Empire of the Ants Page 7

  Battles are still being fought between the two enemy species today but the termite legions rarely win.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  'You met him in Africa, didn't you?'

  'Yes,' replied the professor. 'Edmond was distraught. If I remember rightly, his wife had died. He threw himself into the study of insects.'

  'Why insects?'

  'Why not? Man has always been fascinated by them. Our most distant forbears were afraid of mosquitoes, which gave them fevers, fleas, which made them itch, spiders, which stung them, and weevils, which ate up their food reserves. It's left its mark.'

  Jonathan was talking to Professor Daniel Rosenfeld in Laboratory 326 of the Entomology Department of the National Centre for Scientific Research at Fontainebleau. He was a handsome old man with a pony-tail, who smiled as he talked.

  'Insects are disconcerting. They are smaller and more fragile than us, yet they goad us and menace us. And as maggots feast on our dead bodies, we all end up inside them in the end.'

  'I've never thought of it like that.'

  'Insects were long considered evil incarnate. Beelzebub is depicted with the head of a fly, for example. It isn't a coincidence.'

  'Ants have a better reputation than flies.'

  'It depends. Every culture views them differently. In the Talmud, they symbolize honesty. For Tibetan Buddhism, they represent the derisory nature of material activity. The Baoules of the Ivory Coast believe that if a pregnant woman is bitten by an ant, she will give birth to a child with the head of an ant while some Polynesians hold them to be tiny gods.'

  'Edmond had previously been working on bacteria. Why did he drop them?'

  'He was infinitely less interested in bacteria than in his research on insects, and ants in particular. And when I say "his research", I'm talking about total commitment. He was the one who got up the petition against toy anthills, those plastic boxes on sale in supermarkets, with a queen and six hundred workers. He also fought to get ants used as an "insecticide". He wanted russet ant cities to be introduced systematically into forests to clear them of parasites. It was a good idea. In the past, ants have been used to combat the pine processionary moth in Italy and the fir skipper in Poland, both insects which ravage trees.'

  'So the idea is to set the insects against one another?'

  'Mmm, he called it "interfering in their diplomacy". We did so many stupid things with chemical insecticides last century. It's important never to attack insects head on and even more important never to underestimate them. We can't hope to tame them like mammals. They call for a different way of thinking, a different approach. They can parry all chemical poisons by mithrida-tizing. If we still can't avert plagues of locusts, it's because the blighters adapt. Zap them with insecticide and ninety-nine per cent die but one per cent survive. And the one per cent which escape are not only immune but the young locusts they give birth to are 100 per cent "vaccinated" against the insecticide. Two hundred years ago, we made the mistake of making the chemicals more and more toxic and created hyper-resistant strains capable of absorbing the worst poisons without ill effect.'

  'Do you mean there isn't really any way of combating insects?'

  'See for yourself. There are still mosquitoes, locusts, weevils, tsetse flies — and ants. They resist everything. In 1945, we noticed that only ants and scorpions had survived the nuclear holocausts. And they even adapted to that.'

  The 327th male had shed the blood of a Tribe cell. He had committed the worst act of violence against his own organism. It had left a bitter taste in his mouth but how else could he, the information hormone, have survived to pursue his mission?

  If he had killed, it was because someone had tried to kill him. It was a chain reaction, like cancer. Because the Tribe had behaved abnormally towards him, he was obliged to do likewise. He just had to get used to the idea.

  He had killed one sister cell and might perhaps kill others.

  'But what did he go to Africa for? You said yourself there are ants everywhere.'

  'Yes but not the same ants. I don't think Edmond cared about anything after he lost his wife. With the benefit of hindsight, I even wonder whether he didn't expect the ants to help him "commit suicide".'

  I’m sorry?

  'They nearly ate him, for Heaven's sake. The driver ants of Africa . . . Haven't you ever seen the film When the Marabunta Roars’

  Jonathan shook his head.

  'The Marabunta is the horde of driver ants, or Annoma nigricans, which destroys everything in its path as it moves across the plain.'

  Professor Rosenfeld stood up as if he were about to face an invisible wave.

  'First of all you hear a kind of vast rumble made up of all the shouting and screeching, the beating of wings and stamping of feet of the little animals trying to get away At that stage, you still can't see the driver ants but then a few warriors suddenly appear from behind a mound. After the scouts, the others come up quickly, in columns stretching as far as the eye can see. The hill turns black. It's like a stream of lava that melts everything it touches.'

  The professor was walking up and down waving his arms, caught up in his subject.

  'They're the poisonous blood of Africa. Living acid. They occur in terrifying numbers. A colony of drivers lays on average five hundred thousand eggs a day. That's whole bucketfuls. Along it flows, then, this stream of black sulphuric acid, up banks and trees, quite unstoppable. Any birds, lizards or insectivorous mammals which have the misfortune to go near it are immediately torn to shreds. It's like something out of the Apocalypse. Driver ants aren't afraid of anything. I once saw an over-curious cat dismembered in a trice. They can even cross streams by making floating bridges out of their own corpses. On the Ivory Coast, in the region round the Lamto research centre, where we were studying them, the population still hasn't found a defence against their invasions. When they find out they're going to cross the village, the people run away, taking their most precious belongings with them. They stand the legs of the tables and chairs in buckets of vinegar and pray to their gods. When they return, they find the place cleaned out, as if a typhoon had passed through it. There isn't a scrap of food or any organic substance left anywhere. There isn't any vermin left either. Drivers are the best way to clean your house from top to bottom.'

