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.