Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  'That was Edmonds idea. He put a pair of big, aggressive Rattus norvegicus in a crevice in the rock with a good supply of food. He knew it was a time bomb. Well-fed rats multiply at an exponential rate. They produce six babies a month, which are themselves ready to reproduce after two weeks. To protect himself from them, he used a spray containing a pheromone of aggression that rats can't stand.'

  'So it was the rats which killed Ouarzazate?' asked Augusta.

  'I'm afraid so. Edmond had not foreseen that the ones that passed to the other side of the "pyramid wall" would become even more ferocious.'

  'One of our friends had a phobia about rats anyway and really flipped when a big one jumped up at his face and bit a piece of his nose off. He went straight back up before the pyramid wall had even had time to swing back. Did you hear what happened to him after he got back up?' asked a policeman.

  'I heard he'd gone mad and been shut up in an asylum,' replied

  Augusta, 'but it was only hearsay'

  She went to pick up her glass of water but noticed there were lots of ants on the table. She gave a cry and instinctively brushed them off with the back of her hand. Jonathan sprang forward and grabbed hold of her wrist, his hard expression contrasting sharply with the group's previous serenity. His old nervous twitch, which had seemed cured, had come back.

  'Don't ever ... do that. . . again!'

  Alone in her chamber, Belo-kiu-kiuni was absent-mindedly eating her latest batch of eggs. They had turned out to be her favourite food.

  She knew that this so-called 801st was not just an ambassadress of the new city. 56th, or rather Queen Chli-pou-ni, since that was what she chose to call herself, had sent her to carry on with the investigation.

  She did not need to worry, her rock-scented warriors would deal with her without difficulty. The lame ant in particular was an artist when it came to taking away the burden of life.

  However, it was the fourth time Chli-pou-ni had sent her an over-inquisitive ambassadress. The first had been killed before even finding the lomechusa's room. The second and third had succumbed to the poisonous beetle's hallucinogenic secretions.

  As for this 801st, it appeared that her interview with Mother was scarcely over before she went down there. They really were in more and more of a hurry to die, but they also got further and further into the city each time. Supposing one of them managed to find the passage in spite of everything? Supposing she discovered the secret? Supposing she spread a scent about it?

  The Tribe would not understand. The anti-stress warriors would have little chance to suppress the information in time. How would her daughters react?

  A rock-scented warrior rushed in.

  The spy has managed to overcome the lomechusa beetle! She’s downstairs.

  It had only been a question of time.

  ★ ★

  666 is the name of the beast (the Apocalypse according to St John). But who will be the beast for whom?

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  Jonathan let go of his grandmother's wrist and Daniel created a diversion before any awkwardness could set in.

  'How about the laboratory on the way in? What's that for?'

  'It's the Rosetta Stone. Our efforts have only one purpose: to communicate with them.'

  'Who's them?'

  'Them: the ants. Follow me.'

  They left the lounge for the laboratory. Jonathan, visibly very much at ease in his role as Edmonds successor, picked up a test-tube full of ants from the bench and raised it to eye-level.

  'Look, they're beings, complete beings, not just unimportant little insects. That's something my uncle understood right away. Ants form the second great civilization on Earth. Edmond was a kind of Christopher Columbus, who discovered a new continent between our toes. He was the first to understand that before looking for extraterrestrials in the depths of space, we ought to begin by contacting the intrater res trials.'

  No-one spoke. Augusta was remembering. A few days previously, she had been walking in the Forest of Fontainebleau when she had suddenly felt something crunch under her feet. She had trodden on a group of ants. She bent down to look at them. They were all dead but she was puzzled to see that they were lined up to form an arrow with an inverted head.

