Empire of the Ants (15 page)

They galloped away.

When they had recovered their wits, 103,683rd showed them a new series of corridors to go down. The further they went, the worse the smell got and the more used to it they became. You can grow accustomed to anything. The soldier pointed to a wall and explained that that was where they had to dig.

These are the old compost lavatories. The meeting place is just next door. We like to meet here because it's nice and quiet.

They passed through the wall and came out into a big room smelling of excrement on the other side.

The thirty soldiers who had rallied to their cause were indeed waiting for them there but you would have had to be good at jigsaw puzzles to talk to them. They were in pieces and their heads were often quite a long way from their thoraxes.

They inspected the macabre room, aghast. Who could have killed them there, at the very foot of Bel-o-kan?

It must have been something that came from below,
emitted the 327th male.

I
don't think so,
replied the 56th female, who nevertheless suggested he dig down through the soil.

As he drove in his jaws, it hurt. Beneath them, there was rock.

A huge granite rock,
specified 103,683rd a little later.
It's the bottom of the city, its hard floor. It's thick. Very thick. And wide. Very wide. No-one has ever got to the end of it.

It could have been the bottom of the world for all they knew.

Then they noticed a strange smell. Something had just come into the room, something they liked straight away. No, not a Tribe ant but a lomechusa beetle.

When she was no more than a larva, 56th had heard Mother speak of this insect:

Once you've tasted lomechusa nectar, there's nothing quite like it. It satisfies every desire and destroys the strongest will.

It really did suspend pain, fear and intelligence and ants fortunate enough to survive their supplier were irresistibly driven to leave the city to look for further doses. They could not eat or rest and walked until they dropped. If they could not find a lomechusa, they went into withdrawal, attached themselves to a blade of grass and allowed themselves to die.

One day when she was still a child, 56th had
asked why they allowed such pest
s to enter the city, when termites and bees massacred them without pity. Mother had replied that there were two ways of dealing with a problem. You either avoided it or you took it on board. The second way was not necessarily any the worse. In the right doses or mixed with other substances, lomechusa secretions made excellent medicines.

The 327th male was the first to go forward. Captivated by the beauty of the lomechusa's aromas, he licked the hairs of its abdomen, which were oozing hallucinogenic juices. With its two long hairs, the poisoner's abdomen bore a disturbing resemblance to an ant's head with its two antennae.

The 56th female also rushed forward but did not have time to start her treat. A jet of acid whistled through the air. 103,683rd had aimed and fired. The burnt lomechusa writhed in agony.

The soldier made a sober comment on her action:

It isn't normal to find these insects so deep down. Lomechusas can't dig. Someone must have brought it here on purpose to stop us going any further. We'll find something here.

The other two felt sheepish. They could only admire their friend's perspicacity. The three of them spent a long time looking. They moved bits of gravel aside and sniffed every corner of the room. There were few clues to go on but they finally detected a familiar musty smell, the faint rock scent of the assassins. It was barely perceptible, just two or three molecules, but that was enough. It was coming from under a little rock. They toppled it over and revealed yet another secret passage.

Only this one had one very important characteristic: instead of being dug in earth or wood, it was excavated out of the living granite. No mandible could have made an impression on anything so hard.

The corridor was quite wide but they made their way down it cautiously. After going a short way, they came on a vast room full of food: flour, honey, seeds and meat of various kinds. There were surprising quantities of it, enough to feed the city for five hibernations, and it was all giving off the same smell of rock as the warriors pursuing them.

How could such a well-filled granary have been built there in secret? And with a lomechusa to block the entrance, too! That little bit of information had never done the rounds of the Tribes antennae.

They treated themselves to generous helpings of food, then put their antennae together to take stock. The mystery was thickening. The secret weapon that had wiped out the first expedition, the strange-smelling warriors attacking them on all sides, the lomechusa and the food hidden under the floor of the city could not all be the work of a group of mercenary spies working for the dwarves. Unless they were extremely well organized.

327th and his partners did not have time to pursue their reflections.
Pom pom pompom, pom pom pompom!
Up above, the workers were drumming on the ground with the ends of their abdomens. Something serious was happening. It was the second phase of the alert. They could not ignore the call. Their legs automatically turned round. Moved by an irresistible force, their bodies were already on their way to join the rest of the Tribe.

The ant with the limp, who had been following them from a distance, breathed a sigh of relief. Phew! They had not discovered anything.

When neither his mother nor his father came back up out of the cellar, Nicolas at last made up his mind to inform the police. It was a starving, red-eyed child who turned up at the police station to explain that his parents had disappeared into the cellar and had probably been eaten by rats or ants. Two dumbfounded policemen followed close on his heels as he made his way back to the basement of number three, rue des Sybarites.

intelligence
(cont.): I have set up the experiment again, this time using a video camera.

Subject: another ant of the same species and from the same nest. Day one: she pulls, pushes and bites the twig without success. Day two: as before.

Day three: she gets the knack, pulls a little, wedges the twig by putting her abdomen in the hole and puffing it out, then lowers her grip and starts again. By fits and starts, she slowly gets the twig out.

So that was how it was done.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The alert had been caused by an extraordinary event. La-chola-kan, the most westerly daughter city, had been attacked by legions of dwarf ants.

