Of Ants and Dinosaurs Read online

  of

  ANTS

  and

  DINOSAURS

  BY CIXIN LIU

  The Three-Body Problem

  The Dark Forest

  Death’s End

  *

  Ball Lightning

  The Supernova Era

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Wandering Earth

  Hold up the Sky

  of

  ANTS

  and

  DINOSAURS

  CIXIN LIU

  TRANSLATED BY ELIZABETH HANLON

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © 2010 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin)

  English translation copyright © 2019 FT Culture (Beijing) Co., Ltd.

  Co-published by Chongqing Media & Publishing Co., Ltd.

  Translation by Elizabeth Hanlon

  The moral right of 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781789546118

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781838935191

  ISBN (E): 9781789546095

  Design: David Wardle

  Images: © Shutterstock

  Author Photo: Li Yibo

  Head of Zeus Ltd

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  Contents

  By Cixin Liu

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: Bright Sparks

  1. The First Encounter

  2. The Age of Exploration of the Dinosaur Body

  3. The Dawn of Civilisation

  4. Tablets

  5. The Steam-Engine Age

  6. The Ants’ Arsenal

  7. The First Dinosaur–Ant War

  8. The Information Age

  9. The Dinosaur–Ant Summit

  10. The Strike

  11. The Second Dinosaur–Ant War

  12. The Medical Team

  13. The Final War

  14. Mine-Grains

  15. Luna and Leviathan

  16. Defection

  17. The Ultimate Deterrent

  18. The Battle of the Signal Stations

  Epilogue: The Long Night

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  of

  ANTS

  and

  DINOSAURS

  PROLOGUE

  Bright Sparks

  If the entire history of the Earth were condensed into a single day, one hour would equate to 200 million years, one minute to 3.3 million years and one second to 55,000 years. Life would appear as early as eight or nine o’clock in the morning, but human civilisation would not emerge until the last tenth of the last second of the day. From the morning that philosophers held the first ever debate on the steps of a temple in Ancient Greece… from the day slaves laid the first foundation stone of the Great Pyramid… from the minute that Confucius welcomed his first disciple into the candlelit gloom of his thatched hut… right up until the moment you turned the first page of this book, only one-tenth of a tick of the clock would have elapsed.

  But in the hours before this tenth of a second, what was life on Earth doing? Was every single living being doing nothing but swimming, roaming around, breeding and sleeping for… well… billions of years? Was every other organism universally and unremittingly stupid – for aeon after aeon? Of the countless branches on the tree of life, was our small twig really the only one to have been graced with the light of intelligence? It seems unlikely.

  Nevertheless, for a germ of intelligence to grow into a great civilisation is no easy feat. It requires that many conditions be met simultaneously, a one-in-a-million coincidence. Nascent intelligence is as precarious as a tiny flame in an open field. It’s liable to be snuffed out in the slightest breeze, and even if it does catch and manages to set the surrounding weeds alight, the little fire will likely find its path blocked by a stream or an empty clearing, causing it to die out without so much as a whimper. Should it somehow muster sufficient energy and spread like wildfire, a heavy rainstorm will probably extinguish it. All in all, the chances of a tiny flame becoming a raging conflagration are exceedingly slim. And so we can assume that, through the endless night of antiquity, budding intelligences flickered on and then off again like the brief, brilliant twinkles of fireflies.

  At approximately twenty minutes to midnight – that is, approximately twenty minutes before our arrival – two flames of intelligence appeared on Earth. We might call them bright sparks. This twenty-minute period was no mere flash in the pan, for it equates to more than 60 million years. It’s an era unimaginably distant from ours. Humanity’s ancestors would not emerge for another few tens of millions of years. There were no humans back then, and even the continents were shaped very differently than they are today. On the geologic timescale, it was the Late Cretaceous period.

  At that time, gigantic animals called dinosaurs inhabited Earth. There were many different types of dinosaurs, and most of them were ludicrously large. The heaviest weighed 80 tonnes, or as much as 800 people, and the tallest grew to thirty metres, the height of a four-storey building. They had already lived on Earth for 70 million years, which is to say that they appeared on Earth more than a billion years ago from now.

  Compared with humanity’s several hundred thousand years on Earth, 70 million years is a very long time indeed. Time enough for the patter of raindrops drip-dripping steadily onto the same spot to carve great chasms out of the Earth; time enough for the gentlest of air currents blowing continuously against a mountain to level it. A species undergoing continual evolution over the same timespan, no matter how stupid to begin with, will become intelligent. And that’s what happened to the dinosaurs.

  Over those millions of years, the dinosaurs discovered how to uproot the biggest trees, strip away the branches and leaves, and tie massive boulders to their ends with rattan. If the boulder was round or square, the tree became a hammer so humongous that it could have flattened one of our cars with a single blow. If the stone was flat, the dinosaurs used it as a megalithic axe. If the stone was pointed, they left intact some of the tree’s upper branches and crafted the trunk into a spear tens of metres long. The branches stabilised the spear during flight, and it flew like a dud missile.

