“Why?” he asked, no reproach in his voice, just a genuine curiosity. He had hinted more than once that he could find me a comparable job with the church, but turning my religion into a daily chore, complete with choir, didn’t interest me.

“Why?” Why did I like working as a tour guide? In those early years: “Because I get to be outside a lot. I get to see the city afresh, from the perspective of those unfamiliar with her.”

Because it took me away from Duncan’s world. Because it allowed me to relive, in daydream reveries, my past successes week after week. Because I met interesting people, some of them men, though I had learned to be more discerning than in the past. Because those who I guided saw me not as a failure but as part of the heritage, the history, of Ambergris. And there was something to be said for not trying quite so hard. I arrived in the same place, I had begun to notice, regardless of the amount of effort.

But I could never truly escape Duncan, just as Duncan could not escape himself. And ultimately I wouldn’t have wanted to. Except for my father’s writings, Duncan is my only link to my father. Duncan is still here, I hope, in the flesh, while Dad speaks to me in shards of meaning gleaned from the fragments Duncan kept of his journals, his scribblings and essays. All of it is work-related; Dad appears never to have written anything that was not related to work, or, at least, such writings weren’t found when Mom cataloged his things.

I’ve gone through all of it twice before lugging it here along with anything else I wanted to salvage from Duncan’s apartment. Most of Dad’s papers are so dry, so dusty, that I’ve begun to understand that he lived in his own little specialized world. His work galvanized and, perhaps, electrified, other historians with its sense of rarefied knowledge, but there’s nothing for the rest of us to hold on to. Sometimes I think Duncan took it upon himself to “translate” our dad’s work into a form that might be palatable to the public. (I thought maybe he knew, maybe something in the papers would solve my mysteries. It never did.) Sometimes I think that Duncan would have been better off becoming a plumber, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a merchant, a missionary.

Nothing of our personal history made it into Dad’s work, even though that history had some relevance. Some said, not without a hint of mockery, that you could trace our family’s history on my mother’s side all the way back to the founding of Ambergris by John Manzikert—that one of the anonymous, unremarked-upon members of the ship’s crew, George Bliss, had been our distant great-to-the-umpteenth-power grandfather. Over the years, among our shadow relatives—aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, “shadow” because they lived in far-off cities like Nicea and we saw them rarely—an entire mythology had grown up around Bliss. Stories of Bliss fighting off gray caps, of his friendship with Samuel Tonsure before Tonsure disappeared, vague references to the underground—all apocryphal, of course. (Apocryphal? Maybe, but I enjoyed those stories growing up. Those stories reaffirmed my birthright to crawl around in dimly lit places.)