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And from the produce of the colossal beast, whereof naught remains but a few rare skeletons, the modellers passed to the produce of the Sheep and the Ox, without altering their ovoids or their gourds, even as our Sacred Beetle, without ceasing to be faithful to her pear, accepts the Cow's flat cake in the absence of the favourite morsel, the Sheep's bannock.
"Spokesmen of the Gens, make sure that every individual member of your Gens is fully equipped with flying clothing including belts and ovoids prepared for an indefinite stay outside on the roof of the world! Get your people out swiftly, keeping them in formation!
Unlike in shape, their flame of vitality dimmer than the ovoids of the Disk's golden zone, still I knew that they were even as those ORGANS, organs of unknown senses, unknown potentialities. Their nuclei I could not observe. The floating figures had drawn close to that disk and had paused.
A broad band, translucent as sun golden chrysolite, ran about its periphery. Set within this zodiac and spaced at mathematically regular intervals were nine ovoids of intensely living light. They shone like nine gigantic cabochon cut sapphires; they ranged from palest, watery blue up through azure and purple and down to a ghostly mauve shot with sullen undertones of crimson.
In each of them was throned a flame that seemed the very fiery essence of vitality. The BODY was convex, swelling outward like the boss of a shield; shimmering rosy-gray and crystalline. From the vital ovoids ran a pattern of sparkling threads, irised and brilliant as floss of molten jewels; converging with interfacings of spirals, of volutes and of triangles into the nucleus.
This one didn't look like a standard type at all, and it didn't behave like one, but it looked even less like an airship, and he knew enough to know that he didn't necessarily know every type of spaceship ever built. In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been first used for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like the fat ovoids that he was used to.
In the south as in the north, at the antipodes as here, every Copris fashions ovoids with the egg at the smaller end; every Sacred Beetle models pears or gourds with a hatching-chamber in the neck; but the materials employed vary greatly according to the season and locality and can be furnished by the Megatherium, the Ox, the Horse, the Sheep or by man and several others.
Settled under the sumptuous dish dropped by the Ox, the Phanæus, one would think, ought to make the very best use of it and to stock her burrow with a number of ovoids, after the example of the Lunary Copris. She does nothing of the sort, preferring to roam from one find to the other and to take from each the wherewithal to model a single pellet, which is left to itself for the soil to incubate.
And instant by instant the flood of varicolored flame that poured into its petalings down from the sapphire ovoids waxed and waned in crescendoes and diminuendoes of relucent harmonies ecstatic, awesome. The heart of the rose was a star of incandescent ruby. From the flaming crimson center to aureate, flashing penumbra it was instinct with and poured forth power power vast and conscious.
From the edges of three of the ovoids swirled a little cloud of tentacles, gossamer filaments of opal. They whipped out a full yard from the Disk's surface, touching her, caressing her. For a moment she hung there, her face hidden from us; then was dropped softly to her feet and stood, arms stretched wide, her copper hair streaming cloudily about her regal head.
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