I know that even these simple statements of fact about the Shift will outrage some readers, most of them Nativists. To them, there has been no Shift. To them, the continued “strangeification of the city,” as Duncan once put it, has no pattern to it, no rhythm or cause. Some still deny anything odd is happening at all, pitiable fools. I suppose, in our usual way, even those among us who admit to the Shift have begun to become accustomed to it. (We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it should feel strange.)

Perhaps this will make it more personal, more real: at the beginning of the symptoms of the Shift, James Lacond fell ill. When I say he fell ill, I mean that his fungal disease finally overwhelmed him, as it had sometimes threatened to overwhelm Duncan. (Alas, he hadn’t traveled far enough underground, or for long enough. Which is worse than going too far. I told him more than once that he needed to experience more, to know more, inside his body, to survive it. He refused the advice.) He was forced to retire to a back room in his own offices while Duncan ran everything in his name, instead of just part of it. After a while, he couldn’t hold on any longer and almost literally faded away.

(No one knew how ill he was until after he passed away. Janice, you should have visited him toward the end. I was there every day, hunched over a chair beside his fungus-riddled bed, trying to pry an intelligible word from between the rotted teeth of the poor feeble wreck, to no avail. “Hmmmm bwatchee thoroughgard stinmarta,” he would say to me with the perfect clarity of those beyond hope. I would nod wisely and continue to work on my own diatribes against Nativism and all the other dangerously deluded theories.

(He smelled of the rum I gave him to soothe his agony. He smelled musty, like rooms not opened to the air since the Silence. It’s true I loved him dearly and I helped him as best I could, but you could never say he was a substitute for Bonmot—that would be unfair to both of them. More correctly, when I looked at him, I saw a mirror of my own future self: gray-bearded, addlepated, a half-century’s study of history dribbling out of my brain through a mum-mumbling mouth. I cannot say it comforted me much, and yet how much more tenderly I cared for him because of it!

(There might have been no coherence to his speech, but Lacond could still write at times. Once, he drew me close and showed me some words scribbled on a scrap of paper: “I am concerned that disintegration and ensuing death will blunt my ability to continue to coherently put forth my usual arguments with the customary vigor.” It made me laugh, and that made Lacond smile, as much as he was able. I nodded, to let him know I understood. When he did pass away and I assumed the editorship of the AFTOIS newsletter, it seemed natural to continue, to dig up an almost endless series of “newly discovered” papers by the old rogue, as if he still mumbled nothing-nothing-nothing in my ear.