The mound
The camera is on the savanna in Tanzania. The grass is dry. The sun is high. In every direction, the land goes flat to the horizon, and out of the flatness rises a mound.
The mound is taller than a man. Five metres of red clay, baked hard, cracked at the edges, smooth on the windward face. From a distance it looks like a tooth.
Inside the mound, six million termites are at work.
They cannot see. Termites are blind. They cannot hear, in the sense that a human hears. They have no leader. The queen, in the chamber at the centre, lays an egg every three seconds, and that is her whole job. She does not command. She lays eggs. The mound was here before her, and the mound will be here after her.
The mound itself is breathing. Air enters at the base, rises through tunnels along the warmer inner wall, cools at the top, falls back down through outer ducts. The temperature inside, in the chamber where the queen lays, is held within one degree of thirty centigrade, all year round. Outside, the savanna goes from forty in the day to ten at night. The termites do not adjust the chimney. The chimney was built right.
It was built by termites who are now dead. None of the workers in the mound today were alive when its main structure was poured. The mound is older than its inhabitants, and they keep maintaining it without knowing what it is.
A worker is walking along a tunnel. She is two millimetres long. Her body is soft and pale. She is carrying a grain of clay in her jaws. She does not know where she is taking it.
She is taking it to where the smell is strongest.
A few minutes ago, somewhere in the upper chamber, a crack opened in the wall. A draft of cooler air pushed in. A guard termite at the edge of the crack, sensing the temperature drop, released a small molecule from a gland on her back. The molecule has a name in the chemistry textbooks. It does not have a name in the mound.
The molecule drifts outward, on the air, through the tunnels. Where the tunnel branches, more molecule goes down the branch where the air still moves. The molecule fades with distance. Workers, walking along, sweep their antennae through the air. When the antennae meet the molecule, they turn. They go where the smell is stronger.
Each worker carries a grain. Each grain is a brick. Each brick is laid where the smell is strongest. The smell is strongest at the crack. The crack closes.
No worker has seen the crack. No worker knows the crack exists. No worker has been told to repair it. Each worker has done one thing: walk towards a smell with a grain in her jaws. The crack closed because six thousand workers, each making her one private decision, each turning her own antennae, each placing her one grain — added up, in the way grains add up, to a wall.
This is how the mound is built. This is how the mound is repaired. This is how the mound is defended. There are six smells. Six.
One smell means bring food. One means bring soldiers. One means bring water. One means here is a crack. One means this body is dead, take it out. One means follow me. That is the whole vocabulary of the mound. Six smells, six instructions, six million workers. The grammar is small enough to fit on the back of an envelope. The city is the size of a small house.
Above ground, on the mound's outer face, a guard sits in the sun. She is checking the air. If she releases the soldiers smell, ten thousand soldiers will come up the tunnel within a minute. She has not released it today. The day is quiet. The aardvark that came last week did not come back. The mound holds.
The mound is not the only one. From the camera, in the air, you can see seven more across the visible plain. Each one is doing the same thing, on the same six smells, with no awareness of the others. They are not communicating. They are running the same small grammar, locally, at six different addresses on the savanna.
Step back further and you can see the species. Macrotermes michaelseni. They live across half of Africa. Every mound, on every plain, in every country, runs the same six smells. The grammar is older than the savanna. It was here when the savanna was forest. It was here when the forest was sea.
There is no central termite authority. There is no committee that decides what the smells mean. The smells mean what they mean because the workers who responded to them differently are no longer alive, and the workers who responded to them the same way are still here, building the mound, raising the queen's eggs, repairing the cracks.
The mound is not a city run by minds. It is a grammar of six signals, run by six million bodies, on a plain that does not care.
The wind shifts. A crack of clay breaks somewhere on the western face. A guard releases a molecule. Six thousand workers, in tunnels none of them have ever met each other in, turn their antennae, lift a grain, and walk towards the smell.
A few hundred kilometres to the east, a man is sitting on the porch of a farmhouse. The sun has just gone down. The light is the kind of light that turns the air the colour of a peach. He is reaching towards a small wooden box on the table beside him, and he is turning a knob. The box hums. Then, faintly, in a language he does not speak, a voice begins.
He listens. The signal is coming from somewhere far. He does not know where. The box does not know where. Neither of them needs to.