Empire of the Ants (8 page)

Revived by the vibrations, the young male speeded up his heartbeat again, surprised his executioners by lashing out with his mandibles and made off down the collapsed tunnel. He beat his embryonic wings to accelerate his flight and prolong his leaps over rubble.

Each time there was a strong tremor, he had to stop and He flat on the ground until the avalanches of sand had ceased. Whole sections of tunnels came crashing down into other tunnels. Bridges, arches and crypts collapsed, dragging millions of dazed silhouettes down with them.

Priority alarm scents streamed out and spread. In the first phase, the stimulating pheromones filled the upper galleries like mist. All who breathed in the scent immediately began to tremble and run about in all directions, producing pheromones that were even more arousing and causing the panic to snowball.

The alarm cloud spread like fog, gliding into all the veins of the stricken region and from there into the main arteries. The alien object which had infiltrated the Tribe's body had produced the pain toxins the young male had tried in vain to trigger. As a result, the black blood formed by the crowds of Belokanians began to beat faster. Gangs of workers evacuated the eggs near the disaster area and soldiers formed themselves into combat units.

As the 327th male arrived at a vast crossroads half blocked by sand and crowds, the tremors ceased. There followed an agonizing silence. Everyone stood still, afraid of what would happen next. Raised antennae quivered. They waited.

Suddenly, the knocking which had plagued them earlier was replaced by a kind of muffled growl. They all sensed that the city's fur of twigs had been pierced. Something immense was being inserted into the dome, crushing the walls and sliding between the twigs.

A fine pink tentacle burst in at the heart of the crossroads. It whipped through the air and skimmed the ground at amazing speed, seeking out as many citizens as possible. As the soldiers hurled themselves on it and tried to bite it with their mandibles, a big black cluster formed at the tip. When it was sufficiently coated, the tongue flew up and disappeared, tipped the crowd down an invisible throat and then thrust again, even longer, greedier and more devastating than before.

The second phase of the alert was then triggered. The workers drummed on the ground with the tips of their abdomens to bring out the soldiers on the lower floors, who were still ignorant of the catastrophe.

The whole city resounded with the primal drumbeats. It was as though the city organism were gasping for air: bang, bang, bang! Bang . . . bang . . . bang, replied the alien, who had started hammering at the dome again so as to plunge in deeper. They all flattened themselves against the walls to try and escape the raging red serpent lashing the galleries. When one lap produced a poor yield, the tongue stretched further. A beak, then a gigantic head followed.

It was a woodpecker, the terror of springtime! These greedy birds dug plugs up to sixty centimetres long out of the roofs of ant cities and gorged themselves on their inhabitants.

There was just time to launch phase three of the alert. In a frenzy of unexpressed excitement, some workers began to dance the dance of fear. Their jerky movements involved leaping, mandible-snapping and spitting. Other individuals, by now completely hysterical, ran along the corridors biting everything that moved. Fear had the perverse effect of causing the city to self-destruct when it was unable to destroy its attacker.

The cataclysm was localized on the fifteenth upper-west floor but since the alert had run all three of its phases, the whole city was now on a war footing. The workers, carrying the eggs down to safety in the deepest basement, passed lines of soldiers with raised mandibles hurrying in the opposite direction.

Over countless generations, the ant city had learnt to defend itself against such unpleasantnesses. In the midst of the disorganized movements, the ants of the artillery caste formed commando groups and allocated priority operations.

They encircled the most vulnerable part of the woodpecker, his neck, then turned to take up the close-range firing position. With their abdomens aimed at the bird, they fired, propelling jets of hyper-concentrated formic acid with all the might of their sphincters.

The bird had the sudden, unpleasant feeling that a scarf full of pins was being tightened round his throat. He struggled to get free but was too far in. His wings were imprisoned in the earth and twigs of the dome. He darted his tongue out again to kill as many as possible of his tiny enemies.

A new wave of soldiers took over from the first and fired. The woodpecker started. This time, it felt like spines rather than pins. He rapped his beak nervously. The ants fired again. The bird trembled and began to have difficulty in breathing. The acid spurted yet again, eating away at his nerves while he was wedged in tightly.

The firing ceased. Wide-mandibled soldiers rushed up from all sides and bit into the wounds caused by the formic acid. Another legion went outside onto what remained of the dome, found the animal's tail and started to bore into the most scented part, the anus. The sappers enlarged the entrance to it in no time and disappeared inside the bird's guts.

The first team had managed to break the skin of the neck. When the first red blood began to flow, the pheromone alarm messages ceased. The game was as good as won. The bird's throat was an open wound and whole battalions were hurling themselves into it. The ants still alive in the animal's larynx were saved.

Soldiers then entered the head, looking for the openings to the brain. A worker found a passage, the carotid artery, which led from the heart to the brain. Four soldiers slashed open the duct and flung themselves into the red liquid. Borne on the cardiac current, they were soon propelled into the heart of the cerebral hemispheres. Now they could get down to the job of hacking away at the grey matter.

Crazed with pain, the woodpecker rolled from side to side with no means of countering all the invaders carving him up from the inside. A platoon of ants penetrated his lungs and disgorged acid into them, making him cough horribly.

A whole armed corps plunged into the oesophagus to forge a junction in the digestive system with their colleagues coming from the anus. Moving rapidly up the large colon, they wreaked havoc as they worked on all the vital organs within reach of their mandibles. They dug at the living meat in the same way they dug at the earth, and took by assault, one after another, the gizzard, liver, heart, spleen and pancreas.

