However, the long, exacting task had drained him of energy and he needed food urgently. It was a vicious circle. He was starving because he had built a web but it was the web that would enable him to eat.
He hid under a leaf and waited with his twenty-four claws resting on the main beams. Without even having recourse to one of his eight eyes, he could sense the surrounding space and feel in his legs the slightest movements of air thanks to the web, which reacted with the sensitivity of a microphone membrane.
The minute vibration he could feel was a bee two hundred heads away. It was describing figures of eight to show the bees in its hive the way to a field of flowers.
That other faint quivering must be a dragonfly. They were delicious. But this one was not flying in the right direction to become his lunch.
He felt something heavy land in his web. It was a spider hoping to lay claim to someone else's work. He quickly chased the thief away before any prey turned up.
Speaking of which, he felt a fly arriving from the east in his left hind leg. She did not seem to be flying very quickly. If she did not change course, it looked as if she would fall right into his trap.
Splat! A hit.
It was a winged ant.
The spider - who had no name, for solitary creatures do not need to recognize others of their kind - waited calmly. When he was younger, he used to get carried away with enthusiasm and lost quite a few of his prey that way. He thought that any insect caught in his web was condemned. In reality, only 50 per cent died on contact. The time factor was crucial.
You just had to wait and the terrified game would enmesh itself without any assistance. Such was the first precept of spider philosophy: There is no better combat technique than to wait for your enemy to destroy himself
After a few minutes, he went to take a closer look at his catch. It was a queen, a russet queen from the western empire, Bel-o-kan.
He had already heard of the ultra-sophisticated empire. Its millions of inhabitants had apparently become so 'interdependent' that they could no longer feed themselves unaided. It was a sorry state of affairs and hardly constituted progress!
One of their queens . . . He was holding in his claws a piece of the invaders' future. He had seen his own mother chased by a horde of red weaver ants and he did not like them.
He eyed his prey, who was still struggling. The stupid insects, would they never understand that panic was their worst enemy? The more the winged ant tried to escape, the more entangled it became in the silk, damaging the web and annoying the spider into the bargain.
56th’s anger gave way to despondency. She could now hardly move. With her body already swathed in silk, every movement added a layer to her strait-jacket. She had never dreamt that she would come to such a stupid end after overcoming so many difficulties.
She was born in a white cocoon and she would die in one too.
The spider came even nearer, checking the damaged lines on the way, and 56th had a close-up view of a magnificent orange and black animal with a head crowned with eight green eyes. She had already eaten ones like it. Now it was her turn to be lunch and the spider was spitting silk at her.
You can never bundle them up too much, said the spider to himself before displaying two alarming poison hooks. But spiders do not actually kill, not right away. They like their meat warm, so rather than finishing their prey off, they stun it with sedative venom and only wake it to take a little nibble. That way, they have nice fresh meat to eat whenever they like, safe in its silk wrapping. Sometimes it lasts them a week.
56th had heard of the custom. She shivered. It was a fate worse than death. To have all her limbs amputated one by one . . . Every time you woke up, something got ripped off and then you were put to sleep again. There was a little less of you each time, until your vital organs were finally removed and you were at last liberated by the gift of sleep.
It was better to die by her own hand. Trying not to see the horrible hooks so close to her, she set about slowing down her heartbeats.
At that very moment, a mayfly struck the web with such force that he was immediately bound up tight in the silk. He had only been born a few minutes earlier and would die of old age in a few hours' time. The mayfly's life was a short one. He had to act quickly. There was not a fraction of a second to lose. How would you spend your life if you knew that you were born in the morning only to die in the evening?
He had no sooner emerged from his two years' larval life than he set out to look for a female with reproduction on his mind. It was a vain search for immortality through his offspring. He would spend his only day on the quest, with no thought of eating or resting or being particular.
His main predator was time and every second was an adversary. Compared with time itself, the terrible spider was only a delaying factor, not a full-blown enemy.
He could feel old age coming on apace. In a few hours' time, he would be senile. He was done for and had been born for nothing. It was a bitter blow.
He struggled to get free. The trouble with spiders' webs was that if you moved, you had had it but if you did not move, you were done for anyway.
The spider came up to him and gave a few extra turns of the cord. These two fine kills would supply him with all the protein he needed to make a second web the next day. But just as he was about to put his victim to sleep again, he detected a different vibration, this time an intelligent one. Tap tap taptaptap tap tap tap-tap. It was a female. She came towards him along a thread on which she tapped out a signal:
I’m yours. I haven't come to steal your food.
Her way of vibrating was the most erotic thing the male had ever felt. Tap tap taptaptap. Ah, he could no longer resist her charms and ran to his beloved (a mere slip of a thing only four moults old, whereas he was already twelve). She was three times as big as he but then he liked his females big. He pointed to the two prey from which they would later draw fresh strength.
Then they took up the copulating position, no simple matter where spiders are concerned. The male had no penis but a kind of double genital cannon. He hurriedly built a target, a small-scale web, which he showered with gametes, then moistened one of his legs in it and stuffed it into the female's receptacle. He was very excited and did it several times over. The young beauty for her part was so close to swooning that she suddenly could not stop herself grabbing hold of the male's head and biting it off.
