Anthill_a novel

21
FOR A WHILE the Trailhead Colony, while stricken, still retained most of its military strength. Fifteen percent of its adult members were soldiers. They were contracted to be hoplites, or heavily armored infantry. Twice the size of an ordinary worker, a soldier's exoskeleton was literally heavy armor: thick, tough, and pitted in places like a shield for resilience and strength. A pair of spines projected backward from the midsection of the body to protect the waist. Spikes extended forward from the midsection to protect the neck, and the rear margin of the head was curved forward, turning that part of the surface into a helmet. When attacked, the hoplite soldier could pull in her legs and antennae and tighten up the segments of her body in order to turn her entire body surface into a shield.
The ordinary Trailheader workers, while built for labor, were also available for combat. Then they served as the equivalent of light infantry. Because their exoskeletons were much thinner than those of the hoplites, they were not inclined to stand fast in battle. Instead, they used the swiftness and agility of their supple bodies, running around their enemies, darting in and out, seizing any leg or antenna available, holding on to it, slowing the opponent enough for nestmates to close in and seize another body part. When the adversary was finally pinned and spread-eagled, others piled on to bite, sting, or spray it with poison. This swarm attack, in which a crowd of fighters rush a formidable opponent simultaneously, was the same as used by wolves circling a moose, or infantrymen attacking an enemy firebase.
Such was the force, originally ten thousand strong, that had protected the Trailheader nest against all enemies. Now the number of able-bodied adults had begun to decline, and the survivors were growing old.
The decline of Trailhead Colony was being closely watched by its closest neighbor, the Streamside Colony. This younger and now more powerful superorganism was prepared to take advantage of its neighbor's misfortune.
Early one morning, an elite Streamsider worker, followed by a squad of her nestmates, left her nest to assess the strength of the Trailhead Colony. Precise monitoring of the enemy strength was not easy. The two nests were separated by about two thousand ant lengths, or a distance of twenty yards. The scout, if allowed to travel in a straight line on a smooth surface, might have covered that distance in under six minutes. But a straight run was not possible, because the terrain was filled with obstacles that were scarcely noticeable to a human being but were daunting to a ten-millimeter-long ant. In the miniature world of antdom, clumps of grass were like groves of trees and bushes, and dead leaves and twigs like fallen timber. A surface of sand smooth to humans was to the ants a jumble of rocks, and pebbles were large boulders. Rain was a deadly threat. One drop striking an ant had the human-equivalent force of a firehose jet. A rivulet of rainwater trickling through a crease in the soil was the equivalent of a flash flood raging down a desert ravine.
As the elite ant left on her journey, she remembered the route more or less precisely. She had been to the Trailhead territory before, and remembered the way. She carried a compass in her head, using the sun as a lodestar. This reliance could have been the source of a huge error for an ant, because the sun travels across the sky and so the correct angle constantly changes. However, each ant also carried in her head a biological clock set on a full day's twenty-four-hour cycle, run with a precision far beyond the capacity of an unaided human brain. Using her clock, the scout continuously changed the angle to the sun needed to keep her on track.
The trajectory of the sun by itself is completely reliable in space and time. At Nokobee it traced a geometrically perfect arc across the sky, rising through the pines on the eastern lakeshore, passing directly above the anthills of Dead Owl Cove, and finally disappearing westward into the forest lying beyond. The azimuth read by the ant, however, unlike the transit of the sun, was less than perfect. So the scout occasionally stopped and gazed at prominent features she had memorized during earlier trips. A pair of pine seedlings were one such signpost, a circular opening in the canopy a second, a dark shadow beneath a holly shrub a third.
Then there was the odor terrain, parts of which the scout memorized from chemical cues she had encountered on earlier trips. In exercising this ability, she was as different from a human being as it is possible to imagine. The scout smelled the ground continuously and precisely as its surface rushed by two millimeters' distance beneath her body. Her nose was the outer segments of her paired antennae--the two feelers on her head. She turned these hypersensitive instruments downward, enough to almost touch the ground, and swung them from side to side. The odors she detected as she ran, specific in their mix, intensity, and gradient, provided detailed information of her location and direction of travel. They were her combined field guide and topographic map.
