Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  On the twentieth floor of the basement the 56th female had not yet got as far as discussing the dwarves' secret weapon with the farmers. She was far too interested in what she could see to be able to emit anything whatsoever.

  As the caste of females was especially precious, the latter spent their entire childhood in the princesses' quarters. All they knew of the world was often only a hundred or so corridors, and few of them had ventured below the tenth floor of the basement or above the tenth floor above ground level.

  56th had once tried to go and see the Great Outside her nurses had told her so much about, but sentries had turned her back. You could more or less camouflage your scents but not your long wings. The guards had warned her then that there were gigantic monsters outside. They ate little princesses who wanted to go out before the Festival of Rebirth. 56th had been torn between curiosity and dread ever since.

  When she went down to the twentieth floor of the basement, she realized that before moving around in the Great, wild Outside, she still had lots of wonderful things to discover in her own city. She was now seeing the mushroom beds for the first time.

  According to Belokanian mythology, the first mushroom beds were discovered during the Cereal War in the fifty thousandth millennium. An artillery commando had just laid seige to a termite city. They suddenly came to a room of colossal proportions. In the centre, an enormous, white cake was being endlessly polished by about a hundred termite workers.

  They tasted it and found it delicious. It was like an entirely edible village. Prisoners confessed it was made of mushroom. Termites actually live only on cellulose but they cannot digest it without the help of mushrooms.

  Ants, on the other hand, can digest cellulose perfectly well and do not need to have recourse to mushrooms. They nevertheless grasped the advantage of growing crops inside their cities: it would allow them to hold out during sieges and famines.

  Nowadays, selected strains were grown in the big rooms on the twentieth floor of the basement of Bel-o-kan. Ants no longer used the same mushrooms as termites and, in Bel-o-kan, they mostly grew agarics. A whole new technology based on agricultural activities had developed.

  The 56th female circulated between the beds of the white garden. On one side, workers were preparing a 'bed' in which mushrooms would grow. They were cutting leaves into small squares, which were then scraped, ground, kneaded and turned into patties. The leaf patties were arranged on a compost made from ant excrement (which was collected in basins kept for the purpose), then moistened with saliva and left for time to do the work of germinating the mushrooms.

  Patties which had already fermented were surrounded by balls of edible white filaments. Workers then watered them with their disinfectant saliva and cut away any bits that stuck out of the little white cones. If they had let the mushrooms grow, they would soon have split the room apart. From the filaments harvested by flat-mandibled workers, a tasty, nourishing flour was obtained.

  Here, too, the workers' concentration was at its height. Not a single weed or parasitic fungus must be allowed to take advantage of the care they were lavishing.

  It was in this rather unfavourable context that 56th tried to establish antenna contact with a gardener meticulously cutting up one of the white cones.

  A grave danger is threatening the city. We need help. Will you join our work cell?

  What kind of danger?

  The dwarves have discovered a secret weapon with devastating effects. We must do something as quickly as possible.

  The gardener placidly asked her what she thought of her mushroom, a fine agaric. 56th complimented her on it and the gardener offered her a taste. The female bit into the white dough and immediately felt as if her oesophagus had been set on fire.

  The agaric had been impregnated with myrmicacin, a deadly poison usually used in diluted form as a weed-killer. 56th coughed and spat out the toxic food in time. The gardener let go of the mushroom and leapt at her thorax with her mandibles bared.

  They rolled in the compost and dealt each other short, sharp blows on the head with their club antennae, trying to beat each other's brains out. Crack! Crack! Crack! Farmers separated them.

  What's got into the pair of you?

  The gardener managed to get away but 56th opened her wings, gave a tremendous leap and flattened her to the ground. It was then that she identified a faint smell of rock. There was no doubt about it; it was her turn to stumble on a member of the incredible band of assassins.

  She pinched her antennae.

  Who are you? Why did you try to kill me? What's that smell of rock?

  The other remained silent so she twisted her antennae. The ant writhed in agony but did not answer. 56th was not the kind to hurt a sister cell but she twisted the antennae still more.

  The rock-scented ant stopped moving and entered into voluntary catalepsy. Her heart had almost stopped beating and she would die before long. 56th cut off both her antennae in frustration but she was only wasting her energy on a corpse.

  The workers surrounded her once more.

  What's happening? What have you done to her?

  56th thought now was not the time to justify herself, it was better to get away, which she did by beating her wings. 327th was right. Something mind-boggling was going on. Some Tribe cells had gone mad.

  DEEPER AND DEEPER

  On the forty-fifth floor of the basement, the 103,683rd asexual ant made her way into the wrestling halls; low-ceilinged rooms where the soldiers exercised in readiness for the spring wars.

  All around, warriors were fighting duels. The opponents first felt each other over to assess build and leg size, then circled, tested each others flanks, pulled each others hairs, threw each other scent challenges and provoked each other with the club ends of their antennae.

  Finally, they flung themselves together with a clash of their shells. Each of them tried to grab hold of the other’s thoracic joints. As soon as one of them managed it, the other tried to bite her knees. Their movements were jerky. They reared up on their hind legs, collapsed in a heap and rolled about furiously.

