Of Ants and Dinosaurs

by Cixin Liu

  Meanwhile, crack teams of ants led raids on the dinosaurs from all quarters. Their preferred tactic was to launch their assaults from deep inside, which terrified the dinosaur public. Dinosaurs took to wearing masks at all times, not daring to remove them even while they slept, since the minuscule ants could sidle in and out of their most private spaces like a nightmarish crew of malevolent interns.

  The ant world did not escape unscathed, however. Far from it. Ant civilisation took a severe beating from the dinosaurs. Almost every ant city was decimated, and the ants were forced to retreat underground. But they were not safe even there, for their subterranean bases were often unearthed by the dinosaurs and then destroyed. The dinosaurs made heavy use of chemical weapons and sowed a toxin that was harmless to dinosaurkind but deadly to ants everywhere. This not only killed innumerable ants but sharply constrained the scope of their activities. Individual ant colonies found it more and more tricky to maintain contact with other parts of the Formican Empire; because they lacked long-distance vehicles of their own, they had previously relied on dinosaur conveyances, but this option was no longer available. Communication became increasingly difficult, regions of the ant world became isolated, and the Formican Empire fragmented.

  This was not all. There were more serious consequences still. Because the dinosaur–ant alliance was the foundation stone upon which Cretaceous civilisation was built, the crumbling of that alliance had a pernicious effect on societal structures in both worlds. Social progress ground to a halt and there were clear signs of regression. The survival of Cretaceous civilisation hung in the balance.

  *

  Though both the ants and the dinosaurs gave their all to the global war effort, neither side was able to achieve absolute supremacy on the battlefield, and the fighting degenerated into a protracted war of attrition. Eventually, the high commands of both empires came to recognise the reality of the situation: they were prosecuting a war that could not be won, a war whose ultimate outcome would be the destruction of the great Cretaceous civilisation. In the fifth year of the conflict, the two belligerents began armistice negotiations, and pivotal to these was the historic meeting between the Emperor of the Saurian Empire and the Queen of the Formican Empire.

  The meeting was held in the ruins of Boulder City, on the former site of the imperial palace, where, five years earlier, the fateful summit that had triggered the war had taken place. All that now remained of that once colossal imperial seat were a jumble of shattered, fire-blackened walls. Through the cracks, the smoke-stained skeletons of other buildings were visible in the distance: the desecrated city was sinking back into the soil, its stonework colonised by thickets of lush green weeds and a lattice of creeping vines. The encroaching forest would soon swallow it up altogether.

  As the sun dipped in and out of the haze cast by a remote forest fire, dappled patterns of light and shadow flitted across the old palace walls. Urus peered at the ant queen by his feet. ‘I can’t quite make you out,’ he boomed, ‘but I have a feeling that you are not Queen Lassini.’

  ‘She is dead. We ants lead brief lives. I am Lassini, the second of her name,’ said the new queen of the Formican Empire. On this occasion, she had brought just 10,000 word-corps soldiers with her, and Urus had to stoop to read her response.

  ‘I think it’s time to put an end to this war,’ he said.

  ‘I agree,’ replied Lassini II.

  ‘If the war continues,’ Urus said, ‘you ants will return to scavenging meat from animal carcasses and dragging dead beetles back to your tiny lairs.’

  ‘If the war continues,’ responded Lassini II, ‘you dinosaurs will return to prowling hungrily through the forests and tearing apart your own kind for meat.’

  ‘Well then, does Your Majesty have a specific recommendation as to how we might bring an end to this war?’ Urus asked. ‘Perhaps we should begin with the reason we went to war in the first place. There are many who have forgotten the whys and wherefores – dinosaurs and ants alike.’

  ‘I recall it had to do with the appearance of God. Specifically: does God look like an ant or a dinosaur?’

  Urus cleared his throat. ‘I am happy to inform you, Queen Lassini, that for the last few years the Saurian Empire’s most erudite scholars have devoted themselves to this question. They have now come to a new conclusion, and it is this: God resembles neither an ant nor a dinosaur. Rather, God is formless, like a gust of wind, a ray of light or the air that swaddles this world. God is reflected in every grain of sand, every drop of water.’

