No me.
No ...
My antennae swept the air. Strange. Not home. Not the colony.
Enemy territory.
Smell them. Smell their droppings. Smell the acrid odors they smeared along the ground to mark their boundaries.
"How are you guys doing? It's Tobias. How are you guys doing?" Strangers. The smell of others. They would come. There would be killing.
Killing. Soon.
Move.
"Jake. Marco. Rachel. Cassie. Answer me. It's Tobias. Talk to me." I began moving. My six legs picked their way nimbly. I was a nearly blind insect, picking his way through a forest of giant saw-edged grass blades.
Food. The smell of food. Find it. Take it. Return to the colony with it.
Change direction instantly. Move toward the smell of dead beetle. Others around. Us. Ours.
They had the right smell. They were not enemy.
"You guys are heading the wrong way."
Moving faster now. Feet feeling each blade of grass. Antennae sweeping the air, searching for the scent of the enemy. Searching for the scent of the dead carcass that we had to find and return to the colony.
"Listen to me! You are going the wrong way! The ant minds are controlling you!" Close now. The scent of food was stronger.
Mandibles working. We would touch the carcass. We would judge its size. If it was too big to carry, we would hack it into smaller pieces and carry the chunks to the colony.
"You have to take control! You have to fight! You have to get a grip!" Or enemies would come. And kill.
41 The smell of enemies was everywhere.
There. We had reached the dead beetle. I scented the air. I touched it with my legs, touch ing again and again to learn the size.
I? My legs?
Confusion.
"Fight! Fight it! You have to get control!"
It was big.
The others were with me. I opened my cutting mandibles wide and bit into the beetle, slicing tough shell, biting into meat.
"- listen to me. You are losing. You have to fight!"
Fight?
Suddenly, I realized that there had been some thing ... a sound. Yes, not a smell. Not a smell.
Not a feel.
"You are humans! You are humans. Listen to me. You are not ants. Fight it! Fight it!" Yes, not a smell or a feel. In my head.
My.
Me.
Marco.
"AHHH!" I screamed inside my own head. Tobias said later that it scared him half to death.
He thought I was being killed.
That wasn't it at all. I had been reborn.
"AHHHH! AHHHH! AHHHHH!"
"What's the matter?" Tobias cried.
"I ... I ... I lost myself," I said. "I was gone. I was lost. I didn't even exist."
"Get out of that morph!" Tobias said.
But I could hear the others now, snapping back into reality. Becoming again. Crying.
"What kind of creatures are these?" It was Ax. He sounded terrified. Terrified. "They have no self! I was lost! There was nothing to hold onto. They are not whole. They are only parts, like cells. Just pieces. What kind of foul creatures are these?" 42 "Listen. You guys morph back," Tobias said. "This sucks. This isn't right."
"Hive," Cassie said, sounding shattered. "They are social insects. Part of a colony. A hive. I should have guessed. I should have known. Ax is right. Each of us is only a part. Like a single cell within a human body."
"Guys? I see other ants. They're coming your way," Tobias said.
"How far away?" Jake asked. "Can you see them up there?"
" I'm not in the tree. I'm right here. I'm standing right over you. You're only a few inches from my right talon."
"I don't want to have to do this all over," Rachel said. "Let's do this. Let's get it done."
"Are we all in control now?" Jake asked.
One by one, we said yes. It was only partly true. Yes, I had gained control over the ant mind.
But it was still there. It was powerful in a totally new way. It was the simplicity that made it hard. The ant was a piece of a computer. Just a tiny switch, a part of a much bigger creature - the colony.
"Guys?" Cassie's "voice" in my head. "lf you try, you can kind of use these ant eyes - a little, anyway. If you concentrate you can notice light and dark. It's like watching a really, really bad black-and-white TV that's almost all snow. And you can only see what's right in front of you. But you can almost see a picture."
She was right. I could kind of see. But nothing I saw made any sense, anyway. I could recognize blades of grass. But a long, sloped wall that seemed about six feet high was a mystery to me.
"Someone just ran over my talon," Tobias said.
The wall. Tobias's talon.
"That's good. You're heading in the right direction^ Tobias said. "You're coming up on the fence."
If there was a fence, you couldn't prove it by me. I saw nothing. The bottom of the fence was seven or eight body lengths above me. Irrelevant.
"I don't want to go into Chapman's yard," To bias said. "It would look fishy if anyone saw.
Just keep going in the same direction."
We did. I barreled through a forest of grass. Then, very suddenly, it ended. We were out of the grass and racing across a moonscape of boulders, each the size of my head.
In my ant brain the alarm bells were still ring ing. Enemies! Enemies! Their scent was every where.
43 But it was not fear I felt from the ant brain. It was not capable of emotion, or anything like emotion. It simply knew that there were enemies close by.
And it knew that it would come down, sooner or later, to kill, or be killed.
44 Chapter 10
We hit the wall. I knew it was the concrete wall of the foundation. I knew, logically, that just a foot or so over my head, the wall became wood siding. But I could not see that kind of distance.
What I saw and felt and "smelled" was that the horizontal world had simply stopped. Reality had a corner. The entire world, as far as I was concerned, was a corner between concrete and sand, one vertical, one horizontal. The concrete was full of cracks and pits big enough for me to climb inside of.
"Head down," Jake reminded us. "Look for a way to follow the wall down."
"There's a tunnel here," Rachel said. "But it ... smells . . . bad. Real bad." She was right. I found the tunnel, too. It was one of theirs. It belonged to the enemy.
"I know there is an enemy. I can sense it," Ax said. "But who? What?"
"I don't know," Jake said grimly. "Let's just hope they're not around." We headed down the tunnel. The smell of the enemy was powerful. Their stench wrapped around us. We were an invading force. We were going deep, deep into enemy territory.
The tunnel was narrow. Boulders brushed constantly against my abdomen. My legs kicked some away. Others had to be moved aside. I should have felt cramped and claustrophobic, with the earth all around me, and my friends close ahead and behind me. But my ant mind was at home in tunnels.
I was traveling down. I knew my head was pointed down, but gravity seemed less important than it did when I was human.
"There's a side tunnel up here," Rachel said. She was in the lead. Big surprise. "There are a couple of side tunnels. It's starting to branch out. Should I YAHHHH!"
"What? What?"
"Oh, oh, oh. An ant!"
"What? Rachel!"
"He's running! He's running away. It's okay. It's okay. He was smaller than me. He ran off down a side tunnel."
"I guess we're the baddest ants in the tunnel, I said, trying to joke away the sudden clutch of very human terror.