The nearby pine-leaf litter conveyed its acrid scent to mingle with that from the humus beneath the colony foraging grounds. A surge of one particular blend greeted her here, a countersurge of another kind there. The prevailing background was overpowered now and then by a flashing scent of something radically different--quickly gone but remembered for a while.
The olfactory world of the running Streamsider contained much more than an invisible road map. Bombarding the ant from below and from all sides above were the odors of organisms that inhabited the soil--so densely as to make up a large part of the physical bulk of the soil. There were endless local profusions of fungal hyphae and bacteria. Each gave up its signature smell. There were the rising odors of the animals the size of the ant or smaller, a quarter million packed into every square meter. They were the insects, spiders, pillbugs, nematode roundworms, and other invertebrates that dominate in numbers. One trace within the mix picked up by the sweeping antennae could disclose a potential prey, another a waiting spider or some other ambush predator.
The human mind cannot imagine the tumult of chemical stimuli by which such a traveling ant guides every moment in her life, and thus survives. It cannot conceive of the constant enormity of the deadly risks she must skillfully evade, instantaneously at every moment.
The Streamsider scout hurried undistracted through this olfactory cosmos. Her destination was in the direction of the enemy nest but not the nest itself. She was consciously headed for a flat, open area half the distance there. On arriving, the scout mingled with a group of nestmates who had preceded her, and--an extraordinary event for ants--they also mingled freely with scouts from the Trailhead Colony. One of these enemies was the newly arrived elite and former Trailhead Queen attendant.
In a short time the representatives from the two colonies appeared to dance with one another. The ants were not performing in any human sense, however. They had come here instead to conduct a tournament between colonies. The scouts were gathering information that allowed them to assess the strength of the opposing Trailhead Colony. They could use this information and simultaneously advertise their own strength to the enemy without risk of death or injury. The dance, in short, was not that, but a highly formalized probe and communication that reinforced the security of the two colonies.
At the time of this day's tournament, the Streamside Colony was at its peak as a superorganism. It was strong enough to challenge any neighboring colony, and especially the declining Trailhead Colony. The Streamside Queen was only six years old, the equivalent of thirty years in a human life-span. She was in her prime, bursting with eggs, and she reeked of sweet-smelling royal pheromone. Her colony's nest was on firm, productive ground at the edge of an undisturbed patch of deciduous scrub woodland. Close by in the woods a small stream gave the nest protection on one side. On the other side a miniature ravine dropped away, too steep to harbor nests of potential rivals. The Streamsiders had not chosen this site for their own protection. They were just lucky that their mother Queen had landed there.
As the Streamsider scouts gathered in the arena, they found their Trailheader counterparts also assembling in almost equal numbers. A few had climbed up on the tops of pebbles to serve as sentinels. The first scouts on both sides to encounter the enemy ran home to recruit reinforcements. They laid odor trails to excite and guide their nestmates, and they carried faint smears of the enemy odor on their own body surface to identify the opposition. Within an hour hundreds of ants from both colonies were milling around one another. The original scouts, all of whom were relatively small and thin, were soon joined by contingents of the more massively built soldiers.
The opposing forces were careful not to start a battle. Their strategy was the opposite: the displays were the equivalent of competing military parades by human armies. They wanted their performance to be viewed by the enemy.
As the tournament unfolded, the individual performers made themselves appear as large as possible. They inflated their abdomens by pumping them up with fluid. They straightened their legs to form stilts and strutted around every foreign worker they encountered--sometimes bumping against them. Still others climbed up and posed on top of pebbles, exaggerating their size still more. They never threatened to attack. The effort they were making was meant to persuade the other side that their colony had a great many soldiers. A few small workers served as counters, not engaged in displays themselves but moving about among the crowds of performing workers in order to gain an estimate of the size of the soldier force. The larger the enemy force, the more intense the effort the counters made to attract others to the tournament. A weakness in their recruiting effort was a signal to the other side of that colony's weakness. It was an unintended encouraging clue for the opposing colony.
