Devourer

CHAPTER 3 Ants

The United Nations engaged Fangs in several further meetings. Even though no one else was eaten, the verdict on humanity’s fate remained unchanged.

A meeting was scheduled to take place in a meticulously prepared archaeological excavation site in Africa.

Fangs’ ship landed right on schedule and about 50 feet away from the dig site. The deafening explosion and storm of debris that accompanied the craft’s arrival had by this point become all too familiar.

The Girl from Eridanus had advised them that the vessel’s engine was powered by a miniature fusion reactor. The concept, like most of the information she had provided on the Devourers, was easy enough for the human scientists to understand; the things she told them about the technology of Eridanians, on the other hand, never failed to baffle the people of Earth. Her crystal, for example, began to melt in Earth’s atmosphere. In the end, the entire section containing its propulsion system dissolved, leaving nothing but a thin slice of crystal gracefully floating through the air.

As Fangs arrived at the excavation site, two UN staffers presented him with a large album, a full square yard in size. It had been meticulously designed to accommodate the Devourer’s huge stature. The album’s hundreds of beautifully wrought pages revealed all aspects of human culture in brilliantly colored detail. In some ways it resembled an opulent primer for children.

Inside the large pit of the excavation site itself, an archaeologist vividly described the glorious history of Earth’s civilizations. He threw all his passion into his desperate attempt to make this alien understand; understand that there was so much on this blue planet so worth cherishing. As he spoke, his fervor moved him to tears. It was a pitiable spectacle.

Finally, he pointed to the excavation and intoned: “Honorable emissary, what you see here are the newly discovered remains of a town. This fifty-thousand-year-old site is the oldest human settlement discovered to date. Could the hearts of your people truly be hard enough to destroy this magnificent civilization of ours? A civilization that has developed, step by slow step, over fifty thousand years?”

While all this was going on, Fangs began leafing through the album with obvious, playful amusement. As the archaeologist finished, Fangs raised his head and glanced at the excavation pit. “Hey, archaeologist worm, I care neither for your hole nor your old city in the hole. I would, however, very much want to see the earth you removed from the pit,” he said, pointing at a large pile of dirt.

The archaeologist went from baffled to completely stunned as the artificial voice of the translator finished relaying Fangs’ request. “Earth?” he asked, fumbling for words. “But there’s nothing in that pile of dirt.”

“That is your opinion,” Fangs said, approaching the mound of earth. Bending his gigantic body ground-ward, he reached into the pile with two of his huge claws and began digging. A circle of onlookers quickly formed, many gasping at the deceptive deftness of Fangs’ seemingly unwieldy claws. Prodding the soft earth, he repeatedly retrieved tiny specks from the soil, only to place them on the album. Fangs seemed completely engrossed in this strange labor for a good 10 minutes. Having finished whatever he had been up to, he carefully lifted the album with both claws and straightened his body. Walking toward the gathered humans, he gave them a chance to see what it was that he had placed on the album.

Only by looking very carefully could those gathered make out that it was hundreds of ants. They were gathered in a tight bunch, some alive, others curled up in death.

“I want to tell you a story,” Fangs said as the humans studied the ants. “It is the story of a kingdom. This kingdom was descended from a great empire and it could trace its ancestry all the way back to ends of Earth’s Cretaceous period, where its founders built a magnificent city in the shadow of the towering bones of a dinosaur.” Fangs paused, deep in thought, before continuing. “But that is long-lost, ancient history and when winter suddenly fell, only the last in a long line of queens remembered those glory days. It was a very long winter indeed, and the land was covered by glaciers. Tens of millions of years of vigorous life were lost as existence became ever more precarious.

“After waking from her last hibernation, the queen could not rouse even one out of every hundred of her subjects. The others had been entombed by the cold, some being frozen to nothing but transparent, empty shells. Feeling the walls of her city, the queen realized that they were as cold as ice and hard as steel. She understood that the Earth remained frozen. In this age of terrible cold, even summer brought no thaw. The queen decided it was time to leave the homeland of her ancestors and to seek out unfrozen earth to establish a new kingdom.

