Duration 2.54

Vassian Falluger for a long time believed that the Violent Unknown Event was a mass hallucination perpetrated by the World Society for the Protection of Birds on a public who felt guilty about bird slaughter. Then he changed his mind, or had his mind changed for him.

Vassian's former feelings on the VUE were no doubt prompted both by sibling rivalry, his brother being a celebrated, if censored, enthusiast for the Theory of the Responsibility of Birds, and by the mildness of his symptoms, slight ornith-a-graffiti, a containable patagium 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. Vassian was asked to design the lettering and take the photographs for the publicity material for a new VUE opera that took as its libretto the names of ninety-two 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 available film-stock he could lay his hands on. He taped the Orchard's birdsong, yearly counted the leaves on its eleven trees and scrupulously measured the root growth. He had calculated the value of the Orchard's apples in sterling, dollars, gold and osprey eggs. Vassian claimed to have discovered in the disposition of rocks and trees an intricate system of channels and passageways that, in miniature, matched the pilgrim tracks of the Lleyn Peninsula and the known routes of migrational birds in the Northern Hemisphere.

Vassian has an ambitious programme for the next ten years that includes a full-scale model of the Boulder Orchard, recreated in metal and plastic, an illustrated plant-life, where, he claims, the most successful plants in the Boulder Orchard are the Cranesbill, the Ragged Robin, and the Bird's Foot Trefoil, and a project to deposit a hand-written copy of the ninety-two VUE bird-names in every public library in Great Britain.

The Falls