Nora and the Nomads
This novella is in the same setting as my earlier novelette "Butterflies are the Gentlest." It should stand alone pretty well, but if you find it confusing, try reading "Butterflies are the Gentlest" first. I'm calling the setting itself "the Valentine Divergence".
As always, Nora could not remember the moment the dream began, only the moment it became lucid. She had been walking through a meadow on the mountainside, looking down at the dream-town below, when she remembered the picnic last night. This was near the place she and Orson had spread their blanket and eaten and made love, and then lay there talking until they woke. But Orson wasn't here now. Perhaps he wasn't asleep, or perhaps he had entered the dream before her, had not seen her, and had gone elsewhere. She looked down at the town and prepared to teleport.
Something was off. She studied the town spread out below her and couldn't pinpoint what was wrong; had someone built a new house since last night? Or moved a house? She hadn't heard of any such plans, and usually those things were discussed before being implemented.
She teleported into her own home, which adjoined Orson's, and walked upstairs to the skybridge. But the door at the other end was locked, and he didn't answer her ring; he wasn't home, or wasn't asleep. Downstairs, then, and out the door, after pausing before a mirror to adjust her clothes from the picnic wear she had fallen asleep in. There were dream-children playing in the street, but no dreamers in sight. She walked past the children toward the area that had seemed wrong somehow when she looked down from the mountainside.
She hadn't gone far when she met her friend Ursula coming the other way. "Nora! Have you heard?"
"Heard what?"
"About the nomads -- they're here in the dream."
"But we can't talk to them in the waking! Not head-to-head, I mean. Is it really them, or just dream-people who look like them?" Not all of the people here in the dream were dreamers; some, like the children playing in the street before Nora's house, existed only in the dream. Whether they were "real," or self-aware, was a subject of much debate among the dreamers; Nora thought they were.
"I'm pretty sure it's them. Houses were shifting place and shape around them, and that's something that only happens with an inexperienced dreamer. Doctor Thomas says he thinks they dream on a different frequency than their waking thoughts, like we do, and that it overlaps with our dream-frequency."
"Is it just houses...?"
"I haven't heard of any people being changed -- yet."
Nora had worked hard to get her dream-body just the way she liked it; once in a while an undisciplined dreamer, usually a small child, accidentally transformed her in some way, and it might take her several nights to get herself back in shape. Still, it *usually* wasn't too bad. She was more curious than afraid. "Do you know where they are? Do they have a camp here in the dream-town, too?"
The nomads had arrived yesterday, and arranged to rent a field on the outskirts of town to camp in. Nora had only seen a few of them, who'd come in to the diner for a late lunch near the end of her shift. They'd seemed friendlier than some other foreigners Nora had occasionally met.
"No, not that I know of. They've just been seen in ones and twos walking around town... and things change when they pass."
That made Nora nervous, but she didn't want to let fear master her. The worst an undisciplined dreamer could do to her would be... embarrassing. Horribly embarrassing. But she was tough. She told herself that, and with effort, managed not to run back to her house and close the door behind her.
"I was going to walk around for a little while," she said, "and then come back and see if Orson's fallen asleep yet. He wasn't when I rang at his door a few minutes ago."
"Let's see if we can find any of the nomads, shall we?"
Nora hesitated. "All right."
So they walked toward downtown, but though they saw a couple of nomads at a distance, easily distinguished by their copious pink hair, they couldn't get close enough to talk to them before they vanished.
"I think they're teleporting a lot," Ursula suggested. "Probably with no control."
"They could be waking up when they vanish."
"Could be. It shows they aren't dream-people, though. Dream-people don't teleport."
"That's true -- or at least I've never seen them do it." She hadn't ever asked them if they could, either; you couldn't always get a straight answer out of them.
"So they must be dreaming nomads."
"Or, you know, regular dreamers -- kids playing a prank, maybe -- who've taken the form of nomads for a joke. That could be why they keep teleporting away when we get close -- so we won't recognize them by their speech or body language."
But though they met a couple of other dreamers who said they had talked briefly with one or two of the nomads, who had soon wandered off or vanished, they didn't see any more that night. Nora started feeling that she might wake up soon, and she excused herself and returned home.
