by Anthology
“In this case,” Todd said, “I think so. And here’s another thing. Ants are really good at re-distributing nutrients in the soil. Better than earthworms.” He put a reassuring hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “I’ll bet you that your next crop is going to be the best one ever.”
Zoe started crying.
***
As Todd and Shorty got back into the ute, Shorty asked, “Have you ever seen ants strip an entire field?”
“Nope.”
“They’re like locusts,” Shorty said.
“Actually, they’re nothing like locusts,” Todd said. “Locusts swoop in and eat everything. Including stuff that’s not food, like strips of dried paint off the walls. Ants are very smart and discriminant. They’ll even pick out the embryos from corn kernels before they store them.”
Shorty looked confused.
“So they don’t germinate.”
“What do you mean…‘store them’?”
“I’ll bet that corn is still out there.” Todd waved his hand at the empty field. “But the ants have taken it into underground chambers. It’s still there, just hidden away where we can’t see it.”
“Why do you think they need that much corn?”
Todd had no answer.
“Here’s another question for you.”
“Sure.”
“What do you think of Vauna?”
“Vauna?”
“I mean,” Shorty said with a giggle. “She’s an ant-loving desert scientist. And you’re a desert-loving ant scientist. That makes you…an eremophilous myrmecologist and her…a myrmecophilous eremologist.” She pushed back in her seat, letting her big words hang in the air. “What do you think?”
Todd didn’t have an answer to that question, either.
***
Several hundred miles to the north and west, the Aboriginal myrmecophilous eremologist was driving toward the sheep stations past Leigh Creek and Marree.
I like him fine, I guess, she thought to herself.
She screeched her ute to a stop in the red earth.
A skull, bleached white in the sun, lay in the strip of dirt between road and fence. It wasn’t human, thank goodness. It was an herbivore, with long, narrow face and two arching horns.
Another billy goat skull.
She had plenty of these. This one was already damaged, the cheek bone broken, the nasal bone smashed, the turbinates missing. The skull wasn’t worth saving, but the horns were still nice. They showed indentations where this goat had butted heads with another.
But I’m like Greta Garbo, she thought, shattering the skull against her ute’s roo bars, and extracting the horns.
I just want to be alone.
She tossed the horns onto a tray mounted over the dashboard.
It was filled with specimens.
Jasper from the Flinders Ranges. Smokey quartz from Clarendon. A strange, shiny black rock from Karoonda. It might be part of a lunar meteorite, because it was heavy and magnetic, but the shape was wrong. One side was bumpy, but the other concave and smooth, like a bowl.
All these wonderful and mysterious things she had collected, walking the land.
Alone.
Suppose I want to spend a month in the bush, so blue-tongued lizards and I can stick out our tongues at each other. Is that wrong? Does that make me a bad person?
She drove on.
She passed another goat skull and later a wallaby skull, without stopping either time.
Where she was going, there would be a lot more to collect.
If the rumors were right.
She drove on, turning at the servos and smash repair shops scribbled on her map.
Finally, she arrived at the mystery spot.
It did not disappoint.
It was a wide field of red sand, with rounded hills in the background. Studding the earth were dozens of bones. If not hundreds. Skulls, ribs, vertebrae, scapulae, tibias.
Were they human?
She would need a reference book to distinguish a kangaroo femur from a human’s. But the skulls were clear enough.
Roo. Koala. Horse. Sheep. Goat. No humans among them. Whew.
As Vauna climbed out of the ute, she approached cautiously.
The bones were covered with ants.
Had they killed all these animals?
No, she thought. The bones were too dry. No blood. White from the sun, with dark spots where remnants of muscle and cartilage had been.
The skeletons were disarticulated, the bones jumbled up.
But why were they all in one place?
Sometimes masses of animals would drown in a flash flood, and their bodies wash together. But…that would usually be a herd, the bones all one species. These were mixed. Koalas hung in trees. Wallabies and sheep did not forage together. Why would they be together in death?
Nothing made sense.
Then, in the corner of her eye, she saw something.
She thought she saw one of the bones move.
Probably from the pressure of hundreds of ants boiling up from underneath.
No.
The ants had not only dragged the bones here, but were re-animating them, with muscles and sinews made of chains of ants.
They were like massed Egyptian slaves, moving an enormous block of stone.
They had found a new application for the principle of the lever.
A frenzy of ants was pulling on a femur, erecting it like a skyscraper. Each ant clamped its jaws like visegrips around the waist of the ant in front, right before the gaster.
But the string of ants pulled too hard. The femur went vertical, then fell in the opposite direction.
But they tried again.
And then they were lifting an entire spinal column.
A swirl of ants and bones rose out of the commotion. It was an entire skeleton, perhaps four feet tall. It looked like it had been assembled from several animals, as the two thigh bones were not the same length. The pelvis was upside down, but the entire thing was moving. There was no skull, as the brain was distributed all throughout the body, in the thousands and thousands of ants.
