Of Ants and Dinosaurs

by Cixin Liu

  Kunda pointed first to the tablet he was copying from, then to the one he was working on – which, depressingly, he’d so far inscribed with a mere two-and-a-half characters – and then to the ants. The ants grasped his meaning at once. They surged onto the smooth white face of the partially completed tablet and began to carve the remaining characters into the wood with their mandibles. Kunda, meanwhile, eased himself back against the stack of tablets, feeling rather smug. The ants would take much longer to finish the task than he would, but their patience and tenacity was immeasurably superior to that of any other creature and they would get it done eventually. In the meantime, he could kick back and relax for a spell.

  He dozed off. In his dream he saw himself at the helm of a mighty army of more than a million ants, enthusiastically urging on his troops. The army swarmed over hundreds of blank tablets and like a black tide turned every one of them dark; before long, the tide withdrew, revealing a vast collection of tablets whose white surfaces now bore neat lines of orderly characters carved into them.

  A series of slight pricks on Kunda’s lower leg roused him from sleep and when he raised his head he saw that several ants were gnawing at his left ankle. This was their customary way of getting a dinosaur’s attention. Seeing that he was awake, the ants gestured at the tablet with their antennae, to indicate the job was done. Kunda glanced up at the sun and realised that very little time had passed. He then looked at the tablet and promptly lost his temper. The ants had completed the half-written character at full size, but all the other characters they’d carved were many times smaller. It looked ridiculous – like a tiny tail trailing after the three large characters. Such shoddy work wasn’t just inadequate, it had ruined a whole tablet.

  Kunda had known all along that the ants were crafty little mercenaries, and now he had proof. He raised a broom to mete out the punishment they deserved. But just as he was about to strike, he caught another glimpse of their wooden tablet and a sudden revelation flashed through his mind. The characters the ants had carved were small, but they were fully legible to dinosaur eyes. The reason characters were normally so big was not for ease of reading but because the dinosaurs were not dexterous enough to inscribe anything smaller. It occurred to him that the ants, who were twitching their antennae frantically in his direction, might very well be trying to explain this to him.

  The scowl on his face broadened into a smile and he dropped the broom. Then he set down one of the strips of glow-lizard jerky in the middle of the colony and swished the other tantalisingly. Crouching down in front of the tablet, he gestured at the three large characters and the line of small characters and tried to communicate his idea. It took the ants a while to catch on, but eventually they waggled their feelers in emphatic confirmation: yes, they could carve characters that were smaller still. Immediately, they flooded onto the blank part of the tablet and set to work. Soon they had carved a line of even smaller characters, each about the size of the letters in the title on this book’s cover. As the ants were illiterate, they were simply reproducing the shapes of the characters.

  Kunda rewarded them with the remaining strip of jerky. Then he hacked off the section of the tablet carved with the smallest characters, tucked it under his arm and gleefully lolloped off to see the city prefect.

  Because of Kunda’s low status, the guards stopped him on the steps of the colossal stone mansion that housed the prefect’s office. The guards were imposing, powerfully built dinosaurs and Kunda quickly lifted up the section of the tablet for them to see. They inspected it. Within moments, their expressions had morphed from surprise to awe; it was as if they were in the presence of a sacred relic. Turning their gaze back to Kunda, they gaped at him for a long time, as though he were a great sage, then let him pass.

  ‘What’s that you’ve got there – a toothpick?’ the prefect asked when he saw Kunda.

  ‘No, sir, this is a tablet.’

  ‘A tablet? Are you an idiot? You couldn’t fit half a character onto that piddly piece of wood.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe, I know, sir, but there are actually more than thirty characters on this self-same piddly piece of wood.’ Kunda passed it over.

  The prefect gazed at the tablet with the same wonderment as the guards. After a long time, he looked up at Kunda. ‘I don’t suppose you carved this yourself?’

  ‘Of course not, sir. A gang of ants did it.’

