shimmeringly sibilant; so mellowthat it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last wasjust what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the godsreaching earthward from across space.
He looked at Balatta with swift questioning; but the voice of the Red Onehe had evoked had flung her face downward and moaning among the bones.He returned to contemplation of the prodigy. Hollow it was, and of nometal known on earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by the onesof old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have come,and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and mind.Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly possessed,could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child ofintelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, itindubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fireof hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured thenight of space, threaded the stars, and now rose before him and abovehim, exhumed by patient anthropophagi, pitted and lacquered by its fierybath in two atmospheres.
But was the colour a lacquer of heat upon some familiar metal? Or was itan intrinsic quality of the metal itself? He thrust in the blue-point ofhis pocket-knife to test the constitution of the stuff. Instantly theentire sphere burst into a mighty whispering, sharp with protest, almosttwanging goldenly, if a whisper could possibly be considered to twang,rising higher, sinking deeper, the two extremes of the registry of soundthreatening to complete the circle and coalesce into the bull-mouthedthundering he had so often heard beyond the taboo distance.
Forgetful of safety, of his own life itself, entranced by the wonder ofthe unthinkable and unguessable thing, he raised his knife to strikeheavily from a long stroke, but was prevented by Balatta. She uprearedon her own knees in an agony of terror, clasping his knees andsupplicating him to desist. In the intensity of her desire to impresshim, she put her forearm between her teeth and sank them to the bone.
He scarcely observed her act, although he yielded automatically to hisgentler instincts and withheld the knife-hack. To him, human life haddwarfed to microscopic proportions before this colossal portent of higherlife from within the distances of the sidereal universe. As had she beena dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman to her feet and compelled herto start with him on an encirclement of the base. Part way around, heencountered horrors. Even, among the others, did he recognize thesun-shrivelled remnant of the nine-years girl who had accidentally brokenChief Vngngn’s personality taboo. And, among what was left of these thathad passed, he encountered what was left of one who had not yet passed.Truly had the bush-folk named themselves into the name of the Red One,seeing in him their own image which they strove to placate and pleasewith such red offerings.
Farther around, always treading the bones and images of humans and godsthat constituted the floor of this ancient charnel-house of sacrifice, hecame upon the device by which the Red One was made to send his callsinging thunderingly across the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the farbeach of Ringmanu. Simple and primitive was it as was the Red One’sconsummate artifice. A great king-post, half a hundred feet in length,seasoned by centuries of superstitious care, carven into dynasties ofgods, each superimposed, each helmeted, each seated in the open mouth ofa crocodile, was slung by ropes, twisted of climbing vegetable parasites,from the apex of a tripod of three great forest trunks, themselves carvedinto grinning and grotesque adumbrations of man’s modern concepts of artand god. From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers towhich men could apply their strength and direction. Like a batteringram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mightyred-iridescent sphere.
Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned religiously for himselfand the twelve tribes under him. Bassett laughed aloud, almost withmadness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger, winged withintelligence across space, to fall into a bushman stronghold and beworshipped by ape-like, man-eating and head-hunting savages. It was asif God’s World had fallen into the muck mire of the abyss underlying thebottom of hell; as if Jehovah’s Commandments had been presented on carvedstone to the monkeys of the monkey cage at the Zoo; as if the Sermon onthe Mount had been preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics.
* * * * *
The slow weeks passed. The nights, by election, Bassett spent on theashen floor of the devil-devil house, beneath the ever-swinging,slow-curing heads. His reason for this was that it was taboo to thelesser sex of woman, and therefore, a refuge for him from Balatta, whogrew more persecutingly and perilously loverly as the Southern Cross rodehigher in the sky and marked the imminence of her nuptials. His daysBassett spent in a hammock swung under the shade of the great breadfruittree before the devil-devil house. There were breaks in this programme,when, in the comas of his devastating fever-attacks, he lay for days andnights in the house of heads. Ever he struggled to combat the fever, tolive, to continue to live, to grow strong and stronger against the daywhen he would be strong enough to dare the grass-lands and the beltedjungle beyond, and win to the beach, and to some labour-recruiting,black-birding ketch or schooner, and on to civilization and the men ofcivilization, to whom he could give news of the message from other worldsthat lay, darkly worshipped by beastmen, in the black heart ofGuadalcanal’s midmost centre.
On the other nights, lying late under the breadfruit tree, Bassett spentlong hours watching the slow setting of the western stars beyond theblack wall of jungle where it had been thrust back by the clearing forthe village. Possessed of more than a cursory knowledge of astronomy, hetook a sick man’s pleasure in speculating as to the dwellers on theunseen worlds of those incredibly remote suns, to haunt whose houses oflight, life came forth, a shy visitant, from the rayless crypts ofmatter. He could no more apprehend limits to time than bounds to space.No subversive radium speculations had shaken his steady scientific faithin the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter.Always and forever must there have been stars. And surely, in thatcosmic ferment, all must be comparatively alike, comparatively of thesame substance, or substances, save for the freaks of the ferment. Allmust obey, or compose, the same laws that ran without infraction throughthe entire experience of man. Therefore, he argued and agreed, mustworlds and life be appanages to all the suns as they were appanages tothe particular of his own solar system.
Even as he lay here, under the breadfruit tree, an intelligence thatstared across the starry gulfs, so must all the universe be exposed tothe ceaseless scrutiny of innumerable eyes, like his, though grantedlydifferent, with behind them, by the same token, intelligences thatquestioned and sought the meaning and the construction of the whole. Soreasoning, he felt his soul go forth in kinship with that august company,that multitude whose gaze was forever upon the arras of infinity.
Who were they, what were they, those far distant and superior ones whohad bridged the sky with their gigantic, red-iridescent, heaven-singingmessage? Surely, and long since, had they, too, trod the path on whichman had so recently, by the calendar of the cosmos, set his feet. And tobe able to send a message across the pit of space, surely they hadreached those heights to which man, in tears and travail and bloodysweat, in darkness and confusion of many counsels, was so slowlystruggling. And what were they on their heights? Had they wonBrotherhood? Or had they learned that the law of love imposed thepenalty of weakness and decay? Was strife, life? Was the rule of allthe universe the pitiless rule of natural selection? And, and mostimmediately and poignantly, were their far conclusions, their long-wonwisdoms, shut even then in the huge, metallic heart of the Red One,waiting for the first earth-man to read? Of one thing he was certain: Nodrop of red dew shaken from the lion-mane of some sun in torment, was thesounding sphere. It was of design, not chance, and it contained thespeech and wisdom of the stars.
What engines and elements and mastered forces, what lore and mysteriesand destiny-controls, might be there! Undoubtedly, since so much couldbe enclosed in so little a thing as the fou
ndation stone of a publicbuilding, this enormous sphere should contain vast histories, profoundsof research achieved beyond man’s wildest guesses, laws and formulæ that,easily mastered, would make man’s life on earth, individual andcollective, spring up from its present mire to inconceivable heights ofpurity and power. It was Time’s greatest gift to blindfold, insatiable,and sky-aspiring man. And to him, Bassett, had been vouchsafed thelordly fortune to be the first to receive this message from man’sinterstellar kin!
No white man, much less no outland man of the other bush-tribes, hadgazed upon the Red One and lived. Such the law expounded by Ngurn toBassett. There was such a thing as blood brotherhood. Bassett, inreturn, had often argued in the past. But Ngurn had stated solemnly no.Even the blood brotherhood was outside the favour of the Red One. Only aman born within the tribe could look upon the Red One and live. But now,his guilty secret known only to Balatta, whose fear of immolation beforethe Red One fast-sealed her