Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  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-lay
ing 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.'

  '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 ove
r 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.