Of Ants and Dinosaurs

by Cixin Liu

  ‘How? It’s so far! We don’t have the strength,’ replied one of the other ants.

  ‘We can’t climb out – our feet have already been digested,’ added another.

  Only then did Daba notice that her own five feet had been partially consumed by the gastric juice. The feet of the other four ants had fared no better.

  ‘If only there was another flood to flush us out,’ the first ant said wistfully.

  Her words sent a jolt of realisation through Daba. She stared at the ant, a soldier ant with a pair of venomous mandibles. ‘You twit, you can cause another flood!’ Daba shouted.

  The soldier ant stared at the expedition leader in bewilderment.

  ‘Bite it! Make it throw up!’

  The soldier ant, grasping the idea at last, immediately started nipping savagely at the stomach wall. She quickly chewed through several cilia, leaving deep gouges in the wall. The stomach wall quivered violently, then began to convulse and contort. The cilia forest grew denser, a clear sign that the stomach was contracting and the dinosaur was about to vomit. The digestive sea began to roil, taking the ants with it. Engulfed by the rapidly rising sea, in a very short space of time the five ants were whooshed all the way up the oesophagus, swept over the isthmus of the tongue, catapulted across the two rows of teeth and expelled into the great outdoors, landing in the grass with a flump.

  Once the five expeditioners had disengaged themselves from the slithery slick of vomit, they saw that they were encircled by a vast swarm of ants. A crowd of several hundred thousand had come to cheer the return of the great explorers. The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body had begun in earnest, an era that was to prove as important to antkind as the Age of Discovery was for humankind.

  3

  The Dawn of Civilisation

  Following Daba’s pioneering feat, one ant expedition after another plumbed the depths of the dinosaur body via the oesophagus. They discovered that the fastest way in was to hitch a ride when the dinosaur was eating or drink­ing something, surfing in on a gulp of river water or a ball of chewed-up food. The ants knew that a dinosaur was made up of at least two systems: the digestive system, which they had now probed many times, and the respiratory sys­tem, which they had never visited. After Daba recovered from her injuries, the five-legged, stumpy-feelered ant decided to try the windpipe again. This time her team was consisted of smaller ants and they marched at widely spaced intervals to minimise the irritation to the dinosaur’s respiratory tract and prevent a repeat of the disastrous cough.

  Compared with the oesophagus, the journey through the respiratory tract was gruelling: there was no food or water on which to cadge a lift, and they had to march in gale-force conditions. Only the strongest ants stood a chance of making it. But the great explorer and her team triumphed again and for the first time antkind entered a dinosaur’s respiratory system.

  Where the digestive system was suffocatingly humid, the respiratory system was a domain of fierce winds and unpredictable currents. In the dinosaur’s lungs, the ants witnessed the awe-inducing sight of air dissolving into the bloodstream via the vast three-dimensional labyrinth formed by the air sacs. That river of blood, flowing from some unknown source, alerted them to the existence of other worlds inside the dinosaurs, worlds that they would much later come to identify as the circulatory system, the nervous system and the endocrine system.

  The focus of the third stage of exploration was the dinosaurs’ craniums. On their first attempt, the ants ventured in through their subject’s nostrils. Light-footed though they were, their pattering caused such intense tickling that the dinosaur sneezed with tornadic ferocity, shooting the little prospectors back out of its nasal passageway like bullets from a gun. Most of the team members on that initial mission were torn to shreds. Later cranial survey expeditions entered through the ears, with more success. En route, they investigated the dinosaurs’ visual and auditory organs and analysed those delicate systems. They did eventually manage to reach the brain, though it was many years before they worked out the purpose and significance of that most mysterious of organs.

  And so it was that the ants gained a detailed understanding of dinosaur anatomy, laying the foundations for the medical revolution that followed.

  Ant expeditions often entered the bodies of sick dinosaurs – massive creatures that had been reduced to skin and bone, their eyes dull and heavy, their movements slow and feeble, creatures that could do little but continually moan with pain. By comparing their interior systems with those of healthy dinosaurs, the ant explorers were easily able to pinpoint the locations of the diseased organ or lesion in question. They envisioned many different methods of treating internal diseases in dinosaurs, but not a single one could be put to the test, for such mammoth undertakings would require the consent of the dinosaur itself and to date the ants had always gained access without their hosts’ knowledge.

