As the sun dipped in and out of the haze cast by a remote forest fire, dappled patterns of light and shadow flitted across the old palace walls. Urus peered at the ant queen by his feet. ‘I can’t quite make you out,’ he boomed, ‘but I have a feeling that you are not Queen Lassini.’

‘She is dead. We ants lead brief lives. I am Lassini, the second of her name,’ said the new queen of the Formican Empire. On this occasion, she had brought just 10,000 word-corps soldiers with her, and Urus had to stoop to read her response.

‘I think it’s time to put an end to this war,’ he said.

‘I agree,’ replied Lassini II.

‘If the war continues,’ Urus said, ‘you ants will return to scavenging meat from animal carcasses and dragging dead beetles back to your tiny lairs.’

‘If the war continues,’ responded Lassini II, ‘you dinosaurs will return to prowling hungrily through the forests and tearing apart your own kind for meat.’

‘Well then, does Your Majesty have a specific recommendation as to how we might bring an end to this war?’ Urus asked. ‘Perhaps we should begin with the reason we went to war in the first place. There are many who have forgotten the whys and wherefores – dinosaurs and ants alike.’

‘I recall it had to do with the appearance of God. Specifically: does God look like an ant or a dinosaur?’

Urus cleared his throat. ‘I am happy to inform you, Queen Lassini, that for the last few years the Saurian Empire’s most erudite scholars have devoted themselves to this question. They have now come to a new conclusion, and it is this: God resembles neither an ant nor a dinosaur. Rather, God is formless, like a gust of wind, a ray of light or the air that swaddles this world. God is reflected in every grain of sand, every drop of water.’

The Formican queen’s answer came quickly and unequivocally. ‘We ants do not possess such complicated minds as you dinosaurs,’ she said, ‘and that sort of profound philosophising is challenging for us. But I agree with this conclusion. My intuition tells me that God is indeed formless. And you should know that the ant world has forbidden idolatry.’

‘The Saurian Empire has also forbidden idolatry.’ Urus could hide his relief no longer. His face cracked into a wide, snaggle-toothed grin. ‘In that case, Your Majesty, may I conclude that ants and dinosaurs share the same God?’

‘If you wish, Your Majesty.’

And so the First Dinosaur–Ant War came to a close. It was a war without victors. The dinosaur–ant alliance made a swift recovery. New cities began to appear atop the ruins of the old, and Cretaceous civilisation, after so long spent teetering on the brink of collapse, was reborn.

8

The Information Age

Another millennium whizzed by. Cretaceous civilisation progressed through the Electric Age and the Atomic Age and into the Information Age.