  Jonathan put the test-tube down again and carried on with what he had been saying:

  'When he came back from Africa, Edmond found this building, its underground passage and the temple. It was the ideal place for his laboratory. The first stage in his research consisted of deciphering the pheromones the ants used to talk to one another. This machine is a mass spectrometer. As its name suggests, it produces a spectrum which shows the atomic composition of any substance. I've read my uncle's notes. To begin with, he put his experimental ants under a glass bell-jar connected by a tube to the mass spectrometer. He put an ant near a piece of apple and when it met another ant, it inevitably told it, "There's some apple over there." That was the initial hypothesis, at any rate. He sucked up the pheromones emitted, decoded them and arrived at a chemical formula. For example, "There's apple to the north," was expressed as: "four-methyl two-methylpyrrole carboxylate'. The quantities involved were minute, in the order of two or three picograms (10"12gm) per sentence. But it was enough. He now knew how to say "apple" and "to the north". He went on experimenting with a multitude of objects, foods and situations. This provided him with a French-Ant dictionary. After he had understood the names of only a hundred or so fruits, thirty flowers and a dozen directions, he learnt the pheromones of alarm, pleasure, suggestion and description. He even came across males and females who taught him how to express the "abstract emotions" of the seventh antenna segment. However, being able to "listen" to them was not enough for him. Now he wanted to talk to them and establish a real dialogue.'

  'Amazing!' murmured Daniel Rosenfeld.

  'He began by making each chemical formula correspond to a sound made up of a series of syllables. Four-methyl two-methylpyrrole carboxylate, for example, would be pronounced 4MT2MTPCX, then foremtitoemtipisiex. Finally he stored in the computer's memory: foremtitoemtipi equals apple and siex equals to the north. The computer translates both ways. When it detects "siex", it translates it in writing as "to the north". And when "to the north" is typed, it transforms it into "siex", which triggers the emission of carboxylate by the emitting apparatus.'

  'Emitting apparatus?'

  'Yes, this machine here.'

  He showed him a kind of library made up of thousands of small phials, each ending in a tube connected to an electric pump.

  'The atoms in each phial are sucked up by the pump and passed into this apparatus, which sorts them and measures them in the exact quantities indicated by the computer dictionary.'

  'Extraordinary,' Daniel Rosenfeld went on, 'quite extraordinary. Did he really manage to talk to them?'

  'Hmm. I think the best thing I can do now is read his notes from the Encyclopedia!

  extracts of conversations: Extract of the first conversation with a Formica rufa warrior.

  human being: Are you receiving me? ant: crrrrrrrr.

  human being: Are you receiving me? ant: crrrrrrrrcrrrrrrrrrrrr. Help.

  (N.B. Several adjustments were necessary. The signal was far too strong and was suffocating the ant. The microphone must be set at 1 and the receiver turned up to 10 to avoid the loss of a single molecule.)

  human being: Are you receiving me? ant: Bougu.

  human being: Are you receiving me? ant: Zgugnu. Help. I’m shut in.

  Extract of the third conversation.

  (N.B. The vocabulary was increased to eighty words this time. The signal was still too strong and again had to be turned down. It has to be set almost at zero.)

  ant: What?

  human being: What did you say? ant: I can't understand a thing. Help! human being: Let's talk more slowly.

  ant: Your emissions are too strong. My antennae are saturated.

  Help! I'm shut in.

 
; human being: There, is that better?

  ant: No, can't you talk properly?

  human being: Er . . .

  ant: Who are you?

  human being: I'm a big animal. My name's EDMOND. I'm a

  HU-MAN.

  ant: What did you say? I can't understand a thing. Help! Help! Pm shut in.

  (N.B. The ant died five seconds later. Were the signals still too toxic or did it die of fright?)

  Jonathan stopped reading.

  'As you can see, it isn't easy to talk to them. Accumulating vocabulary isn't enough. Besides, the ant language does not work like ours. It isn't only the conversational signals as such that are perceived but the signals from the eleven other antenna segments as well. They convey the individual's identity, preoccupations and psyche, a sort of global state of mind necessary for good interpersonal understanding. That's why Edmond had to give up. Let me read you his notes.'

  how stupid of me: How stupid of me!

