Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  103,683rd asked whether their termite neighbours ever gave them any trouble. The local ant raised her antennae in surprise. She stopped mumbling between her mandibles and there was a heavy scent silence.

  Termites?

  Her antennae fell. She had nothing more to communicate. In any case, she had work to do. She was in the middle of cutting something up and had wasted enough time already. She said goodbye and turned round, ready to make off. 103,683rd repeated her question.

  The other ant now seemed to panic and her antennae began to tremble. The word termite visibly conjured up something terrible for her. It seemed quite beyond her strength to engage in conversation on the subject. She rushed off to join a group of workers in the middle of a drinking session.

  They had filled their social crops with flower-honey alcohol and were drinking from each other's abdomens in a long, closed chain.

  Five huntresses assigned to the advanced post then made rather a noisy entrance, pushing a caterpillar in front of them.

  Look what we've found. The amazing thing is, it produces honey!

  The one who gave out this news tapped the captive with the tips of her antennae. Then she put a leaf down in front of it and, as soon as the caterpillar started to eat, jumped on its back. The caterpillar reared up in vain. The ant stuck her claws into its flanks and got a good grip, then turned round and licked its last segment until a nectar ran from it.

  Everyone congratulated her and the hitherto unknown honeydew was passed from mandible to mandible. It had a different flavour from greenfly honeydew and was smoother, with a more pronounced after-taste of sap. As 103,683rd was tasting this exotic liquid, an antenna brushed her head.

  It seems you've been asking about the termites.

  The ant who had just sent out this pheromone seemed very, very old. Her whole shell was covered in scars from mandible bites. 103,683rd laid back her antennae in acquiescence.

  Follow me!

  She was known as the 4,000th warrior. Her head was as flat as a leaf and her eyes were tiny. The quavering scents she emitted were very low in alcohol. That was possibly why she had wanted to talk in a tiny, almost enclosed cavity.

  Don't worry, we can talk here. This hole is my chamber.

  103,683rd asked her what she knew about the termite hill of the east. The other spread her antennae.

  Why are you interested in it? You only came here for the lizard hunt, didn't you?

  103,683rd decided to come clean with the old asexual ant. She told her that a baffling secret weapon had been used against the soldiers of La-chola-kan. At first, they had thought it was a dwarf trick but it wasn't them. Their suspicions had naturally then fallen on the termites of the east, their other great enemies.

  The old lady folded back her antennae in surprise. She had never heard of the affair. She examined 103,683rd and asked:

  Was it the secret weapon that took off your fifth leg?

  The young soldier answered no, she had lost it in the Battle of Poppy Hill, during the liberation of La-chola-kan. 4,000th immediately became enthusiastic. She had been there.

  Which legion were you in?

  The 15th. How about you?

  The 3rd.

  During the first charge, one had fought on the left flank and the other on the right. They exchanged recollections. There were always plenty of lessons to be learnt from a battlefield. For example, 4,000th had noticed right at the start of the fighting that mercenary messenger-gnats were being used. According to her, they were far superior to the traditional 'runners' as a means of long-distance communication.

  The Belokanian soldier, who had not noticed them, willingly agreed, then hastily returned to the subject.

  Why won't anyone talk to me about the termites?

  The old warrior came closer until their heads brushed.

  Some very strange things have been happening here, too.

  The scents she was giving off were redolent of mystery. Very strange, very strange. The phrase bounced off the walls in a scent echo.

  Then 4,000th explained that for some time now not a single termite from the eastern city had been seen even though they had previously used the Satei river-crossing to send spies to the west. The ants of Satei had known about it and monitored them after a fashion. Now, there were no longer even spies. There was nothing.

  An enemy who attacks is worrying but an enemy who disappears is even more worrying. As there were no longer any skirmishes with the termite scouts, the ants of the post of Guayei-Tyolot decided to spy in their turn.

  A first band of explorers had set out but nothing more was heard of them. A second group followed and disappeared likewise. They thought it might be the lizard or a greedy hedgehog, but when a predator attacked there was always at least one survivor, even if she were wounded. In this case, the soldiers had vanished as if by magic.

  That reminds me of something . . ., began 103,683rd.

  But the old lady was not to be distracted from her tale. She went on:

  After the failure of the first two expeditions, the warriors of Guayei-Tyolot decided to risk their all and dispatched a minilegion of five hundred heavily armed soldiers. This time, there was one survivor. She dragged herself along for thousands of heads and died in agony just as she reached the nest.

  They examined her body but found no trace of a wound. There was no apparent reason for her death.

  Now do you understand why no-one wants to talk to you about the termite hill of the east?

  103,683rd understood. What was more, she was satisfied she was on the right track. If there was a solution to the mystery of the secret weapon, it was to be found in the termite hill of the east.

  hologram: The human brain and the anthill have something in common, which can be symbolized by a hologram. What is a hologram? It is a set of printed lines which, when superimposed and lit from a particular angle, produce a three-dimensional image.

  The image exists everywhere and nowhere. The combination of printed lines engenders a third dimension and therefore a three-dimensional illusion.

