Empire of the Ants (25 page)

The spider - who had no name, for solitary creatures do not need to recognize others of their kind - waited calmly. When he was younger, he used to get carried away with enthusiasm and lost quite a few of his prey that way. He thought that any insect caught in his web was condemned. In reality, only 50 per cent died on contact. The time factor was crucial.

You just had to wait and the terrified game would enmesh itself without any assistance. Such was the first precept of spider philosophy:
There is no better combat technique than to wait for your enemy to destroy himself

After a few minutes, he went to take a closer look at his catch. It was a queen, a russet queen from the western empire, Bel-o-kan.

He had already heard of the ultra-sophisticated empire. Its millions of inhabitants had apparently become so 'interdependent' that they could no longer feed themselves unaided. It was a sorry state of affairs and hardly constituted progress!

One of their queens . . . He was holding in his claws a piece of the invaders' future. He had seen his own mother chased by a horde of red weaver ants and he did not like them.

He eyed his prey, who was still struggling. The stupid insects, would they never understand that panic was their worst enemy? The more the winged ant tried to escape, the more entangled it became in the silk, damaging the web and annoying the spider into the bargain.

56
^th
’
s anger gave way to despondency. She could now hardly move. With her body already swathed in silk, every movement added a layer to her strait-jacket. She had never dreamt that she would come to such a stupid end after overcoming so many difficulties.

She was born in a white cocoon and she would die in one too.

The spider came even nearer, checking the damaged lines on the way, and 56th had a close-up view of a magnificent orange and black animal with a head crowned with eight green eyes. She had already eaten ones like it. Now it was her turn to be lunch and the spider was spitting silk at her.

You can never bundle them up too much, said the spider to himself before displaying two alarming poison hooks. But spiders do not actually kill, not right away. They like their meat warm, so rather than finishing their prey off, they stun it with sedative venom and only wake it to take a little nibble. That way, they have nice fresh meat to eat whenever they like, safe in its silk wrapping. Sometimes it lasts them a week.

56th had heard of the custom. She shivered. It was a fate worse than death.
To
have all her limbs amputated one by one . . . Every time you woke up, something got ripped off and then you were put to sleep again. There was a little less of you each time, until your vital organs were finally removed and you were at last liberated by the gift of sleep.

It was better to die by her own hand. Trying not to see the horrible hooks so close to her, she set about slowing down her heartbeats.

At that very moment, a mayfly struck the web with such force that he was immediately bound up tight in the silk. He had only been born a few minutes earlier and would die of old age in a few hours' time. The mayfly's life was a short one. He had to act quickly. There was not a fraction of a second to lose. How would you spend your life if you knew that you were born in the morning only to die in the evening?

He had no sooner emerged from his two years' larval life than he set out to look for a female with reproduction on his mind. It was a vain search for immortality through his offspring. He would spend his only day on the quest, with no thought of eating or resting or being particular.

His main predator was time and every second was an adversary. Compared with time itself, the terrible spider was only a delaying factor, not a full-blown enemy.

He could feel old age coming on apace. In a few hours' time, he would be senile. He was done for and had been born for nothing. It was a bitter blow.

He struggled to get free. The trouble with spiders' webs was that if you moved, you had had it but if you did not move, you were done for anyway.

The spider came up to him and gave a few extra turns of the cord. These two fine kills would supply him with all the protein he needed to make a second web the next day. But just as he was about to put his victim to sleep again, he detected a different vibration, this time an intelligent one.
Tap tap taptaptap tap tap tap-tap.
It was a female. She came towards him along a thread on which she tapped out a signal:

I’
m
yours. I haven't come to steal your food.

Her way of vibrating was the most erotic thing the male had ever felt.
Tap tap taptaptap.
Ah, he could no longer resist her charms and ran to his beloved (a mere slip of a thing only four moults old, whereas he was already twelve). She was three times as big as he but then he liked his females big. He pointed to the two prey from which they would later draw fresh strength.

Then they took up the copulating position, no simple matter where spiders are concerned. The male had no penis but a kind of double genital cannon. He hurriedly built a target, a small-scale web, which he showered with gametes, then moistened one of his legs in it and stuffed it into the female's receptacle. He was very excited and did it several times over. The young beauty for her part was so close to swooning that she suddenly could not stop herself grabbing hold of the male's head and biting it off.

After that, it would have been stupid not to eat him all. Once she had finished she was still hungry. She threw herself on the mayfly and shortened his life still more. Then she turned towards the ant queen, who, seeing it was injection time again, panicked and squirmed.

It really was 56th s lucky day, for a new character now burst noisily onto the scene from the depths of the horizon and changed the situation. It was another of the creepy crawlies from the south who had recently moved up north. This time it was a very big one, a rhinoceros beetle. It struck the heart of the web, stretched it like glue and broke it. 95/10 webs are strong but only up to a point. The fine silk doily was torn to shreds, and tattered remnants of it floated in the air.

The female spider had already jumped, clinging to her safety rope. Freed from her white strait-jacket, the ant queen dragged herself along on the ground discreetly, unable to take off.

But the spiders thoughts were elsewhere. She climbed up a branch to build a silken nursery in which to lay her eggs. When her dozens of offspring hatched, their first thought would be to eat their mother. Spiders were like that. They did not know how to say thank you.

'Bilsheim!'

He hastily held the receiver away from his ear as if it had bitten him. It was his boss, Solange Doumeng. 'Hello?'

