The most recent reports focused on the maintenance of the island’s tower, the hub of the hypersonic signals that fed information into the brains of the surface dwellers. Within a few years, the upgraded animals would breed a new generation, and the towers would not be necessary. The surfacers would pass along their perfected genes, and all the unevolved traits would be phased out. But for now, the Queen needed to make sure the towers worked. Allowing them to fail and running the risk of having prewar animals roaming the surface was too dangerous. It would only confirm fears of EMSAH and a return to the previous way of life.
The island’s tower linked with others that were strategically placed around the globe, spreading the Queen’s message in the same way that a human cell phone network transmitted signals. The tower was built from dirt, magnetic stones harvested by the miner caste, and random organic materials, including the brain tissue of the interpreters, the ones who had been bred to translate human language. At the top of the tower rested a transmitter, a sphere pocked with convex indentations, like a massive golf ball. From here, the signal reached every surface creature who had been exposed to the hormone, impregnating their growing minds with the knowledge that would allow them to subdue and overcome the human menace.
The Queen concentrated on incoming news concerning the towers and filtered out the rest. A new report indicated that several of the structures had been compromised by hurricanes in a region designated with the number forty-seven and a combination of scents. The humans called the place Guatemala.
The problem working with organic material was that it required constant maintenance. Moreover, the ants who worked on the towers had to be frequently replaced. Being so close to the signal interfered with their antennae, driving them to insanity. Their minds would be overwhelmed with data, like a deluge bursting a levee. At that point, survival mechanisms implanted in their species would kick in. Some would bite off their own antennae, like a human extracting a rotten tooth. Others would simply freeze in place while their sisters crawled around them. Still others would become violent, which would require the soldiers stationed nearby to pluck them from the tower before they hurt the others or, worse, damaged the transmitter, which was worth more than all their lives combined.
True to form, the reports grew more positive later in the day. A crew of specialized workers had been dispatched. The towers would be repaired by the time the sun was two ant-lengths above the ocean.
Though there had been another failed settlement that needed to be quarantined, the Queen foresaw success with the surface dwellers. There would be harmony. Nature was seemingly designed for a master race to step forward and seize control. If not the ants, who else? Certainly not the humans. The animals still had promise, even though they would take years to realize their potential. Everything her mother told her would come true. The Colony would be the North Star in an eternally spinning constellation.
But this harmony was still so far away, always on the other side of a sunrise. Always tomorrow, always in the next season. Always someday. There were too many variables to predict exactly what would happen. She had been on the warpath for so many centuries now, absorbing and spitting out the hatred of thousands of generations of her people, that she sometimes wondered if she would have the opportunity to appreciate the beauty and purity she would one day bestow upon the earth. She wondered if she would instead be taking in reports of downed towers and weather anomalies until that final moment when her maids could do no more for her, and she went stiff and stopped breathing. Her daughters would attend to her for a few more days, she imagined, before the eggs ran out, and the fluids finally began to leak from her cracked exoskeleton, warning them that death was in their midst. She would be removed from the chamber, stripped of whatever fleshy parts remained. The rest—a shell of armor and hollowed-out legs—would be ejected from the Colony, sent to a trash heap.
The Queen willed her mind to go beyond her own death and beyond the final victory over humanity. By then, the human cities would be completely dismantled by time and nature, overrun with vegetation, decayed by winds, rain, and sunlight. The new settlements would grow. Over time, they would discard whatever artificial human implements they had acquired in the days after the war. Guns, computers, vehicles, engines—the surfacers would no longer need these things. Their network of towns would be so efficient and peaceful that the trappings of human life would fall away. The animals would live as one community—similar to the ants, but still maintaining individuality, still moving forward. They would be mini-Queens perched atop mini-Colonies.
The underground Colony, meanwhile, would continue to explore, carving out the earth from pole to pole. New queens would oversee the exploration of Antarctica with a caste of workers bred to withstand the cold. They would witness the construction of a chain of tunnels linking every continent. Nothing would remain beyond their reach, and perhaps they would encounter more like them in the depths of the underworld.
The Queen went still further, to a time when the earth would begin to grow warm again. She could not imagine what the surface would be like then, but she could picture the sun. It would grow large and dull in the sky. It would extend outward, an ongoing explosion, gobbling up the inner planets until its gases collided with the atmosphere of Earth. Plants would be long gone before then. The ants would probably have to harvest the surface dwellers for food—it would be an act of mercy, since they would probably start eating one another in an orgy of prewar violence. But with the plants dying, the Colony’s fungus reserves would die off as well. The earth, both the land and the tunnels underneath, would be still for a long time.