So they were at it again.

War was now inevitable.

The survivors who had managed to get through the blockade set up by the Shigaepouyans had an incredible tale to tell. This is what they said happened:

At 17°-time, a long acacia branch had come up to the main entrance of La-chola-kan. It had been an abnormally mobile branch and it had suddenly plunged into the opening, wrecking it as it turned.

The sentries had then made a sortie to attack the unidentified digging object but had all been wiped out. After that, they had all stayed safe inside and waited for the branch to cease its ravages but it had gone on and on.

It had ripped the dome open as if it were a rosebud and poked about in the corridors. Even though the soldiers had bombarded it with everything they had, the acid had not stopped it.

The Lacholakanians had been paralysed with fear. It had stopped in the end, though, and they had had 2°-time respite before the dwarf legions arrived at the charge.

The smashed daughter city had found it hard to resist the first attack and had counted its losses in tens of thousands. Those who had escaped had finally taken refuge in their pine stump. They were managing to withstand the siege but would not be able to survive for very long. They were running out of food and the fighting had already reached the wooden arteries of the Forbidden City.

Since La-chola-kan was a member of the Federation, Bel-o-kan and all the neighbouring daughter cities were duty bound to go to its aid. The end of the first accounts of the tragedy had not even reached their antennae before action stations was declared. There was no more talk of rest and reconstruction now. The first spring war had begun.

As the 327th male, 56th female and 103,683rd soldier hurriedly made their way back up, they were surrounded by bustling ants.

The nurses were taking the eggs, larvae and pupae down to the forty-third floor of the basement; the greenfly milkmaids were hiding their cattle in the depths of the city; and the farmers were preparing stocks of chopped food to serve as combat rations. In the halls of the military castes, the gunners were filling their abdomens to the brim with formic acid, the shearers were sharpening their mandibles, and the mercenaries were forming up into compact legions. The males and females were withdrawing to their quarters.

They could not attack at once, it was too cold. But tomorrow morning at first light, war would rage.

Up on the dome, the temperature regulation vents were being closed. The city of Bel-o-kan was contracting its pores, pulling in its claws and clenching its teeth ready to bite.

The fatter of the two policemen put his arm round the boy's shoulders.

'So you really think they're in there, do you?'

The child looked exasperated and pulled away without answering. Inspector Galin leant over the stairs and shouted a ridiculous 'Hello, there,' but only the echo answered.

'It seems very deep,' he said. 'We can't go down like this. We need some equipment.'

Superintendent Bilsh
eim laid a podgy finger to his li
ps and looked concerned.

'Of course. Of course.'

'I'll go and get the f
ire brigade,' said Inspector Gali
n.

'All
right, and while you're doing that, I'll question the kid.'

The superintendent pointed to the melted lock.

'Did your mum do that?'

'Yes.'

'You've got a pretty clever mum, then. I don't know many women who could open a reinforced door with a blowlamp . . . and I don't know any who could unblock a sink.'

Nicolas was in no mood for jokes.

'She wanted to go and find Dad.'

'Yes, of course. I'm sorry. How long have they been down there now?' 'Two days.'

Bilsheim scratched his nose.

'And why did your father go down, do you know?'

'In the beginning, it was to go and look for the dog. Afterwards, we don't know He bought loads of sheets of metal and took them down and then he bought lots of books about ants.'

'Ants? Of course, of course.'

Somewhat at a loss, Superintendent Bilsheim confined himself to nodding and murmuring 'of course' a few more times. The case was getting off to a bad start. He could not get a feel for it. It was not the first time he had had to deal with a 'special' case. You might even have said they handed all the lous
y cases over to him systematicall
y, probably because he was good at making nutters think they had at last found someone who understood them.

It was a gift he had be
en born with. Even when he was li
ttle, his classmates came to him with all their weird ideas. He just shook his head knowingly, gazed at them intently and said 'of course'. It worked every time. Things just got complicated if you tried to make up long, involved sentences for the benefit of others and Bilsheim had noticed that the simple words 'of course' were quite sufficient. It was one of the mysteries of human communication.

It was odder still that the young Bilsheim, who hardly ever uttered a word, had earned the reputation of being an excellent speaker at school. He was even asked to make end-of-year speeches.

He might have become a psychiatrist but he had a thing about uniforms and a white coat did not really fit the bill. It was all to do with 'keeping up standards' and the police and army were the ones for that.

When he joined the police, his gift was soon spotted by his superiors. They off-loaded all the 'baffling cases' onto him systematically. Most of the time, he did not solve them but at least he dealt with them and that was something.

'Ah, and then there are the matches.'

'What about the matches?'

'You have to make four triangles out of six matches to find the solution.'

'What solution?'

'The "new way of thinking". The different "logic" Dad used to talk about.' 'Of course.'

This time, the boy rebelled.

'There's no "of course" about it. You have to find the shape that makes four triangles. The ants, Uncle Edmond and the matches are all linked.'

'Uncle Edmond? Who's Uncle Edmond?'

Nicolas perked up.

'He's the one who wrote the
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge.
But he's dead. Maybe it was the rats. It was the rats who killed Ouarzazate.'