She tried the door of the skybridge to Orson's house again, and still found it locked, and got no answer to her ring. So she went down to the kitchen, cooked herself a stack of pancakes and ate them with lots of real butter and maple syrup, a meal that would have been forbiddingly fattening in the waking. When she felt her waking was imminent, she ran up the long spiral staircase to her tower bedroom, long-jumped from the head of the stairs into the very center of her great circular bed, and was awake almost instantly.
Her waking house was much smaller than her dream-house, of course; most people's were. And she didn't have the whole house to herself, just a mother-in-law suite that she rented from Irene and Arnold Roberts. Her waking bed was much smaller, and not near as soft. And her waking body -- well, technically it wasn't even female, though Doctor Thomas had done what he could, after her secret (and everyone else's) came out. He couldn't find anyone who was competent to do a vaginoplasty when no one really understood how their new biology worked in the first place, and his attempt at hormone therapy hadn't given her much of a figure; the best he could do was laser hair removal, and sending her to a surgeon in North Platte for breast implants.
No one knew what caused the Divergence, but its effects were obvious: the human race suddenly diverged into thousands of neospecies, each in its own local region. Not all were humanoid in anatomy, and some were very different from old-style humans in their neurology. The North Platte dreamers were more human-looking than the Omaha sheepdogs or Lincoln bison, but they were one of a handful of telepathic neospecies in North America; they could talk mind-to-mind with one another within about a quarter of a mile, waking, and they shared dreams with everyone within five miles.
Nora had been terrified, in those first few days after the Divergence when everyone's thoughts were leaking indiscriminately into everyone else's, that everyone would treat her like a pariah once they knew about her. This had been a fairly conservative farming community, and it still was in some ways. But people became a lot more forgiving and tolerant when it wasn't just one person's shameful secret getting exposed by chance once or twice a year, a topic for cruel gossip and pointed preaching, but everyone's lifetime of secrets all spilling in a few days. People tacitly agreed to ignore or forgive pretty much everything short of rape and murder. And they could plainly see, with their new sense, that her thoughts and feelings were as feminine as any other woman's.
Once everyone knew about her, she no longer had any reason not to try to get her body fixed -- but it was suddenly a lot more difficult than before. No two neospecies had the same biology, and for those whose reproductive biology had changed a lot, hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery had to be reinvented from the ground up. And the North Platte, Nebraska change-region was too poor and too low in population to get a lot of research dollars aimed at their particular problems, especially problems that affected only a handful of people like Nora; it was just local doctors like Doctor Thomas sharing notes and getting by as best they could.
Nora showered, got dressed, and ate -- grapefruit and low-fat yogurt, a sad contrast to the buttered, syrupy pancakes from her dream-kitchen. She listened with half her mind to the Roberts' telepathic conversations in the other part of the house; Irene was scolding little Walter for not getting ready for school fast enough, and asking why his waking room couldn't be as clean as his room in their dream-house. Nora asked them if they'd heard anything in the dream about the nomads, and they said no; she told them what she'd heard from Ursula.
As soon as she rinsed her breakfast dishes, Nora walked the half a mile from the Roberts' house to the diner she worked at. On the way to work she continued her breakfast conversation with Irene Roberts, who was walking Walter to school, until they got out of telepathic range. When she lost contact with Irene, she reached out past the general buzz of thoughts and feelings to make contact with Ted, her boss at the diner, to let him know she was nearly there.
Not long after they'd opened up, three of the nomads came in.
They only had two eyes and two arms, and the woman of the group only had two breasts. The men had no glow-ridges, of course. In fact, they looked an awful lot like old-style humans, except that their hair came in varying shades of pink and purple, and their ears had long, dangling earlobes.
They seated themselves and Nora went over to their table to take their orders. Speaking aloud in the waking wasn't something Nora did every day, but it wasn't rare either; sometimes she had to make phone calls to foreigners, or people of her own kind who were outside of telepathic range. They seemed to eat the same kinds of things Nora's people ate, which was good, because Ted wasn't the most versatile cook in the world. She gave Ted their orders, then served a few locals who'd come in earlier, and when he had the nomads' order ready, she brought it to them, ready to make conversation if they seemed agreeable.
"How do you like our town?" she asked. The guy with dark-purple hair who'd ordered eggs sunny-side up with bacon and hash browns said:
"It's a nice place. I could wish there were more people here to buy our wares, so we could afford to stay longer -- but if there were more people, it might not be so nice."