  Even if extraterrestrials existed, we would not be able to understand them. We would have different frames of reference. If we arrived with outstretched arms, they might see it as a threatening gesture.

  We do not even understand the Japanese with their ritual suicide or the Indians with their castes. We cannot even understand other human beings. How can I have presumed to understand ants!

  801st only had a stump of an abdomen left. Even if she had been able to kill the lomechusa beetle in time, her fight with the rock-scented warriors in the mushroom beds had shortened her considerably. It could not be helped, or rather it was a big help: she was lighter without an abdomen.

  She went down the broad passage in the granite. How had ant mandibles been able to excavate that tunnel?

  Down below, she discovered the room full of food that Chli-pou-ni had told her about. She had only gone a few steps into the room when she found another exit. She followed it and soon came to a city, an entire rock-scented city. A city under the city.

  'So he failed?'

  'He brooded over it for a long time. He thought there was no way out and that he'd been blinded by ethnocentricity. Then a spot of trouble opened his eyes. It was his usual antisocial behaviour that sparked it off.'

  'What happened?'

  'If you recall, Professor, you told me before that he'd worked for a company called Sweetmilk Corporation and that he'd had a run-in with his colleagues.'

  'Yes, that's right.'

  'One of his bosses had gone through his desk and that boss was none other than Marc Leduc, the brother of Professor Laurent Leduc.'

  'The entomologist?'

  'In person.'

  'It's incredible. He came to see me pretending to be a friend of Edmonds. He went down.' 'Into the cellar?'

  'Yes, but don't worry, he didn't get far. He couldn't get through the pyramid wall so he came back up again.'

  'Mmm, he came to see Nicolas, too, to try and get his hands on the Encyclopedia. OK. So Marc Leduc had noticed that Edmond was working hard on some sketches of machines (in actual fact the first sketches of the Rosetta Stone). He managed to open the cupboard in Edmonds office and came across a folder containing the Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge. In it, he found all the plans for the first machine for communicating with ants. When he realized what the apparatus was for (and it was sufficiently annotated for him to understand), he talked to his brother about it. Laurent Leduc was obviously very interested and immediately asked him to steal the documents. But Edmond had noticed that someone had been through his things and had let four ichneumon wasps loose in his drawer to protect them from another visit. As soon as Marc Leduc returned to the attack, he got stung by the insects, which have the nasty habit of laying their ravenous larvae in the bodies of those they sting. Edmond spotted the sting marks the next day and publicly unmasked the culprit. The rest you know. He was the one they got rid of.' 'What became of the Leduc brothers?'

  'Marc Leduc got what he deserved. The ichneumon wasp larvae ate away at him from the inside. It took a very long time, several years apparently. As the larvae could not get out of his huge body to turn into wasps, they dug in all directions to find a way out. In the end, the pain became so unbearable he threw himself under a tube train. I read about it by chance in the newspapers.'

  'How about Laurent Leduc?'

  'He did his utmost to find the machine.'

  'You were saying it made Edmond want to have another go. How was it all connected to his research?'

  'Laurent Leduc subsequently contacted Edmond directly. He admitted he knew about his machine for "talking to ants". He said he was interested and wanted to work with him. Edmond wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea, he was at a standstill anyway, and he wondered if it wouldn't be a good thing to get some outside help. As the Bible says, there comes a time when you can't go on alone. Edmond was prepared to guide Leduc to his sanctuary but he wanted to know him better first. They talked at length. When Laurent began to speak highly of the ants' order and discipline, emphasizing the fact that talking to them would surely allow man to imitate them, Edmond saw red. He lost his temper and told him never to set foot in his house again.'

  'I'm not surprised,' sighed Daniel. 'Leduc belongs to a clique of ethologists, the worst of the German school, who want to change the human race by copying some aspects of animal behaviour ... a sense of territory, the discipline of the anthills. People are always fantasizing about it.'

  'It gave Edmond a pretext for getting down to work. He was going to talk to ants from a political point of view He thought they lived in an anarchical system and wanted to ask them to confirm it.'

