There were mummies all around them, for the three insects were in a nursery. Hundreds of termite nymphs were lined up vertically against the walls. 4,000th inspected them and noticed that some of them had died of neglect. The survivors were sending out distress scents to call the nurses. They had not been licked for at least 2° and they were all dying of hunger.
It was all wrong. A social insect would never abandon its brood, even for l°-time. Unless. . . The same idea occurred to both ants. Unless all the workers were dead and only the nymphs were left.
The glow-worm flashed again as a signal for them to follow him down more corridors. There was a strange, sweet smell in the air. The soldier trod on something hard. She did not have infrared simple eyes and could not see in the dark. The living light came close and lit up 103,683rd s legs. She had stepped on the corpse of a termite soldier. It was very like an ant except that it was pure white and did not have a detached abdomen.
The ground was strewn with hundreds of white corpses. It was a massacre! Strangest of all, the bodies were still intact. There had not been a fight. The inhabitants were still frozen in the attitudes of everyday work and must have died instantly. Some seemed to be engaged in conversation or cutting up wood with their mandibles. What could possibly have caused such a catastrophe?
4,000th examined the grisly statues and found they were drenched in pungent scents. The two ants shivered. It was poison gas, which explained everything: the disappearance of the first expedition launched against the termite hill and the death of the last survivor of the second expedition, who had not been wounded.
If they felt nothing themselves, it was because the toxic gas had had time to disperse, but why had the nymphs survived? The old explorer framed a hypothesis. They had specific immune defences or had perhaps been saved by their cocoons. They must now be immune to the poison. Insects are notorious for developing resistance to insecticides. Mithridatizing allows them to become immune to gradually increasing doses of poisons by producing mutant generations.
But who could have fed in the lethal gas? It was a real poser. Once again, while searching for the secret weapon, 103,683rd had stumbled on something just as incomprehensible.
4,000th wanted to leave and the glow-worm flashed its assent. The ants gave the larvae which could be saved a few pieces of cellulose then left to look for the way out. The glow-worm followed. As they went, the corpses of termite soldiers gave way to corpses of workers responsible for looking after the queen. Some were still holding eggs in their mandibles.
The architecture was becoming more and more sophisticated. The corridors, which were triangular in section, were engraved with signs. The glow-worm changed colour and diffused a bluish light, showing that he had noticed something. A gasping sound was coming from the end of the corridor.
The trio came to a kind of sanctuary protected by five giant guards, who were all dead. The entrance was blocked by the lifeless bodies of twenty or so small workers and the ants passed them from leg to leg to get them out of the way.
An almost perfectly spherical cave was thus revealed. The noise had been coming from the termite royal chamber.
The glow-worm gave off a beautiful white light, which lit up a kind of strange slug in the centre of the room. It was the termite queen, who was a caricature of an ant queen. Her small head and scrawny thorax ended in a fantastic abdomen nearly fifty heads long. This hypertrophied appendage was regularly shaken with spasms.
The small head was tossing with pain and screaming in sound and scent. The workers' corpses had stopped up the entrance so thoroughly that the gas had not been able to get in, but the queen was dying of neglect.
Look at her abdomen. The babies are pushing to get out and she can't give birth alone.
The glow-worm climbed up to the ceiling and shed an orange light.
Thanks to the combined efforts of the two ants, the eggs began to flow from the enormous procreative pouch. It was a veritable tap of life. The queen had stopped screaming and seemed relieved.
She asked who had saved her in basic universal scent language and was surprised when she identified the ants' scents. She wanted to know if they were masked ants.
Masked ants were a species very gifted in organic chemistry. They were large, black insects, who lived in the north-east. They could artificially reproduce any pheromone, whether passport, trail or communication, simply by mixing saps, pollens and salivas judiciously.
Once they had distilled their camouflage, they could make their way undetected into termite cities, for example, and then pillage and kill without any of their victims identifying them.
No, we aren't masked ants.
The termite queen asked them if there were any survivors in her city and the ants answered no. She asked them to kill her and put an end to her suffering but she wanted to tell them something first.
Yes, she knew why her city had been destroyed. The termites had recently discovered the eastern end of the world. It was a smooth, black country, where everything was destroyed.
Strange animals live there that are very fast and ferocious. They're the guardians of the end of the world. They're armed with black slabs that can flatten anything. And they're using poison gases now too!
It reminded them of Queen Bi-stin-ga's old ambition to reach one of the ends of the world. Could it really be possible, then? The two ants were dumbfounded.
Until then, they had thought that the Earth was so big it was impossible to reach the edge, and now here was this termite queen telling them that the end of the world was close by and that it was guarded by monsters. Could Queen Bi-stin-ga s dream come true?
The whole tale seemed so incredible they did not know where to begin with their questions.
But why have these 'guardians of the end of the world' come this far? Do they want to invade the western cities?
The fat queen did not know anything else and insisted she now wished to die. She had not learnt how to stop her heart beating so they had to kill her.
The ants therefore decapitated the termite queen after she had told them the way out. Then they ate a few small eggs and left the imposing city, now nothing but a ghost town. At the entrance, they laid down a pheromone telling the story of the tragedy that had taken place there. It was their duty as Federation explorers.
The glow-worm now took his leave of them. No doubt he too had lost his way in the termite hill when sheltering from the rain. Now that it was fine again he would resume his daily round: eat, give off light to attract females, reproduce, eat, give off light to attract females, reproduce ... A glow-worm s life, in fact!
They turned their eyes and antennae to the east. They could not see much from where they were but they knew all the same that the end of the world was not far off. It lay in that direction.
the clash of civilizations: The meeting of two civilizations is always a delicate affair. One of the greatest challenges that has faced mankind was the enslavement of black Africans in the eighteenth century.
Most of the peoples who were enslaved lived inland in the plains and forests and had never seen the sea. A neighbouring king suddenly came and declared war on them for no apparent reason and then, instead of killing them all, took them captive, chained them together and made them walk to the coast. At the end of their journey, they discovered two incomprehensible things: 1) the vast sea, and 2) the white-skinned Europeans. Even if they had never seen the sea with their own eyes, they knew it from tales as the land of the dead, while the white men were like beings from another planet. They smelt peculiar, their skin was a peculiar colour and they wore peculiar clothes. Many died of fright. Others panicked, jumped out of the boats and were eaten by sharks. The survivors had one surprise after another. What did they see? White men drinking wine, for example. And they were sure it was blood, the blood of their own people.
Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
The 56th female was starving. It was not only a body but a whole population that was dema
nding its ration of calories. How was she to feed the tribe she was sheltering inside her? In the end, she made up her mind to leave her egg-laying hole, dragged herself a few hundred heads and brought back three pine needles, which she licked and chewed greedily.
It was not enough. She would have liked to go hunting but she no longer had the strength. She risked ending up as food for the thousands of predators lurking in the vicinity. She settled down in her hole and waited to die.
Instead, an egg appeared. It was her first Chlipoukanian and she had hardly felt it coming. She had shaken her numb legs and squeezed her bowels as hard as she could. It had to work or it was all over. When the egg rolled onto the ground, it was small and so grey it was almost black.
If she allowed it to hatch, the ant inside would be stillborn and she would not be able to feed her anyway. She therefore ate her first offspring.
This immediately gave her some surplus energy. There was one less egg in her abdomen and one more in her stomach. The sacrifice gave her the strength to lay a second egg just as small and dark as the first.
She ate it and felt even better. The third egg was a little lighter but she devoured it anyway.
It was only when she got to the tenth that the queen altered her strategy. Her eggs had turned grey and were as big as her eyeballs. Chli-pou-ni laid three like that, ate one and let the other two live, warming them with her body.
As she continued to lay, the two lucky ones turned into long larvae whose heads remained fixed in a strange grimace. Soon they began to whine for food and the arithmetic got complicated. Out of every three eggs she laid, she now needed one for herself and the other two to feed the larvae.
That is how you can produce something from nothing in a closed circuit. When a larva was big enough, she gave her another larva to eat. It was the only way of supplying her with the protein she needed to turn into a true ant.
But the surviving larva was always famished and writhed about screaming. Her sisters made an unsatisfying meal and, in the end, Chli-pou-ni ate her first attempt at a child.
I must make it, I must make it, she repeated to herself. She thought of the 327th male and laid five much lighter eggs in one go. She swallowed two of them and let the other three grow.
Between infanticide and childbirth, the torch of life was passed on. It was three steps forward and two back but the cruel gymnastics finally resulted in the first prototype of a complete ant.
Undernourished, small and frail, she was still the first Chlipoukanian. The cannibal race for the existence of the city was now half won. This degenerate worker could move about and bring back provisions from the outside world: the corpses of insects, seeds, leaves and mushrooms.
Properly nourished at last, Chli-pou-ni gave birth to eggs that were much lighter and firmer, with strong shells that protected the eggs from the cold. The larvae were a reasonable size and the children who hatched from this new generation were big and strong. They would form the basis of the population of Chli-pou-kan.
The first sickly worker, who had brought the egg-layer food, was quickly put to death and devoured by her sisters. After that, all the pain and suffering which had preluded the foundation of the city were forgotten.
Chli-pou-kan had been born.
mosquito: The mosquito is the insect most willing to duel with man. At one time or another, we have all stood on a bed in our pyjamas with a slipper in our hand and our eyes fixed on the ceil-ing.
Yet it is only the disinfectant saliva from its probe that causes the itching. Without this saliva, each bite could become infected. The mosquito even takes the precaution of biting between two pain reception points.
Faced with man, the mosquito's strategy has evolved. It has learnt to be quicker, more inconspicuous and livelier on the take-off. Some bold souls of the latest generation do not hesitate to hide under their victims' pillows. They have discovered the principle of Edgar Allan Poe's Stolen Letter; the best hiding place is the most obvious one, for we always think of looking further away for something that is very near.
