Empire of the Ants (9 page)

'But you've just said he was in the right.'

'We thought we'd better side with someone we knew and didn't like rather than stick our necks out for someone we liked but didn't know. Edmond didn't have any friends here. He didn't eat or drink with us. He went around with his head in the clouds.'

'Why admit to all that now? You didn't have to tell me.' 'Well, I feel bad about it now he's dead. You're his nephew. Telling you helps get it off my chest.'

At the end of the dark bottleneck stood a wooden fortress, the Forbidden City.

The building was actually a pine stump around which the dome had been built. It acted as the heart and backbone of Bel-o-kan; the heart because it contained the royal chamber and precious food reserves; and the backbone because it allowed the city to withstand storms and rain.

Seen at close quarters, the wall of the Forbidden City was in-crusted with complex patterns like inscriptions in some barbarous script. These were the corridors dug long ago by the first inhabitants of the stump, the termites.

When the founding Belo-kiu-kiuni had landed in the region five thousand years earlier, she had immediately come up against them. The ensuing war had lasted over a thousand years but the Belokanians had won in the end. They had then been amazed to discover a 'hard' city with wooden corridors that never caved in. The pine stump opened up new urban and architectural perspectives.

With the flat, raised table on top and deep roots spreading into the earth below, it was absolutely ideal. However, it soon became too small to shelter the growing population of russet ants. They had then dug outwards from the roots to form the basement and piled twigs on top of the decapitated tree to broaden its summit.

These days, the Forbidden City was almost deserted. Except for Mother and her elite guards, everyone lived in the periphery.

327th approached the stump with small, irregular steps. Regular vibrations would have been perceived as someone walking, whereas irregular sounds could pass for small landslides. He just had to hope he didn't stumble on a soldier. He started to crawl until he was less than two hundred heads from the Forbidden City and could make out the dozens of entrances excavated in the stump, or rather the heads of doorkeeper ants blocking the way in.

Their broad heads, shaped by some freak of genetics, were round and flat, like big nails, and fitted the openings they guarded exactly.

These living doors had already proved themselves in the past. At the time of the Strawberry Plant War, seven hundred and eighty years earlier, the city had been invaded by yellow ants. All the surviving Belokanians had taken refuge in the Forbidden City and the doorkeeper ants had entered backwards, sealing the entrances hermetically.

It had taken the yellow ants two days to force their way in. The doorkeepers had not only blocked the holes but also bitten them with their long mandibles. The yellow ants had attacked the doorkeepers a hundred to one and had finally broken through by digging into the chitin of their heads. But the living doors had not been sacrificed in vain. The other federal cities had had time to muster reinforcements and the city had been liberated a few hours later.

The 327th male certainly had no intention of facing a doorkeeper alone. He was counting on being able to dive in when one of the doors opened, to let out a nurse laden with some of Mother's eggs for example.

Just then a head moved and opened to let through a guard. No chance that time. If he had tried, the guard would have come straight back and killed him.

The doorkeeper's head moved again. He crouched down on all six legs, ready to spring. But no, it was a false alarm, she was only shifting her position. It must really give you cramp to press your neck up against a wooden collar like that.

Suddenly he could wait no longer. He charged at the obstacle. As soon as he was within range of her antennae, the doorkeeper spotted his lack of passport pheromones. She moved back to block the opening better, then let out alarm molecules.

Foreign body in the Forbidden City! Foreign body in the Forbidden City!
she repeated like a siren.

She twirled her claws to intimidate the intruder. She longed to advance and fight him but they had received strict orders. Blocking the way took precedence over everything.

He had to act quickly. The male had an advantage: he could see in the dark, while the doorkeeper was blind. He rushed forward, avoided the mandibles striking out blindly and plunged to seize their roots, slicing through them one after another. The transparent blood flowed and the two stumps continued to wave about harmlessly.

However, 327th still could not get in with the corpse of his adversary blocking his way and her rigid legs leaning against the wood by reflex. What was he to do? He put his abdomen against the doorkeeper's forehead and pulled. The body jerked and the chitin eaten away by the formic acid started to melt, giving off grey fumes. But the head was thick. He had to have four tries before he was able to force his way through the flat skull.

There was just room. On the other side, he discovered an atrophied thorax and abdomen. The ant was nothing but a door.

★
★š
★

competitors
: When the first ants appeared, fifty million years later, they had to watch their behaviour. The distant descendants of the wild, solitary tiphiid wasp, they had neither big jaws nor stings. They were small and puny, but not stupid, and quickly realized it was in their interests to copy the termites and unite. They founded villages and built rough cities. The termites soon started to worry about the competition. In their view, there was only room on Earth for one species of social insect. After that, war was inevitable. All over the world, on islands, trees and mountains, the armies of the termite cities fought the young armies of the ant cities.

Such a thing had never before been seen in the animal world. Millions of mandibles fighting side by side for a non-nutritional objective. A 'political' objective.

At first, the more experienced termites won every battle but the ants adapted. They copied the termites
^’
weapons and invented new ones. Worldwide termite-ant wars set the planet on fire between thirty and fifty million years ago. It was about that time that the ants discovered how to use jets of formic acid as weapons and stole a decisive lead.

Battles are still being fought between the two enemy species today but the termite legions rarely win.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia
of
Relative and Absolute Knowledge

'You met him in Africa, didn't you?'

'Yes,' replied the professor. 'Edmond was distraught. If I remember rightly, his wife had died. He threw himself into the study of insects.'

'Why insects?'

