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 goaclass="underline" 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.”