Original subtitles

(birdsong)

Orchard Falla is a Capistan-speaking young male man.

He suffers from aching teeth, gross anaemia and a marrow deficiency.

For his age and his condition, he is heavy.

There is no known photograph of him.

Orchard lives outside Arklow, County Wicklow,

and works in an ironmonger's that makes a profit selling chicken wire.

It is not known what he thinks of the Violent Unknown Event.

He is very noncommittal about the Responsibility of Birds,

though in an unguarded moment, he has described his enemy as the FOX.

This might be no more enigmatic

than a reference to his profession as a seller of chicken wire.

At least once every 24 hours, Orchard drives five miles to the coast,

ostensibly to collect the skulls of seabirds.

He often returns with one hidden in the toe of a pair of perished waders

he keeps in the back of his car.

Concealment is a precaution in case he is challenged.

His finds are usually limited to the jaw of an oystercatcher

or the head of a herring gull sliced from its tar-covered body

with the penknife given to him by his employer last Bird-Fall Day.

Orchard often spends his time at the beach, day or night,

staring at the sea with both hands clamped tightly to his lower jaw

in the unlikely hope of squeezing away the toothache.

In such a position, he stares fixedly to the southeast.

If he had turned his gaze 45 degrees and stared due east,

he might have faced the horizon that hid the Lleyn Peninsula of Wales,

which is what he wanted to stare at.

As it was, he misplaced his time, his energy and his anxiety

by staring at the horizon that hid Pembrokeshire,

which was much too far to the south.

Constance Ortuist Fallaburr

is a Sackamayer-speaking middle-aged female woman.

She would admit her interest in flight has been a long one.

Since the Violent Unknown Event

she has developed an earthbound shape due to an engrossed coccyx.

She harbours doubts about the Responsibility of Birds

and having an exaggerated respect for gravity, now shuns flight herself.

Constance has two houses side by side on the coast at Southwold, Suffolk.

The one on the left was rented by her husband,

aviation historian Melorder Fallaburr.

It served as a holiday home for air orphans.

The other house was for Constance's own use,

and was crammed with furniture thrown out from airport lounges.

It was called le nid

after the initials of Nathan Isole Dermontier,

who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1870.

Melorder said the story was a fabrication,

not least because the Eiffel Tower did not exist until 1889.

Constance replied that Dermontier must have jumped from Les Invalides.

Both houses have since been demolished

and the bricks used to strengthen sea defences.

Constance now lives in a house beside the main runway at Zürich airport.

And her favourite Tulse Luper story is The Cassowary.

A jet aircraft on a cloudless night began its landing flight path

20 miles due east from the airport where it was due to land.

For the first five miles, the noise from its engine disturbed no one.

At the sixth mile, an ornithologist on a reservoir

was irritated by the jet noise just enough

to give the aircraft a glance. He turned into a swan.

At the seventh mile, a naturalist and his wife saw the aircraft

through their bedroom curtains and turned into crows.

At the eighth mile, four children in a dormitory

saw it through a skylight and turned into herons.

At the ninth mile, seven nurses in an old people's home saw the plane

and turned into swallows.

At the tenth mile, 21 members of eight families saw the plane

and turned into gulls.

By the 19th mile, 24,927 people

in two towns, four villages and a camping site had seen the plane.

Most of them had turned into penguins.

When the plane exploded on the airstrip,

a cassowary stepped from the wreckage

and checked into the VIP lounge.

Melorder Fallaburr, the husband of Constance Fallaburr,

is a comparative-flight historian,

about to make his first flight from one of London's tall buildings.

What number, Melorder, is this building on your list?

It's in the top 20, but there's some trouble getting a permit to land.

Is it high enough?

It's a possibility, though the draughts are inauspicious.

I don't want to end up in the Thames. I can't swim, even if I can fly.

His last words in English were recorded on a tape recorder

in a hotel bedroom at The Crane at Bungay, Suffolk,

where he was making a survey of East Anglian decoy airfields

for the Imperial War Museum.

... two land mines dropped, making a crater big enough to hide a hayrick.

Present owner, Phoenix Insurance Company.

Decoy airfield half a mile from fork in Carrow to Redroads Lane.

From 11940, had lights and fires to attract enemy bombers.

Your researchers have surely told you that success has been very limited?

We all know there has been a conspiracy.

Only the failures have been recorded.

We are all too interested in Icarus and not enough in his father.

Melorder had been employed as a witness of the Violent Unknown Event,

and because of what he saw he had himself sterilised

as a precaution against making his wife pregnant.

He need not have worried. Most of those affected by the VUE,

male and female alike, became sterile anyway.

Melorder's brother-in-law, Rapper Begol,

had flippantly said that a true VUE mutant could only reproduce itself

with the aid of a placenta that had developed an eggshell.

Melorder and his wife rarely lived together after he was sterilised.

Is it true you were married in a DC 110 flying over the Eiffel Tower?

That was the intention.

But by the time the chaplain recovered from airsickness,

we were over Les Invalides.

Will your wife watch the flight?

No. She said, "Too much entertainment,

and not enough research."

What about the timing?

For the inaugural flight, I intend to use lights,

so the most auspicious time would be in the evening, round about now.

I'll make it down into the shadow of the building

when the shadow is at its longest.

That shadow is important to you?

Consider the times it's rotated around this building.

I was born down there. My mother started labour in that shadow

and had to wait until it came around again before she was finished.

When his duties as an official observer were over,

he had turned to publishing an encyclopaedic history of flight

and to the formation of an aircraft museum at Rishangles.

It's said that, having started life in shadow,

that's how it will end for you.

No. I can't help them out.

I've no intention of fulfilling that particular forecast.

Besides, if I fail, it will ruin your producers.

The BFI, the Bird Facilities Investments, might never film again.

The VUE had affected Melorder's sight for the better

and his hearing for the worse.

And the muscles of his arms, chest and back

had become enlarged, engorged and strengthened.

His doctor referred to the phenomenon as petagium fellitis

or skin-wing aggrievement.

This characteristic persuaded Melorder

that his historical and theoretical knowledge of human flight

should be put to practical use.

I hear Armeror Fallstag has ordered you a wreath.

He should save his money. I'm not dying by gravity.

I'd rather be pecked to death by penguins.

Appis (Arris) Fallabus is a Regest-speaking young male man.

He is partially blind, sensitive to temperature and has poor circulation.

Nightly, he has to lubricate himself with Spanish oil.

(speaks Dutch)

Is it true that you are plagued with body lice?

Yes, it is.

Everything you can imagine, ticks, lice,

termites, tapeworms. Everything. You name it.

After a change in the weather, it's especially bad.

Worse in summer, and impossible to get rid of at sea level.

Within reason, I have been advised to make them moderately comfortable

by wearing wool. But I live with it.

Appis, whose comprehension of urban Dutch has not entirely disappeared,

had been born in Zeelem, an isolated village

surrounded by canals that only appeared to empty due to evaporation.

In winter, every inch of water in Zeelem turned to ice

and the body predators that worried Appis slept, froze

or otherwise temporarily capitulated.

It is said that you identify with swallows. Is this correct?

Yes, it's true. But nowadays, that's not unique, is it?

Appis would have been an expert long-distance ice skater

but his mother believed it was dangerous

for his poor circulation to spend too much time out of doors in the winter.

Appis's mother was not a victim of the Violent Unknown Event.

As she grew older and her son remained the same age,

she discovered a new worry for each new season.

She could not have too many seasons left,

so Appis patiently waited to be set free to enjoy immortality on his own.

Meanwhile, he managed a kite factory,

in some part satisfying a desire for unaided flight in himself

and in the 19 million other victims of the VUE.

Is it true your father was killed by a bird counter named Van Hoyten?

My father was at the Amsterdam zoo studying saltwater fish,

when Van Hoyten was employed there as a bird counter.

They quarrelled,

apparently because my father had a fox tattooed on his chest.

It was said they were rivals.

In the summer, Appis flew a stunt kite to intimidate the birds

who he blamed directly for his predicament.

I'm told you drink salt water to crack the ice in your pancreas.

I do? Perhaps you're confusing me with someone else.

My father was always experimenting, putting plaice in the canals

and stimulating the salt glands in pelagic birds.

What do you think of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds?

Well, the coincidences seem inexhaustible, obviously.

But I leave it entirely to the experts.

When flying his kite, Appis left swallows alone

knowing that a single bird of that species could be preyed upon

by a dozen different types of parasite,

and that was punishment enough.

Standard Fallaby has a DC3 single berth caravanette with a glass roof.

In winter, he hides it in caravan sites in the west of England,

ostensibly that it might escape the scrutiny of his sister Tasida Fallaby

whose attentions, says Standard, are not ornithological

and exceed those of an orthodox brother-and-sister relationship.

The VUE Directory Commission have, as yet,

not been able to locate Standard Fallaby or his caravan.

The VUE has contracted Standard's intestine and paralysed his legs.

He is obliged to cling to a hanging brace when asked to stand up.

He speaks Curdine.

Curdine is a cursive language

that deliberately fosters ambiguities and encourages punning.

Tulse Luper has said that in the larynx of the right man,

Curdine would be a superlative language,

an antidote to all the world's feathers.

Since the VUE,

Standard Fallaby has developed an interest in the Corvidae.

Every rook-nesting season, he parks beneath a rookery

somewhere in West England in sight of the Atlantic.

He has made a claim to the World Society for the Preservation of Birds

to have discovered a rook subspecies, Corvus frugilegus atlanticus,

whose diet is largely shellfish and whose call imitates young seagulls.

The WSPB has not recognised his claim.

(reads aloud in Curdine)

"My brother and I were born holding hands."

"My mother says so. His father denies it."

"I sometimes think I took the first small step out of the womb."

Tasida Fallaby is two years and seven months older than her brother.

"He deferred to me."

"This contradicts what might be read on our birth certificates."

"But then I have no patience with bureaucracies."

"It's water off a duck's back to them."

Apart from a thickening of the exterior muscles,

the Violent Unknown Event has only modified Tasida's interior,

leaving her exterior unmolested and encouraging her belief in naturism.

"When I was 15, my hair was longer than his, but he was taller."

"It didn't matter. He got over it."

The Directory credits Tasida with a partially collapsed lung,

a singing tinnitus, black-and-white vision,

a doubling of the menstrual cycle,

and, unlike her brother, a twisting of the intestine into tighter coils

so that Tasida suffers intense cramps and often has malodorous breath.

"Malodorous" is a translation of the adjective that she used

in the autobiography she presented to the VUE Commission

to counteract the statistics she was sure to find describing her

in the VUE Directory.

Tasida's autobiography runs to more than 300 pages written in Curdine,

though the Directory has registered her as a speaker in Katan.

At her insistence the autobiography was read aloud

for the benefit of the Commission who recorded the whole,

taking a greater part of a day to do so.

"I married Messenger after my great disappointment."

"I took to nursing like a duck takes to water."

"Messenger married me for it."

"But as time went on,

I realised that he was too interested in the clothing industry."

"He was even selling stockings to my friend Sanchia."

"I told him to stop making his business interest

break up our relationship."

Tasida has painstakingly learnt a mechanical Curdine

so she might talk to her brother.

Since he only wanted to talk about birds,

she pronounced ornithological terms

with an exactness suggesting enthusiasm.

"It is essential that my version of the facts be taken into account."

Curdine, notorious for ambiguity,

is certainly antipathetic to being spoken mechanically.

Tasida therefore spoke it with some courage, if not rashness.

Her blunt pronunciation contained layers of unconscious innuendo

and the ambiguous imagery had a hazardous relevance.

"...since a mere list of Commission Statistics compiled by assistants

who don't know a ruff from a decorated neckband,

it's bound to be unacceptable, and on this Standard is bound to agree."

Lacer Fallacet, after the Violent Unknown Event, had a dark head,

calloused hands and barked in Agreet like a person unwilling to use words.

She owned a succession of voiceless bitches, named after female aviators,

and her favourite Tulse Luper story. Was The Photographer's Dog.

A naturalist took a photograph of a dead dog on a beach.

The corpse was a week old...

Lacer Fallacet suffered from rheumatism, muscular spasms

and a loss of taste buds.

She was classified as an elderly female woman.

The VUE knocked three inches off her height

and added three stone to her weight.

According to her godson Rapper Begol, Lacer was born on Bardsey Island

where dogs hunted seagulls and learnt to imitate their cry.

Before the VUE, Lacer had variously been a child-minder,

a maths teacher and a pastry cook. She had worked in Sweden

as a swimming instructress, a dietician and a veterinary assistant.

Lacer married a pharmacist from Brougan

and had two daughters who married Russian pilots.

Her granddaughters came to England on Bird-Fall Scholarships

and, having gained political asylum, live in Canada.

- Puffin. - Black-headed gull.

Whatever her other attributes,

Lacer Fallacet has not been able to teach her dogs to fly,

though she may have witnessed, on a visit to the Ukraine,

laboratory tests that suggested dog flight was not impossible.

Six months after the VUE,

the first dog Lacer took up in a plane was a spaniel named Harzy

after Frau Esterházy.

But the first solo flight

was reserved for a three-year-old boxer bitch called Louise.

At Lacer's command, Louise jumped from a helicopter at 1,000 feet

and landed on loose straw in a field outside Copenhagen.

The second jump was from 2,000 feet and was unsuccessful.

The dog landed in a children's playing field.

Lacer was threatened with prosecution but the charge did not stick.

She was fined three kroner

for exercising a dog in a public place without a lead.

Nine days after the VUE,

Arris Fallacie gave evidence of being a dreamer-of-water,

Category One, Flight, which is nearly always illustrated

by the Bedfordshire Level Sequence from HE Carter's film The Last Wave.

Questioned, Arris found no difficulty

identifying his dream with the sample.

At the time of the VUE,

Arris was travelling to London from boarding school in Perth.

He was in a second-class non-smoking compartment facing the engine.

Both schoolboys developed identical VUE symptoms,

but the friend spoke Carn-est-aero and Arris spoke Itino Re.

The language conversion was abrupt and complete.

Their last collaborative work in English had been a mild punishment.

Arris began to spend more and more time asleep.

He developed a stammer round the letter H,

a lung inflammation and a shrinkage of the stomach wall.

He was sent to a dietary counsellor

at the isolation hospital at Bryne Boars, Chesil Beach.

But Arris never arrived.

On the train journey, searching for the toilet to be sick,

he opened the wrong door and fell into the path of an oncoming train.

Mashanter Fallack was registered as a speaker in English and Karnash,

with a knowledge of Allow-ease.

To identify herself with the victims of the VUE,

she insisted in speaking Karnash in public.

(speaks Karnash)

English to her was a language

prepared to debase ornithological nomenclature to an unacceptable level

demonstrating the paucity of the English concern

with the phenomenon of the Violent Unknown Event.

Do you think these film biographies are going to profit the VUE victims?

Of course. Think of who's involved, the IRR, the BFI, the COI,

the European Section of the WSPB, not to miss the Directory Commission.

These bodies have access to a viewing public that covers half the world.

Do you think public money is well spent on making films like this?

Do you ask about the public money being paid to all these people

in all these government offices?

I'm surprised that you of all people can ask that question.

Mashanter was born in the Canary Isles, though at times she denies it.

She now has an office in Berkeley Square.

Her parents were Danish.

Her father was an architect now employed building aviaries.

Her mother, a doctor, drowned in a ship's swimming pool.

Do you think there's any point in the IRR

making a separate case for VUE victims?

On the night of the VUE Mashanter was on holiday in Venice.

Apart from some migraine and insomnia Mashanter suffered little physically.

Her metabolism was invigorated.

