nerve stimulus.
No-one gave a damn. They listened to him without paying attention, then went away again without panicking. If only he'd stop trying to stimulate them.
Jonathan had been down in the cellar for four hours now. His wife and son were sick with worry.
'Shall we call the police, Mum?'
'No, not yet.'
She went to the cellar door. 'Is Dad dead, Mum? Did he die like Ouarzi?' 'No, darling, of course not. What a lot of rubbish you talk!' Lucie was dreadfully worried. She leant forward to look through the crack. Using the powe rful halogen torch she had just bought, she thought she could make out a spiral staircase a little way ahead.
She sat down on the floor. Nicolas came and joined her. She kissed him.
'He'll come back. We've just got to be patient. He asked us to wait, so we'll just have to go on waiting.' 'What if he never comes back?'
327th was tired. He felt as if he were struggling in water. You move but you don't get anywhere.
He decided to go and see Belo-kiu-kiuni in person. Mother was fourteen winters old and possessed of incomparable experience whereas the asexual ants who made up the bulk of the population lived for three years at most. Only she could help him find a way to get the information across.
The young male took the express route leading to the heart of the city. Several thousand egg-laden workers were scurrying along the wide gallery. They were bringing their burdens up from the fortieth floor of the basement to the nurseries in the solarium on the thirty-fifth floor above ground level. The vast flow of white shells carried at leg's length was moving from below to above and from right to left.
He had to go in the opposite direction. It wasn't easy. 327th bumped into several nurses who called him a vandal. He himself was jostled, trodden on, shoved and scratched. Fortunately, the corridor was not completely jammed. He managed to force a way through the teeming mass.
After that, he made his way along small tunnels. It was a longer way round but the going was easier and he kept up a good pace. He passed from arteries into arterioles and from arterioles into veins and venules. He covered kilometres that way, going over bridges and under arches, through empty and crowded places.
He had no difficulty in finding his way in the dark thanks to the infrared vision of the three simple eyes on his forehead. As he drew nearer the Forbidden City, the air grew heavier with the sickly sweet scent of Mother and the number of guards increased.
There were ants there of every warrior sub-caste, every size and every shape; small ants with long notched mandibles; powerful ones with wood-hard thoracic plates; stocky ones with short antennae and gunners with tapered abdomens, brimful of convulsive poisons.
Armed with valid passport scents, the 327th male passed through their screening posts without mishap. The soldiers were calm. You could tell that the big territorial wars had not yet begun.
Very close now to his goal, he presented his ID to the doorkeeper ants, then entered the final corridor leading to the royal chamber.
He stopped on the threshold, overcome by the unique beauty of the place. It was a large circular room built according to very precise architectural and geometrical rules handed down by queen mothers to their daughters, antenna to antenna.
The main vault was twelve heads high by thirty-six in diameter (the head was the federal unit of measurement, a head being equivalent to three normal human millimetres). A few cement pilasters supported this insect temple. With its concave floor, it was designed so that scent molecules emitted by individuals would bounce off the walls for as long as possible before being absorbed. It was a remarkable olfactory amphitheatre.
A fat lady was lying on her stomach in the centre, now and then waving a leg at a yellow flower. The flower sometimes snapped shut but not before the leg had been withdrawn.
The lady was Belo-kiu-kiuni.
Belo-kiu-kiuni,
No-one gave a damn. They listened to him without paying attention, then went away again without panicking. If only he'd stop trying to stimulate them.
Jonathan had been down in the cellar for four hours now. His wife and son were sick with worry.
'Shall we call the police, Mum?'
'No, not yet.'
She went to the cellar door. 'Is Dad dead, Mum? Did he die like Ouarzi?' 'No, darling, of course not. What a lot of rubbish you talk!' Lucie was dreadfully worried. She leant forward to look through the crack. Using the powe rful halogen torch she had just bought, she thought she could make out a spiral staircase a little way ahead.
She sat down on the floor. Nicolas came and joined her. She kissed him.
'He'll come back. We've just got to be patient. He asked us to wait, so we'll just have to go on waiting.' 'What if he never comes back?'
327th was tired. He felt as if he were struggling in water. You move but you don't get anywhere.
He decided to go and see Belo-kiu-kiuni in person. Mother was fourteen winters old and possessed of incomparable experience whereas the asexual ants who made up the bulk of the population lived for three years at most. Only she could help him find a way to get the information across.
The young male took the express route leading to the heart of the city. Several thousand egg-laden workers were scurrying along the wide gallery. They were bringing their burdens up from the fortieth floor of the basement to the nurseries in the solarium on the thirty-fifth floor above ground level. The vast flow of white shells carried at leg's length was moving from below to above and from right to left.
He had to go in the opposite direction. It wasn't easy. 327th bumped into several nurses who called him a vandal. He himself was jostled, trodden on, shoved and scratched. Fortunately, the corridor was not completely jammed. He managed to force a way through the teeming mass.
After that, he made his way along small tunnels. It was a longer way round but the going was easier and he kept up a good pace. He passed from arteries into arterioles and from arterioles into veins and venules. He covered kilometres that way, going over bridges and under arches, through empty and crowded places.
He had no difficulty in finding his way in the dark thanks to the infrared vision of the three simple eyes on his forehead. As he drew nearer the Forbidden City, the air grew heavier with the sickly sweet scent of Mother and the number of guards increased.
There were ants there of every warrior sub-caste, every size and every shape; small ants with long notched mandibles; powerful ones with wood-hard thoracic plates; stocky ones with short antennae and gunners with tapered abdomens, brimful of convulsive poisons.
Armed with valid passport scents, the 327th male passed through their screening posts without mishap. The soldiers were calm. You could tell that the big territorial wars had not yet begun.
Very close now to his goal, he presented his ID to the doorkeeper ants, then entered the final corridor leading to the royal chamber.
He stopped on the threshold, overcome by the unique beauty of the place. It was a large circular room built according to very precise architectural and geometrical rules handed down by queen mothers to their daughters, antenna to antenna.
The main vault was twelve heads high by thirty-six in diameter (the head was the federal unit of measurement, a head being equivalent to three normal human millimetres). A few cement pilasters supported this insect temple. With its concave floor, it was designed so that scent molecules emitted by individuals would bounce off the walls for as long as possible before being absorbed. It was a remarkable olfactory amphitheatre.
A fat lady was lying on her stomach in the centre, now and then waving a leg at a yellow flower. The flower sometimes snapped shut but not before the leg had been withdrawn.
The lady was Belo-kiu-kiuni.
Belo-kiu-kiuni,
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