Empire of the Ants (36 page)

In this folder, you will find the
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge.
As I write these words, it consists of two hundred and eighty-eight chapters about my work. I'd like you to carry on with it. It's worthwhile.

My research is essentially concerned with ant civilization. You'll see what I mean when you read it but first I have a very important request to make of you. When you reached here, I had not yet had time to take measures to protect my secret (if I had, this letter would not have been here in its present form).

I would like you to build them. I have begun to make sketches but I think you will be able to improve on my suggestions since you know so much about it. The purpose of the devices is simple. People must not be able to get to my sanctuary easily, and those who do must never be able to go back to tell others what they have found.

I hope you succeed and that this place brings you as much "wealth" as it has given me. Edmond.'

'Jonathan played the game,' explained Lucie. 'He built all the traps that had been planned and they work, as you've found out.'

'What about the bodies? Are they people who were attacked by rats?'

'No.' Jonathan smiled. 'I can assure you no-one's died in the tunnel since Edmond moved in. The bodies you spotted have been there for at least fifty years. Goodness knows what tragedies took place here then. They must have belonged to some sect or other.'

'Aren't we ever going to be able to go back up again, then?' asked Jason anxiously

'No, never.'

'We'd have to reach the hole above the safety net (which is eight metres up!), get back through the trap, which is impossible, and we haven't any equipment capable of melting it, and still get through the wall (which can't be opened from this side).'

'Not to mention the rats.'

'How did you manage to get rats down here?' asked Daniel.

'That was Edmonds idea. He put a pair of big, aggressive
Rattus norvegicus
in a crevice in the rock with a good supply of food. He knew it was a time bomb. Well-fed rats multiply at an exponential rate. They produce six babies a month, which are themselves ready to reproduce after two weeks. To protect himself from them, he used a spray containing a pheromone of aggression that rats can't stand.'

'So it was the rats which killed Ouarzazate?' asked Augusta.

'I'm afraid so. Edmond had not foreseen that the ones that passed to the other side of the "pyramid wall" would become even more ferocious.'

'One of our friends had a phobia about rats anyway and really flipped when a big one jumped up at his face and bit a piece of his nose off. He went straight back up before the pyramid wall had even had time to swing back. Did you hear what happened to him after he got back up?' asked a policeman.

'I heard he'd gone mad and been shut up in an asylum,' replied

Augusta, 'but it was only hearsay'

She went to pick up her glass of water but noticed there were lots of ants on the table. She gave a cry and instinctively brushed them off with the back of her hand. Jonathan sprang forward and grabbed hold of her wrist, his hard expression contrasting sharply with the group's previous serenity. His old nervous twitch, which had seemed cured, had come back.

'Don't ever
...
do that. . . again!'

Alone in her chamber, Belo-kiu-kiuni was absent-mindedly eating her latest batch of eggs. They had turned out to be her favourite food.

She knew that this so-called 801st was not just an ambassadress of the new city. 56th, or rather Queen Chli-pou-ni, since that was what she chose to call herself, had sent her to carry on with the investigation.

She did not need to worry, her rock-scented warriors would deal with her without difficulty. The lame ant in particular was an artist when it came to taking away the burden of life.

However, it was the fourth time Chli-pou-ni had sent her an over-inquisitive ambassadress. The first had been killed before even finding the lomechusa's room. The second and third had succumbed to the poisonous beetle's hallucinogenic secretions.

As for this 801st, it appeared that her interview with Mother was scarcely over before she went down there. They really were in more and more of a hurry to die, but they also got further and further into the city each time. Supposing one of them managed to find the passage in spite of everything? Supposing she discovered the secret? Supposing she spread a scent about it?

The Tribe would not understand. The anti-stress warriors would have little chance to suppress the information in time. How would her daughters react?

A rock-scented warrior rushed in.

The spy has managed to overcome the lomechusa beetle! She
^’
s downstairs.

It had only been a question of time.

★
★

666 is the name of the beast (the Apocalypse according to St John). But who will be the beast for whom?

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

Jonathan let go of his grandmother's wrist and Daniel created a diversion before any awkwardness could set in.

'How about the laboratory on the way in? What's that for?'

'It's the Rosetta Stone. Our efforts have only one purpose: to communicate with them.'

'Who's them?'

'Them: the ants. Follow me.'

They left the lounge for the laboratory. Jonathan, visibly very much at ease in his role as Edmonds successor, picked up a test-tube full of ants from the bench and raised it to eye-level.

'Look, they're beings, complete beings, not just unimportant little insects. That's something my uncle understood right away. Ants form the second great civilization on Earth. Edmond was a kind of Christopher Columbus, who discovered a new continent between our toes. He was the first to understand that before looking for extraterrestrials in the depths of space, we ought to begin by contacting the intrater res trials.'

No-one spoke. Augusta was remembering. A few days previously, she had been walking in the Forest of Fontainebleau when she had suddenly felt something crunch under her feet. She had trodden on a group of ants. She bent down to look at them. They were all dead but she was puzzled to see that they were lined up to form an arrow with an inverted head.