At night, she studied ornithological literature.

She began to campaign for a better appreciation of avian terminology.

Soon she was spending her income in the magistrates' courts

paying fines for disturbance of the peace, harassment,

being a public nuisance and defacing public monuments.

Mashanter's favourite Tulse Luper story was Sparrow Week.

To curb flocks of sparrows eating one-third of its food production,

a nation organised Sparrow Week.

Day and night, for seven days, the country's population

rang bells, banged saucepan lids and shouted.

The sparrows, frightened to settle, eventually fell dead out of the sky.

Flight exhaustion from the same cause also killed gulls on the coast,

herons in the marsh, eagles in the mountains

and pigeons on the town square.

On the seventh day, Sparrow Week ended.

Next year two-thirds of the country's food supply was eaten by insects

and the money standard changed from gold to eggs.

Were you speaking metaphorically when you said

you were preparing to lay your own golden egg?

(laughs)

Can I take it that...

The compilation of the biography of a living person is a sensitive matter.

Where necessary, and in nearly every case where the subject wanted it,

various forms of anonymity were used.

The VUE Commission offered a choice of ten pseudonymous identities

and Squaline Fallaize, the subject of biography 10, chose identity 10

for she recognised it for another bird victim.

She has requested that accounts of her life should be brief,

unillustrated and translated for her mother's benefit into Kath-a-ganian.

She also insisted it be narrated by a woman.

"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,

yellow skin and a blaze on her forehead

in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle."

(Kath-a-ginian)

"Squaline Fallaize had shining eyes,

yellow skin and a blaze on her forehead

in the shape of the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle."

"She spoke whatever language took her fancy,

her whims influenced by her appetite, which was usually small."

"She was known as a reticent conversationalist."

"Squaline was paid a retainer by the Language Commission."

"When it learnt she was getting an appetite,

the Language University at Caracas

sent several senior professors to her flat on Cappis Island."

"A large meal was cooked slowly in her small kitchen

whilst the linguists sat on the floor of her dining room

to listen to her fluency in 47 languages."

"The two chefs and the waiter who served the meal were paid for

out of a university expense account reserved for ringing storks."

There is some evidence to suggest that Squaline Fallaize is a fiction.

(telephone rings)

(speaks French)

Carlos Fallantly lost his wife...

...at the time of the Violent Unknown Event.

She was a voluble, untidy woman...

...who made her own clothes...

...and washed once a week in the water...

...wrung out of the laundry.

She was invaluable to her husband.

She looked after his poultry,

kept his accounts...

...and when roused...

...was as uxorious a wife...

...as Carlos could wish to have.

On the night of June 12th of the VUE, Carlos's wife suffered a stroke.

Carlos transferred his affection to a turkey.

The VUE Directory records for Carlos

a malfunction of the left ventricle, bone-marrow disease

and, save for the VUE immortality clause,

would have normally given him six months to live.

Carlos had buried his wife in the floor of his greenhouse.

The local authorities had the body exhumed.

Now Carlos lived in the greenhouse to keep his turkey company.

A fowl pest epidemic finally erased Carlos's other poultry.

Two veterinary officials

came to make sure he had burnt or buried all the corpses.

Insisting the one remaining bird should be destroyed,

the vet promised to compensate Carlos with at least a set of photographs.

These were taken as the vet stalked the bird with his camera

whilst the vet's assistant stalked the bird with a shotgun.

Carlos was not happy with the photographs.

He is now awaiting trial at Clichy for shooting the vet.

(sings)

Musicus Fallantly had quickly acclimatised himself

to the effects of the Violent Unknown Event.

A sufferer of petagium fellitis and a speaker of Allow,

he moved to Port Madoc, learnt to sing in Welsh, practised illusionism

and began a study of linguistics he called aero-ethnography.

Musicus worked on an Allow/Welsh dictionary

and adapted da Vinci's notes on human flight

as a text for the VUE anthem.

Musicus also wrote a Welsh/ Allow choral work

celebrating 92 early flight pioneers.

This work, of great complexity and an excess of narrative,

proceeded by listing categories of flight.

The characters were pilots, night pilots, airmen, flyers,

aeronauts and female aeronauts, birdmen and gullers.

A "guller" was an Allow word

for those whose attempts to fly had taken place over water.

Icarus had been a guller.

Musicus called his work Sky Lists and dedicated it to Van Riquardt,

the French patriot and pioneer airman

who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

Cadence, Musicus's wife, said that the film was a reconstruction

because the moving-picture camera wasn't invented until 1895.

Van Riquardt had been a linguist

and a baritone in the Lycée Nouvelle Ménilmontant.

Musicus Fallantly's eldest son Vanrick was named after Van Riquardt

but although interested in his father's illusionism,

he had no interest in choral work, language or self-propelled flight.

He became a sound recordist.

"Dear sir, In reply to your query about Wrallis Fallanway,

my husband was on artificial lake 11 early on the morning of June 13th."

In this dry overflow gully, Wrallis Fallanway began his post-VUE life

after three hours of artificial resuscitation.

His body had been found floating above the weir

on the Lake Marmion Complex, Ontario.

"At half past five, he said the lake shook three times,

the ripples coming from the edge of the lake towards the centre,

the reverse of what would happen if you threw a stone into the water."

"I'm not hiding the fact that my husband was a nationalised Canadian."

"He took his Canadian name from the road where we lived at Kashabowie."

"The road had been named after Lewis Fallan the lumberjack,

a second-generation Patagonian Welshman like Wrallis."

"He'd worked for the Goldhawk Company as a topman,

and he'd been crushed by a giant redwood,

the ones you don't find any more as they've all been pulled down."

"The second time Wrallis felt the lake shake

he fell into the boat and banged his head on the rowlock."

"When he sat up again he felt sure he'd got something in his eye."

"He felt sick at the back of his throat and nose, and his eyes ran."

"He was giddy for a long time."

"I learnt from my neighbours it was common knowledge

that Lewis Fallan had been awarded damages for his accident."

"The Goldhawk Company presented his widow with a certificate

and a tray of eagle eggs and named a road in Kashabowie after him."

"The road is supposed to be exactly 57 metres long,

as long as the redwood that crushed Fallan's chest."

"The third time, my husband fell into the lake."

"Air in his anorak must have kept him afloat

as he remembers nothing else."

"He was picked up by a Goldhawk vessel from the weir

about ten in the morning. He'd been in the water five hours."

"They gave my husband the day off and said he was lucky they'd found him."

"Wrallis became blind two days later and he kept falling over."

Wrallis Fallanway is registered as a middle-aged male man

suffering from Ménière's disease, migraine and apoplexy.

His lips grew calloused, his tongue diminished

and a nictitating membrane on his left eye

operated involuntarily in conditions of bright light,

making his vision sparkle with refracted lights.

"They sent me a certificate

which said that the Goldhawk Fisheries Company named the lake,

number 11 lake, after my husband, the Wrallis Fallanway Lake."

"They gave me a case of stuffed fish. They look like flying fish."

"Here's hoping my knowledge of my husband's case can help you."

"Sincerely yours, Asecretor Fallanway."

Allia Fallanx is the fourth Custodian of the Boulder Orchard,

the recognised geographical epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event.

The Boulder Orchard's first permanent Custodian was HE Carter,

painter, film-maker, banjo-player, hydronomist and indexer.

The second Custodian was Rapper Begol,

photographer, embryologist,

saxophonist, fire-watcher and writer of Egg Tales.

I noticed a brown sort of ball...

The third Custodian was Catuso Phelpis,

singer and ornithological registrar.

Allia Fallanx, as pianist, ornithologist, cataloguer,

apiarist and expert on flying reptiles,

perpetuated and expanded the Custodian tradition.

However, the publication of personal details of VUE Commission employees

is forbidden. This embargo does not extend to their families,

so it is possible to consider the VUE history of Allia's wife,

Starling Fallanx.

(The Lady is a Tramp)

Starling Fallanx, singer, firework enthusiast,

wanderer, collector of berets, bird hats and cardboard boxes,

authority on the nightingale,

was struck down by the VUE near a late-flowering hawthorn bush

on the road into the Manifold Valley.

Starling met Allia just eight hours after the VUE.

They were both suffering from sore feet.

After some wanderings,

with or without the VUE's disorienteering experience,

she moved into the Tyddyn-Corn Farm with her children and hats

when Allia became the Fourth Custodian of the Boulder Orchard.

She likes green grass underneath her shoes

Perhaps finding it difficult to cripple a moving target,

the VUE's interest in Starling Fallanx has been sporadic.

But now she has settled she can no longer taste salt,

open her eyes under water, wear velvet or smell hawthorn blossom.

But she can teach her daughters the 32 songs of the nightingale

and astonish them by locking her Achilles tendons

to grip apples with the soles of her feet.

She likes the theatre but she never stays late

Of all the VUE's attributes Starling felt the most,

and, at the same time, the least enthusiastic about, was immortality.

Barring accidents she would outlive her daughters and granddaughters.

Her kinship with her great-great-granddaughters

would be so diluted that she could scarcely claim a relationship.

She ought by then to be back on the road, maybe starting another family.

There would be chances to begin again.

She goes to opera and she knows every line

She goes to Shakespeare and she thinks him fine

She goes to the opera she knows every line

On the long drives to distant jazz clubs,

Starling kept an eagle eye on the fields looking for scarecrows,

the only site to be buried in

if a VUE victim wished to terminate a relationship with birds.

She likes to go swimming down in Abersoch Bay

She goes to the eisteddfod and she stays wide awake

Ipson and Pulat Fallari were brothers in fiction and half-brothers in fact,

or, thanks to Tulse Luper, maybe the other way around.

Either way they were inseparable.

Ipson Fallari on the right is marginally the eldest,

his mother being Iloge Kyle, who was the elder twin sister of Cloge Kyle

who was the mother of Pulat. The next improbable fact is more difficult.

The 14th VUE Directory declared the brothers to be dead,

shot in an airport hotel in Medina Sidonia

by the only legitimate son of their father.

The Directory is then silent for two years

only to resurrect them in the 17th edition,

this time spelling Ipson as Ipsan.

The father of the Fallari brothers, Crozier Fallari Raphael,

was a feathering and marbling café painter.

In 1939, he'd married a café proprietor's widow

in the Carcenne District of Brussels.

To this lady he'd given a son, Tason Raphael.

Next year, Crozier Raphael joined the British Royal Air Force

and met the refugee Walloon twins, Iloge and Cloge Kyle.

Crozier was killed at Dunkirk

and the Kyle twins each had a son in the same three-hour period.

They were christened Fallari, their father's second Christian name,

and reached their 18th birthday before being aware

of yet another and legitimate stepbrother.

Thinking of themselves as twins of twins,

Ipson and Pulat believed they possessed charmed lives,

took great physical risks, became air couriers and learnt to fly.

They practised parachuting and worked for a circus.

One New Year's Eve they climbed Cologne Cathedral,

and for an encore, crossed the Rhine jumping from ice floe to ice floe.

They ended up in the freezing water, and against expectation, survived.

But the Violent Unknown Event abruptly changed their luck.

From now on they were to share only the symptoms of high blood pressure

and perfectly synchronised blackouts.

They were obliged to relinquish their pilot's licence.

For Ipson it was not an enormous loss.

Pulat took any chance he could to sit at the controls of a small plane

and taxi it in small circles until the fuel was exhausted.

Ipson spoke Allow-ease and Pulat spoke Capistan.

Allow is terse and impersonal, full of abbreviations and imperatives

as though invented for use on a parade ground,

or for the writer of instruction manuals.

Capistan is a lazy, gentle language, spoken from the front of the mouth

and requiring unusual amounts of saliva and exposure of the tongue.

The two languages are as remote from one another as appears possible.

The brothers' adroit, inexhaustible crosstalk was at an end.

Previous to the VUE,

only one event in their lives had so come between them.

That had been Ipson's marriage to Stachia Lacquer.

The introduction of the third party

stretched fraternal loyalties intolerably.

After two years of impossible situations, swapped identities

and frustrated privacy, Stachia had walked out.

There was no way of persuading the VUE to leave.

The half-brothers had experienced several years of VUE's malevolence,

when, with a party of naturalists, they visited Medina Sidonia

on a forced fuelling stop.

They befriended the airport controller and his wife.

As was usual when meeting strangers,

before long the Fallari brothers had communicated their complex origins

to the amused delight of the airport controller's wife.

At three the following morning,

the airport controller burst into the Fallari hotel room

and shot at Ipson and Pulat with an emergency distress pistol.

The controller turned out to be Tason Raphael,

the Fallaris' stepbrother, the only legitimate son of their father.

All three were found unconscious. They'd blacked out.

The Fallaris with high blood pressure

and the stepbrother with alcohol.

From this incident and with assistance

from Tulse Luper's fictional account of the Fallaris,

the Commission Directory drew its conclusions.

A close scrutiny of a plane's passenger list leaving the day after

would show, if not the names of Ipson and Pulat Fallari,

then the names of Ipson and Pulat Raphael,

save Ipson's name had been spelt Ipsan.

(birdsong)

Stachia Lacquer was an authority on vegetable oils.

She was a portrait photographer, a writer and an illustrator.

Stachia finished writing and illustrating The Tar-Barrel Crow

five years before the Violent Unknown Event,

and three years to the day before she met Pulat Fallari.

Stachia Lacquer had gone to Madras to cremate her father

who had been killed in a public disturbance.

She was drinking lemonade on a hotel veranda

when Ipson Fallari fell on top of her.

He'd been tightrope walking the balustrade of the veranda above.

He was awaiting the return of his half-brother Pulat

from conducting a party of English naturalists in Sri Lanka.

Stachia suffered a sprained wrist, a bruised shoulder

and a sliver of lemonade glass had sliced into her thigh.

She was in hospital for three days.

Ipson stayed with her and afterwards helped her to convalesce.

On Stachia's recovery, they flew to Hamburg and got married.

Five days later, Pulat, Ipson's half-brother, found out.

Determined not to be disturbed, he played down its significance.

He helped them set up house on the Vogelstrasse

opposite the statue of Haberlein, the discoverer of archaeopteryx.

For three months, they vastly enjoyed each other's company,

then Pulat began flying long trips, alone to towns without airfields.

Eventually he crashed in North Africa and broke both legs.

Ipson found him and promised to repudiate the marriage.

For a time this worked, then Ipson began seeing his wife again.

Again Pulat found out, and crashed at sea.

He turned up five months later on Smith Island in the New Hebrides.

Stachia suggested Pulat should come and live at the Vogelstrasse.

But after months of impossible situations, swapped identities

and frustrated privacy, Stachia could stand it no longer and walked out.

She wrote and illustrated a story

about a wooden chair that grew back again into a tree,

bore fruit and propagated a forest of chairs.

The story was bought by a seed company

and Stachia wrote their advertising copy.

With funds from the company's publicity account,

she built up an aviary of tropical birds

in Mexico City and then in Amsterdam. Before long she met Van Hoyten,

the Head of the Ornithological Department of Amsterdam zoo

and they were living together at the time of the VUE.

Stachia's VUE complaint is rare. It has been diagnosed as

de faire blessure or the opening of old wounds.

The first sign was inflammation of the skin

around an old scar tissue on her left elbow.

Stachia had fallen on her elbow when she was three years old.

This was followed by the opening of scar tissue on her ears.

Her ears had been pierced when she was seven.

Then bleeding under her arm. Stachia at 15 had cut herself shaving.

Scar tissue on her thigh started to bleed

and she was brought to hospital.

It was the scar from the Madras lemonade glass.

Stachia has spent most of her life in hospital since then.

