Morte (31 page)

The Queen relived all the previous mating days, the successes and the setbacks, as she collected information on how the latest event was proceeding. The males were marched out first, wet
and shivering, but warming in the sun. The workers prodded them toward an opening near the western side of the island, where they would be shielded from the brunt of the sunlight. They still had to gain their footing, though their main skill was to fly. The clumsy ones who tumbled over were gently righted again, if for no other reason than to get them to stop sending anxious signals as if the entire Colony were under attack. It was an amusing contrast to the mammals, who were in the bad habit of putting their males in charge.

And then the winged females emerged. Sleek and menacing angels. More beautiful than any other creature on earth. The future of all life. The females marched out from their chamber, thronged by soldiers and workers who would give their lives to protect them as though they were queens already. The males waited, their wings shaking off the last drops of moisture.

Many would die. Almost all, in fact. They were so tiny, and even though their archenemies had been driven toward extinction, so many things could get them killed before, during, and soon after mating. Errant winds, a poorly timed landing, getting their wings wet and collapsing from exhaustion as they tried to flap them dry again. They would be cut off from the Colony unless they succeeded in establishing new outposts, and even then it would be their responsibility to reconnect with the island. Because she became queen and then mated under emergency circumstances, Hymenoptera was fortunate to have avoided the massacre, for even her intellect would not have saved her from the random cruelty of the world.

For now, there was hope. Until the fertiles took flight, every male was a father to a successful line, and every female was a queen who would spread the range of the Colony to new lands. Their people would build, farm, hunt, and protect. They would move tons of earth, construct massive cities, and produce an
endless supply of crops, bending nature to their collective will. This mating day would help to redeem all life in the wake of the human scourge.

A signal started as a whisper and soon turned into a siren. The workers released their grip on the females. The shiny black angels took flight. The Queen, though buried in her lair, flew with them. The island dropped from beneath her. All around her, wings flapped, pushing the clean air onto her face, brushing it through her antennae. The sun passed through the clouds to ignite the horizon. The convoy moved away from the light and toward land in the west.

Then the males ascended to join them. Rather than launching, they wobbled as they rose, like bubbles climbing to the surface of a pond. They were more delicate, and a slight breeze would tip them sideways. They bumped into one another and yet kept rising, an airborne colony unto themselves. The Queen flew among them as the safe ground lowered out of sight. And then it happened, the music of their species. The two masses intertwined in midair. Claws dug into carapaces. Strong females shrugged off the unworthy, sending them tumbling. The most determined, desperate males alighted on the lead females. Some were so aggressive they bit into the females’ necks to keep them still. And then they united, their bodies coiled against one another. Every successful union resulted in both partners remaining still, not flapping their wings. They plummeted. There was a terrible yet beautiful moment when almost all of them stopped flying at once and dropped to the water. Blissful spirits, no longer afraid of death, falling, the shimmering sea welcoming them. Until at last the act was done, and the females spread their wings again, knocking away the hapless, exhausted males. Some of the drones were so spent that they continued to dive until they splashed down
in the salt water, belly up, legs shaking. The females glided west to land. Toward the future.

The chemical trail faded away for the Queen. Her antennae begged for more. Her maids had nothing left to offer. It always ended like this, with the most ecstatic moment disintegrating too soon. Even if these new queens died, every last one of them, they were still the lucky ones. They could escape this place and choose their own destinies. They could unite with another in a moment of madness. They would never feel the responsibility of Hymenoptera.

The frantic noise, the thick scents, all ceased, replaced with the familiar smell of the chamber, the sound of the workers moving about, cleaning her, plucking eggs from her abdomen. Life continued.

SOME TIME PASSED.
It was getting harder to tell how much. She could always confirm simply by concentrating and accessing the right memories, but the motivation for it sometimes waned. Especially in the days after a mating, when the Colony returned to its daily business of conquest.

A steady stream of chambermaids delivered reports throughout the day. There was a reliable method to this. These specialized workers would spend hours cleaning off the Queen’s exoskeleton before moving toward the rear of her massive body, where they would take care of the constant supply of eggs that fell from her, large and small. Once they collected and prepared enough eggs, the chambermaids transported the cargo to the nurseries. On the way back, they gathered information from the others. Upon reentering the Queen’s lair—which required a special scent to get past the guards—the chambermaids would commune with the Queen, sharing the latest news. Then they would repeat the cycle by again going to work on the Queen’s
relentlessly decaying carapace. She had endured hundreds of moltings by then, and it was getting more painful each time. The last molting required her daughters to pry away the dead skin, scale by scale, flake by flake, like the stubborn shell of a hard-boiled egg. Her old exoskeleton was brittle, and yet it clung to her fresh skin. Her maids, in their zeal to remove the old shell, sometimes pulled off chunks of living flesh. The smell of her blood sent alarm signals throughout the room, summoning all the Queen’s attendants to the afflicted area. They circled around the wound and protected and cleaned it until it healed—yet another bodily function that was not as reliable as it used to be. The Queen resigned herself to the possibility that she would never molt again. No matter what she did, her skin would never be truly clean. It would be only functional enough to keep her from dying when the final victory over the humans was so close.

The most recent reports focused on the maintenance of the island’s tower, the hub of the hypersonic signals that fed information into the brains of the surface dwellers. Within a few years, the upgraded animals would breed a new generation, and the towers would not be necessary. The surfacers would pass along their perfected genes, and all the unevolved traits would be phased out. But for now, the Queen needed to make sure the towers worked. Allowing them to fail and running the risk of having prewar animals roaming the surface was too dangerous. It would only confirm fears of EMSAH and a return to the previous way of life.