  The Formican queen’s answer came quickly and unequivocally. ‘We ants do not possess such complicated minds as you dinosaurs,’ she said, ‘and that sort of profound philosophising is challenging for us. But I agree with this conclusion. My intuition tells me that God is indeed formless. And you should know that the ant world has forbidden idolatry.’

  ‘The Saurian Empire has also forbidden idolatry.’ Urus could hide his relief no longer. His face cracked into a wide, snaggle-toothed grin. ‘In that case, Your Majesty, may I conclude that ants and dinosaurs share the same God?’

  ‘If you wish, Your Majesty.’

  And so the First Dinosaur–Ant War came to a close. It was a war without victors. The dinosaur–ant alliance made a swift recovery. New cities began to appear atop the ruins of the old, and Cretaceous civilisation, after so long spent teetering on the brink of collapse, was reborn.

  8

  The Information Age

  Another millennium whizzed by. Cretaceous civilisation progressed through the Electric Age and the Atomic Age and into the Information Age.

  Dinosaur cities were now immeasurably vast, on a scale even larger than those of the Steam-Engine Age, with skyscrapers that towered 10,000 metres into the sky – or more. Standing on the roof of one of these buildings was like looking down from one of our high-altitude aircraft, putting you way above the clouds that seemed to hug the Earth below. When the cloud cover was heavy, dinosaurs on the perpetually sunny top floors would phone the doorman on the ground floor to check whether it was raining down there and if they’d need an umbrella for the journey home. Their umbrellas were voluminous, of course, like our big-top circus tents.

  Though the dinosaurs’ cars now ran on petrol, not steam, they were still the size of our multi-storey buildings and the ground still trembled beneath their wheels. Aeroplanes had replaced balloons and these were as bulky as our ocean liners, rolling across the sky like thunder and casting titanic shadows across the streets below. The dinosaurs even ventured into space. Their satellites and spaceships moved in geosynchronous orbit and were, naturally, also colossal – so colossal, in fact, that you could discern their shapes quite clearly from Earth.

  The global dinosaur population had increased tenfold and more since the Steam-Engine Age. Because they ate a lot and because everything they used was on a massive scale, dinosaurs consumed foodstuff and materials in astronomical quantities. It required untold numbers of farms and factories to meet these needs. The factories were powered by hulking great nuclear-powered machines and the skies above them were perpetually obscured by dense smoke. Keeping dinosaur society functioning efficiently was an extremely complex operation and the circulation of energy resources, raw materials and finance had to be coordinated by computers. A sophisticated computer network linked every part of the dinosaur world, and the computers involved were necessarily enormous too. Each keyboard key was the size of one of our computer screens, and their screens were as wide as our walls.

  The ant world had also entered an advanced Information Age, but the ants obtained energy from completely different sources; they did not use oil or coal but harvested wind and solar power instead. Ant cities were cluttered with wind turbines, similar in size and shape to the pinwheels our children play with, and their buildings were covered with shiny black solar cells. Another important technology in the ant world was bioengineered locomotor muscle. Locomotor muscle fibres resembled bundles of thick electric cables, but when inje
cted with nutrient solution, they could expand and contract at different frequencies to generate power. All of the ants’ cars and aeroplanes were powered by these muscle fibres.

  The ants had computers of their own: round, rice-sized granules that, unlike dinosaur computers, used no integrated circuitry at all. All computations were performed using complicated organic chemical reactions. Ant computers did not have screens but used pheromones to output information instead. These subtle, complex odours could only be parsed by ants, whose senses could translate the odours into data, language and images. The exchange of information across the ants’ vast network of granular chemical computers was also effected by pheromones rather than by fibre-optic cables and electromagnetic waves.

  The structure of ant society in those days was very different from the ant colonies we see today, bearing a closer resemblance to that of human society. Due to the adoption of biotechnology in embryo production, ant queens played a trivial role in the reproduction of the species, and they enjoyed none of the societal status or importance that they do nowadays.

