Fiasco (15 page)

On the subject of faster-than-light communication there was disagreement. No kind of matter or energy could be made to exceed the speed of light. But that barrier, some said, could be circumvented. Let a pulsar with a magnetic field fixed by a neutron star rotate at a speed approaching
c.
The beam of the emission would go in circles around the pulsar's axis and at a sufficient distance sweep across a sector of space at a speed greater than
c.
If in the subsequent sectors of the beam's rotation there were observers, those observers could synchronize their watches beyond the limit discovered by Einstein. They would only need to know the distances of the sides of the triangle (pulsar—observer A—observer B) and the speed of rotation of the "lighthouse" pulsar.

This is as much as the one resurrected on the
Eurydice
learned, in the year of her constant acceleration, about cosmic civilizations. He came to a barrier that he could not pass. The machine-instructor did not chide the human pupil who was unable to grasp the mysteries of sidereal energetics and its relation to engineering and gravitational ballistics. These recent discoveries made possible the present expedition to the stars of the Harpy, which had been hidden from the astronomers of previous centuries by a cloud called the Coalsack. The
Eurydice
was to pass the Coalsack, enter the "temporal harbor" of a collapsar christened Hades, dispatch one of her segments to the planet named Quinta L-Harpyiae, wait for the return of that scout ship, and perform—for her own return—an incomprehensible maneuver called "passage through a retrochronal toroid," thanks to which she would reappear in the neighborhood of the Sun barely eight years after takeoff. Without that passage she would return two thousand years later, which would be no return at all.

The scout ship of the
Eurydice
was to travel on its own an entire parsec with its crew in a state of embryonization. The vitrifaction of people had been abandoned, as it gave only a 98-percent certainty of reviving the frozen. The pilot of ancient rockets felt, at these lectures, like a child being initiated into the operation of a synchrophasotron. He also realized that he had become a hermit, that he should no longer play Robinson Crusoe at the side of an electronic Friday. He rode to the observatory in the forward section of the
Eurydice,
to see the stars. A great hall gleamed with strange equipment. In vain he looked for the cannonlike cylinder of a reflector or of any other type of telescope—or simply a shuttered dome for viewing the heavens directly. The high hall seemed unoccupied, though lit all around with storied rows of lights. Along these ran narrow galleries that were joined by columns of machines. Returning to his cabin after this unsuccessful excursion, he noticed on the table an old, dog-eared book with a card from Gerbert. Gerbert was loaning it to him: something to read in bed. The physician was known to have brought on board with him a number of science-fiction books, which he preferred to the dazzling holovision shows.

The sight of the book moved the recipient. For so long, once again, he had been among the stars, yet had not seen them for so long. Worse, he was not able to make friends with the people who had bestowed upon him this new voyage along with this new life. The cabin, as he had requested, was furnished half in the style of a sea vessel and half in the style of an old merchant rocket: the living quarters of a helmsman or a navigator, in no way resembling a passenger's cabin, because this was not a place for a brief stay, like a hotel. It was a home.

He even had a bunk bed. Usually he laid his clothes on the top bunk when he undressed. Over the pillow of the bottom bunk he switched on a little lamp, covered his feet with the blanket, and, thinking that once again he was giving in to the sins of sloth and passivity—but perhaps now for the last time—opened the book in the place marked by Gerbert.

For a moment he read without comprehension, such was the strong effect the ordinary black print had on him. The type face of the letters, the yellowed, fragile pages, the real stitches of the binding, the bulge of the cover along the spine, all seemed incredibly familiar to him, unique, a thing lost and then found—though, heaven knows, he had never been an avid reader. But now he felt a solemnity in reading, as if the dead author had made a promise to him once and, although many obstacles had to be overcome, the promise was kept.

He had an odd habit: he would open a volume at random and begin reading there. The writers would not have been too pleased. Why did he do this? Perhaps he wanted to break into the fictional world not through its prepared entrance but all at once, in the middle.

"…tell you?"

The Professor folded his hands on his chest.

"By ship to Port Boma," he began, sinking into the chair. He closed his eyes.