Blood or lymph sometimes spurted out at the wrong moment, drowning a few individuals. However, it only happened to those who were clumsy and did not know how and where to make clean cuts.

The others progressed methodically in the midst of red and black flesh. They knew how to extricate themselves before being crushed by a spasm and avoided touching areas gorged with bile or digestive acids.

The two armies finally met up in the region of the kidneys. The bird was not yet dead. His slashed heart was still pumping blood into the punctured pipes.

Without waiting for their victim to breathe his last, chains of workers had formed and were passing the pieces of meat, still palpitating, from leg to leg. Nothing escaped the little surgeons. When they started to cut out chunks of the brain, the woodpecker had a final convulsion. The whole city rushed to quarter the monster. The corridors teemed with ants clutching feathers or pieces of down they were keeping as souvenirs.

The teams of masons had already gone into action to rebuild the dome and damaged tunnels.

From a distance, it looked as if the anthill was eating a bird. After swallowing it up, it digested it and distributed its flesh and fat, feathers and hide to all parts of the city where they would be of most use.

genesis: How
did ant civilization develop?
To
understand this, it is necessary to go back several hundred million years to the beginning of life on Earth. Among the first to land were the insects.

They seemed poorly adapted to their world. Small and fragile, they were ideal victims for any predator.
To
stay alive, some of them, such as the crickets, chose the path of reproduction. They laid so many young that some necessarily survived. Others, such as the wasps and bees, chose venom, providing themselves, as time went by, with poisonous stings that made them formidable adversaries.

Others, such as the cockroaches, chose to become inedible. A special gland gave their flesh such an unpleasant taste that no-one wanted to eat it.

Others, such as the preying mantises and moths, chose camouflage. Resembling grass or bark, they went unnoticed by an inhospitable nature.

However, in this early jungle, plenty of insects had not discovered the 'trick' of survival and seemed condemned to disappear. Among those at a disadvantage were, firstly, the termites. When this wood-devouring species appeared on the Earth's surface nearly a hundred and fifty million years ago, it had no chance of surviving. It had too many predators and too few natural defences. What would become of the termites!

Many perished but, with their backs to the wall, the survivors managed to work out an original solution in time: 'We won't fight alone any more, we'll band together. It will be more difficult for our predators to attack twenty termites taking a united stand than a single one trying to get away.
'The termites thus opened up one of the royal roads to complexity: social organization. They began to live in small units, at first family ones, all grouped around the egg-laying mother. Then the families became villages and the villages grew into towns. Their cities of sand and cement soon rose over the whole surface of the globe. The termites were the first intelligent masters of our planet and its first society.

Edmond Wells

Encyclopedia
of
Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The 327th male could no longer see his two rock-scented killers. He really had lost them. With a bit of luck, they had been killed by falling rocks.

He must stop dreaming. It would not get him out of the fix he was in. He had no passport scents left at all. If a single warrior crossed his path now, he was as good as dead. The others would automatically consider him a foreign body and would not even allow him to explain. He would be shot down with acid or bitten by mandibles. That was the treatment reserved for anyone who could not emit the passport scents of the Federation.

It was absurd. How had he come to such a pass? It was all the fault of those two damn rock-scented warriors. What had got into them? They must have been out of their minds. Although it was rare, errors in genetic programming sometimes caused psychological accidents of this kind. Rather like the hysterical ants striking out at everyone during the third phase of the alert.

His two assailants did not look hysterical or defective, though. In fact, they seemed to know perfectly well what they were doing. It was as if. . . There was only one situation in which cells consciously destroyed other cells belonging to the same organism. The nurses called it cancer. It was as if. . . they were cancer cells.

In that case, the smell of rock was the smell of sickness. He would have to sound the alarm on that account, too. Now the 327th male had two mysteries to solve, the dwarves' secret weapon and the cancer cells of Bel-o-kan. And he could tell no-one. He had to think. He might well possess some hidden resource that would solve all his problems.

He set about washing his antennae, moistening them (it gave him a funny feeling to lick antennae without recognizing the characteristic taste of passport pheromones), brushing them, smoothing them with his elbow brush and drying them.

What on earth was he to do?

The first thing was to stay alive.

Only one person could remember his infrared image without needing the confirmation of the ID scents and that was Mother. However, the Forbidden City was packed with soldiers. It could not be helped. After all, was there not an old saying of Belo-kiu-kiuni's that stated:
We
are often safest in the midst
of
danger?

'Edmond Wells isn't remembered kindly here. No-one tried to stop him leaving, either.'

The person speaking these words was a pleasant-looking old man, one of Sweetmilk Corporation's assistant managers.

'Didn't he discover a new bacteria for flavouring yoghurt?'

'Well, I must admit he had sudden strokes of genius where chemistry was concerned. But they weren't a regular occurrence, they only came in fits and starts.'

'Was he a trouble-maker?'

'No, not really. He just didn't fit in with the team. He was a loner. His bacteria brought in millions but no-one ever really appreciated him.'

'What exactly was the problem?'

'Every team has a leader. Edmond couldn't stand leaders or anyone in a position of power. He always despised managers. He used to say they only "managed for the sake of managing, without producing anything". When it comes down to it, we all have to do a spot of boot-licking. There's no harm in it. That's how the system works. He had a very high opinion of himself, though. We were his equals but I think it got on our nerves more than on the bosses'.'

'Why did he leave?'

'He had a row about something with one of our assistant managers. Actually, he was entirely in the right. The assistant manager had gone through his desk and Edmond blew his top. When he saw everyone was on the manager's side, he had no choice but to leave.'