She watched it all happen from space, from the outer rim of the system. The red giant, dying, like she was, would burn everything away, all the progress she had made. The star would shed its skin, which would engulf the earth, a final judgment boiling away the oceans, purifying the land, smoothing it out until it was perfectly round. It would take centuries. The expanding gases would incinerate the rock, shooting sparks and debris into space. The light could be seen from galaxies away, a shower of embers propelled by the solar winds. Everything purified by the bursting sun. A universe scraped clean, cleansed by fire, the shards of the earth frozen in space forever. Such a glorious ending, a welcome relief. An opportunity for the world to finally go to sleep.
It was so beautiful that she at first ignored the chemical alarm from a chambermaid—another report on the towers, she supposed. Not enough to distract her from the ecstasy of the final obliteration of the planet. But the message kept repeating, overriding her ability to tune it out. Four maids in a row delivered it. She could no longer ignore them.
There had been an unauthorized use of a translator. The Queen retraced the path of the information. She could see the chemical trail, a bright thread unspooling into the past. She tracked it from her quarters through the tunnels, out to the ships, across the water to the mainland, into the hills. Region 19, location 5.2, Alpha 3,893,216.0692. The link was old—the Alpha who had joined with the mammal had been diverted during the Purge and then the subsequent quarantine. Such a lapse was to be expected. There were occasional dead spots in the network, especially with Alphas scouting on their own for days at a time.
It was the cat who had used the device. Mort(e). The one the humans wanted. The messiah who had escaped the quarantine. What was the word he used? She searched for it. Ah, yes: he sought the source. The source of everything. And now he was linked to her for as long as his fragile mind could withstand it.
She had already seen Mort(e) through the eyes of Culdesac, along with other translator-operators who had interacted with him. There were also the Martinis: the mother and her two children, all of whom were captured after their region was overrun. The soldiers had held them down and forced them to use the interpreting device. True to the odds, only one of them, the boy, survived. But the sessions showed that Mort(e) the Great Warrior, the Scourge of the Colony, was nothing more than an unevolved slave for the humans. He was so or
dinary, like all messiahs. Just a cat, a conditioned pet. Felines were a species that showed promise, though they were prone to bickering, and tended to have the biggest egos. Ordinary house cats always demanded to be in charge of things as if they had hunted humans in the wild before the war.
This cat was different in that way, she had to admit. He had seen the war. He had killed his master, along with so many other humans that he had lost count. She fished out the information: the actual number was eighty-seven. He was determined, as evidenced by his use of the device. He was brave, and did his duty, and was free of the plague of human self-importance. Yes, this one had shown the progress of her vision in every way she could have asked.
She continued absorbing the information taken directly from Mort(e)’s mind. She could see the Martinis’ living room—yes, this was all familiar, viewed from only a foot off the ground rather than from the point of view of a bipedal primate. These were the thoughts he focused on when he used the translator. They kept his mind from bleeding out. So he had been trained. Not by Culdesac, but by someone.
There was—
THERE WAS A room, carpeted, with fluorescent light coming in through frosted glass. A basement. The cat was there. The Queen was the cat now, seeing through his eyes. He was still an animal. He was afraid and curious at the same time, all the time, because he had to be. But his belly was full, and his coat was clean. He protected this house.
The cat awoke from sleep with the dog beside him. The room was cold. His nose was a small ice cube on the end of his face. But the dog was warm. She was curled around him, her stomach rising and falling. She sensed movement, awoke, and stared at the cat. The cat rose. He wanted to take her to a place no one had ever seen before. It was a land he had discovered years earlier, before the children had arrived. Back when he was alone. She had to see it, now that the two of them were joined.
He waited at the foot of the steps until she got to her feet. He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Soon she was running after him, her tongue flopping and dripping. The dog was so excited that she ran right past the room where her master slept with the woman with the sad eyes.
A final flight took them to a small room with a cold wooden floor. An attic, crowded with boxes and coat racks, with two windows letting in light on either side.
The dog was scared. Her paws rested on the top step while her tail sagged in frustration. But the cat explored. There was a box of toys, scuffed but intact, still coated with the scent of the children. The cat pawed at them. Soon the dog lost her fear and joined him, drawn to the sheer wonder of the place.
By force of habit, the two travelers huddled near a box of winter coats, repeating the ritual they had perfected in the basement. She lay down first, sprawling out her legs and tail. The cat found the open space in front of her warm pink tummy. There was no boundary left. They were one, even in the cold reaches of distant lands. Wherever they were together, they were safe.
Some time passed before the humans began calling for the dog. The canine’s ears twitched at the sound. She sat up, listened, and then bolted for the stairs to find her master. The cat waited at the top of the steps. The dog stood beside her master and the woman. While the humans hugged and touched mouths, the dog peered up the steps to her friend. Then her master clipped a leash to her collar and took her away.