Even before the death of the Trailhead Queen, and increasingly now that she was gone, the military pomp of the Trailhead Colony had become noticeably less impressive. Gradually and carefully over a period of a week, led by signals from the elite scout and several of her nestmates, the Trailheaders pulled back from the first territorial boundary. They tried to start tournaments closer to home, where their soldiers together with the make-believe soldiers among the smaller ants who filled out the force could be called to the field more quickly. But this tactic did not fool the elite Streamsider scout and her frontline nestmates on the other side, who pushed even harder and mounted increasingly conspicuous displays. There was nothing the Trailheaders could do but continue to pull back, day after day, thereby ceding some of their foraging territory.
Still, the retreat was not by itself a defeat. There was a chance that the Trailhead Colony might eke out a victory, or at least force a draw. The reason was that as the tournament arena moved closer to their nest, the defenders were able to reach the arena more quickly. They could draw out whatever reinforcements were available on a minute-by-minute basis. The Streamsiders were forced, on the other hand, to accept a comparable disadvantage. They had to travel almost the entire distance between the two nests in order to continue the tournaments. With the lines of communication stretched so far, the adjustments made by the Streamsider force were slow and inaccurate. The weaker Trailheaders, by retreating slowly, were close to striking a balance. If that occurred, they might hold their opponents in place indefinitely, perhaps all the way to the end of the foraging season. The loss of part of their territory would be an acceptable price to a colony with a declining population.
The Trailheaders had now surrendered all their territory to the east of their nest in the direction of the Streamsider nest. There was a possibility that this conquest would be enough for the Streamsiders. They had achieved a great victory without the loss of a single life on either side. If they called off the tournaments now, a long standoff peace--a Pax Formicana, so to speak--might come to the two domains.
Peace with honor was not, however, the way of the Nokobee anthills. After three weeks of advance, culminating finally when the tournaments were held at the edge of the Trailheader nest mound, the Streamsider dancers suddenly switched to an all-out attack on the Trailhead Colony. No more propaganda for them, no more bluffing.
The assault began as an unplanned chain reaction among the Streamsider players. They had grown increasingly excited during each day's event. They seemed to be approaching the threshold that separates hostile display from overt combat. They circled around the Trailheaders more tightly, bumping harder and more frequently.
Finally, near the beginning of one tournament when the Trailheaders had been crowded into a space only several feet wide in front of their nest mound, a Streamsider worker--the elite scout and tournament veteran--crossed the threshold of aggression and single-handedly began the war. She attacked the first Trailheader she encountered, spraying it with a combination of alarm pheromones and poisonous secretions. The odor of these materials galvanized the nestmates closest to her. They crossed the aggression threshold also and launched an attack of their own. Two workers in combat quickly led to three, three to four, and on upward, spreading violence exponentially through the assembled Streamsider ranks. Some of the Trailheaders quickly broke away from the battle and rushed back to their nest to recruit reinforcements. Others responded to the attack by standing their ground and fighting back.
Soon the battle turned into a furious and deadly melee. The Trailheaders were too weak to hold their ground. The Streamsiders drove through the dissolving mass of defenders, attacking each one they could catch. All the ants on both sides now abandoned the tournament mode. They deflated their abdomens to normal size and relaxed the stiltlike stiffness of their legs. Fighters on both sides instead climbed on top of their opponents, seizing legs and antennae with their sawtooth jaws, gnashing and stinging whatever vulnerable body parts they could reach. When two or more Streamsider fighters managed to take hold of a Trailheader at the same time, they spread-eagled her, exposing her body to a fatal bite or sting by others who charged in. Soon dead and dying workers from both sides littered the battlefield. Most of the casualties were Trailheaders. Among them was the elite scout and former nurse, who was stung to death and dismembered.
More of the surviving Trailheaders gave up combat and retreated into the nest entrance. Those who hesitated were run down and killed as though they were insect prey.
They were in fact insect prey. Their bodies were treated the same as those of subdued grasshoppers and caterpillars. After battle the dead and injured would be collected and eaten by their conquerors. Cannibalism was more than just the fruit of conquest. The conquest turned into a foraging expedition.
The defense of the Trailhead Colony completely collapsed within a half hour. A few of the survivors, dodging their pursuers, ran back and forth between their nest and the main battle site, somehow measuring the magnitude of the disaster. The last among them finally pulled back into the nest entirely. As they neared the entrance, a few turned and continued the fight, keeping the area immediately around it clear of the enemy. With the help of others, they dragged in nearby pieces of soil, charcoal, and leaf litter, and piled them up to form a plug in and on top of the nest entrance.
