Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Originally published by Analog magazine, November 2015.

I. JOSHUA

Surrounded by foes, Zoe raised her weapon on high, bringing it crashing down, slaughtering a dozen enemies in one blow.

No, Zoe Rhodes was not a killer robot with concussion hammer fists, or a Mayan warrior with spear and atlatl.

She was a fifth generation Australian sweet corn farmer, with farmer’s tan to prove it. Her weapon was a square-headed shovel. And her quarry was the riot of ants, swarming and pooling at her feet.

“Bloody stinkin’ ants!” she screamed.

Her voice boomed over the rows of corn. Hers was a modest but smooth-running factory farm. Computers monitored the phosphate and saline. GPS helped plot efficient paths for harvesting. Her corn was healthy, the leaftips green, the silks dry and brown.

And into her orderly, pastoral domain trampled multi-legged chaos.

Ants!

Zoe stood between the stalks, feet shoulder-width apart. She inhaled deeply, clenching the shovel’s D-handle. Then she slammed down the blade, letting out another war cry.

“Not! On! My! Farm!”

Her strike left a square dent in the soil, studded with a dozen dead ants.

Victory!

She was grinning like a shot fox, but only for a moment. Like water re-filling a footprint on the beach, ants flowed back into the shovel print.

The ants carried on their business, ignoring the crushed bodies of compatriots, ignoring the killing thing falling from the sky, ignoring Zoe’s war cries.

She cursed, picked up her sore ego, and slammed the shovel down again and again, crushing dozens and dozens more.

“You can’t kill them all!” a voice called from across the field. “At least, not like that!”

Two figures were approaching, a medium-sized man and a large, tall woman.

The oddest thing about them was their footgear. Zoe had tucked her jeans into her socks, but she was covered with ants. These two wore boots like white Santa Claus boots, topped with a thick fur cuff. The ants couldn’t make it north of the fur. So they walked without swatting themselves.

Clearly, they knew what they were doing.

The man held out his hand. “Hey there, I’m Dr. Todd McDaniels, myrmecologist.”

“G’day, mate,” Zoe said, shaking his hand with a very strong grip. “Welcome to Oz. You’re that ant scientist they sent from America?”

“Yup,” Todd said. “And this is Shyla Lethbridge, an entomology grad student at Adelaide.”

“You can call me ‘Shorty,’” the tall girl said, without a hint of irony.

“G’day.”

“G’day.”

“I’ve traveled all around the world fighting ants,” Todd said, mighty chuffed with himself. “From Lebanon to the Euphrates to the setting of the sun…And I was just in Mexico City. Really crowded subways, everything and everyone covered with ants.”

“So what did you do?” Zoe asked.

“Oh, we got them with a designer myrmicide,” Todd said. “A phenylpyrazole derivative, laced with—-”

“That won’t work here!” Zoe protested. “This is a farm, mate! No unauthorized pesticides!”

“So for you,” Todd said, “I’ve got something special. No insecticides. No residues.”

“Right-oh!” Zoe said. “Then let’s get crackin’!”

“In a moment!” Todd bent down. “First, study the enemy…” From his jacket, he pulled a small clear plastic vial with a built-in mag lens.

He caught an ant scout and dissected her with his mind. Reddish head and thorax. Black gaster, with flashes of purple and green. Only one petiole segment in front of the abdomen, which terminated in a slit without a stinger. His mind flipped through the catalog of eleven thousand known ant species. The shapes of the eyes and mouthparts confirmed his analysis.

After only ten seconds, he had completed the biologist’s most foundational but most complex task: species identification.

Proudly, he announced, “This is a subspecies of Iridomyrmex purpureus.”

Shorty and Zoe shrugged.

“Common meat ants.”

A strange expression passed over Zoe’s face, which Todd read as a mix of relief and disappointment.

The disappointment, Todd figured, was that they would not be defeating a more deadly foe. Australians, he had discovered, had a strange pride in surviving in a land where everything was trying to kill you—from crocodiles to snakes to giant spiders.

These weren’t fire ants, or jack jumpers, which leap from the ground to bite you in the backside. No, just common ants. Yes, they would beat them. But where was the glory in that?

“You know, I’ve been killing ants all day.”

Todd and Shorty shook their heads.

“An ant hill is like an iceberg,” Shorty said. “Most of it’s underneath, where it can’t be seen. A queen might pump out a hundred eggs a day. And a colony might have half a dozen queens.”

Todd added, “No matter how many you kill, they’ll just make more ants.”

Todd and Shorty nodded at each other.

“Then let’s get started!”

In the verge, the grass strip between road and field, Todd picked an ant hill for the first test. This subspecies made a cone-shaped mound, about a foot wide and half a foot wide. It was reinforced with mud made of dirt and ant spit, hardened in the sun. The area immediately around it was cleared. Ants had killed the grass by injecting formic acid, then chopped up the bits and carried them away.

Todd re-parked the truck, which Shorty called a ute, closer to the mound. Together, they unloaded a generator, a hot water tank, and several aluminum lances, each about five feet long.

“We’ll be killing the ants with boiling hot water.” Todd handed Zoe a stopwatch. “This is very important. When I say so, count off, every ten, fifteen seconds. What we’re gonna do, we have to do within a minute, or we fail.”

Todd and Shorty positioned themselves about three feet from the mound, on opposite sides. Each held a lance. The pointed tip, against the ground, was threaded like an auger. The near end was clamped in a power drill, with a quick release chuck.

Everyone was ready.

“Before we go,” Todd said, “I have a somber little ritual I started in Bolivia.” From the top of his shirt, he pulled a small plastic cross. It was painted gold and encrusted with fake jewels. “A little boy gave this to me, and he reminded me that ants are magnificent little machines. A symbol of industry, a fount of biodiversity, an endless source of marvel and mystery. But, unfortunately, we can’t have them here.” He kissed the cross, looked down and whispered, “I’m sorry, little guys.”

After a moment of silence, he steeled himself and said, “Ready?”

Zoe and Shorty nodded.

“OK, ready, set, go! Start the timer!”

Todd and Shorty flew into action.

Within seconds, Todd had drilled his pipe almost all the way down, leaving only a few inches above ground. Then, with one practiced move, he picked up another lance with the toe of his boot and flicked it into the air. He caught it mid-air, swung it around and screwed it onto the first pipe, slapping the drill onto it.

“Time!” he shouted.

“15 seconds, mate!”

Shorty had her first lance in, but was struggling with the extender. It made an audible twang and bent in the middle. The power drill almost leapt from her hand.

“I’ve hit something! A rock or—-”

“Forget it!” Todd shouted. “Move on!”

“25 seconds!”

Todd finished his extender and then rushed to help Shorty complete a full-length probe.

“35!”

“We have two good ones in—let’s hope that’s enough!”

“Hook up the hoses!”

Shorty jumped around the mound, snap-fitting hoses onto pipes, including the bent one.

“Time?”

“45!”

“Are we set?”

Shorty tugged at the hoses, checking the connections.

“Shorty!”

“50!”

Shorty flew from the mound, hands over her face. “Clear!”

Todd threw a switch on the water tank and the hoses twisted and writhed. Boiling water pulsed through the connectors, through the probes and deep into the mound.

“Time?”

“Just under a minute!”

Steam rose from the ruins of the ant hill.

Deep underground, ants were drowning by the thousands.

“So what was the point of this?” Zoe held up the stopwatch.

“Ants don’t care much about vibrations on the surface.” Todd kicked the generator. “But once you start drilling into their nest, they know something’s up. They don’t know what. Maybe they think it’s an anteater or pangolin. But their first instinct is to move the queen to safety. We got to get in there before they do.”

“Did we?”

“We’ll see.”

A few minutes later, a small dark spot appeared at the base of the mound. A single droplet of water appeared, then was re-absorbed. Then a trickle of water broke through.

A breach in the wall formed, and a rivulet ran out, hot, steaming.

And full of ant bodies.

Perhaps, though, they were merely stunned. Todd poked the ants with a stick. Yup, they were dead.

“Ace!” Zoe exclaimed.

“Now, we wipe them out, mound to mound.”

“Bonza, mate!” Zoe clapped her hands. “Quick question, though. What are you pumping in there? Smells like…lager.”

“It’s just water.” Todd sniffed the air. Then he tasted the muddy water running out of the mound. “Must be washing out. You know, some ants are farmers like you. Some grow fungi for food. Some grow Aeromonas bacteria to make oxygen. These are apparently growing yeast. Maybe getting a buzz off the alcohol. Weird. I’ve never seen that in this species before—-”

“Cooee!” Shorty called out, pointing at the mound. “Over here!”

The rivulet running from the mound had coughed up a lump. It wasn’t a clod of mud, but dead ant bodies, riding the surface tension. It was a carefully assembled raft, the ants linked one to another, mandible clamping to leg or antennae. They were all drowned, except the one they had sacrificed themselves for. This one paced back and forth on the raft, walking on the heads of her dead sisters.

“Oh no,” Shorty said.

A second, larger clump rode the stream, out of the wrecked mound. It, too, was a tangled mass of linked ant bodies. As the water petered out, it grounded on dry land. The ball unfolded, revealing a single live ant in the center. It was larger than the others, its abdomen distended, with white lines clearly delineating the segments.

“They saved a queen!” Todd shouted.

“It’s like an escape pod, made of ants!” Shorty said.

“I thought they all carked it!” Zoe said.

As they watched the queen ant drag herself toward safety, Todd mumbled to Zoe, “Maybe it is time for your shovel, after all.”

Zoe used her shovel.

Then Shorty asked, “So, what do we do now?”

“I could have a go at the pipes, too,” Zoe said. Having grown up fixing tractors and disc harrows, she was quite mechanically inclined.

“Yeah,” Todd considered. “With three of us drilling, we should be able to put in enough lances.”

Half an hour later, all three were dancing around another ant mound. Metal probes flew through the air, as Todd counted aloud, One Mississippi, Two Mississippi.

By the time he had reached Fifty, they had four full-length pipes in the ground, hoses firmly attached.

Todd threw the switch.

And hot water sprayed everywhere.

Shorty screamed, as she and Zoe ran from the mound. The connectors were secure—Shorty had done her job. But arcs of hot, pressurized water were shooting out of leaks in the hoses. Water jets, backlit by the setting sun, glowed like Roman candles.

Todd slammed the switch closed.

“What just happened?”

“Those were new hoses!” Todd flicked hot water off his face. “Were.”

“Do you think enough water got down there?” Zoe asked.

“Doubtful.”

“Are there more hoses in the truck?” Todd asked.

“In the ute?” Shorty said. “Nah. Heaps more lances, but no more hoses.”

“I’ve got hoses,” Zoe said. “This is a farm, after all.”

“But these are special,” Todd said. “The hot water would ruin a regular hose.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll bring more hoses tomorrow. I think we’re done for the day. It’s getting dark, anyway.”

“Ready to haul it back to Adelaide?” Shorty asked. “My professor should be back from the bush by now.”

“It’ll be nice to finally meet her,” Todd said.

As Todd and Shorty loaded the equipment into the ute, Shorty said, “Do you think the ants chewed through the hoses?”

“I sure hope not,” Todd said. “But we should spray them with repellent anyway.” He turned very serious. “Have you been keeping up with all the reports of ant activity around here?”

“No, why?”

“They’re all over southern Australia,” Todd said. “Port Pirie, Broken Hill. They’re invading factories, bakeries and clean rooms. They ate a wedding cake in Wyalla.”

“What are they doing?” Shorty asked.

“Well, an individual ant has a tiny brain,” Todd said. “But a super-colony has more neurons than a rat brain.”

“Smarty ants, eh?”

“And what are they doing? Anything they want. Unless we stop them.”

As the sky turned red and they started the long drive, Shorty looked back at the farm.

Zoe was furiously slapping her shovel against the ground.

II. JACOB

Back at the University of Adelaide, Todd sat under the light of the Southern Cross, studying the construction of ant nests.

You could determine a nest’s structure by pouring in cement or hot metal, and then digging it out after it hardened. Some nests had one vertical shaft, with side tunnels of decreasing size—like an upside-down Christmas tree. Some had four or five main shafts. Others were as big as a football field, with chambers large enough to hold a watermelon.

The different structures helped the heat and air flow. Or prevented flooding. Which was exactly what Todd was trying to cause.

How did these meat ants construct their nests? Where were the queens’ chambers? In the morning, could Todd improve the placement of the lances?

“C’mon, Todd,” Shorty said, handing him a tinny of Coopers. “The barbie’s just about ready.”

Southern Australia was being overrun by ants and she was worried about a barbecue? Where were her priorities?

“I’m not hungry,” Todd said, lying. “You go on without me.”

“You know, the barbie’s in your honor,” Shorty said. “And my advisor’s returned from the back o’ Burke.”

That got Todd excited. He had read Vauna D’harwala’s books on the ecology of the outback. His knowledge was deep, but narrow. Focused on ants. Hers was very broad. She was sure to have insights he’d missed. “Thanks!”

“No worries,” Shorty said.

No worries, Todd thought. No worries. What an odd statement. From what he saw, the country ran well. Petrol was pumped, Maccas were cleaned, stubbies and sangers delivered. Everything worked, but with a more relaxed attitude than America. Even in the midst of an ecological disaster. Ants are taking over? She’ll be right, mate. They’re stealing food, driving people from their homes? No worries, mate, no worries.

Maybe, despite Shorty’s cheerful attitude, she was terrified on the inside. He was.

And so he sat at a picnic table, an uneaten burger in front of him. Grad students tossed a Frisbee in the starlight.

He toyed with his French fries, imaging them as lances piercing the ant hill of the burger.

“Dr. Todd McDaniels, I’d like you meet Dr. Vauna D’harwala.”

Todd looked up, stunned.

He had read all of Vauna’s books, but none of them gave any personal information or showed a picture.

As he stared at her face, he became keenly aware that he—like everyone else at the barbie—was white; in his case, almost literally. Pale, colorless, nearly albino. He drowned himself in sunscreen to keep from burning.

He moved in international circles and was far too socially adept to ever comment about someone’s skin color or accent.

And yet he was trained as a biologist to differentiate organisms by the finest subtleties of color and shape.

And so for perhaps two or three seconds too long, he found himself acting the biologist, staring at Vauna’s skin—her beautiful skin!—which was the darkest black he had ever seen, as if her face had been delicately carved from onyx, and polished to satiny smoothness.

He had never met an Aborigine before.

And after those two or three seconds, he felt the deepest shame and embarrassment.

Awkwardly, he stuck out his hand in greeting.

Perhaps sensing his discomfort, Vauna shook it and said, “What have you got there?”

“A b-burger,” Todd stammered.

“First one you’ve had in Oz, then?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, let me do it up proper for you.” Vauna snatched away the plate.

It was a politic move, and Todd was thankful for the reprieve.

When she returned a few moments later, they could begin again.

“Give this a go,” she said with a smile. His burger was now twice the thickness.

He carefully dissected it. Aside from the regular hamburger stuff, it now included: a second patty, a slice of beet, pineapple, and an entire fried egg.

It was too tall for him to get his mouth around.

“Now that’s a real Aussie burger,” Vauna said with a laugh. “And there…” She pointed at two small, dark medallions. “Is some kangaroo meat for you. I like to call it ‘marsupan.’”

And now Todd laughed, too, the earlier awkwardness almost forgotten.

He held up a finger and said, “Just a sec.” He put his palms together and closed his eyes to silently say grace.

He thanked the Lord for his food. But more for the chance to come to this foreign land and share in God’s love. What better way was there to express God’s love than to help his new friends with their problems?

Like the ants he saw when he opened his eyes, crawling toward his burger.

“Ewwww,” said one of the undergrads, backing away. Todd and Vauna both leaned in closer.

“Iridomyrmex…” he said.

“…purpureus,” she said.

And they laughed together again.

Todd slid his plate to the side, away from the stream of ants that now ran up one leg of the picnic table, across the top, and down the other leg.

“Do you notice something odd about these ants?” Vauna asked.

“Quiz time!” Todd exclaimed. “I love quiz time!”

He studied the stream of ants. Each scout tapped her antennae on the abdomen of the ant in front, sending rhythmic signals and chemical messages. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual happening.

Todd looked up, and Vauna’s smile glowed with a scientist’s greatest joy: the thrill of discovering something that no one else on the planet knew.

“I give up,” Todd said, intrigued. “Tell me!”

“Look at the direction they’re going,” Vauna said. “I was here this morning when you and Shorty were at the Rhodes farm and—-”

“Disgusting!”

A woman appeared and started spraying Windex on the plastic table cover.

“Wait!” Todd shouted. “Don’t do that! We’re doing an experiment—-”

Too late.

Cleaner was sprayed and ants were wiped away. The woman walked off, muttering, “Scientists!”

New ant scouts appeared to replace the disappeared ones. They followed the trail pheromones left by their nestmates until they reached the Great Windex Ocean.

An ant traffic jam formed at the edge of Windex, until some brave ones started palpating, tracking the shoreline. Then they met ants coming the other way.

The ants exchanged non-aggression signals, proving they were from the same nest.

Todd laughed about the ants trading chemicals. What if, when you were at work, you had to spit in your coworkers’ faces every time you passed them in the hall?

And as he laughed, traffic was restored and the ant stream simply flowed around the Windex Ocean.

“I still don’t understand,” Todd said, “what’s so unusual.”

“Here’s a hint,” Vauna said. “In the morning, they were coming from other there.” She pointed a finger at a low wall by the new astronomy building.

“Oh, wow,” Todd said. “That is weird!”

“I don’t get it!” Shorty said. “What’s so weird about that?”

“Well, tell me what time it is,” Todd said.

“Half past ten.”

“And where were they coming from earlier?”

