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.
“Vauna!” Todd cried over his radio headset.
Just before she was gone, he thought he saw her turn toward him and smile, as if to say, Goodbye.
“Vauna!” he screamed. If she failed her part, the entire mission might fail. And his mission to prove himself to her, to win her love.
He watched her put down her equipment and dissolve into the crowds.
“I’m out of here!” Shorty cried, dashing from the mound. “Maybe I’ll get a Nature paper out of this!”
The team had come apart and Todd had never felt so alone.
This was the man who had defeated the ants in the subways of Mexico City, by the lakes of Nicaragua, in the wheat fields of the Transvaal…
He stood helpless in the face of lost love.
Now he felt the terrible prickling of sweat all over his skin.
It was the ants, biting and stinging him everywhere.
As his heart raced and waves of delirium passed through him, he found words forming in his head.
It was not a booming voice, not Charlton Heston. Just words.
Todd, my son.
This still small voice had pursued him half way around the world.
“Speak to me,” he said to the voice. “And I will hear. But first, please tell me: Who am I? I am neither Joshua nor Jacob. I am utterly destroyed and lost!”
You are a good and faithful servant.
“Thank you.”
And I need you to be Pharaoh.
“No!” Todd screamed in his head. Pharaoh? The one who had kept the Israelites in Egypt? The one who would not let them go until God smote him and his people with plague after plague? The worst person in the Old Testament?
How could that be?
Let them go. Let her go.
“I can’t! Smite me with ten plagues and I will never let her go—isn’t that what love is?”
Todd started crying.
“Why don’t I deserve happiness? And love? I’ll take good care of her! We will plumb the depths of each others’ mysteries!”
Let her go.
He let the words pierce him through the heart.
Now he understood, at least in part.
Some mysteries were not his to solve. What would happen to Vauna? Or Gemma?
It was not his to know.
Let her go.
“I must decrease, so others may increase,” he conceded. He felt like he were dissolving into nothingness.
“This isn’t fair!” he screamed. “You say I’m good and faithful, but…I didn’t even get to unleash Attila or beat the ants or…I’ve worked so hard, struggled so long…Have you nothing for me? Nothing?”
The great myrmecologist collapsed on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
And the voice heard his words and took pity on him.
My son, behold now and wonder marvelously! it chimed. Then it showed him a vision just for him, a discovery no scientist on earth had ever seen.
Afterward, Todd sucked in his breath, ashamed at his insolence. “I am so sorry. And…T-thank you, thank you,” he said, standing slowly, gathering his things and returning to civilization. “Thank you.”
He had been expecting the voice to show him, if anything, the image of a girl.
But instead, this is the vision that he alone was allowed to see:
A little long ways up the pillar, an ant licked sugar water off the back of another.
Together, the royal chariot of ants writhed and tripped over each other, carrying the load ever higher. It was a prolate spheroid, half the size of an Aussie rules football. Chemical commands came from deep inside it.
Push, push.
So the ants pushed. And they passed around bubbles of air, clamping their spiracles shut to hold in their breath. Honeypot ants moved among them, dispensing nectar and nutrients.
The desert ants were most useful, as natural producers of cryoprotectant proteins. These saved the myriads from first the cold, and then the sun, now untempered by atmosphere.
It was the desert ants who survived last, crawling over the bodies of their starved, asphyxiated sisters.
It was the desert ants, undeterred by aggression pheromones, who pulled the load to the end of the ribbon, high above the Equator, the ideal place for jumping off this world.
At the terminus of the ribbon was a counterbalancing weight: balloons filled with oxygen produced by bacteria that the ants had cultivated, and alcohol made by yeast.
When they received the proper signal from inside the load, with their dying strength, the ants pierced some of the balloons with their mandibles, allowing the oxygen and alcohol to explosively mix, rocketing the payload away.
And the queen of queens was gone.
There were no sad goodbyes, no thank-yous.
The ants felt nothing. They had no chemicals to express sadness.
The ants at the base of the pillar had completed their task and were now free from her commands.
They simply stopped whatever they were doing and turned to start their long journey home.
For a little long time, the load spun and circled, before falling to its destination.
The Moon.
It crashed violently into the soft lunar surface, exploding the remaining balloon cushioning, and kicking up a geyser of powdery white sand, finer than any in Australia.
Disturbed by the impact, several insectoid beings came out of hiding, emerging from a small crater capped with a crystalline window. Two guards held a single spear between them and sucked on bubbles of air produced by bacteria deep in their nest. They were shaped like large bipedal ants, with round, multi-faceted eyes and spiked helmets.
Linking themselves together, they carried the load into the mound and disappeared from the surface.
Deep underground, the guards cautiously split open their prize, tearing away the cushion of fine tendrils, rich in sugars, saturated in oxygen.
Under this packaging was a single occupant, dormant but slowly awakening. Should they kill her? They licked her to test her nest odor. Some smells were unknown to them. But a few sparked a celebration that spread quickly through the colony.
Nearby was the wreckage of the nursery, destroyed by a comet, which had flung her, when she was but an egg, off this world and to a timeless land. Her long journey from there was now complete.
And because an eremophilous myrmecologist, who could have destroyed her, had instead let her go: