Empire of the Ants

by Bernard Werber

  They inspected the macabre room, aghast. Who could have killed them there, at the very foot of Bel-o-kan?

  It must have been something that came from below, emitted the 327th male.

  I don't think so, replied the 56th female, who nevertheless suggested he dig down through the soil.

  As he drove in his jaws, it hurt. Beneath them, there was rock.

  A huge granite rock, specified 103,683rd a little later. It's the bottom of the city, its hard floor. It's thick. Very thick. And wide. Very wide. No-one has ever got to the end of it.

  It could have been the bottom of the world for all they knew.

  Then they noticed a strange smell. Something had just come into the room, something they liked straight away. No, not a Tribe ant but a lomechusa beetle.

  When she was no more than a larva, 56th had heard Mother speak of this insect:

  Once you've tasted lomechusa nectar, there's nothing quite like it. It satisfies every desire and destroys the strongest will.

  It really did suspend pain, fear and intelligence and ants fortunate enough to survive their supplier were irresistibly driven to leave the city to look for further doses. They could not eat or rest and walked until they dropped. If they could not find a lomechusa, they went into withdrawal, attached themselves to a blade of grass and allowed themselves to die.

  One day when she was still a child, 56th had asked why they allowed such pests to enter the city, when termites and bees massacred them without pity. Mother had replied that there were two ways of dealing with a problem. You either avoided it or you took it on board. The second way was not necessarily any the worse. In the right doses or mixed with other substances, lomechusa secretions made excellent medicines.

  The 327th male was the first to go forward. Captivated by the beauty of the lomechusa's aromas, he licked the hairs of its abdomen, which were oozing hallucinogenic juices. With its two long hairs, the poisoner's abdomen bore a disturbing resemblance to an ant's head with its two antennae.

  The 56th female also rushed forward but did not have time to start her treat. A jet of acid whistled through the air. 103,683rd had aimed and fired. The burnt lomechusa writhed in agony.

  The soldier made a sober comment on her action:

  It isn't normal to find these insects so deep down. Lomechusas can't dig. Someone must have brought it here on purpose to stop us going any further. We'll find something here.

  The other two felt sheepish. They could only admire their friend's perspicacity. The three of them spent a long time looking. They moved bits of gravel aside and sniffed every corner of the room. There were few clues to go on but they finally detected a familiar musty smell, the faint rock scent of the assassins. It was barely perceptible, just two or three molecules, but that was enough. It was coming from under a little rock. They toppled it over and revealed yet another secret passage.

  Only this one had one very important characteristic: instead of being dug in earth or wood, it was excavated out of the living granite. No mandible could have made an impression on anything so hard.

  The corridor was quite wide but they made their way down it cautiously. After going a short way, they came on a vast room full of food: flour, honey, seeds and meat of various kinds. There were surprising quantities of it, enough to feed the city for five hibernations, and it was all giving off the same smell of rock as the warriors pursuing them.

  How could such a well-filled granary have been built there in secret? And with a lomechusa to block the entrance, too! That little bit of information had never done the rounds of the Tribes antennae.

  They treated themselves to generous helpings of food, then put their antennae together to take stock. The mystery was thickening. The secret weapon that had wiped out the first expedition, the strange-smelling warriors attacking them on all sides, the lomechusa and the food hidden under the floor of the city could not all be the work of a group of mercenary spies working for the dwarves. Unless they were extremely well organized.

  327th and his partners did not have time to pursue their reflections. Pom pom pompom, pom pom pompom! Up above, the workers were drumming on the ground with the ends of their abdomens. Something serious was happening. It was the second phase of the alert. They could not ignore the call. Their legs automatically turned round. Moved by an irresistible force, their bodies were already on their way to join the rest of the Tribe.

  The ant with the limp, who had been following them from a distance, breathed a sigh of relief. Phew! They had not discovered anything.

  When neither his mother nor his father came back up out of the cellar, Nicolas at last made up his mind to inform the police. It was a starving, red-eyed child who turned up at the police station to explain that his parents had disappeared into the cellar and had probably been eaten by rats or ants. Two dumbfounded policemen followed close on his heels as he made his way back to the basement of number three, rue des Sybarites.

  intelligence (cont.): I have set up the experiment again, this time using a video camera.

  Subject: another ant of the same species and from the same nest. Day one: she pulls, pushes and bites the twig without success. Day two: as before.

  Day three: she gets the knack, pulls a little, wedges the twig by putting her abdomen in the hole and puffing it out, then lowers her grip and starts again. By fits and starts, she slowly gets the twig out.

  So that was how it was done.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  The alert had been caused by an extraordinary event. La-chola-kan, the most westerly daughter city, had been attacked by legions of dwarf ants.

  So they were at it again.

  War was now inevitable.

  The survivors who had managed to get through the blockade set up by the Shigaepouyans had an incredible tale to tell. This is what they said happened:

  At 17°-time, a long acacia branch had come up to the main entrance of La-chola-kan. It had been an abnormally mobile branch and it had suddenly plunged into the opening, wrecking it as it turned.