“Oh!’ Shorty said. “I see!”

Ants have a daily cycle. In the morning, they move away from the nest to forage, and then return at night. Now, late this night, they were still moving in the same direction. They were going the wrong way.

“Maybe they’re migrating?” Shorty asked.

Todd and Vauna screwed up their faces.

“This kind isn’t migratory,” they said, almost in unison.

“Most aren’t,” Todd said. “They call it faithfulness to locality. Oh my! Now look at what that scout is doing!”

This kind of ant made a stream that followed the trail scent, Todd explained, but the stream was simply that. A structureless bunch of ants meandering more-or-less in the same direction. Contrast that with the army ants. Their streams of workers were organized, edged with ferocious soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder, jaws in the air, ready to snap at enemies.

These ants didn’t have guards like that.

Except now they did.

Two of them were holding a tiny, sharp twig between them.

Todd had seen ants use tools before. They were miniature bulldozers, moving earth to build nests, throwing pebbles to block up the tunnels of rivals.

And now they had spears?

“Hey, Shorty,” Vauna said, “stick your finger in there.”

“I’m not falling for that!”

Todd laughed. “I shall sacrifice this my body, for the sake of science.” He waved his index finger at the ants and then quickly jerked it back. “Ow!”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know! But it stung.”

“Do it again!”

Todd held up his finger. “For science!” Cautiously this time, he inched his hand closer to the stream of ants. Slowly he moved, studying the ants’ response.

“Do you see that?”

The two ants holding the spear were bobbing and weaving. The tip of the twig moved, tracking Todd’s finger.

Ants had discovered the principle of the lever.

“Amazing!”

“Give me a firm place to stand and I shall move the earth,” Todd joked, looking at Vauna.

Vauna’s eyes opened wide. Her body went stiff.

“What’s wrong?” Todd asked.

“Reminds me of a weird rumor I heard,” she said. “I should check it out in the morning.”

“What?” he said. “You’re not coming with us?”

“With you—- where?”

“Shorty and I are going back to Rhodes Farm,” he said. “You want to steam kill some ants with us? We could really use the help.”

“And…” Shorty said, “as my supervisor, you really should supervise my work.”

“Fine, fine,” Vauna said. “I guess I’m outvoted. I’ll see you in the morning.”

As Vauna got up to leave, Shorty winked at Todd.

Early the next morning, Todd and Shorty had new heat-resistant hoses and dozens of lances packed into the ute.

The water tank was full, and supplemented with a smaller tank. They even had a back-up generator and more power drills. And plenty of gas to power the generators.

Only one element was missing.

Where was Vauna?

Shorty shot her a message. A few minutes later, she answered that she’d be right there.

Vauna arrived just as Todd and Shorty finished loading the cement and ant repellent.

“Vauna! Great!” Todd exclaimed. “We’re all ready to go. I had a question for you—-”

“I’m sorry, Todd,” she said. “I can’t go with you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s these weird rumors from north of Marree,” she said. “I have to go investigate.”

“Maybe we could all go together?”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Oz is a big place. The Rhodes farm is two hours east. I’m going at least three hours north. We’d never make it in time.”

“So…what is it?”

Vauna shook her head. “You’d think I had a roo loose in the paddock if I told you what I’ve heard. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be anything.”

“Then we’ll be short-staffed at the farm,” Shorty said. “C’mon, Vauna, we need you.”

“No,” she said. “Zoe’s pulling in her best farmhands. There will be heaps of people to help you.”

As Vauna turned to walk away, she said over her shoulder, “For science!”

Todd tried to hide his disappointment. When she was out of earshot, he asked Shorty, “What was that all about?”

“Sometimes,” Shorty said, “she just needs to go walkabout.” She climbed into the ute. “But don’t worry. She always comes back.”

Todd climbed in and they drove off.

“Eventually.”

Two hours later, Todd and Shorty arrived at the Rhodes farm.

It seemed oddly still and quiet.

They parked at the porch of the freshly-painted farmhouse, where Zoe had asked them to meet.

“She sure keeps a tidy farm,” Todd said. No rusted silos or caved-in barns here.

Shorty rang the doorbell.

No answer.

It seemed unlikely that the bell didn’t work.

After a few polite seconds, Todd knocked.

Still no answer.

When he knocked a second time, a hand clasped him on the shoulder.

“We did it!” Zoe yelled, her face an explosion of delight.

“Did what?”

Zoe pointed at the fields.

“Between my shovel and your hot water, we did it!”

Todd looked at the corn field, stunned.

The ants were all gone.

“Goodonya, mate!”

In the distance, three farmhands, all Aborigines, were working on a tractor. None of them were swatting themselves free of ants.

“We bopped them in the nose and they, well, buggered off!”

“No, Zoe,” Todd said, shaking his head. “It’s just…This doesn’t make any sense. Ants don’t have feelings. You can’t just scare them off by killing a few. They’ll climb over their colonymates’ dead bodies to complete a mission.”

“As long as they’re gone,” Zoe said, “I don’t care.”

Shorty reached for an ear of corn. “Mind if I celebrate? I haven’t had fresh corn on the cob in years.”

Zoe waved her on.

Todd wasn’t in the mood for celebrating. Zoe could have just called to tell him the ants were gone. Then he could have gone with Vauna on her scientific adventure.

A serious expression came over Zoe’s face. “What I was really worried about was the government.”

“The government?”

“They’ve been seizing failed farms,” Zoe said. “You know, no one had been able to tame this land in 40,000 years. And my family did it in just a few generations. But we’re just one bad crop from losing this place and having it given back to—-” Zoe glanced at the tractor.

“Zoe!” Shorty shouted.

She ushered them over to the cornstalk, pointing at one ear, the husk partially peeled back.

“Is it supposed to look like this?”

Zoe snapped the ear off the plant. In two quick and elegant gestures, she had stripped off the husk and silk.

“What the—-”

There was not a single kernel on the corn.

Had it not grown properly?

If a kernel isn’t fertilized, it makes a shallow white dome. But here were small yellow-gray depressions, scars where the kernels should have been.

No, these kernels had been pollinated. The silk was dry and brown as it should have been.

Todd examined the ear with his mag lens, then checked several others. They were the same.

All the kernels had been surgically removed.

By tiny ant mandibles.

Zoe was standing in the middle of her corn field, without any corn to harvest.

After months of disk plowing, planting, watering, detasseling, fertilizing, and pollinating, she had nothing to show. The harvesters were due next week, and she had nothing. Nothing!

The government was going to take her farm and give it away.

It was too much to bear.

She started slamming her fists into the soil.

After a few moments, she calmed down, and sat in the dirt.

Shorty and Todd joined her.

“If it’s any consolation,” Todd began slowly, “yours is not the only farm overrun by ants. Last time I talked to your department of agriculture, they said they were getting funding to make sure the affected farms didn’t go under.”

“So…the government is going to actually help instead of just taking our money?”

“In this case,” Todd said, “I think so. And here’s another thing. Ants are really good at re-distributing nutrients in the soil. Better than earthworms.” He put a reassuring hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “I’ll bet you that your next crop is going to be the best one ever.”

Zoe started crying.

As Todd and Shorty got back into the ute, Shorty asked, “Have you ever seen ants strip an entire field?”

“Nope.”

“They’re like locusts,” Shorty said.

“Actually, they’re nothing like locusts,” Todd said. “Locusts swoop in and eat everything. Including stuff that’s not food, like strips of dried paint off the walls. Ants are very smart and discriminant. They’ll even pick out the embryos from corn kernels before they store them.”

Shorty looked confused.

“So they don’t germinate.”

“What do you mean…‘store them’?”

“I’ll bet that corn is still out there.” Todd waved his hand at the empty field. “But the ants have taken it into underground chambers. It’s still there, just hidden away where we can’t see it.”

“Why do you think they need that much corn?”

Todd had no answer.

“Here’s another question for you.”

“Sure.”

“What do you think of Vauna?”

“Vauna?”

“I mean,” Shorty said with a giggle. “She’s an ant-loving desert scientist. And you’re a desert-loving ant scientist. That makes you…an eremophilous myrmecologist and her…a myrmecophilous eremologist.” She pushed back in her seat, letting her big words hang in the air. “What do you think?”

Todd didn’t have an answer to that question, either.

Several hundred miles to the north and west, the Aboriginal myrmecophilous eremologist was driving toward the sheep stations past Leigh Creek and Marree.

I like him fine, I guess, she thought to herself.

She screeched her ute to a stop in the red earth.

A skull, bleached white in the sun, lay in the strip of dirt between road and fence. It wasn’t human, thank goodness. It was an herbivore, with long, narrow face and two arching horns.

Another billy goat skull.

She had plenty of these. This one was already damaged, the cheek bone broken, the nasal bone smashed, the turbinates missing. The skull wasn’t worth saving, but the horns were still nice. They showed indentations where this goat had butted heads with another.

But I’m like Greta Garbo, she thought, shattering the skull against her ute’s roo bars, and extracting the horns.

I just want to be alone.

She tossed the horns onto a tray mounted over the dashboard.

It was filled with specimens.

Jasper from the Flinders Ranges. Smokey quartz from Clarendon. A strange, shiny black rock from Karoonda. It might be part of a lunar meteorite, because it was heavy and magnetic, but the shape was wrong. One side was bumpy, but the other concave and smooth, like a bowl.

All these wonderful and mysterious things she had collected, walking the land.

Alone.

Suppose I want to spend a month in the bush, so blue-tongued lizards and I can stick out our tongues at each other. Is that wrong? Does that make me a bad person?

She drove on.

She passed another goat skull and later a wallaby skull, without stopping either time.

Where she was going, there would be a lot more to collect.

If the rumors were right.

She drove on, turning at the servos and smash repair shops scribbled on her map.

Finally, she arrived at the mystery spot.

It did not disappoint.

It was a wide field of red sand, with rounded hills in the background. Studding the earth were dozens of bones. If not hundreds. Skulls, ribs, vertebrae, scapulae, tibias.

Were they human?

She would need a reference book to distinguish a kangaroo femur from a human’s. But the skulls were clear enough.

Roo. Koala. Horse. Sheep. Goat. No humans among them. Whew.

As Vauna climbed out of the ute, she approached cautiously.

The bones were covered with ants.

Had they killed all these animals?

No, she thought. The bones were too dry. No blood. White from the sun, with dark spots where remnants of muscle and cartilage had been.

The skeletons were disarticulated, the bones jumbled up.

But why were they all in one place?

Sometimes masses of animals would drown in a flash flood, and their bodies wash together. But…that would usually be a herd, the bones all one species. These were mixed. Koalas hung in trees. Wallabies and sheep did not forage together. Why would they be together in death?

Nothing made sense.

Then, in the corner of her eye, she saw something.

She thought she saw one of the bones move.

Probably from the pressure of hundreds of ants boiling up from underneath.

No.

The ants had not only dragged the bones here, but were re-animating them, with muscles and sinews made of chains of ants.

They were like massed Egyptian slaves, moving an enormous block of stone.

They had found a new application for the principle of the lever.

A frenzy of ants was pulling on a femur, erecting it like a skyscraper. Each ant clamped its jaws like visegrips around the waist of the ant in front, right before the gaster.

But the string of ants pulled too hard. The femur went vertical, then fell in the opposite direction.

But they tried again.

And then they were lifting an entire spinal column.

A swirl of ants and bones rose out of the commotion. It was an entire skeleton, perhaps four feet tall. It looked like it had been assembled from several animals, as the two thigh bones were not the same length. The pelvis was upside down, but the entire thing was moving. There was no skull, as the brain was distributed all throughout the body, in the thousands and thousands of ants.

Vauna walked among them, cursing herself. She had packed carefully, remembering to bring everything except a camera. Todd and Shorty would not believe her without evidence.

Yes, this was the thrill of discovery, but tempered with the fear of losing credibility if she shared it.

Then she felt another kind of fear.

As this monstrosity of bone and ant turned toward her, she shuddered in panic and ran toward the ute.

Todd pushed another colored pin into the wall map of Australia.

Red was current ant outbreaks. Green was where ants had been, but had now left.

Adelaide was celebrating the departure of the ants. As quickly as the ant tsunami had arrived, streaming through garages and factories, it had gone. The ants had appeared en masse, without warning.

And now, just like that, they were gone.

But they were heading north. The red pushpins formed an inverted V, an arrow pointing up through the middle of Oz.

“So what’s up there?” Todd asked.

As he asked the question, the door opened and Vauna came in.

She was still flustered, agitated.

“How was your great scientific adventure?” Todd joked.

“Uh…” Vauna calmed herself. “It turned out to be…” This experience was just too crazy to share. “A big nothing in the middle of nothing.”

“Well, that must have been disappointing,” Todd said. “But it’s good to have you back!”

“Thanks,” Vauna said, turning her attention to the Australia map. She composed herself and said: “North and a little west of here, after a long drive, is Coober Pedy. That’s opal mines and junkyards. And then, after another long drive, is Alice. Right in the dead center of Australia.” She stabbed a finger at the map. “You Yanks have a military base up there called Pine Gap. You won’t be happy when it’s overrun by ants.”

People have their maps, marking highways and airports. But other creatures have their own maps, superimposed on ours. Dogs don’t care about streets, only where other dogs are. The ancient ancestors walk the songlines of the earth, pausing to reminisce at waterholes and hidden places of spiritual power.

And intertwined in them all were the tracks of the ants.

They ran in thick rivers, millions upon millions, through the houses of Woomera and the new shops at Tarcoola.

Compelled by ineluctable chemical signals, the ants had left their ancestral homes. With nodules of iron oxide in their heads and gasters, they felt the hidden electromagnetic lines of the earth, following them north, fueled on their journey by stolen bounties of corn and wedding cake.

The ants came from myriad niches and represented myriad forms and faces. Some had jaws heavy like sledgehammers, some had jaws long and spikey to catch springtails and silverfish. Some were tiny, some huge in comparison. As if human-sized humans walked beside giants as tall as ten-story buildings. And these myriad myrmidons were peaceably marching together, straight up the middle of Australia.

Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

By white man or black.

Many Aborigines, like Vauna herself, lived modern lifestyles, with modern clothing, performing modern jobs in modern cities. But a few still clung to the ancient ways, speaking the ancient tongues, conferring with the ancient ancestor spirits. And these elders watched the torrent of ants, just as they had long watched the ebb and flow of waters. They kept calendars marked by millennia, not by seasons arbitrarily marked by days.

To them, there was no spring or summer, no fall or winter. There was the season of the Dharratharramirri, which ended when the balgur lost its leaves. There was the season when the pandanus would fruit, and the Dhimurru winds would blow. There was the season of the Burrugumirri, when mornings turned cold and the sharks birthed their young.

None of the elders were scientists in the Western sense, but they knew the land better than most ecologists, even world-famous eremologists.

The traditionals knew this land, this timeless land that had co-existed with them for forty thousand years.

They knew the ants.

They knew that licking the green ants firmed the bosom. That limonite deposits around ant hills made good pigments. That bushfires were coming when meat ants covered their nests with quartz chips. That ant poison was a hallucinogen that helped them commune with spirits.

But what were the ants doing?

The ants had chewed through walls separating room from room, through hoses separating water from air. Now they were chewing through the walls of time, the dividers between the now and the early-early days. And through these holes shot white hot Roman candles of Dreamtime, mingling with the modern age.

As three scientists tried to parse the “stigmergy,” the work that inspired the ants, the Aborigines asked a slightly different question.

In the ancient days, the ancestors had dreamed the world into existence.

What now were the ants dreaming?

They didn’t know.

But answering a call that they neither heard nor understood, the peoples came. They called themselves blackfellas, though their skin represented every shade from black to white, and they lived lifestyles from traditional to modern. And they gathered their families, tumbled them into jeeps and pick-up trucks and followed the ants north.

And Todd and Shorty piled grinding mills and gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers into a ute. Yes, Vauna would be joining them on this great scientific.

But none of them knew where they were going.

“The barrier will be here.”

The American First Lieutenant Lori Osborne pointed at the small map. Three lines, in red, blue and green, represented the defenses around the American facility at Pine Gap, in the dead center of Australia.

Todd nodded in agreement.

This was an important installation. A ground receiving station for a third of America’s spy satellites, including those going over China, Russia and the Middle East. If anyone launched a missile from space, they would see it here first.

Todd had read reports of carpenter ants and fire ants massing in such numbers that they shorted out electrical equipment.

The Americans were right to be prepared. And worried.

Todd, Vauna and Shorty—being non-military and thus not allowed on base—watched the Lieutenant’s presentation on a computer screen in a hotel room.

“What about Alice?” Vauna said, referring to the small town eleven miles from the base.

The Lieutenant was well aware of the touchiness of their relations with their host Aussies.

Peace protestors regularly drove up to the base’s gate, demanding that they “Close the Gap”. Some claimed that the Americans were spying on the Aussies, or else hiding secrets about flying saucers. Some complained that the base made Australia a target, painting a giant bull’s eye in the middle of their country.

“What are you going to do for Alice?”

The Lieutenant explained that Pine Gap, despite its importance, was geographically tiny. Only a few blocks across, and thus readily defensible.

Alice, on the other hand, was small for a town, but would still require miles and miles of defenses to encircle her and her airport. Nonetheless, joint forces were working to protect her.

The outer defense line around Pine Gap would be a string of poison traps. This was where the scientists would come in, selecting the right mix of toxins and attractants.

If that failed, there would be a moat of water, lined with concrete, dug completely around Pine Gap by the Army corps of engineers.

And inside that, a second moat filled with gasoline that could be set on fire if needed.

Similar defenses would be built around Alice and her airport, as best they could.

They had eleven days.

It wasn’t much time, but now they were playing in Todd’s domain.