A recipient of blood transfusions,

prone to persistent low blood pressure and periodic blackouts.

The Directory Certificate states Stachia's condition was caused

by blood emulsification due to an inability to absorb organic oils.

Stachia Fallari is registered as an Allow speaker but rarely speaks.

Her doctor says his patient felt that terse, impersonal Allow,

full of abbreviations and imperatives was antipathetic to her sympathies.

She is now learning Capistan, the language that is lazy and gentle

and requires unusual amounts of saliva and exposure of the tongue.

Aptesia Fallarme, for the purpose of this biography,

has been persuaded to adopt a pseudonymous identity.

It's relevant that she chose a bird victim who was also an actress.

In this unprofessional capacity,

Aptesia received dedications of thanks.

Aptesia Fallarme is supposed to have been the model for the character

Happy Enido in Leo-dee-nine's novel A Sea-Vue.

"She could fill a warm porcelain bath in 20 minutes,

a warm tin bath took a little longer."

"To fill a cold tin bath in less than an hour needed other inducements

like a view of the sea, a cow being milked, or the sound of a waterfall."

Much has been written about Aptesia Fallarme,

most of it exaggerated and most of it scurrilous.

The fair-minded Tulse Luper said, "She was a waterfall on legs."

Majority Powels said,

"She was a creature designed to render the services of an oasis."

"The water poured from her skin,

from the corners of her mouth, from her nose."

"As to the orifices more specialised for the expulsion of water

the audiences were rarely disappointed..."

"...and in the little bathrooms of the suburbs,

the water splashed upon the carpet

and they clapped and threw coins into the bath."

"In summer she was asked to stand on bare patches of lawn in the garden."

Aptesia herself was responsible for part of her exaggerated reputation.

Within months of the VUE, she was travelling far and wide,

exploiting her new characteristics

at disreputable fairgrounds, obscure cabarets and eventually

in the house of a photographer in Barons Court, West London,

where Leo-dee-nine must have seen her.

"The opening of an umbrella was enough."

"Every minute this human waterfall would shake her body like a dog

and wring out her hair."

"HE Carter would run in with a dressing gown

embroidered with a running faucet."

"At the clinic, she was kept away from the radiators

as she soon fogged the room."

"She got locked in the surgery cold store

and an orderly had to chip away the ice with a nail file."

"After an appearance at Palm Springs, she collapsed,

suffering from nervous exhaustion and obesity."

"The hospital arranged a programme to regulate her output."

"Then, against advice, she allowed her name

to be used by a plastic-swimming-pool manufacturer

and the hospital discharged her."

Aptesia's latest and much publicised ambition is to have a baby,

though she is frightened that the baby might drown at birth.

Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds

name as many birds as you can think of.

(buzzer)

Partridge, parrot, peacock, bluetit, coal tit, willow tit, bearded tit,

marsh tit, long-tailed tit, great tit, woodcock...

One factor that influenced the selection of names

for all the other Violent Unknown Event victims

was a collection of interviews filmed 18 months before the VUE

by Erhaus Bewler Falluper.

...whooper swan... - (buzzer)

Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

tell me as much as you can about the emu.

(buzzer)

The emu is the national bird of Australia...

Falluper, a statistician interested in assessing the public's knowledge,

conducted one particular survey by asking 41 interviewees

three elementary ornithological questions.

To assure a random sample, Falluper chose to use all the names

in the same Public Records Office file as himself.

Seven of these 41 subjects later became VUE victims.

And Corntopia Fallas was one of them.

Although happy for us to use material of her filmed before the VUE,

Corntopia had no wish to be photographed at the present time

for her sleep would be disturbed.

For Corntopia spends the cold months in hibernation in this cottage

a few miles from the Boulder Orchard on the Lleyn Peninsula.

The VUE had lowered Corntopia's body temperature

and slowed her circulation. She suffered badly from the cold.

She was happiest when asleep and she dreamt of water.

The dreams, said her doctor,

compensated for her experiences of the Event,

when she had been rescued from a serious forest fire.

You can see the black part there...

Rapper Begol, Second Custodian of the Boulder Orchard

and friend of Corntopia's,

was working as a Forestry Commissioner at the time of the VUE.

- He remembers the fire. - We thought we'd won the battle.

The wind changed, whipped the fire up again.

It started going round the hill.

About the first of May, Corntopia emerges from her hibernation,

and needing little sleep in summer,

is prepared to work up to 18 hours a day

on the weekly WSPB magazine, The Rooster.

Starting at the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name as many birds as you can that start with W.

(buzzer)

Whooper swan, widgeon, wagtail...

To announce Corntopia's return the magazine printed on its cover

a photograph of the will or the poor-will, known as the sleeper,

a bird that lay dormant for weeks without detectable heartbeat

in the cliff crevices of the Sierra Nevada.

...wagtail.

In case of reprisal associated with the death of his two wives,

Anteo Fallaspy made use of a VUE Commission pseudonymous identity.

At the time of the VUE, Anteo Fallaspy was in Germany.

A trained philologian, inventor of fictitious languages and a traveller,

he carried a camera to record his enthusiasm for the written word.

(whispering)

On the night of the VUE, he was in Stuttgart at the Hotel Mack.

Anteo received retractable thumbs,

soft, serrated, fleshy earlobes and a six-part heart.

Registered as a public speaker of Capistan and privately of Althuese,

his major language credential is as inventor of Hartileas B.

Anteo Fallaspy's interest in this new language

has nothing to do with the normal ambition

of creating the invidious universal language,

but is about furthering communication with vertebrates,

mainly birds and their precursors, the reptiles,

along the lines anticipated by Messiaen and Max Ernst.

Anteo had undergone an operation on his tongue

to reshape the spaces of his mouth to approximately coincide

with the proportions of the singing apparatus of the starling.

He chose the starling for the variety of noises it could make,

its ability to mimic, its dual plumage and its sociability.

Anteo travelled, extolling the virtues of his pioneer language

and persuading converts to remedy the defects of their ill-shaped throats.

He persuaded the operation on his associates with mixed results

and the death of both of his wives aroused public suspicion.

Although cleared of their deaths, Anteo declined to marry a third time,

considering his marriage certificate to be a guarantee of fatality.

Pandist Fallaspy,

biography sub judice, pending investigation for embezzlement

from the World Society for the Protection of Birds.

It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here...

Three years after the VUE,

Anteo Fallaspy was in Holland with his camera.

He met music and language teacher Sashio Tempesta in Amsterdam,

where they were at a linguistics conference.

They travelled through Holland and married at Valkenswaard.

The Directory states Sashio had webbed underarms,

a bone-marrow deficiency, a scratched face

and that she is a dreamer, Category One. Water. Flight.

She is also a sufferer of après-radiance,

a radiant, flushed condition after exertion and stress.

Sashio was converted to the use of Hartileas B by her husband

and had alterations made to her mouth cavities

to better accommodate the shrill characteristics of that language.

She accepted an invitation to train with the birds on Bardsey Island

off the Lleyn Peninsula.

In good weather, the boat trip to Bardsey lasts about 20 minutes.

The small boat, laden with books, surgical instruments,

a cello, a portable harmonium,

a tea chest of cosmetics and valuable recording equipment, sank.

Only the helmsman escaped, saying the boat had been attacked by cormorants

soon after his lady passenger started singing and shrieking.

It was presumed that Sashio had been practising Hartileas B.

Sashio's decomposing body washed ashore four days later.

It still shone with après-radiance,

so excessive had been her physical determination not to die.

Three years after the death of his first wife, Anteo Fallaspy

was in Paris recording his enthusiasm for the written word,

and teaching Hartileas B at the French Ornithological Institute.

The Institute allocated Anteo an assistant, Vyanine Entasis.

Thanks to the VUE, Vyanine was a speaker of Ipostan,

suffered intestinal blockages, was allergic to the house-dust mite

and had an incurable desire to stay in a different place every night

and never to eat two successive meals at the same table.

She married Anteo for the opportunity to travel that he represented.

Vyanine had been a student of linguistics at Cairo

and had a working knowledge of some ten different VUE languages.

She studied with Parmitter on the Ayers Rock graffiti

and with Tulse Luper on the bogus Olduvai Papers.

Any likelihood that she was overawed by Hartileas B was remote.

After the marriage, Anteo and Vyanine were awarded a grant

to study the song of the aurally dull godwit

on its long-range migration around the world.

They had made plans to travel to Australia, Antarctica,

Alaska and Hawaii, when Vyanine was knocked down by an electioneering van

in the Rue des Oiseaux.

Making too slow a recovery for her own liking,

Vyanine discharged herself from the hospital.

Travelling by metro to the flat of a friend,

she had a relapse in the Rue Moineau.

The ambulance taking her to hospital was delayed by crowds

and Vyanine died, officially outside the Café Hirondelle,

unofficially opposite the Café Renard.

One, two, three, four...

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

Castenarm Fallast, occasional pianist, professional indexer

and itinerant propagandist for a well-known opera company.

The VUE has not impaired his livelihood

but has widened his outlook on birds.

... dotterel,

pratincol,

phalarope,

sanderling,

bufflehead, tanager...

Castenarm acknowledges the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds

and believes the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event

was the Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, West London.

Somewhere on this western section there are two places, maybe three,

where the epicentre of epicentres might have been situated.

The first is Stamford Brook Underground.

And the second is The Raven public house.

27 people died in the lounge bar on the night of the Event

and 14 had died in the saloon on the morning after.

Seven more had been variously blinded in the beer garden at the back.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

The VUE has introduced Castenarm to insulin, Ventolin and praemocetylene,

widened his feet so that he now takes a larger shoe,

and has given him arthritis.

He now indexes for a publisher of popular ornithological literature.

... sora,

grosbeak,

hawfinch,

lanner,

barbet,

lory,

mooruk, trogon...

A third possible VUE epicentre is this maternity hospital

where 30 children born in the 24 hours following the VUE

all showed a physiology that would suggest flight.

... scoter,

chukar,

killdeer...

In celebration of the Goldhawk Road, Castenarm researched the indices

of the ornithological text books sent to him by the publisher,

and compiled a list of the 92 most unfamiliar bird names he could find.

With this list he is hoping to achieve several ambitions.

One is to find a sympathetic composer

willing to use the bird list as the libretto for an opera.

Ardenaur Fallatter died at sunset

on the 17th anniversary of the Violent Unknown Event.

The VUE had increased his stature, and had given him nine lives

the first four of which he used in the Gabon,

diving off the Letoke cliffs to rescue VUE suicides.

The remaining five lives, along with details of his biography,

became the property of the United African Congress,

who persuaded Fallatter to export his skill at exhibitionist-jumping.

Fallatter lost his ninth life

leaping from a grain store into a barley field

at a VUE flying gala at Stowe in Cheshire.

His body was flown back to the Gabon, and fulfilling his last wishes,

it was ceremoniously thrown off the Letoke cliffs.

Agropio Fallaver alone represented the 92nd language.

His language began and ended with him.

He was classified as a middle-aged female man and he spoke Fallaver.

That is to state the fact three times,

and make up for the incomprehension he was treated with for so long.

But at present, no further facts can be published, broadcast or used

until he and his unique language have been totally investigated.

It has been suggested that Agropio is an unsuspecting vehicle for FOX,

the Society for Ornithological Extermination.

Despite attempts to amalgamate them into one person

there have in fact been three Cissie Colpitts in Goole since 1931.

Propine Fallax is chronologically the third.

The accident of a marriage licence got her into the survey,

which is fitting, for she was President

of the Goole Water Tower Film Vault, home of the VUE Commission's archive.

Cissie Propine Colpitts grew up in the streets around the water tower

and must have known many of the Yorkshire cameramen

who made up the Goole Experimental Film Society.

The original brick water tower, the Pepper, built in the 1900s

became inadequate for Goole's growing population

and in 1933 a new and larger concrete tower, the Salt,

was erected by the Humber Authority on allotment land

leased from Propine's grandmother.

The tower filld the space between the railway line and an abattoir.

The tower was bequeathed to Propine on her fifth birthday

on the understanding that the rents were paid into an account

whereby half the interest

was available for the Goole and District Camera Society

and the other half paid for dancing lessons.

The second Goole Cissie Colpitts

married a bicycle manufacturer and moved to York.

She bequeathed her local film material collection to her namesake.

It was stored in hen coops, in the abattoir

and in the base of the old brick tower.

Propine, worried about the collection deteriorating,

felt it imperative to find it a permanent home.

In 1951, due to demand for yet more water, the tower became obsolete,

and after a two-year conversion, Propine, on her 18th birthday,

reopened it as a film vault.

On the night of the VUE, along with Arturo Fallax, owner of the abattoir,

Cissie Colpitts was on top of the tower with some friends

watching the fires at Hull,

when she fainted and began to bleed from the mouth.

She now suffers from anaemia, splayed thumbs and vertigo,

and to underline her new aversion to the darkness of cinemas

she has made a clean break with her past,

changing her Christian name by deed poll and her surname by marriage.

Biography number 28 has been meagrely reconstructed

from evidence found in an overturned car, licence number NID 301.

The occupant,

inconclusively identified from laundry marks on his underwear,

was a middle-aged man with red hair.

The carrion crow has a deep, hoarse caw

that often punctuates the other bird sounds of March.

Evidence of the VUE's influence on the body,

an engorged throat and petagium fellitis,

were obscured by injuries sustained at the accident.

It's possible that Cash Fallbaez was the victim of bird strike.

A large white bird, probably a swan, maybe two swans,

had smashed the windscreen. On the seat beside the body

was a shopping list written in the VUE language O-Lev-Lit

and a commercial recording of birdsong.

Sometimes in February and March,

you can hear a strident motor-horn note from the crow as well.

(crow caws like a motor-horn)

Antopody Fallbats.

Biography sub judice pending cruelty-to-birds investigation.

The Directory has registered Coppice Fallbatteo

as an Italian-speaking young male man,

though the VUE has taken away his teeth,

made him short of breath, flattened his nose,

made him allergic to cats and rats,

changed his balance and restructured his colon,

it had left him with the language he had learnt as a two-year-old child.

Coppice wished it had not.

Coppice tried very hard to learn one of the VUE languages

but ambitiously he had chosen Betelguese,

the language of unlimited vocabulary

and rapidly changing grammar and syntax.

As fast as he had mastered one small area of its possibilities,

he found that the same area had developed,

aligned with a new set of meanings or had become entirely obsolete.

Dispirited, Coppice had made a hesitant start on Katan,

one of the more popularly spoken of the mutant languages.

But his experience with Betelguese

was like studying a consonant alphabet of two letters

after experiencing a vowel alphabet of 200.

Coppice was an art historian who,

trying to make a novel cultural theory out of the VUE,

had wholeheartedly taken to the idea of the Responsibility of Birds.

After exploring the significance of birds in European painting,

Coppice focused his interest on Francesca's Brera Virgin,

also known as the Egg Painting.

Coppice knew everything about this painting.

Its conception, mathematics, the constituents of its colours,

the hagiography of its saints,

its value in lire, dollars, gold and osprey feathers.

The centre of all this fascination was the suspended egg,

to Coppice, the symbol of the Violent Unknown Event,

and the one perplexing feature for which he had no explanation.

Coppice asked his students to copy the painting and kept the results,

some bad, some indifferent,

some eccentric, some three or four inspired,

two almost impossible to tell from the original

and one considerably better, painted by a girl who spoke Betelguese.

Her name, Adioner Perdona.

When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese,

"Adioner" could be translated into Italian to mean "yellow".

At the time Coppice began to take an interest in the della Francesca,

the word had shifted its meaning to suggest the concept of yolk,

and when Adioner had told Coppice her name it had meant "embryo".

