Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  Many dwarves drowned trying to return to the land of their ancestors and the majority decided they would just have to survive inside the vast, hard structure surrounded by salt water. It went on for days and days.

  Thanks to their Johnstonian organs, they could tell that they were moving at great speed over a phenomenal distance.

  We crossed about a hundred of the Earth's magnetic barriers. Where was it leading us? Here. We were disembarked along with the oleander. We discovered this world and its exotic flora and fauna.

  It turned out to be a disappointing change of scenery. The flowers, fruit and insects were smaller and less colourful. They had left behind a country of reds, yellows and blues for one of greens, blacks and browns. They had exchanged a fluorescent world for a pastel one.

  Then there was the winter and the cold, which brought everything to a standstill. Before, they did not even know the cold existed and the only thing that obliged them to rest was the heat.

  First, the dwarves devised various means of combatting the cold. Their two most effective methods were stuffing themselves with sugar and smearing themselves with snails' fatty slime.

  For the sugar, they collected the fructose of strawberries, blackberries and cherries and, for the fat, they virtually exterminated the region's snails.

  They had really surprising practices in other respects: they had no winged males and females and no nuptial flight. The females made love and laid their eggs at home, under the ground. So that each dwarf city possessed not one but several hundred laying queens. This gave them a real advantage: as well as having a much higher birth rate than the russet ants, they were far less vulnerable. For if killing the queen was sufficient to slay a russet ant city, a dwarf city could be resurrected as long as a single laying female remained.

  And that was not all. The dwarves had a different approach to territorial conquest. On their nuptial flights, the russet ants landed as far as possible from their native nests and afterwards linked themselves to the dispersed Federation empire by trails. The dwarves, on the other hand, moved forward from their central cities centimetre by centimetre.

  Even their small size was an advantage. They needed very few calories to achieve quite a high level of mental and physical activity. It had been possible to measure the speed of their reactions during a heavy rainfall. The russet ants were still having difficulty getting their herds of greenflies and the last of their eggs out of the flooded corridors several hours after the dwarves had finished building a nest in a crevice in the bark of the big pine tree, moving all their treasures into it.

  Belo-kiu-kiuni shook herself to dispel her worried thoughts. She laid two eggs, the eggs of warriors. The nurses were not there to collect them and she felt hungry, so she ate them greedily. They were excellent protein.

  She teased her carnivorous plant but her preoccupations were already uppermost in her mind again. The only means of countering the secret weapon would be to invent another even more powerful and terrible. The russet ants had discovered formic acid, the shield leaf and glue traps in succession. They just needed to think of something else. A weapon that would stupefy the dwarves, something even worse than their destructive branch.

  She left her chamber, met some soldiers and spoke to them. She suggested setting up think-tanks on the topic of 'finding a secret weapon to combat their secret weapon'. The Tribe responded favourably to her stimulus. Small groups of three or five soldiers and workers formed on all sides. By linking their antennae in a triangle or pentagon, they took part in hundreds of absolute communications.

  'Watch out, I'm stopping,' said Galin, anxious not to get shoved in the back by eight firemen.

  'It's so dark in here. Pass me a more powerful torch.'

  He turned round and someone handed him a big torch. The firemen looked apprehensive even though they were wearing leather jackets and helmets. If only he had thought of putting on something more suitable for an expedition of this kind than a town jacket.

  The pencil of light from the torch swept across an inscription engraved at head height on the arched roof.

  Examine yourself,

  If you have not purified yourself assiduously The chemical wedding will harm you Woe betide those who linger there. Let the light-minded refrain.

  Ars Magna

  'Have you seen this?' asked a fireman.

  'It's just an old inscription,' said Inspector Galin soothingly.

  'It sounds like witchcraft.'

  'It seems pretty deep, in any case.'

  'The meaning of the sentence?'

  'No, the staircase. It looks as if it goes down thousands of steps.'

  They started to go down again. They must have been a hundred and fifty metres below street-level and still it was spiralling down. Like a spiral of DNA. It almost made them dizzy. Down they went, deeper and deeper.

  'It could go on like this indefinitely,' grumbled a fireman. 'We didn't come prepared for potholing.'

  'I thought we just had to get someone out of a cellar,' said another, who was carrying the inflatable stretcher. 'My wife was expecting me home for dinner at eight. It's after ten now. She must be really pleased.'

  Galin took his troops in hand.

  'Listen, men, we're closer to the bottom than the top, now. Just keep going a little longer. We're not going to give up halfway'

  In actual fact, they had not gone a tenth of the way.

  ★ ★š ★

  After several hours of AC at a temperature of nearly 15°, a group of yellow mercenary ants came up with an idea that was soon recognized as the best by all the other nerve centres.

  Bel-o-kan happened to have a large number of mercenaries of a rather special species, the 'seed-crushers'. They had large heads and long trenchant mandibles, which allowed them to crack open even the hardest seeds, but with their short legs under heavy bodies, they were not very effective in combat.

  So what was the point in their dragging themselves with difficulty to the site of a confrontation if they could do little damage there? The russet ants had ended up confining them to household tasks, such as cutting up big twigs.