He had available to him a veritable arsenal of chemical weapons to use against the ants.

He had the potent combo of cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives. They were like a pair of sharpshooters, taking out ants without harming innocent bystanders. They were safe to use around livestock, and had been recently approved for use in Australia. So no resistant ants had yet arisen.

But he also had a brand new N-phenylpyrazole variant, which got him very excited. It was related to, but more potent than, what he had used in Mexico City. Where the other compounds used finesse, this new chemical was like an atom-powered Attila the Hun. It was almost out of control, destroying everything. Not just ants, but grasshoppers, ladybugs, protozoans and all sorts of worms, both flat and round. It wasn’t yet approved for use. He was dying to see its devastating effects.

Which one would they use? Would the Aussies let Attila out of his cage?

And which attractant?

The idea is that worker ants would eat the poison, and pass it to other ants, who would eventually pass it to queens, killing them.

But first they had to trick the ants into taking the poison by mixing in a bait.

But what would the local ants prefer? Light corn syrup? Honey? Peanut butter?

The American lieutenant put a dozen of her soldiers at the scientists’ disposal. They went into the field, collecting thousands of ants, which were divided into groups of hundreds and treated to poisons and sweets.

As Todd collated the data, counting dead ants and calculating mortality rate and LD50. He was in the zone, zeroing in on the perfect magic bullet.

A few nights later, the science team decided to take their first break in almost a week.

Shorty went into Alice, ostensibly to get some stubbies, but really to give Todd and Vauna some time alone.

They sat together on a log, watching for meteors. Comets regularly hit the Moon, Vauna explained, knocking off rocks that land in Australia in the form of meteorites.

Maybe someday they would find one together.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Vauna asked.

“Sure, anything,” Todd said.

“You’re religious, eh?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, “I like to think of myself as Christian but not crazy. Is that ok?”

“Oh, yeah, Todd,” she said. “When I was growing up, the only education we got was from a missionary.”

“Nice to know we did something right.”

“So my question is this…I thought you were supposed to be stewards of this land.”

Todd nodded. “Yeah, we are.”

“Then how do you reconcile that with preparing chemicals to kill millions and millions of God’s creations?”

“Yeah,” Todd said, slowly and pensively. “Good question. I once calculated how many ants I’ve killed. Twelve billion, more than one for every man, woman and child on the earth.”

“That can’t feel good.”

“No,” Todd said. “But you know what’s even worse? The torture. For science. I’ve chopped off legs and antennae, or else crossed the right and left antennae and glued them in place, to see what will happen. It really messes them up.” He exhaled deeply. “I’ve also pulled off their heads to see how long they’d keep biting and gnashing.”

“That’s pretty gruesome,” Vauna said. “As a summer intern in a micro lab, the first time I autoclaved a flask of bacteria—a hundred billion individuals—I felt pretty bad. Does it make you feel like you’re committing genocide against the ants?”

“Oooh,” Todd said. “That’s a powerful word.”

“Yeah, as a member of a race that’s been on the receiving end, I don’t use it lightly.”

“Nor I,” he said, “as a member of a race that’s doled it out.”

“So, as a Christian,” Vauna asked, “how do you feel about all the killing God commands in the Old Testament? How do you reconcile that with Jesus as a symbol of love?”

“Oooh, heavy questions.” Todd was silent for a few moments. “This is something I’ve thought about a lot.”

“Your conclusions?”

“I once heard a sermon about deciding what Bible character you wanted to be like,” Todd said. “And I chose Joshua, who travels to another country to do God’s work.”

“Really?” Vauna was shocked. “The guy who committed most of the atrocities?”

“No, no!” Todd protested. “Let me explain. People don’t like the idea of what happened in the Old Testament, because they don’t like the idea of sin. The bible isn’t like what happened in Rwanda…”

“Or here in Australia?”

“Right!” Todd exclaimed. “There’s no justification for that. But…In the Bible, it’s not about the color of your skin. It’s about the color of your soul. In the Bible, death works both ways. Cities of sinners are destroyed. But when the Israelites, God’s own chosen people, go off the rails, they’re destroyed, too, and God sends the Chaldeans to smite them. And God destroyed his own Son when He took on the sin of the world.”

“So…” Vauna asked, “are the ants sinners?”

“Well, yeah!” Todd thought for a moment. “They kill, they steal, they covet their neighbors’ homes and storehouses. When fire ants sweep in, they wipe out ninety-eight percent of the native ant species. That’s genocide.”

“Brutal.”

“Yeah, nature is brutal.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, staring at the sky.

“We are the Chaldeans,” Todd said. “We’re the scourge of God, weeding the garden, putting things right. We are at war.”

Vauna was silent.

She cuddled up against him, but he wondered if she really thought his words merely proved him insane.

The river of ants came.

The desert ants came, with bristles on the backs of their heads to keep sand off their necks. The imported turtle ants came, with their huge dish-shaped heads. The leaf cutter ants came, with tiny minim ants riding on their heads to ward off predators.

The ants came, in a river five miles long and a mile wide.

And Pine Gap was ready for them.

Todd had settled on the sharpshooter chemicals, having not received permission to unleash Attila the Hun. The U.S. military picked up canisters of these compounds from his lab in San Diego, then flew them across the ocean to Sydney, and then to Alice.

The black plastic traps were not available in sufficient numbers, so they used disposable Petri dishes, sent up from Adelaide and down from Darwin.

The toxins were mixed with honey and blackberry extract and dispensed into the dishes, which were hand-placed in the sand every few feet, by soldiers walking the outskirts of Pine Gap and Alice.

Lieutenant Osborne was worried that all this effort was like pouring a single cup of coffee into the ocean. Wouldn’t the poisons be too dilute?

No, Todd reassured her. A hundred parts per million should be enough.

He didn’t have to wait long to see if he was right.

The river of ants came to Pine Gap, and then suddenly it stopped when it reached the ring of bait traps.

The ants were like thirsty travelers who, having marched across the desert, paused to luxuriate at an oasis.

They rushed over the shallow lips of the Petri dishes and swarmed the sweets. And the poisons.

For several hours, the ants bunched up at the line of traps, with no desire to go further. They were enjoying themselves too much.

It was as if the honey and blackberry made an invisible force field.

Then all the food was all gone.

And the ants moved forward as a single super-organism, past the line of traps toward the second barrier, the water moat.

Todd, watching on video monitors, was completely disappointed.

Maybe they should have let him unleash Attila the Hun. Maybe they needed more time for the poisons to work their way to the queens. Maybe he had under-estimated the number of ants. Maybe by an order of magnitude. Maybe he needed ten or a hundred times more poison to get them all.

He turned away from the monitor, turned away from Vauna and Shorty. He couldn’t bear to see their disappointment in him.

The ants, having no emotions, did not revel in their victory over the bait traps, but simply moved on to the water moats.

These held them for a while.

The ants tried to cross the water, which was six feet across, in chains made of ants. Yes, many would sacrifice themselves, drowning, but other would walk across their dead bodies to the other side. But these were washed away in the water’s currents.

The ants also tried to cross using leaves and twigs as little boats. These, too, were washed away.

Walking the perimeter, Lieutenant Osborne was pretty happy about the success of the moat until she felt an itch on her neck. At first she thought it was just formication, the false sensation that an ant was crawling on you.

No, she realized. It was a real ant. Dropping from a tree branch spanning the moat.

“Sergeant Kelleam!” she shouted into her comm. “I ordered all the trees chopped down!”

“We did, ma’am!”

“What about this one I’m standing under?”

“Well, that one shades the commander’s office.”

“He can lose his tree or he can lose his base! I want flame throwers here right now!”

But before the torches arrived, streams of ants rushed the tree. Once some had discovered this avenue, they all knew. They swarmed the branches, crossing high above the water moat, and dropping down on the other side.

Next was the final line of defense, the moat filled with gasoline.

The ants approached this moat cautiously. In a coincidence of chemistry, some of the hydrocarbons in the gas smelled like the chemicals the ants used as alarm pheromones.

So the ants snapped their jaws and sprayed poisons at the moat, as if it were an enormous enemy ant.

Then they started bombarding it with clods of dirt. If they kept this up, they could cross it without having their feet ever touch the foul liquid.

At that moment, the base commander approved the Lieutenant’s request to light it up.

And a ring of fire appeared around Pine Gap, brightening the night sky. It over-saturated the vid feed as Vauna and Shorty watched, filling the screen with white.

Soldiers cheered.

The ants were stopped.

For now.

The problem was that the Lieutenant had assumed that this army of ants was acting like army ants.

Army ants travel across the land, and so they can be stopped by obstacles on the surface. Like flood or fire.

Most other ants travel underground, where they can’t be seen.

This underground river, in fact, was flowing through thick tunnels, dug by mining machines made from koala claws and emu beaks and the bones of wallabies and sheep, re-animated by muscles made of ants.

Yes, the fire stopped the ants on the surface.

But it didn’t stop the river of ants from bursting up, through the ground.

