Лю Цысинь: Of Ants and Dinosaurs

The vast majority of dinosaurs would on no account let the ants burrow into their stomachs or brains, even if their intentions were entirely honourable and therapeutic. However, an epoch-making breakthrough occurred in this regard with a Hadrosaurus named Alija, the earliest named dinosaur in the history of Cretaceous civilisation.

When Alija trudged into the Ivory Citadel that day, it was immediately obvious to the ants that he was in a frail state. A squad of 500 straight away scuttled forward to greet him and offer assistance, as they did with every dinosaur patient, and Alija duly opened his mouth and pointed inside with his claw. It was an unnecessary gesture, for dinosaurs only ever turned up there to get their teeth worked on. But the lead ant doctor, an ant by the name of Avi, who would later become the father of ant internal medicine, noticed that Alija was not actually pointing to his teeth but to somewhere further down – to his throat. Next, the dinosaur pointed to his stomach, grimaced to show that it hurt, and pointed to his throat again. There was no mistaking his meaning: he was asking the ants to examine his stomach.

So Dr Avi led a team of several dozen ants to conduct the first ever internal examination of a consenting dinosaur. The diagnostic team entered Alija’s stomach by way of his oesophagus and quickly discovered a lesion in the stomach wall. Major medical intervention was required, but Dr Avi knew that with the limited antpower currently available to him, this was not possible. He would need a great deal of assistance. When he emerged from the dinosaur’s mouth, he made an emergency appointment with the mayor of the Ivory Citadel. At the meeting, he explained the situation and requested an additional 50,000 ants as well as three kilograms each of anaesthetic and anti-inflammatory drugs.

The mayor waved her antennae angrily. ‘Are you crazy, Doctor? We have a full schedule of dinosaur patients today. If we reassign that many ants to your team, we’ll have to delay service to nearly sixty dinosaurs. Not to mention that that much medicine would be enough for a hundred treatments. That Hadrosaurus is sickly. He’s too weak to find bones and meat. How will he pay for this super-treatment?’

‘You must take the long view, Madam Mayor,’ Dr Avi replied. ‘If this intervention is successful, we ants will no longer be restricted to treating only dental problems – we’ll be able to cure almost any disease. Our business with the dinosaurs will increase tenfold, a hundredfold. We’ll earn more bones and meat than we can count, and your city will grow prodigiously.’

The mayor was persuaded and she gave Avi the ants, drugs and authority he had asked for. A great contingent of 50,000 ants was soon assembled, and two piles of drugs were hauled in. The sick Hadrosaurus lay flat on the ground as the army of ants streamed into his open mouth in continuous, unbroken columns, each ant carrying a tiny backpack filled with drugs. Hundreds of giant dinosaurs gathered around in a circle, gawping at this grand undertaking.

‘I can’t believe that idiot’s letting all those bugs crawl right into his stomach,’ grumbled a Tarbosaurus .

‘So what?’ a Tyrannosaurus snapped back. ‘We already allow them into our mouths, don’t we?’

‘Dental hygiene is one thing, but when it comes to matters of the stomach, well, that’s a whole different ocean of fish,’ the Tarbosaurus replied. ‘Over my dead body—’

‘But what if your body was very nearly dead – like with this poor Hadrosaurus here,’ a squat Stegosaurus behind them interjected, craning her neck to see. ‘If the ants really can cure him—’

‘You mark my words, if we let them into our stomachs now, before we can so much as scratch an itch, they’ll be crawling into our noses, ears, eyes – into our brains, even. And who can anticipate what might happen then.’ The Tarbosaurus glared at the Stegosaurus . ‘Not in a million years would I countenance that.’

‘A million years, huh?’ said the Tyrannosaurus , stroking his chin. ‘But think how easy life would be if every disease could be cured.’

The other dinosaurs chipped in:

‘Yeah, life would be so easy…’

‘Getting sick is a massive pain…’

‘We could live forever…’

The first stage of the operation required that anaesthetic be administered to the lesion in Alija’s stomach. It had been collected from plants for use during dental procedures, and under the direction of Dr Avi the ants now ferried it into the Hadrosaurus ’s stomach. After the area had been numbed, several thousand worker ants began to cut away the diseased tissue. This was a huge project, as the excised gastric tissue had to then be transported out of the dinosaur’s body. Porter ants formed a long black chain, passing little gobbets of flesh from ant to ant, all the way back up the line and onto the ground outside, where the pile of stinky rotten tissue was expanding fast. Once the lesion had been cut out, an anti-inflammatory had to be applied to the wound, which required another great procession into the Hadrosaurus ’s stomach.

The entire procedure took three hours and was completed by sundown. When all of the ants had withdrawn, Alija reported that the pain in his stomach had disappeared. Several days later, he made a full recovery.

The news spread like wildfire through the dinosaur world. The number of dinosaurs seeking treatment at the Ivory Citadel increased tenfold, and this brought multitudes of ants flooding into the city in search of work. Thanks to the healthy uptick in business, the ants’ medical technology advanced in leaps and bounds. Now that they had official access to dinosaur bodies, they learnt to treat various diseases of the digestive and respiratory systems; later, their repertoire expanded to include diseases of the circulatory, visual, auditory and nervous systems – systems that required extraordinary levels of expertise to understand and heal. New drugs were being developed all the time, derived from not only plants but also animals and inorganic minerals.

The ants’ endosurgical techniques also progressed rapidly. For example, when performing surgery in the digestive system, it was no longer necessary for a long line of ants to trek down the dinosaur’s oesophagus. Instead, they entered by means of an ‘ant pellet’. Approximately 1,000 ants would cling tightly to one another and form a ball ten to twenty centimetres in diameter. The dinosaur patient would then wash down one or more of these pellets with water, as though swallowing a pill. This technique improved surgical efficiency substantially.

As the Ivory Citadel continued to mushroom, some of the dinosaurs who came for treatment stayed on, establishing a city of their own not far from the ant megalopolis. Because the dinosaurs constructed their homes with massive stones, the ants called it Boulder City. The Ivory Citadel and Boulder City would later become the capitals of the Formican and Saurian Empires of Gondwana.

There was also significant movement in the opposite direction. Some of the dinosaurs who returned home after having received treatment took groups of ants with them to other dinosaur cities and ant colonies all across Gondwana. When the émigré ants settled in these faraway places, they passed on the Ivory Citadel’s medical technology to the locals. And so dinosaur–ant cooperation gradually spread throughout Gondwana, cementing the foundations for a dinosaur–ant alliance.

Up till now, the cooperation between Earth’s two dominant species could only be classified as an advanced symbiotic relationship. The ants provided medical services to the dinosaurs in exchange for food, and the dinosaurs traded food for medical care. Although the character of the transaction had evolved considerably since the ants had picked that first dinosaur’s teeth, the essence of the contract had remained unchanged.