  'How did you go about studying them if they're so ferocious?'

  'We waited till midday. Insects can't regulate their body temperatures like us. When it's eighteen degrees outside their bodies, it's eighteen degrees inside, and when there's a heatwave, their blood boils. The drivers find it unbearable. As soon as the sun's rays start to burn, they dig a bivouac nest and wait in it till the weather improves. It's like a mini-hibernation except that it's the

  heat that brings them to a standstill, not the cold.' 'And then?'

  Jonathan did not really know how to carry on a conversation. He thought the purpose of discussion was to pass on information like a communicating vase. There was one person who knew, the full vase, and one who did not know, the empty vase, usually himself. The one who did not know listened intently and kept the speaker going with the occasional 'and then?', 'tell me about that' and nods of the head.

  If there were any other ways of communicating, he did not know about them. Moreover, it seemed to him, from his observations of those around him, that they only engaged in parallel monologues, with each just trying to use the other as a free psychoanalyst. That being so, he preferred his own technique. He might not seem to know anything but at least he never stopped learning. Wasn't there, a Chinese proverb that said: Someone who asks a question is stupid for five minutes but someone who doesn't ask is stupid for life?

  'And then? We had a go, damn it. And, believe me, it was quite something. We were hoping to find that blasted queen, the five hundred thousand eggs a day lady. We just wanted to see her and photograph her. We put on big sewer-workers' boots. Edmond was out of luck. He took size forty-three and there was only a pair
of size forties left. He went in desert boots. I remember it as if it were yesterday. At twelve-thirty, we traced out the likely shape of the bivouac nest on the ground and began to dig a trench a metre deep all round it. At one-thirty, we reached the outer chambers. A kind of crackling black liquid started to flow from it. Thousands of overexcited soldiers were snapping their mandibles. In that species, they're as sharp as razors. They planted themselves in our boots but we carried on digging down to the nuptial chamber with spades and pickaxes. At last we found our treasure, the queen. She was ten times the size of our European queens. We photographed her from every angle. She must have been screaming for help the whole time in her scent language. It soon took effect. Warriors converged from all sides and formed mounds at our feet. Some managed to climb up by scaling their sisters who were already stuck in the rubber. From there, they went up under our trousers and then our shirts. We turned into Gullivers, except that our particular Lilliputians wanted to shred us into bite-sized pieces. The main thing was to stop them getting into any of our natural orifices: the nose, the mouth, the anus, the eardrum. Otherwise, we would have had it; they would have dug away at us from the inside!'

  Jonathan kept quiet, clearly moved. The professor seemed to be reliving the scene, acting it out with all the strength of the young man he no longer was.

  'I kept slapping at myself to shake them off. I knew that they were guided to us by our breath and our sweat. We had all done yoga exercises to train ourselves to minimize breathing and control fear. I tried not to think, to forget about these little bunches of warriors who wanted to kill us. Meanwhile I managed to fire off a couple of films, with some flash shots. As soon as we'd finished, we all jumped out of the trench. Except for Edmond. The ants had covered him entirely, up as far as his neck, they were trying to swallow him whole! I grabbed him by the arms and pulled him out, stripped off his clothes and used my machete to scrape off all the mandibles and heads that were embedded in his flesh. We had all suffered, but not to the same extent as him, because he didn't have the right boots. And most of all, because he'd panicked, he'd given off pheromones of fear.'

  'It's horrible.'

  'No, it's just good that he got out of there alive. Besides, it didn't turn him off ants. Far from it, he studied them with even more determination.'

  'And after that?'

  'He went back to Paris and we never heard from him again. He didn't even call his old friend, Rosenfeld, once, the rotter. I finally read about his death in the papers. May he rest in peace.'

  He went and pulled the curtain back from the window to look at an old enamelled metal thermometer.

  'Hmm, thirty degrees in the middle of April. It's incredible. It's getting hotter and hotter every year. If it carries on like this, in ten years' time, France is going to turn into a tropical country'

  'Is it really that bad?'

  'Most people don't notice it because it's happening very gradually. But we entomologists can tell it's happening from a number of details. We keep finding species of insects typical of equatorial regions in the Parisian Basin. Haven't you noticed how gaudy the butterflies are becoming?'

  'Yes, I have. I found a fluorescent red and black one on a car only yesterday.'

  'It was probably a five-spotted zygaena. It's a venomous butterfly only found in Madagascar until now. If it goes on like this. . . Can you imagine driver ants in Paris? There'd be panic. I wouldn't mind seeing it, though.'

  After cleaning his antennae and eating a few warm hunks of the smashed-in doorkeeper, the odourless male scurried away down the wooden corridors. He could smell that his mother's chamber lay in that direction. Fortunately, it was 25°-time and there were few people about in the Forbidden City at that temperature. He should be able to slip through easily.

