"Charles L. Harness-The Araqnid Window" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

"Good heavens," whispered the professor.
"You were supposed to fill it up with plaster of paris, dear," said Coret. "That would give you the
exact shape of the original statue."
"It would probably have been the first complete reproduction of an Araqnid on his Llanoan mount,"
said the professor heavily. "Worth the cost of the expedition."
Coret walked her husband back to the tent, so that the professor would not be tempted to do anything
foolish.
***


* * *


6. The Fall of Civilizations
***


Next morning, the professor opened his breakfast lecture with his inevitable theme. "The
Araqnid-Llanoan mergence took place about four thousand years B.P. Prior to this time the Araqnids
had advanced approximately to the state of our own Egyptian or Mesopotamian cultures, of say three
thousand B.C. They had spears, the crossbow, the battle-ax. They fought battles in chariots. They
cultivated plants equivalent to our wheat, corn, and barley, and they had fruit orchards. Curiously enough,
the Llanoans were beginning to develop their own very primitive culture. In the preceding hundred
thousand years they had evolved from a furry quadruped to a furry biped, although we may speculate
that they still had a somewhat shuffling gait and might from time to time touch the ground with their
knuckles. Although the Llanoans had no agriculture, they had a varied diet. They ate wild berries and
fruits, they trapped and ate small animals. Their only weapons were improvised clubs. The evidence
suggests that before the mergence of the races, the Araqnids and the Llanoans were about the same size
and build. After the mergence, the Araqnids shrank in size and the Llanoans became taller and heavier.
That, of course, was to be expected. The Araqnids became totally parasitical on the Llanoans. We lack
concrete evidence as to the mechanism of the Araqnid body structure that permitted this parasitism to
function. We speculate, however, that when the Araqnid was mounted on the Llanoan, two or more
tubular probes were thrust into the spinal column and the bloodstream of the mount. This system
permitted the Araqnid to dispense in large part with a digestive system. In evolving in this direction they
might well have lost fifty kilos. In their final form, they must have been mostly head and tentacles.
"It was a strange symbiosis. Exact analogies are lacking in our own terrestrial history. As pairs, we
think of homo sapiens and equus, but the analogy is inexact. The horse never had any culture of its own,
and of course there was no blood-to-blood contact between the two animals.
"The Araqnid-Llanoan relationship was unique. Its potentials were immediately recognized by the
Araqnids. All manual labor, all menial tasks, were done by their mounts. The master race was freed to
think, to create, and to invent. In one thousand years they had steam-powered vehicles. A few hundred
years later they were in space. We know they visited several planets in the local sun cluster. And then
they vanished. They must have had a great city, with tall buildings and several million inhabitants. But it
has vanished without a trace. Civilizations have come to an end before, of course. The Babylonians
destroyed Nineveh in 612 B.C., and it never rose again. But at least the ruins are still there. Rome
destroyed Carthage, but at least we know the site, and how it happened. Knossos fell beneath a
combined earthquake and tidal wave. Angkor Wat has been deserted for a thousand years, but we know
where the city is. The Mayan cities of the Yucatan are long deserted, but at least we know they are there,
and we can see and touch the buildings and temples. Not only do we not know where Araqnia is, we
don't know why it disappeared. Was it flood? War?" He coughed raucously and blew his nose.