Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories

by Kelly Barnhill

  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 of witchcraft in its construction and maintenances. What he uses is something else. And they don’t trust it.

  As the sun begins to set, one of his automatons walks out of the tower, its gears in need of tuning and grease, and hoists the Astronomer onto its back, hauling him inside. The next day, the Astronomer is back to normal.

  Or mostly normal.

  The village notices that a smile has begun to play on the Astronomer’s lips. One that has not been there before. It is fixed into his face as though with paste or paint or solder. And what’s worse, he has started muttering.

  “Wings,” the Astronomer whispers over and over again. “Wings, wings, wings. Thorax and segment and luminous eye. But, oh! Wings!”

  Sunup to sundown, he mutters without ceasing.

  And the villagers begin to worry.

  5.

  By the beginning of the Bug’s second day in Vingus Country, the loneliness of the journey has begun to take its toll. Now when he sees the figure of a man moving in the same direction that he, himself, is traveling, the Insect increases his speed, his long legs bounding down the road in great, leaping strides. He adjusts his five pinces-nez on his long snout and smooths his finely tailored waistcoat. He ignores the itching of his tightly bound wings. He clears his throat. He knows the value of a good first impression.

  “Tempora mutantur et nos mutantur in illis,”3 the Insect says to the man—a farmer, by the look of him. He dearly hopes that the man is impressed by this greeting. Indeed, it is terribly impressive, as well as being profoundly true. Has not the Pyca been changed by his time away? Has not his home country been changed as well?

  It is nearly noon, and the Hon. Professor is feeling peckish and overly warm. He would not mind an invitation to lunch on a blanket in the shade, or, even more desirable, to lunch in a farmhouse with cold milk and cold ale and a highly solicitous farmwife. He waves to the farmer and uncurls the final segment of his right arm to shake the man’s hand. With his left, he adjusts the two final pinces-nez at the end of his impressively long proboscis and gives what he is sure must be a winning smile.

  (The winning smile is important. After all, did Professor Pedantare not implore his students over and over with the same sage proclamation: Ut ameris, amabilis esto4? Surely, after all this time, the lesson still stands.)

  “Come again?” the farmer says. He is an aged fellow. His face is deeply creased and his back is bent. The Insect, in possession of a sensitive heart and a loving soul, is moved to pity. He reaches into his pack and pulls out a brightly colored parasol and proffers it to the farmer with a flourish. The farmer jumps backward and screams. “Attack an old man, will you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I have no money if that’s what yer asking.”

  The Pyca peers at the parasol, its bright point gleaming dangerously in the midday sun, and understands. “My apologies,” the Bug says. In the Capital City—a cosmopolitan, forward-thinking place—his appearance is, while unusual, rarely commented on. No one finds him particularly dangerous. Why would they? The Hon. Professor spent his career cultivating his erudition and his appearance. To see an insect standing eye to eye with a man must surely
be a surprise for the uninitiated, but seeing him decked in a perfectly tailored waistcoat of the finest brocade and a top hat imported from the Lands Beyond the Sea—well. Clearly the man is in shock. The Pyca decides to try a different tack.

  “My good man,” he says, “it occurs to me that my appearance alarms you. Fear not. I seek education and nothing more. As the scholars tell us, scientia potentia est.5 Have we not found such pearls of wisdom to be more than true? And if not, who are we to argue with scholars?”

  “Yer lookin’ for the Astronomer?”

  “My good man,” says the Pyca. “That is exactly who I seek. Quaere verum,6 my good professor once said to me. If I am to seek the truth, I believe the truth must rest in the hands of the man who watches the stars.”

  “Hmph,” the farmer grunts. “Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.”7

  So startled is the Professor that all five of his pinces-nez fly from his proboscis and tumble to the ground. One shatters irrevocably. “Why,” he sputters, pressing his hands to his heart, “my dear sir! You are a scholar!” In all his years in Vingus Country, he had never heard anyone respond in Latin—except glumly, in school, before the headmaster’s downward stare. It was the custom to, instead, bear the weight of learning with the patience of a snapping turtle, and leave it behind as soon as possible. This, after all, is why the Insect left.

  “No,” the farmer says darkly. “That man in the tower’s the scholar. If you can call him a man.” He pauses, rubs his hand over the gnarl of his face, expels breath through pursed lips. “It is rude, I know, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I won’t share the road with you, Mister . . . whatever you are. I’ll not invite you to my home, nor to my table, neither, but you’re welcome to the lunch my good wife packed for me in this sack.” He lets his sack fall to the ground, and he backs away. “This road’ll take you right to where you want to go. Walk ’til you find that infernal tower. It’s unnatural, is what it is. Stars. The Astronomer. All of it. Unnatural. And I’ll bid you good day.”

  And the farmer turns on his heel and walks down the road in the opposite direction. The Bug does not call out to him, nor does he beg him to return. “A strange sort of fellow,” he says, and pulls a hunk of meat from the satchel. He eats it slowly and presses onward through the shimmering hills.

  6.

  The Astronomer lives alone. He has always lived alone.

  The Astronomer, it is generally thought, first came to Vingus Country four decades ago. Or, perhaps it was four years. Or maybe a month. No one knows for sure. When the Vingare try to puzzle it out, when they try to count the years on their fingers and toes and hash out the months on bits of paper, or perhaps a wall, they find themselves drawing a blank. Their eyes lose their focus and their minds turn to thoughts of faraway dust clouds, the bright accretion of swirling nebulae, of planets made of water or ice or storm, and quietly pulsing stars. Their eyes gaze skyward and they forget why they questioned in the first place.

  The Astronomer has always been here.

  The Astronomer has just arrived.

  Both are true.

