THE BEATING OF HIS WINGS
Paul Hoffman
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2013
Copyright © Paul Hoffman, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket illustration by Peter Bergting. bergting@mac.com
All rights reserved
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
ISBN: 978-0-141-95772-2
Contents
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Four
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Five
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Appendix i
Appendix ii
For my editor, Alex Clarke, who got there first.
The Beating of His Wings
The Publishers of The Beating of His Wings are ordered by the International Court of Archaeological Artefacts to print this judgment on the first page of each copy.
Moderator Breffni Waltz
38th of Messidor AD 143.830
Summary of Preliminary Judgment dated Republican Era 143.710 from the International Court of Archaeological Artefacts concerning the Left Hand of God trilogy and administration of the so-called ‘Rubbish Tips of Paradise’. These ‘tips’, for the avoidance of doubt, constitute the four square miles centred on the first discovery by Paul Fahrenheit of large amounts of printed paper dating from extreme antiquity. My judgement is preliminary and subject to review in the first instance by the Court of Pleas. However, an immediate decision is required because of the claim by UNAS that irreplaceable documents and artefacts are being lost for ever, citing the routine use of the contents of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise as toilet paper by the nomadic tribes that frequently pass through the site.
The facts of this case are not in dispute and are as follows:
This litigation has its origins in the first landing on the moon by Captain Victoria Ung Khanan some thirty years ago. That within days Captain Khanan discovered she had been beaten to this greatest of all firsts by some 165,000 years was as great a shock, perhaps, as has ever been delivered to WoMankind. The fragile remnants of what must have been an even more fragile spacecraft revealed that it had its origins in a vanished terrestrial civilization we knew nothing about, a civilization which soon became known as the Flag People, after the starred and striped insignia planted next to the craft. As a result, The Unified Nations Archaeological Survey was founded with the sole purpose of searching for evidence of the Flag People on earth itself.
So far this search has proved fruitless and for one simple reason: ice. UNAS quickly discovered that 164,000 years ago a period of major glaciation, now known as The Snowball, covered nearly the entire planet in ice, often to a depth of several miles. Ice that brings low vast mountain ranges has little problem removing the veneer of even the most complex civilization – clearly only the smallest rump of the population could have survived. Further investigation, however, revealed a later and significant period of warming during The Snowball, which for fifteen thousand years caused the ice to retreat far enough and long enough for new civilizations to emerge, before they in turn were swallowed up by the returning ice.
It is at this point in this frustrating story that Paul Fahrenheit emerged to criticize, to put it at its mildest, his colleagues for their obsession with technological solutions to this great problem. He pointed out that trying to find such whispery traces of the past was like ‘looking for hay in a haystack’ unless they used ‘some mechanism’ to guide the technology. The ‘mechanism’ likely to prove most effective in narrowing down the haystack, he argued, was that of legend and folk story. He claimed that real historical events from the distant past could become embedded in what were apparently entirely imaginary stories of gods and monsters and other fantastical tales. His ideas were dismissed out of hand and the relationship between Fahrenheit and his colleagues and superiors at UNAS became what could only be called vituperative.
As a result, in the Ventose of Republican Era 139, Paul Fahrenheit left UNAS in pursuit of what to his colleagues was the very definition of a wild goose chase – in search of what the isolated Habiru people called the Rubbish Tips of Paradise. It was here Mr Fahrenheit thought he might be able to find the first terrestrial evidence if not of the Flag People then of the civilizations that briefly followed.
Four years after Paul Fahrenheit’s disappearance the first volume of a ‘fantasy’ fiction trilogy entitled
The Left Hand of God
was published. It was widely translated into some twenty-six languages but its reception by both audiences and critics was highly polarized: it was greatly admired by some but much disliked by others for its peculiar tone and odd approach to the art of storytelling. How are these two apparently unrelated events connected? It turns out that Mr Fahrenheit was behind the publication of
The Left Hand of God
and a subsequent volume,
The Last Four Things
. These books were very far from the contemporary works of escapist fantasy they were presented as
.
As it happens, Fahrenheit’s belief in the potential of the Rubbish Tips of Paradise was entirely on the mark. To cut a long and bitter story short, Fahrenheit took it into his head not to tell his former employer of his discovery, as he was legally bound to do. Instead, he claimed UNAS would, and I quote, ‘smother the undoubted brilliance of what I have called the Left Hand of God trilogy in a dreary academic translation worked over by an army of self-serving pedants who would bury its vitality under a layer of high-minded dullness, footnotes and incomprehensible and obscurantist analysis.’