"I like the big sky in this part of the country," the pinkish-purple haired woman said, after swallowing a bite of her oatmeal. "Where we come from there were mountains all around. Here you can see for miles in every direction."
"Where is that?" Nora asked politely.
"The Canadian Rockies," sunny-side up said. "Near Calgary -- well, not very near Calgary but it's the only nearby city you'd have heard of."
"Nearer to Calgary than we are to Omaha?" Nora asked with a smile. "Or have people in Canada even heard of Omaha?"
"Yes, and we were a little closer to Calgary than that but not by much. Of course we all left within three or four months after the Divergence, and more than half of us within a couple of weeks; some of us have gone back to visit once or twice, but my family hasn't. They say some of the Calgary marmots have moved into the houses we abandoned."
"They're welcome to them, I say," said oatmeal. The light-purple haired man hadn't said anything aloud yet, his mouth constantly full of pancakes, but Nora suspected he was having an ongoing telepathic conversation with the other two, judging from the look in his eyes. For that matter, Nora was sharing this conversation with Ted and a couple of friends among the other breakfast customers, and listening at the same time to her friends' conversation about what they'd bought at the nomads' market yesterday, and what they'd seen of the nomads.
"So, I hear we can share dreams even though we can't talk telepathically while awake?"
"I'm not sure," sunny-side up said. "Dalvorius said he had a strange dream, but I don't remember what I dreamed."
"I dreamed I was walking along the streets of a town like this, but most of the houses were bigger," oatmeal said. "And most of the people were like you, with three arms and bone-ridges on their heads and stuff..." She nattered on, oblivious to Nora's acute embarrassment. There was nothing she could do about her horribly masculine glow-ridges. Doctor Thomas said it wasn't safe to remove them, there were so many nerve endings and blood vessels in them, and no one was sure how critical those bundles of nerves running from them down into the brain were. When she first transitioned, she'd tried wearing a hood or wig over them, but they got uncomfortably hot within minutes. She just had to display them like a man, and suffer even worse embarrassment when they glowed green when she was aroused. Of course, even genetic women's arousal was immediately obvious to everyone within telepathic range; but it was the maleness of Nora's arousal that caused her so much distress.
"But I'm not sure it was a shared dream," oatmeal concluded. "Do you folks share dreams? We do sometimes, but not as often as you might think."
"Yes, we all share dreams. We've got longer range in our dreams than awake -- about nine times farther. My friend and I, in the dream this morning, we saw some of you at a distance but you kept vanishing before we got close."
"Are you sure you didn't just dream about us?" sunny-side up asked. "That seems much more likely than that we'd actually share dreams, when our telepathy works on such different frequencies."
"Maybe it's nothing," Nora said. "But if we meet in the dream-town, let's share a secret, nothing too important but something we haven't had any reason to tell anyone else. And then see if the other knows it when we meet again."
"Good idea," oatmeal said. "I'm Umusalina, by the way."
"I'm Nora. Uh, if you don't mind my asking, what kind of name...?"
"We all chose new names for ourselves after the Divergence," sunny-side up said. "Original names, not from any old-time language or culture. I'm Sashuwerel, and that's Dalvorius," gesturing toward the guy eating pancakes.
"Well, I'd better get back to work," Nora said as Regina walked in. "Let me know if you need anything."
Regina had given her order to Ted telepathically as soon as she got in range of the diner, of course; all the locals did. Nora only had to take orders verbally from foreigners like the nomads, but was kept busy enough serving food, cleaning tables, cleaning the floor and the bathrooms, restocking the napkin dispensers and salt shakers and so forth... While she was doing all that, she could still converse with Regina and whatever other friends were in range, as long as she didn't get distracted.
"I didn't see you in the dream last night," Regina said, sitting down in her usual booth.
"I walked around downtown with Ursula for a while, then went home and ate breakfast," Nora replied, clearing the dishes from the table a couple of early customers had just vacated. "Ursula told me about the nomads, and we went looking for them; we saw a couple at a distance but didn't get to talk to them."
"I heard about them, too, but I didn't see any. Did they tell you anything when you served their food?"
"We talked about it. But they don't remember their dreams clearly enough to be sure whether they were sharing our dreams or not. They sounded skeptical, actually."
"I can barely remember what that was like... But you'd think they'd share dreams, too, being telepathic. Aren't they?"
"Different telepathic neospecies are all different, I guess, like everybody else."
