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

Suddenly, she became very aware of sweat all over her body.

Is this what love is?

Sweat was everywhere, dribbling down her cheeks, into her eyes.

But it wasn’t sweat—

It was ants!

Ants were inside her suit! They must have found a pinhole or chewed through the seams. She could feel something—fabric, skin, ants—bunching up around her knees.

Inside her suit, she was drowning in ants as they began stinging and biting everywhere, even in her mouth.

If she ran, maybe she could toss out some pheromone cases before too many ants got her.

If she—-

Something told her to stand there, body and soul.

Maybe, she thought, she could be like Karl Schmidt, famed herpetologist who had been bitten by a poisonous boomslang snake and catalogued all his symptoms as he was dying. Bradycardia, no. But, tachycardia, yes. Plus: fever, delirium, the sensation of floating.

She felt disconnected from her body, as her blood percolated with formic acid, undecane, propionic acid and acetate.

She checked for more symptoms. Urticaria, hypertension, angioedema? Yes, yes, and probably.

After a while, the bites no longer hurt, no longer felt like white-hot firebrands.

No, the scientists were wrong. Ant venom did not kill. Formic acid was not a poison.

They were hallucinogens, unlocking the doors of perception.

She fell through layers of time, and words formed in her ears.

Listen to the pillar sing , they said.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Are you real?”

The voices were many, but she could not tell if they were male or female, young or old.

We are your ancestors. I am your ant mother. You are the ant dreaming woman.

“Doubtful.” Vauna laughed at the biological improbability of an ant-human hybrid. “Do I have blood or hemolymph? Can I have both an endo- and exoskeleton? How can an ant’s armor hold up the weight of—-”

Listen to the pillar sing.

Now, with a cocktail of ant poisons flowing through her veins, she heard.

The pillar was a harp string plucked by the wind, harmonizing with the songs that echoed through the billabongs and the leaves of the eucalyptus.

Each rock and each bush sang its own story. This hill was the fossilized heart of a kangaroo spirit. Those rocks were the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. Their songs were mixed with the drone of the didjeridoo and the snap of the clapstick.

Listen to the pillar sing.

And now Vauna understood that the trails she had traveled between watering holes were songlines. When she had gone walkabout all those times, her soul had sailed and she had sung the ancestral songs, never knowing.

And now before her was the songline that reached from earth to heaven.

“I am not an Oreo, not Coconut girl,” she said to herself. “I am ant dreaming woman.”

You are at home with no man, black or white. We are not human, and neither black nor white…

“Are you cytoplasm or ectoplasm? I want to know…” Vauna cried. “Your history, your ecology…”

Then come with us…

Tears in her eyes, she laid down the coolant and the oxygen tank and the case of ant pheromones, unopened, being careful not to crush any of her tiny ant sisters.

Come with us…

“For science!” she said.

Then she walked on, ripping herself out of her protective suit, like an insect molting its chitinous skin, and she disappeared into a sea of black faces, wondering where this new scientific adventure would take her.

“Vauna!” Todd cried over his radio headset.

Just before she was gone, he thought he saw her turn toward him and smile, as if to say, Goodbye.

“Vauna!” he screamed. If she failed her part, the entire mission might fail. And his mission to prove himself to her, to win her love.

He watched her put down her equipment and dissolve into the crowds.

“I’m out of here!” Shorty cried, dashing from the mound. “Maybe I’ll get a Nature paper out of this!”

The team had come apart and Todd had never felt so alone.

This was the man who had defeated the ants in the subways of Mexico City, by the lakes of Nicaragua, in the wheat fields of the Transvaal…

He stood helpless in the face of lost love.

Now he felt the terrible prickling of sweat all over his skin.

It was the ants, biting and stinging him everywhere.

As his heart raced and waves of delirium passed through him, he found words forming in his head.

It was not a booming voice, not Charlton Heston. Just words.

Todd, my son.

This still small voice had pursued him half way around the world.

“Speak to me,” he said to the voice. “And I will hear. But first, please tell me: Who am I? I am neither Joshua nor Jacob. I am utterly destroyed and lost!”

You are a good and faithful servant.

“Thank you.”

And I need you to be Pharaoh.

“No!” Todd screamed in his head. Pharaoh? The one who had kept the Israelites in Egypt? The one who would not let them go until God smote him and his people with plague after plague? The worst person in the Old Testament?

How could that be?

Let them go. Let her go.

“I can’t! Smite me with ten plagues and I will never let her go—isn’t that what love is?”

Todd started crying.

“Why don’t I deserve happiness? And love? I’ll take good care of her! We will plumb the depths of each others’ mysteries!”

Let her go.

He let the words pierce him through the heart.

Now he understood, at least in part.

Some mysteries were not his to solve. What would happen to Vauna? Or Gemma?

It was not his to know.

Let her go.

“I must decrease, so others may increase,” he conceded. He felt like he were dissolving into nothingness.

“This isn’t fair!” he screamed. “You say I’m good and faithful, but…I didn’t even get to unleash Attila or beat the ants or…I’ve worked so hard, struggled so long…Have you nothing for me? Nothing?”

The great myrmecologist collapsed on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.

And the voice heard his words and took pity on him.

My son, behold now and wonder marvelously! it chimed. Then it showed him a vision just for him, a discovery no scientist on earth had ever seen.

Afterward, Todd sucked in his breath, ashamed at his insolence. “I am so sorry. And…T-thank you, thank you,” he said, standing slowly, gathering his things and returning to civilization. “Thank you.”

He had been expecting the voice to show him, if anything, the image of a girl.

But instead, this is the vision that he alone was allowed to see:

A little long ways up the pillar, an ant licked sugar water off the back of another.

Together, the royal chariot of ants writhed and tripped over each other, carrying the load ever higher. It was a prolate spheroid, half the size of an Aussie rules football. Chemical commands came from deep inside it.

Push, push.

So the ants pushed. And they passed around bubbles of air, clamping their spiracles shut to hold in their breath. Honeypot ants moved among them, dispensing nectar and nutrients.

The desert ants were most useful, as natural producers of cryoprotectant proteins. These saved the myriads from first the cold, and then the sun, now untempered by atmosphere.

It was the desert ants who survived last, crawling over the bodies of their starved, asphyxiated sisters.

It was the desert ants, undeterred by aggression pheromones, who pulled the load to the end of the ribbon, high above the Equator, the ideal place for jumping off this world.