Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  “Really?” Vauna was shocked. “The guy who committed most of the atrocities?”

  “No, no!” Todd protested. “Let me explain. People don’t like the idea of what happened in the Old Testament, because they don’t like the idea of sin. The bible isn’t like what happened in Rwanda…”

  “Or here in Australia?”

  “Right!” Todd exclaimed. “There’s no justification for that. But…In the Bible, it’s not about the color of your skin. It’s about the color of your soul. In the Bible, death works both ways. Cities of sinners are destroyed. But when the Israelites, God’s own chosen people, go off the rails, they’re destroyed, too, and God sends the Chaldeans to smite them. And God destroyed his own Son when He took on the sin of the world.”

  “So…” Vauna asked, “are the ants sinners?”

  “Well, yeah!” Todd thought for a moment. “They kill, they steal, they covet their neighbors’ homes and storehouses. When fire ants sweep in, they wipe out ninety-eight percent of the native ant species. That’s genocide.”

  “Brutal.”

  “Yeah, nature is brutal.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the sky.

  “We are the Chaldeans,” Todd said. “We’re the scourge of God, weeding the garden, putting things right. We are at war.”

  Vauna was silent.

  She cuddled up against him, but he wondered if she really thought his words merely proved him insane.

  ***

  The river of ants came.

  The desert ants came, with bristles on the backs of their heads to keep sand off their necks. The imported turtle ants came, with their huge dish-shaped heads. The leaf cutter ants came, with tiny minim ants riding on their heads to ward off predators.

  The ants came, in a river five miles long and a mile wide.

  And Pine Gap was ready for them.

  Todd had settled on the sharpshooter chemicals, having not received permission to unleash Attila the Hun. The U.S. military picked up canisters of these compounds from his lab in San Diego, then flew them across the ocean to Sydney, and then to Alice.

  The black plastic traps were not available in sufficient numbers, so they used disposable Petri dishes, sent up from Adelaide and down from Darwin.

  The toxins were mixed with honey and blackberry extract and dispensed into the dishes, which were hand-placed in the sand every few feet, by soldiers walking the outskirts of Pine Gap and Alice.

  Lieutenant Osborne was worried that all this effort was like pouring a single cup of coffee into the ocean. Wouldn’t the poisons be too dilute?

  No, Todd reassured her. A hundred parts per million should be enough.

  He didn’t have to wait long to see if he was right.

  The river of ants came to Pine Gap, and then suddenly it stopped when it reached the ring of bait traps.

  The ants were like thirsty travelers who, having marched across the desert, paused to luxuriate at an oasis.

  They rushed over the shallow lips of the Petri dishes and swarmed the sweets. And the poisons.

  For several hours, the ants bunched up at the line of traps, with no desire to go further. They were enjoying themselves too much.

  It was as if the honey and blackberry made an invisible force field.

  Then all the food was all gone.

  And the ants moved forward as a single super-organism, past the line of traps toward the second barrier, the water moat.

  Todd, watching on video monitors, was completely disappointed.

  Maybe they should have let him unleash Attila the Hun. Maybe they needed more time for the poisons to work their way to the queens. Maybe he had under-estimated the number of ants. Maybe by an order of magnitude. Maybe he needed ten or a hundred times more poison to get them all.

  He turned away from the monitor, turned away from Vauna and Shorty. He couldn’t bear to see their disappointment in him.

  The ants, having no emotions, did not revel in their victory over the bait traps, but simply moved on to the water moats.

  These held them for a while.

  The ants tried to cross the water, which was six feet across, in chains made of ants. Yes, many would sacrifice themselves, drowning, but other would walk across their dead bodies to the other side. But these were washed away in the water’s currents.

  The ants also tried to cross using leaves and twigs as little boats. These, too, were washed away.

  Walking the perimeter, Lieutenant Osborne was pretty happy about the success of the moat until she felt an itch on her neck. At first she thought it was just formication, the false sensation that an ant was crawling on you.

