The Hon. Professor Pycanis Educatus—called the Insect, or the Pyca, or the Bug-in-Spats, or the Insectus Insufferabilis, or the Hon. Doctor Please-Swat-Me Creepy-Crawlie, by his students and former students and current colleagues—was one of only nine of his kind when he was born. Now, he is the only one. At one time Pycanum bellus gigantis were numerous in this part of the world—and widely known for their devotion to the arts and sciences, as well as the noble pursuits of athleticism, skepticism, gnosticism, and algorithmic recalculations. Not anymore. They are gone now. All, all gone. And he is alone.
If it is wrong for Man to be alone, the Insect muses in the solitude of his room, must it not also be wrong for Insect? If I share the intellect and soul of Man, should I not also share in his joy?
There must be a logical answer, he tells himself. A proof for the theorem. And so the professor puts his brain to work.
The Insect, in his way, has always sought solutions in the study of opposites. Does not light, he asks, counter darkness? Does not plenty vanquish want? Contraria contrariis curantur,1 he reasons silently. Hippocrates, as dependable as the rising sun, provides the answer, as always. Surely his loneliness must have an antidote. Surely if the fact of himself has been the source of his terrible singularity, the cure would be found in companionship with his own antithesis—one as wholly unlike himself as to become him. Light, after all, cannot know itself to be light until it first knows darkness; and music cannot know itself without coupling with silence. It is, he feels, astonishingly obvious, and he sits down with his notes and his ledgers and scratches out the beginning of his next treatise—one of many that he will never complete.
Later that night, the Insect dreams of the Astronomer. He wakes in a sweat.
That same night, in a faraway country, the Astronomer dreams of the Insect. He wakes with a shiver and a cry, and, as usual, consults the stars. He does not breathe (he never does); he does not blink (how can he? He has no tears). The stars, as usual, are silent. The Astronomer watches without moving.
The Insect and the Astronomer have never met.
But they will. The Insect is sure of it.
3.
It has been many years since the Bug-in-Spats last set foot in Vingus Country—land of his birth, land whereby he received his extensive and thorough education (by the hand of one Professor Ignatius Pedantare, at whose name the Pyca clasps his delicate tarsus to his brightly clothed thorax and sighs prodigiously), and land that, despite its tendencies toward backward thinking and provincial blindness, he still refers to in his more nostalgic moments as his home. He had thought at one time that he would never return. Indeed, he swore that he would not.
Still, as he traverses the land where the green of the hills begins to lighten and sparkle, where it finally, thinly protesting, gives way to endless hills of yellow and yellow and yellow—the glow of his country, the shimmer of home—the Insect feels his soul begin to shudder and shake. He feels his bound wings begin to tremble and moan. He raises his curled fingers to his enormous black eyes and discovers a hidden reservoir of tears.
How odd, he thinks. He brings a single tear to his mouth and tastes the salt on his long, prehensile tongue. It tastes, he knows, ever so much like an ocean, though he has never seen an ocean, nor tasted it for comparison. He knows there are oceans somewhere, just as there is an ocean inside him, inextricably linked to his heart.
The heart breaks and an ocean flows; this is the way of things.
“Abyssus abyssum invocat,”2 he whispers out loud. And he believes it too. The abyss of his soul has pulled him here, on this path, toward the one who ponders the abyss of the sky.
The Astronomer, his dreams have told him. The Astronomer will know what to do.
The Insect has brought little for the journey. Only a flutter of hope in his heart. And something else, in the regions beyond his heart. A quiet something that he could not identify or name. But it is heavy, and dark, and alive.
The journey has been long and his feet are tired. He sees no one on his first day home. Still. It is home. And that flutter in his heart feels like an ocean’s gale. And the salt lingers on his tongue.
4.
The moment that the Insect crosses into Vingus Country, the Astronomer freezes in his tracks. The people in the village see him halfway up the yellow hillside where his terrible tower stands. His left foot hovers over the ground in an aborted step. His right hand is nearly to his mouth. His lips remain parted, as though he is about to smile. Or speak. Or cry out.
The village folk see this, but they do not offer to help. Those who have business dealings with the Astronomer (and they are many) simply turn on their heels and hurry back down the hill. They do their best not to look at the Astronomer. Of course, this is nothing new.
His chest don’t rise and it don’t fall, the people have whispered.
There’s not a thing on that hill what’s alive, they’ve grumbled since he first arrived.
It’s not natural. All that star looking and planet tracking. It’s not natural with his infernal machines. It’s not natural at all. They seethe and seethe and seethe. Every day they watch the Astronomer turn the keys in his tower and mind the gears in his automatons and polish his instruments until they gleam. They know that he used neither an iota of magic nor a whiff
