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This was not all. There were more serious consequences still. Because the dinosaur–ant alliance was the foundation stone upon which Cretaceous civilisation was built, the crumbling of that alliance had a pernicious effect on societal structures in both worlds. Social progress ground to a halt and there were clear signs of regression. The survival of Cretaceous civilisation hung in the balance.

*

Though both the ants and the dinosaurs gave their all to the global war effort, neither side was able to achieve absolute supremacy on the battlefield, and the fighting degenerated into a protracted war of attrition. Eventually, the high commands of both empires came to recognise the reality of the situation: they were prosecuting a war that could not be won, a war whose ultimate outcome would be the destruction of the great Cretaceous civilisation. In the fifth year of the conflict, the two belligerents began armistice negotiations, and pivotal to these was the historic meeting between the Emperor of the Saurian Empire and the Queen of the Formican Empire.

The meeting was held in the ruins of Boulder City, on the former site of the imperial palace, where, five years earlier, the fateful summit that had triggered the war had taken place. All that now remained of that once colossal imperial seat were a jumble of shattered, fire-blackened walls. Through the cracks, the smoke-stained skeletons of other buildings were visible in the distance: the desecrated city was sinking back into the soil, its stonework colonised by thickets of lush green weeds and a lattice of creeping vines. The encroaching forest would soon swallow it up altogether.

As the sun dipped in and out of the haze cast by a remote forest fire, dappled patterns of light and shadow flitted across the old palace walls. Urus peered at the ant queen by his feet. ‘I can’t quite make you out,’ he boomed, ‘but I have a feeling that you are not Queen Lassini.’

‘She is dead. We ants lead brief lives. I am Lassini, the second of her name,’ said the new queen of the Formican Empire. On this occasion, she had brought just 10,000 word-corps soldiers with her, and Urus had to stoop to read her response.

‘I think it’s time to put an end to this war,’ he said.

‘I agree,’ replied Lassini II.

‘If the war continues,’ Urus said, ‘you ants will return to scavenging meat from animal carcasses and dragging dead beetles back to your tiny lairs.’

‘If the war continues,’ responded Lassini II, ‘you dinosaurs will return to prowling hungrily through the forests and tearing apart your own kind for meat.’

‘Well then, does Your Majesty have a specific recommendation as to how we might bring an end to this war?’ Urus asked. ‘Perhaps we should begin with the reason we went to war in the first place. There are many who have forgotten the whys and wherefores – dinosaurs and ants alike.’

‘I recall it had to do with the appearance of God. Specifically: does God look like an ant or a dinosaur?’

Urus cleared his throat. ‘I am happy to inform you, Queen Lassini, that for the last few years the Saurian Empire’s most erudite scholars have devoted themselves to this question. They have now come to a new conclusion, and it is this: God resembles neither an ant nor a dinosaur. Rather, God is formless, like a gust of wind, a ray of light or the air that swaddles this world. God is reflected in every grain of sand, every drop of water.’

The Formican queen’s answer came quickly and unequivocally. ‘We ants do not possess such complicated minds as you dinosaurs,’ she said, ‘and that sort of profound philosophising is challenging for us. But I agree with this conclusion. My intuition tells me that God is indeed formless. And you should know that the ant world has forbidden idolatry.’

‘The Saurian Empire has also forbidden idolatry.’ Urus could hide his relief no longer. His face cracked into a wide, snaggle-toothed grin. ‘In that case, Your Majesty, may I conclude that ants and dinosaurs share the same God?’

‘If you wish, Your Majesty.’

And so the First Dinosaur–Ant War came to a close. It was a war without victors. The dinosaur–ant alliance made a swift recovery. New cities began to appear atop the ruins of the old, and Cretaceous civilisation, after so long spent teetering on the brink of collapse, was reborn.

8

The Information Age

Another millennium whizzed by. Cretaceous civilisation progressed through the Electric Age and the Atomic Age and into the Information Age.

Dinosaur cities were now immeasurably vast, on a scale even larger than those of the Steam-Engine Age, with skyscrapers that towered 10,000 metres into the sky – or more. Standing on the roof of one of these buildings was like looking down from one of our high-altitude aircraft, putting you way above the clouds that seemed to hug the Earth below. When the cloud cover was heavy, dinosaurs on the perpetually sunny top floors would phone the doorman on the ground floor to check whether it was raining down there and if they’d need an umbrella for the journey home. Their umbrellas were voluminous, of course, like our big-top circus tents.

Though the dinosaurs’ cars now ran on petrol, not steam, they were still the size of our multi-storey buildings and the ground still trembled beneath their wheels. Aeroplanes had replaced balloons and these were as bulky as our ocean liners, rolling across the sky like thunder and casting titanic shadows across the streets below. The dinosaurs even ventured into space. Their satellites and spaceships moved in geosynchronous orbit and were, naturally, also colossal – so colossal, in fact, that you could discern their shapes quite clearly from Earth.

The global dinosaur population had increased tenfold and more since the Steam-Engine Age. Because they ate a lot and because everything they used was on a massive scale, dinosaurs consumed foodstuff and materials in astronomical quantities. It required untold numbers of farms and factories to meet these needs. The factories were powered by hulking great nuclear-powered machines and the skies above them were perpetually obscured by dense smoke. Keeping dinosaur society functioning efficiently was an extremely complex operation and the circulation of energy resources, raw materials and finance had to be coordinated by computers. A sophisticated computer network linked every part of the dinosaur world, and the computers involved were necessarily enormous too. Each keyboard key was the size of one of our computer screens, and their screens were as wide as our walls.

The ant world had also entered an advanced Information Age, but the ants obtained energy from completely different sources; they did not use oil or coal but harvested wind and solar power instead. Ant cities were cluttered with wind turbines, similar in size and shape to the pinwheels our children play with, and their buildings were covered with shiny black solar cells. Another important technology in the ant world was bioengineered locomotor muscle. Locomotor muscle fibres resembled bundles of thick electric cables, but when injected with nutrient solution, they could expand and contract at different frequencies to generate power. All of the ants’ cars and aeroplanes were powered by these muscle fibres.