by Anthology
“I think the geography was against us,” Todd said. “The ants were moving in a line, and they flowed around the barrier we built. But here…”
He pulled out a map of Arnhem.
“They’re already gathered in one place for us,” he said. “There’s no place for them to go.”
“Except up,” Shorty joked.
“Let’s be serious,” he said. “I say we encircle their super-colony and hit them with everything we’ve got, everything that’s permitted. The cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives, arylpyrazoles, heteropyrazoles, and lithium perfluorooctane sulfonate.”
Shorty nodded, but Vauna withheld judgment.
“As for attractants,” he continued, “I say we use everything. Sucrose, maltose, fructose, lithium salts, molasses. Everything.”
“The whole kitchen sink, eh,” Vauna said.
“You have different thoughts?” Todd said. “I’d love to hear them.”
“We’ve got a potent ant-killing force right here,” Vauna said. “We just have to unleash its power.”
“What is it?”
“Ants.”
Todd nodded, thoughtfully.
“You mean…” Shorty said, “we get the ants to turn on each other?”
“That’s a great idea, Vauna!” Todd said. “The basic ant alarm pheromone is a mix of undecane and formic acid.”
“I thought that only worked on some ants,” Vauna said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Some ants only respond to this call to arms by running around like crazy to avoid predators. We need them to actually attack each other.”
After consulting some papers, Todd added, “Maybe we could mix in dimethylated C27 hydrocarbons. That elicits aggression in carpenter ants. And pyrazines and alkylpyrazines. That drives fire ants crazy.”
The plan became clearer.
They had to be sure to out-compete the appeasement chemical, decyl butyrate, that the ants were using to keep all the disparate types pacified and cooperative.
If they used enough of the aggression chemicals, the ants could only respond in one way.
Vauna imagined the horror show that would happen.
Ants would attack, attempting to dismember each other at the joints. But, unlike a human head, an ant head doesn’t stop moving when separated from the body. A chopped-off ant head could keep biting, keep slashing with antennae, keep injecting formic acid for quite a while. Sometimes an ant warrior would clamp its jaws onto the leg of an enemy. If its body were cut off, the head would still stay clamped on, hindering its foe, even in death.
The three scientists would don protective suits as they sprayed the alarm and aggression pheromones on the ants.
The plan should work, even if they had the concentrations wrong. The ants themselves would make more pheromones, creating a feedback loop that would destroy them all.
The internecine ant war would be horrific, but there was no other way.
Now that the plan was settled, Shorty excused herself again to find some stubbies to drink.
Todd and Vauna were finally alone again.
They stared at each other, nervously.
Finally, Todd broke the silence by saying with a smile, almost as a joke, “Who are you, you magnificent and mysterious being from another land?”
“Who are you?” Vauna said.
“I don’t know!”
“I don’t know, either!”
“You know how, when I first got here,” Todd said, “I told you I thought of myself as Joshua?”
Vauna nodded.
“I’ve re-thought that,” he said.
“No more genocide?”
He smiled a tight-lipped smile. “I don’t think I’m Joshua. I think I’m Jacob.”
“Why,” Vauna said with a laugh, “because now you’ve seen a ladder from heaven to earth? With angels going up and down?”
“No,” Todd said. “I hadn’t even thought of that, but that’s clever.” His face became serious. “No, Jacob went into a foreign land and worked very hard for a long time…” He looked deeply into Vauna’s eyes. “To prove himself worthy…for the girl…he loved…”
With that, he leaned in to kiss her.
But she twisted her body.
And pushed him away.
Not sure what to say, Vauna blurted, “Didn’t that story end with Jacob getting tricked and having to do two seven-year stints?”
“It’s not a perfect analogy. I hope.”
Vauna shook her head.
“I do like you…” she said.
Todd threw up his hands in exasperation. “You know, my dating pool is very small. There are only a few hundred ant scientists in the entire world. And you’re a myrmecophilous eremologist and I’m an eremophilous myrmecologist! What could be more perfect than that?”
Vauna smiled at him, very sadly. “I can’t do this again…”
“Why? Why? Why?”
“Because of who I am,” she said. “Because of everything that’s happened to me. I don’t think I’m capable of loving anyone again.”
Todd looked into her eyes, sadly. “Tell me everything.”
“I told you I grew up very poor, on what you’d call a reservation,” she said. “And it was horrible. Horrible. I escaped through books. But instead of encouraging me, other blacks shot me down. ‘That’s a white thing to do,’ they said. They called me ‘Oreo’. Or ‘Coconut girl.’”
Todd looked at her, not comprehending.
“Black on the outside, white on the inside,” she said. “And so I tried to fit in, in white society. Have you ever had someone say ‘Happy birthday’ to you when it’s not your birthday?”
“Once or twice.”
“Happens to me all the time!” Vauna said. “If any other black girl had a birthday, I was being congratulated—because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us apart. It only hurt worse that they were trying to be nice.”
Vauna was now crying deep sobs.
