‘I would like a termite.’
‘You clearly haven’t understood,’ Ef buzzed monotonously. ‘Termites are social insects, you should look after a…’
‘A termite,’ I said. ‘Just not a soldier. I want a termite from a different caste.’
They gave me a ‘nymph’ – a delicate, fragile creature, vaguely reminiscent of a winged ant. Her wings looked like the slender petals of a fantastic translucent daisy. In contrast to the soldier she had a sex (the entomologist, it’s true, didn’t want to tell me which, but I was sure that she was a little girl) and could see. For the first three hours she fluttered about the container full of joy, then settled down on a wall and gnawed off both her wings. Once they had fallen to the bottom of the container they stopped looking like silvery petals, but grew darker and started to look like husks. Her wingless body reminded me of the body of the soldier, except without the mandibles and the armour. She refused food, and I got a bad feeling, and Cracker told me that in the termite mound nymphs like this are also, just like the warriors, fed digested cellulose by the workers. But I tried to convince myself that this time everything would work out. I kept repeating to myself: there are no mandibles blocking her mouth, nothing except stubbornness and laziness is stopping her from taking some food. She’ll get hungry and then she’ll eat… She ceased living five days later from hunger, surrounded by the cellulose, like her predecessor the warrior.
As he took the corpse from the container, the entomologist told me that nymphs cannot feed themselves either, because their intestines lack the bacteria
Trichonympha campanula, Leidyopsis sphaerica, Trichomonas
and
Streblomastix strix.
Without these the termite cannot digest food. These bacteria only live in the intestines of worker termites.
‘So, have you figured it out finally?’ Ef asked, looking at the empty container.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve figured it out. I would like a worker…’
They died, one after another. They would die and I would weep for them and ask for new ones. The correctees (all of them, apart from Cracker – he understood) saw my termites as martyrs and saw me as a crazy murderer. The entomologist stopped talking to me entirely. The psychologist checked my PIA every other day (the result was negative). The House administration sent official complaints to the SPO and asked for Ef to be relieved of his duties (reply: ‘declined’). Nothing changed. A termite would die, I would ask for a new one, and Ef would force the administration to fulfil my request. Why? He was as stubborn as I was. He wanted me to be the first to break.
They could not survive outside the termite mound.
I had a worker termite that on the very first day covered the inside of the plastic walls of the container with something like cement; it must have made this substance in its intestines. When he was finished with the walls, he did the ceiling, which the air came through, too. He ceased living from lack of oxygen.
I had a worker termite who built a strange thin tube in his container, leading from the floor to the ceiling, and walled himself in inside it.
I had a worker termite that at first ate well, but then stopped and died, seemingly from sadness.
I had a worker termite that ran away during feeding and died from the light – they found him unliving by the entrance to the termite room.
I had a worker termite that died for some unknown reason, instantly.
I had a worker termite that died for some unknown reason, having first suffered for a long time.
They kept dying, but over time I started getting slightly longer lives from some of them. Twelve days. Eighteen. Twenty-four. A month and a day. A month and two days…
‘…Put the piece of paper in the container,’ I cooed. ‘If you don’t want to end up in solitary like the Butcher’s Son.’
‘…Give my diagram to a termite? So I’ll have to digest it first
Amy Lane
Ruth Clampett
Ron Roy
Erika Ashby
William Brodrick
Kailin Gow
Natasja Hellenthal
Chandra Ryan
Franklin W. Dixon
Faith [fantasy] Lynella