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.