  Suddenly, he detected the scent of two warriors coming from the opposite direction. There was a big one and a small one and the small one had some legs missing.

  They smelt each others' scents from a distance.

  It's incredible, it's him.

  It's incredible, it's them.

  The 327th male bolted away in the hope of losing them. He turned this way and that in the three-dimensional labyrinth and left the Forbidden City. The doorkeepers did not slow him down because they were only programmed to filter in-going traffic. There was now loose earth underfoot. He took turn after turn.

  But the others were very quick too and did not let him outdistance them. Then the male bumped into and knocked over a worker carrying a twig. He had not done it on purpose but it slowed the rock-scented killers down.

  Taking advantage of the respite, he quickly hid in a crevice. The ant with the limp was coming closer. He drew back a little further into his hiding place.

  'Where's he got to?' 'He's gone back down.' 'What do you mean, gone back down?'

  Lucie took Grandmother Augusta's arm and led her over to the cellar door.

  'He's been down there since yesterday evening.' 'And he's still not back up?'

  'No, I don't know what's going on down there but he strictly forbade me to call the police. He's already been down several times and come back up.'

  Augusta was dumbfounded.

  'But that's crazy. Especially when his uncle had strictly forbidden him to.'

  'When he goes down now, he takes loads of tools with him, pieces of steel, big slabs of concrete. I haven't a clue what he's up to down there.'

  Lucie put her head in her hands. She could not take any more and felt she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. 'And we're not allowed to go down and get him?' 'No. He's put a lock on the door. He locks it from the inside.' Augusta sat down, disconcerted.

  'Dear me. If I'd known talking about Edmond would cause so much trouble . . .'

  specialist: In the big, modern ant cities, repeated task-sharing over millions of years has led to genetic mutations. Some ants are born with huge, shearing mandibles to become soldiers, others have crushing mandibles to produce flour from cereals, and yet others are equipped with overdeveloped salivary glands to moisten and disinfect young larvae.

  It's rather as though our soldiers were born with fingers like knives, farmers with claw-feet for climbing trees and picking fruit and wet-nurses with a dozen pairs of nipples. But the most spectacular of all the 'professional' mutations is the one for love.

  In order for the mass of industrious workers not to be distracted by erotic impulses, they are born asexual. All the city's reproductive energies are concentrated on specialists, the males and females, princes and princesses of this parallel civilization. They are born and equipped solely for love and benefit from a number of features designed to help them copulate. These range from wings to infrared simple eyes, by way of antennae which emit and receive abstract emotions.

  Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

  His hiding place was not a dead end but led to a little cave. 327th holed up in it. The rock-scented warriors passed by without detecting him. The only trouble was, the cave was not empty. There was someone warm and sweet-smelling in it, who emitted a question. Who are you?

  The olfactory message was clear, precise and imperative. Thanks to his infrared simple eyes, he could make out the big animal questioning him. As far as he could tell, it must have weighed at least ninety grains of sand. It was not a soldier, though. It was something he had never seen or smelt until then.

  A female.

  And what a female! He took the time to look her over. She had shapely, slender legs decorated with litde hairs that were deliriously sticky with sexual hormones. Her thick antennae sparkled with strong scents. The red lights in her eyes made them look like two bilberries. Her massive abdomen was smooth and tapering. Her broad thoracic shield was surmounted by an adorably grainy mesonotum and her wings, lastly, were twice as long as his own.

  The female opened her sweet little mandibles and jumped at his throat to decapitate him.

  He could not swallow. He was stifling. Given his lack of passports, the female
was not about to relax her embrace. He was a foreign body and must be destroyed.

  However, the 327th male managed to free himself by taking advantage of his small size. He climbed onto her shoulders and squeezed her head. Now it was her turn to worry. She struggled to get free.

  When she had worn herself out, he threw his antennae forward. He did not want to kill her, just get her to listen to him. It was not that simple. He wanted to have AC with her. Yes, absolute communication.

  The female (the 56th, according to her clutch number) moved her antennae away to avoid his touch. Then she reared up to rid herself of him but he remained firmly fixed to her mesonotum and increased the pressure of his mandibles. If he carried on, the female's head would be torn off.

  She stopped moving. So did he.

  With the 180° vision of her simple eyes, she could see the aggressor perched on her back clearly. He was very small. A male!

  She remembered what the nurses had taught her:

  Males were half-beings. Unlike all the city's other cells, they were equipped with only half the chromosomes of the species. They were conceived from unfertilized eggs and were therefore big ova, or rather big sperms, living out in the open.

  She had a sperm on her back who was strangling her. She found the idea almost amusing. Why were some eggs fertilized and others not? Probably because of the temperature. Below 20°, the sperm store was not activated and Mother laid unfertilized eggs. Males were therefore born of the cold, like death.

  It was the first time she had ever seen one in flesh and chitin. Whatever could he be looking for here in the virgins' quarters? It was taboo territory, reserved for female sexual cells only. If any old foreign cell could get into their fragile sanctuary, the door was open to all kinds of infection.