When Vauna saw the video of the swirling mass of bone and ant erupt from the earth, she bit her tongue. Perhaps she should have told the others of her discovery, even without film or other evidence. Perhaps she should have predicted this was what they were using the bones for. Huge, ant-driven underground mining machines.

Pine Gap and Alice were quickly overrun.

Commissaries were emptied, mess halls cleared out. Bikkies and lollies were eaten out of the jars on secretaries’ desks.

And, then, just like that, the ants were gone.

Moved on, moving north.

In the end, Pine Gap only lost two laptop computers to the ants. Satellite monitoring was only briefly interrupted, and order was quickly restored.

All of Pine Gap’s defenses had been nothing more than a rock thrown into a river. And the river had flowed around it.

III. PHARAOH

“What’s north of here?” Todd asked. “Where are we going?”

They had stopped at a takeaway in the middle of nowhere.

Todd paused to look at the distant hills, rounded by time. The land was beautiful in its antiquity, he thought. Here ancient flightless birds still walked the earth. And the sun had bleached red sand to pink, green plants to gray. Like a faded photo. You could go backward 40,000 years, or forward. The land would look the same, he imagined. It existed outside of time.

“Not much north of here,” Vauna said. “The Top End. And then you’re at the ocean, and the Equator.”

Were the ants planning to cross the sea in rafts made of ants?

After what he had seen, Todd did not put it past them.

“I got you a Diet Coke,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I never touch the stuff.”

“I thought you—-“

She shook her head.

“Let me go get myself a real Coke,” she said.

“You’re not going walkabout on me again, are you?” Todd asked.

“No,” Vauna said. “But I reserve the right to, later.”

Then she pointed at a sign indicating mileage to Arnhem Land.

“I should drive this next bit.”

“But I’m not tired.”

“Trust me,” she said. “Arnhem is Aboriginal land. You’ll be glad I’m behind the wheel.”

They arrived at a new gatehouse to Arnhem, with one car in front of them.

A yellow and black striped metal bar blocked their path. A trickle of ants zigged across under the bar and into Arnhem.

The car in front of them was a rented Holden convertible with two blonde Yanks inside, skin as white as sour cream.

“G’day, mate,” said the dark-skinned gatekeeper. “May I please see your permit?”

“Fishing permit?” the American driver asked. “We don’t have one. How much?”

“No, mate,” the gatekeeper said, pointing at a sign.

YOU ARE NOW ON ABORIGINAL LAND. TO ENTER ABORIGINAL LAND, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO BE IN POSSESSION OF A WRITTEN PERMIT ISSUED BY TRADITIONAL ABORIGINAL OWNERS, THEIR DELEGATE OR THE NORTHERN LAND COUNCIL. PENALTY FOR ENTERING ABORIGINAL LAND WITHOUT A PERMIT IS $1000.00.

“So… I need a permit to cross?”

“That’s right, mate,” the guard said. “This is Aboriginal land now. It’s not Crown land. It’s not public land. It’s private, owned by us, since they gave it back.”

A much larger blackfella stood on the other side of the car. “Without a permit, it’s trespassing.”

An emu ducked its head under the gate and strode into Arnhem.

“Your kind doesn’t do well in gaol.”

The American started sweating. Now he was the minority.

“Could I buy a permit? Please? Sir?”

“Well, you have to go back to Darwin.”

“Darwin? That’ll take hours!”

“Yeah, plus a week to process. Maybe two. That is, if you can get one. You know, they only let in 15 cars a week.”

“This is insane—what if I just drove around—-“

“Sure you could.” The largest of the Aborigines moved in front of the car. He was now joined by three others. “But there’s only one road. We’ll catch ya.”

“No, you won’t.”

“And how’s that, then? You go off road in this and you’ll get stuck in a billabong.” The black pushed up and down on the front of the car. “Maybe flipped over by a water buffalo. And eaten by a croc. But…do whatever you want, mate.”

The Americans swore at them, and the blackfellas just laughed and laughed.

Then they fell back when the American revved his engine.

But the gate remained closed.

Vauna realized what was happening and slammed the ute into reverse. She barely missed being hit when the Americans spun around and sped down the road. Back to Darwin.

“That was fun!” Vauna said. “This is, of course, why I wanted to drive.”

She turned to Shorty in the backseat and said, “You should hide back there, among the equipment.”

She pulled up to the gate.

“G’day!” the gatekeeper said.

“G’day!” Vauna said.

“Where ya goin’?”

“Eh, just mucking about.”

The gatekeeper looked at Todd, and Vauna quickly put her black hand over his white hand.

“He’s with me,” she said. “He’s fair dinkum.”

After a pause, the guard said, “All right, then! Off ya go. Enjoy your holiday!”

The gate opened, and they drove on.

At the edge of the ocean, the ants made their stand.

They began excavating a huge communal super-colony.

Although they came from different architectural schools, there was no bickering over design or construction. A single female, a queen of queens, sent aggregation and pacifying signals throughout the hordes. Her orders were inviolable.

She chose a nest topped by a large conical mound. Soon it was as tall as a red boomer kangaroo. Soon, twice that, and then twice that again. It was built with the aid of half a dozen wallaby and jumbuck skeletons, animated by ant muscles.

By her command, sand and pebbles covered the eastern slope, warming the nest in the morning sun.

The queen of queens chose leafcutter ants as middle managers. Overseers of the most complex colonies, they were ideally suited to this task. They collected—and taught other ants to collect—seeds, leaves and flowers to feed the massive fungal gardens, which were kept scrupulously clean and free of parasites. They ran the food distribution and garbage disposal systems, teaching others to deposit debris outside the nest, regularly turning it to aid decomposition.

The leafcutters entrusted their pupae to the jaws of other ants. These pupae produced silk, and the ants wielded them in their mouths like glue guns, assembling shelters and tents made of leaves.

Now the queen of queens sent new chemical signals. In addition to the chitins and chitosans they naturally produced for their armored shells, the ants would be making new materials. Multi-walled nanofibers with inclusions and cross-linkers of di-pentane-octane and tri-pentane-tri-heptane. New materials for a new project.

In their previous lives, the ants had only built down, and out.

Now they were building up.

The blacks were fascinated by, and very possessive of, the ants’ construction project, the only one of its kind in the world.

They began patrolling the border between Arnhem and the rest of Australia. Their goal: to keep out the balanda, the white man who had taken their land and given them smallpox. The ones who threw them in gaol on trumped-up charges and beat them to death in their cells, with no fear of repercussion.

No, the white man was not welcome here.

This was the blacks’ land.

This was their time.

And so they came.

And came.

Some came in business suits, some in T-shirts. Some came barefoot, stripped to the waist, their dark skin painted in white stripes like a snake, or dotted like a cowrie shell.

Some spoke to Jesus. Some to the Wandjina, the ancestral spirits that dreamed the world into existence. Some believed Jesus was a Wandjina. And they listened as the spirits spoke back to them.

They said the ants were building a ribbon up into the heavens, a road reuniting mother earth and grandmother sky.

And as the ants built and blacks gathered around them, waving their flags of unity, whites massed at the border, looking in.

One white army general fumed and foamed about the military dangers of the ants’ ribbon. He rode the lead vehicle of a column of armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

Right up to the Arnhem gate.

The gatekeeper said to him:

“G’day, mate, may I please see your permit?”

Permit? His permit was a Vulcan cannon and .50 caliber machine gun.

The gate stayed down, though, blackfellas massed behind it. Telephone calls were made rapid fire.

These quickly went up to the PM, who backed up the gatekeeper. He said he’d have the general’s head if he crashed the gate.

And so, in frustration, the general unholstered his sidearm and shot it into the air.

At that moment, several black soldiers climbed out the caravan, leaving their positions and strolling across the border into Arnhem, from where there would now be no extradition.

As Todd and Shorty set up their portable chemistry lab, Vauna—with no particular expertise in such matters—excused herself to wander off.

Todd hated to see her leave, and wondered if she would come back.

She strolled through the crowds gathered at the base of the ribbon.

Maybe her family was here.

She had never seen so many black faces in one place, or in such variety.

Some had black blood mixed with white, some with Japanese or Pakistani. Some had last names like Harris or Thompson, some Yunupingu or Nullyarimma. Some spoke only English, some also Yolnju or Tarawalla or Pitjantjatjara. Some represented the last of their tongues. When they died, their languages would die with them.

Vauna did not find her family, but she ran into a man from a nothing town in the Kimberly. You can’t walk down the street, he said, without kicking beer bottles. There’s no work there, nothing to learn, nothing to do but get pissed on grog. But now, experiencing this Black Woodstock, he was changed. He would throw away the bottle. When he got back, he would bring in teachers. He would make sure his town had electricity. And computers. He would make something out of his life.

Several groups of men sat in small circles, dreaming. Long ago their ancestors had sat around sacred stones, dreaming them into existence. Now they sat near the ants’ ribbon—the world’s largest lingam—dreaming into existence a new generation and a fairer Australia.