  The sentries had then made a sortie to attack the unidentified digging object but had all been wiped out. After that, they had all stayed safe inside and waited for the branch to cease its ravages but it had gone on and on.

  It had ripped the dome open as if it were a rosebud and poked about in the corridors. Even though the soldiers had bombarded it with everything they had, the acid had not stopped it.

  The Lacholakanians had been paralysed with fear. It had stopped in the end, though, and they had had 2°-time respite before the dwarf legions arrived at the charge.

  The smashed daughter city had found it hard to resist the first attack and had counted its losses in tens of thousands. Those who had escaped had finally taken refuge in their pine stump. They were managing to withstand the siege but would not be able to survive for very long. They were running out of food and the fighting had already reached the wooden arteries of the Forbidden City.

  Since La-chola-kan was a member of the Federation, Bel-o-kan and all the neighbouring daughter cities were duty bound to go to its aid. The end of the first accounts of the tragedy had not even reached their antennae before action stations was declared. There was no more talk of rest and reconstruction now. The first spring war had begun.

  As the 327th male, 56th female and 103,683rd soldier hurriedly made their way back up, they were surrounded by bustling ants.

  The nurses were taking the eggs, larvae and pupae down to the forty-third floor of the basement; the greenfly milkmaids were hiding their cattle in the depths of the city; and the farmers were preparing stocks of chopped food to serve as combat rations. In the halls of the military castes, the gunners were filling their abdomens to the brim with formic acid, the shearers were sharpening their mandibles, and the mercenaries were forming up into compact legions. The males and females were withdrawing to their quarters.

  They could not attack at once, it was too cold. But tomorrow morning at first light, w
ar would rage.

  Up on the dome, the temperature regulation vents were being closed. The city of Bel-o-kan was contracting its pores, pulling in its claws and clenching its teeth ready to bite.

  The fatter of the two policemen put his arm round the boy's shoulders.

  'So you really think they're in there, do you?'

  The child looked exasperated and pulled away without answering. Inspector Galin leant over the stairs and shouted a ridiculous 'Hello, there,' but only the echo answered.

  'It seems very deep,' he said. 'We can't go down like this. We need some equipment.'

  Superintendent Bilsheim laid a podgy finger to his lips and looked concerned.

  'Of course. Of course.'

  'I'll go and get the fire brigade,' said Inspector Galin.

  'All right, and while you're doing that, I'll question the kid.'

  The superintendent pointed to the melted lock.

  'Did your mum do that?'

  'Yes.'

  'You've got a pretty clever mum, then. I don't know many women who could open a reinforced door with a blowlamp . . . and I don't know any who could unblock a sink.'

  Nicolas was in no mood for jokes.

  'She wanted to go and find Dad.'

  'Yes, of course. I'm sorry. How long have they been down there now?' 'Two days.'

  Bilsheim scratched his nose.

  'And why did your father go down, do you know?'

  'In the beginning, it was to go and look for the dog. Afterwards, we don't know He bought loads of sheets of metal and took them down and then he bought lots of books about ants.'

  'Ants? Of course, of course.'

  Somewhat at a loss, Superintendent Bilsheim confined himself to nodding and murmuring 'of course' a few more times. The case was getting off to a bad start. He could not get a feel for it. It was not the first time he had had to deal with a 'special' case. You might even have said they handed all the lousy cases over to him systematically, probably because he was good at making nutters think they had at last found someone who understood them.

  It was a gift he had been born with. Even when he was little, his classmates came to him with all their weird ideas. He just shook his head knowingly, gazed at them intently and said 'of course'. It worked every time. Things just got complicated if you tried to make up long, involved sentences for the benefit of others and Bilsheim had noticed that the simple words 'of course' were quite sufficient. It was one of the mysteries of human communication.

  It was odder still that the young Bilsheim, who hardly ever uttered a word, had earned the reputation of being an excellent speaker at school. He was even asked to make end-of-year speeches.

  He might have become a psychiatrist but he had a thing about uniforms and a white coat did not really fit the bill. It was all to do with 'keeping up standards' and the police and army were the ones for that.

  When he joined the police, his gift was soon spotted by his superiors. They off-loaded all the 'baffling cases' onto him systematically. Most of the time, he did not solve them but at least he dealt with them and that was something.

  'Ah, and then there are the matches.'

  'What about the matches?'

  'You have to make four triangles out of six matches to find the solution.'

  'What solution?'

  'The "new way of thinking". The different "logic" Dad used to talk about.' 'Of course.'

  This time, the boy rebelled.

  'There's no "of course" about it. You have to find the shape that makes four triangles. The ants, Uncle Edmond and the matches are all linked.'

  'Uncle Edmond? Who's Uncle Edmond?'

  Nicolas perked up.

  'He's the one who wrote the Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge. But he's dead. Maybe it was the rats. It was the rats who killed Ouarzazate.'

  Superintendent Bilsheim sighed. It was appalling. What was this scrap of a kid going to turn into when he grew up? An alcoholic at the very least. At last Inspector Galin arrived with the fire brigade. Bilsheim looked at him with pride. He was a dab hand, was Galin. A bit of a pervert, too. He actually got a kick out of cases involving nutters. The weirder, the better.