The Trailheader nest was now a sealed and hidden bunker. The victorious Streamsider army poured over its mound surface, and some of their scouts pressed on to explore the newly conquered land beyond.
The siege of the Trailheader nest had begun. During the next day, and for days to follow, Trailheader foragers slipped out for brief periods to search for whatever scraps of food had been overlooked by the Streamsider patrols combing the surrounding area. Some were caught, others killed. The others retreated too quickly to be successful in their foraging.
Within a week the colony began to starve. The nurse ants killed and cannibalized the last of the larvae and pupae, their own baby sisters, and regurgitated their liquid and tissue to other adults. Finally, no reserves were left except dwindling fat in the bodies of the huddled survivors.
The Streamside Colony relentlessly pressed its conquest. Its workers explored the new land to the outer edges of the old Trailheader domain. They tolerated no remaining trace of the Trailhead Colony. If its scouts could find the newly hidden entrance of the nest, they would summon a force to invade the interior. If they then succeeded, the conflict between the two colonies would escalate to a quick and final end.
Under these conditions the Trailhead Colony was unable to conceal itself for long. The surviving population huddled inside the nest was too big and the odor it emitted too strong. The prewar territorial secretions Trailheader workers had laid over the nest surface, thickest near the entrance, now pointed like traffic signs to the nest entrance. The chemical signals that once guided homecoming workers and warned off intruders were about to become the agent of the Trailheader downfall.
The failed strategy of the Trailheaders was the opposite of another neighbor, the meek little Woodland Colony hidden nearby. These ants were even closer to the Trailhead Colony than was the Streamsider Colony. The Woodlanders had been forced by competition from the Trailheaders to remain in a small, hidden nest. They were unable to increase their population size, and persisted only at constant great risk of discovery and destruction.
As their own population grew, the Trailheaders, in contrast, had invested a large amount of their resources in defense and propaganda. They had built a large soldier force and committed themselves to elaborate tournaments. They used territorial pheromones to advertise the nest. Now in decline, their earlier strength had turned into a fatal liability.
The Woodlanders survived as the Trailheaders perished. They were too few to play in the formicid big league. To survive, they had been forced to rely on the hidden site of their nest and on their timid demeanor when they left to hunt for food. They went unnoticed while war raged next door. Woodlanders fought no battles. They were excused from the necessity either to win or to lose. Their weakness had become a strength--at least for the moment.
Meanwhile, as the Woodlanders held fast, the end approached for the Trailhead Colony. Three weeks following the big victory, Streamsider scouts converged on the shielded entrance of the Trailheader nest and immediately attacked it. Some ran away briefly to recruit more nestmate soldiers to the spot. The assembled force pulled aside the debris the defenders had dragged in to serve as a cover. Trailheader soldiers poured out of the nest in a last desperate effort to protect the entrance. In the tumult that followed, many fighters on both sides were killed or crippled. Finally, the weakened Trailheaders began to pull back. One by one the minors gave up the last of their resistance, turning away and running down the main gallery and into the lateral galleries and chambers deep in the nest.
The Trailheader soldiers, however, did not retreat. They regrouped instead, forming a tight circle around the nest entrance with their heads facing outward, ready to fight to the last ant. Their snapping jaws held off the attackers into the late afternoon hours. At first it appeared that they had succeeded in reversing the battle. As the light faded, the Streamsiders, true to the biological clock of their species in all things including even war, pulled away and returned home.
The withdrawal was not a retreat by the Streamsiders; nor was it a victory for the Trailheaders. In the confusion that reigned through the night, the Trailhead Colony felt--it knew--that it was in extreme difficulty. It had no conception of defeat, but only because it had never suffered one. The nest interior was filled with the odor of alarm and recruitment pheromones released by both sides during the attempted Streamsider breakin at the entrance. The fighters were contaminated by the alien body odor of the invaders. They could see the battle flags of the enemy, so to speak, while listening to the continuous shriek of loudspeaker alarms.