A painted old woman sat in the dust, cross-legged. “Listen, you mob,” she said. “Let your souls sail between heaven and earth. The whitefella too young to know and too old to understand. Let your souls sail a little long ways up the pillar, and listen to the singing. Listen.”

Vauna stood for a few minutes, but her soul stayed put, and she could not hear the pillar sing.

“Now that everyone’s back,” Todd said, winking at Vauna as she came into the tent. “We can decide on the strategy for the final assault.”

“What do you think went wrong at Pine Gap?” Shorty said.

“I think the geography was against us,” Todd said. “The ants were moving in a line, and they flowed around the barrier we built. But here…”

He pulled out a map of Arnhem.

“They’re already gathered in one place for us,” he said. “There’s no place for them to go.”

“Except up,” Shorty joked.

“Let’s be serious,” he said. “I say we encircle their super-colony and hit them with everything we’ve got, everything that’s permitted. The cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives, arylpyrazoles, heteropyrazoles, and lithium perfluorooctane sulfonate.”

Shorty nodded, but Vauna withheld judgment.

“As for attractants,” he continued, “I say we use everything. Sucrose, maltose, fructose, lithium salts, molasses. Everything.”

“The whole kitchen sink, eh,” Vauna said.

“You have different thoughts?” Todd said. “I’d love to hear them.”

“We’ve got a potent ant-killing force right here,” Vauna said. “We just have to unleash its power.”

“What is it?”

“Ants.”

Todd nodded, thoughtfully.

“You mean…” Shorty said, “we get the ants to turn on each other?”

“That’s a great idea, Vauna!” Todd said. “The basic ant alarm pheromone is a mix of undecane and formic acid.”

“I thought that only worked on some ants,” Vauna said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Some ants only respond to this call to arms by running around like crazy to avoid predators. We need them to actually attack each other.”

After consulting some papers, Todd added, “Maybe we could mix in dimethylated C27 hydrocarbons. That elicits aggression in carpenter ants. And pyrazines and alkylpyrazines. That drives fire ants crazy.”

The plan became clearer.

They had to be sure to out-compete the appeasement chemical, decyl butyrate, that the ants were using to keep all the disparate types pacified and cooperative.

If they used enough of the aggression chemicals, the ants could only respond in one way.

Vauna imagined the horror show that would happen.

Ants would attack, attempting to dismember each other at the joints. But, unlike a human head, an ant head doesn’t stop moving when separated from the body. A chopped-off ant head could keep biting, keep slashing with antennae, keep injecting formic acid for quite a while. Sometimes an ant warrior would clamp its jaws onto the leg of an enemy. If its body were cut off, the head would still stay clamped on, hindering its foe, even in death.

The three scientists would don protective suits as they sprayed the alarm and aggression pheromones on the ants.

The plan should work, even if they had the concentrations wrong. The ants themselves would make more pheromones, creating a feedback loop that would destroy them all.

The internecine ant war would be horrific, but there was no other way.

Now that the plan was settled, Shorty excused herself again to find some stubbies to drink.

Todd and Vauna were finally alone again.

They stared at each other, nervously.

Finally, Todd broke the silence by saying with a smile, almost as a joke, “Who are you, you magnificent and mysterious being from another land?”

“Who are you?” Vauna said.

“I don’t know!”

“I don’t know, either!”

“You know how, when I first got here,” Todd said, “I told you I thought of myself as Joshua?”

Vauna nodded.

“I’ve re-thought that,” he said.

“No more genocide?”

He smiled a tight-lipped smile. “I don’t think I’m Joshua. I think I’m Jacob.”

“Why,” Vauna said with a laugh, “because now you’ve seen a ladder from heaven to earth? With angels going up and down?”

“No,” Todd said. “I hadn’t even thought of that, but that’s clever.” His face became serious. “No, Jacob went into a foreign land and worked very hard for a long time…” He looked deeply into Vauna’s eyes. “To prove himself worthy…for the girl…he loved…”

With that, he leaned in to kiss her.

But she twisted her body.

And pushed him away.

Not sure what to say, Vauna blurted, “Didn’t that story end with Jacob getting tricked and having to do two seven-year stints?”

“It’s not a perfect analogy. I hope.”

Vauna shook her head.

“I do like you…” she said.

Todd threw up his hands in exasperation. “You know, my dating pool is very small. There are only a few hundred ant scientists in the entire world. And you’re a myrmecophilous eremologist and I’m an eremophilous myrmecologist! What could be more perfect than that?”

Vauna smiled at him, very sadly. “I can’t do this again…”

“Why? Why? Why?”

“Because of who I am,” she said. “Because of everything that’s happened to me. I don’t think I’m capable of loving anyone again.”

Todd looked into her eyes, sadly. “Tell me everything.”

“I told you I grew up very poor, on what you’d call a reservation,” she said. “And it was horrible. Horrible. I escaped through books. But instead of encouraging me, other blacks shot me down. ‘That’s a white thing to do,’ they said. They called me ‘Oreo’. Or ‘Coconut girl.’”

Todd looked at her, not comprehending.

“Black on the outside, white on the inside,” she said. “And so I tried to fit in, in white society. Have you ever had someone say ‘Happy birthday’ to you when it’s not your birthday?”

“Once or twice.”

“Happens to me all the time!” Vauna said. “If any other black girl had a birthday, I was being congratulated—because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us apart. It only hurt worse that they were trying to be nice.”

Vauna was now crying deep sobs.

“I try to walk down the streets, but it’s just not safe,” she cried. “Men catcalling, grabbing you. Saying the most awful things…”

“And that’s why you go to the outback,” Todd said. “To get away?”

She wiped away her tears. “It’s not so bad out there. Maybe I just don’t like talking to people. But the red boomers don’t care what color you are. Or the blue-tongued skinks. They’ll stick their tongues out at anyone.” She laughed sadly.

“I’m not like that!” Todd protested. “Come away with me!”

“I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because you—-”

Todd turtled his neck back. “What’s wrong with me?”

“Oh, Todd,” Vauna said, stroking his white hand with her black fingers. “Do you know what I see what I look at you?”

“No, I don’t. Tell me.”

“I see someone else behind your eyes. Someone who hurt you very badly. Long ago.”

Todd was silent.

“I don’t know her name. But I can tell you this. She couldn’t identify ant species. She probably wasn’t even a scientist. Maybe she was jealous of your success and fame and world traveling. And she drank diet Coca-Cola, and was very upset when you forgot that.”

Todd was still silent.

“How can you hold me when you’re still holding onto someone else?”

Todd thought for a second and said, “We’re a mess, aren’t we?”

“Who are we?”

They both laughed sad, pathetic laughs.

“You know,” he said, “ants are hardwired to live in complex relationships. You take a grasshopper and separate it from other grasshoppers and it’ll be fine. You do that to an ant, and it can’t function. It can’t live. It needs to be in contact with others of its kind, trading chemicals, communicating. You and me, we’re both living in isolation. Maybe this is our last chance for a real human connection? Can’t we give it a try?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

The next few days were very awkward for Shorty.

Sometimes when Todd and Vauna worked together, perfecting the mix of aggression pheromones, they joked around, like little kids. Other times, Todd would whisper something to Vauna, and she would turn sharply away, then wander off to another tent to complete an experiment alone.

Todd sat at his make-shift lab bench, lost in his own dream time. He knew Vauna was just playing hard-to-get. Their work would defeat the ants, and he would prove himself worthy of her.

And then maybe they could go off on more great scientific adventures. They could go to hidden jungles, identifying new species. They could play around with Jerusalem crickets and tailless whip scorpions. They could don diving suits, exploring the bottom of the ocean, cradling giant marine isopods in their arms. They could discover new things, sharing the thrill of discovery.

This was all excruciating to Shorty. She felt like a helpless child, watching her parents fighting.

And so she was relieved when the day came for the final assault. They would dispense the chemicals and complete the mission, a happy science team again.

“No matter what happens, Shorty,” Vauna said, “you’ll get a good thesis out of this!”

Todd was excited, dreaming of their combined knowledge and strength as scientists. Nothing could stop them, if they were together.

Vauna used fewer and fewer words, her face inscrutable, hiding mysteries and secrets.

Finally, the three scientists donned their protective suits. Under his, Todd wore a gaudy plastic cross.

The suits were thick, like a down jacket. A puffed space lay between the inner and outer layers to prevent the ants from pinching.

The suits entirely covered their bodies, head to toe. So they carried an external oxygen source. Plus a heavy cooling unit. To say nothing of the cases full of pheromones.

Despite the cooling units, they were boiling hot in their suits.

There was an annular no man’s land, rocky and about ten feet wide. It lay between the ant mound and the surrounding Aboriginal camps. Outside the ring, the blackfellas sat, waving flags and singing of land rights and the better world they would build for themselves when they left this place. As a people, they were reborn and triumphant.

Inside the ring, the ground was dark with ants. They bubbled and boiled, in streams inches deep in places.

Anything alive that entered that space—goanna, millipede, snake—would be torn apart and eaten alive.

