Kunda had known all along that the ants were crafty little mercenaries, and now he had proof. He raised a broom to mete out the punishment they deserved. But just as he was about to strike, he caught another glimpse of their wooden tablet and a sudden revelation flashed through his mind. The characters the ants had carved were small, but they were fully legible to dinosaur eyes. The reason characters were normally so big was not for ease of reading but because the dinosaurs were not dexterous enough to inscribe anything smaller. It occurred to him that the ants, who were twitching their antennae frantically in his direction, might very well be trying to explain this to him.
The scowl on his face broadened into a smile and he dropped the broom. Then he set down one of the strips of glow-lizard jerky in the middle of the colony and swished the other tantalisingly. Crouching down in front of the tablet, he gestured at the three large characters and the line of small characters and tried to communicate his idea. It took the ants a while to catch on, but eventually they waggled their feelers in emphatic confirmation: yes, they could carve characters that were smaller still. Immediately, they flooded onto the blank part of the tablet and set to work. Soon they had carved a line of even smaller characters, each about the size of the letters in the title on this book’s cover. As the ants were illiterate, they were simply reproducing the shapes of the characters.
Kunda rewarded them with the remaining strip of jerky. Then he hacked off the section of the tablet carved with the smallest characters, tucked it under his arm and gleefully lolloped off to see the city prefect.
Because of Kunda’s low status, the guards stopped him on the steps of the colossal stone mansion that housed the prefect’s office. The guards were imposing, powerfully built dinosaurs and Kunda quickly lifted up the section of the tablet for them to see. They inspected it. Within moments, their expressions had morphed from surprise to awe; it was as if they were in the presence of a sacred relic. Turning their gaze back to Kunda, they gaped at him for a long time, as though he were a great sage, then let him pass.
‘What’s that you’ve got there – a toothpick?’ the prefect asked when he saw Kunda.
‘No, sir, this is a tablet.’
‘A tablet? Are you an idiot? You couldn’t fit half a character onto that piddly piece of wood.’
‘It’s hard to believe, I know, sir, but there are actually more than thirty characters on this self-same piddly piece of wood.’ Kunda passed it over.
The prefect gazed at the tablet with the same wonderment as the guards. After a long time, he looked up at Kunda. ‘I don’t suppose you carved this yourself?’
‘Of course not, sir. A gang of ants did it.’
Boulder City’s municipal officials gathered round and the tablet was passed from claws to claws, much like we might hand round an ivory figurine to be admired. These dinosaurs constituted the city’s ruling class and they now launched into fervent discussion.
‘Incredible – such tiny characters…’
‘… and totally legible too.’
‘Over the millennia, so many of our ancestors have tried to write like this, but to no avail.’
‘Those itsy-bitsy bugs really are quite capable.’
‘We should have known they’d be good for more than medical care.’
‘Just think of all the materials we’ll save…’
‘… and how easily we’ll be able to transport our tablets. You know, I might be able to carry the entire register of the city’s residents by myself! No need to employ a hundred-strong division of dinosaur movers any more.’
‘And that’s just the start of it, I’d say. We can now consider changing the materials we use for the tablets too.’
‘Quite so. After all, where’s the merit in using tree-trunks? For characters this small, bark would surely be lighter and more portable.’
‘Precisely. And a lot cheaper too. Small lizard skins could be used as well.’
The prefect interrupted the chatter with a wave. ‘Right then, from now on the ants will be our scribes. We shall start by raising a writing force of a million ants or more. Let’s see…’ He surveyed the room, his eyes finally falling on Kunda. ‘You will lead this campaign.’
So Kunda realised his dream, and Boulder City, along with the rest of the dinosaur world, saved a great deal of wood and stone and an enormous quantity of hides. But compared with the real significance of this event in the history of Cretaceous civilisation, those savings were trivialities.
The advent of fine antprint made it possible to transcribe vast volumes of information, and at the same time the dinosaurs’ script grew richer and more sophisticated. At long last, the alpha and omega of the dinosaurs’ experience and knowledge could be fully and systematically recorded using the written word and mathematical equations. It could also be disseminated far more widely, reliably and permanently, no longer subject to the vagaries of dinosaur memory and oral tradition. This remarkable advancement gave fresh impetus to Cretaceous science and culture, sending the long-stagnant Cretaceous civilisation into a period of whirlwind development.
Meanwhile, new applications for the ants’ fine-motor skills were found in all sectors of the dinosaur world. Take timekeeping technology as an example. Dinosaurs had invented the sundial long ago, but because they used large tree-trunks as gnomons and drew rough hour lines around them, these had to remain fixed in place. Thanks to the ants, sundials could now be made smaller and the hour lines rendered more precisely, allowing dinosaurs to carry them around. Later, dinosaurs would invent the hourglass and the water clock, and though they might have been able to make the containers themselves, only ants could bore the crucial holes. The manufacture of mechanical clocks was even more dependent on ant labour, for though a grandfather clock might be taller than a dinosaur, it still contained numerous tiny parts that could only be machined by ants.
But the area in which the ants’ skills made the most meaningful contribution to the advancement of civilisation, besides writing, was scientific experimentation. Thanks to the ants’ capacity for intricate work, it was now possible to take measurements with an exactitude that had eluded dinosaurs, allowing a shift in experimentation from the qualitative to the quantitative. Research once thought impossible became a reality, leading to rapid strides in Cretaceous science.
Ants were now an integral part of the dinosaur world. Dinosaurs of high standing were never without a miniature ant nest. Most of these nests resembled a wooden sphere and housed several hundred ants. When a dinosaur needed to write, it would unfold a strip of bark or hide parchment on the table and set down its ant nest beside it. The ants would scurry out onto the parchment and etch the words dictated to them by the dinosaur. They used a very particular system of concurrent writing, quite different from our own. Where we humans write one character at a time, the ants teamed up and inscribed multiple characters simultaneously. This allowed them to complete a transcription very rapidly, at a pace that would far outstrip our own handwriting speed. Naturally, a dinosaur’s pocket-sized ant nest also came in handy for all sorts of other tasks that required a light touch.
For their part, the ants received much more than just bones and meat from the dinosaurs. After their new collaboration began, the first invaluable asset the ant world gained was written language. Ants had never had a written language before, and even as they became the dinosaurs’ scribes, they remained illiterate, which meant they were limited to simple reproduction work, copying out the characters from the dinosaurs’ outsized tablets. Their efficiency was relatively poor, as they could only transcribe one stroke at a time. But the dinosaurs were in dire need of ants who could take dictation like secretaries, and the ants, who were well aware of the importance of written language to society, were eager to learn. Thanks to a concerted effort on both sides, the ants quickly mastered the dinosaurs’ script and co-opted it for use in their own society.