  Boulder City’s municipal officials gathered round and the tablet was passed from claws to claws, much like we might hand round an ivory figurine to be admired. These dinosaurs constituted the city’s ruling class and they now launched into fervent discussion.

  ‘Incredible – such tiny characters…’

  ‘… and totally legible too.’

  ‘Over the millennia, so many of our ancestors have tried to write like this, but to no avail.’

  ‘Those itsy-bitsy bugs really are quite capable.’

  ‘We should have known they’d be good for more than medical care.’

  ‘Just think of all the materials we’ll save…’

  ‘… and how easily we’ll be able to transport our tablets. You know, I might be able to carry the entire register of the city’s residents by myself! No need to employ a hundred-strong division of dinosaur movers any more.’

  ‘And that’s just the start of it, I’d say. We can now consider changing the materials we use for the tablets too.’

  ‘Quite so. After all, where’s the merit in using tree-trunks? For characters this small, bark would surely be lighter and more portable.’

  ‘Precisely. And a lot cheaper too. Small lizard skins could be used as well.’

  The prefect interrupted the chatter with a wave. ‘Right then, from now on the ants will be our scribes. We shall start by raising a writing force of a million ants or more. Let’s see…’ He surveyed the room, his eyes finally falling on Kunda. ‘You will lead this campaign.’

  So Kunda realised his dream, and Boulder City, along with the rest of the dinosaur world, saved a great deal of wood and stone and an enormous quantity of hides. But compared with the real significance of this event in the history of Cretaceous civilisation, those savings were trivialities.

  The advent of fine antprint made it possible to transcribe vast volumes of information, and at the same time the dinosaurs’ script grew richer and more sophisticated. At long last, the alpha and omega of the dinosaurs’ experience and knowledge could be fully and systematically recorded using the written word and mathematical equations. It could also be disseminated far more widely, reliably and permanently, no longer subject to the vagaries of dinosaur memory and oral tradition. This remarkable advancement gave fresh impetus to Cretaceous science and culture, sending the long-stagnant Cretaceous civilisation into a period of whirlwind development.

  Meanwhile, new applications for the ants’ fine-motor skills were found in all sectors of the dinosaur world. Take timekeeping technology as an example. Dinosaurs had invented the sundial long ago, but because they used large tree-trunks as gnomons and drew rough hour lines around them, these had to remain fixed in place. Thanks to the ants, sundials could now be made smaller and the hour lines rendered more precisely, allowing dinosaurs to carry them around. Later, dinosaurs would invent the hourglass and the water clock, and though they might have been able to make the containers themselves, only ants could bore the crucial holes. The manufacture of mechanical clocks was even more dependent on ant labour, for though a grandfather clock might be taller than a dinosaur, it still contained numerous tiny parts that could only be machined by ants.

  But the area in which the ants’ skills made the most meaningful contribution to the advancement of civilisation, besides writing, was scientific experimentation. Thanks to the ants’ capacity for intricate work, it was now possible to take measurements with an exactitude that had eluded dinosaurs, allowing a shift in experimentation from the qualitative to the quantitative. Research once thought impossible became a reality, leading to rapid strid
es in Cretaceous science.

  Ants were now an integral part of the dinosaur world. Dinosaurs of high standing were never without a miniature ant nest. Most of these nests resembled a wooden sphere and housed several hundred ants. When a dinosaur needed to write, it would unfold a strip of bark or hide parchment on the table and set down its ant nest beside it. The ants would scurry out onto the parchment and etch the words dictated to them by the dinosaur. They used a very particular system of concurrent writing, quite different from our own. Where we humans write one character at a time, the ants teamed up and inscribed multiple characters simultaneously. This allowed them to complete a transcription very rapidly, at a pace that would far outstrip our own handwriting speed. Naturally, a dinosaur’s pocket-sized ant nest also came in handy for all sorts of other tasks that required a light touch.

