Has anyone here ever heard of the Fable of the Bees by the philosopher Bernard Mandeville? I haven't actually read it but I know what it's about. You should look it up. Well anyway, I basically wrote a short story that is the inverse of that famous tale (because I don't agree with Mandeville). And it is set in a dwarf fortress universe with antmen. It's got a corny humanistic gist, if you're into that.
We are all familiar with the trope "there is a society full of nice, rule-abiding people, but there is also one leach, one exploiter, one selfish prick to ruin it all for everyone". My story is basically the reverse of that. The idea is "What happens when a saint lives in a society of psychopaths?"
The Fable of the Antmen by Rakust Mandeville, Dwarven necromancer
In a time before time the antmen were very different. The altruism that they now epitomize was as far removed from their society as discord is today. They simply lacked, originally, the feelings of love and fraternity they now possess. Thus, in order to keep their colonies cohesive and ensure survival, the queens and viziers of the antmen set the foundations of their societies on elaborate systems of rewards and punishments. It was the only way they could achieve the common good, the preservation of the species. Without the manipulation of self-interest, there could not possibly be any antmen colonies, especially not any successful ones.
At least, that's what the queens and viziers told themselves.
There must have been a degree of truth in the old wisdom of the antmen aristocracy, because the antment used to work themselves tirelessly, to a pitch unheard of in present times. The Queen let the most loyal and patriotic and tireless of the drones fertilize batches of her eggs. The Queen's viziers rewarded merit with roasted draltha thighs and jabberer brain stew. Antmen who underperformed were killed and fed to their stronger brothers. At every corner and instant of antman life, the viziers had set up an elaborate system of surveillance and incentives.
Each antman worked very hard at exploiting and cheating these systems.
The drones who collected the most food, as measured by a crude stone scale at the nest entrance, knew they would be rewarded with leisure and prestigious garments in their old age. And the antwomen watched their drones, whom they had raised since they were larvae; if a drone did well in the colony, his nurse was likewise rewarded only a select few antwomen were allowed to leave the nest to become Queens. The new Queens were paraded out of the nest on thrones held aloft by their less successful counterparts, and after much fanfare the antwomen who did not become Queens were thrown into a pit and burned alive and their ashes were used as buttressing for the snout of the anthill, and as bedding for the Queen and her larvae, and other such things.
The antmen hated each other. They could not help it. Their happiness was contingent on fulfilling their duties to the colony better than those around them. The viziers made sure of that. The viziers themselves were selected from only the wisest of antmen; those who had proven their shrewdness in coordinating raiding missions and hunting parties and arranging the storage of food, tools, and eggs. They were extremely bright and inventive, and they plotted against each other constantly.
The antmen were very cooperative. They needed to be in order to be successful, and they needed to be successful in order to live. Though it pained them greatly to smile at their enemies, the antmen were always very cordial with each other.
For example, every antman went out of his way to comfort and reinvigorate the less fortunate. There were occasional nervous wrecks and many depressed and hopeless antmen who gave up on their plight and tried to feed themselves to the domesticated giant cave spiders. The unfortunate wretches would be swarmed by mobs of scrambling heroes who would grab them roughly, tear them away from the precipice clumsily, and shout over each other their words of encouragement and condolence. Unfortunately, it was generally very difficult for the heroes to muster a sincere expression or tone of voice.
The viziers watched these occurrences intently to see who in the colony cared most about preventing wasteful, unproductive suicide.
As for the wretches, they usually ended up killing themselves at a later date anyway, despite the heroes' best efforts. The successful suicides tended to happen when no viziers were present to watch.
The antmen often cheered for their Queen, whom they envied bitterly, and recited blessings on her nest and her reign whenever she appeared. They sang patriotic songs and wracked their brains with insomnia every night trying to memorize all the lyrics (the viziers, in their eagerness to show brilliance, wrote new odes and anthems unceasingly). Each antman desired to be known as the most patriotic and loyal in the colony. They could not help it; the incentives were quite powerful.
This is how the antmen once were. They were competitive. They were dishonest. They were brutally selfish, bitterly loveless, proud and humiliated, foolishly brave and pathetically fearful: agonized by their own existence.
Armok, Master of Slaves, God of Blood, Praise to Him, must have been quite entertained.
It was unfortunate then, that the antmen changed irrevocably. This is the story of how they changed their ways.
In a forgotten nest of deep antiquity, in an epoch incomprehensibly distant; in a continent that was utterly sundered, and in a universe that has long since been erased by Armok, Master of Slaves, God of Blood, Praise to Him, and then reforged many times over and over since; on an obscure day in this unknown past and within this unremarkable nest; one unusual antman was born who overturned the legacies of even earlier prehistory, and bent the destinies of all antmen in all futures, in an impossible new direction. His name is lost to history.
Our protagonist was neither strong nor intelligent nor confident nor decisive. He was cursed by luck (luck ruled his fate, for even Fate had abandoned him) with not only a lack of ability, but a lack of motivation to possess ability. A lack of motivation, moreover, to claim any of the prizes hung in front of his antennas. He had an eccentric curiosity with death, and with nature, and with the subject matter of his private ruminations which - even in his own epoch - only he ever knew. Most damning of all, he was emotionally weak. He loved his fellow antmen all around him, genuinely and earnestly in a way that only the mad can, in a way that turned his thorax to water and made him blush and shed tears for the sake of his mortal enemies.
What to do about love? The feeling is uncontrollable in the bearer, and can induce one to challenge Armok Himself, Master of Slaves, God of Blood, Praise to Him, in foolhardy passion, if it is strong enough. There is no controlling it. There is no way to free oneself from its ruinous temptations. It is doom to the bearer; an invitation to exploitation; the bane of volition and cautious reason. Love, it has been said, is the epitome of all that is pathetic and weak in the world, and cannot long survive.
