Empire of the Ants (10 page)

heat that brings them to a standstill, not the cold.' 'And then?'

Jonathan did not really know how to carry on a conversation. He thought the purpose of discussion was to pass on information like a communicating vase. There was one person who knew, the full vase, and one who did not know, the empty vase, usually himself. The one who did not know listened intently and kept the speaker going with the occasional 'and then?', 'tell me about that' and nods of the head.

If there were any other ways of communicating, he did not know about them. Moreover, it seemed to him, from his observations of those around him, that they only engaged in parallel monologues, with each just trying to use the other as a free psychoanalyst. That being so, he preferred his own technique. He might not seem to know anything but at least he never stopped learning. Wasn't there, a Chinese proverb that said: Someone who asks a question is stupid for five minutes but someone who doesn't ask is stupid for life?

'And then? We had a go, damn it. And, believe me, it was quite something. We were hoping to find that blasted queen, the five hundred thousand eggs a day lady. We just wanted to see her and photograph her. We put on big sewer-workers' boots. Edmond was out of luck. He took size forty-three and there was only a pair of size forties left. He went in desert boots. I remember it as if it were yesterday. At twelve-thirty, we traced out the likely shape of the bivouac nest on the ground and began to dig a trench a metre deep all round it. At one-thirty, we reached the outer chambers. A kind of crackling black liquid started to flow from it. Thousands of overexcited soldiers were snapping their mandibles. In that species, they're as sharp as razors. They planted themselves in our boots but we carried on digging down to the nuptial chamber with spades and pickaxes. At last we found our treasure, the queen. She was ten times the size of our European queens. We photographed her from every angle. She must have been screaming for help the whole time in her scent language. It soon took effect. Warriors converged from all sides and formed mounds at our feet. Some managed to climb up by scaling their sisters who were already stuck in the rubber. From there, they went up under our trousers and then our shirts. We turned into Gullivers, except that our particular Lilliputians wanted to shred us into bite-sized pieces. The main thing was to stop them getting into any of our natural orifices: the nose, the mouth, the anus, the eardrum. Otherwise, we would have had it; they would have dug away at us from the inside!'

Jonathan kept quiet, clearly moved. The professor seemed to be reliving the scene, acting it out with all the strength of the young man he no longer was.

'I kept slapping at myself to shake them off. I knew that they were guided to us by our breath and our sweat. We had all done yoga exercises to train ourselves to minimize breathing and control fear. I tried not to think, to forget about these little bunches of warriors who wanted to kill us. Meanwhile I managed to fire off a couple of films, with some flash shots. As soon as we'd finished, we all jumped out of the trench. Except for Edmond. The ants had covered him entirely, up as far as his neck, they were trying to swallow him whole! I grabbed him by the arms and pulled him out, stripped off his clothes and used my machete to scrape off all the mandibles and heads that were embedded in his flesh. We had all suffered, but not to the same extent as him, because he didn't have the right boots. And most of all, because he'd panicked, he'd given off pheromones of fear.'

'It's horrible.'

'No, it's just good that he got out of there alive. Besides, it didn't turn him off ants. Far from it, he studied them with even more determination.'

'And after that?'

'He went back to Paris and we never heard from him again. He didn't even call his old friend, Rosenfeld, once, the rotter. I finally read about his death in the papers. May he rest in peace.'

He went and pulled the curtain back from the window to look at an old enamelled metal thermometer.

'Hmm, thirty degrees in the middle of April. It's incredible. It's getting hotter and hotter every year. If it carries on like this, in ten years' time, France is going to turn into a tropical country'

'Is it really that bad?'

'Most people don't notice it because it's happening very gradually. But we entomologists can tell it's happening from a number of details. We keep finding species of insects typical of equatorial regions in the Parisian Basin. Haven't you noticed how gaudy the butterflies are becoming?'

'Yes, I have. I found a fluorescent red and black one on a car only yesterday.'

'It was probably a five-spotted zygaena. It's a venomous butterfly only found in Madagascar until now. If it goes on like this. . . Can you imagine driver ants in Paris? There'd be panic. I wouldn't mind seeing it, though.'

After cleaning his antennae and eating a few warm hunks of the smashed-in doorkeeper, the odourless male scurried away down the wooden corridors. He could smell that his mother's chamber lay in that direction. Fortunately, it was 25°-time and there were few people about in the Forbidden City at that temperature. He should be able to slip through easily.

Suddenly, he detected the scent of two warriors coming from the opposite direction. There was a big one and a small one and the small one had some legs missing.

They smelt each others' scents from a distance.

It's incredible, it's him.

It's incredible, it's them.

The 327th male bolted away in the hope of losing them. He turned this way and that in the three-dimensional labyrinth and left the Forbidden City. The doorkeepers did not slow him down because they were only programmed to filter in-going traffic. There was now loose earth underfoot. He took turn after turn.

But the others were very quick too and did not let him outdistance them. Then the male bumped into and knocked over a worker carrying a twig. He had not done it on purpose but it slowed the rock-scented killers down.

Taking advantage of the respite, he quickly hid in a crevice. The ant with the limp was coming closer. He drew back a little further into his hiding place.

'Where's he got to?' 'He's gone back down.' 'What do you mean, gone back down?'

Lucie took Grandmother Augusta's arm and led her over to the cellar door.

'He's been down there since yesterday evening.' 'And he's still not back up?'

'No, I don't know what's going on down there but he strictly forbade me to call the police. He's already been down several times and come back up.'

Augusta was dumbfounded.

'But that's crazy. Especially when his uncle had strictly forbidden him to.'

'When he goes down now, he takes loads of tools with him, pieces of steel, big slabs of concrete. I haven't a clue what he's up to down there.'

Lucie put her head in her hands. She could not take any more and felt she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. 'And we're not allowed to go down and get him?' 'No. He's put a lock on the door. He locks it from the inside.' Augusta sat down, disconcerted.

'Dear me. If I'd known talking about Edmond would cause so much trouble . . .'

specialist
: In the big, modern ant cities, repeated task-sharing over millions of years has led to genetic mutations. Some ants are born with huge, shearing mandibles to become soldiers, others have crushing mandibles to produce flour from cereals, and yet others are equipped with overdeveloped salivary glands to moisten and disinfect young larvae.

It's rather as though our soldiers were born with fingers like knives, farmers with claw-feet for climbing trees and picking fruit and wet-nurses with a dozen pairs of nipples. But the most spectacular of all the 'professional' mutations is the one for love.

In order for the mass of industrious workers not to be distracted by erotic impulses, they are born asexual. All the city's reproductive energies are concentrated on specialists, the males and females, princes and princesses of this parallel civilization. They are born and equipped solely for love and benefit from a number of features designed to help them copulate. These range from wings to infrared simple eyes, by way of antennae which emit and receive abstract emotions.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge