt about a terrible trunk which pursued her to inject its carnivorous children into her.

The entry code had not changed. Nicolas still had his keys and only had to break the seals that the police had put on the door to get inside the flat. Nothing had been touched since the firemen's disappearance. Even the cellar door was still wide open.

He did not have a flashlight so he calmly got down to the job of making a torch. He managed to break off a table leg, fixed a tightly packed crown of crumpled paper to it and set fire to it. The wood quickly caught light and burnt with a small, even flame that would last and withstand draughts.

He immediately vanished down the spiral staircase with the torch in one hand and his penknife in the other. Resolute, his jaws clenched, he felt he was the stuff of heroes.

Down and round he went, endlessly down and round. It seemed to have been going on for hours and he was hungry and thirsty but the will to succeed drove him on.

He got worked up and went even faster, then started to yell out loud, sometimes calling his father and mother and sometimes letting out spirited war-cries. His tread had become extraordinarily sure, and he flew from step to step without any conscious control.

Suddenly,' he came to a door. He pushed it open. Two tribes of rats were fighting but they fled from the apparition of the screaming child with his halo of flames.

The oldest rats were worried. For some time now, the 'big ones' visits had become more frequent. What did it mean? They only hoped this one would not go and set fire to the dens of the pregnant females.

Nicolas continued his descent. He had been going so fast he hadn't seen the rats. There were more stairs and more strange inscriptions, which he certainly would not read this time. Suddenly he heard a flapping noise and felt a touch. A bat was clinging on to his hair. He was terrified and tried to get away from it but it seemed to have soldered itself to his head. He tried to repel it with his torch but only succeeded in singeing his own hair. He screamed and broke into a run again but the bat stayed perched on his head like a hat and only flew away after sucking a little of his blood.

Nicolas no longer felt tired. Breathing noisily and with his heart and temples beating fit to burst, he suddenly bumped into a wall. He fell down but picked himself up again straight away with his torch intact. He moved the flame about in front of him.

It really was a wall. Better still, he recognized the plates of concrete and steel his father had carted down. And the cement pointing was still fresh.

'Mum, Dad, answer if you're there!'

But only the echo answered. Yet he must be close to his goal. The wall must pivot because that was what happened in films when there was no door.

What was behind the wall, then? Nicolas at last found an inscription which read:

How do you make four equilateral triangles out of six matches?

And just below it there was a small keypad with letters rather than figures, twenty-six letters you had to use to type the answer to the question.

'You have to think differently,' he said out loud. He was amazed because the sentence had come to him of its own accord. He thought for a long time without daring to touch the keypad. Then he was filled with a strange silence, a vast silence which emptied him of all thought but which inexplicably guided him to type a succession of seven letters.

He heard the soft hum of a mechanism and the wall swung round. Nicolas went forward, excited and ready for anything, but soon after he had passed through, the wall moved back into place, causing a draught which blew out the remaining stump of torch.

Plunged into total darkness, his mind confused, Nicolas retraced his footsteps. There were no coded keys on this side of the wall, though. It was impossible to go back. He tore at the concrete and steel plates but his father had made a good job of it. He wasn't a locksmith for nothing.

cleanliness
: What could he cleaner than a fly? It is forever washing itself not out of duty hut out of necessity. If its antennae and eye facets are not all impeccably clean, it will never be able to detect food from a distance or see the hand about to squash it. For insects, cleanliness is a major factor in survival.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The next day, the front-page headlines of the popular press read: 'The dreaded cellar of Fontainebleau strikes again. Latest disappearance: the only son of the Wells family. What are the
police doing?'

The spider glanced down from the top of his fern. It was very high. He exuded a drop of liquid silk, stuck it to the leaf, went to the end of the branch and jumped into space. He took some time to fall. The line stretched and stretched, then dried, hardened and broke his fall just before he touched down. He had nearly been squashed like a ripe berry. Many of his sisters had already been smashed to pieces because a sudden cold spell had made the silk harden more slowly.

The spider wriggled his eight legs until he swung like a pendulum, then stretched out and made fast to a leaf. This would be the second mooring point of his web and he stuck the end of his line to it. You cannot get far with a taut rope, though. He spotted a trunk to the left and ran over to it. A few more branches, a few more leaps and his support lines were in place. They would take the strain of the winds and the weight of prey. The whole thing formed an octagon.

Spiders' silk is made of a fibrous protein, fibroin, which is strong and waterproof. When certain spiders have had enough to eat, they can produce seven hundred metres of silk two microns in diameter, which is proportionally as strong as nylon and three times as elastic.

To cap it all, they have seven glands, each producing a different kind of thread: a silk for the web support lines; a silk for the safety rope; a silk for the lines at the heart of the web; a sticky-coated silk for a quick grip; a silk to protect the eggs; a silk to build shelters; and a silk to wrap up prey.

The silk is actually the fibrous extension of spider hormones just as pheromones are the volatile extensions of ant hormones.

The spider manufactured a safety rope and made fast to it. He would now be able to drop down at the first sign of danger and escape without wasting any effort. This had already saved his life many times.

He then intertwined four lines at the centre of his octagon. His gestures had not changed in a hundred million years. His construction was beginning to look like something. Today, he had decided to make a web out of dry silk. The sticky-coated silks were far more effective but they were too fragile. All the dust and bits of dead leaves got caught in them. Dry silk had less snaring power but at least it would last until nightfall.

Once the spider had got the ridge beams in place, he added a dozen spokes and put the finishing touches to his work with the central spiral. That was the part he liked best. He fastened his dry thread to a branch and jumped from spoke to spoke, always in the direction of the Earth s rotation, taking as long as possible to get to the heart of the web.

He did it in his own special way. Just as no two human beings have the same fingerprints, no two spiders' webs on Earth are alike.

It was important to keep the mesh taut. Once he had reached the centre, he looked over his scaffolding of threads to gauge its strength. Then he paced up and down each spoke and shook it with his eight legs. It held.

Most of the spiders in the region built webs on the plan 75/12. Seventy-five turns of the filling-in spiral to twelve spokes. He preferred the fine lace of 95/10.

It might be more conspicuous, but it was stronger. And as he used dry silk, he could not afford to skimp on the quantity. Otherwise insects would only pay passing visits.

However, the long, exacting task had drained him of energy and he needed food urgently. It was a vicious circle. He was starving because he had built a web but it was the web that would enable him to eat.

He hid under a leaf and waited with his twenty-four claws resting on the main beams. Without even having recourse to one of his eight eyes, he could sense the surrounding space and feel in his legs the slightest movements of air thanks to the web, which reacted with the sensitivity of a microphone membrane.

The minute vibration he could feel was a bee two hundred heads away. It was describing figures of eight to show the bees in its hive the way to a field of flowers.

That other faint quivering must be a dragonfly. They were delicious. But this one was not flying in the right direction to become his lunch.

He felt something heavy land in his web. It was a spider hoping to lay claim to someone else's work. He quickly chased the thief away before any prey turned up.

Speaking of which, he felt a fly arriving from the east in his left hind leg. She did not seem to be flying very quickly. If she did not change course, it looked as if she would fall right into his trap.

Splat! A
hit.

It was a winged ant.