Three Termite Cities * 1: Öb. The Tall City The botfly-woman was anxious, as if there might have been ants, hiding in ambush; she’d landed on the lip of the central chimney and circled sun-wise, as demanded by ritual. It was always easy to confuse the botfly with the hirsute ground-dwelling wasp, but botfly-women knew to circle any city chimney, sun-wise; botfly women knew to fan their wings and wet any ample number their hairs with spittle, before plucking those strands and dropping them into the depths of the city to announce their arrival. The botfly-woman had done this, signaling her presence and her harmless intentions to the city below, and The Warrior caught word of her scent, from the glands of a news-vendor. She might have been there for long, long hours. She might have been there for moments, more likely, if the trio of boisterous near-male alates were any indication; they might have seen her in the distance. They might have called to her: prone, as they were, to pepper her with questions or to simply watch the motion of her wings. There were messengers and news-vendors here as well: pale, blind near-women from the depths of the city, and The Warrior paid only scant courtesies as he cut a path through the small gaggle of messengers and near-male citizens, wing-buds marking the start of their first metamorphosis. “Horse,” the botfly-woman said in the susurrating rasp of her species. “Where horse?” She spoke as well as any botfly might, given the complex difficulties of the termite tongue. She spoke well. “Where horse. Where nursery?” Though the question had been aimed at an alate (or all of them) The Warrior bobbed his head, clicking the scimitar-blades of his shiny, black mandibles on the chimney lip—Clack!—in the manner of common, inter-species greeting. “There are no horses,” The Warrior said. “Not here.” There was something profound and mournful in the botfly-voice, whole oceans of disappointment that drew a chill through The Warrior’s flesh. She spoke, he thought, like a Queen, and in some real way, she was, as all botfly-women were full-female alates, heavy with unborn children. All botfly-women laid eggs like any rare queen. “Far? If not horse, then cow?” “If you want horses or cows,” The Warrior said. “Find humans.” “No humans.” A shudder of revulsion rippled along the length of the botfly’s wings. “No murderers!” “Humans,” the Warrior said. “Farms. There are farms above the longest of our tunnels. East. There are farms with humans and horses and cows to the east. Go in the night: humans cannot murder when they sleep.” The botfly-woman nodded, a breeze stirring the bristled hairs on her arms, her legs, and the oblate, tapering curve of her abdomen. Horses. Cows. Her questions told of the presence of eggs: a prodigious load. Horses. Cows. She spoke—without words—of her need for nurseries: living food and living shelter for her voracious young. She spoke—without words—of her own impending death. Horses. Cows. I shelter and feed my eggs before I die! “News,” the botfly-woman said, breaking her gaze from the Warrior. “Ants. West. The city of Thetht.” Ants. She said that clearly and without accent, and without the overlay of concern for her eggs, or the approach of her own death. Ants she said, and drew an image, in that single word, of them swarming through the tunnels and the chambers of Thetht. The Warrior locked onto that single word, and glanced along the lip of the chimney, past its rim and into the open air and the stretch of land in the distance, where trees grew behind a veil of haze, where water flowed and caught late-day sunlight. There were no cities in that direction: none the Warrior could see or scent; there were no ants, as far as he could tell, but the mention of them was like a stabbing blast of winter. “Ants,” the botfly-woman said. “Two days flight; too many ants for Thetht.” “Are they moving?” The botfly-woman tapped her hind-most legs in patterns of quiet unrest. “Moving,” she said. “Easterly. Thetht: do you know this city?” There was no way to know every city, and no need for such knowledge: not for a warrior. The Warrior didn’t know Thetht. At all. “West of Öb,” the botfly-woman said. “A large colony. Hungry. Hungry. In the west, there is drought. The ants starve. The ants grow violent. Öb stands east of Thetht. Ants move west.” If she understood the weight of her words, she didn’t let it show, and the Warrior drew a deep breath, as if he might read her pheromones, might taste some subtle word on the air, but there was nothing from the botfly, though a waft of fear bled from the half-males, the messengers, and the news-vendor already crafting her salivas and her ethers for dispersal through the city. Ants. The Warrior tasted that word, and a more complex repetition of the botfly-woman’s casual declaration. West of Öb. A large colony. Hungry. Hungry. In the west, there is drought. The ants starve. The ants grow violent. Öb stands to the east of Thetht. Thetht is dead. Ants move west. Burdened with the botfly’s recitation, the Warrior broke away from the small crowd, hauling himself towards the lip of the chimney… …and down. Thetht is dead. Ants move west. There may have been cities between Thetht and Öb. There may have been empty space. This was something the Queen would know, something the King might understand. It was their worry, and the worry of