After that, it would have been stupid not to eat him all. Once she had finished she was still hungry. She threw herself on the mayfly and shortened his life still more. Then she turned towards the ant queen, who, seeing it was injection time again, panicked and squirmed.
It really was 56th s lucky day, for a new character now burst noisily onto the scene from the depths of the horizon and changed the situation. It was another of the creepy crawlies from the south who had recently moved up north. This time it was a very big one, a rhinoceros beetle. It struck the heart of the web, stretched it like glue and broke it. 95/10 webs are strong but only up to a point. The fine silk doily was torn to shreds, and tattered remnants of it floated in the air.
The female spider had already jumped, clinging to her safety rope. Freed from her white strait-jacket, the ant queen dragged herself along on the ground discreetly, unable to take off.
But the spiders thoughts were elsewhere. She climbed up a branch to build a silken nursery in which to lay her eggs. When her dozens of offspring hatched, their first thought would be to eat their mother. Spiders were like that. They did not know how to say thank you.
'Bilsheim!'
He hastily held the receiver away from his ear as if it had bitten him. It was his boss, Solange Doumeng. 'Hello?'
'Why haven't you carried out my orders? What are you playing at? Are you waiting for the whole city to disappear into this cellar? I know you, Bilsheim. The only thing you ever want to do is take it easy. I won't have layabouts. I insist you settle this affair within forty-eight hours.'
'But. . .'
&nbs
p; 'There's no but about it. Your guys have been given my instructions. All you have to do now is go down with them tomorrow morning. The equipment will be there. Get off your backside, for God's sake!'
His hands began to tremble. He was not a free man. He had to obey if he wanted to keep his job and avoid becoming a social outcast. At that point in time, the only way he could conceive of freedom was as a tramp and he was not quite ready for that. An ulcer formed on the battlefield of his stomach. In the end, his respect for order overcame his taste for freedom and he complied.
The troop of huntresses were watching the lizard from behind a rock. He was a good sixty heads (eighteen centimetres) long. His tough, greenish-yellow armour with black markings was both frightening and disgusting. 103,683rd had the impression that the markings were splashes of its victims' blood.
As expected, the animal was sluggish with cold. He was walking in slow motion and seemed to hesitate before putting his foot down anywhere.
Just as the sun was about to disappear, a pheromone went out.
Kill the Beast!
The lizard saw an army of aggressive little black creatures sweeping down on him. He reared up slowly, opened a pink mouth, lashed the nearest ants with a quick tongue and swallowed them down. Then he gave a little burp and made off in a flash.
Breathless and dumbfounded, the huntresses were left about thirty fewer in number. For someone anaesthetized by the cold, the lizard was not exactly defenceless.
103,683rd, although she could never be suspected of cowardice, was one of the first to say it was suicide to attack such an animal. He was an impregnable stronghold. His skin was proof against mandibles or acid and his size and speed, even at a low temperature, gave him an unassailable superiority.
However, the ants did not give up. Like a pack of tiny wolves, they threw themselves on the trail of the monster. They galloped under the ferns throwing off menacing pheromones that smelt of death. For the time being, this only frightened the slugs, but it helped the ants to feel terrible and invulnerable. They caught up with the lizard a few thousand heads further on, clinging to the bark of a spruce digesting his breakfast.
They had to act fast. The longer they waited, the more energy he would have accumulated. If he was quick when it was cold, he would be invincible when stuffed full of solar calories. They put their antennae together to confer and decided on the tactics to adopt in their attack.
Some warriors dropped onto the animal's head from a branch. They tried to blind him by nibbling his eyelids and started to bore into his nostrils. But this first commando group failed. The irritated lizard brushed his face with his leg and swallowed the stragglers.
A second wave of assailants came running up. When they were almost within range of his tongue, they made a wide detour before swooping brutally on the stump of his tail. As Mother said: Each enemy has his weak point. Find it and concentrate your attacks on it.
They re-opened the scar by burning it with acid and dived inside the lizard, invading his bowels. He rolled on his back, pedalling his hind legs in the air and striking his stomach with his forelegs. A thousand ulcers were gnawing at him.
Then another group at last got a foothold in his nostrils, which were immediately enlarged and hollowed out with jets of boiling acid.
Further up his face, they were attacking his eyes. They burst the soft marbles but the eye sockets turned out to be blind alleys. The holes in the optic nerves were too narrow to enter to reach the brain so they joined forces with the teams already deep inside the nostrils.
The lizard writhed and stuck its leg in its mouth to try and squash the ants piercing its throat but it was too late.
In a corner of its lungs, 4,000th met up with her young colleague, 103,683rd. It was pitch-black and they could see nothing because asexual ants have no infrared simple eyes. They joined the ends of their antennae together.
Our sisters are busy. Let's take advantage of it to leave for the termite hill of the east. They'll think we've been killed in combat.
They left the same way they had come in, through the caudal stump, which was now bleeding profusely.
