Empire of the Ants (29 page)

103,683rd gave out the scent of non-aggression. Although all beedes understand this language, the glow-worm did not reply. His green light faded and turned yellow before gradually taking on a reddish tinge. The ants supposed that this new colour expressed a question.

We're lost in this termite hill,
emitted the old explorer.

At first, the glow-worm did not answer. After a few degrees he started to flash, expressing either joy or irritation. Since they did not know which, they waited. Suddenly he went off down a side corridor, flashing faster and faster. He seemed to want to show them something so they followed him.

They found themselves in an even colder, damper part of the termite hill. They could hear a mournful whining but could not tell where it was coming from. It was like cries of distress in the form of scents and sounds.

The two explorers wondered what to do. The light insect could not speak but he could hear perfectly. As if in reply to their question, he lit up and went out in long bursts, as if to say:
Don't be afraid. Follow me.

All three of them went deeper and deeper into the foreign basement until they reached a very cold sector where the corridors were much wider.

The whining started up again louder than ever.

Look out!
emitted 4,000th suddenly.

103,683rd turned round. The glow-worm was lighting up a kind of monster that was coming towards them. It had the wrinkled face of an old man and its body was wrapped in a transparent white shroud. The soldier screamed a powerful scent of terror that suffocated his two companions. The mummy continued to approach them and seemed to be leaning forward to speak to them but it toppled over and fell full-length on the ground, hitting it hard. The shell opened and the monstrous old man turned into a new-born termite nymph.

The disembowelled mummy had to prop herself up in a corner, where she continued her sad whining and writhing. So that was where the cries had been coming from.

There were mummies all around them, for the three insects were in a nursery. Hundreds of termite nymphs were lined up vertically against the walls. 4,000th inspected them and noticed that some of them had died of neglect. The survivors were sending out distress scents to call the nurses. They had not been licked for at least 2° and they were all dying of hunger.

It was all wrong. A social insect would never abandon its brood, even for l°-time. Unless. . . The same idea occurred to both ants. Unless all the workers were dead and only the nymphs were left.

The glow-worm flashed again as a signal for them to follow him down more corridors. There was a strange, sweet smell in the air. The soldier trod on something hard. She did not have infrared simple eyes and could not see in the dark. The living light came close and lit up 103,683rd s legs. She had stepped on the corpse of a termite soldier. It was very like an ant except that it was pure white and did not have a detached abdomen.

The ground was strewn with hundreds of white corpses. It was a massacre! Strangest of all, the bodies were still intact. There had not been a fight. The inhabitants were still frozen in the attitudes of everyday work and must have died instantly. Some seemed to be engaged in conversation or cutting up wood with their mandibles. What could possibly have caused such a catastrophe?

4,000th examined the grisly statues and found they were drenched in pungent scents. The two ants shivered. It was poison gas, which explained everything: the disappearance of the first expedition launched against the termite hill and the death of the last survivor of the second expedition, who had not been wounded.

If they felt nothing themselves, it was because the toxic gas had had time to disperse, but why had the nymphs survived? The old explorer framed a hypothesis. They had specific immune defences or had perhaps been saved by their cocoons. They must now be immune to the poison. Insects are notorious for developing resistance to insecticides. Mithridatizing allows them to become immune to gradually increasing doses of poisons by producing mutant generations.

But who could have fed in the lethal gas? It was a real poser. Once again, while searching for the secret weapon, 103,683rd had stumbled on something just as incomprehensible.

4,000th wanted to leave and the glow-worm flashed its assent. The ants gave the larvae which could be saved a few pieces of cellulose then left to look for the way out. The glow-worm followed. As they went, the corpses of termite soldiers gave way to corpses of workers responsible for looking after the queen. Some were still holding eggs in their mandibles.

The architecture was becoming more and more sophisticated. The corridors, which were triangular in section, were engraved with signs. The glow-worm changed colour and diffused a bluish light, showing that he had noticed something. A gasping sound was coming from the end of the corridor.

The trio came to a kind of sanctuary protected by five giant guards, who were all dead. The entrance was blocked by the lifeless bodies of twenty or so small workers and the ants passed them from leg to leg to get them out of the way.

An almost perfectly spherical cave was thus revealed. The noise had been coming from the termite royal chamber.

The glow-worm gave off a beautiful white light, which lit up a kind of strange slug in the centre of the room. It was the termite queen, who was a caricature of an ant queen. Her small head and scrawny thorax ended in a fantastic abdomen nearly fifty heads long. This hypertrophied appendage was regularly shaken with spasms.

The small head was tossing with pain and screaming in sound and scent. The workers' corpses had stopped up the entrance so thoroughly that the gas had not been able to get in, but the queen was dying of neglect.

Look at her abdomen. The babies are pushing to get out and she can't give birth alone.

The glow-worm climbed up to the ceiling and shed an orange light.

Thanks to the combined efforts of the two ants, the eggs began to flow from the enormous procreative pouch. It was a veritable tap of life. The queen had stopped screaming and seemed relieved.

She asked who had saved her in basic universal scent language and was surprised when she identified the ants' scents. She wanted to know if they were masked ants.

Masked ants were a species very gifted in organic chemistry. They were large, black insects, who lived in the north-east. They could artificially reproduce any pheromone, whether passport, trail or communication, simply by mixing saps, pollens and salivas judiciously.

Once they had distilled their camouflage, they could make their way undetected into termite cities, for example, and then pillage and kill without any of their victims identifying them.