The coincidence was too great for Coppice

and his wish to possess, marry and own Adioner was violent.

He found a reason to fail her in her finals exam,

and under the excuse of giving her extra tuition,

he won her confidence and seduced her. She had a child.

Coppice had the boy fostered by his married sister

and had him christened Piero dell'Adioner.

By that time "Adioner" in Betelguese

could only legitimately be translated into Italian as "egg".

Agrendo Fallbazz. Drowned in a ship's swimming pool.

Bereavement clause honoured for 16 weeks.

Full biography in later versions of The Falls.

Cisgatten Fallbazz lived off the Goldhawk Road

in a house fronted by a monkey-puzzle tree.

He was a designer and manufacturer of VUE novelties.

Soon after the VUE, Cisgatten had bought a licence to sell bird hats

and made avian upholstery for several years

until the Responsibility of Birds Theory became commonplace.

He turned to the children's toy market,

and in partnership with his brother, Agrendo, was very successful.

Thanks to the VUE, Cisgatten was obliged to wear rubber gloves

to stop his hands from drying out.

The VUE also robbed him of his sense of smell and impaired his sight

though apparently not at night.

His enemies and competitors called him Moreau Fallbazz

and accused him of experimenting on birds

to make the species interchangeable.

They hinted he kept owls illegally at his house

and that his brother had committed suicide for fear of prosecution.

The brothers bought a cottage on the Lleyn Peninsula, since burnt down,

where Cisgatten had met Cathine Fallbutus as a child.

They had both gone to the same primary school in the Goldhawk Road.

Against his brother's opposition Cisgatten proposed marriage to her.

Now that his brother was out of the way,

Cisgatten is keen to approach Cathine Fallbutus a second time.

The Violent Unknown Event

concentrated its vehemence on the head, face and neck

of Hasp Fallbazz.

Inoperable glaucoma, muscular collapse and skin discoloration

had persuaded Hasp to wear a mask.

For this film he asked that he might use the face of Jean-Paul Marat.

He agreed to an interview under conditions of his own choosing.

Hasp Fallbazz was a U-thalian- speaking convert from Entrée.

Hasp made the difficult language conversion from Entrée to U-thalian

as his interests were mechanical and technological

and Entrée had lacked even a word for "wheel".

The sketchy introductory nature of that language well deserved its name.

As a dreamer-of-water, Category One, Flight, it was not lost on Hasp

that U-thalian also had 47 words for water,

each one describing it in less than three syllables and under 14 letters,

for various of its states, like its purity, scarcity,

temperature, weight, salinity, iridescence, distance from the sea,

height above sea level, colour, rapidity of movement and its age.

Hasp has respiratory problems, is lame in the left leg

and is partly paralysed in the left arm.

He has been advised to keep exertion to a minimum, to eat no meat,

avoid the dark and stay near water.

Catuso Phelpus has said

it is fortunate Hasp is creatively interested in technology,

especially hydraulics,

for these irritating prohibitions could be eased to an extent

by machinery of his own invention.

Hasp's machines, drawings and patents

are die-stamped with the emblems of an inverted left leg,

taken, according to HE Carter,

from the last evidence of the birdmen in Breughel's Death of Icarus.

Rapper Begol has stated that after years of experiment,

Hasp made a claim that he was able to grow bone

and manufacture feathers.

He works alone and is financially supported by the WSPB,

and the Kite Association, who send a weekly cheque from the Yellow Bank,

a fund financed by the sale of kites in China.

(artillery fires)

Thanks to the Violent Unknown Event, Canopy Fallbenning was immortally 83.

She spoke Abcadefghan,

and her favourite Tulse Luper story was The Cassowary.

(speaks foreign language)

During the First World War,

she worked in an armaments factory at Stoke,

and suffered from sympathetic tinnitus.

(artillery fires)

The VUE had neither ameliorated or exaggerated the tinnitus in any way

but had regulated it to a cycle of 30 seconds.

Canopy could time an egg by it.

To suit her pragmatism

and perhaps allow her some measure of self-retribution

Canopy gave the VUE an explosive origin, no doubt man-made.

She kept a diary and with home-made inks whose strength waxed and waned,

wrote authoritatively about everything.

(artillery fires)

For example, at a time when the ink was running strong,

she argued about the sexual quadrimorphism

that was a perplexing characteristic of the VUE.

She was old enough to have read Tulse Luper's Quadruple Fruit

and saw the implications of quadruple bonding

in the Violent Unknown Event's division of two orthodox sexes

into a heterodox four.

(artillery fires)

However, Canopy believed the division,

like so much else about the VUE, had been inconclusive, even bungled.

There had been too much indecision, too much hesitancy.

There was no clear role for the four newly formulated genders.

The original explosion perhaps had not been strong enough,

had been sidetracked by unnecessary adjuncts

like compound articulacy and immortality.

Canopy's original insistence on the VUE's incompetence

mellowed as each 83rd birthday passed by.

It took a strong personal event to revive it.

Like the death of a daughter,

when she wrote of a god who was a charlatan,

an inexperienced quack whose sense of time was irresponsible.

Three days after this entry she relented a little

and put the unsatisfactory incompleteness of the VUE's efforts

down to a god who had suffered the loss of a necessary skill.

A day later, in a pale and yellowing ink,

she softened more, and wrote that it was difficult

for one magician to accomplish successfully another's magic.

At a perpetual 83, her problems were not going to involve reproduction.

She was determined to enjoy immortality

and to reserve her splenetic attacks for agents of the VUE Commission,

especially those who believed in the Responsibility of Birds.

Cole Fallbird.

Biography sub judice pending trial for misconduct with a mynah.

It's a good field. It runs from a north-south direction...

Before the Violent Unknown Event,

Castel Fallboys was a competent pilot and a hang-glider enthusiast,

happy to discuss his enthusiasm on film.

After the VUE, Castel's ability at both skills became phenomenal.

The VUE added four inches to his height, shed him of 3 stone,

encouraged hair growth, raised his blood temperature,

shortened his vocal cords and taught him Instantaneous Dekis.

...where you just take off and become part of the elements.

Castel achieved his significant personalised flight

by a prodigious mastery of technique and by the use of new materials.

He was able to stay in the air for long periods,

his record was five days and four nights

and his longest recorded flight being 917 miles.

...designs into computers and getting much better designs out of computers.

His skill at assessing weather conditions,

and his ability to manoeuvre in poor visibility were not equalled.

He left his competitors so far behind that his skill isolated him.

He bricked up the doorways of his house

making it compulsory for himself to enter by the roof.

To minimise muscular growth that would inhibit flying

he used his legs seldom, until his gait resembled a starling.

Castel developed a great restlessness at every change in the weather

and on autumn nights accompanied migrating birds far out to sea,

always turning back with the greatest reluctance.

To extend his range and comparability with birds,

Castel ruthlessly streamlined his body by exercise and diet,

growing very lean in the leg, muscular in the shoulders,

long in the arm and short in the neck.

He was finally and fatally caught out.

Flying with a flock of terns, he banked too steeply, too sharply,

too suddenly and broke his neck.

His corpse dropped like a stone into the sea at Hell's Mouth

and his last pair of nylon wings are preserved at Slimbridge.

Acataloope Fallbus. A last-minute entry into the VUE Directory

due to very late-developing symptoms.

No details of biography as yet available.

Of all European countries affected by the Violent Unknown Event,

France has only a known total of 512 victims

and on investigation it seems only seven of these were French by birth.

The VUE Commission have put forward various reasons for this immunity

and rejected them all.

The Aérospace Nationale have suggested

that France had already paid an excessive quota of flight victims

in the early days of experimental flying.

(speaks Italian)

Was anything wrong with the car?

The Italian Institute of Languages

hypothesised that the French language is responsible.

...30 mph. - Had you been here before?

No. It was the first time and this is the second.

Astraham and Loosely Fallbute

were touring on holiday in central France at the time of the Event.

On the night of June 12th they were driving on a little-used road

near Voile d'Argent when their car stopped.

The clock on the dashboard showed 11:41, Greenwich Mean Time.

Is this the place where it happened?

Yes. The engine stalled and the car stopped.

Astraham Fallbute, formerly a designer of sports facilities,

is now a designer of hospital equipment.

Loosely Fallbute, once a cosmetician, is now a catalogue researcher.

Did you have any sensation, any clue what had happened?

The Fallbutes both began to speak Cathanay

within 24 hours of the Violent Unknown Event.

Loosely Fallbute was employed by an insurance firm

to examine a possible topographical pattern in VUE incidents.

Among the many sites receiving her especial attention were number 23,

the maternity hospital in the London Goldhawk Road,

with special reference to delivery room seven.

Number 37, room number three of the Commission's own library.

The room was once the office of a film-production company

specialising in ornithological projects.

And site number 59,

the intersection of Broad Street and the Yarmouth Road, Norwich.

Appreciating firsthand accounts in her research,

Loosely was happy to help the Italian Linguistics Laboratory

investigate the paucity of VUE incidence in France.

What happened then?

Astraham, now an authority on the rehabilitation of VUE paraplegics,

suffered from partial paralysis and was keen to aid his wife's research

on sites where there had been a high toll of VUE malignancy

appearing as muscle collapse or muscle deterioration.

As at site number 119,

the railway bridge and electricity station at Cloudheath, Suffolk,

where Tulse Luper says the information on signs is significant.

And site number 171 at Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, Yorkshire,

where 310 people complained of sudden and involuntary muscle paralysis

which intermittently froze their lower limbs.

Both Astraham and Loosely share certain VUE symptoms

suggesting that proximity to a site or another victim might be relevant.

Most noticeable in the Fallbute case is the matching skin discoloration.

The Fallbute pulled themselves together and drove on

and at about midnight they arrived in Nevers

where a film company was making a film about a holocaust

and the Fallbutes were not surprised to be taken for extras.

Six members of the Fallbutus family living in England

are registered victims of the Violent Unknown Event.

They have an especial relevance to this study of the VUE

by owning property near the two main accredited VUE centres,

off the Goldhawk Road, London

and near the Tyddyn-Corn Farm on the Lleyn Peninsula.

Betheda Fallbutus had come to England with her American husband

to take advantage of the Welfare State to raise a large family.

She wanted the best gynaecological attention she could find,

anticipating labour pains to rival a wren laying the eggs of an ostrich.

So she insisted on being close to the Maternity Hospital in Goldhawk Road.

Betheda had been an air hostess, a milliner

and the owner of a restaurant.

She had flown too often, wasted too many feathers

and cooked too many chickens.

On her admission, sufficient excuse for herself and her family

to be plagued by the VUE in both their houses.

The family lived in various apartments along the Goldhawk Road

whilst they continued the search for a family home.

After the birth of her only daughter, Cathine,

Betheda's husband inherited his parents' Lleyn farmhouse

where Betheda could recuperate from further pregnancies.

After the birth of her second son, Vacete,

the Fallbutuses finally bought a town house off the Goldhawk Road

where in 1827 Audubon had lived while he worked on his Birds of America.

After her husband's death, Betheda spent her time

ferrying her children between the two houses.

Eventually she ferried her grandchildren back and forth.

And it was to see Cathine and her grandchildren

that Betheda drove down to the Lleyn farm, the House of the Two Palms,

on the evening of the Violent Unknown Event.

She arrived at five o'clock in the morning, two hours before dawn.

Her grandchildren had strung a rope

between the two palms that fronted the garden to the west.

Both children were hanging by their legs.

The nose of the elder child was bleeding, dripping onto the gravel.

The younger child had a bruised forehead and was singing.

As Betheda took this in, she started to sneeze

and then to blow bubbles of mucus from her nose.

Groping in her sleeve for a handkerchief

she saw a hoopoe was sitting in one of the palms.

From then on Betheda suffered from an excess of catarrh

that blurred her speech, forced her to breathe through her mouth,

tainted her food and irritated her digestion,

making her life so wretched that she often contemplated suicide.

She said it was the excitement of immortality

that stopped her cutting her wrists.

But more likely a concern for her grandchildren

made her accept her disabilities.

(speaks Welsh)

Cathine Fallbutus, after six years in America,

returned to the Lleyn peninsula and the House of the Two Palms.

Now a divorcee with two daughters, she planned to buy a guesthouse.

As a child she had known the Tyddyn-Corn Farm

and half in jest had always planned to marry its owner.

Now the owner was gone and the farm was empty.

Cathine contacted the farm agents, found out the highest price offered

and bettered it, and in anticipation of owning the farm,

bought a can of paint called Canary Ochre and painted the front door.

Against the whitewashed walls, the door could be seen for several miles.

The agent gave Cathine the key and with her two children she explored

the house, barns and outbuildings that fronted the Boulder Orchard.

On the eve of the Violent Unknown Event,

Cathine and her daughters were at the Tyddyn-Corn farmhouse.

In a yard in front of the house on a washing line strung between two trees

was a rag, possibly a dishcloth or floorcloth.

It might have hung there for months. It was grey with age or dirt.

Menenome, Cathine's eldest daughter, asked her mother what it was.

Cathine replied that it was a clout.

The children were amused at such a dead-sounding monosyllabic word.

Their laughter surprised a ewe...

That night, the VUE struck, maybe in the Boulder Orchard, maybe not.

Cathine, the following morning, was found unconscious in bed.

The Boulder Orchard became a restricted area

and the Tyddyn-Corn Farm remained unoccupied for a further six years.

Cathine was registered as a Maudine-speaking young female woman

with a passion for symmetry. Her body reabsorbed her breasts

and the top digits of all her fingers and toes.

Not uninfluenced by her mother, Cathine reverted to her maiden name

and legalised Fallbutus as the surname of her children.

Adept at all languages, Cathine relearnt Welsh

and opened a guesthouse for VUE victims at Aberdaron,

living quietly, rejecting numerous and persistent offers of marriage.

When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese

Adioner could be translated into Italian to mean "yellow"...

Bwythan Fallbutus was Betheda's eldest son. Until he was killed,

he was the officially appointed VUE Commission's linguistic expert.

He lived just off the Goldhawk Road

within three minutes' walk of his mother, whom he visited every day.

Wish to possess...

The VUE had given Bwythan a bone-marrow deficiency,

wattles and cobs along his backbone

and a foot disease that shredded his toenails.

He could drink salt water without harm

but felt listless away from the influence of chlorophyll.

Bwythan could speak 14 VUE languages

and interpret successfully in nine of them at a diplomatic level.

And it was Bwythan who had organised the examination of Agropio Fallaver,

the sole speaker of the language named after him.

Although Bwythan came to the private opinion

that Fallaver was somehow a fake manoeuvred by FOX,

the Society for Ornithological Extermination.

...an antidote to all the world's feathers.

Bwythan has privately researched the 10,000 most popularly used words

in 43 of the main VUE languages and produced a comparative dictionary.

From this research he wrote a book, The View from Babel,

to explain, or attempt to explain,

the gift of tongues and the fragmentation of language.

A fox watched a crow...

In trying to do this,

and in his associated search for a common linguistic denominator,

he successfully demonstrated that the names of birds

were important key words.

It was rumoured that because of the conclusions of his research

Bwythan was run down by a white van, registration number NID 92,

on a zebra crossing in the Goldhawk Road.

A van with this registration had been seen outside his house

an hour before the accident.

The police later found the vehicle on a deserted airfield.

It was supposed the assailant or assailants had escaped by air.

...what you lack are wits.

Cathine's daughters, Menenome and Olivine Fallbutus,

spent the summer months in the company of a red chair.

In honour of this chair and in his pursuit of Cathine

the toy-maker, Cisgatten Fallbazz,

had given Menenome and Olivine a picture book.

Menenome, perpetually eight years old, spoke Maudine,

was prone to toothache and nosebleeds,

and was happiest hanging upside down like a bat.

She sang a lot, swam well,

and like a velvet scoter, could stay under water for five minutes.

Olivine, perpetually four years old, a Maudine speaker,

frugivorous and neuralgic, spent much of her time asleep.

When awake, she accompanied her sister

in an extended dance, song and talk marathon with the red folding chair.

Dragged along the tide line, floated in the sea,

tied to a breakwater, the chair only lasted a summer

and always had to be replaced.

Menenome remembered one word of English which she taught her sister,

though Olivine may have remembered it.

They used the word to describe the VUE's malevolence.

They pronounced it with a fierce, sharp, monosyllabic stab.

The word was "clout".

Vacete Fallbutus was Betheda's youngest son.

Mother and son seldom communicated

because Betheda disapproved of how her son earned his living,

though Vacete rarely left the vicinity of the Goldhawk Road.

Vacete could do all the tricks of the body conjuror's repertoire.

He could waggle his ears, spit 80 yards

and blow smoke rings through his nose. He was a gifted petomane.

There were dubious and dangerous tricks that Vacete would do

for special prices in the public houses of the Goldhawk Road.

He stayed in The Swakeley,

named after the collective noun for immature carrier pigeons,

in The Wheatsheaf, changed from The Wheatear because the publican

had no belief in the Responsibility of Birds, in The Goldhawk,

and on the night of the VUE, Vacete was found sightless and breathless

in the beer garden at The Raven public house.

He was running in small circles.

The blindness was impermanent, and only returned

when the light was less than f11 on the Weston scale.

Later Vacete became allergic to travelling at speeds over 10mph,

unless it happened when the light was under f11,

when he couldn't see how fast he was going.

Lf, in spite of all precautions, he did see light flashing by at 15mph,

he was sick, painfully giddy and found it hard to catch his breath.

His personal hero was Reichfelt,

the patriot airman who threw himself off the Eiffel Tower in 1909.

Vacete's family scorned the hero worship,

knowing Vacete was scared of heights.

To prove them wrong,

Vacete climbed the railway bridge in the Goldhawk Road and leapt off.

He survived the jump,

but under the bridge the light registered less than f11.

Stumbling in small circles, temporarily blinded,

Vacete was run over by a white van.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds

name as many birds as you can think of.

(buzzer)

Great northern diver, red-throated diver, black-throated diver,

bean goose, barnacle goose, red-breasted goose, snowgoose...

Astra Fallcas was a very responsive interviewee

in Falluper's ornithological survey

filmed some 18 months before the Violent Unknown Event.

...whimbrel, curlew, redshank, greenshank,

marsh sandpiper, terek sandpiper...

It is difficult to interview Astra again, for he has disappeared.

Everything points to his having gone to earth.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

In a hospital ophthalmic test

after the Violent Unknown Event, Astra amazed his examiners

by recognising three-dimensional shapes in almost total darkness

but they noted his ability did not extend to written letters.

Pratincole,

phalarope,

sanderling...

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name for me as many birds as you can that start with B.

(buzzer)

Blackbird, bar-tailed godwit, black-tailed godwit, bobolink,

black vulture...

Astra was an experienced speleologist and ornithographer.

...booby...

Through the VUE, he'd combined these interests

to identify himself with the Caprimulgiformes,

the birds that flew at dusk or twilight, and a year after the VUE

he disappeared on a night ferry to Le Havre.

(buzzer)

Capercaillie...

He'd taken his camping equipment, his savings, his maps,

a supply of food and a cassette tape recorder.

For three years Astra's sister received picture postcards,

all of which featured cave systems.

Then came a last postcard from Peru

saying that Astra had found a colony of guacharo, or oilbirds,

at San Luis Rey and was preparing a paper for the WSPB

on echolocation sensibility in birds.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds

tell me as much as you can about the Bittern.

(buzzer)

The Bittern is one of the Ardeiformes, Botaurus stellaris.

This Bittern, Botaurus stellaris stellaris,

is a crepuscular animal.

Five years ago, Astra's sister and three of his former caving friends

went to Peru to see if they could find him.

They spent four months in the cave systems of Tualito,

searching, asking local people and leaving provisions and equipment

at useful cave landmarks.

They also left tape cassettes of some of Astra's favourite music.

But with no result.

Some 24 hours before they were due to return to England,

Astra's sister was in the Castcatapel cavern at Tualito

when she heard the Bird List Song echoing along a deep cave system.

She was convinced that Astra was responsible for, characteristically,

the treble frequencies were accentuated,

the instrumental backing to the song had been tuned out

and only the high-pitched female voice was audible.

David Fallcash. Directory error. Non-VUE victim,

entered into Directory due to false representation.

No criminal charge pending.

Bewick Fallcaster is an alias given by the Directory Commissioners,

only knowing at the time of the first edition the maiden name of his wife.

Since there have been no objections from him

the name has been ratified and is legal.

Seven days after the VUE, Bewick registered as a VUE victim at Zagreb,

suffering from intermittent amnesia, a singing migraine,

ravenous appetite and decalcification of the teeth.

14 days after the VUE, Bewick was in Budapest,

where he described a VUE tinnitus to a radio engineer

who attempted to convey the nature of the condition with a tape recording.

To mask the insistent repetitious sound,

Bewick composed 92 variations on his tinnitus theme

and at night, to help him sleep, he played them back through headphones.

Bewick sent his family money, fragments of taped music and slides.

The money was in different currencies

and the music was always recorded in the neutral spaces of a studio,

so it was to the slides that Bewick's family turned

to search for clues of Bewick's whereabouts and state of health.

When asked why Bewick didn't return to his family,

Bewick's wife had four possible answers.

A change in name obliterated a sense of place.

Bewick Fallcaster is dead and the money, taped music and slides

are sent by an imposter, perhaps on behalf of the FOX.

Tinnitus might be contagious.

Bewick Fallcaster was busy collecting music

for an encyclopaedic work of biography.

Catch-Hanger Fallcaster had been a teacher.

She had taught Russian to Germans and, before the VUE,

would not have claimed knowledge of ornithology.

(buzzer)

Stork, heron, swallow,

swift, penguin, cassowary...

The VUE had made Catch-Hanger three inches taller,

paralysed her index fingers and improved her eyesight.

She now taught Abcadefghan to anyone who wanted to learn.

Abcadefghan is often used in papers on engineering,

metallurgy and radiophonics.

It is said that Lapps and Finns can understand Abcadefghan,

which is not that scientifically valuable

since there aren't that many technical papers in these languages.

Catch-Hanger has translated Tulse Luper's

Birds of the Northern Hemisphere,

establishing pronunciation equivalents for the Falconidae.

She has also started work on a Abcadefghan English primer

that is based largely on three nursery rhymes,

Goosey Goosey Gander, Who Killed Cock-Robin?

And I Shot a Little Duck.

Before the VUE, Clasper Fallcaster, Bewick's mother-in-law,

had always been very sensitive to natural forms of electricity.

Brushing her hair produced sparks that lit her bedroom,

and she reluctantly entered any building

that did not have a lightning conductor.

The VUE had magnified this sensitivity

and Clasper was now allergic to large expanses of water.

She kept away from the coast, inland lakes and large rivers,

and she was apprehensive of open-air swimming pools.

Her sense of direction became phenomenal,

but family car rides now had to be planned to avoid bridges over water,

and, in England, to especially avoid the towns of Bath,

Leamington, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells.

The city of Clasper's nightmares was Venice.

Her sensitivity to the Earth's, electric field

was favourably compared to night-flying migrational birds

that could accurately navigate without the moon and stars.

Catch-Hanger's brother, Felix, was a furniture designer.

The VUE struck him when he was on a subway train in Toronto,

which he pronounced Ter'ono,

so customs officials took him for a local and ceased to search him

for the feathers he imported to plump up his sofas.

The subway train driver was killed by the VUE.

Felix was trapped for 12 hours without lights beneath Lake Ontario.

As a result, he was nervous of the smell of leather in the dark,

a professionally debilitating experience.

Felix was sure he'd twice bumped into his missing brother-in-law.

Both times it wasn't a facial recognition.

First came a furniture auction in the house of a musician outside Nice,

where Felix recognised a repetitious tune being played on a broken piano.

When Felix investigated, the pianist had gone.

The second meeting was in a drugstore at Frère Jacques, Delaware.

Felix had queued behind a man wearing earphones

who filled in, then abandoned, a customs declaration form,

copying an address with difficulty from a printed envelope.

The address was Catch-Hanger's.

The man bought a postcard of the Frère Jacques Municipal Bandstand

and a cassette of birdsong of the Great Lakes.

These items in due course turned up the 14th time

Catch-Hanger celebrated her fifth wedding anniversary.

Max Fallcaster, Bewick's father-in-law,

was an architect's photographer.

Before the VUE, Max had illustrated a classic textbook series

on European rural building.

After the VUE, he studied ornithology and photographed nests.

He is now planning a book

on the buildings of man and bird in symbiosis,

storks on Bavarian chimneys and swallows on English country houses.

It may be with his father-in-law in mind

that Bewick photographed these pigeon roosts.

Max watched his son-in-law's slides with critical interest,

offering a geographical position for Bewick's whereabouts

based on his knowledge of nests and vernacular architecture.

Orian Fallcaster

had Orian Bye entered as his name on his birth certificate,

Orian Oddmansson stitched onto his first pair of swimming trunks

and Orian Setolier printed on his first lifesaving certificate.

Nine months after his mother expired in a ship's swimming pool,

a fourth set of adoption...

Before his biographical material could be compiled

yet another set of adoption papers has been taken out on Orian's behalf

and his name is now Orian Niagara, thus putting him, much to his regret,

officially outside the scope of this present collection.

What do you get when you cross a chicken with a cement mixer?

A bricklayer.

On which side does a chicken have most feathers?

On the outside.

Which birds can lift the heaviest weights?

The crane.

"Throper Castor Fallcaster, born in an egg, 11:41 pm on June the 13th,

the year of the Violent Unknown Event."

That was the tiny inscription written

on every egg in Throper's secret collection.

For true mythological accuracy

it should have been written on a swan's egg,

but they were protected.

What kind of bird do you find down a coal pit?

A mynah bird.

Throper, oologist, infant polymath,

collector of bird jokes in English, Greek, German and Vionester,

was Catch-Hanger's youngest nephew and the survivor of twins.

His brother Idis had perished of embolism, and his mother of grief.

As to his father, no one knew where he was.

Pursuing the Leda connection, gossip made Bewick Fallcaster the father.

Catch-Hanger denied it.

Heard about the woodpecker? It's boring.

The VUE changed the colour of Throper's hair and darkened his eyes.

His average pulse rate had quickened and he began to speak Vionester.

Most Vionester is spoken

with the teeth, if not the lips, tightly closed.

When the lips and teeth were parted, it was only to whistle.

Why did the owl owl? Because the woodpecker woodpecker.

Throper collected eggs, perhaps because it was forbidden.

A few domestic birds were exempt and occasionally Max Fallcaster,

Throper's uncle, notified Throper of an abandoned nest.

Why do birds fly south in the winter? Because it's too far to walk.

Throper devised a way of drawing a photographic picture

of the spots and freckles that characterised eggshell markings,

and devised a Responsibility of Birds Theory of his own.

What is a certain way to get a wild duck?

Buy a tame one... Buy a tame one and annoy it.

Cutting photosensitive paper to wrap around the egg,

Throper placed a fibre-optical light source through a pinhole in the shell

and exposed the film through the shell.

Why did the chicken cross the road? For some fowl reason.

From the negatives he made slides and projected them onto his bedroom wall,

making detailed and scaled drawings to present to the VUE Commission

along with his personal conclusions.

What's red, white and black? A sunburnt penguin.

In recognition of his effort, the Commission sent him an ostrich egg.

Raskado Fallcastle was a retired ship's navigator

turned farmer who invented maps

from the black-and-white hides of his dairy herd.

The Easter before the Violent Unknown Event,

while staying with his sister-in-law near Hereford,

Raskado met Gandy Ova, a cartographer

employed by the Ornithological Society

to plot the distribution of owls in the Black Mountains.

Raskado and Gandy exchanged maps.

At 11:41 on the evening of the VUE,

Raskado and Gandy Ova were standing under a hot shower

in a caravan site wash house on land owned by Raskado's sister-in-law.

The following morning, Gandy Ova's body,

covered in red and white blotches, was found on the wash house forecourt

and the local police accused Raskado of murder by scalding.

The police confiscated the cow maps as evidence.

Refused bail, Raskado was held for seven days

before the full details of the VUE were known.

The imprisonment, the bereavement, a sense of guilt

and rapidly developing VUE symptoms of deafness and nausea,

unbalanced Raskado's mind.

On his release he bought a rifle,

slaughtered his herd and tarred out the white patches on their hides.

With money from the knacker's yard, he bought building materials

and attempted to reconstruct the wash house on his Suffolk property

as a memorial to Gandy Ova.

Then, learning of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds,

he bought a shotgun and two untrained retrievers

and began a vigourous campaign of ornithological slaughter,

incinerating the corpses every Friday in the reconstructed wash house.

When the police began circulating his photograph, Raskado left his farm

and found his way to the bird sanctuary at Minsmere

to continue his onslaught.

After three days of mayhem, Raskado took the cow maps,

the clothes Ova had taken off in the shower house and a can of petrol,

and burnt himself to death in a bird hide in the marsh by the sea.

Appropinquo Fallcatti spoke Agalese and Orthocathalian

and was classified a an elderly male man with a body temperature of 109°C,

the average temperature of sedentary passerines.

Appropinquo lived on the sea front at Barmouth,

in a two-roomed ground-floor flat that faced the Atlantic.

Fallcatti started his working life as a veterinary ornithologist in Turin,

staging musical pageants,

until book reviews under the pen name Gargeny earned him enough

to give up his surgery and concentrate on the production

of what he called "ecological" dramas

that earned him the derision of theatre critics and biologists alike.

Even public sympathy for dramatised natural history

in the years after the VUE did not make Fallcatti a household name.

Seeking a reputation with the British Ornithological Establishment,

Fallcatti with his wife and adopted son came to England.

To attract attention

he wrote a biographical series on celebrated ornithologists,

and canvassed for commercial sponsorship.

In conjunction with the BFI, the Bird Facilities Industry,

Appropinquo Fallcatti organised critical screenings

of films with an ornithological bias.

To ingratiate himself with Tulse Luper

he anticipated showing a little-known film called A Walk Through H

or The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist.

This film had been used by Van Hoyten to reinforce the view

that Tulse Luper was incapable of distinguishing good jokes from bad,

and was described by Gang Lion as "a piece of cinematic guano."

However, nobody could find a copy of the film

to check on Van Hoyten's sense of humour

or on Gang Lion's ability to tell film from birdshit.

It was consequently believed that the film no longer existed,

or indeed had ever existed, but was a hoax set up by Fallcatti

to dupe a public eager to identify with any ornithological red herring.

Some members of this public had been persuaded that Tulse Luper

was merely a pseudonym for Audubon.

After this unsatisfactory introduction to the British public,

Fallcatti moved to Barmouth.

In the evening, when the light was not too bright,

he ventured out and sat in this promenade kiosk,

sometimes with his wife, sometimes alone.

Fallcatti is now planning a dramatised version

of the Violent Unknown Event to rival the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

Agrimany Fallchester was arrested and fined £80

for exploiting the area round the Boulder Orchard for financial gain.

If he had not pleaded guilty and not cooperated with the authorities

the fines would have been ten times that amount.

A not-guilty plea would have easily been refuted.

The police had film of Agrimany collecting material

from around the Boulder Orchard site on three occasions.

Thanks to the Event,

Agrimany spoke Glozel in the Northern Hemisphere version,

had a six-part heart, incipient petagium fellitis,

enlarged ischial muscles

and suffered from various mild and seasonal skin changes

which are associated with moult in birds.

Finding his London relatives appreciative of samples

taken from the Boulder Orchard during his duties as a soil sampler,

Agrimany was persuaded by an uncle in the bird-token market

to keep him supplied with suitable mementos for the tourist trade.

Eventually, with his girlfriend, Agrimany began operating on his own,

packaging three or four items in a plastic bag

and selling them through a friend in Aberystwyth.

Agrimany cooperated with the authorities

to demonstrate the sort of material he was collecting.

Organic items were favoured, especially the skeletons of birds.

His girlfriend's handwriting on a label accompanying a crow wishbone

started the police on their investigation.

Agrimany says that his prosecution was a test case

to deter others from entering a potentially very profitable market.

Biography unavailable. Subject suspected of being blackmailed by FOX

over a tar-and-feathering prosecution.

It is useful to believe the Boulder Orchard

is indeed the epicentre of the Violent Unknown Event,

if you want to believe in the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds.

Both mythologies, and they are myths,

appeal to those with a vested interest in ecology...

The Commission interviewed five people

who claimed to be Ostler Falleaver.

Not one of the five spoke in a fully authenticated VUE language,

and they all made the identical obviously prepared statement

that denies any credence in the Boulder Orchard.

(speaks French)

The VUE Commission assumes that this multiple identity has been prepared

to confuse the identity of the real Ostler Falleaver, who in 1946,

as a college graduate, we understand is featured in this photograph.

Until this is sorted out, we can only usefully quote the VUE Directory.

Ostler Falleaver is a middle-aged sufferer of respiratory problems,

glaucoma, involuntary speech and compound schizophrenia.

Edio Fallenby was classified as an elderly female woman.

She spoke Untowards with a Yorkshire accent

and suffered from fluttering eyelashes, excess numeracy

and a high blood temperature.

Edio came from a very large family, sisters, brothers, aunts, nephews,

cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

Between the Second World War and the Violent Unknown Event,

as many of the family as possible, met for a fortnight's holiday

on one of the beaches on the East Yorkshire coast,

Filey, Scarborough, Saltburn, Redcar, Whitby and Bridlington.

They occupied more than one guesthouse at a time,

and gathered on the beach in fine weather and in bad,

staking out a territory known as the Fallenby camp.

They were noisy, exhibitionist, friendly, energetic,

gregarious and generous. The VUE wiped them all out.

All except Edio Fallenby and her husband.

Edio was an officer in the Woman's Voluntary Service,

and at the time of the VUE, when news arrived from the west

of a disaster of large proportions,

she was made responsible for the welfare of her neighbourhood.

Windows were criss-crossed with tape,

and sterilised dustbins in the back alleys cooked soup to feed 5,000.

Every household container was filled with water

and left standing in the street in case of fire.

When the first fears were not realised

and the help needed was of another kind,

Edio Fallenby and her neighbours went off to the hospitals.

The soup was sold to a pig farmer, the windows were stripped

and water in the containers was used to wash down the pavements.

Several containers were never claimed and stood in the streets

as a reminder of the sort of disaster usually expected of a Violent Event.

Shey Fallenby's occupation in the VUE Directory

is listed as a ship's plumber, retired, or ephemerologist.

Either way, Shey drove a green van in circles in Tooley Park Nurseries

because, being a VUE hallucinist,

he was not officially permitted to drive on a public highway.

Shey's dual occupation stems from a bridge conversion.

He is a member of the San Luis Rey Society,

a popular club of some 2,000 VUE victims

who were struck by the VUE on bridges over running water.

Shey holds membership card number 19.

Shey's bridge was the swing bridge known as the Centre Walk,

over the Treadle Canal, Liverpool.

Shey was walking to work the midnight shift

on the evening of the Violent Unknown Event when the warning bell rang

and the bridge shook as though struck by a barge.

Shey doesn't remember the next 56 hours,

but apparently he got up and kept on walking,

not to the shipyards but to the portside

where he stowed away, and three weeks later turned up in Hamburg.

Five weeks later he was in Vienna

tearing up English newspapers, rearranging the items

and pretending he was Tulse Luper.

Shey Fallenby and Tulse Luper have never met

but they do share a physical resemblance.

Tulse Luper paid for Shey to return to Liverpool,

has since collected Shey's collages, bound them into a book called,

at Fallenby's insistence, Tulse Luper and the Centre Walk,

and presented it to the VUE Library

Where it is catalogued under Hobbyist of the Absurd.

Its author, Shey Fallenby, is described as...

"A lover of crowds,

an anti-vivisectionist, a speaker of Glendower

and an eclectic opportunist who elusively remodels his personality

on an ever-changing succession of heroes."

Affinado Falleur, according to his wife, was paid £5,000

for changing his name and identity by deed poll.

The transaction took place in room 22 in The Crane Hotel, Guernsey.

Affinado was given a selection of ten identities to choose from.

Only two of these were different from the ten pseudonymous identities

in the selection normally offered by the VUE Commission.

The differences were the replacement of Van Hoyten by Gang Lion

and Madame Klaust by Cissie Colpitts.

From the list Falleur chose who he thought was Nathan Isole Dermontier,

the fifth identity in each list.

Falleur-Dermontier shared the £5,000 with his wife and then disappeared.

Falleur-Dermontier's wife

has three theories to explain her husband's identity change.

Falleur's name was wanted by FOX as an identity for a saboteur.

The Institute of Reclamation wanted a character without a history

to represent them at the repeal of the European Landscape Bill.

By assuming the name and identity of Dermontier

it might have been easier for Falleur to obtain a pilot's licence.

Apparently, according to Falleur-Dermontier's wife,

her husband could be identified by a grid

tattooed, branded or otherwise marked on the palm of his right hand.

The grid corresponded to the window of room 22

of The Crane Hotel, Guernsey

where the £5,000 in used notes had been exchanged.

The VUE Commission offered Falleur-Dermontier's wife anonymity,

but after perusing the possibilities, she declined.

Erek Fallfree.

Use of biographical material owned exclusively by Crow Films.

14 passenger trains a day stopped at Diss Railway Station, in Suffolk.

With the eight trains that stopped on a Sunday, that made 92 trains a week,

the number of presently known VUE languages.

With bank holidays and without cancellations,

Thomax Fallfresh, the Diss stationmaster,

could expect 4,730 trains a year.

Thomax was waiting for the 100,000th train.

That was the number he had formally agreed to see through Diss Station

before he returned to Wales and the Dovey Valley.

It was a promise he'd made first to his wife

who disliked flat East Anglia.

Secondly to British Rail who employed him on a VUE contract,

and only thirdly to himself.

He personally somewhat feared a return to a landscape of mountains

where the VUE had afflicted him with partial deafness,

a loss of balance on any gradient greater than one metre in 200,

and pigeon toes that were slowly and appreciably growing whiter.

Thomax, Jamaican by birth,

found his body was slowly developing random white patches.

It was a source of amusement to his Welsh wife.

His doctor's first diagnosis was Caucasian Empathy,

but that was cancelled when Thomax's wife, to her delight and hilarity,

discovered other colour changes on her husband's body.

Medical tests detected small, dilute traces

of carotin and melanin, dionin and ri-melanin,

pigments responsible for the colouring in feathers.

For now, an orthodox British Rail stationmaster's uniform

would hide the transformation from his staff,

but Thomax wondered how soon he could find a way out.

Which would come quickest, albinoism, a skin of many colours

or the 100,000th train?

All three alternatives

would mean him crossing the line into areas he didn't want to go.

Zachia Fallgillot. Biography ex-directory on medical advice

due to subject's allergy to public exposure.

Joyan Fallicory.

Error. Fallicory is the name of a place, not a person.

For biography of Tender Joyan, see VUE Directory under Joy.

Bird Gaspara Fallicutt, born Gaspara Gekle,

met her husband, Obsian Fallicutt, in the Air Force Cinema

at Birdlip near Gloucester,

when she was translating the Starfighter 143 flight manual

from the VUE language Hapaxlegomena into French.

Their common interest was not strictly films, but aero engines.

The Raven, Kes,

The Two-Headed Eagle, Only Angels Have Wings.

Gaspara widened Obsian's interest in films,

weaned him off documentaries, and introduced him to feature films.

But Obsian's enthusiasm remained desultory

until he saw The Birds by AJ Hitchcock.

Caged Heat, Blackbird...

Gaspara is registered in the VUE Directory

as an accredited sufferer of Dreams-of-Water, Category Three,

usually illustrated by the ripple sequence from Draining Away

by Mazy Reynard and Shey Talbot.

Gaspara's mother drowned in a ship's swimming pool

on a VUE benefit cruise in the Indian Ocean.

Sparrows Can't Sing, Wings, Three Days of the Condor...

Gaspara's medical history also makes mention of après-radiance,

petagium fellitis and haemophilia. She spoke seven minor VUE languages

and was generally employed as a linguist and as an interpreter.

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, The Owl and the Pussycat...

In her spare time,

she checked foreign-language versions of IRR films

and did unpaid translation work for the VUE Commission.

Where Eagles Dare, Yellow Canary...

When her husband, Obsian,

became deeply involved in researching the filmic origins of the VUE,

Gaspara grew unsympathetic and began to share a great deal of time

with the archivist, Algaris Bardin.

Four Feathers...

She is helping him prepare a French version...

The Birds...

...of his Catalogue of Bird Film Titles.

Will Mr Tulse Luper please pick up a telephone? Thank you.

Obsian Fallicutt had a theory that the VUE was an expensive hoax

perpetrated by AJ Hitchcock to give some credibility

to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film The Birds.

Obsian is registered as a speaker of Katan with a six-part heart.

Like his wife, he is a sufferer of Dreams-of-Water, Category Three.

Obsian is also allergic to direct sunlight,

a disability alleviated by his obsession with the cinema

which normally keeps him safely in the dark.

After seeing The Birds one wet afternoon in a Leeds cinema,

Obsian left his job as a designer of artificial horizons

and joined a film laboratory as an optical engineer

to examine closely the technical expertise needed

to produce cinematic illusion.

With his wife, he plunged into a thorough programme of research,

viewing all the ornithological film material he could find,

not missing a reference, however tenuous, to be fully equipped

to make a definitive examination of Hitchcock's film.

He visited the Lleyn Peninsula,

discovering from clues in Hitchcock's film a farm outside Aberdaron

called Fay Mar, the name of the boat in the Hitchcock film

where the first bird attack had taken place.

The farm was run by an American Holiday Consortium

traceable to a Minneapolis Hospital, and then to the Hitchcock Estate.

Becoming an accomplished bird identifier,

there was one species in the film

which Obsian had always failed to identify.

It looked like a hybrid of rook and seagull.

Obsian christened it an Alfred

and hoping for a response from the Hitchcock estate,

he wrote off asking if this composite bird owed its existence

to the specifications of the director or a property manager.

After a delay he was answered by a scriptwriter's wife

that her husband could not answer any questions,

having seriously suffered from the effects of the VUE,

but she knew that the bird had been given a Latin title in the studios,

Corvus frugilegus atlanticus.

She added that her husband went to the Lleyn Peninsula

to look for locations.

She intimated that Obsian ought to continue his research.

Encouraged, Obsian now spent all his free time pursuing his theory.

Using the laboratory facilities, he began to build up an illicit library

of films with ornithological themes.

And he instituted an elaborate frame count

with a new 35mm copy of The Birds. Obsian worked such long hours,

Gaspara thought he was being blackmailed by FOX,

the Society For Ornithological Extermination,

and suggested he might like to change his name to avoid persecution.

Obsian, amused, said it was too late to contemplate such a deception

for it was obvious by now that he was being closely watched.

Two years ago,

Obsian began visiting California without his wife,

and six months ago, applied for a permanent resident's permit.

He is now living in a luxurious apartment at Bel Air,

ostensibly receiving an income from his editorship

of a screen magazine called The Hoopoe,

whose rare issues are concerned with birds in feature film making.

Gaspara has discovered this magazine is financed by the Hitchcock estate.

Wrallis Fallinway.

Typing error for Wrallis Fallanway. See Biography 13.

Ashile Fallko, like Marat, died in his bath.

Novelist, historian and ornithological journalist,

Fallko got into this bath about 11 pm, June 13th,

on the night of the Violent Unknown Event,

and was still in it on the 17th, four days and nights later,

a total of some 93 hours.

Severely paralysed, speechless and incontinent,

he was discovered by accident by a looter.

Admitted to hospital suffering from exposure, congested lungs, shock

and a rapidly developing skin eczema,

Ashile Fallko was slow to recover as he was slow to dry out.

The Directory declared him to be

a middle-aged female man speaking Ringer.

Against medical advice, Ashile insisted on returning to his flat.

He began to document his case

and then the case histories of other VUE patients,

to lobby for recognition of their condition

and to persuade international cooperation

to put aside funds for the rehabilitation of VUE victims.

Since his skin eczema was eased by submersion in warm salt water,

he dictated most of his letters, articles and stories from his bath.

Every room in the flat, including this bathroom,

was equipped with a microphone wired to a tape recorder in the hall.

It is said of Fallko

that if the VUE had not happened, then Fallko would have invented it.

A furious scourge and a shrill critic of institutions,

Ashile hounded the VUE Commission

and succeeded in getting five directors removed or dismissed,

and it is reported he developed a strong case

against Van Hoyten and FOX, and was waiting for an opportunity to use it.

Over a period of six years, he employed over 30 secretaries,

most of whom left, complaining of the workload,

the crowds in this bathroom, the smell

or Fallko's emotional and physical demands.

Fallko was periodically readmitted to hospital

suffering from exhaustion, depression or scalding.

Persuaded into the role of a contemporary Marat,

Fallko only needed a zealous executioner and a celebrated painter

to complete the necessary cycle.

The execution he had to commit himself.

It was said that FOX had finally trapped him in a technical hypocrisy.

The suicide weapon appears to have been a two-bar electric fire

and the images for posterity were taken by a police photographer.

The bathroom being wired for dictation,

the equipment recorded a last message.

(scream)

A message as poignant

as anything written with a pen which was also a feather.

Agostina Fallmutt had started off her career as the official biographer

of Dr Frederich Karl Haberlein, the medical officer of Pappenheim,

the reputed discoverer of the first fossil remains

of the primitive reptile bird archaeopteryx.

On the title page of the biography she had written

Which of the two following objects were blown away in a gale

and drowned in the Solnhofen Lake:

Dr Frederich Haberlein or archaeopteryx?

At the time of publication, this enigmatic inference was ignored.

The biography in its first edition never sold more than 500 copies.

Agostina quietly continued to teach biology at Torquay,

spending weekends collecting material from the beach

to make collages for her friends.

Then Agostina wrote an article for the WSPB's journal, The Rooster,

reconstructing an imaginary conversation

between the two involuntary iconoclasts of Oxford University

who destroyed one of the last dodo specimens.

The traditionally dour readers were amused,

and she was invited to speak at ornithological meetings

and be interviewed for local television.

Her ability to combine wit and avian blasphemy made her popular

and her publishers printed

a second edition of her Haberlein biography.

The debate about bird origins was taken up on a wider front

and the enigmatic question on the title page of the book

became a shorthand and convenient way of summing up the complex issue.

Agostina Fallmutt was diagnosed as a female woman,

officially speaking Antoneen.

She was treated for mild epilepsy, high blood pressure

and was advised to take frequent rests.

She suffered from phantom pregnancies like Mary the First of England,

whose Portrait with a Parrot was pasted on Agostina's bathroom mirror.

Soon after the VUE, the hardier areas of skin on Agostina's body,

on the fingertips, palms of her hands, soles of her feet,

further hardened and new-toughened skin appeared on her elbows,

knees and ankles which coruscated just above the elbows

into protuberant gristle.

Agostina took to wearing loose-sleeved blouses

which kept the contours of her elbows hidden.

She gave no evidence that she was distressed

or unduly concerned by these unusual features.

They may have influenced a pamphlet she later published

on avian cobs, wattles, wens and casques.

With her change in fortune, Agostina went to Australia to study ratites,

flightless birds like the kiwi and the emu,

and more importantly, to research the fossil record of their ancestors.

Agostina's French mechanic in Adelaide named her La Solitaire

on account of the Ionely safaris she took,

driving in a battered Land Rover she called The Goatsucker.

La solitaire was also an extinct flightless pigeon

that had lived uniquely on the island of Rodriguez in the Indian Ocean.

It was described by François Leguat

as having round masses of bone on each wing,

enabling the cock birds to inflict damage on their rivals.

Agostina must have been aware of the coincidence but never remarked on it.

Agostina camped for 17 months without human contact in the Bar-She cave

near Lake Te-Anin on South Island, New Zealand,

where a colony of notorni, a ratite long believed to be extinct,

had unexpectedly turned up in 1948.

It was from this cave Agostina wrote out her theory of ratite revenge.

Ousted by greed and ignorance on the part of man,

the ratites were attempting a return to their former supremacy.

They had perpetrated the Violent Unknown Event

to transform man himself into a ratite.

When her thesis was published, not by the WSPB who thought it ridiculous,

Agostina was pilloried, and on a number of different levels.

Her landlady sought a court order to get her out of her flat in Torquay,

the paperboy burnt her newspapers,

her grocer accused her of stealing egg powder

and her publisher withheld royalties.

Agostina began driving her Land Rover in circles on the Torbay beach

until that too was forbidden by the police

who impounded the vehicle to search it for pornography.

At the onset of a phantom pregnancy,

Agostina took to staying indoors in the daytime to avoid further calumny.

She went walking at night.

The persecution ended tragically, for her body was eventually discovered

in a boat-and-tackle hut at Teignmouth.

It was difficult to establish foul play, so the verdict was ascribed

to delayed effects of the Violent Unknown Event.

This one.

The next two biographies have been blue-pencilled

by the Bird Foundation Industries.

Biography 72, ostensibly because it dealt with rival sponsorship,

and Biography 73, because Cottes Fallope, cartographer,

had been caught in an act of trespass.

However, there is reason to suppose

both biographies were curtailed because of their length.

It is intended to publish them later with other suspended biographies

if not in a subsequent edition of The Falls, then under separate cover.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary,

accentor,

dowitcher,

dotterel,

bobolink,

gargny,

pratincol,

phalarope,

sanderling...

Before the Violent Unknown Event,

Pollie Fallory did indifferent bird imitations.

She had impersonated a nightingale for 27 nights

in a play called The Little Green Finches,

and she played a budgerigar with clipped wings

in a film called The Reluctant Singer.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

Her act was accompanied by random fluttering gestures

and the habit of singing through an almost closed mouth.

When she employed an agent

he would always be telling her to open her mouth and freeze her arms.

Pochard,

serin,

siskin,

thrasher,

whimbrel,

whinchat,

willet,

junco,

goony,

fulmar...

After the Violent Unknown Event,

Pollie Fallory spoke Mickel-ease or Mickel.

It was a language full of alliteration, sudden turns of speech,

high registers, changes in volume and unexpected silences

in which the speaker took prolonged and exaggerated breaths.

Waiting for the next syllable in Mickle-ease

was like waiting for a child to scream after a fall.

Pollie quickly assumed a command of Mickle-ease

that stretched the human tongue and voice box

to influence the language of animals rather than the other way around.

... loon,

rail,

scaup...

In a belated response to the badgering of her former agents,

Pollie's body now stood rigid when she sang and remained that way,

ideally unaccompanied by the slightest facial or body gesture.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

Except for an occasional patient smile, she indicated with her body

as little as possible that might reflect on her speech.

She was persuaded to relearn English

to reach and recruit a larger ornithological audience,

to add the VUE anthem to her repertoire

and to make a definitive version of the Bird List Song.

Pollie became a raconteur. She also did woman imitations.

Capercaillie,

lammergeyer,

cassowary...

The Violent Unknown Event had partially paralysed the face

of Afracious Fallows, enlarged his heart, thumbs and genitals,

made him scrofulous, softened and widened his feet

and thoroughly wrecked his career as a school headmaster.

Afracious regularly sought to relieve his depression

by driving a stolen car round a traffic island in Abersoch

until the petrol ran out or he was stopped by the police.

He made a living through petty thieving, mimicry,

Latin lessons, car stealing, bird identification and prostitution.

His greatest source of pride

was being secretary of the Abersoch Audubon Ornithological Society

and his rented beach house at Cappis Sand housed sick seabirds,

incompetent efforts at taxidermy

and eccentric systems of bird classification of his own invention.

Afracious strongly identified with Linnaeus and the hoopoe.

Three years ago, accused of embezzlement,

he was unanimously dismissed from the Abersoch Audubon Society.

To display his rancour and his erudition in one gesture,

he spent the 13th anniversary of the VUE

stealing from beach houses at Cappis Sand

owned by members of the Abersoch Audubon Society

who were not VUE victims.

He stole an umbrella from The Homestead,

property of Mr Herbert Armada.

A pair of plimsolls, size eight, from Orinoco,

owned by Mr and Mrs C Fretcalfe.

A pair of underpants from an unnamed beach house,

owned by Mr Harris Rippley.

A second pair of plimsolls, size five, from Oleander,

owned by Mrs Lily Armada.

An anorak from an unnamed property.

A pair of earrings from the unnamed property,

of Mrs Freda Baal, who at the time of the robbery was Mrs Freda Cowls.

A third pair of plimsolls from The Polyanna,

property of Mrs N Ipositan.

A black full-length overcoat from The Ole, belonging to Mr G Odfrey.

A fourth pair of plimsolls, child's size six,

from the unnamed beach house, belonging to Mr C Unrodriguez.

And a pair of brown shoes, size eight, from Endview,

owned by Mr and Mrs Stewupsson.

The Latin title Upupa Epops and the English name of the hoopoe

are spelt out by the initials of the stolen items and the beach houses.

If the responsibility was still in any doubt

the initials of the owners of the beach houses spell out Afracious.

Additional anagrams, and acrostics are fanciful.

Once put on the track the Abersoch detectives could not be held back.

Afracious was easily caught, as he intended to be.

He pleaded guilty

and asked for 27 other offences to be taken into account.

He was imprisoned for three years and released after two,

earning remission for permitting his mouth to be reshaped

the better to learn Hartileas B.

Hearty Fallparco is at present solely represented by this snippet of film.

Reputedly he is the boy in glasses holding the eagle.

After a night of vomiting and epilepsy, the VUE Directory notes

his destruction on the morning of the Event at Tampa, Florida,

by a hurricane christened by the weather station

as Birdie Number One.

(recites "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" in French)

Sallis Fallpinio, children's broadcaster in five languages,

visited Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, Yorkshire,

in the afternoon prior to the Violent Unknown Event.

Sometime between 4:12 and 4:25, along with some 310 other people,

Sallis walked in front of the Temple of Piety.

A carrion crow sat on an oak Watching a tailor shape his cloak.

"Wife," cried he, "bring me my bow That I may shoot yon carrion crow."

Subsequently, along with those 310 afternoon visitors,

Sallis suffered from petagium fellitis, loss of weight,

an ability to speak and write Cathaganian in its prime version

and an involuntary paralysis, intermittent and sudden,

locking the lower limbs in a stance that could persist for 40 minutes.

There was a little man and he had a little gun,

And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead.

He went to the brook and shot a little duck

Right through the middle of the head, head, head.

Sallis took a photograph of the grounds at about 4:15.

Her aunt is there, along with a friend of the family.

The closer to the temple the visitors wandered,

the greater their subsequent Cathaganian vocabulary

and the greater their weight loss.

At a range of 400 yards, a visitor could later command

a vocabulary of some 17,000 Cathaganian words

and normally suffered a weight loss of about a stone and a half.

An approach of under 50 yards meant a debilitating weight loss

requiring constant hospital attention.

As I went over the water, the water went over me.

I saw two little blackbirds sitting on a tree.

One called me a rascal, one called me a thief.

And I took up my little black stick and knocked out all their teeth.

Sallis, collector of nursery rhymes, playground songs and folklore,

believed in the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds

and was not surprised in the least at the VUE's malevolence,

knowing the traditional antipathy and antagonism

of man towards birds that begins its propaganda in the nursery.

"Oh what have you got for dinner, Mrs Bond?"

"There's beef in the larder and ducks on the pond."

"Dilly-dilly, dilly-dilly, come to be killed."

"For you must be stuffed and my customers filled."

Crasstranger Fallqueue knew both meanings of "flight"

having had to escape from vehement political persecution

by hijacking a plane.

Variously disguised as an acrobat who juggled eggs

and as a blind ornithologist, he eventually made a home in Wales

and settled on the Lleyn Peninsula.

The VUE is now his persecutor.

Crasstranger could have flown the aircraft he hijacked.

It could be said that his family had prepared him for it.

They experienced a fair share of underplanned flying

mostly unwillingly, from tenth-storey prison windows.

It wasn't too difficult to make defenestration

look like ambitious mimicry of birds.

The family passion for aeronautics was a useful cover for assassination.

Crasstranger's grandfather, a language schoolteacher,

earned the first Slovak degree in aeronautical engineering

and had pursued a wish to fill the skies with aircraft,

a wish that was only fulfilled by his pupils on Saturday afternoons.

Crasstranger's uncles had outwitted one another in flying stunts,

and his father, developing a motorised parachute,

littered his speech with artificial sibilants

to encourage lightness of body by the lightness of speech.

Crasstranger considered his father's linguistic mannerisms

were a worthwhile course to develop in any attempt to identify with birds

and he urged VUE victims to express themselves by singing, not flying.

He now earned his living as an aeronautical journalist

and as a flight historian.

His knowledge of the facts and feats of air pioneering

were rarely contested.

He knew that the man who threw himself off the Eiffel tower

in April 1911 was not the patriot airman Nathan Isole Dermontier,

nor the Welsh baritone called Van Riquardt,

but was an Austrian clothing manufacturer called Reichelt

testing a parachute-coat of his own design.

Any amount of historical inaccuracy, misguided heroic identity

and misrepresentation could not disguise what was for Crasstranger

a supreme example of the folly of aspiring to emulate the birds.

Romanese Fallracce was struck by lightning

in the early hours of June 13th

in the year of the Violent Unknown Event.

Fallracce, singer, arborealist, community organiser,

spent most summer weekends with her husband and her two sons,

camping in and around the Black Forest.

On the evening of the VUE, the Fallracces had pitched two tents

at an approved camping site near Villingen.

After a quarrel with her husband, Romanese slept in the family car,

and at about six in the morning,

she was woken by rain drumming on the car roof.

To loosen the guy ropes on her sons' tent,

Romanese left the safety of the car and was struck by lightning.

Onlookers said that for five seconds or more,

Romanese's scarlet anorak appeared to shine brightly

as though illuminated from inside.

Romanese then fell into a sitting position,

and finally flopped over into the drenched pine-needles.

The pattern of her underclothes was stencilled in burn marks on her body

and the metal in her brassiere had melted

and spattered small burn marks down her back.

She was rushed to a casualty department at Freiburg,

where she recovered to find herself a victim of the Violent Unknown Event.

A Freiburg newspaper singled her out as a special victim of the VUE

and Romanese herself did little to put the record straight.

She grew to believe

it had been the very essence of the VUE that had struck her.

She became a Bavarian celebrity.

With her husband and her two sons, and a growing band of adherents,

Romanese visited the site of her lightning strike every June 13th.

Six years after the Event, she was still introduced at VUE functions

as the woman who was struck by VUE lightning.

The VUE victims in her audience took a certain comfort

from seeing Romanese naked to the waist

standing on a rostrum talking confidently about her experiences.

They could believe that the VUE was comprehensible as an electric shock,

random in its choice of victim,

arbitrary in the scale of damage it could do

and bizarre in its peripheral effects.

They were conveniently, if erroneously, reminded

that lightning was supposed never to strike twice.

By Romanese's example, they were thus immune from future disaster.

There was the explanation of the VUE's immortality characteristic,

to be immortal was synonymous with being immune to lightning strike.

The mild idolatry accorded to Romanese

was encouraged by her husband. Her sons were less convinced.

Especially when she developed symptoms like a loss of memory

and outbreaks of uncontrollable grief that shook her body

and dangerously lowered her temperature.

Last year, Romanese's name was entered in the VUE Directory,

as a middle-aged female woman speaking Candoese

and suffering from intermittent nervous collapse

and involuntary hypothermia.

She refused to visit the site of her lightning strike,

though her sons occasionally made the pilgrimage.

Rapid conifer growth and the cutting of firebreaks

have increasingly made the local geography unfamiliar.

Ascrib Fallstaff.

Pernicious inclusion of fictional character. Criminal charge pending.

At an open-air concert at Phoenix, Arizona,

Armeror Fallstag is reputed by his fans and promoters

to have flown 310 metres, and they are not speaking metaphorically.

Is it true, Armeror Fallstag,

that when you flew for the first time you were airsick?

(speaks French)

All fledglings on their first flight regurgitate their food.

Did you use feathers?

No way.

How far did you fly that first time?

However far it was, it was certain...

It is thought Armeror could have flown further,

but he caught his foot in railings...

Did you fly near the sun?

...and was pulled down by the crowd.

No way.

How about night flying?

He came regularly to Britain to visit all the accredited VUE sites

and a lot of the unaccredited ones as well.

I find it difficult to judge any distance from the ground.

What do you do about landing in the dark?

Armeror was a generous donor and had made speculative plans

with an American Foundation to purchase Bardsey Island

as a sanctuary and last resting place for severely afflicted VUE victims.

Is it true what they say about flight?

He was not as yet successful,

though in anticipation of eventual entombment on Bardsey

many VUE victims were buried in mainland cemeteries near the island.

Wings indeed. You don't need to die.

What are your opinions about powered flight?

It was a wrong turning.

Do you think that the Wright Brothers are to be praised or cursed?

The Wright Brothers should have stayed put and made bicycles.

Originally intent on an academic career

rewriting Victorian novels with the benefit of hindsight,

he was side-tracked by an interest in music to make a fortune,

which he sunk into property, literary ephemera and psychic drawings.

On the whole, fine flying birds have negligible walking ability

and it is not easy to empathise with an ostrich.

Do you believe it was Haberlein who discovered archaeopteryx?

No way.

With the advent of the VUE, he began to collect VUE artefacts

and is now negotiating to buy the fossil archaeopteryx

found by Dr Haberlein in the Solnhofen Lake.

It is presently the property of the Natural History Museum in London.

This fossil was sold to the British Museum by Haberlein in 1862

to provide a dowry for his eldest daughter

and is the subject of Fallstag's best-selling record

Abigail and the Early Bird.

Yet he was eminently a failure was he not?

What's your opinion about the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds?

The imagery of birds is vast and unlimiting.

You can take what you like...

Armeror, a sufferer of poor vision

and taker of Flutinol for intestinal problems, speaks Foreignester,

though when he sings, the lyrics are full of references in French,

a language he refuses to speak on account of his animosity to Blériot.

...arranged to meet Tulse Luper at...

As an American citizen on a visitor's visa to Britain,

he is obliged to seek a permit from the American Embassy

before realising a flying project at Dover

where he hopes, he says, to further discredit Blériot

who could only fly the English Channel with the help of an engine.

One last question, Armeror. If indeed you can fly,

why did you use professional aircraft to get you to Britain?

- To help exhaust the oil supply. - Armeror, thank you very much.

Combayne Fallstoward agreed to meet us here in the porch of her house.

So we waited.

Combayne Fallstoward was immortally 19.

It was she who wrote The Boulders of Flight.

It was published about the time

she celebrated her 19th birthday for the 30th time.

After its publication, she wore black and lived with her dog at Merle

in attempted isolation.

The house had been owned in the 19th century

by the American historian Austin Carter Scops.

Scops had two galleries or wings

built onto the original, rather prosaic farmhouse

that he inherited from his grandmother, and here he displayed

the badly scarred and fractured statues of Hermes and Eros,

that he had acquired from various European collections.

It was suggested he stole most of them from public gardens,

and the scarring and fracturing was caused by his unceremonious haste

in removing them from their niches and pedestals after dark.

After his improvements, Scops had grandly called his house

The Winged Samothrace in emulation of that statue now in the Louvre.

This name was perhaps not unnaturally accredited to Combayne Fallstoward,

the house's new occupant, apparently much to her annoyance,

but it did not go unnoticed that she signed her letters

on more than one occasion with the initials WS.

The Directory classified Combayne as a young female woman

speaking Untowards and suffering from timidity.

11 years ago, a tree on this site was the subject of an unfinished film.

The film was made by Geoffrey Fallthuis,

student pupil of Tulse Luper, and at 19,

the shortest and youngest of the Luper admirers

who supported the Luper programme

for an unassisted naturally evolving landscape.

The tree, a wych elm, had been planted on this site

on the south bank of the Thames, when it was the garden of a broker

who apparently specialised in importing timber

for manufacturing musical instruments.

Due to coincidences of date, name and geography,

Geoffrey Fallthuis chose to structure the cutting copy of his film

on Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra,

a choice cemented by the knowledge that another Schoenberg pupil,

Hans Eisler, had composed a work to a tree,

an oak that had survived the bombing of Berlin.

Three months after his modest film exercise,

Geoffrey Fallthuis joined an ecological foundation,

studied tree culture and went to America.

Seven years later, he married Corntopia Felixchange,

a soprano who eventually joined the Metropolitan Opera Company.

Geoffrey Fallthuis was in Ontario at the time of the VUE,

supervising the planting of conifers.

The VUE gave him a bone-marrow disease, incipient petagium fellitis

and a neuralgia that Fallthuis was able to partly anaesthetise

with nicotine and aspirin.

Fallthuis, in acknowledgement of his VUE disabilities, took a job

giving him time to travel with his wife on her singing tours of Europe.

Eventually his wife was invited to London to the Royal Festival Hall

and Fallthuis visited the South Bank for the first time in 11 years.

One September evening at dusk, whilst his wife attended a rehearsal,

Fallthuis stepped out of this door to look again at the tree

which had been the subject of his last film exercise.

Much had changed.

The buildings he had filmed in their early stages of construction

were now long completed.

And the tree had gone.

Heavily supported by chains at the time Fallthuis had filmed it,

the tree became a potential danger to pedestrians and had been cut down.

Fallthuis lit a cigar and walked along this balcony

to a position he could not have anticipated

as a camera position 10 years before.

While standing about here, no doubt leaning on the balustrade like this,

he fell.

Or he was pushed. Or he jumped deliberately.

One witness is on record as saying that at the time Fallthuis fell,

there had been a pistol shot.

Anton Webern had been shot.

He too had been standing on a balcony.

The lighted tip of his cigar had made him the target after curfew

for an overzealous American soldier in 1945.

The connection was not lost on Fallthuis's wife.

She demanded and got an inquiry. 11 witnesses came forward.

But the evidence was so conflicting the coroner passed a verdict

of misadventure abetted by delayed effects of the VUE.

Corntopia Felixchange lobbied the IRR

to provide funds to remake her late husband's film

with a new musical structure that would reflect Webern's Five Pieces

and provide her with a vocal part.

The work was to be dedicated to all VUE victims.

An early friend of Fallthuis's, Nye Galibo,

who appears in this, the fifth part of the original film,

generously agreed to compose the new music.

As yet neither the IRR nor any other body

have come up with the funds to make Corntopia's film

and in deference to VUE victims the music has, in the meantime,

been used to accompany some of the VUE biographies in The Falls.

Insubstantial entry.

Merriem Falltrick appears only once in all 14 editions of Directory

as deaf-mute, with cerebral palsy and wings.

Stephany Falltrix is trying hard to shake off

the crippling effects and influence of the VUE on her mind and body

and argues that the inclusion of her disabilities in this film

is not going to help her recovery.

One of her afflictions is an allergy to the colour red.

For the moment, in lieu of her biography,

she has presented to the VUE library as evidence of her determination

a book of red-painted pages.

Her slow but steady progress, which we respect,

is indicated by the red pages progressively becoming whiter.

Tolley Falluger, historian, classification theorist,

bird counter and authority on animal migration,

normally lives on a boat in the Bardsey Island Straits.

He has proposed theories, for those wishing to believe

in a concerted effort on the part of birds,

to have found a viable parliament of fowls.

These have so struck the World Society for the Protection of Birds

that they have muzzled him.

His brother, Vassian, believes Tolley was sent to the Tasman Archipelago

to study the Steven's Island wren, whose entire population was killed

by a lighthouse keeper's cat in the first four months of 1894.

Vassian Falluger long believed that the Violent Unknown Event

was a mass hallucination perpetrated by the WSPB

on a public who felt guilty about bird slaughter.

Then he changed his mind, or had his mind changed for him.

His former feelings on the VUE were prompted both by sibling rivalry,

his brother being a celebrated, if censored, enthusiast

for the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds, and by his mild symptoms,

slight ornith-a-graffiti, a containable petagium fellitis

and a preference for travel in spring and autumn.

Vassian's conversion relied on two fortuitous events,

a visit to the Boulder Orchard

and a present of a facsimile edition of the Havell Double Elephant Folio

of Audubon's Birds of America.

The visit was initially a professional one.

He was asked to design the lettering and take photographs

for the publicity material for a new VUE Opera

that took as its libretto the names of 92 birds.

The Folio was given to him by Allia Fallanx,

at that time the resident Boulder Orchard Custodian.

Vassian saw one phenomenon reflected in the other

and considered both of them to be interchangeable.

For Falluger, Audubon had replaced Tulse Luper

as the Violent Unknown Event's master strategist and cataloguer.

With the obsessive enthusiasm of a true convert,

Vassian drew and photographed the Orchard,

and filmed it on every film stock he could lay his hands on.

He taped the Orchard's birdsong,

yearly counted the leaves on its 11 trees

and scrupulously measured the root growth.

He calculated the value of the Orchard's apples in sterling,

dollars, gold and osprey eggs.

Vassian claimed he discovered in the disposition of the rocks and trees

a system of passageways that, in miniature,

matched the pilgrim tracks of the Lleyn Peninsula

and the known routes of migrational birds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Vassian's programme for the next ten years

includes a full-scale model of the orchard

recreated in metal and plastic, an illustrated plant life,

where he claims the most successful plants in the orchard

are the cranesbill, ragged robin and bird's-foot trefoil,

and a project to deposit a handwritten copy

of the 92 VUE bird names in every public library in Great Britain.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds, name as many birds as you can think of.

(buzzer)

Honey-buzzard, osprey.

Wren, sparrow, starling.

Swallow, gull, buzzard.

Tit, bluetit, coal tit, great tit, little tit and many others.

Before the VUE, Erhaus Bewler Falluper was a master cataloguer,

an enumerator and a collector of statistics.

He inaugurated grand and extensive projects

that other less gifted statisticians completed.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name as many birds as you can that start with the letter C.

In the five years before the Violent Unknown Event,

amongst other unfinished projects,

Erhaus conducted 17 surveys about the state of the public's knowledge

of natural landscape and all that was in it.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name as many birds as you can that start with the letter P.

- (buzzer) - Pigeon...

The value of these surveys is doubtful.

The results were erratic and arbitrarily catalogued.

True to form, all 17 incomplete surveys

have, in various ways, spawned further projects.

At the buzzer, in 30 seconds,

name as many birds as you can that start with the letter L.

This particular survey on bird knowledge is no exception.

Lark.

Lark.

- Linnet. - Lapwing.

I can't think of any.

- Lark. - Lovebirds.

What are those things in the zoo with the...

- The... - (buzzer)

At the buzzer, tell me as much as you can about the cuckoo.

(buzzer)

The cuckoo is about 30 centimetres long.

Indeed, Falluper's random choice of interviewees has been borrowed,

the VUE Commission choosing people whose surnames,

like Falluper's own, begin with the letters FALL.

Whilst acknowledging his output,

his detractors accused him of manufacturing fictions,

and deliberately confusing identities,

also of not knowing the difference between a good joke and a bad one.

(buzzer)

His supporters thought these accusations were often true,

but they believed that Falluper's half-fictions were by-products

of his compulsion to draw up maps, index disaster

and break chaos into small pieces that he might rearrange them

in a different way, perhaps alphabetically.

...in the penguin family.

But Falluper's supporters had no illusions about his jokes.

They knew he was too serious to have a sense of humour.

They come from the Falkland Islands.

Falluper asked his questions of 41 people.

In the VUE Directory, there were exactly double that number of persons

whose surnames began with the letters FALL.

Of the 41 persons Falluper interviewed,

seven were to become VUE victims.

These seven, like Falluper himself now speak Abcadefghan,

have superlative night vision, are welcomed at children's parties,

can whistle well, fear flying, loathe the FOX

and inaugurate projects that others less gifted invariably complete.

- Curlew. - Black crow.

- Swallow. - Sparrow.

Jackdaw.

(buzzer)

- Dodo! - Dodo.

Little grey ones.

Six out of the seven, like Falluper,

have kept their post-VUE physical appearance hidden.

The seventh victim has permitted her likeness to be used

as an aid to the finding of her husband.

If it had been necessary,

Falluper could have invented the Violent Unknown Event.

It certainly effaced him. There have been no more grand projects.

It is said that Falluper has changed identity and become a catalogue clerk

working nights in an office in Whitfield Street, London W1.

- Deerhen. - Lighthouse bird.

Sepoy.

- Chubb. - Buzzard.

Grastled Fallusson invented so much fiction about himself,

the Directory cannot vouch for any version of his biography.

Castral Fallvernon,

curator of photographs and pictures for the VUE Commission

lives and works in a disused aircraft on the outfield at Heathrow.

Three years after the Violent Unknown Event,

to aid VUE victims afflicted with a variety of avian paranoias,

Castral approached the Airport Authority

for help in developing a rehabilitation programme

based on visual stimulation.

Sleep in the tail, breakfast over the wing,

office up front, lounge in the cockpit.

Legolas Varda bought me a mynah bird.

Within six months, Castral could offer a prospectus

including bird-recognition therapy, exercise in a flight simulator,

lepidoptery, ornithological taxidermy and free-fall parachuting.

Progressing patients are assessed by their reaction to visual material

on tapes, slides and film,

accompanied by a great deal of specially composed music,

full use of the VUE languages and a wealth of bird anecdote.

Filmstrip 17 was a favourite project

with apparently considerable curative properties.

It certainly introduced Castral to her husband,

who as a self-styled flyer, modelled himself on William Cody

and until the treatment of filmstrip 17,

was persecuted by the thought that an attack from the air would blind him.

Castral's appreciation of the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds

and the Value of Personalised Flight was equivocal

and could be typified by her copy of the da Vinci flying machine.

Aircraft vibration loosened a drawing pin holding it to the wall.

The picture had swung round so that the machine flew upside down.

Castral had not seen fit to put it back the right way up.

The pictures in filmstrip 17 were taken from an early collection

of black-and-white photographs of birds kept in zoos.

Most of the photographs had been heavily retouched.

In some cases, they had been virtually recreated with a brush.

Maybe this was instrumental in the filmstrip's high success rate.

Either that or patients were intimidated

by the eye of the marabou stork.

The timorous may have identified Castral with that stern eye.

She had no room for failures.

Capercaillie, lammergeyer, cassowary...

Leasting Fallvo wrote plots, fictions, lyrics and narratives.

She likes the theatre...

Among his clients were second offenders, alibi hunters,

newspaper editors, con men, dramatists and bored children.

The audience, the pay and the state of the Fallvo imagination

dictated the swing of each narrative and its outcome.

...down in Abersoch Bay. Abersoch. A-B-E-R-S-O-C-H...

Before the Violent Unknown Event,

an Earth reconstructed from Fallvo's entire imaginative output

would have been populated only by homo sapiens and a few bushes.

The VUE changed all that.

...pratincol, phalarope...

These are the photographs...

Fallvo was in Bavaria in a ski lift at 11.41 on the evening of the VUE.

In an ensuing accident he lost the use of both his legs,

but as to actual VUE symptoms, Fallvo was slow to be affected.

Carlos was not happy with the photographs...

A year after the Event, Fallvo began to speak Oso-leet-ter,

a plain rhythmic language

suitable for the telling of a steady uncluttered narrative

and an Earth reconstructed now from his output

would be populated by birds and a few piles of brick.

...in a haversack,

along with the silver spoon from his mother's second-wedding presents.

However, he lost his English-speaking audience and his earnings slumped.

To earn money he came to the VUE Commission with a proposal

to establish a library contributed to solely by those afflicted by the VUE.

...auklet, noddy...

Eventually, there were enough VUE products to demand a catalogue.

Fallvo volunteered to put it together. The Commission agreed,

provided Fallvo produced the catalogue in English.

...and cucumbers...

Fiction was poorly represented and Fallvo himself

saw to it that the nearly empty shelves looked more respectable.

Among his works in English were

The Madras Lemonade Glass, The Tyddyn-Corn Clout,

Bird Tales of the Eiffel Tower, A Walk Through H,

A Turkey for a Wife, The House of the Two Palms,

The Dogs on Bardsey Island, The Tulse Luper Suitcase,

Protest at the Golden Egg, The Missing Composer,

The Making of Hartileas B,

The Wash-House Corpse, The Red Chair and many others.

It was said that if the VUE had not happened,

then Leasting Fallvo could have invented it.

...skua...

With the preposterous Violent Unknown Event receding in everyone's minds,

an need for new fiction persuaded Fallvo's clients to reemploy him.

...scaup...

Seven years after the Event, Fallvo was more prosperous than ever

but there were two penalties.

First, the slowly encroaching influence of the VUE on Fallvo

was affecting his eyesight.

...Anthior Fallwaste...

Second, the VUE was persuading him he had no memory worth preserving.

Both these facts improved his standard of living further.

The first because he could rely less on observation

and the second because he was forced to keep reinventing.

...a bird scarer. The conventional sanctuary...

Fallvo's circle of contacts and clients continued to increase.

Whether they treated his narratives as allegories

or as metaphors of their own difficulties has to be researched.

Anthior Fallwaste has achieved

what so many immortal VUE victims have failed to do.

He was successfully buried on the site of a bird scarer

the conventional sanctuary

of those seeking to irrevocably terminate a relationship with birds.

And that is the end of The Falls.

The next name in the Directory is Artesian Falma.