The cat was sad. He called to her. The dog did not answer. He fell asleep on the landing wondering when she would come back—
THE QUEEN EXTRACTED herself from the memory. The sensation of it was almost physical, like pulling her jaws from the open wound of a dying enemy. Meanwhile, the signals kept coming in from her chambermaids, all of them repeating the same alert. As mere vessels for this information, her daughters had no idea how repetitive they could be.
At last, she delivered an order to a gibbering maid:
BRING ME THE HUMAN.
She did not need to specify which one.
BRIGGS WAS STILL wearing the skinned legs of the raccoon when the guards led him into the Queen’s chamber. The “pants” had ragged holes at the knees, revealing the leathery flesh of the animal who had offered to be skinned. Briggs also wore a long-sleeved shirt made of some breathable synthetic fabric. That, too, was ripped and smudged, the result of being manhandled by the Alphas over the previous few days. The man’s face was serene. He had no doubt been briefed on what to expect if he were ever captured. But it was more than that. He did not fear death. He radiated the confidence of a man who had already tasted victory.
The journey Briggs had taken to get here was typical of many captured humans. Given enough time, the Colony caught all spies roaming the frontier. There were too many intersecting bits of data coming in from the Queen’s daughters: reports of unusual scents, the unique pitch of a human voice, eyewitness sightings, footprints. In Briggs’s case, an army of smaller ants tracked his scent trail, finding a pattern in his breath, his urine—which could never be disposed of completely—and his sweat. The Alphas found him as he stepped out of a wooded area on his way to the turnpike. Surrounded, Briggs stopped and removed the raccoon head. The Alphas brought him to the staging area for the Purge, where many others were corralled for the ceremony. Then he was on a ship, forced into tight quarters where he could neither stand nor lie down. When the vessel arrived at the island, the humans were marched out, with many going to a holding area. It was an open room with a communal feeding trough full of a protein liquid that would keep them alive for whatever purposes the Queen had devised. The strongest were often sent to the farms, where they would be fed a diet that kept them bloated and docile, like aphids. Specialized workers would extract blood from vents that punctured their sides. It was a far better fate than those who were taken to the laboratories. A few unfortunate test subjects were returned to the holding area, blinkered and driven insane, sometimes missing parts of themselves. That way, the others could see what awaited them.
Briggs probably heard the stories, still circulating among the prisoners, of how a small group of humans escaped the island to build the resistance. Because of this legend, incoming prisoners were often treated with reverence. Rather than showing that the ants were winning, the captures confirmed the success of the human uprising. There must be thousands of us out there, the most pathetic ones often assured themselves. Millions! All over the globe! Even the most cynical of the new prisoners could not convince the desperate ones to stop getting their hopes up.
The guards led Briggs to a small mound of earth directly in front of the Queen. Briggs sat down. A worker entered the room with a translator. Briggs did not turn to see. The Queen remained still as the worker fit the device onto the man’s head. Even after he was ready, the Queen waited a few moments longer.
When at last the only sound left in the room was the man’s breathing, the Queen leaned forward and connected her antennae with the device.
PLUMBING A HUMAN mind with the translator made the Queen feel like an army of worker ants invading an enemy nest. To navigate an unfamiliar structure, the workers would release their chemical trails, noting each time they crossed and each time they reversed direction, until the pathways with the strongest scent became the ones everyone used. It was a self-correcting method that never failed.
This human was older than most she had encountered these days, and so his mind was like an old termite colony, with many decrepit chambers and even more dead ends. She made her way through each of them, a fluid movement that overwhelmed the labyrinth. She did not have to find the perfect route—she merely had to flood the tunnels until she was everywhere at once.
Briggs. Charles Briggs, named for a father he never met, raised by his mother. He was a target at school for the other students, who made fun of his unkempt hair, his large glasses, the khaki slacks he wore almost every day. When he was twelve, Charlie’s Aunt Thea talked his mother into letting him stay for a summer at her cabin in the mountains, where she operated a tackle store. It would toughen him up. Thea was fierce and independent, built like a bear,
often dressed like a man in overalls and plaid shirts. The summer spent with Aunt Thea was both the worst and somehow the best of Charlie’s life. It gave him strength to endure anything, even the slaughter of his comrades. Even surviving in the woods for a month after the disaster in Charleston. Even skinning a masochistic raccoon for its pelt. That summer kept him alive. And now, he hoped it would help him face death like a man.
Like a man, the Queen thought.
Aunt Thea gave him a slew of tasks that summer: chopping wood, skinning potatoes, cooking breakfast, weeding the garden, changing tires. He did everything wrong, and punishments for failure ranged from a whack across the temple to having to sleep in the shed. It was that same shed where Thea took Briggs after waking him extra early to watch her slaughter a pig. She stunned it with a bat, then bled it to death with a small incision in the neck. When it came time for him to learn this new skill, his constant crying earned him a few more nights in the shed, now fragrant with pig blood and urine. She told him he squealed louder than the pigs because he was no better than one.
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