Vauna walked among them, cursing herself. She had packed carefully, remembering to bring everything except a camera. Todd and Shorty would not believe her without evidence.
Yes, this was the thrill of discovery, but tempered with the fear of losing credibility if she shared it.
Then she felt another kind of fear.
As this monstrosity of bone and ant turned toward her, she shuddered in panic and ran toward the ute.
***
Todd pushed another colored pin into the wall map of Australia.
Red was current ant outbreaks. Green was where ants had been, but had now left.
Adelaide was celebrating the departure of the ants. As quickly as the ant tsunami had arrived, streaming through garages and factories, it had gone. The ants had appeared en masse, without warning.
And now, just like that, they were gone.
But they were heading north. The red pushpins formed an inverted V, an arrow pointing up through the middle of Oz.
“So what’s up there?” Todd asked.
As he asked the question, the door opened and Vauna came in.
She was still flustered, agitated.
“How was your great scientific adventure?” Todd joked.
“Uh…” Vauna calmed herself. “It turned out to be…” This experience was just too crazy to share. “A big nothing in the middle of nothing.”
“Well, that must have been disappointing,” Todd said. “But it’s good to have you back!”
“Thanks,” Vauna said, turning her attention to the Australia map. She composed herself and said: “North and a little west of here, after a long drive, is Coober Pedy. That’s opal mines and junkyards. And then, after another long drive, is Alice. Right in the dead center of Australia.” She stabbed a finger at the map. “You Yanks have a military base up there called Pine Gap. You won’t be happy when it’s overrun by ants.”
> ***
People have their maps, marking highways and airports. But other creatures have their own maps, superimposed on ours. Dogs don’t care about streets, only where other dogs are. The ancient ancestors walk the songlines of the earth, pausing to reminisce at waterholes and hidden places of spiritual power.
And intertwined in them all were the tracks of the ants.
They ran in thick rivers, millions upon millions, through the houses of Woomera and the new shops at Tarcoola.
Compelled by ineluctable chemical signals, the ants had left their ancestral homes. With nodules of iron oxide in their heads and gasters, they felt the hidden electromagnetic lines of the earth, following them north, fueled on their journey by stolen bounties of corn and wedding cake.
The ants came from myriad niches and represented myriad forms and faces. Some had jaws heavy like sledgehammers, some had jaws long and spikey to catch springtails and silverfish. Some were tiny, some huge in comparison. As if human-sized humans walked beside giants as tall as ten-story buildings. And these myriad myrmidons were peaceably marching together, straight up the middle of Australia.
Nothing like this had ever been seen before.
By white man or black.
Many Aborigines, like Vauna herself, lived modern lifestyles, with modern clothing, performing modern jobs in modern cities. But a few still clung to the ancient ways, speaking the ancient tongues, conferring with the ancient ancestor spirits. And these elders watched the torrent of ants, just as they had long watched the ebb and flow of waters. They kept calendars marked by millennia, not by seasons arbitrarily marked by days.
To them, there was no spring or summer, no fall or winter. There was the season of the Dharratharramirri, which ended when the balgur lost its leaves. There was the season when the pandanus would fruit, and the Dhimurru winds would blow. There was the season of the Burrugumirri, when mornings turned cold and the sharks birthed their young.
None of the elders were scientists in the Western sense, but they knew the land better than most ecologists, even world-famous eremologists.
The traditionals knew this land, this timeless land that had co-existed with them for forty thousand years.
They knew the ants.
They knew that licking the green ants firmed the bosom. That limonite deposits around ant hills made good pigments. That bushfires were coming when meat ants covered their nests with quartz chips. That ant poison was a hallucinogen that helped them commune with spirits.
But what were the ants doing?
The ants had chewed through walls separating room from room, through hoses separating water from air. Now they were chewing through the walls of time, the dividers between the now and the early-early days. And through these holes shot white hot Roman candles of Dreamtime, mingling with the modern age.
As three scientists tried to parse the “stigmergy,” the work that inspired the ants, the Aborigines asked a slightly different question.
In the ancient days, the ancestors had dreamed the world into existence.
What now were the ants dreaming?
They didn’t know.
But answering a call that they neither heard nor understood, the peoples came. They called themselves blackfellas, though their skin represented every shade from black to white, and they lived lifestyles from traditional to modern. And they gathered their families, tumbled them into jeeps and pick-up trucks and followed the ants north.
And Todd and Shorty piled grinding mills and gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers into a ute. Yes, Vauna would be joining them on this great scientific.
But none of them knew where they were going.
***
“The barrier will be here.”
The American First Lieutenant Lori Osborne pointed at the small map. Three lines, in red, blue and green, represented the defenses around the American facility at Pine Gap, in the dead center of Australia.
Todd nodded in agreement.
This was an important installation. A ground receiving station for a third of America’s spy satellites, including those going over China, Russia and the Middle East. If anyone launched a missile from space, they would see it here first.