  The vast majority of dinosaurs would on no account let the ants burrow into their stomachs or brains, even if their intentions were entirely honourable and therapeutic. However, an epoch-making breakthrough occurred in this regard with a Hadrosaurus named Alija, the earliest named dinosaur in the history of Cretaceous civilisation.

  When Alija trudged into the Ivory Citadel that day, it was immediately obvious to the ants that he was in a frail state. A squad of 500 straight away scuttled forward to greet him and offer assistance, as they did with every dinosaur patient, and Alija duly opened his mouth and pointed inside with his claw. It was an unnecessary gesture, for dinosaurs only ever turned up there to get their teeth worked on. But the lead ant doctor, an ant by the name of Avi, who would later become the father of ant internal medicine, noticed that Alija was not actually pointing to his teeth but to somewhere further down – to his throat. Next, the dinosaur pointed to his stomach, grimaced to show that it hurt, and pointed to his throat again. There was no mistaking his meaning: he was asking the ants to examine his stomach.

  So Dr Avi led a team of several dozen ants to conduct the first ever internal examination of a consenting dinosaur. The diagnostic team entered Alija’s stomach by way of his oesophagus and quickly discovered a lesion in the stomach wall. Major medical intervention was required, but Dr Avi knew that with the limited antpower currently available to him, this was not possible. He would need a great deal of assistance. When he emerged from the dinosaur’s mouth, he made an emergency appointment with the mayor of the Ivory Citadel. At the meeting, he explained the situation and requested an additional 50,000 ants as well as three kilograms each of anaesthetic and anti-inflammatory drugs.

  The mayor waved her antennae angrily. ‘Are you crazy, Doctor? We have a full schedule of dinosaur patients today. If we reassign that many ants to your team, we’ll have to delay service to nearly sixty dinosaurs. Not to mention that that much medicine would be enough for a hundred treatments. That Hadrosaurus is sickly. He’s too weak to find bones and meat. How will he pay for this super-treatment?’

  ‘You must take the long view, Madam Mayor,’ Dr Avi replied. ‘If this intervention is successful, we ants will no longer be restricted to treating only dental problems – we’ll be able to cure almost any disease. Our business with the dinosaurs will increase tenfold, a hundredfold. We’ll earn more bones and meat than we can count, and your city will grow prodigiously.’

  The mayor was persuaded and she gave Avi the ants, drugs and authority he had asked for. A great contingent of 50,000 ants was soon assembled, and two piles of drugs were hauled in. The sick Hadrosaurus lay flat on the ground as the army of ants streamed into his open mouth in continuous, unbroken columns, each ant carrying a tiny backpack filled with drugs. Hundreds of giant dinosaurs gathered around in a circle, gawping at this grand undertaking.

  ‘I can’t believe that idiot’s letting all those bugs crawl right into his stomach,’ grumbled a Tarbosaurus.

  ‘So what?’ a Tyrannosaurus snapped back. ‘We already allow them into our mouths, don’t we?’

  ‘Dental hygie
ne is one thing, but when it comes to matters of the stomach, well, that’s a whole different ocean of fish,’ the Tarbosaurus replied. ‘Over my dead body—’

  ‘But what if your body was very nearly dead – like with this poor Hadrosaurus here,’ a squat Stegosaurus behind them interjected, craning her neck to see. ‘If the ants really can cure him—’

  ‘You mark my words, if we let them into our stomachs now, before we can so much as scratch an itch, they’ll be crawling into our noses, ears, eyes – into our brains, even. And who can anticipate what might happen then.’ The Tarbosaurus glared at the Stegosaurus. ‘Not in a million years would I countenance that.’

  ‘A million years, huh?’ said the Tyrannosaurus, stroking his chin. ‘But think how easy life would be if every disease could be cured.’