The entire colony was on the edge of panic. Agitated ants ran back and forth through the rooms and galleries of the nest, to no special purpose. The colony was not yet aware of the ultimate meaning of its own mood and actions, but it was instinctively preparing for one last maneuver, a final, almost suicidal response that might yet save some of its members. What remained to them as an option was a burst of flight to the outside, every ant for herself. With luck a few survivors might then reassemble and restart the colony elsewhere. That is, if they had a real queen. But of course they had only their inadequate Soldier-Queen.
During the desperate hours the oldest Trailheader workers remembered another extraordinary event that occurred the previous summer, when they were young and most of their nestmates now present had not yet been born. The sun was shining that day. The Trailhead Queen was strong, and well-fed larvae crowded the floors and walls of the brood chambers. A large number of foragers had taken the field, including workers just old enough to leave their nursing duties and embark on their first exploration outdoors.
As the sun approached its zenith in the cloudless sky, it was suddenly blotted out. Then, as abruptly, it returned, and disappeared again, and so on off and on for a long while. With an ant's dim vision the foragers saw that gigantic elongate objects were casting shadows. They seemed to be trees reaching into the sky. But moving! Then down from somewhere high came strange, loud sounds very different from those made by birds, squirrels, or singing insects. There were hissing and grunting noises, mingled together, and traded back and forth, their volume shifting up and down. Strange odors also came down to blanket the ground. The disturbance was unique in the experience of Trailheader elders. It was as violent as any wind or rainstorm they had ever experienced. Most of the foragers fled into the nest. A few chased the moving trees and tried to climb and attack them.
The visit, by a human family that had spread its picnic lunch carelessly next to the Trailheader nest, continued into the middle of the afternoon, then suddenly ended. The strange sounds faded into the distance. The odors began to fade. When the Trailheader workers ventured out again, they found a scene as odd as the gargantuan apparitions themselves. Some of their nestmates who stayed outside had been crushed flat into the ground. Far more oddly, all around the nest surface and beyond, food particles were scattered. They were a kind never before encountered by the ants. Some were the size of a worker ant, others hundreds of thousands of times larger. None resembled dead insects, parts of plants, or anything else the Trailheaders could remember. Still, they were pure food, rich in protein, fat, and sugar. The ants found the heaven-born gifts more delicious even than aphid feces, and more nourishing than freshly butchered cockroaches. To their good fortune, the humans had thoughtlessly dumped the garbage from their lunch on top of the Trailheader territory.
It was in the memories of the older ants that most of the distributed intelligence of the colony existed, as opposed to mere instinct and emotion. To the mind of a young ant, born just this year, the elders' memories of an event of the previous year, if such could be communicated at all, was a nonexistent formicid antiquity.
But for some elders in the Trailheader superorganism, the moving trees were powers that lived outside the ant cosmos, equivalent to the way gods are viewed in the human mind. The elders thought, and therefore the colony thought in part, as a segment of the human brain might think, that the moving-tree gods cared about them in some inexplicable way. Perhaps they were gigantic nestmates. They might now, in the hour of the Trailheaders' dire peril, spread benevolence again.
Other elders did not think this way. To them the gods were just a less common version of what the colony experienced routinely, such as a powerful wind off the lake or a violent thunderstorm. At least, not a living force concerned with the fate of ants. Still others--a small minority, to be sure--doubted that the gods ever existed. Instead, they thought of the gods as just a strong delusion acquired long ago--human decades ago as measured by ant standards.
Lamentation and hope were mingled among the Trailheader inhabitants. The ants were like a doomed people in a besieged city. Their unity of purpose was gone, and their social machinery halted. No foraging, no cleaning and feeding larvae, no Queen for them to rally around. The pheromones of her substitute, the Soldier-Queen, were too weak to hold them together. The order of the colony was dissolving. Out there, indomitable and waiting, were the hated, filthy, unformicid Streamsiders. Finally, all the Trailheaders knew was terror, and the existence of a choice--they could fight or run from the horror. There was nothing else left in their collective mind.
To deceive and intimidate enemies, to build the sturdiest fortress, to maneuver, to reinforce, to safeguard, to preempt, to emigrate to a better home--such were the actions that might have saved them. But all that had now passed.