Edmond Wells, Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
Grandmother Augusta gazed at her cases, which were already packed. She was going to move into the rue des Sybarites the next day. It seemed incredible but Edmond had envisaged Jonathan s disappearance and made provision for it in his will: 'If Jonathan dies or disappears, and has not himself left a will, I should like my mother, Augusta Wells, to move into my flat. If she disappears, or if she refuses this legacy, I should like Daniel Rosenfeld to inherit it and if he refuses or disappears, Jason Bragel could then come and live . . .'
In the light of recent events, Edmond had certainly not been wrong to allow himself at least four heirs. But Augusta was not superstitious and thought that even if Edmond were antisocial, he had no reason to wish the death of his nephew and mother. As for Jason Bragel, he was his best friend.
A strange thought crossed her mind. Edmond seemed to have tried to manage the future as if everything began after his death.
They had been walking in the direction of the rising sun for days. 4,000th's health was deteriorating all the time but the old warrior went on advancing without complaining, her courage and curiosity equal to anything.
Late one afternoon, they were climbing up the trunk of a hazelnut tree when they were suddenly surrounded by red ants; more of the tiny insects from the south who had set out to see the world. Their long bodies ended in a venomous sting and, as everyone knew, the slightest contact with it caused instant death. The two russet ants wished themselves elsewhere.
Apart from a few degenerate mercenaries, 103,683rd had never seen red ants in the Great Outside before. The lands of the east were definitely worth discovering.
There was a flurry of antennae. The red ants could communicate in the same language as the Belokanians.
You haven't got the right passport pheromones. Get out! This is our territory.
The russet ants replied that they were only passing through and wanted to go to the eastern end of the world. The red ants consulted one another.
They had recognized the other two as belonging to the Russet Federation. It might be a long way away but it was powerful (sixty-four cities before the last swarming) and the reputation of its armies had crossed the western river. It was probably better not to go looking for trouble. The red ants were a migrant species and were bound to have to cross the russets' federal territories one day.
The antenna movements gradually calmed down. It was a time for composition. A red ant passed on the group's decision:
You can spend one night here. We are prepared to show you the way to the end of the world and even to take you there. In exchange, you will leave us some of your identification pheromones.
It was a fair deal. 103,683rd and 4,000th knew that in giving away some of their pheromones, they were handing the red ants free passage to all the vast Federation territories. But to be able to go to the end of the world and back was worth any price.
Their hosts guided them to the encampment a few branches higher. It was unlike anything they had ever seen. The red ants, who weave and sew, had built their temporary nest by sewing together the edges of three big hazelnut leaves. One served as the floor and the others the side walls.
103,683rd watched a group of weavers busy closing the 'roof before nightfall. They selected the hazelnut leaf that would serve as the ceiling. To join this leaf to the other three, they formed a living ladder from dozens of workers piled one on top of the other until they made a mound that reached the leaf-roof.
The pile collapsed several times. It was too high.
The red ants then adopted a different approach. A group of workers hauled themselves up onto the ceiling-leaf and formed a chain hanging from its very tip. The chain went down and down to meet up with the living ladder below. When it still did not reach, a bunch of red ants weighed it down at the end.
They were almost there. The stem of the leaf had bent and they were only a few centimetres sh
ort on the right. The ants in the chain made it swing to close the gap. At the end of each swing, the chain stretched and seemed to be on the point of breaking, but it held. At last the mandibles of the upper and lower acrobats linked up, snap!
The second manoeuvre was to shorten the chain. The workers in the middle very carefully left the line and climbed onto their colleagues' shoulders and everyone pulled to draw the two leaves together. The leaf-ceiling descended little by little on the village, casting its shadow over the floor.
However, although the box now had a lid, it still had to be sealed. An old red ant rushed inside a house and came back out brandishing a fat larva. It was the weaving instrument.
They made the sides parallel and held them together, then introduced the fresh larva. The poor thing had been building a cocoon in which to moult in peace, but now it would not get the chance. A worker seized a thread from the ball and began to unwind it. She stuck the end to a leaf with a little saliva, then passed the cocoon to her neighbour.
Feeling her thread being removed, the larva produced more to make up for it. The more they stripped her, the colder she got and the more silk she spat out. The workers took advantage of this. They passed the living shuttle from mandible to mandible and did not skimp on the thread. When their child died of exhaustion, they used another. Twelve larvae were thus sacrificed for that piece of work alone.
When they had finished closing the second edge of the leaf-ceiling, the village had the appearance of a green box with white edges. On several different occasions, 103,683rd, who was walking about as if she were at home there, noticed black ants in the middle of a crowd of red ants. She could not help asking about it.
Are they mercenaries?
No, they're slaves.
The red ants were not known as slave-makers, but one of them was willing to explain that they had recently met a horde of slave-making ants heading west and had exchanged some black ant eggs for a portable woven nest.