"Paddleboat to Bangala… That's where the jungle begins. Then six weeks on horseback, no more is possible. Even mules will drop. Sleeping sickness… There was one old shaman there, Nfo Tuabé." He pronounced the word with a French accent on the last syllable. "I had come to catch butterflies. But he showed me the way…"

He stopped for a moment, opened his eyes.

"You know what the jungle is? But how could you? Life, green and mad. Everything quivering, watching, moving. In the underbrush, a crowd of ravenous mouths. Insane flowers like explosions of color. Hidden insects in sticky webs. Thousands, thousands of unclassified species. Not like here, in Europe. No need to go looking for them. In the night the whole tent was covered by moths as big as a hand, insistent, blind, falling into the fire by the hundreds. Shadows passed across the canvas. The natives trembled. The wind carried thunder from different quarters. Lions, jackals… But that was nothing. Then came the weakness and the fever. We left the horses, continued on foot. I took serum, quinine, German camomile, everything. Finally, one day—there is no reckoning of time there: a man gets to feel that the division of the week, the whole calendar, is a silly, artificial thing—one day, it was impossible to go on. The jungle ended. There was another native village, at a river. The river isn't on the map—three times a year it disappears into quicksand. Part of the bed is underground. A few huts made of sun-baked clay and silt. That's where Nfo Tuabé lived. Didn't know English. How could he? I had two translators. One put my words into the dialect of the coast, the other put that into Bushman. Over that whole belt of jungle, from the sixth parallel, rules an ancient royal family. Descendants of the Egyptians, I would guess. Taller, much more intelligent than the blacks of Central Africa. Nfo Tuabé even drew a map for me, showing the borders of the kingdom. I had saved his son from the sleeping sickness. It was for that…"

Not opening his eyes, the Professor reached into an inner pocket. From a notebook he took out a piece of paper scribbled with red ink. The lines were tangled and twisted.

"Hard to read… The jungle stops here, as if cut with a knife. It's the border of the kingdom. I asked what lay beyond. He didn't want to talk about that in the night. I had to come back during the day. Only then, in that stinking hole of a hut without windows—you can't imagine the stench—did he tell me that there were ants beyond. White, blind ants that built great cities. Their realm extended for many kilometers. Red ants fought the white. They came in a great, living river through the jungle. Elephants would leave the vicinity then in herds, making curved tunnels through the underbrush. Tigers fled. Even the snakes. Of the birds, only the vultures remained. The ants traveled variously: sometimes for a month, day and night, in a rust-red, moving current. Whatever stood in their path they destroyed. They reached the edge of the jungle, came upon the mounds of the whites, and the battle began. Nfo Tuabé, in his lifetime, had seen it once. The red ants, overcoming the sentries of the whites, entered their cities. And never returned. What happens to them, no one knows. But next year new legions come plowing through the jungle. It was this way in the time of his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. It was always this way. The soil in the place of the white ants is fertile. Long ago, the natives tried to cultivate it, tried to burn down the mounds of the termites. They lost that battle. The crops were destroyed. They built huts and enclosures of wood; the termites reached these through underground passageways, penetrated the structures, ate them out from inside, so that a touch of the hand made them crumble. The natives resorted to clay. Then, instead of workers, soldiers appeared. These"—he pointed to a jar.

In the center, fastened with surgical clips to glass plates, were specimens of giant termites. Several warriors: enormous and deformed creatures. A third of the thorax was covered by horny armor, with a helmet ending in open scissors. The broad armor weighed down the delicate legs and abdomen.

"Nothing new to you, I suspect? We know that there are regions in which termites rule. In South America… They have two kinds of soldier, defenders and something like an internal police. The mounds reach eight meters in height. Built of sand and excrement, they're harder than Portland cement. Proof against any steel. Eyeless, white, soft insects that have lived for some twenty million years away from the light. Studied by Packard, Schmelz, many others. But not one of them ever dreamed… You understand? I saved his son, and in exchange… Oh, he was wise. Knew how to repay a white man, royally. Completely gray Negro. Skin like ashes, the face a mask, smoke-cured. He said to me:

"'The mounds go on for miles. The whole plain is covered with them. Like a forest, a dead forest, one after another, giant petrified trunks. It is difficult to pass between them. Everywhere the ground is hard, it booms underfoot like a drum, and is strewn with braids of thick string. Those are the tubes through which the termites run. Made of the same cement as the mounds, they go very far, down into the earth and up again, and they branch, intersect, and lead inside the mounds, and every fifty or sixty centimeters they widen, so that the termites running in different directions can pass each other. And in the center of the city, among a million stonelike termitaria that seethe with blind, violent life, there stands a different mound. Smaller, black, and bent like a hook.' He showed me how with his brown thumb. 'The heart of the ant nation lies there.' More he did not want to say."