The island’s tower linked with others that were strategically placed around the globe, spreading the Queen’s message in the same way that a human cell phone network transmitted signals. The tower was built from dirt, magnetic stones harvested by the miner caste, and random organic materials, including the brain
tissue of the interpreters, the ones who had been bred to translate human language. At the top of the tower rested a transmitter, a sphere pocked with convex indentations, like a massive golf ball. From here, the signal reached every surface creature who had been exposed to the hormone, impregnating their growing minds with the knowledge that would allow them to subdue and overcome the human menace.

The Queen concentrated on incoming news concerning the towers and filtered out the rest. A new report indicated that several of the structures had been compromised by hurricanes in a region designated with the number forty-seven and a combination of scents. The humans called the place Guatemala.

The problem working with organic material was that it required constant maintenance. Moreover, the ants who worked on the towers had to be frequently replaced. Being so close to the signal interfered with their antennae, driving them to insanity. Their minds would be overwhelmed with data, like a deluge bursting a levee. At that point, survival mechanisms implanted in their species would kick in. Some would bite off their own antennae, like a human extracting a rotten tooth. Others would simply freeze in place while their sisters crawled around them. Still others would become violent, which would require the soldiers stationed nearby to pluck them from the tower before they hurt the others or, worse, damaged the transmitter, which was worth more than all their lives combined.

True to form, the reports grew more positive later in the day. A crew of specialized workers had been dispatched. The towers would be repaired by the time the sun was two ant-lengths above the ocean.

Though there had been another failed settlement that needed to be quarantined, the Queen foresaw success with the surface dwellers. There would be harmony. Nature was seemingly
designed for a master race to step forward and seize control. If not the ants, who else? Certainly not the humans. The animals still had promise, even though they would take years to realize their potential. Everything her mother told her would come true. The Colony would be the North Star in an eternally spinning constellation.

But this harmony was still so far away, always on the other side of a sunrise. Always tomorrow, always in the next season. Always someday. There were too many variables to predict exactly what would happen. She had been on the warpath for so many centuries now, absorbing and spitting out the hatred of thousands of generations of her people, that she sometimes wondered if she would have the opportunity to appreciate the beauty and purity she would one day bestow upon the earth. She wondered if she would instead be taking in reports of downed towers and weather anomalies until that final moment when her maids could do no more for her, and she went stiff and stopped breathing. Her daughters would attend to her for a few more days, she imagined, before the eggs ran out, and the fluids finally began to leak from her cracked exoskeleton, warning them that death was in their midst. She would be removed from the chamber, stripped of whatever fleshy parts remained. The rest—a shell of armor and hollowed-out legs—would be ejected from the Colony, sent to a trash heap.

The Queen willed her mind to go beyond her own death and beyond the final victory over humanity. By then, the human cities would be completely dismantled by time and nature, overrun with vegetation, decayed by winds, rain, and sunlight. The new settlements would grow. Over time, they would discard whatever artificial human implements they had acquired in the days after the war. Guns, computers, vehicles, engines—the surfacers would no longer need these things. Their network of towns
would be so efficient and peaceful that the trappings of human life would fall away. The animals would live as one community—similar to the ants, but still maintaining individuality, still moving forward. They would be mini-Queens perched atop mini-Colonies.

The underground Colony, meanwhile, would continue to explore, carving out the earth from pole to pole. New queens would oversee the exploration of Antarctica with a caste of workers bred to withstand the cold. They would witness the construction of a chain of tunnels linking every continent. Nothing would remain beyond their reach, and perhaps they would encounter more like them in the depths of the underworld.

The Queen went still further, to a time when the earth would begin to grow warm again. She could not imagine what the surface would be like then, but she could picture the sun. It would grow large and dull in the sky. It would extend outward, an ongoing explosion, gobbling up the inner planets until its gases collided with the atmosphere of Earth. Plants would be long gone before then. The ants would probably have to harvest the surface dwellers for food—it would be an act of mercy, since they would probably start eating one another in an orgy of prewar violence. But with the plants dying, the Colony’s fungus reserves would die off as well. The earth, both the land and the tunnels underneath, would be still for a long time.

She watched it all happen from space, from the outer rim of the system. The red giant, dying, like she was, would burn everything away, all the progress she had made. The star would shed its skin, which would engulf the earth, a final judgment boiling away the oceans, purifying the land, smoothing it out until it was perfectly round. It would take centuries. The expanding gases would incinerate the rock, shooting sparks and debris into space. The light could be seen from galaxies
away, a shower of embers propelled by the solar winds. Everything purified by the bursting sun. A universe scraped clean, cleansed by fire, the shards of the earth frozen in space forever. Such a glorious ending, a welcome relief. An opportunity for the world to finally go to sleep.

It was so beautiful that she at first ignored the chemical alarm from a chambermaid—another report on the towers, she supposed. Not enough to distract her from the ecstasy of the final obliteration of the planet. But the message kept repeating, overriding her ability to tune it out. Four maids in a row delivered it. She could no longer ignore them.

There had been an unauthorized use of a translator. The Queen retraced the path of the information. She could see the chemical trail, a bright thread unspooling into the past. She tracked it from her quarters through the tunnels, out to the ships, across the water to the mainland, into the hills. Region 19, location 5.2, Alpha 3,893,216.0692. The link was old—the Alpha who had joined with the mammal had been diverted during the Purge and then the subsequent quarantine. Such a lapse was to be expected. There were occasional dead spots in the network, especially with Alphas scouting on their own for days at a time.

It was the cat who had used the device. Mort(e). The one the humans wanted. The messiah who had escaped the quarantine. What was the word he used? She searched for it. Ah, yes: he sought
the source
. The source of everything. And now he was linked to her for as long as his fragile mind could withstand it.