Jonathan put the test-tube down again and carried on with what he had been saying:

'When he came back from Africa, Edmond found this building, its underground passage and the temple. It was the ideal place for his laboratory. The first stage in his research consisted of deciphering the pheromones the ants used to talk to one another. This machine is a mass spectrometer. As its name suggests, it produces a spectrum which shows the atomic composition of any substance. I've read my uncle's notes. To begin with, he put his experimental ants under a glass bell-jar connected by a tube to the mass spectrometer. He put an ant near a piece of apple and when it met another ant, it inevitably told it, "There's some apple over there." That was the initial hypothesis, at any rate. He sucked up the pheromones emitted, decoded them and arrived at a chemical formula. For example, "There's apple to the north," was expressed as: "four-methyl two-methylpyrrole carboxylate'. The quantities involved were minute, in the order of two or three picograms (10"
¹²
gm) per sentence. But it was enough. He now knew how to say "apple" and "to the north". He went on experimenting with a multitude of objects, foods and situations. This provided him with a French-Ant dictionary. After he had understood the names of only a hundred or so fruits, thirty flowers and a dozen directions, he learnt the pheromones of alarm, pleasure, suggestion and description. He even came across males and females who taught him how to express the "abstract emotions" of the seventh antenna segment. However, being able to "listen" to them was not enough for him. Now he wanted to talk to them and establish a real dialogue.'

'Amazing!' murmured Daniel Rosenfeld.

'He began by making each chemical formula correspond to a sound made up of a series of syllables. Four-methyl two-methylpyrrole carboxylate, for example, would be pronounced 4MT2MTPCX, then foremtitoemtipisiex. Finally he stored in the computer's memory: foremtitoemtipi equals apple and siex equals to the north. The computer translates both ways. When it detects "siex", it translates it in writing as "to the north". And when "to the north" is typed, it transforms it into "siex", which triggers the emission of carboxylate by the emitting apparatus.'

'Emitting apparatus?'

'Yes, this machine here.'

He showed him a kind of library made up of thousands of small phials, each ending in a tube connected to an electric pump.

'The atoms in each phial are sucked up by the pump and passed into this apparatus, which sorts them and measures them in the exact quantities indicated by the computer dictionary.'

'Extraordinary,' Daniel Rosenfeld went on, 'quite extraordinary. Did he really manage to talk to them?'

'Hmm. I think the best thing I can do now is read his notes from the
Encyclopedia!

extracts of conversations
: Extract of the first conversation with a
Formica rufa
warrior.

human being
: Are you receiving me?
ant
: crrrrrrrr.

human being
: Are you receiving me?
ant
: crrrrrrrrcrrrrrrrrrrrr. Help.

(N.B. Several adjustments were necessary. The signal was far too strong and was suffocating the ant. The microphone must be set at 1 and the receiver turned up to 10 to avoid the loss of a single molecule.)

human being
: Are you receiving me?
ant:
Bougu.

human being
: Are you receiving me?
ant:
Zgugnu. Help.
I’
m
shut in.

Extract of the third conversation.

(N.B. The vocabulary was increased to eighty words this time. The signal was still too strong and again had to be turned down. It has to be set almost at zero.)

ant
: What?

human being
: What did you say?
ant
: I can't understand a thing. Help!
human being
: Let's talk more slowly.

ant
: Your emissions are too strong. My antennae are saturated.

Help! I'm shut in.

human being
: There, is that better?

ant:
N
o
, can't you talk properly?

human being
: Er . . .

ant:
Who are you?

human being
:
I'm a big animal. My name's ED
MOND. I'm a

HU-MAN.

ant
: What did you say? I can't understand a thing. Help! Help!
Pm
shut in.

(N.B. The ant died five seconds later. Were the signals still too toxic or did it die of fright?)

Jonathan stopped reading.

'As you can see, it isn't easy to talk to them. Accumulating vocabulary isn't enough. Besides, the ant language does not work like ours. It isn't only the conversational signals as such that are perceived but the signals from the eleven other antenna segments as well. They convey the individual's identity, preoccupations and psyche, a sort of global state of mind necessary for good interpersonal understanding. That's why Edmond had to give up. Let me read you his notes.'

how stupid of me
: How stupid of me!

Even if extraterrestrials existed, we would not be able to understand them.
We
would have different frames of reference. If we arrived with outstretched arms, they might see it as a threatening gesture.

We
do not even understand the Japanese with their ritual suicide or the Indians with their castes.
We
cannot even understand other human beings. How can I have presumed to understand ants!

801st only had a stump of an abdomen left. Even if she had been able to kill the lomechusa beetle in time, her fight with the rock-scented warriors in the mushroom beds had shortened her considerably. It could not be helped, or rather it was a big help: she was lighter without an abdomen.

She went down the broad passage in the granite. How had ant mandibles been able to excavate that tunnel?

Down below, she discovered the room full of food that Chli-pou-ni had told her about. She had only gone a few steps into the room when she found another exit. She followed it and soon came to a city, an entire rock-scented city. A city under the city.

'So he failed?'

'He brooded over it for a long time. He thought there was no way out and that he'd been blinded by ethnocentricity. Then a spot of trouble opened his eyes. It was his usual antisocial behaviour that sparked it off.'