  Following the resolution of the First Dinosaur–Ant War, there had been no major conflict between the two worlds. The dinosaur–ant alliance endured, contributing to the steady development of Cretaceous civilisation. In the Information Age, the dinosaurs were more reliant than ever on the ants’ fine-motor skills. Swarms of ants worked in every dinosaur factory, manufacturing tiny component parts, operating precision equipment and instruments, performing repair and maintenance work, and handling other tasks that the dinosaurs could not manage.

  Ants also continued to play a critical role in dinosaur medicine. All dinosaur surgery was still performed by ant surgeons, who physically entered the dinosaurs’ organs to operate on them from the inside. They had a range of sophisticated medical devices at their disposal, including miniature laser scalpels and micro-submarines that could navigate and dredge dinosaur blood vessels.

  It also helped that ants and dinosaurs no longer had to rely on word corps to understand each other. With the invention of electronic devices that could directly translate ant pheromones into dinosaur speech, that peculiar method of communicating, via formations comprising tens of thousands of ant soldiers, gradually became the stuff of legend.

  The Formican Empire of Gondwana eventually unified the uncivilised ant tribes on every continent, establishing the Ant Federation, which governed all ants on Earth. By contrast, the once united Saurian Empire split in two. The continent of Laurasia gained its independence, and another great dinosaur nation was founded: the Laurasian Republic. Following a millennium of conquests, the Gondwanan Empire came to occupy proto-India, proto-Antarctica, and proto-Australia, while the Laurasian Republic expanded its territory into the lands that would become Asia and Europe.

  The Gondwanan Empire was mainly populated by Tyrannosaurus rex, while the dominant group in the Laurasian Republic was Tarbosaurus bataar. During this long period of territorial expansion, the two nations engaged in almost continual warfare. In the late Steam-Engine Age, the militaries of these two great empires crossed the channel separating Gondwana and Laurasia in massive fleets to attack each other. Over the course of many great battles, millions of dinosaurs were slain on the wide, open plains, leaving mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.

  Wars continued to plague both continents well into the Electric Age, decimating countless cities in the process. But in the last two centuries, since the dawning of the Atomic Age, the fighting had stopped. This was entirely due to nuclear deterrence. Both dinosaur nations amassed colossal stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons; if these missiles were ever deployed, they would transform Earth into a lifeless furnace. The fear of mutual destruction kept the planet balanced on a knife edge, maintaining a terrifying peace.

  The world’s dinosaur population continued to expand at a dramatic rate. Every continent suffered from extreme overcrowding and the dual threats of environmental pollution and nuclear war became more acute with each passing day. A rift reopened between the ant and dinosaur worlds and a pall of ominous clouds settled over Cretaceous civilisation.

  9

  The Dinosaur–Ant Summit

  Ever since the Steam-Engine Age, the Dinosaur–Ant Summit had been held annually without fail. It had become the most important meeting of the Cretaceous world, bringing dinosaur and ant leaders together to dis­cuss dinosaur–ant relations and the major issues facing the world.

  This year’s Dinosaur–Ant Summit was to be held in the Gondwanan Empire’s World Hall, the largest building known to Cretaceous civilisation. Its interior was of such epic proportions that it had developed its own micro­climates. Clouds often formed on the domed ceiling, pre­cipi­tating rain and snow, and temperature differences in different parts of the hall gave rise to gusts of wind. This phenomenon had not been anticipated by the hall’s architects. The microclimates effectively made the hall redundant, since being inside the hall was pretty much akin to standing outdoors. On several occasions, summit meetings had been subjected to rain showers or snowstorms, necessitating the construction of a temporary smaller chamber in the centre of the hall. Today, however, the weather inside the World Hall was clear and fine and more than a hundred lights beamed down from the sky-dome like small, brilliant suns.

