Duration 3.00

Thanks to the Violent Unknown Event, Canopy Fallbenning was immortally eighty-three. She spoke Abcadefghan, and her favourite Tulse Luper story was The Cassowary. 

During the First World War, Canopy had worked in an armaments factory at Stoke, and she suffered from sympathetic tinnitus. 

The VUE had neither ameliorated or exaggerated the tinnitus in any way but had merely regulated it to a cycle of thirty seconds. Canopy could time an egg by it. To suit her pragmatism and perhaps to allow herself 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, she wrote authoritatively about everything. For example, at a time when the ink was running particularly strong, she argued with herself about the sexual quadromorphism that was a perplexing characteristic of the VUE. She was one of the few old enough to have read Tulse Luper's "Quadruple Fruit", and she saw the implications of quadruple bonding in the Violent Unknown Event's division of the two orthodox sexual units into a heterodox four.

However, it was Canopy's belief that 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, it had been side-tracked by too many unnecessary adjuncts like compound articulacy and immortality.

Canopy's original vehement insistence on the VUE's incompetence mellowed as each eighty-third birthday passed by. It took a strong personal event to revive it, like the death of one of her daughters, when she wrote angrily 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 even more, and wrote sympathetically that it was difficult for one magician to accomplish successfully another magician's magic.

At a perpetually eighty-three, Canopy's problems were not going to involve reproduction. She was determined to enjoy immortality, and in future to reserve her splenetic attacks for agents of the VUE Commission, especially those who believed in The Responsibility of Birds.