The organic intellectual

The men pushing the giant egg started to grow quiet and wary; they were approaching ant country.

The egg was frail and so was the woman inside it. It occurred to her that she could probably get out of it if she wanted to, and it further occurred to her that she wouldn’t try. She had always wondered why prisoners so meekly trotted along to their executions: surely it was better to die nominally free in a hail of musketshot than at the hand of whatever ghastly mechanism the Elders had dreamed up for their demise. But now she found herself in the same position she realised what a powerful force inertia was. There were various elements to it: a dread that was paralytic but not all enveloping; it left small spaces in her mind through which permeated the idea that doing a runner would be in some way improper. And so one resigned oneself to despair, or to waiting for a miracle — for the right moment that never came.

She supposed that was what she was doing, but mostly she was tired and in pain and had a morbid curiosity about what was going to happen next.

She didn’t have long to wait; even slaves, soldiers and fanatics cannot be marched too far into the antlands, and scarcely had the vegetation given way to grey dust than the procession came to a halt.

The priest came forwards. Of course there was a priest. It is important that executions be very solemn and involve a specific ritual and chronology, else they would look too much like what they are. There were speeches and symbols. Her charges were read out: sedition, incitement to violence and some trumped up charges to make it all sound worse. She was given the opportunity to say her last words and she said once again the word that had caused all this trouble: “why?”

The priest paused, the ritual had not anticipated a call-and-response section. But he decided this was a rhetorical “why” and that he was not called upon to defend imperial policy. He continued to read out words like “rightful” and “accordance” from the page until he and everyone else felt better about not knowing the answer to her question.

Then the priest brought forward the gourd with the pheromone and with great ceremony smashed it on the roof of the egg. Then, all pretence of solemnity and dignity immediately abandoned, everyone ran away as fast as they could. In other circumstances the sudden switch from sombre pomposity to panicky chaos would have been quite funny.

Now she could think about escaping but still she hesitated. The egg might be frail but it would still take time to escape from, and then when she did so she was in ant country. Not that deep into ant country in fairness, but potentially deep enough, particularly given her illness. If the ants caught her in the open they would rip her to shreds. Immediately she comprehended how effective a cage this ramshackle little wood and canvass oval was. Even before the ants came her fear of them entrapped her, and so she continued to hesitate, knowing every moment of delay made her odds yet slimmer.

And so once again the moment slipped past. She sat passively even after she became aware of a distant rumbling, sat passively as a living sea broke over the horizon, and was still passive as she found it suddenly all around her. She hadn’t moved when the blackness took her.

She had been condemned for being annoying, and she was oh so very annoying. She had been an annoying child, peppering her parents and siblings with questions. Sometimes they had enjoyed answering, peacocking their intelligence, but often they grew weary and frustrated. Nothing was ever enough for her. She would ask for the why behind the why, and the why behind that why, relentlessly. Eventually their frustration would grow to anger and they’d yell. It was a pattern she would become accustomed to over the years.

“Shut up, you’re not funny” was her brother’s standard retort. She wasn’t trying to be funny; she was trying to understand.

The Elders had been correct in their assumptions. Ants are clever, especially collectively, but they have very low-resolution vision, they can only really see outlines and movement. They saw a whiteish blob in a dark greyish desert with some sign of life inside it. It smelt like one of their eggs and was about the same size as one of their eggs. They were baffled as to how it had got there, but ants can compartmentalise the practical and the philosophical and though the nest as a whole would be arguing about the strange egg for years, the workers who found it still brought it back to the heart of the nursery where it belonged.

That was often the way with ants: the nest had a mind of its own, the collective thoughts of its individual members, and this mind was a powerful thing. But the individual ants also had minds of their own and communication between the individual and the whole was slow and imperfect. So a lot of things happened automatically — like the filing of lost eggs. Behaving automatically is a wonderful way to believe to yourself that you are doing what a larger system wants you to do.

She had got sick as a teenager and had remained so. No one had quite worked out why. She had spent a lot of time alone in bed and had been very angry for a very long time and very sad for an even longer time. There was no one to answer her questions and so she had thought about them herself, long and hard. She hadn’t found any answers but she had realised that a lot of the answers she had been given weren’t very satisfactory either.

