Do ants dream of wings?

Prologue

There are a great many ants in the world. More than the stars you could ever count, and far more than the names you could ever hold in your head. If every one of them stopped, just for a moment, and called out to the world, Here I am! — the world would go deaf on the spot and never recover. So the ants, lucky for everyone, do no such thing. They haul their small loads in silence; they are born, they work, and they vanish, never once demanding that a single line be written about them.

This story is about one of them.

And the first thing worth knowing about him is this: he was nothing special. Not the biggest, not the bravest, not the cleverest in his anthill. If you poured out a thousand ants in front of you and tried to guess which was our hero, you would guess wrong a thousand times running — and it would not wound your pride at all, because there was simply no way to guess.

And yet he — and not any of the thousand exactly like him — will become, a few pages from now, the only one. Stop beside something perfectly ordinary, look closely, love it a little — and no thousand others like it will ever take its place again.

Now, about me — since I’ll be keeping you company the whole way, it’s only fair we get acquainted up front.

You won’t see me. I have no legs, no antennae, not even a fixed place from which to look out. I am the voice that knows a little more than it should — and will, without fail, pretend to know more still. I see from above: the whole road at once — the part behind and the part ahead, and even the turns our hero has yet to stumble on. It sounds like an advantage. It is closer to a curse: to know the road, and be unable to take a single step of it for anyone else.

I won’t be telling this story alone. The two of us will tell it together — our hero and I. For I know the road as a map, while he will come to know it as the pebbles underfoot; I can see the turns, but not how each one weighs when you’re standing down below. He is the other way around: he sees not a single turn ahead, yet feels every pebble, every fear, every small joy that I, up above, never even notice.

On our own, the two of us make poor storytellers: I would know everything and understand nothing; he would understand everything and know nothing. So we’ll split the telling between us: I’ll give you the sky, he’ll give you the ground. The sky remembers the shape of things; the ground remembers the pain. Maybe, between the two, we’ll come to something like the truth.

And now — let’s begin where he began. Down below. In the gray. Small — and entirely certain that small was all he would ever be.

For it is from exactly that kind of certainty that the longest roads most often begin. And this one began — with a dream.

CHAPTER ONE

The Gray Sky of the Anthill

If you have never been inside an anthill, here is the first thing you ought to know: it is gray in there. Deep underground, where an ant’s life is spent, a warm, even dusk holds sway, and the only sky young ants ever see above them is the ceiling. A low, dark ceiling of packed earth, the same over everyone, equally gray at morning and at evening. They call it the sky — for want of anything better.

The real sky, of course, is somewhere — up there, beyond the thickness of the earth. But our hero, still young, had never had occasion to go out into it, and so had little notion of what it even was. For him, the sky was the gray ceiling. And for a long time he supposed that was how it was meant to be.

In an anthill, no one chooses what to be — not even you. It is all decided before you are born.

Fate, here, is a road you were shown before you’d learned to walk. And it is a wonder how many ants spend their whole lives grateful for it — grateful that they were thoughtfully spared the chance to lose their way.

Every ant comes into the world with its fate already made, like a stamp pressed on before anyone thought to ask. One is born a carrier. Another a digger. A third a sentry. Not because it turned out so in time, not because they chose it or earned it — but simply because that is what they were made, before they drew their first breath. By the time one might have asked but why a carrier?, it was already too late: the one who might have asked had only just come into the world.

There are a great many ways to arrange a life, and this one was among the sturdiest. For no order is firmer than one that passes sentence before birth. There is no one to protest. No one to file an appeal. When you are told who you are at the very instant you first open your eyes, all that’s left to you is to believe it — for you know nothing else yet. And believing is a great deal easier than doubting.

Our hero was made a carrier. And so he woke as a carrier, one gray morning — without choice, without surprise, without ceremony. A day simply came when there was carrying to be done.

And after that came the daily round.

A carrier’s days are as plain as the packed earth overhead. You take a grain — or a crumb, or a bit of straw, or whatever you’ve been told to carry that day — and you carry it from here to there. Then you go back and carry the next. Then another. And another. The grains are bigger than you, the road is longer than a whole life, and you yourself are as good as not there at all — there is only the thing you carry and the place you carry it to.

And in this there was a comfort of its own. While you carry, you needn’t decide anything. The road has already been laid by others, the goal already fixed by someone above, and all that depends on you is the moving of your legs. Thousands of ants did the very same: shoulder to shoulder, this way and that, in dark and steady streams. Over it all hung the even, soothing hum of work, beneath which one’s thoughts grew quiet of their own accord.

This was called peace.

And perhaps it truly was peace — for peace, looked at closely, very often means simply that no one is asking anything. Where everyone knows their place, there are no quarrels, no bewilderment, none of those awkward pauses when someone suddenly freezes in the middle of a task and asks, quietly, Wait — why are we doing any of this? In the anthill, such pauses never happened. Here everything was done because it had always been done, and always is the shortest answer in the world, for it allows no continuation at all.

In an anthill there are no separate families. There is exactly one — and it is the whole anthill.

All those thousands of ants that streamed past him each day in their dark currents — every last one was his kin. He had no separate burrow of his own to come home to in the evening: wherever he was in the anthill, he was already home, and whomever he passed, he was passing his own. His home was the whole anthill, and his family an entire people. So it ran, at least, by the law of the anthill. In practice, of course, every heart still kept a smaller circle quietly its own — a chamber where one’s nearest gathered of an evening; but of that, a little later.

