But this harmony was still so far away, always on the other side of a sunrise. Always tomorrow, always in the next season. Always someday. There were too many variables to predict exactly what would happen. She had been on the warpath for so many centuries now, absorbing and spitting out the hatred of thousands of generations of her people, that she sometimes wondered if she would have the opportunity to appreciate the beauty and purity she would one day bestow upon the earth. She wondered if she would instead be taking in reports of downed towers and weather anomalies until that final moment when her maids could do no more for her, and she went stiff and stopped breathing. Her daughters would attend to her for a few more days, she imagined, before the eggs ran out, and the fluids finally began to leak from her cracked exoskeleton, warning them that death was in their midst. She would be removed from the chamber, stripped of whatever fleshy parts remained. The rest — a shell of armor and hollowed-out legs — would be ejected from the Colony, sent to a trash heap.
The Queen willed her mind to go beyond her own death and beyond the final victory over humanity. By then, the human cities would be completely dismantled by time and nature, overrun with vegetation, decayed by winds, rain, and sunlight. The new settlements would grow. Over time, they would discard whatever artificial human implements they had acquired in the days after the war. Guns, computers, vehicles, engines — the surfacers would no longer need these things. Their network of towns would be so efficient and peaceful that the trappings of human life would fall away. The animals would live as one community — similar to the ants, but still maintaining individuality, still moving forward. They would be mini-Queens perched atop mini-Colonies.
The underground Colony, meanwhile, would continue to explore, carving out the earth from pole to pole. New queens would oversee the exploration of Antarctica with a caste of workers bred to withstand the cold. They would witness the construction of a chain of tunnels linking every continent. Nothing would remain beyond their reach, and perhaps they would encounter more like them in the depths of the underworld.
The Queen went still further, to a time when the earth would begin to grow warm again. She could not imagine what the surface would be like then, but she could picture the sun. It would grow large and dull in the sky. It would extend outward, an ongoing explosion, gobbling up the inner planets until its gases collided with the atmosphere of Earth. Plants would be long gone before then. The ants would probably have to harvest the surface dwellers for food — it would be an act of mercy, since they would probably start eating one another in an orgy of prewar violence. But with the plants dying, the Colony’s fungus reserves would die off as well. The earth, both the land and the tunnels underneath, would be still for a long time.
She watched it all happen from space, from the outer rim of the system. The red giant, dying, like she was, would burn everything away, all the progress she had made. The star would shed its skin, which would engulf the earth, a final judgment boiling away the oceans, purifying the land, smoothing it out until it was perfectly round. It would take centuries. The expanding gases would incinerate the rock, shooting sparks and debris into space. The light could be seen from galaxies away, a shower of embers propelled by the solar winds. Everything purified by the bursting sun. A universe scraped clean, cleansed by fire, the shards of the earth frozen in space forever. Such a glorious ending, a welcome relief. An opportunity for the world to finally go to sleep.
It was so beautiful that she at first ignored the chemical alarm from a chambermaid — another report on the towers, she supposed. Not enough to distract her from the ecstasy of the final obliteration of the planet. But the message kept repeating, overriding her ability to tune it out. Four maids in a row delivered it. She could no longer ignore them.
There had been an unauthorized use of a translator. The Queen retraced the path of the information. She could see the chemical trail, a bright thread unspooling into the past. She tracked it from her quarters through the tunnels, out to the ships, across the water to the mainland, into the hills. Region 19, location 5.2, Alpha 3,893,216.0692. The link was old — the Alpha who had joined with the mammal had been diverted during the Purge and then the subsequent quarantine. Such a lapse was to be expected. There were occasional dead spots in the network, especially with Alphas scouting on their own for days at a time.
It was the cat who had used the device. Mort(e). The one the humans wanted. The messiah who had escaped the quarantine. What was the word he used? She searched for it. Ah, yes: he sought the source. The source of everything. And now he was linked to her for as long as his fragile mind could withstand it.
She had already seen Mort(e) through the eyes of Culdesac, along with other translator-operators who had interacted with him. There were also the Martinis: the mother and her two children, all of whom were captured after their region was overrun. The soldiers had held them down and forced them to use the interpreting device. True to the odds, only one of them, the boy, survived. But the sessions showed that Mort(e) the Great Warrior, the Scourge of the Colony, was nothing more than an unevolved slave for the humans. He was so ordinary, like all messiahs. Just a cat, a conditioned pet. Felines were a species that showed promise, though they were prone to bickering, and tended to have the biggest egos. Ordinary house cats always demanded to be in charge of things as if they had hunted humans in the wild before the war.
This cat was different in that way, she had to admit. He had seen the war. He had killed his master, along with so many other humans that he had lost count. She fished out the information: the actual number was eighty-seven. He was determined, as evidenced by his use of the device. He was brave, and did his duty, and was free of the plague of human self-importance. Yes, this one had shown the progress of her vision in every way she could have asked.
She continued absorbing the information taken directly from Mort(e)’s mind. She could see the Martinis’ living room — yes, this was all familiar, viewed from only a foot off the ground rather than from the point of view of a bipedal primate. These were the thoughts he focused on when he used the translator. They kept his mind from bleeding out. So he had been trained. Not by Culdesac, but by someone.
There was—
THERE WAS A room, carpeted, with fluorescent light coming in through frosted glass. A basement. The cat was there. The Queen was the cat now, seeing through his eyes. He was still an animal. He was afraid and curious at the same time, all the time, because he had to be. But his belly was full, and his coat was clean. He protected this house.
The cat awoke from sleep with the dog beside him. The room was cold. His nose was a small ice cube on the end of his face. But the dog was warm. She was curled around him, her stomach rising and falling. She sensed movement, awoke, and stared at the cat. The cat rose. He wanted to take her to a place no one had ever seen before. It was a land he had discovered years earlier, before the children had arrived. Back when he was alone. She had to see it, now that the two of them were joined.
He waited at the foot of the steps until she got to her feet. He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. Soon she was running after him, her tongue flopping and dripping. The dog was so excited that she ran right past the room where her master slept with the woman with the sad eyes.
A final flight took them to a small room with a cold wooden floor. An attic, crowded with boxes and coat racks, with two windows letting in light on either side.