Empire of the Ants (37 page)

'What happened?'

'If you recall, Professor, you told me before that he'd worked for a company called Sweetmilk Corporation and that he'd had a run-in with his colleagues.'

'Yes, that's right.'

'One of his bosses had gone through his desk and that boss was none other than Marc Leduc, the brother of Professor Laurent Leduc.'

'The entomologist?'

'In person.'

'It's incredible. He came to see me pretending to be a friend of Edmonds. He went down.' 'Into the cellar?'

'Yes, but don't worry, he didn't get far. He couldn't get through the pyramid wall so he came back up again.'

'Mmm, he came to see Nicolas, too, to try and get his hands on the
Encyclopedia.
OK. So Marc Leduc had noticed that Edmond was working hard on some sketches of machines (in actual fact the first sketches of the Rosetta Stone). He managed to open the cupboard in Edmonds office and came across a folder containing the
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge.
In it, he found all the plans for the first machine for communicating with ants. When he realized what the apparatus was for (and it was sufficiently annotated for him to understand), he talked to his brother about it. Laurent Leduc was obviously very interested and immediately asked him to steal the documents. But Edmond had noticed that someone had been through his things and had let four ichneumon wasps loose in his drawer to protect them from another visit. As soon as Marc Leduc returned to the attack, he got stung by the insects, which have the nasty habit of laying their ravenous larvae in the bodies of those they sting. Edmond spotted the sting marks the next day and publicly unmasked the culprit. The rest you know. He was the one they got rid of.' 'What became of the Leduc brothers?'

'Marc Leduc got what he deserved. The ichneumon wasp larvae ate away at him from the inside. It took a very long time, several years apparently. As the larvae could not get out of his huge body to turn into wasps, they dug in all directions to find a way out. In the end, the pain became so unbearable he threw himself under a tube train. I read about it by chance in the newspapers.'

'How about Laurent Leduc?'

'He did his utmost to find the machine.'

'You were saying it made Edmond want to have another go. How was it all connected to his research?'

'Laurent Leduc subsequently contacted Edmond directly. He admitted he knew about his machine for "talking to ants". He said he was interested and wanted to work with him. Edmond wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea, he was at a standstill anyway, and he wondered if it wouldn't be a good thing to get some outside help. As the Bible says, there comes a time when you can't go on alone. Edmond was prepared to guide Leduc to his sanctuary but he wanted to know him better first. They talked at length. When Laurent began to speak highly of the ants' order and discipline, emphasizing the fact that talking to them would surely allow man to imitate them, Edmond saw red. He lost his temper and told him never to set foot in his house again.'

'I'm not surprised,' sighed Daniel. 'Leduc belongs to a clique of ethologists, the worst of the German school, who want to change the human race by copying some aspects of animal behaviour
...
a sense of territory, the discipline of the anthills. People are always fantasizing about it.'

'It gave Edmond a pretext for getting down to work. He was going to talk to ants from a political point of view He thought they lived in an anarchical system and wanted to ask them to confirm it.'

'Of course!' murmured Bilsheim.

'It was becoming a man-sized challenge. My uncle thought a lot longer and decided that the best way to communicate would be to build a "robot ant".'

Jonathan waved some sketch-covered sheets.

'Here are the plans for the robot. Edmond christened it "Dr Livingstone". Its made of plastic. You can imagine how fiddly it was to make. Its a little masterpiece. All the joints are reproduced and moved by microscopic electric motors connected to a battery in the abdomen and the antennae have eleven segments capable of emitting eleven different pheromones simultaneously. The only difference between Dr Livingstone and a real ant is that he's connected to eleven pipes, each as thick as a hair, which join up to make a kind of umbilical cord as thick as a piece of string.'

'Amazing. Simply amazing,' enthused Jason.

'Where is Dr Livingstone, by the way?' asked Augusta.

She was being followed by rock-scented warriors. As she ran, 801st suddenly spotted a very broad gallery and rushed down it. She thus came to an enormous room, at the centre of which stood a funny-looking ant of above average size.

801st went up to him cautiously. The scents of the strange, solitary ant were only half true. His eyes did not shine and his skin seemed to be covered in black dye. The young Chlipoukanian tried to work it out. How was it possible to be so little like an ant?

The soldiers had already flushed her out, though. The ant with the limp came forward, alone, for a duel. She leapt at her antennae and started to bite them and they both rolled on the ground.

801st remembered Mother's advice:
See where your enemy likes to strike you. It's often his own weak point.
When she seized the lame ant's antennae, her attacker writhed furiously. They must have been very sensitive. 801st sliced them off and managed to get away, but now she had a pack of over fifty killers at her heels.

'If you want to know where Dr Livingstone is, follow the wires leading from the mass spectrometer.'

They could see a kind of transparent tube that ran along the bench as far as the wall, rose to the ceiling and finally disappeared inside a kind of big wooden chest hanging just above the organ in the centre of the church. The chest was probably full of earth and the new arrivals craned their necks to get a better look at it.

'But you said there was solid rock above our heads,' remarked Augusta.

'Yes, but I also pointed out there's a ventilation shaft we no longer use.'

'And if we no longer use it,' went on Inspector Galin, 'it isn't because we've blocked it up.' 'But if it wasn't you . . .' 'It must have been them.' 'The ants?'

