For these reasons (and more, too tedious to, etc., etc.), the arrangement did not last. One day I came to Duncan with an assignment (the abysmal task of creating an “upbeat” listing and description of funeral homes and cemeteries in Morrow; it made me suspicious—had Sirin come up with that to torment me?) and Duncan told me he couldn’t do it. No, Duncan had taken a “regular” job.

My brother, Duncan Shriek, the fearless explorer, had finally accepted everyday reality as his own—just as I had begun to reject it. Joined the humdrum, wash-the-dishes, take-out-the-garbage, go-to-bed-early, get-up-and-go-to-work life shared by millions of people from Stockton to Morrow, Nicea to Ambergris. My shock only amused him. (Actually, dear sister, it was your squinty-eyed, sallow face, the way your pupils seemed ready to rise up into your head as your jaw, as if in balance, dropped. You looked, in short, as if we had traded places, sunshine for the subterranean. At least one of us was taking out the garbage.)

What job had Duncan taken? A teaching job at Blythe Academy, a minor Truffidian religious school. Blythe might have been best known for its longevity—it had been established some years before the Silence, although it had wandered from place to place, finally coming to rest a few blocks from the Truffidian Cathedral. In a bit of irony I’m sure they had thought made good sense, Blythe’s library had been superimposed on the ruins of an old gray cap library. (It wasn’t ever a library. It was more of a marker for the Machine.) In the center of their main reading room, the circular nubs of that former structure remained, looking cold, remote, and threatening.

Blythe had a pointed history of accepting as many students from “artistic” or “creative” parents as possible, especially those of a certain social status—regardless of whether they believed in Truffidianism. I suppose the founders believed that the rote, compulsory weekly religious services in the small chapel behind the school might eventually permeate the brains of their charges—or at the very least instill the kind of guilt that in later years results in large sums of money being sent in to support new buildings, philosophies, or styles of teaching.

Blythe had also had famous teachers from time to time—Cadimon Signal for a few years, and even some of the Gorts who had gained such fame from the statistician Marmy Gort’s controversial findings. Certainly, there was no shame in attending as a student or teaching at the school. However, as Duncan soon found out, greater shame could be found in those serving as headmaster, or Royal, to the school.