56th was quite surprised but did not falter. Fine pheromones, indeed! If they were hoping to conceal the existence of the secret weapon, they were too late anyway. In the first place, everyone knew La-chola-kan had been a victim of it, even if it was still a complete mystery from the technological point of view.
The two soldiers remained impassive and did not relax their grip. Everyone had forgotten about La-chola-kan. Victory had stilled their curiosity. Anyway, you only had to sniff the corridors: there was not the slightest whiff of toxin. The whole Tribe was quietly awaiting the next day's Festival of Rebirth.
What did they want from her, then? Why were they holding her head so tightly?
While racing through the lower floors during the chase, the lame ant had detected a third ant. A soldier. What was her identification number?
So that was why they had not killed her outright. In reply, the female poked the ends of both her antennae deep into the big ant's eyes. The fact that she had been blind from birth did not make it any the less painful. The lame ant was astounded and slackened her grip.
The female ran and flew in order to get away more quickly. Her wings raised a cloud of dust which put her pursuers off her track. She had to get back to the dome quickly.
She had just had a brush with death. Now she was going to begin another life.
The following is an extract from Edmond Wells's address to the Parliamentary commission of enquiry in support of his petition against toy anthills:
'In the shops yesterday, I saw the new toys that are being given to children as Christmas presents. They're transparent plastic boxes filled with earth containing six hundred ants and a queen whose fertility is guaranteed.
You can see them working, digging and running about.
It's fascinating for a child. It's as if he were being given a city. Except that the inhabitants are minute. Like hundreds of small, autonomous dolls moving about.
To tell the truth, I have anthills like them myself, simply because my work as a biologist involves studying them. I've set them up in vivariums covered with perforated cardboard.
However, I get a strange feeling each time I stand in front of my anthill, as if I were omnipotent in their world, as if I were their God.
If I feel like depriving them of food, my ants will all die. If I take it into my head to make it rain, I merely have to pour a little water over their city from a watering can. If I decide to increase the temperature in the anthill, I just have to put them on the radiator. If I want to kidnap one to examine it under a microscope, I only have to plunge my tweezers into the vivarium and if I feel like killing some, I won't meet with any resistance. They won't even understand what's happening to them.
I tell you, gentlemen, we have inordinate power over these tiny creatures simply by virtue of their size.
I don't abuse that power myself but just imagine what a child might do to them.
Sometimes I have crazy ideas. When I see a sand city, I say to myself: what if it were ours? What if we, too, have been set up in a prison vivarium and another giant species is watching us?
What if Adam and Eve were guinea pigs in an experiment to see what would happen if they were placed in an artificial setting?
What if their banishment from Paradise were just a change of prison vivarium?
What if the Flood were, after all, just a glass of water tipped over us by a careless or curious God?
Impossible, do I hear you say? Who knows. Maybe the only difference is that my ants are shut in by glass walls and we are held in by a physical force: the Earth's attraction.
My ants always manage to slash through the cardboard, however, and several have already escaped. And we manage to launch rockets which escape the Earth's gravity.
Coming back to the vivarium cities. I am, as I mentioned just now, a magnanimous, merciful and even slightly superstitious god so I never make my subjects suffer. I don't do anything to them I wouldn't like to have done to me.
But the thousands of anthills sold at Christmas are going to turn children into little gods. Will they all be as magnanimous and merciful as I?
Most of them will surely understand that they are responsible for a city and that that gives them rights but also divine duties: to feed them, keep them at the right temperature and not kill them for fun.
However, when things go wrong for them, when their parents are rowing or they do badly at school or have fights with their friends, children, especially very young children, who are not yet responsible for their actions, may very well forget their duties as 'young gods'. I dread to think what they might do to their 'citizens' in a fit of rage.
I am not asking you to pass this law prohibiting toy anthills out of pity for ants or in the name of animal rights. Animals have no rights: we hatch them in batteries and sacrifice them for our consumption. I am asking you to pass it because you would not want the Earth to be given to an irresponsible young god one day as a Christmas present.'
The sun was high in the sky.
Latecomers, both male and female, were hurrying along the arteries just below the city's skin. Workers were pushing them along, licking and encouraging them.
The 56th female vanished in time into the jubilant crowd, where all passport scents merged. No-one there would be able to identify hers. She allowed herself to be carried along by the flow of her sisters and climbed higher and higher, passing through hitherto unknown districts.
Suddenly, at the end of a corridor, she encountered something she had never seen before. The light of day. At first, it was only a halo on the walls but soon it became a blinding light. Here at last was the mysterious force the nurses had described to her. The warm, gentle, beautiful light. The promise of a fabulous new world.
The raw photons she absorbed through her eyes made her feel drunk, as if she had indulged in too much of the fermented honeydew on the thirty-second floor.
The 56th princess continued to move forward. There were splashes of hard white light on the ground and she floundered in the hot photons. For someone who had grown up underground, this was in violent contrast with the dark she had always known.