"And you believed him?" whispered the listener. The dark eyes of the Professor burned.

"I returned to Boma. Bought fifty kilograms of dynamite in pound sticks, the kind used in mines. Picks, shovels, spades, a complete outfit. Tanks of sulfur, metal hoses, gas masks, netting—the best I could obtain. And cans of airplane gasoline, and an arsenal of insecticides, more than you can imagine. Then I hired twelve bearers and went into the jungle.

"Are you acquainted with Collenger's experiment? It's considered nonsense. He was not, true, a myrmecologist, only an amateur. Cut through an entire termite mound from top to bottom and inserted a steel plate, so that the two halves could not communicate with each other in any way. The mound was young, the termites had only begun building it. After six weeks he removed the plate. It turned out that the new tunnels had been constructed in such a way that their mouths, on either side of the barrier, exactly corresponded—not a millimeter off, vertically or horizontally. Just as men build a tunnel, beginning the work simultaneously on both sides of the mountain and meeting in the middle. How did the termites communicate through the steel? And then—Gruss's experiment. Also not verified. He maintained that if you killed the termite queen, workers that were several hundred meters from the mound immediately showed agitation and returned to the nest."

Again he paused. He stared at the red embers in the fireplace and the flickering blue flames that appeared and disappeared over them.

"I had a map … yes. First the guide ran off, then the translator. They left their things and disappeared. Early one morning I awoke in my mosquito net—silence, bulging eyes, terrified faces, whispering behind my back. I ended up tying the lot of them to me, wrapped the cord around my hand. Took their knives, so they couldn't cut themselves loose. From lack of sleep or from the sun, my eyes became inflamed. In the morning I could hardly open the lids, they were so badly stuck. Summer was on us. My shirt was stiff with sweat, as if starched, and if you touched the helmet on the outside, you immediately got blisters. The rifle barrel burned like a red-hot poker.

"We hacked our way for thirty-nine days. I didn't want to go through old Nfo Tuabé's village, as he had asked me not to. So we came to the edge of the jungle without warning. Suddenly that hellish, stifling thicket of leaves, vines, and screaming parrots and monkeys ended. As far as the eye could see, a plain, yellow as the skin of an old lion. On it, among clumps of cacti, stood cones. The mounds. Built blindly from within, hence formless in conception. We spent the night here. At dawn I awoke with a fierce headache. The day before, I had carelessly removed my helmet for a moment. The sun was high. The heat was such that the air burned the lungs. The shapes of objects shimmered, as if the sand were on fire. I was alone. The natives had fled, chewing through their cord. The only one remaining was a thirteen-year-old, Uagadu.

"I began to walk. Together we carried the baggage a distance of fifty feet. Then went back and brought the rest of the things. We had to repeat this five times under the sun, which burned infernally. Despite my white shirt I developed sores on my back, which did not heal. I had to sleep on my stomach. But this is unimportant. All day we penetrated the city of the termites. I don't think there is anything in the world more eerie. Imagine: on all sides—in front of you, in back of you—stony mounds two stories high. In places so close, one could barely squeeze between them. An endless forest of rough gray columns. And from the center of each column, when one stopped, came a faint, incessant, steady rustling, at moments changing into individual taps. The walls trembled constantly to the touch day and night. Several times it happened that we crushed one of the tunnels, which looked like ash-gray cords scattered over the ground in bundles. We saw endless rows of white insects marching. Then there would appear, suddenly, the horned helmets of the soldiers, who cut the air blindly with their pincers and ejected a sticky, burning fluid.