  No one knows where he traveled from, nor his country of origin, and he has never told. His accent is obscure, his clothes unusual, and his many trunks of fragile equipment unsettlingly strange.

  The Vingare asked him when he arrived—as they watched him carefully remove item after item from his line of trunks, inspecting each one for damage and wear—what his many tools were for, but he simply smiled vaguely and gave a delicate wave of his small, pale hand. “Oh, you know,” he said, over and over again, “work, work, work.” And then he would say nothing.

  The Vingare were unused to obscure answers. They are a concrete people. It became clear to the Vingare that the new resident was not like them, did not belong, and should probably leave their country, so they did their best to give him the cold shoulder. Or, as best they could. The Vingare are a welcoming people by nature, and usually not prone to open confrontation. They opted for subtle hints. Therefore, they did not line his walkway with rose petals, as was their custom, opting instead for a measly bundle of wildflowers (surely they would wilt soon) tied up in a ribbon that was not new, and presented in a vase. They thought certainly the Astronomer would feel the depths of their non-welcome, but he did not. He thanked them profusely for their kindness and declared the flowers the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

  The Vingare decided more drastic measures were needed. They brought him neither meat pies nor sugared fruits nor brightly colored jellies, opting instead for common foods like bread and cheese and wine. He did not take the hint. He declared that Vingus bread was better than the finest pastries in the Capital City, and that Vingus cheese and wine would rival the sundries produced in the most gastronomically famous cities in the Lands Beyond the Sea. The Vingare were flummoxed. They had never met so dense a fellow. They then threw no banquet in his honor, gave him not a single key to any city—high, low, or middling—and neglected to organize a welcoming parade. He refused to notice these slights as well.

  It was infuriating.

  Meanwhile, the Astronomer told anyone who would listen how much he admired the Vingare people, and how much he desired to become one of them. To that end, he altered his appearance to fit in with his adopted countrymen (his hair, his dress, even the color of his eyes and skin). He mimicked their mannerisms, their habits, their way of walking, and tried desperately to integrate the linguistic oddities peculiar to that region into his patterns of speech, but the results were disastrous. The more he tried to assimilate, the more strange he became to his neighbors.

  He never gave up his desire to become as near-to-like his chosen kinsmen as he could, however. And while he would never be Vingare, he would have to settle for Vingare-non-Vingare, and that would be that. And he would be alone.

  And in time, the Astronomer was—if not accepted—at least tolerated. He was to the Vingare like a rare bird, flown into their region by mistake, and too lost to find another way home. Not of them, or even with them, but near them. And the Astronomer had to content himself with that.

  To build his tower, the Astronomer contracted fifteen Vingus laborers, five Vingus draftsmen, nineteen ironworkers, twenty-two tinsmiths, three surveyors, two engineers, and one overseer. He set up a small tent—(There were stars inside, people said. Real stars that rose and set in tandem with the actual stars they represented.)—on the top of a hill and marked out a shape on the ground. It was said that before work began, he sat for hours in the center of that shape, staring at the sky.

  It took nearly five years to build the tower. (Or was it ten? Or twenty? No one can remember.) The Astronomer set up a second tent where matters of business and construction could be discussed. It was filled with drafting tables and chalkboards and narrow-drawered cabinets to accommodate and organize his meticulously drafted—and entirely inscrutable—plans.

  The Vingare soon realized that it didn’t matter how much they failed to understand the instructions laid out for them. The tower had a mind of its own.

  The hill upon which the tower slowly grew was tall and bald—a knob of rock in the center of a broad, flat yellow prairie. As a result, most Vingare were able to watch the tower as it progressed, floor by shining floor. They watched the silvery skeleton of each story uncurl from the struts below and hook together like a web. They watched as the substrate of machinery grew like lichen from the base.

  They held their hands to their open mouths. It was beautiful—but not in a way that they could name. It was a beauty that stopped their voices in their throats and held them silent.

  The tower had hollow walls with a complicated network of steam pipes, humming engines, tiny levers, and delicate gears. There were dumb waiters and smart waiters and waiters of unknowable intelligence. There were automatic ottomans that rolled toward any visitor who needed to put their feet up for a moment or two. On each floor were copper-plated mecha
nized arms, each with four elbows and nine fingers. These were placed at the four corners of each room, each one with a different function. One arm set up the desks and work tables each morning with razor sharp precision, one saw to the dust, one fetched things (books, pencils, napkins, drafting tools, toothpicks) moments before a person actually felt the need for them, and one took hats and coats and shook the hands of weary travelers.

  In addition to the mechanical arms on the inside, there were three on the outside, and these would lift materials and supplies to the laborers on the upper floors, as well as fetch lunch boxes, jugs of water, afternoon tea, notes from home, and—if a particular laborer looked as though they needed encouragement or were simply having a bad day—offer a sympathetic pat on the back.

  The Vingus laborers went home each evening, their mouths heavy with stories they could not tell. Not that they were forbidden—the Astronomer had told them he had no secrets that he minded sharing and no aspect of his tower that he’d rather keep hidden. No, they simply had no words. And so their husbands and wives and children and neighbors pestered them with questions that they lacked the language to answer.

  “What is in that tower?” their loved ones said. “What is he building?” they needled.

  “Nothing,” said the laborers. “Everything,” they countered.

  Both were true.

  7.

  The Insect lies on his curved, shining back and rests his head on the torso of a fallen tree. He tilts his head toward the domed sky and watches the clockwork movements of the glinting stars. He had grown accustomed to the luxury afforded to him at the university, but he does not miss it now. No featherbeds or scented sheets here, yet the Vingus soil gives way to the ease of his back, and the Vingus winds blow gentle and warm on his skin. He has never been more comfortable.