A city of ants and elephants on a red escarpment, built at two scales and bound by the Mandate – a law that weighs every body to decide its use. Ant engineers cast resin armour for war-elephants, a secret language runs through the ground, and in the fungal laboratories under the barracks a weapon waits that cannot tell friend from foe.
From the Fungal Plains the city looks like a cliff that has learned to breathe. Myrmecopolis sits on the Laterite Shelf, a red escarpment four hundred metres above the Pale, and it is built twice over: once for bodies that weigh six tonnes, and once, inside the first, for bodies that weigh four kilo...
The Mandate is not written down. That is the first thing a foreigner gets wrong. There is no tablet, no scroll, no carved lintel. The ants hold it as a pheromone sequence passed from nurse to larva; the elephants hold it in memory, matriarch to daughter, recited in a rumble that takes nine minutes a...
*From the primer read to every newly emerged worker in the Chrysalis Cloisters, with the nurse's own remarks in brackets.* You are a daughter of the galleries. You were weighed this morning. The ratio on your harness is your name until you earn another. Here is what you are, and what the others are...
*Testimony of Loxodonta the Unforgetting, Matriarch-Justice, rumbled before the Tribunal and transcribed by three scribes working in relay. Pauses longer than a minute are marked.* You asked me how the herds live inside the Mandate. I will tell you how we lived before it, because that is the only w...
*Synod of the Spinnennetz, Manual of the Thread, fourth revision. Annotations by Aranea the Weaver in the margins, transcribed here in italics.* The two peoples of the Shelf share no voice. An elephant speaks in a register too low for an ant to hear through air; an ant speaks in scent and in the st...
In Myrmecopolis, a letter is a seed. A spore-letter begins as a pheromone message written by an ant scribe onto a wafer of dried fungal culture. The wafer is sealed in a resin bead and sold. When the buyer cracks it and wets it, the culture wakes, grows for a day and a half, and the mycelium lays i...
Article III is three short sentences long, and the Verdant Barracks exist to enforce its last one. *No body shall eat a body. Leaf, root, bark, fungus and nectar are given; flesh is taken. What is taken shall be answered.* Both peoples of the Shelf have always eaten plants. The leafcutters among t...
*Field report of Ocellus the All-Seeing, Ocular Compact, on the Siege of the Resin Quarter, thirty-one years ago. Dictated in trail to two ant scribes; the original is kept in the Annals and has begun to fade.* I smelled it first at the third hour after dark, on the eastern wind: formic acid, old b...
*Laboratory notebook of Mandelbrot the Symbios, Mycelium Arsenal, the Sporeforge. Selected entries. The handwriting – mandible-scratched into wax – is fast and often abandons a sentence for an equation.* **Day 1.** Strain 14 isolated from the specimen brought in by the scouts from the Pale. A Carno...
Every child in Myrmecopolis learns two stories of how the city began, and learns at the same time that it is impolite to ask which one is true. They are taught on alternate days in the Chrysalis Cloisters. The calves hear them in rumble and the larvae in trail, and by the time either can speak, both...
*Bureau of Impossible Geography, Department of Adjacent Realities. Bleed assessment: Myrmecopolis / the Chitinous Mandate. Classification: structural.* Most realities bleed outward through sound or light – a song that turns up in another world's radio static, a colour that should not exist on a nei...
The Chamber of Unseen Weights is the oldest room in the Mandible Precinct and the only one in the city with no galleries in its walls. The ants were not permitted to bore it. Its laterite is solid, polished by two centuries of elephant flanks, and so silent that a visitor can hear her own blood. In ...