As she turned another bend, a pencil of pure light shot through her before widening into a dazzling circle, then a silver veil. She was forced back, bombarded by the light. She could feel its grains entering her eyes, burning the optical nerves and eating into her three brains. The three brains were an ancient inheritance from her worm ancestors who had a nerve ganglion for each, segment and a nervous system for each part of the body.
She carried on into the wind of photons. In the distance, she could make out the silhouettes of her sisters, who were being swallowed up by the sun. They looked like ghosts.
Still she moved forward, her chitin growing warm. People had tried to describe this light to her thousands of times but words could not describe it, it had to be experienced. She spared a thought for all the workers of the 'doorkeeper' sub-caste who spent their whole lives shut up in the city and would never know what the outside world and its sun were like.
She entered the wall of light and was flung to the other side, outside the city. Her many-faceted eyes gradually focused as she felt the sting of the wild air, a cold, moving, scented air quite unlike the tame atmosphere of the world in which she had lived.
Her antennae twirled. She had difficulty in pointing them in the direction she wanted. A faster gust flattened them to her face. Her wings flapped.
Up on the high point of the dome, workers received her. They grabbed her by her legs, pulled her up and pushed her forward into a crowd of winged ants, hundreds of swarming males and females crammed onto a narrow surface. The 56th princess understood that she was on the runway ready for take-off on the nuptial flight but that they must wait for the weather to improve.
However, while the wind was still playing havoc with their plans, a dozen sparrows had spotted the winged ants. Excited by the windfall, they fluttered closer and closer. When they got too near, the gunners crowning the summit rewa
rded them with jets of acid.
Just then, one of the birds tried his luck. He dived into the crowd, seized three females and flew off. Before he could regain height, he was shot down by the gunners. He rolled in the grass pitifully, his beak still full, in an attempt to wipe the poison off his wings.
It was an example to all the sparrows and they drew back a little. No-one was taken in, though. They would soon be back to put the anti-aircraft defences to the test again.
predator: What would our human civilization he like if it had not got rid of its major predators, such as wolves, lions, hears and hyenas?
Certainly an anxious civilization, perpetually at risk. To give themselves a fright in the midst of their libations, the Romans used to have a corpse brought in. That was their way of reminding themselves that nothing is permanent and that death can occur at any time.
But nowadays, man has crushed, eliminated and relegated to the museum every species capable of eating him, leaving only germs, and possibly ants, to worry about.
The Myrmician civilization, on the other hand, has developed without managing to eliminate its major predators. As a result of this, the insect is perpetually at risk. It knows it has only gone halfway, since even the most stupid animal can destroy the fruit of thousands of years of considered experience with a blow of the paw.
Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
★ ★
The wind had dropped, there were fewer gusts and the temperature was rising again. At 22°-time, the city decided to let go of its children.
The females whirred their four wings. They were ready and more than ready. The smell of all the mature males had raised their sexual appetite to a peak.
The first virgins took off gracefully. They rose to a height of about a hundred heads and were cut down by the sparrows. None got through.
There was dismay down below but a second wave took off, undeterred. Four females out of a hundred managed to get through the barrage of beaks and feathers. The males pursued them in close formation. They were too puny to interest the sparrows and were allowed through.
A third wave of females launched their attack on the clouds. There were more than fifty birds in its path. It was carnage and there were no survivors. More and more birds gathered, as if word had got round. There were sparrows, blackbirds, robins, chaffinches and pigeons all squawking away up there now. They were having a festival too.
A fourth wave took off. Not a single female got through this time, either. The birds fought among themselves for the best morsels.
The gunners were getting rattled. They were shooting straight up in the air with all the might of their formic acid glands but the predators were too high. The drops of acid fell back on the city in a deadly rain, causing a great deal of injury and damage.
Some females gave up in terror. They decided that it was impossible to get through and that they had better go back down and copulate indoors along with other princesses who had been involved in accidents.
The fifth wave rose up, ready to make the supreme sacrifice. They had to get through the wall of beaks at all costs. Seventeen females got through, with forty-three males close on their tails.
Of the sixth wave, twelve females got through.
Of the seventh, thirty-four made it.
56th fluttered her wings. She dared not go yet. The head of one of her sisters had just landed at her feet, softly followed by some ominous down. She had wanted to know what the Great Outside was like. Well, now she knew.
Would she take off with the eighth wave? No, and she was right not to, for it was completely wiped out.
The princess was feeling nervous. She whirred her four wings and rose slightly off the ground. Well, at least that worked, no problem there, it was just that. . . Suddenly, she was filled with fear. She must keep a clear head. She knew she had very little chance of succeeding.
56th stopped beating her wings: seventy-three females in the ninth wave had just got through. The workers let out pheromones of encouragement. Hope sprang anew. Would she leave with the tenth wave?
As she hesitated, she suddenly spotted the small lame ant and the big killer with lifeless eyes a little way ahead of her. She needed no further persuading. All at once, she took flight and the mandibles of the other two closed on empty air. They had only just missed her.
