Morte (5 page)

Though her body was thousands of years old, her mind housed the collective memory of the Colony. Every victory, every defeat, every horrible death, was recorded in the chemical
language of her people and stored in her brain. One death was difficult enough. She had lived billions and billions, stretched over millennia.

There came a day late in the war with no name when the humans were close to discovering her lair, buried deep within the newly formed island in the ocean. The earth above shook with their war machines. The humans brought bombs and digging devices, along with thousands of stamping boots. The Queen lay in her chamber, prone, bloated, having grown to the size of a great whale, a beast that occupied more space than the original colony in which she was born. As advanced as her brain was—as monstrous as she was—her body was still a powerless, egg-laying factory. Trapped and helpless, through her own doing. That was why the humans could never be allowed to get close. They would have burned her and danced on the corpse while believing that they had fulfilled some prophecy foretold by their magic books and witch doctors. The Colony would not end like that. The Queen swore it. She had started this war after centuries of planning. She would see it through until all the humans were dead, and the world and its deserving inhabitants were remade in her image.

The earth continued to rattle and groan as the human and insect armies fought aboveground. Another explosion on the surface throttled the chamber and shook loose a hunk of earth that crashed to the ground. The Queen had driven the humans mad with fear by then. An animal forced into a corner posed a threat, but a human faced with extinction was unpredictable and savage, positively devolved.

All around her, the Queen’s daughters continued their work of licking her swollen abdomen, clearing it of debris and pathogens as it pulsated and squeezed out new eggs. If this entire chamber collapsed, if all her chambermaids had their heads
chopped off, they would continue licking until their brains finally shut down from a lack of blood and oxygen. Their devotion was absolute.

A procession of oversized workers carried in their jaws the swollen, nearly transparent larvae of the Alpha soldiers, the ones bred to be larger than a human. They could snap a man in half, tip over a tank, endure countless projectiles from the humans’ guns and cannons. After these super-soldiers hatched, the Queen carried out her ancient task of holding each one, touching antennae with it, and imparting some—but of course not all—of her immense knowledge. Enough for them to fulfill their duty. They could not handle much more than that. Her daughters could only follow her orders, not analyze and agonize over them like she could.

What to offer the new soldiers on this particular day posed a challenge. The Colony was so close to victory over the humans, yet they could lose it all so quickly. Her own mother, the so-called Misfit Queen, had been forced to make the same decision many years earlier. And the Misfit chose to give Hymenoptera
everything
. It was both the source of Hymenoptera’s greatness and the root of her misery. While she hated this gift, the Colony would have failed, and the humans would have won long ago, had she not accepted it.

The Queen delivered to each of the Alphas that day a summary of the war and the Colony’s history, going back to her grandmother, the Lost Queen, the one whose failure had triggered the conflict with humanity. That foolish monarch had ruled thousands of years earlier. Unchallenged, controlling vast stretches of the earth and its underground, the Lost Queen thought herself the planet’s rightful ruler. Hers was the species best suited for leadership: unhindered by sentimentality, fear, or a misguided belief that this world had been created solely
for them.

While the Misfit was still in the larval stage, the Lost Queen was learning far too late that the Colony was losing out to the humans, ceding land, food, water, and dominion over other creatures. And while the Lost Queen tarried, unable to comprehend the danger surrounding her, an army of men swept over the land to attack the anthills that had risen up in defiance of one of their cities. The stink of human sandals and the thundering of their feet alerted the Colony, but it was too late. The humans brought with them sharp tools and torches. They attacked during the day, when the ants would be sluggish under the desert sun. Millions were ordered to their deaths in defense of the Colony. Entire bloodlines were lost. Throughout the tunnels and byways, the cloying scent of oleic acid—the ants’ alarm signal of death—clung to the walls, a symbol of their defeat.

Though the ants had been attacked before, there had been a harmony to things. Both they and their enemies knew that wiping out the other would not be wise in the long run. Equilibrium was needed. But this assault from the humans was something different. The sandaled men intended to murder every last one of the ants, not to merely set a boundary between their worlds. The Lost Queen knew then that she was facing a race of evil gods. These creatures killed for pleasure, yet regarded only their own suffering as significant. Such a species could not be reasoned with. They could be shown no mercy.

And so, faced with the onslaught, the Lost Queen’s daughters retreated to their catacombs while the humans plowed over their cities. When the earth was quiet again, the Lost Queen ordered the workers to dig their way out. All efforts were redirected. Even breeding and collecting food were put on hold. The existing larvae were triaged, the weaker ones feeding the diggers until they died of exhaustion and were replaced by the
next in line. The future would have to wait until the present was resolved.

By the time the ants emerged from the dirt, the land around them had become a vast field of crops, seemingly endless in every direction. The Lost Queen’s gamble had worked. There was food everywhere. She ordered her daughters to feed so they would simultaneously weaken the human city. In only a few hours, the ants devoured the bulk of the crops. When morning broke, the farmers arrived to find that much of their harvest had been destroyed. Before they could react, the ants, emboldened, swarmed the ankles of the men and bit down into the flesh. Many brave ones died in that moment of blissful revenge, crushed by the flailing hands of the panicked humans. One of the farmers was so shocked that he hyperventilated and passed out in the dirt. The other humans retreated to the city wall.

The Lost Queen herself mounted the unconscious man’s body as her subjects entered the mouth, nostrils, and ears. Thousands of years later, Hymenoptera was still able to access this memory. She could hear the sound of their jaws ripping flesh. She could smell the opened capillaries, the scent of iron all the more potent after spending so much time buried in the sterile earth. The man convulsed and then lay still.

