Pestle frowned and her face achieved a certain narrow intensity. “Why, I’d ask you to tell him that he’s wrong and that the Nativists are right.”

“And that he should stop trying to scare people with his theories,” Mortar added.

Mortar and Pestle stood there, waiting for my response while the sun baked us all. My gaze fled to two swallows chasing insects through the searing blue sky, and I wondered how it had come to this. Had I misjudged how far I had fallen, and was falling still? Where will it end? Can it end? Should it end? My fingers are green with spores. That cannot be a good sign.

I could have told old Mortar and Pestle—for whom I now feel a mounting affection where no such affection should exist—that Duncan was closer than they might have thought, and perhaps they would like to meet him? But I don’t think they really would have wanted to meet him. That the person they had pictured in their minds actually existed would probably have confounded them. Unlike Nativism, which existed precisely so people could avoid being confounded.

Nativism, to my mind, had become the next “phenomenon,” like the New Art before it, except in a different discipline. You didn’t have to paint anything or enjoy art to join it. You didn’t have to react or interpret or express yourself. Nothing so active. You just had to believe in a theory and mindlessly recite it to others with any minor variations you might have added to it in the meantime. (Not much different from the chants some of the imprisoned Truffidian monks used to drive the fear from their hearts.)

Nativism would become so popular that not long after Mortar, Pestle, and I had our enlightening conversation in Bender Square, the Ambergris Tourism Board, against my sole and emphatic “No—hell, no,” vote, added a Nativism tour to my busy schedule.

What did this new tour consist of? Our standard “Gray Cap Oddities” tour combined with a few extras, like a view of Sabon’s family home, Blythe Academy, and some carefully selected and cultivated fungus-infested walls—“Ooh, very pretty, very awe-inspiring,” most tourists would coo—and a lot of extra propaganda that made my teeth hurt. I never thought that I would ever be required to repeat the name “Sabon” so many times to so many strangers.

“Am I Duncan’s sister?” I finally replied. “Yes, I am. Do you know him?”

“We know of him,” Mortar said, almost cleverly.

“But you don’t know him?”

“No, not personally,” Pestle replied.

“They didn’t even know you, Duncan,” I told him later. “Hadn’t met you even once. And yet it was as if they thought they did know you—personally.”

“Oh, I see. I thought perhaps, given your use of his first name, that you were old friends of his.”

“The price of reflected fame, I guess,” Duncan said, staring out the window into the courtyard. “It’s enough to have read about you.”