“And so the queen led her surviving subjects to the surface to begin their long and arduous journey in the shadow of looming glaciers,” Fang said. “Most of her remaining subjects perished during their protracted wanderings, consumed by the deadly cold. But the queen and a few straggling survivors finally found a patch of earth that remained untouched by frost. Overflowing geothermal energy warmed this sliver of land. The queen, of course, knew nothing of this. She did not understand why there should be moist and soft soil in this frozen world, but she was in no way surprised that she had found it: A race that persevered through sixty million long years could never suffer extinction!

In the face of a glacier-covered Earth and a dim Sun, the queen proclaimed that it was here that they would found a new great kingdom, a kingdom that would endure for all eternity. Standing under the summit of a tall, white mountain, she declared that this new kingdom would be known as ‘Realm of the White Mountain’,” he said grandly.

“In fact, the eponymous summit was the skull of a mammoth,” he continued. “It was the zenith of the Late Pleistocene of the Quaternary Glaciation. In those days the human worms were still dumb animals, shivering in their scattered holes. It would still be ninety thousand years before the first candle light of your civilization would appear a continent away on the plains of Mesopotamia.

Living off the frozen remains of mammoths in the vicinity the Realm of the White Mountain, they survived ten thousand hard years. Then, as the ice age ended, spring returned to Earth and the land was again draped in green. In this great explosion of life, the Realm of the White Mountain quickly entered a golden age of prosperity. Its subjects were beyond number and ruled a vast domain. In the next ten thousand years the kingdom was ruled by countless dynasties, and countless epics told its stories.”

As he continued, Fangs pointed at the large pile of earth in front of them. “That is the final resting place of the Realm of the White Mountain. As you archaeologist worms were preoccupied by your excavations of a lost and dead fifty-thousand-year-old city, you completely failed to realize that the soil above those ruins was teeming with a city that was very much alive. In scale it was easily comparable to New York, and the latter is a city on merely two-dimensions. The city here was a grand three-dimensional metropolis with many layers. Every layer was densely packed with labyrinthine streets, spacious forums, and magnificent palaces. The design of the city’s drainage and fire prevention systems handily outshone those of New York.

“The city was home to a complex social structure and a strict division of labor,” he told his captive audience. “Its entire society ran with machine-like precision and harmonious efficiency. The vices of drug use and crime did not exist here and hence there was neither depravity nor confusion. But its inhabitants were by no means devoid of emotion, showing their abiding sorrow whenever a subject of the Realm passed away. They even had a cemetery on the surface at the edge of the city and there they would bury their dead an inch under the ground.

“However, the greatest acclaim must be reserved for the grand library nestled in the lowest layer of this city. In this library one could find a multitude of ovoid containers. Each container was a book filled with pheromones. The exceedingly complex chemistry of these pheromones stored the city’s knowledge. Here the epics detailing the enduring history of the Realm of the White Mountain were recorded. Here you could have learned that in a great forest fire all the subjects of the kingdom embraced each other to form countless balls, and that with heroic effort they were able to escape a sea of fire by floating down a stream. You could have learned the history of the hundred-year war against the White Termite Empire; or of the first time that an expedition from the kingdom saw the great ocean…” Fangs let his translator’s voice trail off.

Then his booming voice again rang out. “But it was all destroyed in three short hours. Destroyed when, with an Earth-shattering roar, the excavators came, blackening the sky. Then their giant steel claws came cutting down. They grabbed the soil of the city, utterly destroying it and crushing all within. They even destroyed the lowest layer where all the city’s children and the tens of thousands of snow-white eggs, yet to become children, rested.”

All of the world again seemed to have fallen deathly quiet. This silence outlasted the quiet that had followed Fangs’ horrible feast. Standing before the alien emissary, humanity was, for the first time, at a loss of words.

Finally Fangs said, “We still have a very long time to get along and very many things to talk about, but let us not speak of morals. In the universe, such considerations are meaningless.”