  Each neurone in our brains and each individual in the anthill holds all the information but only their collective activity gives rise to consciousness or 'three-dimensional thought'.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  When the 56th female, recently turned queen, recovered consciousness, she found that she had been washed up on a huge gravel beach. She had probably only escaped the frogs thanks to a rapid current. She would have liked to take off but her wings were still wet. All she could do was wait.

  She cleaned her antennae methodically, then sniffed the surrounding air. Where was she? She only hoped she had not ended up on the wrong side of the river.

  She vibrated her antennae at 8,000 strokes a second and caught a few whiffs of familiar smells. By luck, she was on the west bank of the river. However, there were no trail pheromones whatsoever. She would need to move a little nearer the central city if she wanted to link her future city to the Federation.

  She flew off westwards at last. She would not be able to go far for the time being. Her wing muscles were tired and she hedge-hopped.

  They returned to the main hall of Guayei-Tyolot. Since 103,683rd had tried to enquire about the termites of the east, the ants there had avoided her as if she were infected with alternaria. She was completely absorbed in her mission and did not falter.

  Around her, the Belokanians were taking part in trophallaxis with the Guayeityolotians, getting them to taste the new agaric harvest and savouring honeydew extracted from wild caterpillars in return.

  After ranging far and wide, the conversation turned to the lizard hunt. The Guayeityolotians told them that three lizards had recently been spotted terrorizing the greenfly herds of Zoubi-zoubi-kan. They had destroyed two herds of a thousand beasts and all the accompanying shepherdesses.

  There had been panic for a time. The shepherdesses had only moved their cattle about in the protected passages dug into the f
lesh of branches. But thanks to the acid artillery, they had managed to repulse the three dragons. Two had gone a long way away. The third had been wounded and had settled on a stone fifty thousand heads away. The Zoubizoubikanian legions had already cut off its tail. They had to seize the opportunity and finish it off before it recovered its strength.

  Is it true that lizards' tails grow again? asked one explorer. They replied that it was.

  The tail that grows again isn't the same, though. As Mother says, you never get back exactly what you've lost. There are no vertebrae in the second tail, so it's much softer.

  A Guayeityolotian supplied more information. Lizards were very sensitive to changes in the weather, far more so than ants. If they had stored up a lot of solar energy, they had incredibly quick reactions. When they were cold, on the other hand, all their movements slowed down. They would need to plan the next day's offensive on the basis of this. Ideally, they should charge the lizard at dawn. It would have cooled down during the night and would be lethargic.

  But we'll have cooled down, too! remarked one Belokanian pertinently.

  Not if we use the dwarves' techniques for resisting the cold, retorted a huntress. We'll stuff ourselves with sugar and alcohol for energy and paint our shells with slime to stop the calories escaping too quickly from our bodies.

  103,683rd listened to these words with a distracted antenna. She was thinking about the mystery of the termite hill and the unexplained disappearances related to her by the old warrior.

  The first Guayeityolotian, the one who had shown her the trophies but refused to talk about the termites, came up to her again.

  Have you talked to 4,000th?

  103,683rd acquiesced.

  Don't take any notice of what she said, then. You might just as well have been talking to a corpse. She got stung by an ichneumon wasp a few days ago.

  An ichneumon wasp! 103,683rd shuddered in horror. The ichneumon wasp had a long proboscis with which it made holes in ants' nests in the night. When it came across a warm body, it pierced it and laid its eggs inside.

  It was the ant larvae's worst nightmare: a syringe shot out of the ceiling and felt about for soft flesh into which to empty its young. These then grew quietly inside the host organism before changing into voracious larvae which gnawed away at the living animal from the inside.

  That night, 103,683rd inevitably dreamt about a terrible trunk which pursued her to inject its carnivorous children into her.

  The entry code had not changed. Nicolas still had his keys and only had to break the seals that the police had put on the door to get inside the flat. Nothing had been touched since the firemen's disappearance. Even the cellar door was still wide open.

  He did not have a flashlight so he calmly got down to the job of making a torch. He managed to break off a table leg, fixed a tightly packed crown of crumpled paper to it and set fire to it. The wood quickly caught light and burnt with a small, even flame that would last and withstand draughts.

  He immediately vanished down the spiral staircase with the torch in one hand and his penknife in the other. Resolute, his jaws clenched, he felt he was the stuff of heroes.

  Down and round he went, endlessly down and round. It seemed to have been going on for hours and he was hungry and thirsty but the will to succeed drove him on.

  He got worked up and went even faster, then started to yell out loud, sometimes calling his father and mother and sometimes letting out spirited war-cries. His tread had become extraordinarily sure, and he flew from step to step without any conscious control.

  Suddenly,' he came to a door. He pushed it open. Two tribes of rats were fighting but they fled from the apparition of the screaming child with his halo of flames.

  The oldest rats were worried. For some time now, the 'big ones' visits had become more frequent. What did it mean? They only hoped this one would not go and set fire to the dens of the pregnant females.

  Nicolas continued his descent. He had been going so fast he hadn't seen the rats. There were more stairs and more strange inscriptions, which he certainly would not read this time. Suddenly he heard a flapping noise and felt a touch. A bat was clinging on to his hair. He was terrified and tried to get away from it but it seemed to have soldered itself to his head. He tried to repel it with his torch but only succeeded in singeing his own hair. He screamed and broke into a run again but the bat stayed perched on his head like a hat and only flew away after sucking a little of his blood.

  Nicolas no longer felt tired. Breathing noisily and with his heart and temples beating fit to burst, he suddenly bumped into a wall. He fell down but picked himself up again straight away with his torch intact. He moved the flame about in front of him.

  It really was a wall. Better still, he recognized the plates of concrete and steel his father had carted down. And the cement pointing was still fresh.

  'Mum, Dad, answer if you're there!'

  But only the echo answered. Yet he must be close to his goal. The wall must pivot because that was what happened in films when there was no door.

  What was behind the wall, then? Nicolas at last found an inscription which read:

  How do you make four equilateral triangles out of six matches?

  And just below it there was a small keypad with letters rather than figures, twenty-six letters you had to use to type the answer to the question.

  'You have to think differently,' he said out loud. He was amazed because the sentence had come to him of its own accord. He thought for a long time without daring to touch the keypad. Then he was filled with a strange silence, a vast silence which emptied him of all thought but which inexplicably guided him to type a succession of seven letters.

  He heard the soft hum of a mechanism and the wall swung round. Nicolas went forward, excited and ready for anything, but soon after he had passed through, the wall moved back into place, causing a draught which blew out the remaining stump of torch.

  Plunged into total darkness, his mind confused, Nicolas retraced his footsteps. There were no coded keys on this side of the wall, though. It was impossible to go back. He tore at the concrete and steel plates but his father had made a good job of it. He wasn't a locksmith for nothing.

  cleanliness: What could he cleaner than a fly? It is forever washing itself not out of duty hut out of necessity. If its antennae and eye facets are not all impeccably clean, it will never be able to detect food from a distance or see the hand about to squash it. For insects, cleanliness is a major factor in survival.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  The next day, the front-page headlines of the popular press read: 'The dreaded cellar of Fontainebleau strikes again. Latest disappearance: the only son of the Wells family. What are the police doing?'

  The spider glanced down from the top of his fern. It was very high. He exuded a drop of liquid silk, stuck it to the leaf, went to the end of the branch and jumped into space. He took some time to fall. The line stretched and stretched, then dried, hardened and broke his fall just before he touched down. He had nearly been squashed like a ripe berry. Many of his sisters had already been smashed to pieces because a sudden cold spell had made the silk harden more slowly.

  The spider wriggled his eight legs until he swung like a pendulum, then stretched out and made fast to a leaf. This would be the second mooring point of his web and he stuck the end of his line to it. You cannot get far with a taut rope, though. He spotted a trunk to the left and ran over to it. A few more branches, a few more leaps and his support lines were in place. They would take the strain of the winds and the weight of prey. The whole thing formed an octagon.

  Spiders' silk is made of a fibrous protein, fibroin, which is strong and waterproof. When certain spiders have had enough to eat, they can produce seven hundred metres of silk two microns in diameter, which is proportionally as strong as nylon and three times as elastic.

  To cap it all, they have seven glands, each producing a different kind of thread: a silk for
the web support lines; a silk for the safety rope; a silk for the lines at the heart of the web; a sticky-coated silk for a quick grip; a silk to protect the eggs; a silk to build shelters; and a silk to wrap up prey.

  The silk is actually the fibrous extension of spider hormones just as pheromones are the volatile extensions of ant hormones.

  The spider manufactured a safety rope and made fast to it. He would now be able to drop down at the first sign of danger and escape without wasting any effort. This had already saved his life many times.

  He then intertwined four lines at the centre of his octagon. His gestures had not changed in a hundred million years. His construction was beginning to look like something. Today, he had decided to make a web out of dry silk. The sticky-coated silks were far more effective but they were too fragile. All the dust and bits of dead leaves got caught in them. Dry silk had less snaring power but at least it would last until nightfall.

  Once the spider had got the ridge beams in place, he added a dozen spokes and put the finishing touches to his work with the central spiral. That was the part he liked best. He fastened his dry thread to a branch and jumped from spoke to spoke, always in the direction of the Earth s rotation, taking as long as possible to get to the heart of the web.

  He did it in his own special way. Just as no two human beings have the same fingerprints, no two spiders' webs on Earth are alike.

  It was important to keep the mesh taut. Once he had reached the centre, he looked over his scaffolding of threads to gauge its strength. Then he paced up and down each spoke and shook it with his eight legs. It held.

  Most of the spiders in the region built webs on the plan 75/12. Seventy-five turns of the filling-in spiral to twelve spokes. He preferred the fine lace of 95/10.

  It might be more conspicuous, but it was stronger. And as he used dry silk, he could not afford to skimp on the quantity. Otherwise insects would only pay passing visits.