  The understanding Bilsheim and the enthusiastic Galin together made up the unofficial squad which dealt with the 'nutty cases no-one else wanted'. They had already been sent out on the case of the little old lady who got eaten by her cats', 'the prostitute who stifled her clients with her tongue', and the 'pork-butchers' head shrinker'.

  'Right then,' said Galin, 'you stay here, Chief. We'll dive in and bring them back for you on inflatable stretchers.'

  In her nuptial chamber, Mother had stopped laying. She raised a single antenna and asked to be left alone. Her servants disappeared.

  Belo-kiu-kiuni, the living genitals of the city, was disturbed.

  No, she was not afraid of war. She had already won and lost a good fifty of them. It was something else that was worrying her, the affair of the secret weapon. The turning acacia branch that had ripped off the dome. And she had not forgotten, either, the 327th male's eye-witness account of the twenty-eight warriors who had died without even having taken up the firing position. Could she risk not taking that extraordinary information into account?

  Not any more.

  But what was she to do?

  Belo-kiu-kiuni remembered another occasion when she had had to confront an 'incomprehensible secret weapon'. It had been during the wars against the termites of the south. One. fine day they had announced to her that a squadron of a hundred and twenty soldiers had been 'immobilized', if not destroyed.

  There had been utter panic. They had thought that they would never again be able to vanquish the termites and that their enemies had taken a decisive technological lead.

  They had sent out spies and discovered that the termites had come up with a caste of glue-throwing gunners, the nasutiter-mes, capable of hurling a sticky substance that gummed up the legs and jaws of soldiers two hundred heads away.

  The Federation had given it great thought and come up with a means of countering them by advancing under the cover of dead leaves. That led to the famous Battle of Dead Leaves, which the Belokanian troops had won.

  This time, however, the adversaries were no longer lumbering termites but dwarves whose vivacity and intelligence had already caught them out on several occasions. Besides, the secret weapon seemed to be particularly destructive.

  She fiddled nervously with her antennae.

  What exactly did she know about the dwarves?

  A great deal and very little.

  They had arrived in the region a hundred years before. In the beginning, there had been just a few scouts so small they did not seem to be a cause for concern. Then the caravans of dwarves had arrived, bringing their eggs and food reserves with them. They had spent their first night under the root of the big pine.

  In the morning, half of them had been wiped out by a starving hedgehog. The survivors had gone away to the north, where they had set up a bivouac not far from the black ants.

  In the Federation, they had told themselves it was between the black ants and them. Some of them had even felt guilty about leaving the puny creatures to act as fodder for the big black ants.

  However, the dwarf ants had not been massacred. They could be seen up there daily, carrying twigs and little beetles. What could no longer be seen, on the other hand, were the big black ants.

  They still did not know what had happened but the Belokanian scouts reported that the dwarves now occupied the whole of the black ant nest. The news was received with fatalism and even humour. It serves those black ants right for being so pretentious, went the scent in the corridors. And anyway, such trifling little ants were not about to worry the powerful Federation.

  However, after the black ants, it was one of the beehives in the dog-rose that was occupied by the dwarves. Then the last termite hill of the north and the red stinging ants' nest in turn passed under the dwarves' banner.

  The refugees w
ho flooded into Bel-o-kan and swelled the throng of mercenaries related that the dwarves had avant-garde combat strategies. For example, they infected water supply points by pouring poison from rare flowers into them.

  They were still not seriously alarmed, though. And it had taken the fall of the city of Niziu-ni-kan the previous year in 2°-time to make them realize at last that they were dealing with formidable adversaries.

  But if the russet ants had underestimated the dwarves, the dwarves had not judged the russet ants at their full worth. Niziu-ni-kan was a very small city but it had links with the entire Federation. The day after the dwarf victory, two hundred and forty legions of one thousand two hundred soldiers each came to wake them up with a fanfare. The outcome of the battle was certain but that did not prevent the dwarves from fighting fiercely and it took the federal troops a whole day to enter the liberated city.

  They then discovered that the dwarves had installed not one but two hundred queens in Niziu-ni-kan. It came as quite a shock.

  army of aggression: Ants are the only social insects to maintain an army of aggression.

  Termites and bees, two less refined royalist and loyalist species, only use their soldiers to defend the city or protect workers far from the nest. It is relatively rare for a termite hill or beehive to set out on a territorial conquest but it is not unknown.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  The dwarf queens who had been taken prisoner recounted the history and customs of the dwarves. It was an extraordinary tale.

  Many years before, according to them, the dwarves lived in another country, billions of heads away.

  That country was very different from the Federation forest. Sweet-tasting, brightly coloured fruit grew to an enormous size and there was no winter and no hibernation. It was a land of plenty, where the dwarves had built the 'old' Shi-gae-pou, a city itself stemming from a very old dynasty. The nest was built at the foot of an oleander bush.

  One day, both the oleander and the surrounding sand were torn from the ground and laid in a wooden box. The dwarves tried to escape from the box but it had been placed inside something gigantic and very hard. When they reached the structure's frontiers, they found only water, salt water stretching as far as the eye could see.