  For their part, the ants received much more than just bones and meat from the dinosaurs. After their new collaboration began, the first invaluable asset the ant world gained was written language. Ants had never had a written language before, and even as they became the dinosaurs’ scribes, they remained illiterate, which meant they were limited to simple reproduction work, copying out the characters from the dinosaurs’ outsized tablets. Their efficiency was relatively poor, as they could only transcribe one stroke at a time. But the dinosaurs were in dire need of ants who could take dictation like secretaries, and the ants, who were well aware of the importance of written language to society, were eager to learn. Thanks to a concerted effort on both sides, the ants quickly mastered the dinosaurs’ script and co-opted it for use in their own society.

  For Cretaceous civilisation, this was of immeasurable significance because it forged a bridge between their respective worlds. Over time, the ants came to understand dinosaur speech, but dinosaur anatomy meant that dinosaurs would never be able to understand the ants’ pheromone-based language. Consequently, only simple exchanges took place between the two worlds. But the ants’ mastery of written language brought about a fundamental change in this, for the ants could now communicate with the dinosaurs through writing. To facilitate this, they invented an astounding new method. Within a square patch of ground, thousands of ants would quickly arrange themselves to form lines of text. This drill composition technique grew more polished by the day. Eventually, the transition between drill formations was so swift that the block of ants resembled the instantaneous output of a computer screen.

  As communication between the two worlds improved, the ants absorbed more and more knowledge and ideas from the dinosaurs, for each new scientific and cultural achievement could now be promptly disseminated throughout antkind. And so the critical defect in ant society – the dearth of creative thinking – was remedied, leading to the simultaneous rapid advancement of ant civilisation. The result of the dinosaur–ant alliance was that the ants became the dinosaurs’ dexterous hands, while the dinosaurs became a wellspring of vision and innovation for the ants. The fusion of these two budding intelligences in the late Cretaceous had finally sparked a dramatic nuclear reaction. The sun of civilisation rose over the heart of Gondwana, dispelling the long night of evolution on Earth.

  5

  The Steam-Engine Age

  Time flew by, and 1,000 years passed. Cretaceous civilisation entered a brand-new era as the ants and dinosaurs established their own vast empires.

  The dinosaur world moved into the Steam-Engine Age. Though the dinosaurs had not yet harnessed electricity, they mined minerals on a massive scale, smelted a variety of metals and powered their complex machines with huge steam engines. They constructed cities across the continent and linked them via a web of broad-gauge railways serviced by a fleet of ginormous trains. These comprised carriages the size of our five- or six-storey buildings and were drawn by steam locomotives so behemothic that they made the ground shake beneath them and left billowing clouds lingering on the horizon. There were also high-altitude transport balloons, whose shadows enveloped entire cities as they floated by, and mighty ships plying every major ocean; these too were powered by steam engines or sometimes by magnificent sails. Fleets of these ships, as high and hefty as a seaborne mountain range, carried Gondwanan dinosaurs and ants to other continents, and so their particular model of civilisation, based on the dinosaur–ant alliance, spread right across the Late Cretaceous world.

  By their own standards, the ants’ empire was also incomparably vast. No longer confined to subterranean nests, the ants now resided in cities that dotted every continent like a constellation of stars. Just as it is hard for us to grasp the immense scale of dinosaur civilisation, it is difficult to imagine the miniature nature and intricate structures of ant civilisation. Though ant cities were generally no larger than one of our football fields, the detail and complexity of these megalopolises was dizzying. Ant buildings were typically one to two metres tall, with elaborately filigreed interiors that functioned like three-dimensional labyrinths. Their trains were the size of our smallest toy cars, and their transport balloons were like soap bubbles drifting with the wind. These vehicles could only cover short distances, so if an ant wanted to travel further afield, they had to board a dinosaur train, balloon or ship.