Todd had read reports of carpenter ants and fire ants massing in such numbers that they shorted out electrical equipment.
The Americans were right to be prepared. And worried.
Todd, Vauna and Shorty—being non-military and thus not allowed on base—watched the Lieutenant’s presentation on a computer screen in a hotel room.
“What about Alice?” Vauna said, referring to the small town eleven miles from the base.
The Lieutenant was well aware of the touchiness of their relations with their host Aussies.
Peace protestors regularly drove up to the base’s gate, demanding that they “Close the Gap”. Some claimed that the Americans were spying on the Aussies, or else hiding secrets about flying saucers. Some complained that the base made Australia a target, painting a giant bull’s eye in the middle of their country.
“What are you going to do for Alice?”
The Lieutenant explained that Pine Gap, despite its importance, was geographically tiny. Only a few blocks across, and thus readily defensible.
Alice, on the other hand, was small for a town, but would still require miles and miles of defenses to encircle her and her airport. Nonetheless, joint forces were working to protect her.
The outer defense line around Pine Gap would be a string of poison traps. This was where the scientists would come in, selecting the right mix of toxins and attractants.
If that failed, there would be a moat of water, lined with concrete, dug completely around Pine Gap by the Army corps of engineers.
And inside that, a second moat filled with gasoline that could be set on fire if needed.
Similar defenses would be built around Alice and her airport, as best they could.
They had eleven days.
***
It wasn’t much time, but now they were playing in Todd’s domain.
He had available to him a veritable arsenal of chemical weapons to use against the ants.
He had the potent combo of cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives. They were like a pair of sharpshooters, taking out ants without harming innocent bystanders. They were safe to use around livestock, and had been recently approved for use in Australia. So no resistant ants had yet arisen.
But he also had a brand new N-phenylpyrazole variant, which got him very excited. It was related to, but more potent than, what he had used in Mexico City. Where the other compounds used finesse, this new chemical was like an atom-powered Attila the Hun. It was almost out of control, destroying everything. Not just ants, but grasshoppers, ladybugs, protozoans and all sorts of worms, both flat and round. It wasn’t yet approved for use. He was dying to see its devastating effects.
Which one would they use? Would the Aussies let Attila out of his cage?
And which attractant?
The idea is that worker ants would eat the poison, and pass it to other ants, who would eventually pass it to queens, killing them.
But first they had to trick the ants into taking the poison by mixing in a bait.
But what would the local ants prefer? Light corn syrup? Honey? Peanut butter?
The American lieutenant put a dozen of her soldiers at the scientists’ disposal. They went into the field, collecting thousands of ants, which were divided into groups of hundreds and treated to poisons and sweets.
As Todd collated the data, counting dead ants and calculating mortality rate and LD50. He was in the zone, zeroing in on the perfect magic bullet.
***
A few nights later, the science team decided to take their first break in almost a week.
Shorty went into Alice, ostensibly to get some stubbies, but really to give Todd and Vauna some time alone.
They sat together on a log, watching for meteors. Comets regularly hit the Moon, Vauna explained, knocking off rocks that land
in Australia in the form of meteorites.
Maybe someday they would find one together.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Vauna asked.
“Sure, anything,” Todd said.
“You’re religious, eh?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, “I like to think of myself as Christian but not crazy. Is that ok?”
“Oh, yeah, Todd,” she said. “When I was growing up, the only education we got was from a missionary.”
“Nice to know we did something right.”
“So my question is this…I thought you were supposed to be stewards of this land.”
Todd nodded. “Yeah, we are.”
“Then how do you reconcile that with preparing chemicals to kill millions and millions of God’s creations?”
“Yeah,” Todd said, slowly and pensively. “Good question. I once calculated how many ants I’ve killed. Twelve billion, more than one for every man, woman and child on the earth.”
“That can’t feel good.”
“No,” Todd said. “But you know what’s even worse? The torture. For science. I’ve chopped off legs and antennae, or else crossed the right and left antennae and glued them in place, to see what will happen. It really messes them up.” He exhaled deeply. “I’ve also pulled off their heads to see how long they’d keep biting and gnashing.”
“That’s pretty gruesome,” Vauna said. “As a summer intern in a micro lab, the first time I autoclaved a flask of bacteria—a hundred billion individuals—I felt pretty bad. Does it make you feel like you’re committing genocide against the ants?”
“Oooh,” Todd said. “That’s a powerful word.”
“Yeah, as a member of a race that’s been on the receiving end, I don’t use it lightly.”
“Nor I,” he said, “as a member of a race that’s doled it out.”
“So, as a Christian,” Vauna asked, “how do you feel about all the killing God commands in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile that with Jesus as a symbol of love?”
“Oooh, heavy questions.” Todd was silent for a few moments. “This is something I’ve thought about a lot.”
“Your conclusions?”
“I once heard a sermon about deciding what Bible character you wanted to be like,” Todd said. “And I chose Joshua, who travels to another country to do God’s work.”