Empire of the Ants (30 page)

Chli-pou-kan had been born.

mosquito
: The mosquito is the insect most willing to duel with man. At one time or another, we have all stood on a bed in our pyjamas with a slipper in our hand and our eyes fixed on the ceil-ing.

Yet it is only the disinfectant saliva from its probe that causes the itching. Without this saliva, each bite could become infected. The mosquito even takes the precaution of biting between two pain reception points.

Faced with man, the mosquito's strategy has evolved. It has learnt to be quicker, more inconspicuous and livelier on the take-off. Some bold souls of the latest generation do not hesitate to hide under their victims' pillows. They have discovered the principle of Edgar Allan Poe's
Stolen Letter;
the best hiding place is the most obvious one, for we always think of looking further away for something that is very near.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

Grandmother Augusta gazed at her cases, which were already packed. She was going to move into the rue des Sybarites the next day. It seemed incredible but Edmond had envisaged Jonathan s disappearance and made provision for it in his will: 'If Jonathan dies or disappears, and has not himself left a will, I should like my mother, Augusta Wells, to move into my flat. If she disappears, or if she refuses this legacy, I should like Daniel Rosenfeld to inherit it and if he refuses or disappears, Jason Bragel could then come and live . . .'

In the light of recent events, Edmond had certainly not been wrong to allow himself at least four heirs. But Augusta was not superstitious and thought that even if Edmond were antisocial, he had no reason to wish the death of his nephew and mother. As for Jason Bragel, he was his best friend.

A strange thought crossed her mind. Edmond seemed to have tried to manage the future as if everything began after his death.

They had been walking in the direction of the rising sun for days. 4,000th's health was deteriorating all the time but the old warrior went on advancing without complaining, her courage and curiosity equal to anything.

Late one afternoon, they were climbing up the trunk of a hazelnut tree when they were suddenly surrounded by red ants; more of the tiny insects from the south who had set out to see the world. Their long bodies ended in a venomous sting and, as everyone knew, the slightest contact with it caused instant death. The two russet ants wished themselves elsewhere.

Apart from a few degenerate mercenaries, 103,683rd had never seen red ants in the Great Outside before. The lands of the east were definitely worth discovering.

There was a flurry of antennae. The red ants could communicate in the same language as the Belokanians.

You haven't got the right passport pheromones. Get out! This is our territory.

The russet ants replied that they were only passing through and wanted to go to the eastern end of the world. The red ants consulted one another.

They had recognized the other two as belonging to the Russet Federation. It might be a long way away but it was powerful (sixty-four cities before the last swarming) and the reputation of its armies had crossed the western river. It was probably better not to go looking for trouble. The red ants were a migrant species and were bound to have to cross the russets' federal territories one day.

The antenna movements gradually calmed down. It was a time for composition. A red ant passed on the group's decision:

You can spend one night here. We are prepared to show you the way to the end of the world and even to take you there. In exchange, you will leave us some of your identification pheromones.

It was a fair deal. 103,683rd and 4,000th knew that in giving away some of their pheromones, they were handing the red ants free passage to all the vast Federation territories. But to be able to go to the end of the world and back was worth any price.

Their hosts guided them to the encampment a few branches higher. It was unlike anything they had ever seen. The red ants, who weave and sew, had built their temporary nest by sewing together the edges of three big hazelnut leaves. One served as the floor and the others the side walls.

103,683rd watched a group of weavers busy closing the 'roof before nightfall. They selected the hazelnut leaf that would serve as the ceiling. To join this leaf to the other three, they formed a living ladder from dozens of workers piled one on top of the other until they made a mound that reached the leaf-roof.

The pile collapsed several times. It was too high.

The red ants then adopted a different approach. A group of workers hauled themselves up onto the ceiling-leaf and formed a chain hanging from its very tip. The chain went down and down to meet up with the living ladder below. When it still did not reach, a bunch of red ants weighed it down at the end.

They were almost there. The stem of the leaf had bent and they were only a few centimetres short on the right. The ants in the chain made it swing to close the gap. At the end of each swing, the chain stretched and seemed to be on the point of breaking, but it held. At last the mandibles of the upper and lower acrobats linked up,
snap!

The second manoeuvre was to shorten the chain. The workers in the middle very carefully left the line and climbed onto their colleagues' shoulders and everyone pulled to draw the two leaves together. The leaf-ceiling descended little by little on the village, casting its shadow over the floor.

However, although the box now had a lid, it still had to be sealed. An old red ant rushed inside a house and came back out brandishing a fat larva. It was the weaving instrument.

They made the sides parallel and held them together, then introduced the fresh larva. The poor thing had been building a cocoon in which to moult in peace, but now it would not get the chance. A worker seized a thread from the ball and began to unwind it. She stuck the end to a leaf with a little saliva, then passed the cocoon to her neighbour.

Feeling her thread being removed, the larva produced more to make up for it. The more they stripped her, the colder she got and the more silk she spat out. The workers took advantage of this. They passed the living shuttle from mandible to mandible and did not skimp on the thread. When their child died of exhaustion, they used another. Twelve larvae were thus sacrificed for that piece of work alone.

When they had finished closing the second edge of the leaf-ceiling, the village had the appearance of a green box with white edges. On several different occasions, 103,683rd, who was walking about as if she were at home there, noticed black ants in the middle of a crowd of red ants. She could not help asking about it.

Are they mercenaries?

No, they're slaves.