  The two dinosaur delegations, headed by the Emperor of Gondwana and the President of the Laurasian Republic, took their seats around a large roundtable in the middle of the hall. Though the table was the size of a human football field, it seemed no bigger than a dot within the hall’s capacious expanse. The ant delegation, led by Supreme Consul Kachika of the Ant Federation, was only just now arriving, their aircraft drifting like graceful white feathers towards the roundtable. As the gossamer airships floated in, the dinosaurs blew at them, sending them whirling through the air. The dinosaurs roared with laughter at this. It was a traditional joke played at every year’s summit. Some of the ants tumbled out of the aircraft and onto the table. Though they were light enough not to come to any harm, they still had to trudge all the way to the table centre.

  The rest of the ants managed to steady their aircraft and landed on a crystal platter in the middle of the table – their seat at the summit. The dinosaurs ranged around the table’s edge could not see the ants from so far away, but a camera aimed at the platter projected an image of the ants onto a huge screen to one side, making them look just as massive as the dinosaurs. Magnified, the tiny insects looked a lot tougher, sleeker and more powerful than the dinosaurs, their metallic bodies giving them the appearance of formidable battle-ready warriors.

  The secretary-general of the summit was a Stegosaurus with a row of bony plates down his back. He declared the meeting open and the delegates immediately quieted down. Then they all rose as one and saluted as the flag of Cretaceous civilisation was slowly hoisted up a tall, distant flagpole. The flag depicted a hybrid dinosaur displaying the characteristic features of every type of dinosaur alongside an ant of equal stature, composed of many smaller ants. The two creatures stood facing into the rising sun.

  Without preamble, the meeting moved promptly to the first item on the agenda: a general debate on major global crises. Supreme Consul Kachika of the Ant Federation spoke first. As the slender brown ant waved her antennae, a device translated her pheromones into rudimentary dinosaur speech.

  ‘Our civilisation is teetering on a precipice,’ said Kachika. ‘The heavy industries of the dinosaur world are killing the Earth. Ecosystems are being destroyed, the atmosphere is thick with smog and toxins, and forests and grasslands are disappearing rapidly. Antarctica was the last continent to be opened up but the first to be reduced to nothing but desert, and the other continents are headed for the same fate. This predatory exploitation has now spread to the oceans. If the overfishing and polluting of the oceans continues at the current rate, they too will be dead in less than half a century. But all that is as nothing compared with the dangers of nuclear war. The world is at peace right now, but preserving peace through nuclea
r deterrence is like tiptoeing across a tightrope above the fires of hell. A nuclear war could be triggered at any moment, and that will be the end of everything, for the nuclear arsenals of the two dinosaur powers are capable of destroying all life on Earth a hundred times over.’

  ‘We’ve heard all this before,’ sneered Laurasian president Dodomi, a mountainous Tarbosaurus. His lip curled contemptuously.

  ‘It’s your insatiable consumption of natural resources that’s at the root of all this,’ Kachika continued, waggling her antennae at Dodomi. ‘The amount of food just one of you gets through in a single meal is enough to feed a large city of ants for an entire day. It’s simply not fair.’

  ‘You’re talking twaddle, little bug,’ boomed the Gondwanan emperor, a powerful Tyrannosaurus named Dadaeus. ‘We can’t help being so big. Would you have us starve? To survive, we must consume, and for that we need heavy industry and energy.’

  ‘Then you should use clean, renewable energy.’

  ‘That’s just not possible. Those little pinwheels and solar cells you ants rely on couldn’t even power one of our electronic wristwatches. Dinosaur society is energy hungry. We’ve no choice but to use coal and oil – and nuclear power, of course. Pollution is unavoidable.’

  ‘You could reduce your energy consumption by controlling the size of your population. The global dinosaur population is now in excess of 7 billion. It cannot be allowed to get any bigger.’

  Dadaeus shook his monstrous head and rolled his monstrous eyes. It was indeed a quite monstrous sight. ‘The urge to reproduce is the most natural instinct of every lifeform,’ he growled. ‘And growth and expansion are intrinsic to the advancement of civilisation. To survive, to maintain its strength, a country must have a sufficiently large population.’ Then he threw down the equivalent of a dinosaur’s clawed gauntlet. ‘If Laurasia is willing to smash its eggs, we dinosaurs of Gondwana will smash an equal number of ours.’