  The other dinosaurs chipped in:

  ‘Yeah, life would be so easy…’

  ‘Getting sick is a massive pain…’

  ‘We could live forever…’

  The first stage of the operation required that anaesthetic be administered to the lesion in Alija’s stomach. It had been collected from plants for use during dental procedures, and under the direction of Dr Avi the ants now ferried it into the Hadrosaurus’s stomach. After the area had been numbed, several thousand worker ants began to cut away the diseased tissue. This was a huge project, as the excised gastric tissue had to then be transported out of the dinosaur’s body. Porter ants formed a long black chain, passing little gobbets of flesh from ant to ant, all the way back up the line and onto the ground outside, where the pile of stinky rotten tissue was expanding fast. Once the lesion had been cut out, an anti-inflammatory had to be applied to the wound, which required another great procession into the Hadrosaurus’s stomach.

  The entire procedure took three hours and was completed by sundown. When all of the ants had withdrawn, Alija reported that the pain in his stomach had disappeared. Several days later, he made a full recovery.

  The news spread like wildfire through the dinosaur world. The number of dinosaurs seeking treatment at the Ivory Citadel increased tenfold, and this brought multitudes of ants flooding into the city in search of work. Thanks to the healthy uptick in business, the ants’ medical technology advanced in leaps and bounds. Now that they had official access to dinosaur bodies, they learnt to treat various diseases of the digestive and respiratory systems; later, their repertoire expanded to include diseases of the circulatory, visual, auditory and nervous systems – systems that required extraordinary levels of expertise to understand and heal. New drugs were being developed all the time, derived from not only plants but also animals and inorganic minerals.

  The ants’ endosurgical techniques also progressed rapidly. For example, when performing surgery in the digestive system, it was no longer necessary for a long line of ants to trek down the dinosaur’s oesophagus. Instead, they entered by means of an ‘ant pellet’. Approximately 1,000 ants would cling tightly to one another and form a ball ten to twenty centimetres in diameter. The dinosaur patient would then wash down one or more of these pellets with water, as though swallowing a pill. This technique improved surgical efficiency substantially.

  As the Ivory Citadel continued to mushroom, some of the dinosaurs who came for treatment stayed on, establishing a city of their own not far from the ant megalopolis. Because the dinosaurs constructed their homes with massive stones, the ants called it Boulder City. The Ivory Citadel and Boulder City would later become the capitals of the Formican and Saurian Empires of Gondwana.

  There was also significant movement in the opposite direction. Some of the dinosaurs who returned home after having received treatment took groups of ants with them to other dinosaur cities and ant colonies all across Gondwana. When the émigré ants settled in these faraway places, they passed on the Ivory Citadel’s medical technology to the locals. And so dinosaur–ant cooperation gradually spread throughout Gondwana, cementing the foundations for a dinosaur–ant alliance.

  Up till now, the cooperation between Earth’s two dominant species could only be classified as an advanced symbiotic relationship. The ants provided medical services to the dinosaurs in exchange for food, and the dinosaurs traded food for medical care. Although the character of the transaction had evolved considerably since the ants had picked that first dinosaur’s teeth, the essence of the contract had remained unchanged.

  In fact, this sort of mutualistic association between different species had long existed on Earth and persists to the present day. The practice is as old as the hills – older than most hills, actually. Consider, for example, the cleaning symbioses among marine organisms. Cleaner species rid certain fish of ectoparasites, fungi and algae, as well as damaged tissue and wayward scraps of food, and in the process they get to eat their fill. They assemble at fixed ‘cleaning stations’ to wait for client fish to swim by. Cleaners and clients establish ways of signalling to each other: for example, when a cleaner shrimp wants to approach a large fish, it will nudge it with its antennae. If the fish wishes to be cleaned, it will tilt its body, flare its gills and open its mouth to indicate its acceptance. Only then will the cleaner shrimp proceed; otherwise, it runs the risk of being eaten. Cleaning associations are extremely important to fish, and whenever a cleaner species is removed from an area, there’s a decline in both the health and abundance of the client fish species.