'Why haven't you carried out my orders? What are you playing at? Are you waiting for the whole city to disappear into this cellar? I know you, Bilsheim. The only thing you ever want to do is take it easy. I won't have layabouts. I insist you settle this affair within forty-eight hours.'

'But. . .'

'There's no but about it. Your guys have been given my instructions. All you have to do now is go down with them tomorrow morning. The equipment will be there. Get off your backside, for God's sake!'

His hands began to tremble. He was not a free man. He had to obey if he wanted to keep his job and avoid becoming a social outcast. At that point in time, the only way he could conceive of freedom was as a tramp and he was not quite ready for that. An ulcer formed on the battlefield of his stomach. In the end, his respect for order overcame his taste for freedom and he complied.

The troop of huntresses were watching the lizard from behind a rock. He was a good sixty heads (eighteen centimetres) long. His tough, greenish-yellow armour with black markings was both frightening and disgusting. 103,683rd had the impression that the markings were splashes of its victims' blood.

As expected, the animal was sluggish with cold. He was walking in slow motion and seemed to hesitate before putting his foot down anywhere.

Just as the sun was about to disappear, a pheromone went out.

Kill the Beast!

The lizard saw an army of aggressive little black creatures sweeping down on him. He reared up slowly, opened a pink mouth, lashed the nearest ants with a quick tongue and swallowed them down. Then he gave a little burp and made off in a flash.

Breathless and dumbfounded, the huntresses were left about thirty fewer in number. For someone anaesthetized by the cold, the lizard was not exactly defenceless.

103,683rd, although she could never be suspected of cowardice, was one of the first to say it was suicide to attack such an animal. He was an impregnable stronghold. His skin was proof against mandibles or acid and his size and speed, even at a low temperature, gave him an unassailable superiority.

However, the ants did not give up. Like a pack of tiny wolves, they threw themselves on the trail of the monster. They galloped under the ferns throwing off menacing pheromones that smelt of death. For the time being, this only frightened the slugs, but it helped the ants to feel terrible and invulnerable. They caught up with the lizard a few thousand heads further on, clinging to the bark of a spruce digesting his breakfast.

They had to act fast. The longer they waited, the more energy he would have accumulated. If he was quick when it was cold, he would be invincible when stuffed full of solar calories. They put their antennae together to confer and decided on the tactics to adopt in their attack.

Some warriors dropped onto the animal's head from a branch. They tried to blind him by nibbling his eyelids and started to bore into his nostrils. But this first commando group failed. The irritated lizard brushed his face with his leg and swallowed the stragglers.

A second wave of assailants came running up. When they were almost within range of his tongue, they made a wide detour before swooping brutally on the stump of his tail. As Mother said:
Each enemy has his weak point. Find it and concentrate your attacks on it.

They re-opened the scar by burning it with acid and dived inside the lizard, invading his bowels. He rolled on his back, pedalling his hind legs in the air and striking his stomach with his forelegs. A thousand ulcers were gnawing at him.

Then another group at last got a foothold in his nostrils, which were immediately enlarged and hollowed out with jets of boiling acid.

Further up his face, they were attacking his eyes. They burst the soft marbles but the eye sockets turned out to be blind alleys. The holes in the optic nerves were too narrow to enter to reach the brain so they joined forces with the teams already deep inside the nostrils.

The lizard writhed and stuck its leg in its mouth to try and squash the ants piercing its throat but it was too late.

In a corner of its lungs, 4,000th met up with her young colleague, 103,683rd. It was pitch-black and they could see nothing because asexual ants have no infrared simple eyes. They joined the ends of their antennae together.

Our sisters are busy. Let's take advantage of it to leave for the termite hill of the east. They'll think we've been killed in combat.

They left the same way they had come in, through the caudal stump, which was now bleeding profusely.

The next day, the lizard would be cut up into thousands of edible strips. Some would be covered in sand and carted off to Zoubi-zoubi-kan. Others would even reach Bel-o-kan and a whole new epic tale would be made up to describe the hunt. The ant civilization needed to take comfort from its strength. Conquering lizards was something it found particularly reassuring.

hybridization
: It would be wrong to suppose that the nests are impenetrable to foreigners. Each insect admittedly bears the scent flag of its city but that does not mean that it is 'xenophobic' in the human sense of the word.

If, for example, you mix a hundred
Formica rufa
ants and a hundred
Lasius niger
ants, including a fertile queen of each species, in a vivarium full of earth, you notice that after a few nonfatal skirmishes and lengthy antenna discussions, the two species start to build the anthill together. Some corridors are adapted to the size of the russet ants, others to the size of the black ants, but they intersect and mingle, proving that neither species is dominant and neither tries to shut the other up in a closed quarter forming a ghetto within the city.

Edmond Wells,
Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge

The path leading to the eastern territories had not yet been cleared. The wars against the termites had prevented all pacification of the region.

4,000th and 103,683rd trotted along a trail that had been the scene of a good many skirmishes. There were magnificent, poisonous butterflies flying overhead, which they could not help but find disturbing.

Further on, 103,683rd felt something crawling under her right leg. She eventually discovered that it was mites, tiny creatures equipped with points and antennae, hairs and hooks, which migrate in herds in search of nice dusty nooks. 103,683rd was amused at the sight.
To
think there were beings as small as mites and as big as ants on the same planet.