  According to the yellow ants, there was a way in which these clumsy, great oafs could be transformed into superlative war machines. They just needed to be carried by six agile little workers.

  Guiding their 'living legs' by smell, the seed-crushers could sweep down on their adversaries at high speed and cut them to pieces with their long mandibles.

  A few soldiers stuffed with sugar carried out tests in the solarium. Six ants lifted up a seed-crusher and ran along, trying to synchronize their steps. It seemed to work very well.

  The city of Bel-o-kan had just invented the tank.

  They never came back up.

  The next day, the newspaper headlines read: 'Fontainebleau -Eight firemen and a police inspector disappear mysteriously in a cellar'.

  In the purple light of dawn, the dwarf ants surrounding the Forbidden City of La-chola-kan prepared to do battle. The russet ants isolated in the stump were starving and exhausted. They could not hold out much longer.

  When the fighting started again, the dwarves captured two more crossroads after long artillery duels with acid. The wood eaten away by the shots spewed forth the bodies of the besieged soldiers.

  The last russet survivors were finished. The dwarves advanced through the city, hardly slowed by the sharp-shooters hidden in cracks in the ceilings.

  The nuptial chamber could not be far away now. Inside it, Queen Lacho-la-kiuni was beginning to slow down her heartbeats. All was lost.

  But the dwarf troops who had advanced furthest suddenly picked up an alarm scent. Something was happening outside. They retraced their steps.

  Up on Poppy Hill, overlooking the city, thousands of black dots could be made out amidst the red flowers.

  The Belokanians had at last made up their minds to attack. That would teach them. The dwarves sent mercenary messenger-gnats to warn the central city.

  All the gnats bore the
same pheromone:

  They're attacking. Send reinforcements from the east to catch them in a pincer movement. Prepare the secret weapon.

  The warmth of the first ray of sunlight, filtering through a cloud, sparked off the decision to move into the attack. It was three minutes past eight. The Belokanian legions swept down the slope, skirting blades of grass and leaping over bits of gravel. There were millions of soldiers running along with their mandibles wide open. It was quite impressive.

  But the dwarves were not afraid. They had foreseen these tactics. On the previous day they had dug holes in the ground in staggered rows and had hidden inside them with only their mandibles poking out, their bodies protected by the sand.

  This line of dwarves at once broke the russet ant assault. The Federation troops fenced uselessly with enemies who presented them with nothing but strong points. There was no way of cutting off their legs or ripping out their abdomens.

  It was then that the bulk of the infantry of Shi-gae-pou, stationed nearby under cover of a circle of devil's boletuses, launched a counter-offensive which caught the russet ants in a pincer movement.

  If there were millions of Belokanians, the Shigaepouyans could be counted in tens of millions. There were at least five dwarf soldiers for every russet ant, not to mention the warriors crouched in individual holes, who chopped off the heads of all who passed within reach of their mandibles.

  The fight quickly turned to the disadvantage of the smaller army. Hammered by the dwarves, who suddenly appeared on all sides, the federal lines broke.

  At thirty-six minutes past nine, the russet ants beat a retreat. The dwarves were already raising victory scents. Their stratagem had worked perfectly. They had not even needed to use the secret weapon. They pursued the runaway army and considered the siege of La-chola-kan as good as over.

  But with their short legs, the dwarves had to take ten steps for everyone a russet ant took. They got out of breath climbing Poppy Hill. It was exactly what the Federation strategists had counted on. The sole purpose of the first charge had been to bring the dwarf troops out of their basin to confront them on the slope.

  The russet ants reached the crest of the hill with the dwarf legions in disorderly pursuit. At the top, a forest of thorns suddenly reared up. It was the seed-crushers' giant claws. They brandished them so that they glittered in the sunlight, then lowered them level with the ground and swooped down on the dwarves. Seed-crushers, dwarf-crushers!

  They took them completely by surprise. The stupefied Shigaepouyans, their antennae stiff with fright, were mown down. Taking advantage of the slope, the seed-crushers went hell for leather at the enemy lines and broke them. The six workers under each of them really put their hearts into it. They were the war machines' Caterpillar tracks. Thanks to the perfectly synchronized antenna communication between the turrets and wheels, the thirty-six-legged animals with two giant mandibles moved with ease among their hordes of enemies.

  The dwarves scarcely had time to glimpse the juggernauts before they fell on them by the hundred; smashing, flattening and crushing them. Their hypertrophied mandibles plunged into the crowd, browsed and rose again full of bloody legs and heads, which they snapped like straw.

  There was total panic. The terrified dwarves bumped into, trampled and sometimes even killed one another.

  Having 'raked through' the dwarf ranks, the Belokanian tanks were carried beyond them by their momentum. They eventually came to a halt and immediately started back up the slope for a fresh sweep, still perfectly in line. The survivors would have liked to pre-empt them but a second front of tanks appeared above them and started to descend on them.

  The two parallel columns met and corpses piled up in front of each tank. It was a massacre.

  The Lacholakanians, watching the battle from a distance, came out to encourage their sisters. Their initial surprise gave way to enthusiasm and they sent up pheromones of joy. It was a victory of technology and intelligence. The spirit of the Federation had never been so clearly expressed.