any alates at home near the deepest chambers. Ants! They were the Warrior’s worry, and with the taste of botfly words in flesh of his mouth, he let gravity pull him through the hollow chimney as he breathed and sweated an echo of the botfly-warning and smeared it on stucco and stone, racing—as he did, and with ungraceful haste—to the royal chambers at the core of the city. * Chsh: The Deep City They were old alates: wingless bachelors; they were the historians, the calendars, the maps, and the clocks of the city. They were—as tradition called them—the city’s literacy and the city’s mind. Today, they were troubled. They sat, crouched, and huddled in a chamber beneath the egg-laying mother’s vault: they could smell the chatter of egg-groomer gossip in the chambers above and around them. If one or another of the wingless bachelors listened, he might have heard the whisper of air from the under-hollows sculpted into the city’s foundation: where the Greater and Lesser lakes held the comforting necessity of fungi and slimes on their shores. The Greater and the Lesser lakes (their fungi and their slimes) were one of the secrets of the city, one of its beauties. But the alate-bachelors were unconcerned with what lived beneath them; their focus was on the young news-vendor in their midst. He was an alate: easy to identify by his smell, his narrow, handsome wings, and the taste he wrote upon the air. But he was a member of a newer caste: a biped with only four limbs: two arms, like anyone and everyone, but only two legs. Like a human: as pale as a worker, as pale as a grub. Pale. And there had been a human, once, who’d gained access to the city of Thetht, and to its egg-laying mother. He’d called himself Hieronymus. He’d taught one of the ancient mothers of Thetht (through subtle, wasp methods) how to give birth to human shapes, and in the centuries after his life, other egg-laying city mothers learned what she knew. Now, there were alates: males like the human, Hieronymus, who carried that soft-skinned and strange human shape. The young alate (with his handsome, slender wings, and larva-pale skin) belonged to the outlandish human caste, but he spoke well and with a prodigious measure of dignity. He spoke beautifully, and was more than a news-vendor, if the scent of his voice was any indication. He spoke exquisitely, even as he said upsetting things. The city of Thetht is dead, the alate news-vendor had said, his wings rigid and trembling, as if wooden and with warriors inside, tapping their heads in warning against stucco walls. Ant armies have advanced to Dl and to Stöét but their tunnels are safe. Their warriors prevail. Ant armies have advanced to Tkik-Tkik-áá. Their warriors prevail, but with losses. There is damage in the city walls and to the floor; the gardens of Tkik-Tkik-áá are wounded. The gardens of Tkik-Tkik-áá wilting. The Ant armies have advanced to Öb, where the first warrior refugees of Thetht are waiting with the warrior natives of Öb. The Ant armies are weakened. The Armies are slowing. But there is no city called Thetht, and the gardens of Tkik-Tkik-áá are wilting. The Lakes of Chsh are safe. The mother and the father are safe. The warriors of Chsh are ready for the arrival of the Ants. The Historians and the Memories of Chsh are safe, but it is wise for one of each and one of each to journey out and south to the city of Háh, and to the city of Fálfeth. The city of Chsh is safe and ready for the arrival of the hungry Ants, but precaution is wise. The alate-bachelors sighed their distress and wrote it into the darkness of their chamber; one, another and another of them drew close to the news-vendor, past twinges of caste-bigotry, to smell/taste the subtleties of the news-vendor’s words. “I will go,” the youngest of the alate-bachelors said. “I will go to Háh. I will go tonight.” “I will go,” the oldest of them said, after a laborious moment of deliberation. “I will go to Fálfeth. It is wise to protect our deepest memories and our oldest words. I will go to Fálfeth.” For long, long moments after that, there was silence. Only in desperation might one leave a city and take one’s chances elsewhere, and though Chsh was safe (for now) from marauding ants, there was desperation for all of the People. It was born in the death of Thetht, and the wilting gardens of Tkik-Tkik-áá. Silence—as the oldest of the bachelors knew—was the only way in which one might meet desperation. And so, for long, long moments, the bachelors held the silence around them for a while. And then, slowly, and without a word, the oldest and the youngest of the bachelors left the chamber… …and in the darkness of a moonless night, left the city. * Sūt: The Wide City Too many changes, Pálkó thought, in leaving the city-mother’s dark and humid chamber. He knew two mothers: one more than normal, and that memory—the extra one—was more of a burden than the changes it accompanied, the changes that it followed. There was another encumbrance: changes to come; and Pálkó felt the first of them, though it had yet to press its weight onto his shoulders. Changes…changes: they were an army of inconsistencies, too many stresses for the world to bear. Pálkó was smaller than the world: small enough the mother said, to slide between the instabilities of flux and bring about a new species of order. There may be a future among these