And he knew his own not by sight — to the eye, all ants are alike — but by scent. Every anthill has its own scent, one for all, shared like a family name. By it, one of your own will know another in the thickest dark, and never once be wrong.

And in this there was a real warmth. To be part of something larger, to feel one’s own on every side, to know you are not alone. It was for this that the grain was carried, for this that one rose each morning into the gray. When he lay down to sleep, ringed on all sides by the breathing of thousands of his kin, it seemed to him that this was how it ought to be, that this was everything one could wish for — and that to wish for anything more would be a touch ungrateful, even.

Almost seemed.

For in the evening, when the work died down and the hum faded, leaving behind a strange, almost ringing silence, in that silence there woke each time the tiny, barely audible but why? It had no real words yet. The anthill had words for grain, for tunnels, for orders, for danger; for this, it had none. So it simply stood somewhere at the very bottom and glowed, faintly, the way an ember glows that someone forgot to put out.

He didn’t know what to do with it. So he did what everyone did: he shut his eyes and fell asleep.

And then, that night — that most ordinary of nights, no different from the thousand before it — for the first time, he dreamed.

CHAPTER TWO

A Dream of Wings

A dream is a strange thing. By day the anthill — that flawless machine, where everything has its place and its appointed hour — never once suspects what becomes of each of its little cogs by night. In a dream, a carrier may stop being a carrier for one night. In a dream, even the grayest ant may have wings — because a dream sometimes allows what life never allows at all.

Usually, dreams are erased by morning.

This one wasn’t.

At first there was darkness, as always. Then the darkness suddenly… ended.

He stood at the very edge of something high — higher than anything he knew: higher than the deepest tunnel and the tallest hall, higher than the very thought of height. And above him there was no ceiling. For the first time in all his life there was no ceiling above him — there was sky, real, open, immeasurable, and it did not press down from above but drew him upward, as if calling.

And below lay the world. A whole world, unrolled all the way to the horizon: a valley flooded with a light that does not exist in an anthill, where everything is gray — but here everything blazed, green and gold and blue, and every color was so loud that it set something ringing inside him.

Then he did what he had never been able to do and never could. He stepped off the edge — not down, but forward, into the emptiness — and the emptiness held him.

Because he had wings.

He didn’t know where they had come from. He didn’t remember ever having had them. But there they were — light, strong, sure — and they carried him, and the wind held him up from below like a great gentle palm, and he flew. He, a carrier, flew above the valley; and it was so natural, so right, as if he had done nothing else his whole life — as if walking on his legs through gray tunnels had been a regrettable mistake, a misunderstanding that had finally been set right.

And here was what astonished him most: he did not fall. All his life he had been taught that a body is heavy, that the earth pulls you down, that height is a thing to fear; but here there was neither weight nor fear. There was air — springy, alive, obedient — that held his every motion. He tipped a wing, and turned. He folded his wings, and slid downward until something inside him dropped away. He spread them, and soared up again, toward that light. The body that, down below, had been merely a tool for hauling grain turned out, up here, to have been made for something else entirely. For this. For flight.

And the heart of it wasn’t even the body. The heart of it was what he felt. Because for the first time — the first time in all his life — he had nowhere to hurry, nothing to carry, no one to be needed by. There was no it’s time, no you must, no you’re a carrier. There was only him, and the sky, and that unbearable, near-tearful lightness that made him want to laugh and weep at once. He was free. Until then he hadn’t known there was such a word in the world — because in an anthill there is nowhere for such a word to land. But here he understood it at once, with his whole body, without needing a word of explanation: this is it. This is how it is. And he understood one more thing, the strangest of all: that this one — flying, fearless, happy — was the real him. And the other, the gray one down below, was only his dream.

And far off, at the far edge of the valley, a hill rose up. A soft, round hill, flooded with that same impossible light. At its foot, water gleamed wide and calm — a bright band with the whole sky mirrored in it. And there, on the slope, just above the water, something else stood dark. Round, warm, lived-in — something he could not quite make out, however he circled above it, and peered, and strained toward it with his whole body. It drew him more strongly than even the sky pulled him up. And it seemed: if only he could reach it, touch it — he would finally remember something very important. The most important thing. The thing without which even wings would only weigh him down.

He woke.

Above him was the ceiling. A gray, low, hard ceiling of packed earth. Everything in its place. Everything as always.

And never in his life had waking been so bitter.

Usually, on waking, an ant feels the dream fall away, and solid reality settles back into place. With him it went the other way. It was reality that fell away from him, like something unreal. The grayness, the ceiling, the hum of work already starting up somewhere nearby — all of it suddenly seemed a counterfeit, a dull copy thrown together in place of the true thing that had been up above. He lay there and could not get his mind around the most frightening thought of all: what if the real world was up there? What if this, the one here, was only a dream he somehow couldn’t wake from?

He shut his eyes to go back. He strained to recall the wind, the height, the wings — but reality was already closing over him like water over someone gone under, and the light went out, and the hill dissolved, and in a moment there was only the ceiling, only the gray, only the call to carry.

The dream did not return.

He waited for it — the next night, and the night after, lying down with his heart in his throat and begging the darkness: once more, only once more. But the darkness remained simply darkness. The dream had come a single time — and gone, as if it had never been.

But it didn’t need to. Such dreams don’t pass. They only learn to keep quiet. One night had opened a place in him he’d never suspected he had. And what has once opened inside never closes over so tightly that no light is left in it.