know it, Josef,” said Peter. “What happened to those ants is happening to us.”
“Hush!” said Josef desperately.
“We’re the ones without pincers, Josef. We’re done. We aren’t made to work and fight in huge hordes, to live by instinct and nothing more, perpetuating a dark, damp anthill without the wits even to wonder why!”
They both fell into red-faced silence as Borgorov navigated the last hundred yards. “Come now,” said Borgorov, rounding the corner of the toolshed, “our samples couldn’t have been as disappointing as all that.”
“It’s just that we’re tired,” said Josef, giving his ingratiating grin. “The fossils are so sensational we’re stunned.”
Peter gently laid the chip with the murdered ant and its attackers embedded in it on the last pile. “We have the most significant samples from each layer arranged in these piles,” he said, pointing to the row of rock mounds. He was curious to see what Borgorov’s reaction might be. Over Josef’s objections, he explained about two kinds of ants evolving within the species, showed him the houses and books and pictures in the lower levels, the crowded gatherings in the upper ones. Then, without offering the slightest interpretation, he gave Borgorov his magnifying glass, and stepped back.
Borgorov strolled up and down the row several times, picking up samples and clucking his tongue. “It couldn’t be more graphic, could it?” he said at last.
Peter and Josef shook their heads.
“Obviously,” said Borgorov, “what happened was this.” He picked up the chip that showed the bas-relief of the pincerless ant’s death struggle with countless warriors. “There were these lawless ants, such as the one in the center, capitalists who attacked and exploited the workers—ruthlessly killing, as we can see here, scores at a time.” He set down the melancholy exhibit, and picked up the house into which the pincerless ants were crammed. “And here we have a conspiratorial meeting of the lawless ants, plotting against the workers. Fortunately”—and he pointed to the soldier ants outside the door—“their plot was overheard by vigilant workers.
“So,” he continued brightly, holding up samples from the next layer, a meeting of the pincered ants and the home of a solitary ant, “the workers held democratic indignation meetings, and drove their oppressors out of their community. The capitalists, overthrown, but with their lives spared by the merciful common people, were soft and spoiled, unable to survive without the masses to slave for them. They could only dillydally with the arts. Hence, put on their own mettle, they soon became extinct.” He folded his arms with an air of finality and satisfaction.
“But the order was just the reverse,” objected Peter. “The ant civilization was wrecked when some of the ants started growing pincers and going around in mobs. You can’t argue with geology.”
“Then an inversion has taken place in the limestone layer—some kind of upheaval turned it upside down. Obviously.” Borzorov sounded like sheathed ice. “We have the most conclusive evidence of all—the evidence of logic. The sequence could only have been as I described it. Hence, there was an inversion. Isn’t that so?” he said, looking pointedly at Josef.
“Exactly, an inversion,” said Josef.
“Isn’t that so?” Borgorov wheeled to face Peter.
Peter exhaled explosively, slouched in an attitude of utter resignation. “Obviously, Comrade.” Then he smiled, apologetically. “Obviously, Comrade,” he repeated …
Epilogue
“Good Lord, but it’s cold!” said Peter, letting go of his end of the saw and turning his back to the Siberian wind.
“To work! To work!” shouted a guard, so muffled against the cold as to look like a bundle of laundry with a submachine gun sticking out of it.
“Oh, it could be worse, much worse,” said Josef, holding the other end of the saw. He rubbed his frosted eyebrows against his sleeve.
“I’m sorry you’re here, too, Josef,” said Peter sadly. “I’m the one who raised his voice to Borgorov.” He blew on his hands. “I guess that’s why we’re here.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” sighed Josef. “One stops thinking about such things. One stops thinking. It’s the only way. If we didn’t belong here, we wouldn’t be here.”
Peter fingered a limestone chip in his pocket. Embedded in it was the last of the pincerless ants, ringed by his murderers. It was the only fossil from Borgorov’s hole that remained above the surface of the earth. Borgorov had made the brothers write a report on the ants as he saw them, had had every last fossil shoveled back into the bottomless cavity, and had shipped Josef and Peter to Siberia. It was a thorough piece of work, not likely to be criticized.
Josef had pushed aside a pile of brush, and was now staring with fascination at the bared patch of earth. An ant emerged furtively from a hole, carrying an egg. It ran around in crazy circles, then scurried back into the darkness of the tiny earth womb. “A marvelous adjustment ants have made, isn’t it, Peter?” said Josef enviously. “The good life—efficient, uncomplicated. Instinct makes all the decisions.” He sneezed. “When I die, I think I’d like to be reincarnated as an ant. A modern ant, not a capitalist ant,” he added quickly.
“What makes you so sure you aren’t one?” said Peter.
Josef shrugged off the jibe. “Men could learn a lot from ants, Peter, my boy.”
“They have, Josef, they have,” said Peter wearily. “More than they know.”
KURT VONNEGUT was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him, in the words of The New York Times, as “a true artist” with the publication of Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
SIDNEY OFFIT has written two novels, two memoirs, and ten books for young readers. He was a senior editor of Intellectual Digest and a book editor of Politics Today, and for three decades he has served on the boards of the Authors Guild and PEN American Center. Currently, Mr. Offit is the curator emeritus of the George Polk Awards in Journalism. He lives in New York City with his wife, Avodah.
Early, unpublished short stories by America’s
“unimitative and inimitable social satirist” *
Kurt Vonnegut
LOOK AT THE BIRDIE
UNPUBLISHED SHORT FICTION
Available in hardcover and eBook editions
October 20, 2009
Frequently startlingly perceptive, at points ruefully sinister, always vintage Vonnegut, the fourteen never-before-published short stories featured in Look at the Birdie date from the years before this American master began his ascent to international stardom and provide an unparalleled look into the early mind of the man who would go on to change the literary landscape forever.
* Harper’s
CLASSIC VONNEGUT
AVAILABLE NOW FROM
THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP
A Man Without a Country
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Galápagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Jailbird
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
a cognizant original v5 release october 04 2010
The Petrified Ants is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by The Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Trust
Foreword © 2009 by Sidney Offit
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The story “The Petrified Ants” will appear in Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, forthcoming from Delacorte Press.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33939-7
Good News, copyright © 1994 Kurt Vonnegut/Origami Express, LLC
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