  No, she realized. It was a real ant. Dropping from a tree branch spanning the moat.

  “Sergeant Kelleam!” she shouted into her comm. “I ordered all the trees chopped down!”

  “We did, ma’am!”

  “What about this one I’m standing under?”

  “Well, that one shades the commander’s office.”

  “He can lose his tree or he can lose his base! I want flame throwers here right now!”

  But before the torches arrived, streams of ants rushed the tree. Once some had discovered this avenue, they all knew. They swarmed the branches, crossing high above the water moat, and dropping down on the other side.

  Next was the final line of defense, the moat filled with gasoline.

  The ants approached this moat cautiously. In a coincidence of chemistry, some of the hydrocarbons in the gas smelled like the chemicals the ants used as alarm pheromones.

  So the ants snapped their jaws and sprayed poisons at the moat, as if it were an enormous enemy ant.

  Then they started bombarding it with clods of dirt. If they kept this up, they could cross it without having their feet ever touch the foul liquid.

  At that moment, the base commander approved the Lieutenant’s request to light it up.

  And a ring of fire appeared around Pine Gap, brightening the night sky. It over-saturated the vid feed as Vauna and Shorty watched, filling the screen with white.

  Soldiers cheered.

  The ants were stopped.

  For now.

  The problem was that the Lieutenant had assumed that this army of ants was acting like army ants.

  Army ants travel across the land, and so they can be stopped by obstacles on the surface. Like flood or fire.

  Most other ants travel underground, where they can’t be seen.

  This underground river, in fact, was flowing through thick tunnels, dug by mining machines made from koala claws and emu beaks and the bones of wallabies and sheep, re-animated by muscles made of ants.

  Yes, the fire stopped the ants on the surface.

  But it didn’t stop the river of ants from bursting up, through the ground.

  When Vauna saw the video of the swirling mass of bone and ant erupt from the earth, she bit her tongue. Perhaps she should have told the others of her discovery, even without film or other evidence. Perhaps she should have predicted this was what they were using the bones for. Huge, ant-driven underground mining machines.

  Pine Gap and Alice were quickly overrun.

  Commissaries were emptied, mess halls cleared out. Bikkies and lollies were eaten out of the jars on secretaries’ desks.

  And, then, just like that, the ants were gone.

  Moved on, moving north.

  In the end, Pine Gap only lost two laptop computers to the ants. Satellite monitoring was only briefly interrupted, and order was quickly restored.

  All of Pine Gap’s defenses had been nothing more than a rock thrown into a river. And the river had flowed around it.

  ***

  III. PHARAOH

  “What’s north of here?” Todd asked. “Where are we going?”

  They had stopped at a takeaway in the middle of nowhere.

  Todd paused to look at the distant hills, rounded by time. The land was beautiful in its antiquity, he thought. Here ancient flightless birds still walked the
earth. And the sun had bleached red sand to pink, green plants to gray. Like a faded photo. You could go backward 40,000 years, or forward. The land would look the same, he imagined. It existed outside of time.

  “Not much north of here,” Vauna said. “The Top End. And then you’re at the ocean, and the Equator.”

  Were the ants planning to cross the sea in rafts made of ants?

  After what he had seen, Todd did not put it past them.

  “I got you a Diet Coke,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said, “but I never touch the stuff.”

  “I thought you—-“

  She shook her head.

  “Let me go get myself a real Coke,” she said.

  “You’re not going walkabout on me again, are you?” Todd asked.

  “No,” Vauna said. “But I reserve the right to, later.”

  Then she pointed at a sign indicating mileage to Arnhem Land.

  “I should drive this next bit.”

  “But I’m not tired.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “Arnhem is Aboriginal land. You’ll be glad I’m behind the wheel.”

  ***

  They arrived at a new gatehouse to Arnhem, with one car in front of them.

  A yellow and black striped metal bar blocked their path. A trickle of ants zigged across under the bar and into Arnhem.