  However, Shi-gae-pou had not played out its hand yet. It still had its secret weapon. Normally speaking, this had been designed to dislodge recalcitrant siege-defenders but, faced with the nasty turn taken by the fighting, the dwarves decided to go for broke.

  The secret weapon took the form of russet ant heads shot through with a brown plant.

  A few days earlier, the dwarf ants had discovered the body of a Federation explorer. Her body had burst from the pressure of a parasitic fungus, alternaria. The dwarf researchers had analysed what had happened and found that the parasitic fungus produced volatile spores. These stuck to the ant's cuirass, ate into it and invaded it, then grew until it exploded.

  What a weapon!

  And guaranteed safe to use, for although the spores stuck to the russet ants' chitin, they could not get a hold on that of the dwarves. Quite simply this was because the latter felt the cold and were in the habit of smearing themselves with snail's slime, and that gave them protection from alternaria.

  The Belokanians might have invented the tank but the Shigaepouyans had discovered bacteriological warfare.

  An infantry battalion moved off carrying three hundred infected russet heads collected after the first battle of La-chola-kan.

  They threw them into the thick of their enemies. The seed-crushers and their bearers sneezed from the deadly dust. When they saw that their cuirasses were coated with it, they lost their heads. The bearers dropped their burdens and the seed-crushers, once more helpless, panicked and violently took it out on other seed-crushers. It was a rout.

  At about ten o'clock, a sudden cold spell separated the combatants. It was impossible to fight in an icy draught. The dwarf troops took advantage of the lull in the fighting to make good their escape and the russet ant tanks climbed up the slope again with some difficulty.

  Both sides counted the wounded and dead. The provisional toll showed heavy losses and they longed to tip the battle in their favour.

  The Belokanians had recognized the alternaria spores and decided to put all the soldiers hit by the fungus out of their misery.

  At that point, spies came running and told them they could protect themselves from the bacteriological weapon by smearing themselves with snail's slime. No sooner said than done. They decided to sacrifice three snails (which were becoming more and more difficult to find) and everyone protected themselves from the scourge.

  They made antenna contact and the russet ant strategists decided they could no longer attack with tanks alone. In the new plan of attack, the tanks would occupy the centre but a hundred and twenty legions of regular infantry and sixty legions of foreign infantry would be deployed on the wings.

  Morale rose again.

  argentine ant: The Argentine Ants (Iridomyrmex humilis) arrived in France in 1920. In all likelihood, they were transported in tubs of oleanders destined to brighten up the roads of the Cote d'Azur.

  They were first reported in 1866 in Buenos Aires (hence the name by which they are commonly known). In 1891, they were found in the United States, in New Orleans.

  Hidden in the litter of exported Argentine horses, they next arrived in South Africa in 1908, in Chile in 1910, in Australia in 1911 and in France in 1920.

  The species is distinguished not only by its minute size, which makes it a pygmy compared with other ants, but also by the intelligence and warlike aggressiveness which are in fact its main characteristics.

  No sooner were the Argentine ants established in the south of France than they waged war on all the indigenous species and defeated them.

  In 1960, they crossed the Pyrenees and made their way as far south as Barcelona. In 1961, they spanned the Alps and poured down as far as Rome. Then, in the 1910s, the Iridomyrmex began to move north again. They are thought to have bridged the Loire one hot summer in the late 1990s. The invaders, whose combat strategies equalled those of Caesar or Napoleon, then found themselves up against two rather tougher species: the federative russets (in the south
and east of the Parisian region) and the pharaoh ants (to the north and east of Paris).

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  The Battle of Poppy Hill was not yet won. At ten-thirteen, Shi-gae-pou decided to send reinforcements. Two hundred and forty legions of reservists would go and join the survivors of the first charge. When told about the 'tanks', they put their antennae together for an AC. There must be some way to outwit the terrible machines.

  At about ten-thirty, a worker made a suggestion: The seed-crusher ants owe their mobility to the six ants who carry them. All we have to do is cut off their 'living legs'. Someone came up with another idea:

  The weak point of their machines is their inability to turn round quickly. We can make use of this handicap. All we have to do is form up into compact squares. When the machines charge, we just move aside to let them pass without resisting. Then, while they are still being carried forward by their momentum, we strike them from the rear. They won't have

  time to turn round.

  And a third:

  The movement of the legs is synchronized by antenna contact, as we've seen. All we have to do is jump up and cut off the seed-crushers' antennae so they can no longer direct their bearers.

  All the ideas met with approval and the dwarves began to work out their new battle plan.

  suffering: Are ants capable of suffering? A priori, no. Their nervous system is not designed for it. Where there is no nerve, there can be no pain message. This may explain why parts of ants sometimes go on Hiving9 independently of the rest of their bodies for a very long time.

  The absence of pain leads to a whole new world of science fiction. Without pain, there can be no fear, perhaps no consciousness of ‘self’ even. Entomologists have long been inclined to the theory that ants are incapable of suffering and that this is the basis of their society’s cohesion. Which explains everything and nothing. The idea has the added advantage of removing any scruples we might have about killing them.