And into the neutral zone the science team stepped.

The outer membrane of their suits was impregnated with ant repellent. This came from the bitter foam excreted by the Archachatina, the giant forest snail, to repel armies of Ghananian driver ants.

As Vauna stepped out of the neutral zone and into the ant’s colony, Todd saw her suit slowly changing color. At first he thought that the ants were covering it with their own dead and poisoned bodies. Soon to crawl over these, to get at her eyes.

No, they were sticking little clumps of wet earth on her.

In either case, they didn’t have much time.

“Vauna, you OK?” Todd said over the radio.

She turned and gave him a thumb’s up. Then she looked through her visor straight into his eyes.

He mouthed the words, “I love you,” and he thought he saw tears in her eyes.

Inside her suit, Vauna’s voice caught in her throat. She wanted to say “I love you” back, but couldn’t.

Suddenly, she became very aware of sweat all over her body.

Is this what love is?

Sweat was everywhere, dribbling down her cheeks, into her eyes.

But it wasn’t sweat—

It was ants!

Ants were inside her suit! They must have found a pinhole or chewed through the seams. She could feel something—fabric, skin, ants—bunching up around her knees.

Inside her suit, she was drowning in ants as they began stinging and biting everywhere, even in her mouth.

If she ran, maybe she could toss out some pheromone cases before too many ants got her.

If she—-

Something told her to stand there, body and soul.

Maybe, she thought, she could be like Karl Schmidt, famed herpetologist who had been bitten by a poisonous boomslang snake and catalogued all his symptoms as he was dying. Bradycardia, no. But, tachycardia, yes. Plus: fever, delirium, the sensation of floating.

She felt disconnected from her body, as her blood percolated with formic acid, undecane, propionic acid and acetate.

She checked for more symptoms. Urticaria, hypertension, angioedema? Yes, yes, and probably.

After a while, the bites no longer hurt, no longer felt like white-hot firebrands.

No, the scientists were wrong. Ant venom did not kill. Formic acid was not a poison.

They were hallucinogens, unlocking the doors of perception.

She fell through layers of time, and words formed in her ears.

Listen to the pillar sing, they said.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you real?”

The voices were many, but she could not tell if they were male or female, young or old.

We are your ancestors. I am your ant mother. You are the ant dreaming woman.

“Doubtful.” Vauna laughed at the biological improbability of an ant-human hybrid. “Do I have blood or hemolymph? Can I have both an endo- and exoskeleton? How can an ant’s armor hold up the weight of—-”

Listen to the pillar sing.

Now, with a cocktail of ant poisons flowing through her veins, she heard.

The pillar was a harp string plucked by the wind, harmonizing with the songs that echoed through the billabongs and the leaves of the eucalyptus.

Each rock and each bush sang its own story. This hill was the fossilized heart of a kangaroo spirit. Those rocks were the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. Their songs were mixed with the drone of the didjeridoo and the snap of the clapstick.

Listen to the pillar sing.

And now Vauna understood that the trails she had traveled between watering holes were songlines. When she had gone walkabout all those times, her soul had sailed and she had sung the ancestral songs, never knowing.

And now before her was the songline that reached from earth to heaven.

“I am not an Oreo, not Coconut girl,” she said to herself. “I am ant dreaming woman.”

You are at home with no man, black or white. We are not human, and neither black nor white…

“Are you cytoplasm or ectoplasm? I want to know…” Vauna cried. “Your history, your ecology…”

Then come with us…

Tears in her eyes, she laid down the coolant and the oxygen tank and the case of ant pheromones, unopened, being careful not to crush any of her tiny ant sisters.

Come with us…

“For science!” she said.

Then she walked on, ripping herself out of her protective suit, like an insect molting its chitinous skin, and she disappeared into a sea of black faces, wondering where this new scientific adventure would take her.

“Vauna!” Todd cried over his radio headset.

Just before she was gone, he thought he saw her turn toward him and smile, as if to say, Goodbye.

“Vauna!” he screamed. If she failed her part, the entire mission might fail. And his mission to prove himself to her, to win her love.

He watched her put down her equipment and dissolve into the crowds.

“I’m out of here!” Shorty cried, dashing from the mound. “Maybe I’ll get a Nature paper out of this!”

The team had come apart and Todd had never felt so alone.

This was the man who had defeated the ants in the subways of Mexico City, by the lakes of Nicaragua, in the wheat fields of the Transvaal…

He stood helpless in the face of lost love.

Now he felt the terrible prickling of sweat all over his skin.

It was the ants, biting and stinging him everywhere.

As his heart raced and waves of delirium passed through him, he found words forming in his head.

It was not a booming voice, not Charlton Heston. Just words.

Todd, my son.

This still small voice had pursued him half way around the world.

“Speak to me,” he said to the voice. “And I will hear. But first, please tell me: Who am I? I am neither Joshua nor Jacob. I am utterly destroyed and lost!”

You are a good and faithful servant.

“Thank you.”

And I need you to be Pharaoh.

“No!” Todd screamed in his head. Pharaoh? The one who had kept the Israelites in Egypt? The one who would not let them go until God smote him and his people with plague after plague? The worst person in the Old Testament?

How could that be?

Let them go. Let her go.

“I can’t! Smite me with ten plagues and I will never let her go—isn’t that what love is?”

Todd started crying.

“Why don’t I deserve happiness? And love? I’ll take good care of her! We will plumb the depths of each others’ mysteries!”

Let her go.

He let the words pierce him through the heart.

Now he understood, at least in part.

Some mysteries were not his to solve. What would happen to Vauna? Or Gemma?

It was not his to know.

Let her go.

“I must decrease, so others may increase,” he conceded. He felt like he were dissolving into nothingness.

“This isn’t fair!” he screamed. “You say I’m good and faithful, but…I didn’t even get to unleash Attila or beat the ants or…I’ve worked so hard, struggled so long…Have you nothing for me? Nothing?”

The great myrmecologist collapsed on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.

And the voice heard his words and took pity on him.

My son, behold now and wonder marvelously! it chimed. Then it showed him a vision just for him, a discovery no scientist on earth had ever seen.

Afterward, Todd sucked in his breath, ashamed at his insolence. “I am so sorry. And…T-thank you, thank you,” he said, standing slowly, gathering his things and returning to civilization. “Thank you.”

He had been expecting the voice to show him, if anything, the image of a girl.

But instead, this is the vision that he alone was allowed to see:

A little long ways up the pillar, an ant licked sugar water off the back of another.

Together, the royal chariot of ants writhed and tripped over each other, carrying the load ever higher. It was a prolate spheroid, half the size of an Aussie rules football. Chemical commands came from deep inside it.

Push, push.

So the ants pushed. And they passed around bubbles of air, clamping their spiracles shut to hold in their breath. Honeypot ants moved among them, dispensing nectar and nutrients.

The desert ants were most useful, as natural producers of cryoprotectant proteins. These saved the myriads from first the cold, and then the sun, now untempered by atmosphere.

It was the desert ants who survived last, crawling over the bodies of their starved, asphyxiated sisters.

It was the desert ants, undeterred by aggression pheromones, who pulled the load to the end of the ribbon, high above the Equator, the ideal place for jumping off this world.

At the terminus of the ribbon was a counterbalancing weight: balloons filled with oxygen produced by bacteria that the ants had cultivated, and alcohol made by yeast.

When they received the proper signal from inside the load, with their dying strength, the ants pierced some of the balloons with their mandibles, allowing the oxygen and alcohol to explosively mix, rocketing the payload away.

And the queen of queens was gone.

There were no sad goodbyes, no thank-yous.

The ants felt nothing. They had no chemicals to express sadness.

The ants at the base of the pillar had completed their task and were now free from her commands.

They simply stopped whatever they were doing and turned to start their long journey home.

For a little long time, the load spun and circled, before falling to its destination.

The Moon.

It crashed violently into the soft lunar surface, exploding the remaining balloon cushioning, and kicking up a geyser of powdery white sand, finer than any in Australia.

Disturbed by the impact, several insectoid beings came out of hiding, emerging from a small crater capped with a crystalline window. Two guards held a single spear between them and sucked on bubbles of air produced by bacteria deep in their nest. They were shaped like large bipedal ants, with round, multi-faceted eyes and spiked helmets.

Linking themselves together, they carried the load into the mound and disappeared from the surface.

Deep underground, the guards cautiously split open their prize, tearing away the cushion of fine tendrils, rich in sugars, saturated in oxygen.

Under this packaging was a single occupant, dormant but slowly awakening. Should they kill her? They licked her to test her nest odor. Some smells were unknown to them. But a few sparked a celebration that spread quickly through the colony.

Nearby was the wreckage of the nursery, destroyed by a comet, which had flung her, when she was but an egg, off this world and to a timeless land. Her long journey from there was now complete.

And because an eremophilous myrmecologist, who could have destroyed her, had instead let her go:

The queen of queens had returned home, to take her place on the throne of the Selenites.