The ants brought her food and kept her clean. She didn’t know what they thought she was, presumably some partly emerged larva in a state of arrested development — some burdensome problem child, she was used to society viewing her as that — but they saw it as their duty to feed the larvae in the nursery and they weren’t going to be thrown out of their routine by the fact that one of their charges was weird.

Everything about this was disgusting, but in her years of illness she had experienced pretty much all the disgust the human body was capable of generating, and had become hard to it. She had become hard in general, with inner reserves that were slightly scary to those that knew her.

She didn’t want to think too much about what she was eating: some masticated slurry of mostly vegetable matter with the odd suspicious bit of protein. She wondered why if the ant nest itself was so wise and so long lived did it farm so unsustainably: sending raiding parties out to scour the land to dust as opposed to allowing some plants and animals to survive so they could continuously feed from them. She had heard tell that in other lands the ants were much smaller, smaller than a dog, and there they ate much more sensibly.

Over the years a number of people had come to realise that she was very kind and very wise and they had sought out her company and her thoughts. They asked her for advice. She never gave any: she just asked lots of questions. She asked why the things they were concerned about were occurring, and then she asked for the why behind that why. This got her and them in to a lot of trouble.

After the rebellion they threw her in prison. After the Prisoner’s Revolt they threw her in a lunatic asylum. When the Elders finally regained full control after the Years of Insanity they sentenced her to death. There was some public sympathy for this — the Years of Insanity had been a trying time — but she also had her supporters. The Elders had never provided a satisfactory answer to some of their most pressing whys: Why were some of them rich and others poor? Why did we lock our sick and mad people out of the way where no one would think about them? Why did we follow the Elders at all? Why were we an empire and what would happen if the ships ever stopped returning laden with fruit and plunder? The Mutiny on the Scaffold was the closest the empire came to collapsing.

The ants spoke by semaphore using their mandibles. She had nothing to do but learn their language and so she did. It took a while to master, but eventually she realised that every conversation was two conversations. The first was the conversation between the ants: mundane, transactional. The second was the song the nest was singing to itself: often abstract, vague, philosophical. She realised that each ant would scarcely, if ever, have more than one conversation with the same ant twice, and perhaps would not even realise it if they had. But yet they could still forge relationships and have deep long lasting and recurring conversations: with the nest itself, or more often with factions or sections within the nest who thought as they did about certain things and so would respond to the notes they played in this greater orchestra.

After her final trial she was brought before the Elders. They told her her fate and she asked why it would take that form. They gave a number of reasons: some of them made more sense than others but none amounted to a comprehensive explanation. She asked them why things were the way they were and why they couldn’t be different. They did not answer but several of them shifted uncomfortably. They asked her why she had done what she had done. She asked them the same question. They asked her why she would not stop. She asked them why it was so important to them that they stop her. It was a most unsatisfactory conversation.

One day an ant brought her two long twigs. It did not appear to be something the nest had decreed, or if it was she had not picked up on it. This seemed to be a spontaneous act of kindness, or of curiosity. Maybe the strange larva could speak, and had just lost its means of doing so. She held the sticks crossed and to the left, in the ant gesture of thanks. The ant snapped its mandibles together twice — “you’re welcome” — and scurried along its way. If it was curious about what she might have to say with her new found abilities it did not show it.

But she had not communicated with another being in oh so very long and she felt a connection with this ant in particular, the first creature to speak to her, to show her any kindness at all, in an eternity. So she hailed it back with her twigs, beckoning to it as the hatching larvae do to the workers who bring them food.

The ant rubbed its mandibles impatiently and gestured with them to its burden: a large pellet of masticated food from which it had broken off small segments to give to each of the larvae on its route. The vast majority of the pellet remained, and she noticed that as she was at the end of a row he must be leaving the nursery with it. She raised a twig but as if pre-empting the expected question the ant made a series of downstrokes and then one lugubrious final upwards flourish: “for the Queen”.

There’s a combination of practice, instinct and muscle memory that allows the truly gifted to do what they do. For some people playing an instrument is as easy as breathing, some athletes can move like flowing water. As they grow older their movements might lack for power and vigour but they never lose the technique: it comes so naturally it does not even require thought. Old warriors will forever remember how to land a killing blow.

She was halfway through the motion before she even noticed that she had started it; a simple, elegant swish of stick through air:

“Why?”