The next day, the lizard would be cut up into thousands of edible strips. Some would be covered in sand and carted off to Zoubi-zoubi-kan. Others would even reach Bel-o-kan and a whole new epic tale would be made up to describe the hunt. The ant civilization needed to take comfort from its strength. Conquering lizards was something it found particularly reassuring.
hybridization: It would be wrong to suppose that the nests are impenetrable to foreigners. Each insect admittedly bears the scent flag of its city but that does not mean that it is 'xenophobic' in the human sense of the word.
If, for example, you mix a hundred Formica rufa ants and a hundred Lasius niger ants, including a fertile queen of each species, in a vivarium full of earth, you notice that after a few nonfatal skirmishes and lengthy antenna discussions, the two species start to build the anthill together. Some corridors are adapted to the size of the russet ants, others to the size of the black ants, but they intersect and mingle, proving that neither species is dominant and neither tries to shut the other up in a closed quarter forming a ghetto within the city.
Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
The path leading to the eastern territories had not yet been cleared. The wars against the termites had prevented all pacification of the region.
4,000th and 103,683rd trotted along a trail that had been the scene of a good many skirmishes. There were magnificent, poisonous butterflies flying overhead, which they could not help but find disturbing.
Further on, 103,683rd felt something crawling under her right leg. She eventually discovered that it was mites, tiny creatures equipped with points and antennae, hairs and hooks, which migrate in herds in search of nice dusty nooks. 103,683rd was amused at the sight. To think there were beings as small as mites and as big as ants on the same planet.
4,000th stopped in front of a flower. The pain was suddenly too much. Within her old body, which had been through a lot that day, the young ichneumon wasp larvae had at last woken up. They were probably having lunch, gaily tucking in to the poor ant s internal organs.
To help her, 103,683rd brought up a few molecules of lomechusa honeydew from the bottom of her social crop. After the fight in the underground passages of Bel-o-kan, she had stored a minute amount of it in case she needed an analgesic. She had handled it very carefully and had not been contaminated by the delicious poison.
4,000th s pain was relieved as soon as she ingested the liqueur but she wanted more. 103,683rd tried to reason with her but 4,000th was not to be deterred. She was ready to fight her friend for the precious drug and was about to leap to the attack when she slid into a kind of sandy crater. A lion-ant trap!
Lion ants, or to be more precise their larvae, have shovel-shaped heads, with which they dig their notorious craters. All they have to do then is bury themselves and wait for passers-by.
4,000th realized a little too late what was happening to her. Generally speaking, ants are light enough to get out of such a spot, but before she could even begin her climb, two long mandibles bristling with spikes suddenly appeared from the bottom of the bowl and sprayed her with sand.
Help!
She forgot the suffering caused by her uninvited guests and her craving for the lomechusa liqueur. She was afraid and did not want to die that way.
She struggled with all her might but, like spiders' webs, lion-ant traps are designed to work on their victims' panic. The more 4,000th flailed about to climb out of the crater, the more its sides collapsed and dragged her down to the bottom, where the lion ant was still spraying her with fine sand.
103,683rd had quickly grasped that if she leant over to hold out a helping leg, she would be in danger of falling in as well. She went away to look for a blade of grass that would be sufficiently long and strong.
The old ant grew tired of waiting and let out a scent cry. She pedalled harder than ev
er in the almost liquid sand and went down even faster. She was now no more than five heads from the shears. Seen close up, they were absolutely terrifying. Each mandible was notched with hundreds of sharp little teeth, themselves separated by long, curved pikes. The tip resembled an awl which could pierce any ant shell without too much difficulty.
103,683rd at last reappeared at the edge of the bowl and held out a daisy to her companion. The old ant quickly reached up to grasp the stem but the Hon ant had no intention of relinquishing his prey. He frantically showered the two ants with sand so that they could no longer see or hear anything. Then he began to throw pebbles, which made an ugly sound as they bounced off their chitin. Half buried, 4,000th continued to slide.
103,683rd gripped the stem in her mandibles and braced herself for a jolt which did not come. Just as she was about to give up, a leg shot out of the sand. 4,000th was safe. At last she jumped out of the death-trap.
Down below, the greedy claws snapped with rage and disappointment. The Hon ant needed protein for his metamorphosis into an adult. How long would he have to wait before another prey slid down to him?
4,000th and 103,683rd washed and indulged over and over again in trophallaxis. This time, lomechusa honeydew was not on the menu.
'Good morning, Bilsheim.' She held out a limp hand.
'Yes, I know you're surprised to see me here but this case is dragging on too long. It's become too serious now. The chief's already taking a personal interest in it. I've decided to lend a hand before the minister steps in as well. Cheer up, Bilsheim, I'm only kidding. Where's your sense of humour?'
The old policeman was lost for words. This had been going on for fifteen years. Saying 'of course' to Solange Doumeng had never worked and she had soured considerably with age. He glared at her but her eyes were hidden under a lock of the hair she dyed a fashionable red. It did not make her any less unattractive.
'Why did you come? Do you want to go down into the cellar?' asked the policeman.
Empire of the Ants Page 18