This is only an approximate account of their conversation, of course; their telepathic speech consisted partly of English words and fragments of sentences, but largely of mental images, sounds, smells -- some iconic, like Nora's memories of seeing distant nomads vanish, but others of which had acquired a conventionalized meaning over the years since the Divergence: an image of the glorious faux-Egyptian City Hall in the dream-town to signify the town, a loaf of bread to signify food. And Nora was simultaneously conversing with Ted about food orders that were nearly ready to serve, and Regina was simultaneously conversing with other friends who were in range.
That group of nomads left after forty-five minutes or so, but several other groups, two to four at a time, came in for lunch or supper at various times. Nora conversed with most of them, except for one young couple who were interested only in each other and wanted to give Nora their orders and then ignore her. She learned a little more about the nomads, and two of them told her what they could remember of their dreams. Both had dreamed about meeting and talking with North Platte dreamers, but neither remembered much about the scene of their dreams. One said he'd been in a large rambling house with dozens of rooms, which could have been almost any house in town; another said she was in a small park surrounded by houses, which could be any of several parks. The latter, a woman named Talrasia, couldn't answer Nora's questions about what the houses around the park had looked like, or whether there was a fountain or monument in the center of it; she only remembered she'd been walking in a park, and had met a woman with three breasts and a little arm coming out of her blouse just below the middle one, like Nora. "Except she didn't have those bony ridges," Talrasia said with a frown, and Nora's glow-ridges turned yellow with embarrassment. She didn't feel like explaining. "And she was shorter than you... I guess I'd know her if I saw her in the real world. But probably she was just an amalgam of a bunch of women I saw at the market yesterday."
Now that she'd had time to think, Nora wasn't as worried about the nomads making houses move around or change shape. She hadn't actually seen any of that happen, and wasn't sure how much Ursula had seen. She wished she could talk to Ursula, but Ursula lived four miles outside town, on a farm with her husband and mother-in-law, and didn't get into town every day. They weren't in telepathic range except when they were asleep. And Ted was okay with telepathic conversations during working hours, but frowned on cell-phone conversations unless the diner was totally empty of customers and the floor had been recently mopped. Besides, Ursula was probably busy too. She'd call her after work, maybe, or more likely look for her in the dream tonight.
Nora found herself walking down the street to Regina's house, smiling at the dream-children playing hopscotch in the street. The one Nora knew best, Edna, broke from the group and came running up to her just as she reached Regina's front gate.
"Dalvorius asked me about you," she said. "I told him you weren't at home but he should maybe come back later."
"Oh," Nora said, realizing she was dreaming and remembering who Dalvorius was. The silent nomad with the big stack of pancakes. Somewhat disturbed, she rang the bell and opened the gate; Regina stepped out onto the porch as Nora came up the walk.
"Good evening," Regina said, though it was broad daylight as it almost always was here; they conventionally reversed their day and night words here in the dream-town, "evening" for the period shortly after you noticed you were dreaming, "morning" for the time when you realized you were going to wake soon, and so forth.
"Good evening. I was going to walk downtown; want to come?"
"Sure."
They chatted as they went, mainly gossiping about the nomads. Nora thought briefly about telling Edna that if Dalvorius called for her again, he should look for her downtown, but Regina said something that distracted her, and she forgot.
They met more and more people as they went downtown, including Ursula, who joined them. "Have you seen any of the nomads tonight?" Nora asked her.
"I saw one at a distance, but he turned a corner and was gone before I could greet him."
They continued toward downtown, and saw their first nomad. It was the young man from the couple who had eyes only for each other and didn't want to talk. His wife or girlfriend wasn't with him; he was wandering around with a dazed air.
"Do you recognize him?" Ursula asked. "You said several of them ate at the diner yesterday."
"Yes..."
"Why don't you go talk to him?"
"I don't want him to transform me," Nora said nervously.
"None of us do," Ursula said, "but I can see where it might be worse for you..."
"He might remember seeing me in the waking with my... you know." Even here, with the confidence her feminine body gave her, she was too embarrassed to mention the glow-ridges she had in her waking body.
"I'll talk to him." And Ursula walked up to him, leaving Nora and Regina a few paces behind. They could hear clearly as she said: "Good night; welcome to town. Are you lost? Can I help you get somewhere?"
