For two months, Duncan lugged thousands of pages of books, magazines, and old papers down here. For weeks, he labored on this very typewriter, creating his early history of the city. I believe he thought he might be creating a Machine of his own, made from the city’s leavings. (The assignment came at the right time—it came as I was attempting to synthesize and explain all that I had learned over the years. It took two months, yes, but also thirty years to write that account. My findings might have been destined for a travel guide, but that didn’t mean I had to make them shallow or incomplete.)

I left him to it, after a while. I stopped in every few days to see how it was going, but that was all—I had my own life to lead, and an ever-growing list of tourists to exhume the city’s highlights for …

When Duncan showed me pieces of his essay so that I could report to Sirin on his progress, he did so by reading selections of it to me aloud.

“The importance of squid to the Ambergrisian economy cannot be overstated,” he would say.

“Not squid again,” I would say, and he would make a hushing sound.

“Certainly the rebel Stretcher Jones learned to appreciate the freshwater squid, as it sustained his army for long periods of time when they were relegated to the salt marshes on the fringes of the Kalif’s empire,” he would intone.

I would catch Sybel’s eye and he would fold his arms and shake his head, while I nodded in agreement. (How like you to conjure up a dead man to agree with you.)

“The type of cannonballs used by the Kalif during the Occupation proved useful in the creation of walls during the rebuilding efforts.” (A very interesting fact that many a tourist would have found useful, if it had survived Sirin’s sword.)

And on and on. It didn’t sound much like a tourist guide, based on my experience guiding tourists around, but at least Duncan was making progress toward completion. I didn’t think it productive to give him advice until he had finished it.

But, at the end of two months, Duncan bypassed me completely and sent his finished manuscript to Sirin via courier. It was six hundred pages long. Of those six hundred pages, two hundred and fifty pages consisted of long, convoluted footnotes, some of which had their own footnotes and additional annotations. I think he knew what I would have said had I read it first.

Sirin called me up to his office, where we could both contemplate the green-stained pages that lay in an awkward lump on his desk. Some of the pages looked like dried, veined lettuce leaves. Others had the consistency of moist glue. Still others had a dark phosphorescence to them. I could have sworn I could hear a low hum coming from the pile.

“What,” he asked, “am I to make of this?”