changes; for all of us. For you. For your dead city: Thetht, taken by ants. Humans bear memory in different ways from us, and my bachelors tell me that it may be wise to learn the methods of human memory, and to trade something of ourselves for them. You look like a human, even with your alate’s wings; they are easy enough to tear off, easy enough to live without, and it will be wise for you to do this, and to go to the human city of Ööna, where memories and where histories live in books of pulp and—at times—carved into unloving stone. Go to that human city, and live among the wingless ones who look like you. Learn how to make memory into books. Live as a human might live. For a time, at least, and come back to us. Later. Much, much later…and show us what you have learned. The immobile mother had spoken softly, dwarfed (like any mother) by the throbbing vastness of her abdomen and her countless, countless ovaries. She’d expelled something more potent than a mother’s desires in the scent of her words, and the demands of the entire city echoed through Pálkó’s nostrils as he made his way through the streets and the tunnels of Sūt. There was traffic, as always, and news-vendors, wafting complex reportage from their spiracles; a trio of groomers carried egg-husks into the factory-shops of cobblers, haberdashers, and dress-makers, and the smell of dye muddled the narrative of a temperance-poet extolling the virtues of unpolished wings. There were horses in Sūt, ridden by rich and effete alates, and itinerant lice who sold dubious, intoxicating elixirs and called themselves businessmen. There were botfly-women: two or a dozen of them, haggling with alates for the sale of their nurseries. That was the botfly-woman word for the sleek and elegant animals: nurseries, and they could afford feed-horses for their children because the pupa skins of their offspring were in prodigious demand among the most exclusive dress-makers. Pálkó went back to the dorm he shared with other refugee alates: friends, brothers, and something else protean and intimate. Tóg was the oldest of them, and from Thetht, like Pálkó himself. Emhát’emhá, scented with his strange Öb-born accent, shared a common age with Pálkó, but had a city to return to. He was on loan he said from the mother of Öb, to dwell with the orphans of Thetht now at home in the largest and most profoundly cosmopolitan of cities. Tóg and Emhát’emhá were waiting for him. They, like Pálkó, were human-shaped alates; they kept themselves fastidiously wingless, though they’d likely grow their wings if they ever left Sūt. They greeted him with their common, playful rough-house exuberance embraces, suckles, and nibbles that were their common habit, and afterward, Tóg gave him a glass of cellar-chilled water and Emhát’emhá presented him with a plate of acacia-wood wafers, garnished with lemon-seeds and gleaming, sticky drops of aphid-sugar. They allowed him time to drink and to eat, and then led him into the empty room, where they removed his sandals and his tunic, and—at last—his kilt; they bathed him, with scrupulous care, with chew-fiber sponges and gentle caustics in the water, to remove the chatter of random city-talk from his flesh. They left the sponges, squeezings, and exfoliations in the wash bowl, and left it in the entrance corridor for whatever fungus-gardeners might have need of used sponges and flakes of dead skin. Afterward, they went to the balcony, overlooking the bustle of the street; it was their habit to watch the traffic and the lice, selling their bottles of dark, fermented bliss. They spoke without moving their mouths, though on occasion Pálkó or Tób might throat-laugh at one of Emhát’emhá’s more colorful mispronounciations. There was no laughter as sunset flared behind the silhouette of the Warrior’s Tower and the Dome, where the city’s oldest bachelor historians lived. There was only the redolence of speech, as Pálkó told him that he was leaving, under Mother’s Orders. To Ööna he said. A human city. Human. It was as chilling a word as Ant, and like Ant the human name was synonymous with murder though not as profoundly. There had been humans—one in particular—who’d done something other than kill city dwellers. He’d lived—according to the oldest stories of Ant-murdered Thetht—within the peripheries of that city. A long time ago, and it was Tób who spelled the scent of that long-dead man’s name. Hieronymus. He was the alien saint of all travelers, the alien saint of anyone bound to become an alien in alien cities, and the quiet scent of that name was a comfort now: the last comfort for a while. I’ll miss the scent of your voices, Pálkó said. But I’ll think of you, always. Emhát’emhá nodded. Tób nodded. And a breeze muddled their conversation with the faint scent of tanner’s dye from a factory three streets away, as a botfly-woman boasted to another, of the firm succulence of her newest nursery. End *Thank you for reading and viewing, and commenting: I plan to catch up as soon as I can...and I plan to write more in this world, as the sheer amount of termite research prevents me from stopping at the end of Sūt, known among termites as "the Wide City." Indeed, Pálkó will make his second appearance in my gallery, soon...but until then...I hope you've enjoyed the three short sketches that (hopefully) reveal something of a complete story here...