  They usually held their grip, then suddenly struck another limb. They were careful, though. It was only a training exercise. Nothing got broken, no blood was spilt. The fight ended as soon as an ant was turned over and laid back its antennae in submission. The duels were quite realistic all the same. The combatants often stuck their claws in each other’s eyes to get a grip and snapped their jaws on empty air.

  Some way off, gunners seated on their abdomens were aiming and firing at bits of gravel five hundred heads away. The jets of acid often hit their targets.

  An old warrior was teaching a novice that the outcome of the battle was decided before contact was made. The mandible or jet of acid only ratified a situation of dominance already recognized by the two opponents. Before the fray, there was inevitably one who had decided to win and one who consented to be beaten. It was simply a question of sharing out the roles. Once they had been allocated, the winner could shoot a jet of acid and hit the

  bull's-eye without aiming while the loser could go all out with her mandibles without even succeeding in injuring her opponent. Only one piece of advice was worth giving: accept victory. It was all in the mind. Accept victory and nothing could withstand you.

  Two duellists jostled the 103,683rd soldier. She shoved them away vigorously and went on her way. She was looking for the mercenaries' quarters, which had been set up below the arena where the fights took place. Soon she caught sight of the passage leading to it.

  Their hall was even more vast than that of the legionaries. Admittedly, the mercenaries spent all their time in their exercise area. Their only reason for being there was war. All the peoples of the region, both subject and allied, rubbed shoulders there: yellow ants, red ants, black ants, glue-spitting ants, primitive ants with poisonous stings and even dwarves.

  Yet again, it was the termites who ha
d thought up the idea of feeding foreign populations so that they would fight beside them during invasions. The subtleties of diplomacy had led the ant cities to enter into alliances with termites against other ants. This had led the termites to an arresting thought: why not hire ant legions outright to live permanently in the termite hills? It was a revolutionary idea and the ant armies had quite a surprise when they had to confront sisters of the same species fighting for the termites. The Myrmician civilization, so quick to adapt, had overplayed its hand this time.

  The ants would gladly have responded by imitating their enemies and taking termite legions into their pay to fight the termites. But there was one major obstacle to their plan: the termites were absolute royalists. Their loyalty was flawless and they were incapable of fighting their own kind. Only ants, whose political regimes were as varied as their physiology, were capable of coming to terms with all the perverse implications of fighting as mercenaries.

  Not that it really mattered. The great russet-ant federations had been content to reinforce their armies with a large number of legions of foreign ants, all united under the one Belokanian scent banner.

  103,683rd approached the dwarf mercenaries and asked them if they had heard of the development of a secret weapon at Shi-gae-pou, a weapon capable of annihilating an entire expedition of twenty-eight russet ants in a flash. They replied that they had never seen or heard of anything so effective.

  103,683rd questioned other mercenaries. A yellow ant claimed to have witnessed such a wonder. It was not a dwarf attack, however, only a rotten pear which had unexpectedly fallen from a tree. Everyone let out bubbly little pheromones of laughter. It was yellow-ant humour.

  103,683rd went back up to a room in which some of her close colleagues were training. She knew them all individually. They listened to her carefully and believed her and there were soon over thirty determined warriors in the 'group searching for the dwarves' secret weapon'. If only 327th could have seen it!

  Be careful. An organized band is trying to get rid of anyone who wants to know. They must be russet-ant mercenaries working for the dwarves. You can identify them by their smell of rock.

  For the sake of security, they decided to hold their first meeting in the very depths of the city in one of the rooms on the fiftieth floor. No-one ever went down there. They should be able to organize their offensive without being disturbed.

  But 103,683rd's body indicated a sudden acceleration in time. It was 23°. She took her leave and hurried off to her meeting with 327th and 56th.

  aesthetics: What could be more beautiful than an ant? Its lines are curved and pure and it is perfectly aerodynamic. Its whole body is designed so that each limb fits perfectly into its intended notch and each joint is a mechanical marvel. The plates fit together as if by computer-assisted design and there is never any creaking or friction. The triangular head slices through the air and the long, flexed legs give the body a low-slung, comfortable suspension. It is like an Italian sports car.

  The claws allow it to walk on the ceiling and the eyes have 180° panoramic vision. The antennae pick up thousands of items of information which are invisible to us and their extremities can be used as hammers. The abdomen is full of pockets, sacs and compartments, in which the insect can stock chemicals, while the mandibles cut, nip and seize. A formidable network of internal pipes allows it to lay down scent messages.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  Nicolas did not want to go to sleep. He was still watching television. The news had just ended with the announcement of the return of the Marco Polo probe. The conclusion: there was not the slightest trace of life in the neighbouring solar systems. All the planets visited by the probe had offered only images of rocky deserts or liquid ammonia surfaces. There was no sign of moss, amoeba or bacteria.

  'Supposing Dads right?' Nicolas said to himself. 'Supposing we're the only intelligent life-form in the whole universe?' It was obviously disappointing but might well be true.

  After the news, there was a major report in the World Cultures series, this time devoted to the caste problem in India.

