SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Compelled by ineluctable chemical signals, the ants had left their ancestral homes. With nodules of iron oxide in their heads and gasters, they felt the hidden electromagnetic lines of the earth, following them north, fueled on their journey by stolen bounties of corn and wedding cake.

The ants came from myriad niches and represented myriad forms and faces. Some had jaws heavy like sledgehammers, some had jaws long and spikey to catch springtails and silverfish. Some were tiny, some huge in comparison. As if human-sized humans walked beside giants as tall as ten-story buildings. And these myriad myrmidons were peaceably marching together, straight up the middle of Australia.

Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

By white man or black.

Many Aborigines, like Vauna herself, lived modern lifestyles, with modern clothing, performing modern jobs in modern cities. But a few still clung to the ancient ways, speaking the ancient tongues, conferring with the ancient ancestor spirits. And these elders watched the torrent of ants, just as they had long watched the ebb and flow of waters. They kept calendars marked by millennia, not by seasons arbitrarily marked by days.

To them, there was no spring or summer, no fall or winter. There was the season of the Dharratharramirri, which ended when the balgur lost its leaves. There was the season when the pandanus would fruit, and the Dhimurru winds would blow. There was the season of the Burrugumirri, when mornings turned cold and the sharks birthed their young.

None of the elders were scientists in the Western sense, but they knew the land better than most ecologists, even world-famous eremologists.

The traditionals knew this land, this timeless land that had co-existed with them for forty thousand years.

They knew the ants.

They knew that licking the green ants firmed the bosom. That limonite deposits around ant hills made good pigments. That bushfires were coming when meat ants covered their nests with quartz chips. That ant poison was a hallucinogen that helped them commune with spirits.

But what were the ants doing?

The ants had chewed through walls separating room from room, through hoses separating water from air. Now they were chewing through the walls of time, the dividers between the now and the early-early days. And through these holes shot white hot Roman candles of Dreamtime, mingling with the modern age.

As three scientists tried to parse the “stigmergy,” the work that inspired the ants, the Aborigines asked a slightly different question.

In the ancient days, the ancestors had dreamed the world into existence.

What now were the ants dreaming?

They didn’t know.

But answering a call that they neither heard nor understood, the peoples came. They called themselves blackfellas, though their skin represented every shade from black to white, and they lived lifestyles from traditional to modern. And they gathered their families, tumbled them into jeeps and pick-up trucks and followed the ants north.

And Todd and Shorty piled grinding mills and gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers into a ute. Yes, Vauna would be joining them on this great scientific.

But none of them knew where they were going.

“The barrier will be here.”

The American First Lieutenant Lori Osborne pointed at the small map. Three lines, in red, blue and green, represented the defenses around the American facility at Pine Gap, in the dead center of Australia.

Todd nodded in agreement.

This was an important installation. A ground receiving station for a third of America’s spy satellites, including those going over China, Russia and the Middle East. If anyone launched a missile from space, they would see it here first.

Todd had read reports of carpenter ants and fire ants massing in such numbers that they shorted out electrical equipment.

The Americans were right to be prepared. And worried.

Todd, Vauna and Shorty—being non-military and thus not allowed on base—watched the Lieutenant’s presentation on a computer screen in a hotel room.

“What about Alice?” Vauna said, referring to the small town eleven miles from the base.

The Lieutenant was well aware of the touchiness of their relations with their host Aussies.

Peace protestors regularly drove up to the base’s gate, demanding that they “Close the Gap”. Some claimed that the Americans were spying on the Aussies, or else hiding secrets about flying saucers. Some complained that the base made Australia a target, painting a giant bull’s eye in the middle of their country.

“What are you going to do for Alice?”

The Lieutenant explained that Pine Gap, despite its importance, was geographically tiny. Only a few blocks across, and thus readily defensible.

Alice, on the other hand, was small for a town, but would still require miles and miles of defenses to encircle her and her airport. Nonetheless, joint forces were working to protect her.

The outer defense line around Pine Gap would be a string of poison traps. This was where the scientists would come in, selecting the right mix of toxins and attractants.

If that failed, there would be a moat of water, lined with concrete, dug completely around Pine Gap by the Army corps of engineers.

And inside that, a second moat filled with gasoline that could be set on fire if needed.

Similar defenses would be built around Alice and her airport, as best they could.

They had eleven days.

It wasn’t much time, but now they were playing in Todd’s domain.

He had available to him a veritable arsenal of chemical weapons to use against the ants.

He had the potent combo of cyfluthrin and bifenthrin derivatives. They were like a pair of sharpshooters, taking out ants without harming innocent bystanders. They were safe to use around livestock, and had been recently approved for use in Australia. So no resistant ants had yet arisen.

But he also had a brand new N-phenylpyrazole variant, which got him very excited. It was related to, but more potent than, what he had used in Mexico City. Where the other compounds used finesse, this new chemical was like an atom-powered Attila the Hun. It was almost out of control, destroying everything. Not just ants, but grasshoppers, ladybugs, protozoans and all sorts of worms, both flat and round. It wasn’t yet approved for use. He was dying to see its devastating effects.

Which one would they use? Would the Aussies let Attila out of his cage?

And which attractant?

The idea is that worker ants would eat the poison, and pass it to other ants, who would eventually pass it to queens, killing them.

But first they had to trick the ants into taking the poison by mixing in a bait.

But what would the local ants prefer? Light corn syrup? Honey? Peanut butter?

The American lieutenant put a dozen of her soldiers at the scientists’ disposal. They went into the field, collecting thousands of ants, which were divided into groups of hundreds and treated to poisons and sweets.

As Todd collated the data, counting dead ants and calculating mortality rate and LD50. He was in the zone, zeroing in on the perfect magic bullet.

A few nights later, the science team decided to take their first break in almost a week.

Shorty went into Alice, ostensibly to get some stubbies, but really to give Todd and Vauna some time alone.

They sat together on a log, watching for meteors. Comets regularly hit the Moon, Vauna explained, knocking off rocks that land in Australia in the form of meteorites.

Maybe someday they would find one together.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Vauna asked.

“Sure, anything,” Todd said.