  The car in front of them was a rented Holden convertible with two blonde Yanks inside, skin as white as sour cream.

  “G’day, mate,” said the dark-skinned gatekeeper. “May I please see your permit?”

  “Fishing permit?” the American driver asked. “We don’t have one. How much?”

  “No, mate,” the gatekeeper said, pointing at a sign.

  YOU ARE NOW ON ABORIGINAL LAND. TO ENTER ABORIGINAL LAND, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BE IN POSSESSION OF A WRITTEN PERMIT ISSUED BY TRADITIONAL ABORIGINAL OWNERS, THEIR DELEGATE OR THE NORTHERN LAND COUNCIL. PENALTY FOR ENTERING ABORIGINAL LAND WITHOUT A PERMIT IS $1000.00.

  “So…I need a permit to cross?”

  “That’s right, mate,” the guard said. “This is Aboriginal land now. It’s not Crown land. It’s not public land. It’s private, owned by us, since they gave it back.”

  A much larger blackfella stood on the other side of the car. “Without a permit, it’s trespassing.”

  An emu ducked its head under the gate and strode into Arnhem.

  “Your kind doesn’t do well in gaol.”

  The American started sweating. Now he was the minority.

  “Could I buy a permit? Please? Sir?”

  “Well, you have to go back to Darwin.”

  “Darwin? That’ll take hours!”

  “Yeah, plus a week to process. Maybe two. That is, if you can get one. You know, they only let in 15 cars a week.”

  “This is insane—what if I just drove around—-“

  “Sure you could.” The largest of the Aborigines moved in front of the car. He was now joined by three others. “But there’s only one road. We’ll catch ya.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “And how’s that, then? You go off road in this and you’ll get stuck in a billabong.” The black pushed up and down on the front of the car. “Maybe flipped over by a water buffalo. And eaten by a croc. But…do whatever you want, mate.”

  The Americans swore at them, and the blackfellas just laughed and laughed.

  Then they fell back when the American revved his engine.

  But the gate remained closed.

  Vauna realized what was happening and slammed the ute into reverse. She barely missed being hit when the Americans spun around and sped down the road. Back to Darwin.

  “That was fun!” Vauna said. “This is, of course, why I wanted to drive.”

  She turned to Shorty in the backseat and said, “You should hide back there, among the equipment.”

  She pulled up to the gate.

  “G’day!” the gatekeeper said.

  “G’day!” Vauna said.

  “Where ya goin’?”

  “Eh, just mucking about.”

  The gatekeeper looked at Todd, and Vauna quickly put her black hand over his white hand.

  “He’s with me,” she said. “He’s fair dinkum.”

  After a pause, the guard said, “All right, then! Off ya go. Enjoy your holiday!”

  The gate opened, and they drove on.

  ***

  At the edge of the ocean, the ants made their stand.

  They began excavating a huge communal super-colony.

  Although they came from different architectural schools, there was no bickering over design or construction. A single female, a queen of queens, sent aggregation and pacifying signals throughout the hordes. Her orders were inviolable.

  She chose a nest topped by a large conical mound. Soon it was as tall as a red boomer kangaroo. Soon, twice that, and then twice that again. It was built with the aid of half a dozen wallaby and jumbuck skeletons, animated by ant muscles.

  By her command, sand and pebbles covered the eastern slope, warming the nest in the morning sun.

  The queen of queens chose leafcutter ants as middle managers. Overseers of the most complex colonies, they were ideally suited to this task. They collected—and taught other ants to collect—seeds, leaves and flowers to feed the massive fungal gardens, which were kept scrupulously clean and free of parasites. They ran the food distribution and garbage disposal systems, teaching others to deposit debris outside the nest, regularly turning it to aid decomposition.

  The leafcutters entrusted their pupae to the jaws of other ants. These pupae produced silk, and the ants wielded them in their mouths like glue guns, assembling shelters and tents made of leaves.