  'Of course!' murmured Bilsheim.

  'It was becoming a man-sized challenge. My uncle thought a lot longer and decided that the best way to communicate would be to build a "robot ant".'

  Jonathan waved some sketch-covered sheets.

  'Here are the plans for the robot. Edmond christened it "Dr Livingstone". Its made of plastic. You can imagine how fiddly it was to make. Its a little masterpiece. All the joints are reproduced and moved by microscopic electric motors connected to a battery in the abdomen and the antennae have eleven segments capable of emitting eleven different pheromones simultaneously. The only difference between Dr Livingstone and a real ant is that he's connected to eleven pipes, each as thick as a hair, which join up to make a kind of umbilical cord as thick as a piece of string.'

  'Amazing. Simply amazing,' enthused Jason.

  'Where is Dr Livingstone, by the way?' asked Augusta.

  She was being followed by rock-scented warriors. As she ran, 801st suddenly spotted a very broad gallery and rushed down it. She thus came to an enormous room, at the centre of which stood a funny-looking ant of above average size.

  801st went up to him cautiously. The scents of the strange, solitary ant were only half true. His eyes did not shine and his skin seemed to be covered in black dye. The young Chlipoukanian tried to work it out. How was it possible to be so little like an ant?

  The soldiers had already flushed her out, though. The ant with the limp came forward, alone, for a duel. She leapt at her antennae and started to bite them and they both rolled on the ground.

  801st remembered Mother's advice: See where your enemy likes to strike you. It's often his own weak point. When she seized the lame ant's antennae, her attacker writhed furiously. They must have been very sensitive. 801st sliced them off and managed to get away, but now she had a pack of over fifty killers at her heels.

  'If you want to know where Dr Livingstone is, follow the wires leading from the mass spectrometer.'

  They could see a kind of transparent tube that ran along the bench as far as the wall, rose to the ceiling and finally disappeared inside a kind of big wooden chest hanging just above the organ in the centre of the church. The chest was probably full of earth and the new arrivals craned their necks to get a better look at it.

  'But you said there was solid rock above our heads,' remarked Augusta.

  'Yes, but I also point
ed out there's a ventilation shaft we no longer use.'

  'And if we no longer use it,' went on Inspector Galin, 'it isn't because we've blocked it up.' 'But if it wasn't you . . .' 'It must have been them.' 'The ants?'

  'Precisely. A gigantic russet ant city has been built above the slab of rock. You know, the insects that build big domes of twigs in the forests.'

  'According to Edmond's calculations, there are over ten million of them.'

  'Ten million? They could kill us all!'

  'Don't panic, there's nothing to be afraid of. Firstly, because they talk to us and know us and also, because not all the ants in the city are aware of our existence.'

  As Jonathan said that, an ant fell out of the chest in the ceiling and landed on Lucie's forehead. She tried to catch it but 801st panicked and went and hid in her red hair, slid down her ear lobe, tumbled down the back of her neck, dived into her blouse, skirted her breasts and navel, galloped over the fine skin of her thighs, fell down to her ankle and, from there, plunged to the ground. She quickly found her bearings and made straight for one of the lateral air vents.

  'What's got into her?'

  'How should I know? She was attracted by the draught of cool air from the shaft, in any case. She won't have any trouble getting out.'

  'But she won't get back to her city that way, will she? She'll come out completely to the east of the Federation.'

  The spy has managed to get away. If this goes on, we'll have to attack the so-called sixty-fifth city.

  Some rock-scented soldiers had made their report with lowered antennae. After they had withdrawn, Belo-kiu-kiuni brooded for a while over the grave failure of her policy of secrecy, then wearily recalled how it had all begun.

  When she was very young, she too had been confronted with a terrifying event pointing to the existence of giant beings. It was just after she had swarmed. She had seen a black slab crush several fertile queens without even eating them. Later, after engendering her city, she had managed to organize a meeting on the subject, at which most of the queens, both mothers and daughters, were present.