So let us recount exactly what happened to our doomed, wretched, lover.
Our protagonist gained a reputation in the colony. He brought little back from foraging, mostly because he, glad to have his load lightened, willingly gave away his quarry to rivals who had only just left the nest and who shrewdly encountered him 'by chance' on the trail. These rivals would then return to the nest from which they had just emerged and weigh the food on the scale under their own name.
Though the rivals tried to be discreet, the viziers often saw these exchanges, and this was not due to luck. For the viziers, ever increasing in their shrewdness, were always devising new ways of spying diligence and lecherousness, so that they might allot what was deserved and reap the prestige accorded to wise leaders. They thought our protagonist was the most patriotic and industrious individual in the whole colony, since he eagerly gave away his foraged prizes, the measure of the value of his very being. They were compelled by selfishness to duty. And they were compelled by duty to reward what they saw.
The other antmen sometimes traded skills and items by contract (a risky endeavor, considering the incentives to cheat) but our protagonist gave freely, and received never. He was emaciated as a result. Over time he developed subtle but substantive, albeit still below average, musculature. This was because he always performed his morning exercise regimen diligently, out of nothing but foolish love for the Queen's dominion and a wish to serve it, whereas his rivals cheated and miscounted their routines, and inflated their gymnastic statistics. In any previous age our protagonist would have been the worse, but due to the burning mutual envy of the viziers, who were always trying to outdo each other in guileful surveillance and accounting, he was noticed. In their bitter competition they could not possibly avoid noticing him.
Our protagonist was tireless in his pathetic sincerity. He loved the Queen and the colony. He memorized every lyric of every song ever composed, and sung with a heartfelt gusto that knew no equivalent, for no other reason than because he loved the sound of his own voice singing the glory of the Queen who ate the entrails of her political enemies and who laughed silently when sentencing to death unprofitable runts like himself.
His rivals, the other antmen, considered him no threat; for none, including our protagonist himself, were aware of the clever viziers' tactics.
For a time, the other antmen used to approach him with congratulations and compliments for fictitious qualities, so that he might reward them with his fervent and irrational generosity. They were induced by self interest to perform these tactics of manipulation. They could not help it. After all, they would need his gifts so that they themselves could contribute more to the colony's stocks (which were always being robbed) and thereby acquire good marks, and distinguish themselves. Despite unending flattery, our protagonist never rewarded his patrons over anyone else, but loved all equally, in a way that only the wretched and truly friendless can. Slowly, therefore, his rivals abandoned the strategy.
Our naive little protagonist was happy with his life. He was overworked. He slept little and ate almost nothing at all, and he despaired at every new reminder of mortality, which, in an antman colony, is very often. But he also loved to sing the glory of the Queen. He loved to view the industriousness of his comrades, for he did not realize that much of it was fake. He did not perceive when he was cheated or exploited unjustly, and so he loved his leaches with all his heart. His only regret was that he wished he could serve his rivals still more generously. He was moved to tears by the nobility and heroism he thought he witnessed in his more able compatriots, and he sincerely enjoyed watching them succeed at his expense.
As a result of our protagonist's chronic exploitation, he died very young. The other antmen were remorseless. They did not care about him, but each antman was eager to say good things about him, so that they might improve their reputation by honoring the colony's most devoted servant, thus demonstrating their patriotism. Even the viziers liked to gab about the colony's noblest denizens. One thing led to another, and another, and the viziers decided to immortalize our protagonist as an example of loyal citizenship. A *tool* was what they thought they would make him. He would be one more conspicuous example of a good and justly rewarded slave, and one more talking point on a vizier's resume.
While his body was still fresh, they removed the reproductive organs intact (in such an ambitious and competitive age, the technology of the antmen had grown much more sophisticated than it is today). Our hero inseminated a batch of the Queen's eggs.
Despite everything, he had been successful in life (or rather, in death) after all. His rivals ensured it. Pushed and pulled by hatred, they could not possibly have done otherwise.
Our protagonist's spawn lived lives that mirrored his own. All of them were selfless. All of them were emaciated. All of them were happy. Most importantly, all of them loved their rivals, earnestly and unconditionally.
All of them were honored, and reproduced.
His descendants spread across the entire subterranean world. They were weak, but they worked harder, and with less inefficient jockeying for prestige, than any other race of antmen that had ever existed. Whole colonies of his descendants rose to prominence. Inevitably, after many centuries, this altruistic line of antmen was the only one left. It could not have been otherwise. The distracting ambitions and incentives of the other antmen could not possibly allow any other course of events to pass.
Armok, Master of Slaves, God of Blood, Praise to Him, was irritated by the generosity of the new antmen. It was boring. He collapsed their cavern abodes, sundered their continent, and rent their entire world and universe to pieces. He remade the universe anew. With new antmen.
Yet - and what power is capable of such a thing I almost dare not venture to ask the new antmen, unknowingly and without effort, repudiated the mandate of the Divine Anvil of Creation. A quiet and humble, yet defiant fact, more curious, more sublime, than any of the Great Mysteries in the folklore of the Sacks of Rogues (a human civilization) manifested itself.
The sparks of Genesis, infinitely creative as they are, never fashion for a new world a peculiarity that had ever before existed or been imagined in another. Yet the new antmen preserved our obscure hero's idiosyncrasies.
They loved.
And Armok, Master of Slaves, God of Blood, Praise to Him, omniscient and omnipotent, whose mighty power exceeds the boundaries of space and time, could not undo the puny wretch's unwitting work; not once in any of the numberless universes created between our fable and the present day. Love survived each and every apocalypse.
Could there exist a force more powerful than the God of gods?
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress themed short story - game theory, altruism, Fable of the Bees (Read 734 times)