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.”
At least I got the courtesy of an embarrassed look from old Mortar. Pretty Pestle, though, went right on pounding away.
Eventually, I managed to rescue myself from the Nativism tour, but it took almost a year. People liked the irony of a Shriek, any Shriek, narrating that tour—at least the ones who had read Mary’s book, and too many of them had read Mary’s book. {Even me. I’m surprised you make no mention here of the time I took your Nativism tour. I’ve never seen anyone have to hold in so much irritation for such a long time. I only did it because for a time I contemplated joining the fray. If they wanted to use my life for their mass hallucinations, then I should at least have made a little extra money off of it. Can you imagine the furor if Duncan Shriek had become a tour guide?}
Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps was a book we needed during those reactionary rebuilding years as much as we’d needed Sabon’s pig cartel book a few years before. It was the book that made the rift between Duncan and Mary permanent. As Duncan wrote in his journal after reading it, “For the first time, my body understands what my mind accepted long before: Mary is never coming back to me.”
In her book, Sabon alternately refuted Duncan’s theories about the gray caps and cribbed from them—as if she had ground Duncan’s ideas down to specks of glitter and then used them to decorate her own creations. {Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t given her a copy of my own Cinsorium when we were at Blythe, inscribed “My dearest Mary—here’s the heart of me. Treat it gently. Love, Duncan.” She couldn’t have treated my Cinsorium more ruthlessly in her Cinsorium if she’d honed the book’s boards to a fatal sharpness and then stabbed me with them repeatedly. I can forgive her for most things, but not that.}
“So that is the message you would like me to relay to Duncan?” I asked Pestle, to make sure.
A triumphant look from Pestle. “Yes, thanks. That would be wonderful. But we have more to tell him.”
“I rather thought you might.”
As everyone knows, Nativism consists of two major ideas, but most people do not realize that only one of them is unique. The other has been around for centuries. Sabon’s innovation consisted in how she put the two together and then slapped her father’s crowd-pleasing title of “Nativism” on top of it all like the final slice of bread on a particularly messy sandwich.
What was the first part of this magnificent theory? To start with, Sabon floated the thought—I can’t even credit it with the term “idea”—that the gray caps were the degenerate descendents of a local tribe similar to the Dogghe or the Nimblytod {without asking either tribe how they felt about being lumped in with the gray caps, and without consulting their extensive oral histories}, but a tribe that had been colonized and then subjugated by several variations of fungus found in both above- and belowground Ambergris. She claimed that the mighty city that had existed before Manzikert I razed it had housed a Saphant-type civilization predating the gray caps. She even went so far as to suggest that the gray caps had been a servant class to this hypothetical other race. {I found it highly ironic, given the fate of my books at the hands of reviewers, that by postulating this “other race” and leaving that question as the book’s central mystery, she so captured readers’ imaginations that no one thought to cry out, “Where’s the proof?”}
Pestle said, “Tell Duncan that he doesn’t need to worry about the gray caps.”
“They say you don’t need to worry about the gray caps, Duncan.”