"The church," the young man said. "I was supposed to be there twenty minutes ago... she'll think I've gotten cold feet and abandoned her...!"
"Right this way," Ursula said, leading him toward the dream-avatar of the Methodist church.
Nora wasn't sure that was a good idea -- what if he moved the church or even messed with its architecture? But she and Regina followed them at a little distance. Before they got there, though, the young man abruptly turned aside and walked through a gate in someone's garden wall -- Nora thought it was the Leesons' house, but didn't know them well and wasn't sure. The gate shouldn't have opened for him unless he knew the Leesons well. Ursula tried to follow him, but the gate wouldn't open for her.
"Should we ring the bell and warn them?" Regina wondered. Ursula did so, but no one answered, and after a few minutes they continued toward town.
As they were passing the library, Orson came out with three books under his arm. His eyes lit up and his glow-ridges turned purple as he saw Nora; she smiled and approached him.
"Hi," she said. "Miss me?"
"Is she talking to Orson?" Ursula asked Regina, who nodded. Ursula lived four miles northwest of town, and Orson three miles south -- so they were out of dream-range for each other, and weren't in each other's version of the dream-town.
In answer, Orson's glow-ridges faded from purple to light green. He hugged Nora, and kissed her; she kissed him back intently, and felt his central arm fondle her middle breast. She shivered, and thought about inviting him back home... but Regina said:
"We're looking for nomads. Want to come with us?"
"Sure," Orson said. "I heard about them but haven't seen them yet, in the waking or here."
"They look like old-style humans with purple hair," Regina explained, and Nora told him about the ones who'd come into the diner in the last couple of days.
They wandered around looking for nomads, and met several people who said they'd seen one, but saw none for themselves. Then they found a group of people standing around talking, pointing at a couple of houses.
"What's going on?" Orson asked.
"Look!" Irene Roberts said. "My house was to the left of Arnold's, and now it's to the right. And the sky-bridge connecting them is gone, and the cupola on Arnold's house, and the mullions are all wrong! We're trying to imagine them back but we need some help. Want to join in?"
"Sure," Orson said, and he, Nora, Ursula and Regina all started working with Irene and Arnold Roberts, listening as the couple described how their houses were supposed to look and be situated, and what the sky-bridge looked like from outside and inside, and the feel of the carpet... They all imagined it together, and suddenly the houses swapped places. But the sky-bridge still wasn't there.
"Keep trying," Arnold urged, and they did.
Then Nora felt that she was going to wake up soon. It wasn't considered polite to do it in front of others if you could help it, and she didn't feel like teleporting. She made her excuses and ran like the wind toward home. She had just turned into her street when Edna stopped her, tugging on her arm.
"Dalvorius came by again," she said. "He left a note for you in your mailbox."
"But I don't have a mailbox..." She did now, though, she saw as she dashed toward her house. She opened it, pulled out a rolled-up handwritten sheet, and read it as she walked in the door and up the spiral staircase.
"You said you wanted to share secret messages so we could figure out if we're really meeting in dreams, or just dreaming about each other. This isn't much of a secret, but none of your people know it yet. We're going to put on a parade and pageant on Saturday -- that part's not secret, we'll announce it all over tomorrow and some people at City Hall already know from us applying for the permits. I'm going to wear an old-style magician's costume in the parade, a top hat and suit with tails, plus a big wand. And at the pageant, I'll do a magic act. I'm not going to tell you how I do my tricks, but --"
She woke up before she finished reading the note, or reached the top of the stairs and her bed.
The next day, there weren't as many nomads coming in for breakfast, but several came in around lunchtime, beginning with Dalvorius and a couple of others Nora had seen the day before but couldn't remember the names of. Not the ones he'd eaten breakfast with yesterday, anyway. Dalvorius held a stack of fliers and asked Nora if it was okay to put one or two of them up; Nora asked Ted telepathically, he said yes, and she passed the message on verbally. Dalvorius taped up one by the cash register and another by the door:
PARADE and PAGEANT
Saturday, May 23
Parade begins at 11 a.m. in front of the high school and ends at the nomad market
Pageant to follow at 12 Noon
Admission free, free-will offerings gladly accepted in cash, local handicrafts, produce or preserves.
Suitable for the entire Family.
There was a map of the parade route, and a drawing of a marching band in fantastical costumes.
"Did you have another interesting dream last night?" Nora asked him as he was taping up the one by the cash register.
