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ant’s excretion, smell signals, poison, and reproduction. Not that the gaster is a featureless balloon; no, if you look carefully, you’ll see that the gaster is structured like a plant bud or a pinecone, it’s made up of a series of overlapping plates capable of sliding enough so that the gaster can bend quite a bit.
    The gaster contains glands that secrete poison. In order to repel enemies, some ants rear back and squirt out jets of their toxins. For closer infighting, ants inflict stab wounds with their poison-smeared stingers. Ant poison is a mixture of formic acid, neurotoxins, and histamines.
    Ants’ gasters also secrete pheromones, or so-called semiochemicals. These chemical signals can express alarm, a recruitment call, or a desire to exchange oral and anal liquid; pheromones tag the smells of nest-mates and the members of the various castes; judicious sprays of pheromones serve as trail markers and as territorial boundaries.

    Ants are cool. The motion of a trail is continuous as water flowing, but if you watch one particular ant, you’ll see that she (the only male ants are the winged ones that appear for mating flights) does not, on the average, follow the main line of the trail she’s moving along. Instead she meanders back and forth across the trail, occasionally breaking into fresh territory and then turning back. She rubs antennae with every sister she encounters. “Seen anything new?” “What’s up?” “How do you feel?” “How’re things back in the nest?” “Found any food?” “Which way are you headed?”
    Back East, when I lived in a small Virginia town called Killeville, people had been like that, too, male or female, always stopping to chat and rub antennae. No way in CA. In California we drove around in our cars instead of rubbing antennae like ants. Rush, drive, work, and buy—with a cold smile and a hard laugh, a snarl and The Finger, with a shrug and a higher fence.
    I put my rack of backup CDs in the trunk of my car. The backup was only a week old, so once the ants had been flushed out of my system I could start over. All my source code and programming tools were in there.
    I figured the best thing to do right now would be to drive up to GoMotion and find out what had actually happened. On the other hand, it was a forty-minute commute each way, and I was going to have to do it again for Jeff Pear’s weekly meeting on Wednesday—day after tomorrow. And, it occurred to me, if Coolidge was going to play tricks on me, why should I be in such a big hurry to report back in at his company? I decided to take the day off ... but to do what? I stood there near my car, thinking and looking around.
    My front yard was five steep feet of tough dirt with wizened shrubs. The street was Tangle Way, a looping blacktop two-laner that ran uphill and eventually back
down. Our hill was called Polvo Para Hornear, a needlessly complicated name that at least wasn’t religious, so far as I knew. There were so many Spanish and Catholic names in California that I felt like an immigrant and an atheist.
    Numerous dead-end roadlets branched off of Tangle Way. Next to my house was the tiniest of traffic’s capillaries, a dirt alley that led to one last house perched on the edge of the eternally dry gully behind my home. Old Mr. and Mrs. Toth lived there. Mrs. Toth was a New Age healer. She had a massage table in her front hall and she talked about the supernatural in a cozy apple-cheeked way.
    Shortly after we’d moved in, Mrs. Toth had found out I’d been a math professor back East. She talked me into giving a talk to her “realization group,” which met monthly in the community center. I’d spoken on synchronicity and Hilbert Space, an old interest of mine from grad school days. A few members of Mrs. Toth’s group had been angered by my insistence that coincidences are explicitly not subject to control by