The Bibazon

Looking westwards, over the hilltops extinguished by the night’s deepest flight, there is Altair, the swift-spinning star transfixing the throat of Aquila—amid the self-canonized canon of Western constellations, the eagle who clasps the thunderbolts of Zeus in unearthly talons. In the reckoning of stellar lifetimes, Altair is only a youth at one hundred million years old; the melancholic stegosaurs could not have glimpsed it.

Overhead, the sister-stars of the Pleiades cling to one another, longing for a waning moon. This is the natural environment of the stargazer, a place lit by the curious radiance of the dark. The grass has surrendered its colors, and the trees and clumped thornbushes gather around them their skirts of shadows, abandoning their own shapes and permitting the generation of others, new and ambivalent.In the Oudemian civilization, which has not yet come into being, it has been speculated that just as plants draw their sustenance from the photosynthetic process, daily consuming the light, so too may there be organisms that eat the dark.

There is the constellation of Cassiopeia, the hapless Queen forever chained to her throne after daring to declare her daughter to be more beautiful than the weed-draped sea nymphs. It was in Cassiopeia that a supernova flared nearly five hundred years ago, evincing a universe far vaster and far more corruptible than was previously believed.

And there is Vega, so blue in Lyra, the celestial lyre. Due to the Earth’s precession, Vega appeared as the northern polestar some fourteen thousand years ago, when glaciers groaned in their retreat and humans translated megafauna into ochre upon cavern walls. Someday, it shall become the polestar once again. To the ancients of Greece, this was the instrument borne by the musician Orpheus. With Lyra he played melodies so heartrending they convinced Death itself to release his wife, though in accordance the sorrowful bargaining of gods, Orpheus would lose her once again. In Oudemia, the afterworld is said to be a book.

. There come the night noises: the hushed motions of things which do not wish to be seen, footfalls and snapped twigs, a soft gnawing. The bats speak their pinpricks, swooping low.

Not until the dawn’s agonizing brink will Sirius rise. The brightest star of the night sky, it forms one part of the constellation Canis Major; thus to many has it been long known as the Dog Star. Notoriously, to the ancients of Greece and Rome, Sirius shone not only as a harbinger of the summer’s most fervid heat, but furthermore as a warning of the canicular days, when we are especially susceptible to certain afflictions, including a heightened vulnerability to rabies, creeping indolence, nymphomania, and in some, a slow madness. Some folk writhed with amorousness, while others slavered and recoiled at the sound of running water, and others slumped with an almost despairing, almost delusional fatigue. Pliny the Elder provides that during the dog days, hydrophobia may be cured only with the root of a wild rose, as was perceived by an unnamed oracle; this was one of three canicular portents, he writes, alongside a talking dog and a barking snake. Beneath Sirius, the seas below grow tumultuous, and even in dim cellars the wine ripples in its barrels. But, Pliny explains, it is the gazelle in its desert haunts that is the first creature of the Earth to recognize the rise of the Dog Star, whereupon it emits a sneeze as a call of worship.

The air shifts now, an aimless wind arising just enough to stir the willows, and something is surely moving at the edge of the brambles, a pale form darting between shadows with just enough subtlety to be only half-believable. Perhaps a fox on the hunt, perhaps a cat conducting its mysteries, and perhaps that was the flash of possible eyes.

To the Oudemian civilization, which does not yet exist, Sirius is also part of the future constellation of the Bibazon. In some accounts, the Bibazon is an animal not dissimilar to a jackal, though its face is not entirely unlike a lemur or a person. The creature’s body is mammalian, though it is shaped like sand. Standing as tall as a poet, its neck somewhat resembles that of a wood-pigeon, but its limbs are agile and taut; one source locates the wings as nestled against the dewclaws, while the teeth move diagonal. Like the moon swollen upon the horizon, it appears larger from a particular distance. In the celestial Bibazon, the Dog Star represents the disquietingly large eye.

Whether any living specimens of the creature endure has yet to be confirmed, as does its reality. A certain museum is said to hold its wishbone in a locked collection, but few Oudemians place any trust in this grim institution. Some skeptics thus identify the Bibazon as a kind of narrative device, beyond the overwrought testimonies found in dubiously confirmed bestiaries. In many legends, the beast is a standard monster confronting the archetypal hero, who must battle it with enchanted weapons or cunning tricks, for various reasons: familial honor, a stolen birthright, a homeward journey, true romance.Sometimes it possesses an artificial heart. Only in one eschatological myth does the animal exhibit any benevolence, when before a great conflagration, it conceals the world in its mouth. As such, many claim, the Bibazon is generally a metaphor for the tribulations which beset us all.

By now, it is certain that the scurrying shape beneath the trees is not a mere figment, not a trick of starlight upon a briar; that is certainly the flash of eyes. Wild animals, we are told, are more scared of us than we of them.

However phantasmal the depictions of the Bibazon, note other Oudemian scholars, the fact persists that the rise of Sirius heralds a dangerous time, that spell of fever-heat in which people easily fall prey to peculiar ailments. When the Bibazon wheels across the firmament, people tend towards panics and paranoias, or are seized by fervid rages, or go reeling into the unhealthy imaginary, capable of hearing the thoughts of colors and falling in love with anything. With eyes shimmering in their delirium, they envision birds which are also hands, and burn with inarticulable emotions of which they are certain none has felt ever before, and fancy themselves to be alphabets.

Therefore, say some observers, the Bibazon and its brightest star evince the words of Sir Thomas Browne, that we should affirm that all things were within all things, that heaven were but earth celestified, and earth but heaven terrestrified, and each part above has its influence upon its divided affinity below. So wrote the royal physician in 1650. In the halls of Oudemia, the echoes will profess that yes, as above, so below: the Bibazon in its monstrous absurdity calls forth the same within us. Critics claim this is no more than superstition.

Sirius is in fact a binary system, a body twice the mass of the sun locked in orbit with a white dwarf, the last exhausted fragment of another stellar core.We do not know how the paired stars appear to one another. Perhaps we ought to flee inside, by now, for the shadow with its incandescent eyes is surely coming closer, the rustles and cracks of its movement are amplifying, and its intentions are silent.

In another interpretation, the Bibazon is decidedly real, though it cannot be said to be singular. It is at once the animal, unwonted and uncaught, and it is also the constellation with its treacherous star, disrupting earthly hearts. But, so it is said, the Bibazon will not bear to remain bound to the superlunary spheres. As the tale warns, it has always been approaching, coming ever so slightly closer with each spell of summer madness; just as Sirius spurs our canicular frenzies, so too do we drive it into a fascinated mania, deranging the order of the celestial spheres. None have precisely estimated the time of the Bibazon’s arrival, nor what shall then come to pass, though it is said that this will be preceded by the sound of a sudden exhalation, somewhere in the blue desert.