She thought he blushed, but it was a very faint blush. "I dreamed about you," he said, "only you weren't in the dream. I was trying to find you and give you an important message, and I kept missing you everywhere I went."
"I dreamed that I got a letter from you," she said. "I didn't have time to read it all before I woke up, but you told me about this parade and pageant, and said you were going to do a magic show as part of the pageant."
"Oh... I suppose that proves it. We really are sharing dreams."
Nora was telling Ted and several customers sitting too far away to hear their conversation about this, and soon word would spread all over town. People out of waking telepathic range would hear about it tonight in the dream. Many people had already been sure of it, but here was more confirmation.
"Do you remember where you looked for me?"
"I asked directions to your house, and you weren't home -- it was a big house, three storeys with a tower above that, with wood siding painted light blue."
He was pretty observant.
"And there was a blue mailbox in front, though I didn't notice it the first time -- only after I came back after going to several other places people said you might be, the church and the library and I don't remember where else. So I put a note in the mailbox and I woke up soon after that."
She nodded. "I look forward to seeing your magic show."
Ted was urging her, "Talk to him about the disruptions! Ask him if he noticed anything or if the other nomads told him about their dreams." Several others were chipping in their two cents, suggesting questions to ask, sly ways of working around to the issue, or sternly forbidding her from mixing herself up in it. "This is an issue for the City Council," old Mrs. Swenson insisted from the grocery store down the street.
She ignored most of the contradictory advice, and said: "I hope we can get along as well in the dream as we do in the waking. I heard some rumors about vandalism in some parts of the dream-town, and some people were blaming you -- it could be some of our own children, of course, that's happened before. Their imaginations aren't very disciplined yet."
"Oh -- I hope we haven't done any damage. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, if so. Do you want me to talk to people about it?"
"Yes, if you please."
Dalvorius and his friends ate and left, presumably to put up more of those flyers elsewhere -- she saw several in store windows on her way home. Later, in the lull between lunch and supper, the young couple came in again, the man whom she, Ursula and Regina had met in the dream last night and his wife or girlfriend. (They didn't wear rings, but then she hadn't seen wedding rings on any of the nomads; a lot of neospecies had abandoned or reinvented some old-style human customs, and she'd heard of people who got matching tattoos, or brands, or started shaving matching patterns in their fur, or etched symbols into their carapaces when they married.)
"Did you find what you were looking for last night?" she asked him, after she brought them their burgers and onion rings.
"Hmm?"
"In the dream... you were looking for the church, and Ursula was going to show you the way, but, ah, we got separated on the way there."
He frowned in puzzlement, his mouth full of food, and his wife or girlfriend said: "How'd you know what he dreamed about? He'd forgotten it himself until this moment."
"We shared dreams," Nora explained. "Didn't you know?"
"I know they call you North Platte dreamers," she said, and the man swallowed his mouthful of food and continued, "-- isn't that what you like to be called? I've heard you called other things but I'm not sure... some of those other names, well..."
"'Dreamers' is good. We share dreams more than most telepathic neospecies, and they're almost always lucid. And apparently we can share dreams with you, too, though not with the telepaths from Alabama who came to visit a few years ago, or the ones from New York."
"I see," he said uneasily. "That's interesting."
"Dalvorius and I talked about it this morning... I thought the word would have spread among you by now."
"We haven't been in range of Dalvorius since we left the camp this morning -- we went out to knock on doors at the farms east of town and tell them about the parade and pageant. We've picked up some gossip since we got back, but not that..." He got a distant look for a few moments, probably asking questions of nearby friends, and then said: "Oh. Dalvorius sent you a letter in his dream, and you got it in yours?"
"Pretty much like that."
"That's interesting. We share dreams sometimes, but not every night, and we don't remember shared dreams much more often or clearly than normal dreams."
"Lucid dreaming's something you can learn, you know. Some old-style humans used to do it, and maybe we have more of a knack for it than they did, but we didn't all fall asleep the night after the Divergence already knowing how. A few people in North Platte who knew how taught the neighbors they shared dreams with how to recognize and remember them, and it spread from there when people scattered to the small towns around the change-region."