“I try to walk down the streets, but it’s just not safe,” she cried. “Men catcalling, grabbing you. Saying the most awful things…”
“And that’s why you go to the outback,” Todd said. “To get away?”
She wiped away her tears. “It’s not so bad out there. Maybe I just don’t like talking to people. But the red boomers don’t care what color you are. Or the blue-tongued skinks. They’ll stick their tongues out at anyone.” She laughed sadly.
“I’m not like that!” Todd protested. “Come away with me!”
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because you—-”
Todd turtled his neck back. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Oh, Todd,” Vauna said, stroking his white hand with her black fingers. “Do you know what I see what I look at you?”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“I see someone else behind your eyes. Someone who hurt you very badly. Long ago.”
Todd was silent.
“I don’t know her name. But I can tell you this. She couldn’t identify ant species. She probably wasn’t even a scientist. Maybe she was jealous of your success and fame and world traveling. And she drank diet Coca-Cola, and was very upset when you forgot that.”
Todd was still silent.
“How can you hold me when you’re still holding onto someone else?”
Todd thought for a second and said, “We’re a mess, aren’t we?”
“Who are we?”
They both laughed sad, pathetic laughs.
“You know,” he said, “ants are hardwired to live in complex relationships. You take a grasshopper and separate it from other grasshoppers and it’ll be fine. You do that to an ant, and it can’t function. It can’t live. It needs to be in contact with others of its kind, trading chemicals, communicating. You and me, we’re both living in isolation. Maybe this is our last chance for a real human connection? Can’t we give it a try?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
&nbs
p; ***
The next few days were very awkward for Shorty.
Sometimes when Todd and Vauna worked together, perfecting the mix of aggression pheromones, they joked around, like little kids. Other times, Todd would whisper something to Vauna, and she would turn sharply away, then wander off to another tent to complete an experiment alone.
Todd sat at his make-shift lab bench, lost in his own dream time. He knew Vauna was just playing hard-to-get. Their work would defeat the ants, and he would prove himself worthy of her.
And then maybe they could go off on more great scientific adventures. They could go to hidden jungles, identifying new species. They could play around with Jerusalem crickets and tailless whip scorpions. They could don diving suits, exploring the bottom of the ocean, cradling giant marine isopods in their arms. They could discover new things, sharing the thrill of discovery.
This was all excruciating to Shorty. She felt like a helpless child, watching her parents fighting.
And so she was relieved when the day came for the final assault. They would dispense the chemicals and complete the mission, a happy science team again.
“No matter what happens, Shorty,” Vauna said, “you’ll get a good thesis out of this!”
Todd was excited, dreaming of their combined knowledge and strength as scientists. Nothing could stop them, if they were together.
Vauna used fewer and fewer words, her face inscrutable, hiding mysteries and secrets.
***
Finally, the three scientists donned their protective suits. Under his, Todd wore a gaudy plastic cross.
The suits were thick, like a down jacket. A puffed space lay between the inner and outer layers to prevent the ants from pinching.
The suits entirely covered their bodies, head to toe. So they carried an external oxygen source. Plus a heavy cooling unit. To say nothing of the cases full of pheromones.
Despite the cooling units, they were boiling hot in their suits.
There was an annular no man’s land, rocky and about ten feet wide. It lay between the ant mound and the surrounding Aboriginal camps. Outside the ring, the blackfellas sat, waving flags and singing of land rights and the better world they would build for themselves when they left this place. As a people, they were reborn and triumphant.
Inside the ring, the ground was dark with ants. They bubbled and boiled, in streams inches deep in places.
Anything alive that entered that space—goanna, millipede, snake—would be torn apart and eaten alive.
And into the neutral zone the science team stepped.
The outer membrane of their suits was impregnated with ant repellent. This came from the bitter foam excreted by the Archachatina, the giant forest snail, to repel armies of Ghananian driver ants.
As Vauna stepped out of the neutral zone and into the ant’s colony, Todd saw her suit slowly changing color. At first he thought that the ants were covering it with their own dead and poisoned bodies. Soon to crawl over these, to get at her eyes.
No, they were sticking little clumps of wet earth on her.
In either case, they didn’t have much time.
“Vauna, you OK?” Todd said over the radio.
She turned and gave him a thumb’s up. Then she looked through her visor straight into his eyes.
He mouthed the words, “I love you,” and he thought he saw tears in her eyes.
Inside her suit, Vauna’s voice caught in her throat. She wanted to say “I love you” back, but couldn’t.
Suddenly, she became very aware of sweat all over her body.
Is this what love is?
Sweat was everywhere, dribbling down her cheeks, into her eyes.
But it wasn’t sweat—
It was ants!
Ants were inside her suit! They must have found a pinhole or chewed through the seams. She could feel something—fabric, skin, ants—bunching up around her knees.
Inside her suit, she was drowning in ants as they began stinging and biting everywhere, even in her mouth.
If she ran, maybe she could toss out some pheromone cases before too many ants got her.
If she—-
Something told her to stand there, body and soul.
