“But we’ve already been through that,” Arkady said tiredly. “Like you said, whatever answer I would give you about Absalom would only be what I know.”
“What I want, for now at least, is more basic. I want your trust.”
“If you’re trying to convince me to trust you, then letting Yassin scare me half to death just now wasn’t the best way to go about it.”
“It’s nice,” Yusuf observed, “that you have this fairy godmother kind of impression of me. But my powers at present don’t actually extend to protecting you from Yassin’s steroid addicts.”
“If you can’t protect me,” Arkady pointed out, “then why should I believe you have the power to deliver whatever else you’re offering?”
Yusuf’s smile widened. “Who says we’re offering you anything?”
We? The pronoun had been no accident; Yusuf was watching him process it like a cat watching a bird land on its windowsill.
“Who sent you?” Arkady asked.
“I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Arkady, but just in case…has it escaped your notice that everyone else is pumping you for information and I’m giving it to you?”
“No.”
“Good. Think about it. And while you’re thinking, let me pass along two more of those rumors we were talking about earlier. Rumor number one: Turner has a man in Moshe’s camp. Rumor number two: UNSec has a highly placed agent somewhere among Didi’s people. Apparently they’re pissed as hell that Didi hasn’t told them about you, and they consider this the final chapter in a long line of Mossad fuckups starting with Tel Aviv. They seem to be playing it along to see where it goes, but they could step in and squash the deal anytime they want. And when UNSec squashes, they wield a big hammer and they don’t worry too much about whose toes happen to be in the slam zone.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“I told you. Trust.” He smiled, all sparkling green eyes and honey-colored skin and dazzlingly white teeth. “Is it working? Do you trust me?”
“What difference does it make?” Arkady asked tiredly.
“None at the moment. But it might later on. And you might need to make the decision very quickly. So think about it while you’re sitting back in that nasty little cell Moshe has you in. And be careful what you say: you’ve already contradicted yourself a few times. That sort of thing could earn you the wrong kind of attention from people we really don’t want paying attention to you.”
“Who sent you?” Arkady asked again, more urgently. “Korchow?” He searched the boy’s eyes in growing desperation. “Safik?”
He could hear Yassin’s guards in the hall. In a moment it would be too late, and he would never have the chance to ask the questions he should have been asking from the beginning of this inexplicable conversation.
“Who?” he cried, just as the door opened and Shaikh Yassin appeared.
Yusuf stood up, his back still to Yassin and the bodyguards, and mouthed a single unmistakable word:
Absalom.
NOVALIS
Trapping Crows
Two broad generalizations have begun to emerge that will be reinforced in subsequent chapters: the ultimate dependence of particular cases of social evolution on one or a relatively few idiosyncratic environmental factors; and the existence of antisocial factors that also occur in a limited, unpredictable manner. If the antisocial pressures come to prevail at some time after social evolution has been initiated, it is theoretically possible for social species to be returned to a lower social state or even to the solitary condition.
It began quietly, a faint thrumming under the everyday whistle and chatter of the awakening forest.
Birds sang, but they were far off, hunting and nesting in the sunlit heights of the canopy. Only gradually did a louder, more urgent song alert Arkady that the great predator was on the hunt. A thrush appeared—no, an entire flock of thrushes, flying and dipping and warbling. A moment later Arkady caught sight of a pair of ocellated antbirds: no mere opportunistic swarm followers but professionals who would have flown their appointed rounds before sunrise, peering into the hidden bivouacs of the swarm raiders to determine which army was most likely to be on the march today. Arkady had seen spinfeed of ocellated antbirds literally knocking each other off tree branches in order to stake out the best positions from which to swoop down on the moveable feast that was about to come their way. The pair weren’t quite at that level of feeding frenzy, but they were obviously expecting action.
A moment later a chaotic flurry of ant butterflies—Arkady thought they were ithomiines but he couldn’t be sure—erupted into the clearing, a sure sign that the raiders were approaching. But by then Arkady could already hear the murmur and hiss of a vast insect throng, running, hopping, slithering, and flying in a desperate attempt to escape the raid front.
The raiders surged into the clearing like a glittering, granular, red tsunami. The raid front was fifteen meters wide: tens of thousands of reddish-black ants flowing through and around and under the debris of the forest floor, covering the ground with a deadly carpet of razor-sharp mandibles. Arkady and Bella retreated cautiously, skirting around to the side of the glittering tide until they could track its progress without being overrun themselves.
The swarm’s method of operation was deceptively simple: the front rank of the raiders simply seized every living thing in their path, grappling and stinging until by the simple expedient of piling ant upon ant upon ant, they could subdue spiders, scorpions, beetles, cockroaches, grasshoppers, entire ant colonies, small rodents, and even, according to the ancient rumors of Earth’s jungles, unwatched human infants. In the space of five minutes Arkady and Bella watched this raid front seize a spider, a cluster of caterpillars, and half a dozen foraging ponerines unlucky enough to be caught in the raiders’ path. A bright blue beetle was caught by the tide, succeeded in staying afloat for a few precarious moments, and then capsized and was sucked into the whirl of glistening bodies. As the swarm caught each new prey item, major workers grasped and immobilized it while their comrades dismembered it for easier transport back down the supply lines. And gradually, at more or less the pace of a walking human, the raid front flowed through the clearing and into the forest beyond, leaving a thinned-out but still-impressive braid of foraging paths behind it: forward-moving columns carrying reinforcements up to the raid front, while backward-flowing ones transported prey items back to the bivouac to feed the ravenous larvae.
Arkady leaned cautiously over the swarm, poised his soft-nosed tweezers above one of the foraging routes, and plucked out one of the powerful soldiers guarding the columns to hold up for Bella’s inspection.
“She’s beautiful,” she said.
“She’s also one of the most successful organisms Earth ever created. Without these ants there would be no humans. And I don’t mean only biologically. Army ants evolved in the same environments early humans did, and the words for them—siafu, soldier, soldado, and so forth—go back as far as any words in human speech. There’s even a theory that organized human hunting and warfare developed from prehistoric man’s observations of the African Driver Ant’s raiding fronts.
He turned the soldier to give Bella a better view of the armored head, with its massive jaw muscles and barbed mandibles. “In pre-Evacuation Africa people even used to use them as surgical staples. You hold the soldier up to the wound, like so.” He demonstrated, keeping a careful distance between the furiously grasping mandibles and his own arm. “You squeeze her body to make her bite down on the edges of the wound, and then you twist off the body, and the head stays locked in place until you’re ready to take it out. And of course then the ant’s own immune defenses make the method as sterile as anything short of viral surgery. Neat, huh?”