  The ant and dinosaur worlds maintained a closely cooperative, mutually dependent relationship. By then the dinosaurs had invented technology that enabled them to quickly print long tracts of text on paper, and they had also created typewriters with keys the size of our computer screens, to accommodate their fat fingers. Though the dinosaurs therefore no longer needed ants for scriptorial work, in many other sectors their fine-motor skills were more important than ever – indispensable, in fact. After all, it would have been impossible to manufacture printing presses and typewriters without the countless precision parts machined by the ants. And with the emergence of large-scale industry in the dinosaur world, there was a greater demand for fine manipulation. The manufacture of everything from steam-engine valves and meters to ocean-liner compasses required the ants’ pinpoint accuracy. The field of medicine, which was where the dinosaur–ant alliance originated, was now more ant-dominated than ever, as dinosaurs, with their clumsy claws, had never learnt to operate on their own kind.

  The dinosaur and ant worlds may have been interdependent civilisations, but they were also independent entities, and this necessitated the development of a more sophisticated economic relationship. Globally, there were two currencies in circulation: paper bills the size of our extra-large yoga mats, as used by the dinosaurs, and tiny slivers of shredded paper, as used by the ants. The two currencies were exchanged on a one-for-one basis.

  For the first 1,000 years of Cretaceous civilisation, relations between the ant and dinosaur worlds were harmonious and, on the whole, frictionless. This was due in large part to their interdependence, for had the alliance broken down, it would have precipitated a deadly crisis for both worlds. Another important reason was that the ants lived in a low-consumption society. Their material requirements were easily satisfied, and they took up very little space. Much of the Formican Empire’s territory overlapped but did not interfere with that of the Saurian Empire, allowing the dinosaurs and the ants to coexist without intense competition.

  There was, however, a deep and unbridgeable cultural gulf between the two civilisations – a manifestation of the sharp differences in the physiologies and social structures of the two species. Because of this, the ant and dinosaur worlds never truly became one. And as civilisation advanced, intercultural conflict became unavoidable.

  With the expansion of their respective intelligences, both the ants and the dinosaurs showed a growing awareness of the vastness of the cosmos, but exploratory research into the underlying laws of the universe was still in its infancy. Science seemed weak and inadequate, so religion was born, and religious fanaticism rapidly reached fever pitch in both worlds. As the differences between the two civilisations were expressed through increasingly distinctive religious beliefs, the latent crisis came to a head and dark clouds gathered over Cretaceous
civilisation.

  A Dinosaur–Ant Summit was held annually in Boulder City. At this meeting, the sovereigns of the Saurian and Formican Empires discussed the major issues of the day. Boulder City and the Ivory Citadel were still the imperial capitals, and although the latter, relatively tiny as it was, seemed no more conspicuous than a postage stamp pasted onto the side of the magnificent Boulder City, the two were nevertheless equal in status. When Queen Lassini of the Formican Empire entered the lofty imperial palace of the Saurian Empire, she was therefore accorded a grand reception. As happened whenever an important ant official travelled, she was accompanied by a contingent of soldier ants known as a word corps, whose function was to assume the formations necessary to facilitate negotiations with the dinosaurs. The size of a word corps was determined by the rank of the official, and the corps that came to Boulder City with the ant queen was, of course, the largest of them all.

  And so it was that as the dinosaur guard of honour sounded their fanfare of bugles, a phalanx of 100,000 soldier ants escorted their queen into the hall. Tightly packed into a dense black quadrilateral of precisely two square metres, the ants advanced slowly across a floor as smooth and shiny as a mirror and halted before the dinosaur emperor, who had come to receive the queen.

  Emperor Urus greeted his opposite number. ‘Hello there, Queen Lassini! Are you out in front of that black square?’ He stooped and peered intently at the ground in front of the word corps, then shook his enormous head. ‘How long has it been since we last saw each other – a year? The last time we met, I could still see you, but that’s quite impossible now. Ah, but I am old, and my eyes are not what they were.’