Fahrenheit became obsessed with his belief that the modern world should confront these three books in something of the way their original audience might have confronted them. As a result, he took it upon himself to translate them (a considerable intellectual feat recognized even by his detractors) and have them published under his mother’s family name as the above contemporary works of fiction. Who knows how long this curious subterfuge might have worked were it not for Mr Fahrenheit’s indiscreet pillow talk with a young woman, who, it turned out, was not as trustworthy as he believed and who promptly sold the story to a news tablet, which in turn led to UNAS applying to this court for an injunction putting the Rubbish Tips of Paradise under their legal control.
The Unified Nations Archaeological Survey is granted, as requested, complete but temporary control over the site.
However, its suit to prevent the publication of the final ‘novel’ in the Left Hand of God trilogy,
The Beating of His Wings
, in a translation by Paul Fahrenheit, is denied. Publication may proceed under the condition that the summary of this judgement is printed at the beginning of
The Beating of His Wings
. Both UNAS and Paul Fahrenheit are given leave to add an appendix at the conclusion of the work in which they may explain their positions.
There are three fundamental human emotions: fear, rage and love.
J. B. Watson, Journal of Experimental Psychology
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specific world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even into a beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.
J. B. Watson,
‘What the nursery has to say about instincts’
Psychologies of 1925
By the time you are fourteen years old the worst thing that will ever happen to you will probably have already taken place.
Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles
PART ONE
I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who
I am, or what I have been doing
.
Aurangzeb
1
A brief report on Thomas Cale, Lunatic. Three conversations at the Priory on the Island of Cyprus.
(NB This appraisal took place after Mother Superior Allbright’s stroke. The notes she filed have been mislaid along with Cale’s admission details. This report needs to be read in the light of this absence and so I will not be held liable for any of my conclusions.)
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Medium stature, unusually pale. Middle finger of his left hand missing. Depression fracture to the right side of his skull. Severe keloid scar tissue in wound in left shoulder. Patient says he experiences intermittent pain from all injuries.
SYMPTOMS
Severe retching, usually in mid-afternoon. Exhaustion. Suffers insomnia and bad dreams when able to sleep. Loss of weight.
HISTORY
Thomas Cale suffers no hysterical delusions or uncontrolled behaviour beyond that of his sour nature. His mid-afternoon retching leaves him speechless with exhaustion, after which he sleeps. By late evening he is able to talk, although he is the most sarcastic and wounding of persons. He claims to have been bought for sixpence from parents he does not remember by a priest of the Order of the Hanged Redeemer. Thomas Cale is droll, not his least irritating affectation, and always tries either to make his interlocutor unsure as to whether he is mocking them or, by unpleasant contrast, to make it abundantly clear that he is. He tells the story of his upbringing in the Sanctuary as if daring me to disbelieve the daily cruelties he endured. Recovering from an injury which caused the dent in his head he claims – again it is not possible to tell with what degree of seriousness – that his already great prowess (he seems boastful in hindsight, but not at the time) was greatly increased as a result of the injury and that since this recovery he is always able to anticipate in advance any opponent’s movements. This sounds unlikely; I declined his offer of a demonstration. The rest of his story is as improbable as the most far-fetched children’s story of derring-do and swashbuckling. He is the worst liar I have ever come across.
His story briefly. His life of deprivation and military training at the Sanctuary came to a dramatic end one night after he accidentally came upon a high-ranking Redeemer in the middle of performing a live dissection upon two young girls, some kind of holy experiment to discover a means to neuter the power of women over mankind. Killing that Redeemer in the ensuing struggle, he escaped from the Sanctuary with the surviving young woman and two of his friends, with more Redeemers in vengeful pursuit. Evading their pursuers, the quartet ended up in Memphis where, plausibly, Thomas Cale made many enemies and (rather less plausibly) a number of powerful allies, including the notorious IdrisPukke and his half-brother, Chancellor Vipond (as he then was). Despite these advantages his violent nature asserted itself in a brutal but unusually non-fatal altercation with (so he says) half a dozen of the youths of Memphis in which (of course) he emerged triumphant but bound for prison. Nevertheless, Lord Vipond again mysteriously intervened on his behalf and he was sent into the countryside with IdrisPukke. The peace of the Materazzi hunting lodge where they were staying was interrupted shortly after he arrived by a woman who attempted to assassinate him, for reasons he was unable to clarify. His murder was prevented not by his own wonderful abilities – he was swimming naked at the time of the attack – but by a mysterious, unseen and insolent stranger who killed his would-be assassin by means of an arrow in the back. His saviour then vanished without explanation or trace.
By now the priests of the Sanctuary had discovered his general whereabouts and attempted to flush him out (he claims) by kidnapping Arbell Materazzi, daughter of the Doge of Memphis. When I asked him why the Redeemers would risk a ruinous war with the greatest of all temporal powers for his sake, he laughed in my face and told me he would reveal his magnificent importance to me in due course. The inflated mad, in my experience, take their importance most seriously but it is a feature of Thomas Cale that his demented state only becomes apparent a few hours after a conversation with him comes to an end. While you are in his company even the most implausible stories he tells cause you to suspend disbelief until several hours later, when a most irritating sensation creeps over you, as if you had been tricked by a marketplace quack into parting with ready money for a bottle of universal remedy. I’ve seen this before in a lunatic, though rarely, in that some are so powerfully deluded and in such a strange way that their delusions run away with even the most cautious of anomists.
Of course, Thomas Cale rescues the beautiful princess from the wicked Redeemers but, it must be said, not by means of the fair and noble fight against overwhelming odds but by stabbing most of his opponents in their sleep. This is another unusual feature of his delusion – that each one of his endless triumphs is not generally achieved by heroism and noble audacity but through brutal trickery and conscienceless pragmatism. Usually such madmen present themselves as gallant and chivalrous, but Thomas Cale freely admits to poisoning his enemies’ water with rotting animals and killing his opponents in their sleep. It’s worth recording briefly one of our exchanges in this regard.