'Why not? Man has always been fascinated by them. Our most distant forbears were afraid of mosquitoes, which gave them fevers, fleas, which made them itch, spiders, which stung them, and weevils, which ate up their food reserves. It's left its mark.'

Jonathan was talking to Professor Daniel Rosenfeld in Laboratory 326 of the Entomology Department of the National
Centre for Scientific Research at Fontainebleau. He was a handsome old man with a pony-tail, who smiled as he talked.

'Insects are disconcerting. They are smaller and more fragile than us, yet they goad us and menace us. And as maggots feast on our dead bodies, we all end up inside them in the end.'

'I've never thought of it like that.'

'Insects were long considered evil incarnate. Beelzebub is depicted with the head of a fly, for example. It isn't a coincidence.'

'Ants have a better reputation than flies.'

'It depends. Every culture views them differently. In the Talmud, they symbolize honesty. For Tibetan Buddhism, they represent the derisory nature of material activity. The Baoules of the Ivory Coast believe that if a pregnant woman is bitten by an ant, she will give birth to a child with the head of an ant while some Polynesians hold them to be tiny gods.'

'Edmond had previously been working on bacteria. Why did he drop them?'

'He was infinitely less interested in bacteria than in his research on insects, and ants in particular. And when I say "his research", I'm talking about total commitment. He was the one who got up the petition against toy anthills, those plastic boxes on sale in supermarkets, with a queen and six hundred workers. He also fought to get ants used as an "insecticide". He wanted russet ant cities to be introduced systematically into forests to clear them of parasites. It was a good idea. In the past, ants have been used to combat the pine processionary moth in Italy and the fir skipper in Poland, both insects which ravage trees.'

'So the idea is to set the insects against one another?'

'Mmm, he called it "interfering in their diplomacy". We did so many stupid things with chemical insecticides last century. It's important never to attack insects head on and even more important never to underestimate them. We can't hope to tame them like mammals. They call for a different way of thinking, a different approach. They can parry all chemical poisons by mithrida-tizing. If we still can't avert plagues of locusts, it's because the blighters adapt. Zap them with insecticide and ninety-nine per cent die but one per cent survive. And the one per cent which escape are not only immune but the young locusts they give birth to are 100 per cent "vaccinated" against the insecticide. Two hundred years ago, we made the mistake of making the chemicals more and more toxic and created hyper-resistant strains capable of absorbing the worst poisons without ill effect.'

'Do you mean there isn't really any way of combating insects?'

'See for yourself. There are still mosquitoes, locusts, weevils, tsetse flies — and ants. They resist everything. In 1945, we noticed that only ants and scorpions had survived the nuclear holocausts. And they even adapted to that.'

The 327th male had shed the blood of a Tribe cell. He had committed the worst act of violence against his own organism. It had left a bitter taste in his mouth but how else could he, the information hormone, have survived to pursue his mission?

If he had killed, it was because someone had tried to kill him. It was a chain reaction, like cancer. Because the Tribe had behaved abnormally towards him, he was obliged to do likewise. He just had to get used to the idea.

He had killed one sister cell and might perhaps kill others.

'But what did he go to Africa for? You said yourself there are ants everywhere.'

'Yes but not the same ants. I don't think Edmond cared about anything after he lost his wife. With the benefit of hindsight, I even wonder whether he didn't expect the ants to help him "commit suicide".'

I’
m sorry?

'They nearly ate him, for Heaven's sake. The driver ants of Africa . . . Haven't you ever seen the film
When the Marabunta Roars’

Jonathan shook his head.

'The Marabunta is the horde of driver ants, or
Annoma nigricans,
which destroys everything in its path as it moves across the plain.'

Professor Rosenfeld stood up as if he were about to face an invisible wave.

'First of all you hear a kind of vast rumble made up of all the shouting and screeching, the beating of wings and stamping of feet of the little animals trying to get away At that stage, you still can't see the driver ants but then a few warriors suddenly appear from behind a mound. After the scouts, the others come up quickly, in columns stretching as far as the eye can see. The hill turns black. It's like a stream of lava that melts everything it touches.'

The professor was walking up and down waving his arms, caught up in his subject.

'They're the poisonous blood of Africa. Living acid. They occur in terrifying numbers. A colony of drivers lays on average five hundred thousand eggs a day. That's whole bucketfuls. Along it flows, then, this stream of black sulphuric acid, up banks and trees, quite unstoppable. Any birds, lizards or insectivorous mammals which have the misfortune to go near it are immediately torn to shreds. It's like something out of the Apocalypse. Driver ants aren't afraid of anything. I once saw an over-curious cat dismembered in a trice. They can even cross streams by making floating bridges out of their own corpses. On the Ivory Coast, in the region round the Lamto research centre, where we were studying them, the population still hasn't found a defence against their invasions. When they find out they're going to cross the village, the people run away, taking their most precious belongings with them. They stand the legs of the tables and chairs in buckets of vinegar and pray to their gods. When they return, they find the place cleaned out, as if a typhoon had passed through it. There isn't a scrap of food or any organic substance left anywhere. There isn't any vermin left either. Drivers are the best way to clean your house from top to bottom.'

'How did you go about studying them if they're so ferocious?'

'We waited till midday. Insects can't regulate their body temperatures like us. When it's eighteen degrees outside their bodies, it's eighteen degrees inside, and when there's a heatwave, their blood boils. The drivers find it unbearable. As soon as the sun's rays start to burn, they dig a bivouac nest and wait in it till the weather improves. It's like a mini-hibernation except that it's the