North Platte had already been a small town by most standards, with twenty-five thousand people just before the Divergence, but that was too many telepaths to live in close proximity, and within a year, ninety-five percent of the people there had relocated to tiny towns and villages like Carston. It had been confusing enough here in Carston the day of the Divergence, where Nora had lived all her life (all "his" life, people had thought); she didn't envy the people who'd been living in North Platte at the time, and couldn't imagine how horrible it must have been for that neighborhood in Brooklyn where the neospecies was telepathic. (Some people said they'd just collapsed into a hive-mind, but Nora discounted that rumor, knowing that people in Omaha and Lincoln thought the same about the North Platte dreamers.)
"Maybe you folks can give us some lessons, then."
"We'd be glad to." Hopefully if they were dreaming lucidly, they wouldn't wreak unconscious changes on the dream-town the way they'd been doing. Of course, they could then try to force deliberate changes... but they seemed like nice people, who wanted to leave a friendly impression in case they wanted to come back and visit someday, or in case other traveling groups of their people came here.
Nora conversed with Regina and several other people in the course of the afternoon, and word about her idea spread: soon a delegation went to the nomad camp and made the offer of free classes in lucid dreaming. Nora found herself volunteered to teach one of the classes, the next evening after she got off work. Even before then, she offered basic tips on lucid dreaming to any nomad customers who were interested; by closing time, word had spread among them and nearly all of them were asking her for a dreaming lesson along with their food and drink.
Not long after little Walter fell asleep, his thoughts quieting down, Nora felt Arnold and Irene starting their foreplay, and resigned herself to a restless night. Even though she tried to focus on her TV show, and when that proved hopeless, on Irene's sensations rather than Arnold's, she felt her hateful organ sliding out of its sheath, making her panties uncomfortably tight. And though she avoided the mirror, she knew her glow-ridges were bright green. She went to bed, but didn't fall asleep until sometime after Arnold and Irene did.
She found herself in the library of her dream-house, which contained copies of all the books she'd read in dreams, and all the books she'd read in the waking often or recently enough to remember them well. It wasn't a large library compared to Orson's or Ursula's; she wasn't a great reader, not as much as she'd been before the Divergence, when secretly reading stories about people like her was the only indulgence she allowed her real self. Now that she had the dream, she didn't need those stories the way she used to, though a few she'd read over and over still lingered here in her library. And a new addition to the shelf, there before her, was Dalvorius' letter. She picked it up and found the place she'd left off:
"...I'm not going to tell you how I do my tricks, but I'll say this: I'll start with a series of card tricks, and lead up to a Vanishing Lady. You can watch the pageant and see if this letter is just a figment of dream or if we're really in telepathic contact while we sleep.
"Yours cordially,
"Dalvorius of clan Pelerin."
She chewed that over for a few moments, and thought about going out and looking for Dalvorius or other nomads. But she wanted something else more urgently. She went to the skybridge and found Orson coming across it toward her; they embraced, and kissed, and he said: "Your place or mine?"
"Why not right here?" She'd just had to listen to Arnold and Irene -- and often enough, every other couple within a quarter mile of her house. People had necessarily given up caring about privacy within months after the Divergence, though there'd been a noticeable slump in the number of babies born nine to fifteen months after that day. If the neighbors saw them through the skybridge windows, she didn't care. It was only in dreams that they could be together as husband and wife; in the waking they met almost every weekend, but the physical manifestation of their love was so awkward and unsatisfying compared to what it was here that they usually didn't go much beyond kissing until they fell asleep.
After the first time they moved from the skybridge to her bedroom. After the third time she started to feel vaguely guilty about not going to look for Dalvorius or the others she'd talked to and following up on her lucid dreaming lessons; she suggested they get dressed and go out for a walk. Orson was agreeable, and they started out toward downtown. But then, during one of the little discontinuities where people transitioned from one period of REM sleep to the next, and about ninety minutes of dreamless sleep passed in the real world, he vanished; he must have woken up. She sighed. Maybe he'd fall asleep again before morning and rejoin her.
She walked aimlessly for a while, then heard loud music from somewhere off to her left, and took the next side street in that direction. It was mostly dream-people's houses in this neighborhood; the dreamers tended to cluster on certain streets, mostly near downtown but a few in outlying areas like Nora, Orson, Ursula and Regina. She came to a house with a large front lawn she didn't remember seeing before, and an open garage with a driveway -- an anomaly in a town where there were no cars, where a person could walk as far and fast as they liked without getting tired, or even teleport if they wished. There were people dressed for summer weather standing around the lawn and driveway with drinks and little plates of food, talking animatedly, and a band was set up just inside the garage, playing old-school rock and roll. Most of them were normal-looking people, a few dream-people she recognized and many she didn't, but there in the middle of the lawn, holding a drink in front of her breasts (only two of them) and a plate of food in front of her crotch, was a pink-haired nomad who looked familiar. Nora came closer and recognized her as Talrasia, one of the customers she'd talked with at the diner.