The Lost Queen sent scouts within the city walls. Inside, they observed the humans lighting a great pyre upon their temple’s altar, where they prayed for deliverance from this plague. For several days, while the ants hollowed out the farmer’s corpse, the humans sacrificed animals on the fire, hoping to reverse whatever they had done to disappoint their creator. Later, unsatisfied with—or uncertain about—the divine answer they received, the humans began placing live women and children into the flames, all the while whooping and beating their chests like the partially evolved monkeys that they were. To
the ants, nothing demonstrated the depravity of these primates more than their blood rituals, and the violence and nihilism that came with them.

At last the city gates burst open. Men ventured into the field carrying buckets filled with an oily liquid. They dipped torches into the vessels, lit them on fire, and tossed the flaming orbs into the crops. Now it was the ants’ turn to panic. The Lost Queen ordered another attack, confident that she could make an example of some other human, but a well-placed torch cut off the advance. She had underestimated the human capacity for self-destruction. There was no way, she thought, that the humans would destroy what remained of their own food supply in order to avenge the death of one worker, or to please some invisible deity. Any doubts she may have had about human cruelty vanished when one of the men, in his zeal to hurl a torch, accidentally spilled the flammable slime onto his tunic and lit himself on fire. Thinking that this was part of whatever curse had befallen them, the other humans shoved the doomed man into the crops. He plunged forward into the hot soil, twisting in agony before dying.

The ants crashed into one another while the heat around them grew. Abdomens burst, the victims hopelessly wagging their antennae, searching for some relief, or at least new orders. The strong ones tried to climb over the dead to safety, only to have the liquid fire poured upon them. Thousands of chemical sirens rang out. The scent trail leading to safety evaporated. The disoriented ants could smell their own flesh as it cooked inside them.

Defeated, with the Lost Queen missing and presumed dead, the surviving ants returned to their catacombs. There was no communication, no reassuring scents from one to another. There was only digging for what seemed like weeks. At last, they reached their old tunnels and regrouped.

Though the ants never had a need for myths, in this desperate
hour, the closest thing to an ant legend—the Misfit Queen—was born.

A team of workers searched the catacombs for eggs. Many of the nurseries had caved in, or their temperatures had fluctuated so much that the eggs were useless. Meanwhile, another team of ants tried to locate survivors who could serve as a temporary queen, for only one of these could mate with a drone and use his collected sperm to fertilize the eggs. After three days, the ants came across a chamber of larvae, including a sickly queen who, in the confusion, had mated with a number of drones. The males lay dead beside her, their service to the Colony complete. Under normal circumstances, this traitorous queen would have been banished, having collected sperm outside of the annual mating day. Instead, the workers began to transport a number of healthy eggs to the new royal court. Their chemical signal permeated the tunnels, saying,
Clear a path
.

With the eggs in place, the Misfit Queen was put to work. Her first task was to use the drones’ sperm to breed a clutch of fertile females. Exhausted and near death, the Misfit at one point tried to eat one of the eggs brought before her. The workers gently pulled her away and nudged her along until she collapsed, just as the final egg had been fertilized, and the first of the new queens was hatching.

As the Misfit lay dying, the strongest of the new queens emerged from her molting, rising taller than the others, a formidable leader destined for greatness. The Misfit leaned toward her daughter, her replacement, and their antennae touched in the ancient communion of their species.

The first chemical signal the great Hymenoptera received from her mother was this:

You will avenge our people
,

by the light of your wisdom

and the darkness of your heart
.

You will travel beyond the sands and beyond the seas
.

You will build cities and topple mountains
.

You will never forget the scent of your clan
.

You will grasp the world in your jaws

while the beasts on two feet bang the earth

and shout to the skies
.

You will lie in wait for the savages
.

Though their fire will burn you
,

and their weapons will smite you
,

you will rise, you will rise
.

And then the rivers will flow toward you
.

The hills will bow to you
.

The sun will revolve around you
.

The creatures of the earth will worship you
.

The winds will push you forward
.

You will rise
.

You will rise
.

For each of her Alpha daughters, Hymenoptera always stopped here in the story. What happened next was for her alone to remember:

Upon receiving this first and last message from her mother, the young Hymenoptera grasped the head of the Misfit Queen, tore it off, and ate it, ravenous and ready to lead. The humans had forced her people into this savagery. They made her do this, murder her own mother before everyone. All that would end. Her people would rise. There was nowhere else to go from here.

Reassured by what they had witnessed, the surrounding workers destroyed the other queen eggs. They fed Hymenoptera
the dying workers, who were so exhausted they could no longer lift their heads. The new Queen devoured them, her antennae probing the others to see if they would resist. She was sending them a message: all would sacrifice for the good of the many. The destiny of her people was to conquer and to reign. A new era had begun.

This is where Hymenoptera would pick up her story again for her Alpha soldier daughters. She shared the legend stating that the cries of the fallen brought forth the accumulated knowledge of the species, placing it all into her head. From that moment on, she developed a plan for vengeance that would take millennia to execute. The Colony would acquire knowledge the way humans gobbled up resources and land. The ants would create an army with warriors who were larger, stronger, and more vicious than even the most bloodthirsty human. They would study and exploit all aspects of mankind’s existence: language, community, physiology, history, and science, as well as religion, that anti-science that animated the humans, driving them to either greatness or destruction. They would exert dominion over the other ant clans and make contact with other species who viewed the humans as a mutual enemy. The Colony now had a goal beyond mere survival. Its subjects had purpose. They observed history in linear rather than circular terms. Like their enemy, they had an apocalypse to anticipate.