  This type of symbiotic relationship has its limitations, however. The two symbionts come together solely for the purpose of exchanging the basic services necessary for survival. But the transition to civilisation requires symbionts to exchange something more profound, to engage in a higher level of cooperation, so that they might establish an alliance that is not merely symbiotic but co-evolutionary.

  It was at this point in time that something happened in Boulder City to raise the dinosaur–ant alliance to new heights.

  4

  Tablets

  Tablets were as vital to the dinosaur world as the paper on which we write. They came in two types: stationary and movable. Also called ‘wordhills’ or ‘wordstones’, station­ary tablets (which we might also, rather pleasingly, term ‘dinosaur stationery’), were hills with a relatively even slope, gentle cliff faces or enormous rocks with smooth surfaces, on which the dinosaurs carved their super-sized words. Movable tablets could be made from many differ­ent materials, but wood, stone and leather were the most common. Because the dinosaurs did not yet use metal, let alone saws, they were unable to manufacture wooden boards; instead, they used their megalithic stone hatchets to cleave tree-trunks in two, lengthwise down the middle, and they then carved characters into the cross-section of one-half of them. Their stone tablets were flat slabs with facades soft enough for engraving; these came in all shapes and sizes, but the smallest would have been at least as big as one of our family dining-tables. Leather tablets were made from animal hides or lizard skins, and characters were drawn on them in plant- or mineral-based paint; often a single tablet required that many skins be joined together.

  The dinosaurs’ thick, clumsy fingers made it impossible for them to grip small implements for carving or writing, and they lacked the dexterity needed to form small characters. As a result, the characters they produced were very large: the smallest they could manage were still the size of a football. This meant that their tablets were by necessity huge and unwieldy, and even then they could fit only a few characters on each one.

  Tablets were usually held communally by a dinosaur tribe or settlement and were used to keep simple records of collective property, membership, economic output, and births and deaths. A tribe of 1,000 dinosaurs would need twenty to thirty sizeable trees for a register of its members, and the minutes from one meeting might require over a hundred hides. As a result, the manufacture of tablets placed a significant strain on the dinosaurs’ resources, and furthermore, when tribes or settlements relocated (a frequent occurrence during the Hunting Era), transporting libraries of tablets proved an even greater burden. For this reason, althou
gh dinosaur society had possessed a written language for 1,000 years, its cultural development was painfully slow and had nearly come to a standstill in recent centuries. Their script had remained extremely crude. With only simple, unary numerals and a handful of pictographs, it lagged far behind the sophistication of their spoken language. The sluggish emergence of writing had become the biggest obstacle to scientific and cultural progress in the dinosaur world, one which had arrested dinosaur society in a primitive state for a long time. It was a textbook example of how a species’ ill-shaped hands could hinder its evolution.

  The dinosaur Kunda was one of a hundred or so scribes in Boulder City. In the dinosaur world, the job of a scribe fell somewhere between that of the modern-day occupations of typist and printer. Scribes were chiefly responsible for copying tablets by hand. On the day in question, Kunda and twenty other scribes were working in front of a mountain of tablets, making a copy of the register of Boulder City’s residents for safekeeping. Most of the original register had been recorded on wooden tablets. Hundreds of split tree-trunks were stacked in hill-height piles, giving Kunda’s workplace the appearance of one of our timber yards.

  Kunda, a blunt stone knife gripped in his left claw and one of those humongous stone hammers in his right, was transcribing the pictograms from a ten-metre-long wooden tablet onto two new, shorter tablets. He had been at this dull, draining work for days and days, but still the inselberg of blank trunks in front of him didn’t seem to have got any smaller. Hurling down the stone knife and hammer, he rubbed his weary eyes, leant back against a stack of tablets and heaved a deep sigh, feeling very dispirited about his tedious life.

  Just then, a squadron of 1,000 ants paraded past on the ground before him – on their way back from surgery, Kunda presumed. A sudden inspiration seized him. He stood up, picked out two dried strips of glow-lizard jerky and waved them at the colony. Glow-lizards were so called because they emitted a fluorescent light at night, and their meat was a favourite with ants. No surprise then that the ant squadron immediately changed its direction of travel and veered towards him.