Maybe, she thought, she could be like Karl Schmidt, famed herpetologist who had been bitten by a poisonous boomslang snake and catalogued all his symptoms as he was dying. Bradycardia, no. But, tachycardia, yes. Plus: fever, delirium, the sensation of floating.
She felt disconnected from her body, as her blood percolated with formic acid, undecane, propionic acid and acetate.
She checked for more symptoms. Urticaria, hypertension, angioedema? Yes, yes, and probably.
After a while, the bites no longer hurt, no longer felt like white-hot firebrands.
No, the scientists were wrong. Ant venom did not kill. Formic acid was not a poison.
They were hallucinogens, unlocking the doors of perception.
She fell through layers of time, and words formed in her ears.
Listen to the pillar sing, they said.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you real?”
The voices were many, but she could not tell if they were male or female, young or old.
We are your ancestors. I am your ant mother. You are the ant dreaming woman.
“Doubtful.” Vauna laughed at the biological improbability of an ant-human hybrid. “Do I have blood or hemolymph? Can I have both an endo- and exoskeleton? How can an ant’s armor hold up the weight of—-”
Listen to the pillar sing.
Now, with a cocktail of ant poisons flowing through her veins, she heard.
The pillar was a harp string plucked by the wind, harmonizing with the songs that echoed through the billabongs and the leaves of the eucalyptus.
Each rock and each bush sang its own story. This hill was the fossilized heart of a kangaroo spirit. Those rocks were the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. Their songs were mixed with the drone of the didjeridoo and the snap of the clapstick.
Listen to the pillar sing.
And now Vauna understood that the trails she had traveled between watering holes were songlines. When she had gone walkabout all those times, her soul had sailed and she had sung the ancestral songs, never knowing.
And now before her was the songline that reached from earth to heaven.
“I am not an Oreo, not Coconut girl,” she said to herself. “I am ant dreaming woman.”
You are at home with no man, black or white. We are not human, and neither black nor white…
“Are you cytoplasm or ectoplasm? I want to know…” Vauna cried. “Your history, your ecology…”
Then come with us…
Tears in her eyes, she laid down the coolant and the oxygen tank and the case of ant pheromones, unopened, being careful not to crush any of her tiny ant sisters.
Come with us…
“For science!” she said.
Then she walked on, ripping herself out of her protective suit, like an insect molting its chitinous skin, and she disappeared into a sea of black faces, wondering where this new scientific adventure would take her.
***
“Vauna!” Todd cried over his radio headset.
Just before she was gone, he thought he saw her turn toward him and smile, as if to say, Goodbye.
“Vauna!” he screamed. If she failed her part, the entire mission might fail. And his mission to prove himself to her, to win her love.
He watched her put down her equipment and dissolve into the crowds.
“I’m out of here!” Shorty cried, dashing from the mound. “Maybe I’ll get a Nature paper out of this!”
The team had come apart and Todd had never felt so alone.
This was the man who had defeated the ants in the subways of Mexico City, by the lakes of Nicaragua, in the wheat fields of the Transvaal…
He stood helpless in the face of lost love.
Now he felt the terrible prickling of sweat all over his skin.
It was the a
nts, biting and stinging him everywhere.
As his heart raced and waves of delirium passed through him, he found words forming in his head.
It was not a booming voice, not Charlton Heston. Just words.
Todd, my son.
This still small voice had pursued him half way around the world.
“Speak to me,” he said to the voice. “And I will hear. But first, please tell me: Who am I? I am neither Joshua nor Jacob. I am utterly destroyed and lost!”
You are a good and faithful servant.
“Thank you.”
And I need you to be Pharaoh.
“No!” Todd screamed in his head. Pharaoh? The one who had kept the Israelites in Egypt? The one who would not let them go until God smote him and his people with plague after plague? The worst person in the Old Testament?
How could that be?
Let them go. Let her go.
“I can’t! Smite me with ten plagues and I will never let her go—isn’t that what love is?”
Todd started crying.
“Why don’t I deserve happiness? And love? I’ll take good care of her! We will plumb the depths of each others’ mysteries!”
Let her go.
He let the words pierce him through the heart.
Now he understood, at least in part.
Some mysteries were not his to solve. What would happen to Vauna? Or Gemma?
It was not his to know.
Let her go.
“I must decrease, so others may increase,” he conceded. He felt like he were dissolving into nothingness.
“This isn’t fair!” he screamed. “You say I’m good and faithful, but…I didn’t even get to unleash Attila or beat the ants or…I’ve worked so hard, struggled so long…Have you nothing for me? Nothing?”
The great myrmecologist collapsed on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
And the voice heard his words and took pity on him.
My son, behold now and wonder marvelously! it chimed. Then it showed him a vision just for him, a discovery no scientist on earth had ever seen.
Afterward, Todd sucked in his breath, ashamed at his insolence. “I am so sorry. And…T-thank you, thank you,” he said, standing slowly, gathering his things and returning to civilization. “Thank you.”
He had been expecting the voice to show him, if anything, the image of a girl.
But instead, this is the vision that he alone was allowed to see: