Duration 2.50
The Directory has registered Coppice Fallbatteo as an Italian-speaking young male man. Though the Violent Unknown Event had taken away his teeth, made him short of breath, flattened his nose, made him allergic to cats and rats, re-arranged his sense of balance and re-structured his colon, it has left him with the language he had leant as a two-year-old child. Coppice wished it had not.
Bwythan Fallbutus: "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 small area had developed, re-aligned itself with a new set of meanings, or had indeed 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 a bit like contemplating a consonant alphabet of two letters after experiencing a vowel alphabet of two hundred."
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 dutiful exploration of 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 there was to know about this painting: its conception, its mathematics, the mineral 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 definitive explanation.
Coppice encouraged his students to copy the painting, and he kept the results, some bad, some indifferent, some eccentric, some three of four inspired, two almost impossible to tell from the original, and one considerably better, painted by a girl who spoke Betelguese. Her name, Adioner Perdone.
Bwythan Fallbutus: "When Coppice had first tried to learn Betelguese, "Adioner" could be translated approximately into Italian to mean 'yellow'. At the time Coppice had 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 herself 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 inveigled his way into 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'."
The Falls Biographies
