‘Hello, I’m Aquitain.Do you mind if I look around?’ he said, using mindspeak.
The one of the antsthat looked different from the others replied, using mindspeak,that he was not authorised to let Aquitain move about freely. SoAquitain asked whether he was a prisoner and was told that hewasn’t. So he asked if the ant could get authorisation for him tomove around, expecting a delay of several minutes, but the ant toldhim several seconds later that he was authorised to move freely butwould be given a guide to explain what he saw. A minute lateranother ant similar to the one he had been talking to appeared, andintroduced itself using mindspeak.
‘Hello my name isXentos. Queen Beatrix has asked me to be your guide. Feel free toask any questions you wish.’
‘What sort of creaturesare you?’ Aquitain asked curiously.
‘We are known as Crin.We vaguely resemble, physically, the much smaller common ants thatinhabit the dirt throughout the jungle, but we have manydifferences. We came from an endangered world many years ago at theinvitation of the druids, and care for the jungle within a radiusof several leagues. Come, let us walk while we talk.’
Aquitain bypassed thebarrier and noticed that the other Crin began removing it. Theywere being very cordial and hospitable. Miranda obviously had asound relationship with them for them to allow a big brute like himinto their city. He casually wandered the tunnels observing,smelling and talking continually with his guide Xentos. He foundout that their society was structured as a strict hierarchyconsisting of the Queen who had absolute authority overeverything,, and four other distinct social classes: the Enforcers,the Jobmasters, the warriors and the workers.
The Enforcers were theQueen’s military commanders who were her advisors on city security,the royal guards, and directed the warriors during hostilities.They were as physically as large as Aquitain now was, and built forserious fighting. They had big mandibles and tough armoured bodies,but small heads. There were a few dozen Jobmasters who werephysically half the size of the Enforcers, and who filled the rolesof managers, communicators, supervisors and specialists. They werethe planners and organizers within the city, and the navigators andcommunicators outside.
The warriors were muchthe same size as the Jobmasters, about the size of a pony. Theywere sleek, fast, deadly and fearless, but not too bright. Theywere designed for one thing only, fighting and killing. They hadlarge mandibles like two razor sharp sickles at the front, whichcould cut a creature in two in a single snip, and dagger-likestingers at the rear which they used to inject poison.
The workers were small,about the size of a dog, but what they lacked in size and strengththey made up in numbers. There were hundreds of them, and as theirname suggested they did all the work around the city, and all theforaging outside in the jungle.
Perhaps the mostcurious thing that Aquitain discovered was that they were allmindlinked in a single huge communication network called the citymind, which was controlled by the Queen. Only she and theJobmasters were allowed speak over it. She issued tasks to theJobmasters, and allocated resources in the form of workers andfighters. The Jobmasters supervised the tasks, continually feedingback progress reports to the Queen.
Since the range oftheir mindlink was about half a league, several Jobmasters oftenhad to be spaced at half league intervals if they were foraging orpatrolling at longer distances, and wished to remain in contactwith the Queen. When out of contact with her, all the members of agroup remained in contact with each other through their group’sJobmaster or Enforcer, if one was present.
The obvious weaknesswith the system was that if both the Jobmaster and Enforcer werekilled when out of contact with the Queen, then the remainingwarriors and workers would be leaderless and have no motivation todo anything except run back to their city, assuming they knew whereto go. In practice this would be rare, as the fighters and workerswould all fight to the death to protect their Jobmaster, whogenerally would not fight in a battle but would linger at a safedistance directing the combat.
During their impromptutour, Aquitain had noticed many of the workers carrying baskets ofleaves from the jungle. He thought this quite curious, so askedabout it. Xentos the guide said that rather than talk about it hewould show the bear how the leaves were used. They followed a lineof workers carrying leaves to a long and narrow room containingseveral shallow pits. Each the workers emptied their loads into oneof the pits and left.
Xentos then explainedwhat was happening. The Crin came from another world and were notsure whether the meats and vegetation would be edible for them. Sothey brought with them various forms of fungi, which could breakdown meats and vegetable matter into more basic components and thenfed that to other mushroom-like fungi, which could then use thosebreakdown components to build tissue that they could eat withoutany problems.
He pointed out thatthey had three types of mushroom that had different flavours. Oneof the druids had described the flavours as being like chicken,venison and fish. By preparing pieces of these three types ofmushroom meat with spices from plants that they had also beenallowed to bring from their home world, they were able to reproducetheir traditional dishes without needing to use much of the localwildlife.
The druids consideredthem friendly to the jungle as they had little impact on it, andconsequently gave them independent control and authority over anarea for ten leagues around their city. Everything was totallycontrolled and orderly. All the members of each class knew theirplaces in their society, and each contributed to the whole, butAquitain couldn’t help wondering what each got out of it. Itcertainly wouldn’t be his first choice of a place to live.
After visiting the foodarea Xentos stated that Queen Beatrix was interested in meetinghim, so he followed Xentos to the Queen’s chambers deeper withinthe underground city. He was escorted downwards through a series ofearthy tunnels with countless twists, turns and offshoots. Many ofthe chambers off the