No, we aren't masked ants.

The termite queen asked them if there were any survivors in her city and the ants answered no. She asked them to kill her and put an end to her suffering but she wanted to tell them something first.

Yes, she knew why her city had been destroyed. The termites had recently discovered the eastern end of the world. It was a smooth, black country, where everything was destroyed.

Strange animals live there that are very fast and ferocious. They're the guardians of the end of the world. They're armed with black slabs that can flatten anything. And they're using poison gases now too!

It reminded them of Queen Bi-stin-ga's old ambition to reach one of the ends of the world. Could it really be possible, then? The two ants were dumbfounded.

Until then, they had thought that the Earth was so big it was impossible to reach the edge, and now here was this termite queen telling them that the end of the world was close by and that it was guarded by monsters. Could Queen Bi-stin-ga s dream come true?

The whole tale seemed so incredible they did not know where to begin with their questions.

But why have these 'guardians of the end of the world' come this far? Do they want to invade the western cities?

The fat queen did not know anything else and insisted she now wished to die. She had not learnt how to stop her heart beating so they had to kill her.

The ants therefore decapitated the termite queen after she had told them the way out. Then they ate a few small eggs and left the imposing city, now nothing but a ghost town. At the entrance, they laid down a pheromone telling the story of the tragedy that had taken place there. It was their duty as Federation explorers.

The glow-worm now took his leave of them. No doubt he too had lost his way in the termite hill when sheltering from the rain. Now that it was fine again he would resume his daily round: eat, give off light to attract females, reproduce, eat, give off light to attract females, reproduce
...
A glow-worm s life, in fact!

They turned their eyes and antennae to the east. They could not see much from where they were but they knew all the same that the end of the world was not far off. It lay in that direction.

the clash of civilizations
: The meeting of two civilizations is always a delicate affair. One of the greatest challenges that has faced mankind was the enslavement of black Africans in the eighteenth century.

Most of the peoples who were enslaved lived inland in the plains and forests and had never seen the sea. A neighbouring king suddenly came and declared war on them for no apparent reason and then, instead of killing them all, took them captive, chained them together and made them walk to the coast. At the end of their journey, they discovered two incomprehensible things: 1) the vast sea, and 2) the white-skinned Europeans. Even if they had never seen the sea with their own eyes, they knew it from tales as the land of the dead, while the white men were like beings from another planet. They smelt peculiar, their skin was a peculiar colour and they wore peculiar clothes. Many died of fright. Others panicked, jumped out of the boats and were eaten by sharks. The survivors had one surprise after another. What did they see? White men drinking wine, for example. And they were sure it was blood, the blood of their own people.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The 56th female was starving. It was not only a body but a whole population that was demanding its ration of calories. How was she to feed the tribe she was sheltering inside her? In the end, she made up her mind to leave her egg-laying hole, dragged herself a few hundred heads and brought back three pine needles, which she licked and chewed greedily.

It was not enough. She would have liked to go hunting but she no longer had the strength. She risked ending up as food for the thousands of predators lurking in the vicinity. She settled down in her hole and waited to die.

Instead, an egg appeared. It was her first Chlipoukanian and she had hardly felt it coming. She had shaken her numb legs and squeezed her bowels as hard as she could. It had to work or it was all over. When the egg rolled onto the ground, it was small and so grey it was almost black.

If she allowed it to hatch, the ant inside would be stillborn and she would not be able to feed her anyway. She therefore ate her first offspring.

This immediately gave her some surplus energy. There was one less egg in her abdomen and one more in her stomach. The sacrifice gave her the strength to lay a second egg just as small and dark as the first.

She ate it and felt even better. The third egg was a little lighter but she devoured it anyway.

It was only when she got to the tenth that the queen altered her strategy. Her eggs had turned grey and were as big as her eyeballs. Chli-pou-ni laid three like that, ate one and let the other two live, warming them with her body.

As she continued to lay, the two lucky ones turned into long larvae whose heads remained fixed in a strange grimace. Soon they began to whine for food and the arithmetic got complicated. Out of every three eggs she laid, she now needed one for herself and the other two to feed the larvae.

That is how you can produce something from nothing in a closed circuit. When a larva was big enough, she gave her another larva to eat. It was the only way of supplying her with the protein she needed to turn into a true ant.

But the surviving larva was always famished and writhed about screaming. Her sisters made an unsatisfying meal and, in the end, Chli-pou-ni ate her first attempt at a child.

I
must make it, I must make it,
she repeated to herself. She thought of the 327th male and laid five much lighter eggs in one go. She swallowed two of them and let the other three grow.

Between infanticide and childbirth, the torch of life was passed on. It was three steps forward and two back but the cruel gymnastics finally resulted in the first prototype of a complete ant.

Undernourished, small and frail, she was still the first Chlipoukanian. The cannibal race for the existence of the city was now half won. This degenerate worker could move about and bring back provisions from the outside world: the corpses of insects, seeds, leaves and mushrooms.

Properly nourished at last, Chli-pou-ni gave birth to eggs that were much lighter and firmer, with strong shells that protected the eggs from the cold. The larvae were a reasonable size and the children who hatched from this new generation were big and strong. They would form the basis of the population of Chli-pou-kan.

The first sickly worker, who had brought the egg-layer food, was quickly put to death and devoured by her sisters. After that, all the pain and suffering which had preluded the foundation of the city were forgotten.