And Duncan wanted to become their leader: the Lord of the Disinclined. Disinclined to work. Disinclined to hold a job. The Disenchanted who had never been enchanting, except, perhaps, as children. No wonder Mary hated that group. I hated that group. We could have taken an oath of solidarity on that much, at least. (And yet, they, and I, are much closer to the truth than those who scoffed at our organization, regardless of the sometimes illegitimate evidence provided at those meetings. I sense a certain amount of snobbery in your remarks, Janice, as if the only people worth a damn are artists or writers or playwrights—but look back on your own description of the New Art and the New Artists. Were they really any different, except that the results of their obsessions and imagination were more forcefully inflicted upon the world? Sometimes a theory or idea is as strangely beautiful as that expressed by any painting, even when it’s articulated by those who are not articulate.

(Let me tell you what I saw that day, at that meeting. I saw a woman trying to come to terms with the death of her sister by inexplicable means. She did so by taking what facts she knew about Samuel Tonsure and bending them to a theory that attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable. In that forced assimilation of fact and fancy, Janice, there might have been a fragment of truth, even if only a psychological truth. Perhaps by seeing Tonsure in a different light than I, she advanced my understanding of him one tiny increment.

(Sarah Potent’s diatribe about the truth, taking as her basis Stretcher Jones’s rebellion against the Kalif and expanding it to include many of the unanswered questions about Ambergris’s past—wasn’t she, in disguised form, asking the same questions we all have asked from time to time? Does she deserve vilification for trying to think her way through all of this?

(Could you have missed the beauty of Frederick Madnok’s theory that Ambergris is “shadowed” from below by a giant fungus, wide as the city and deep as the city is tall, through which catacomb the tunnels of the gray caps? Could you not see the utter precision and craftsmanship of his many diagrams? The humor of the labeling—a sense of humor that tells the reader that Madnok knows how outlandish his theory may sound.

(There is an art, Janice, to being an outsider, a skill to being a good crackpot. Some people decide to become writers of fiction and this is considered a legitimate endeavor. Others decide to make their expressions of the imagination more personal. I, for one, gained more from that meeting than from any novel I have ever read!)