56th hovered a moment halfway between the city and the horde of birds. Then she was enveloped in the flight of the tenth wave and took advantage of it to fly straight up into the void above. Her two neighbours were snapped up, while she passed unexpectedly between the enormous talons of a tit.
It was just a question of luck.
There, fourteen of them had come out of the tenth wave unharmed. But 56th had few illusions. She had only overcome the first ordeal. The hardest was yet to come. She knew the figures. In general, out of one thousand five hundred princesses who took flight, only a dozen touched down without mishap. Four queens at best would manage to build a city.
sometimes when: Sometimes, when I go for a walk in the summer, I notice I have almost stepped on a kind of fly. I look at it more closely and see that it is a queen ant. If there is one, there are a thousand. They writhe about on the ground and get crushed underfoot or crash into car windscreens. When they are exhausted, they lose all control of their flight. How many cities have been annihilated by windscreen wipers on a summer road?
Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
As the 56th female beat her four long stained-glass wings faster, she saw the wall of feathers behind her close on the eleventh and twelfth waves. Poor things. Another five waves of females and the city would have spat out all its hopes.
She had already stopped thinking about them, sucked up by the infinite blue. It was all so blue. How wonderful it was to cleave the air for an ant who had known only life underground. It seemed to her that she was moving in a different world. She had left her narrow galleries for a dizzy space where everything exploded in three dimensions.
She discovered intuitively all the possibilities of flight. By leaning on one wing, she could turn right. She could ascend by altering the pitch of her wing-beats. Or descend. Or accelerate. She noticed that to make a perfect turn she had to place her wing-tips along an imaginary axis and not hesitate to position her body at an angle of over 45°.
The 56th female discovered that the sky was not empty. Far from it. It was full of currents. Some of them, the thermals, made her go up. Air pockets, on the other hand, made her lose altitude. You could only spot them by watching the insects ahead of you and preparing yourself according to their movements.
She felt cold. It was cold at altitude. Sometimes there were whirlwinds, gusts of warm or freezing air, which span her like a top.
A group of males had rushed in pursuit of her. The 56th female went faster so that only the fastest and most stubborn would catch up with her. It was the first genetic selection.
She felt a touch. A male was securing himself to her abdomen, climbing up her, scaling her. He was quite small but as he had stopped beating his wings, he felt heavy.
She lost a little altitude. Above, the male was twisting about to avoid being hampered by her wing-beats. Completely off balance, he curved his abdomen under to reach the female's sex organs with his sting.
She waited curiously to see what it would feel like. She began to feel a delicious tingling sensation. That gave her an idea. Without warning, she tipped forward and went into a nosedive. It was marvellous, total ecstasy! Her first great cocktail of pleasure was made up of speed and sex.
An image of the 327th male appeared furtively in her brain. The wind whistled between the hairs of her eyes. A spicy sap made her antennae tremble. Her thoughts became a stormy sea. Strange liquids ran from her glands and mingled to form an effervescent soup which poured into her encephalon.
When she reached the top of the grass, she gathered her strength and started beating her wings again. Then she flew straight up an
d by the time she had levelled out, the male was no longer feeling well. His legs were trembling and his mandibles kept opening and shutting for no apparent reason. He had a cardiac arrest and went into free fall.
The males of most insects are programmed to die the first time they make love. They only get one go at it. When the sperms leave their bodies, they take with them the lives of their owners.
In the case of ants, ejaculation kills the male. In other species, it is the female who subsequently massacres her partner for the simple reason that she has worked up an appetite.
You have to bow to the inevitable: the world of insects is largely a world of females or, to be precise, widows. Males have only a fleeting place in it.
But a second sire was already clinging to her. One had no sooner gone than another took his place. A third came along, then many more. The 56th female lost count of them. At least seventeen or eighteen of them relayed one another to fill her sperm-store with fresh gametes.
She could feel the living liquid seething in her abdomen. It was the store of inhabitants of her future city, millions of male sexual cells that would allow her to lay every day for fifteen years.
All around her, her winged sisters were experiencing the same emotions. The sky was full of flying females mounted by one or more males copulating with the same females; caravans of love suspended in the clouds. The ladies were drunk with fatigue and happiness. They were no longer princesses, they were queens. They were almost stunned with repeated pleasure and could hardly control their flight paths.
Four majestic swallows chose that moment to fly up suddenly from a flowering cherry tree. With chilling impassiveness, they slid rather than flew between the layers of sky and swooped down on the winged ants with wide-open beaks, swallowing them one after another. The 56th was pursued in her turn.
103,683rd was in the explorers' room. She had been counting on continuing the investigation alone by infiltrating the termite hill in the east but someone had suggested she join a group of explorers to go 'dragon hunting'. A lizard had been spotted on the grazing lands of Zoubi-zoubi-kan. With nine million beasts to milk, it was the city with the largest herd of greenflies in the entire Federation. One lizard could hamper pastoral activities considerably.
Empire of the Ants Page 15