  The dinosaurs formed primitive tribes and dwelt in enormous caves they excavated themselves. They learnt to use fire, preserving the embers left by lightning strikes to illuminate their cavernous abodes and to cook food. For candles they co-opted entire pine trees several arm-spans around. They even wrote on the walls of their caves with the charred tree-trunks, recording in simple strokes how many eggs were laid yesterday and how many baby dinosaurs hatched today. More importantly, the dinosaurs already possessed a rudimentary language. To our ears, their conversations would have sounded like the whistling of trains.

  At the same time, another species on Earth was showing signs of budding intelligence. Ants. They too had undergone a long process of evolution; in fact, by this point, the scale of ant society far outstripped that of dinos
aur society. Ants had raised cities on every continent – some of these took the form of towering ant-hills, others were subterranean labyrinths – and many of their kingdoms had populations exceeding 100 million. These vast societies developed ingenious, tightly organised structures and hummed along to an efficient, systematic rhythm. The ants communicated with each other using pheromones – extremely sophisticated odour molecules that could convey the most detailed information – and this endowed them with a more advanced language than that of the dinosaurs.

  However, although the first glimmers of intelligence had appeared in two species on Earth – one great and one small – both species were beset with fatal flaws, and their respective paths to civilisation were strewn with insurmountable obstacles.

  The dinosaurs’ biggest disadvantage was that they lacked dexterous hands. Their huge, clumsy claws were matchless in a fight (one type of dinosaur, Deinonychus, had claws as sharp as sabres, which it used to disembowel its rivals) and could fashion crude tools, but they were incapable of performing fiddly tasks, manufacturing sophisticated implements or writing anything complicated. This was problematic because manual dexterity is a prerequisite for the development of civilisation. Only when a species has versatile hands can a virtuous circle form between brain evolution and survival activities.

  The ants, conversely, could execute extraordinarily fiddly tasks, and they constructed the most intricate architecture both above ground and beneath it. But they lacked flair and a certain richness of thought. When a gathering of ants reached critical mass they exhibited a collective intelligence that was literal and unerring, much like a computer program. Guided by these programs, which developed over extended periods of time, ant colonies built city after labyrinthine city. Their society operated like a vast, precisely engineered piece of machinery, but separate an ant cog from that machine and you’d find that the individual’s thought processes were disappointingly shallow and pedestrian. This was the ants’ downfall, for the sort of creative thinking required to progress civilisation is the province of individuals – individuals like our Newton and Einstein, for example. The very nature of collective intelligence, its intrinsic principle of redundancy, is antithetical to the production of advanced thought; 100 million of us humans, though we might rack our brains as hard as we can, would still not come up with the three laws of motion or the theory of relativity.

  In the ordinary run of things, therefore, neither ant society nor dinosaur society could have continued to evolve. As with countless such examples before and since, the flames of intelligence that had flared into life within these two species should have fizzled out in the waters of time, a couple of ephemeral bright sparks in the long night of Earth’s history.

  But then a curious thing happened.

  1

  The First Encounter

  It was an ordinary day in the Late Cretaceous. It is impossible to determine the exact date, but it was truly an ordinary day, and Earth was at peace.

  Let us examine the shape of the world that day. At that time, the profiles and positions of the continents differed radically from their current forms. Antarctica and Australia made up a single landmass greater in size than either continent today, India was a large island in the Tethys Sea, and Europe and Asia were two separate landmasses. Dinosaurs were found predominantly on two supercontinents. The first, Gondwana, had been Earth’s only continuous landmass several billion years earlier. It had since broken up, and its area was greatly reduced, but it was still as big as present-day Africa and South America combined. The second, Laurasia, had split from Gondwana and would later come to form what we now know as North America.

  That day, every creature on every continent was occupied with the business of survival. In that uncivilised world, they knew not where they’d come from and cared not where they were headed. When the Cretaceous sun was directly overhead and the shadows cast by the leaves of the cycads were at their smallest, their sole concern was where they were going to get lunch.

  In a sunlit clearing amid a stand of tall sago palms in central Gondwana, one as yet quite unexceptional Tyrannosaurus rex had just lynched a plump, good-sized lizard for its midday meal. With its fearsome claws it ripped the still wriggling lizard in two and tossed the tail end into its gaping jaws. As it munched away with relish, the dinosaur felt entirely happy with the world and its own place within it.

  Things below ground were far from calm, however. The Tyrannosaurus’s pursuit of the lizard had caused a powerful earthquake in the subterranean ant town located a mere metre from the dinosaur’s left foot. Fortunately, the town had just avoided being trampled, but now hordes of its thousand or so residents scuttled to the surface to see what had happened.

