The Best of Argosy #3 - Drink We Deep by Arthur Leo Zagat & RadioArchives.com

Author:Arthur Leo Zagat & RadioArchives.com [Zagat, Arthur Leo]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: RadioArchives.com
Published: 2014-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

WE WERE now close to the enclosure whose appearance had intrigued me. Animals within the fence milled to escape some Taphetnit who worked among them. I saw one of the little beasts caught and dragged off into the windowless building. We flicked past.

“What are they?” I exclaimed.

“Tivra,” Nalinah gave me their Mernian name. “From their skins come the leather from which all our clothing is fashioned, and all our cordage.”

She called them tivra, but I knew them by another name. Most laymen think of prehistoric creatures as the incredibly gigantic reptiles of the Mesozoic, Dinosaurus, Triceratops, and king of all, Tyrannosaurus. True, these did stalk old Terra fourteen million years ago, but the Glacial Ages, beginning five thousand centuries before the birth of Christ and ending some five hundred B.C., are quite as prehistoric. As we know by the fossil record of the rocks, the fauna of those times were diminutive rather than enormous. They were the tiny ancestors of the mammals we know today, like the Eohippi, like the tivra. Deer scarcely larger than our present-day fawns, their full-grown horns mere knobs behind their ears, our unimaginative paleontologists have named them Dicroreri.

The people of Mernia were diminutive humans, the wings of the Taphetnit notwithstanding. The two specimens of their animal life I had seen (I suspected then and know now the only two) were miniature mammals known to Earth’s surface as recently as the end of the Pleistocene Era, but vanished since.

My slitted gaze strayed to Nalinah’s wand, where she had thrust it into her belt. The device at its tip was, beyond dispute, a representation of the sun and its nine attendant planets. What could these dwellers in the subterranean world know of our solar system? True enough, they had made some excursions to the surface, yet it seemed utterly incongruous that the tenants of our skies should be important enough, to them to inspire what was evidently the symbol of their autarchy.

There was some clue, in all this, to their origin. The answer hovered tantalizingly at the threshold of my mind, slipped away from me as Nalinah brought me back to our discourse.

“Hula! You seem dismayed as you speak of the situation in your Upper World, yet to me it seems still a very Paradise, compared to Mernia.”

“I don’t wonder,” I grunted, my mind still busy with the problem suggested by the Dicroreri. “No, I don’t wonder.”

“You started with a lavish abundance and much of that remains. Our universe is a closed one, limited by the four walls, the ceiling and the floor, of this great cavern. Nothing can come into it save the water that feeds the fortlik. Nothing can go out of it. Yet the Folk have survived here, for thousands of sloonit.”

“That is about all you have done,” I responded. “Survive. Because you know nothing better, you are content to be ruled in all your thoughts, and all your actions, for every minute of your waking and sleeping lives by laws so rigorous that the punishment for their violation is a horrible death.

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