  Now the queen of queens sent new chemical signals. In addition to the chitins and chitosans they naturally produced for their armored shells, the ants would be making new materials. Multi-walled nanofibers with inclusions and cross-linkers of di-pentane-octane and tri-pentane-tri-heptane. New materials for a new project.

  In their previous lives, the ants had only built down, and out.

  Now they were building up.

  ***

  The blacks were fascinated by, and very possessive of, the ants’ construction project, the only one of its kind in the world.

  They began patrolling the border between Arnhem and the rest of Australia. Their goal: to keep out the balanda, the white man who had taken their land and given them smallpox. The ones who threw them in gaol on trumped-up charges and beat them to death in their cells, with no fear of repercussion.

  No, the white man was not welcome here.

  This was the blacks’ land.

  This was their time.

  And so they came.

  And came.

  Some came in business suits, some in T-shirts. Some came barefoot, stripped to the waist, their dark skin painted in white stripes like a snake, or dotted like a cowrie shell.

  Some spoke to Jesus. Some to the Wandjina, the ancestral spirits that dreamed the world into existence. Some believed Jesus was a Wandjina. And they listened as the spirits spoke back to them.

  They said the ants were building a ribbon up into the heavens, a road reuniting mother earth and grandmother sky.

  And as the ants built and blacks gathered around them, waving their flags of unity, whites massed at the border, looking in.

  One white army general fumed and foamed about the military dangers of the ants’ ribbon. He rode the lead vehicle of a column of armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

  Right up to the Arnhem gate.

  The gatekeeper said to him:

  “G’day, mate, may I please see your permit?”

  Permit? His permit was a Vulcan cannon and .50 caliber machine gun.

  The gate stayed down, though, blackfellas massed behind it. Telephone calls were made rapid fire.

  These quickly went up to the PM, who backed up the gatekeeper. He said he’d have the general’s head if he crashed the gate.

&
nbsp; And so, in frustration, the general unholstered his sidearm and shot it into the air.

  At that moment, several black soldiers climbed out the caravan, leaving their positions and strolling across the border into Arnhem, from where there would now be no extradition.

  ***

  As Todd and Shorty set up their portable chemistry lab, Vauna—with no particular expertise in such matters—excused herself to wander off.

  Todd hated to see her leave, and wondered if she would come back.

  She strolled through the crowds gathered at the base of the ribbon.

  Maybe her family was here.

  She had never seen so many black faces in one place, or in such variety.

  Some had black blood mixed with white, some with Japanese or Pakistani. Some had last names like Harris or Thompson, some Yunupingu or Nullyarimma. Some spoke only English, some also Yolnju or Tarawalla or Pitjantjatjara. Some represented the last of their tongues. When they died, their languages would die with them.

  Vauna did not find her family, but she ran into a man from a nothing town in the Kimberly. You can’t walk down the street, he said, without kicking beer bottles. There’s no work there, nothing to learn, nothing to do but get pissed on grog. But now, experiencing this Black Woodstock, he was changed. He would throw away the bottle. When he got back, he would bring in teachers. He would make sure his town had electricity. And computers. He would make something out of his life.

  Several groups of men sat in small circles, dreaming. Long ago their ancestors had sat around sacred stones, dreaming them into existence. Now they sat near the ants’ ribbon—the world’s largest lingam—dreaming into existence a new generation and a fairer Australia.

  A painted old woman sat in the dust, cross-legged. “Listen, you mob,” she said. “Let your souls sail between heaven and earth. The whitefella too young to know and too old to understand. Let your souls sail a little long ways up the pillar, and listen to the singing. Listen.”

  Vauna stood for a few minutes, but her soul stayed put, and she could not hear the pillar sing.

  ***

  “Now that everyone’s back,” Todd said, winking at Vauna as she came into the tent. “We can decide on the strategy for the final assault.”

  “What do you think went wrong at Pine Gap?” Shorty said.