  The Tyrannosaurus had blocked out more than half their sky; it was like a towering peak piercing the clouds. For the ants massed in the mountain’s shadow, it was as if the day had suddenly become overcast. They squinted up, up, high into the sky, watching as the lizard’s tail arced through the air and into the fathomless mouth of the Tyrannosaurus. They listened to the sound of the dinosaur chewing, to the cracking and rumbling that was like thunder from the heavens. On previous occasions, this thunder had often been accompanied by a heavy downpour of splintered bones and chunks of flesh. Even a light drizzle of the dinosaur’s leftovers would provide lunch for the entire town. But this Tyrannosaurus kept its mouth tightly closed, and nothing rained down from the sky. After a few moments, it tossed the other half of the lizard into its mouth. Thunder boomed overhead again, but still the shower of bones and flesh held off.

  When the Tyrannosaurus had finished, it took a couple of steps back and lay down contentedly for a nap in the shade. The ground shuddered, the peak collapsed into a distant mountain range, and brilliant sunshine flooded the clearing once more. The ants shook their heads and sighed. The dry season was long this year, and life was getting harder by the day. They had already gone hungry for two days.

  Just as the crestfallen critters were turning back towards the entrance to their town, another earthquake rocked the clearing. The mountain range was rolling agitatedly back and forth across the ground! The ants watched intently as the Tyrannosaurus stuck one of its monstrous claws into its mouth and began to dig furiously between its teeth. Immediately, they understood why the dinosaur could not sleep: lizard flesh had got stuck in its teeth and was getting on its nerves.

  The mayor of the ant town had a sudden idea. It climbed onto a blade of grass and released a pheromone towards the colony below. As the pheromone spread, the ants understood the mayor’s meaning and passed the message on. Antennae waved as a tide of excitement swept through the crowd.

  Led by the mayor, the ants marched towards the Tyrannosaurus, streaming across the ground in orderly black rivulets. At first the mountain range seemed impossibly far away, visible on the horizon but unreachable. But then the restless Tyrannosaurus rolled towards them again, closing the gap between itself and the procession of ants in an instant. As it shifted, one of its huge claws fell from the sky and landed with an earth-shaking thump right in front of the mayor. The impact bounced the entire procession clear off the ground, and the dust it raised mushroomed before the ants like an atomic cloud.

  Without waiting for the dust to settle, the ants followed their mayor onto the dinosaur’s claw. The dinosaur’s palm had come to rest perpendicular to the ground, forming a craggy, precipitous cliff. But to the ants, who excelled at climbing, this was no obstacle. They quickly darted up the cliff-face and onto the dinosaur’s forearm. Still in formation, they navigated the rough skin of the forearm, winding their way across its plateau-like surface, down and up the steep sides of its countless gullies and on towards the upper arm and the Tyrannosaurus’s maw.

  Just then, the Tyrannosaurus raised its massive claw to pick at its teeth again. The ants advancing across its forearm felt the ground beneath them tilting, followed by an alarming increase in G-force. They clung on for dear life. Half their view of the sky was now taken up by the
dinosaur’s colossal head. Its slow breathing was like wind gusting through the heavens and its oceanic eyes peering down at them made them tremble with fear.

  Spotting the ants on its forearm, the Tyrannosaurus raised its other arm to brush them off. Its palm blotted out the midday sun like a vast stormcloud, casting a threatening shadow over the ant army. They stared up at it in horror, twitching their antennae frantically. The mayor quickly raised one of its front legs and the rest of the troop immediately did the same, the entire colony now one long, quivering black arrow pointing at the dinosaur’s mouth.

  The Tyrannosaurus was stunned for a few seconds but eventually grasped the ants’ intention and lowered its arm. The stormcloud dispersed and sunlight returned. Then the dinosaur opened its mouth wide and placed a single clawed finger against its titanic teeth, forming a bridge between arm and jaw. There was a fraction of hesitation, but the mayor took the lead once again and the rest of the colony marched on without demur.

  The first group of ants swiftly reached the end of the finger. Standing on the smooth, conical claw-tip, they gazed into the dinosaur’s mouth in awe. Before them was a night-time world where a storm was brewing. A fierce, damp wind reeking of gore blasted their faces, and rumblings rose up from the dark, chasmic depths. When the ants’ eyes adjusted to the gloom, they could just make out a patch of even denser darkness in the distance, the borders of which kept changing shape. It took them a long time to realise that this was the dinosaur’s throat. It was also the source of the rumbling, which was coming from the Tyrannosaurus’s stomach. The ants instinctively recoiled in fright. Then, one by one, they climbed onto the dinosaur’s huge teeth and crawled down the smooth white enamel cliffs.

  With their powerful mandibles, the ants tore at the pink lizard flesh that was lodged in the ravines between the teeth. As they chewed, they stared up at the enormous white columns rising skywards to either side of them. High above them, on the dinosaur’s palate, another row of gnashers gleamed menacingly in the sunlight, looking for all the world as if they might come chomping down at any moment. But the Tyrannosaurus had already moved its finger to its upper jaw, and an unbroken stream of ants was now scaling those teeth and devouring the meat stuck between them, creating a mirror-image of the scene on its lower jaw.