The red ants were not known as slave-makers, but one of them was willing to explain that they had recently met a horde of slave-making ants heading west and had exchanged some black ant eggs for a portable woven nest.

103,683rd did not let her off that easily and asked her if the meeting had not afterwards turned into a fight. The other ant answered no, the terrible ants were already full up and had too many slaves as it was. Besides, they were afraid of the red ants' deadly stings.

The black ants that had hatched from the swapped eggs had taken on the passport scents of their hosts and served them as if they were their parents. How were they to know that their genetic inheritance made them predators and not slaves? They knew nothing of the world beyond what the red ants were willing to tell them.

Aren't you afraid they'll rebel?

They agreed there had already been hiccoughs but the red ants generally forestalled incidents by eliminating any isolated recalcitrants. As long as the black ants were unaware that they had been stolen from a nest and belonged to another species, they lacked any real motivation.

Night and cold fell on the hazelnut tree and the two explorers were allocated a corner in which to spend the nocturnal mini-hibernation.

Chli-pou-kan was gradually growing. They had begun by laying out the Forbidden City. It was built, not in a stump, but in a peculiar object they had found buried there: a rusty tin that had once contained three kilos of stewed fruit and was rubbish from a nearby orphanage.

In this new palace, Chli-pou-ni frantically laid her eggs while they stuffed her with sugar, fat and vitamins.

Just below the Forbidden City, her first daughters had built a nursery heated with rotting humus; the most practical method until work on the dome of twigs and the solarium could be completed.

Chli-pou-ni wanted her city to benefit from all the latest technology: mushroom beds, tanker ants, greenfly herds, supporting ivies, honeydew fermentation rooms, flour manufacturing rooms, mercenaries' quarters, a spy room, an organic chemistry room, etc.

Ants were running about in all directions. The young queen had managed to transmit her hopes and enthusiasm. She did not want Chli-pou-kan to be just another federal city. Her ambition was to make it a centre of the avant-garde, the high point of Myrmician civilization, and she was full of suggestions.

For example, they had discovered an underground stream in the region of the twelfth floor of the basement. She felt that water was an element that had been insufficiently studied and that they must be able to find a way of walking on it.

In the first phase, a team was given the job of studying freshwater insects: water-beetles, cyclops and daphnia. Were they edible? Could they one day be raised in controlled ponds?

She made her first known speech on the subject of greenflies:

We're moving towards a period of warfare. Weapons are becoming more and more sophisticated and we won't always be able to keep up. One day it may become risky to hunt outside. We have to plan for the worst. Our city must extend as far as possible in depth and we must favour the raising of greenflies above any other source of supply of vital sugars. These cattle will be kept in sheds on the lowest floors.

Thirty of her daughters made a sortie and brought back two greenflies who were about to give birth. A few hours later, they had a hundred or so baby greenflies, whose wings they cut off. They kept this embryonic herd on the twenty-third floor of the basement, where it was quite safe from ladybirds, and they gave it a plentiful supply of fresh leaves and sap-filled stems.

Chli-pou-ni sent explorers in all directions. Some brought back agaric spores, which were then planted in the mushroom beds. The queen was so hungry for discoveries she even decided to realize her mother's dream by planting a row of carnivorous flower seeds on the eastern frontier. She hoped in this way to slow down any attack by the termites and their secret weapon.

For she had not forgotten the mystery of the secret weapon, the assassination of the 327th prince and the food reserves hidden under the granite.

She dispatched a group of ambassadresses to Bel-o-kan. Officially, they were responsible for announcing to the queen mother the building of the sixty-fifth city and its rallying to the Federation. Unofficially, they were to try to carry on with the investigation on the fiftieth floor of the basement of Bel-o-kan.

The doorbell rang while Augusta was pinning her precious sepia photographs up on the grey wall. She checked that the safety chain was on and opened the door a crack.

A middle-aged man was standing there. He was very neatly dressed and did not even have any dandruff on the lapels of his jacket.

'Good morning, Mrs Wells. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Professor Leduc, a colleague of your son Edmond. I won't beat about the bush. I know you've already lost your grandson and great-grandson in the cellar and that eight firemen, six policemen and two detectives have also disappeared. However, I'd like to go down there just the same, Mrs Wells.'

Augusta was not sure she had heard right. She turned her hearing-aid up to maximum volume.

'Are you Professor Rosenfeld?'

'No. Leduc. Professor Leduc. I see you've heard of Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld, Edmond and I are all entomologists. We share the same speciality, the study of ants, though it would be fair to say that Edmond had a considerable lead on us. It would be a pity if mankind did not get the benefit of it. I'd like to go down into your cellar.'

When you are hard of hearing, you study people more closely. She examined Leduc and decided she did not much like the look of him.

'And what are you hoping to find in the cellar?'

'A book, an encyclopedia in which he systematically made a note of all his work. Edmond was secretive. He must have buried everything down there and set traps to kill or scare away the ignorant. But I'm forewarned and a man forewarned . . .'

'. . .can just as easily get killed,' finished Augusta.

'Let me try.'

'Listen, Mr . . .?'

'Leduc, Professor Laurent Leduc, of the National Centre for Scientific Research, Laboratory 352.'

She showed him to the cellar. There was a warning painted in big, red letters on the wall built by the police:

NEVER EVER GO DOWN INTO THIS DAMN CELLAR AGAIN!!!

She nodded her head towards it.

'Do you know what the people in this building are saying, Mr Leduc? They're saying it's carnivorous and that it eats anyone who irritates its throat. Some of them would even like to fill it up with concrete.'