'Precisely. A gigantic russet ant city has been built above the slab of rock. You know, the insects that build big domes of twigs in the forests.'

'According to Edmond's calculations, there are over ten million of them.'

'Ten million? They could kill us all!'

'Don't panic, there's nothing to be afraid of. Firstly, because they talk to us and know us and also, because not all the ants in the city are aware of our existence.'

As Jonathan said that, an ant fell out of the chest in the ceiling and landed on Lucie's forehead. She tried to catch it but 801st panicked and went and hid in her red hair, slid down her ear lobe, tumbled down the back of her neck, dived into her blouse, skirted her breasts and navel, galloped over the fine skin of her thighs, fell down to her ankle and, from there, plunged to the ground. She quickly found her bearings and made straight for one of the lateral air vents.

'What's got into her?'

'How should I know? She was attracted by the draught of cool air from the shaft, in any case. She won't have any trouble getting out.'

'But she won't get back to her city that way, will she? She'll come out completely to the east of the Federation.'

The spy has managed to get away. If this goes on, we'll have to attack the so-called sixty-fifth city.

Some rock-scented soldiers had made their report with lowered antennae. After they had withdrawn, Belo-kiu-kiuni brooded for a while over the grave failure of her policy of secrecy, then wearily recalled how it had all begun.

When she was very young, she too had been confronted with a terrifying event pointing to the existence of giant beings. It was just after she had swarmed. She had seen a black slab crush several fertile queens without even eating them. Later, after engendering her city, she had managed to organize a meeting on the subject, at which most of the queens, both mothers and daughters, were present.

She remembered. It was Zoubi-zoubi-ni who had spoken first. She had related that several of her expeditions had been subjected to showers of pink balls, which had caused over a hundred deaths.

Her other sisters had outdone one another with lists of those killed or maimed by the pink balls or black slabs.

Cholb-gahi-ni, an old mother, remarked that, according to the evidence, the pink balls only seemed to move in herds of five.

Another sister, Roubg-fayli-ni, had found a motionless pink ball nearly three hundred heads below the surface. The pink ball was connected to a soft substance which had quite a strong smell. They had burrowed into it with their mandibles and finally come out onto hard, white stems, as if the animals had shells inside their bodies instead of outside.

By the end of the meeting, the queens had all agreed that such things were beyond their understanding and decided to observe absolute secrecy in order to avoid panic in the anthills.

Belo-kiu-kiuni, for her part, quickly decided to set up her own 'secret police', a work group formed of fifty or so soldiers at that time. Their mission was to eliminate anyone who witnessed the pink balls or black slabs in order to avoid panic in the city.

But one day something incredible had happened.

A worker from an unknown city had been captured by her rock-scented warriors. Mother had spared her because she had told them the strangest thing they had ever heard.

The worker claimed to have been kidnapped by pink balls. They had thrown her into a transparent prison along with several hundred other ants. They had been subjected to all sorts of experiments. More often than not, they were put under a bell-jar and received very concentrated scents. It was very painful at first but the scents were gradually diluted and the smells had then turned into words.

In the end, with the aid of the scents and bell-jars, the pink balls had talked to them, presenting themselves as giant animals who called themselves 'human beings'. They had told her that there was a passage in the granite under the city and said that they wanted to speak to the queen. She could be sure that no harm would be done to her.

It had all happened very quickly after that. Belo-kiu-kiuni had met their 'ambassador ant',
Doc-
tor Li-ving-stone, a
strange ant ending in a transparent intestine, but one you could talk to.

They had had a long conversation. To begin with, they could not understand one another at all but manifestly shared the same exhilaration and seemed to have so much to say to one another.

The human beings had subsequently fitted the earth-filled chest at the end of the shaft and Mother had sown this new city with eggs. In secret, without her other children knowing.

But Bel-o-kan 2 was more than the city of the rock-scented warriors. It had become the link-city between the ant world and the human world.
Doc-tor Li-ving-stone
(a ridiculous name if ever there was one) was always to be found there.

extracts of conversations
: Extract of the eighteenth conversation with Queen Belo-kiu-kiuni:

ant
: The wheel? It's incredible we've never thought of using the wheel. When I think we've all seen dung beetles pushing along balls of dung and none of us has ever come up with the wheel.
human being: How
do you intend to use this information?
ant:
I don't know yet.

Extract of the fifty-sixth conversation with Queen Belo-kiu-kiuni:
ant:
You sound sad.

human being
: My scent organ must be badly tuned. Since I added emotive language, the machine seems to be misfiring.
ant:
You sound sad.

human being: . . .

ant
:Aren't you emitting any more?

human being
: I think it's just a coincidence but I really do feel sad.

ant:
What's the matter?

human being
: I used to have a female. Male human beings live a long time so we live in couples, one male and one female. I used to have a female but I lost her a few years ago. I loved her and I can't forget her.

ant
: What does Hove' mean?

human being
: Possibly that we had the same scents.

Mother remembered the end of the
hu-man Ed-m
ond.
It had happened during the first war against the dwarves. Edmond had wanted to help them and had left the underground room. But he had manipulated so many pheromones that he was completely drenched in them. Without knowing it, he passed in the forest for a russet ant of the Federation. When the wasps in the fir tree (with whom they were at war at the time) spotted his passport scents, they all pounced on him.

They killed him because they mistook him for a Belokanian. He must have died happy.

Later, Jonathan and his community had resumed contact.