  'The Hindus belong for life to the caste in which they were born. Each caste operates according to its own set of rules, a rigid code which no-one can transgress without being banished from their own caste as well as all the others. To understand such behaviour, we have to remember that—'

  'It's one o'clock in the morning,' butted in Lucie.

  Nicolas had had a bellyful of images. Since the trouble with the cellar, he had put in a good four hours of television a day. It was his way of stopping thinking and being himself. His mother's voice brought him back to painful reality.

  'Aren't you tired?'

  'Where's Dad?'

  'He's still in the cellar. You must go to sleep now.' 'I can't sleep.'

  'Would you like me to tell you a story?' 'Oh, yes. A story. A lovely story'

  Lucie accompanied him into his room and sat on the edge of the bed loosening her long, red hair. She chose an old Hebrew tale.

  'Once upon a time, there was a stone-cutter who had had enough of wearing himself out digging away at the mountain under the burning rays of the sun. "I'm fed up with living like this. It's exhausting to be always cutting, cutting the stone and then there's the sun, always the sun. Oh. How I'd love to be in its place. I'd be up there all-powerful and hot, flooding the world with my rays," said the stone-cutter to himself. His call was miraculously heard and the stone-cutter was immediately turned into the sun. He was happy to see his wish granted. But, as he was having fun sending his rays everywhere, he noticed they were being stopped by the clouds. "What's the point in being the sun if mere clouds can stop my rays," he exclaimed. "If clouds are stronger than the sun, I'd rather be a cloud." So he became a cloud. He flew over the world, raced along and scattered rain but suddenly the wind rose and dispersed the cloud. "Ah, the wind can disperse clouds so it must be stronger. I want to be the wind," he decided.'

  'And so he became the wind?'

  'Yes, and he blew all over the world. He made storms, gales and typhoons. But suddenly he noticed a wall in his way. A very high, hard wall. A mountain. "What's the point in being the wind if a mere mountain can stop me? It must be stronger," he said to himself.'

  'And so he became the mountain.'

  'That's right. And just at that moment, he felt something hitting him. Something stronger than he was, digging away at him from the inside. It was a little stone-cutter.'

  'Aaaah.'

  'Did you like the story?' 'Oh yes, Mum!'

  'Are you sure you haven't seen better ones on television?' 'Oh no, Mum.' She laughed and hugged him. 'Do you think Dad's digging, too, Mum?' 'Maybe, who knows? He seems to think he's going to turn into something different if he goes down there, anyway'

  'Doesn't he like it here?'

  'No, Nick, he's ashamed of being out of work. He thinks it's better to be the sun. An underground sun.' 'Dad thinks he's the king of the ants.' Lucie smiled.

  'He'll get over it. He's like a little boy still. And little boys are always interested in anthills. Haven't you ever played with ants?' 'Yes, I have.'

  Lucie plumped up his pillow and kissed him. 'Time to go to sleep now. Goodnight, darling.' 'Goodnight, Mum.'

  Lucie caught sight of the matches on the bedside table. He must have been having another go at making the four triangles. She went back into the living room and picked up the book on architecture which told the history of the house.

  Many scientists had lived in it, most of them Protestants. Michael Servetus, for example, had lived here for a few years.

  One passage in particular caught her attention. It said a tunnel had been dug during the Wars of Religion to allow the Protestants to flee from the city; an unusually long, deep tunnel.

  The three insects made a triangle to take part in absolute communication. That way, they would not need to recount their adventures. They would know everything that had happened to them instantaneous
ly, as if they were a single body that had divided into three in order to investigate better.

  They linked antennae. Thoughts began to circulate and merge. It worked. Each brain acted as a transistor, conducting and enriching the electrical message it received. Three ant minds united in this way transcended the simple sum of their talents.

  Suddenly the spell was broken. 103,683rd had picked up a parasitic smell. The walls had antennae. To be precise, two antennae, which were sticking out of the opening to 56th's chamber. Someone was listening to them.

  Midnight. It was two days since Jonathan had gone back into the cellar and Lucie was walking up and down nervously in the living room. She went to check on Nicolas, who was sound asleep, and the matches suddenly caught her eye. At that moment, she had a sense that the beginning of an answer to the riddle of the cellar might lie in the riddle of the matches. How did you make four equilateral triangles out of six little sticks?

  'You have to think about it differently. If you think about it in the usual way, you won't get anywhere,' Jonathan had said. Picking up the matches, she went back into the living room, where she played about with them for a long time. At last, exhausted with worry, she went to bed.

  That night, she had a strange dream. First, she saw Uncle Edmond, or at least someone resembling her husband's description of him. He was standing in a kind of long cinema queue in the middle of a desert Uttered with loose stones. The queue was surrounded by Mexican soldiers, who were 'keeping order'. In the distance stood a dozen gallows, on which people were being hanged. When they were quite dead, they were taken down and others were strung up. And the queue moved forward.

  Behind Edmond stood Jonathan, Lucie herself and a fat man wearing very small glasses. All the condemned people were chatting placidly, as if there were nothing the matter.