She was obviously acutely embarrassed by her nakedness, though none of the dream-people standing around her were taking any obvious notice of it. Nora took pity on her and said, pitching her voice to carry over the music: "Talrasia, have you noticed that you're dreaming?" Then she turned her eyes respectfully away.
Talrasia said, after a pause, "Oh... of course."
"Try imagining yourself with clothes on," Nora advised, still not looking directly at her. "Be specific."
"All right... Wow! This is so cool!"
"Can I look?"
"Be my guest."
Nora turned and saw Talrasia wearing an ankle-length elaborately sequined blue gown, with puffy short sleeves and matching blue slippers.
"Let's go somewhere we can talk," Nora suggested loudly, and Talrasia followed her down the street away from the party.
"I'm dreaming and I know it," Talrasia said delightedly. "This hasn't happened since I was a little girl. Before the Divergence."
"It never happened to me until afterward. You folks need to learn how to notice you're dreaming by yourselves, without us telling you. I think you *might* have just created that house there, and even some of the people in it... I'm not quite sure, because I don't know this neighborhood well, but other nomads have apparently changed things around them without meaning to."
"It looked a lot like a house where I went to some parties when I was a teenager," Talrasia said. "What do you mean, you don't know this neighborhood well? Is this part of your town?"
"Yes -- if you haven't already heard, we share a dream-image of our town. People who live in little apartments in the waking town have big houses of their own here, and people who live out in the country in the waking live closer together, or even right downtown, if they want to. And we try to keep it consistent from night to night, except when we want to change things. But you folks' dreams have been mixing up with ours, and it seems like you're changing things around unconsciously -- the way scenery used to change around randomly in our old separate dreams before the Divergence."
"I'm sorry," Talrasia apologized. "I didn't know."
"We figure maybe if you learn to dream lucidly, you can avoid --"
But Talrasia vanished; probably she had just woken up. That used to happen a lot to Nora and the others when they were first learning to dream lucidly; it was a hard balance to maintain at first, knowing that you were dreaming and yet continuing to dream.
Nora wandered toward downtown, and conversed here and there with friends and acquaintances, but didn't meet any more nomads that night.
The next morning, Talrasia was one of the first customers they got after the diner opened; she came in with Sashuwerel and Umusalina.
"I dreamed about you last night!" she exclaimed when Nora came over to take their orders. "Was it real? I mean, were we really meeting or did I just dream about you?"
"I met you in the dream... we were at a party at a house on Red Oak Avenue. I reminded you you were dreaming." She didn't think she should mention the fact that Talrasia was naked, though if the nomads' telepathy worked like the dreamers', the others probably already knew.
"That was it! Except I didn't notice the name of the street we were on. And --" She glanced at the others, and Sashuwerel said:
"Several of us remembered dreams this morning. In nearly all of them, we were somewhere in a strange city, surrounded by people like you -- North Platte dreamers. Talrasia has told us about her dream. You think we've been unconsciously causing changes to your dream city?"
"It looks that way, from what I've heard, but I can't be sure. I don't know Red Oak Avenue well enough to say for sure, but I don't think that house was there before, or at least it didn't look quite like that. And night before last, Irene and Arnold Roberts' houses got flipped around, and the skybridge between them disappeared. I've heard about other things happening, but those are the ones I've seen."
"I don't know how we can avoid that, if we're doing it unconsciously, but we'll try," Umusalina said. "I'll have a glass of grapefruit juice and a bowl of oatmeal with raisins, please."
The others placed their orders then, and as more customers were coming in, both locals and nomads, Nora didn't have time to talk to them much more. When they paid for their meal, she reminded them about the lucid dreaming classes and encouraged them to come.
"We can't all come at once," Sashuwerel said. "But many of us will be there this evening."
"Including me," Talrasia said.
"If you have several classes a day, we can all come at different times," Umusalina added.
"I'll see what I can do. I'll be one of the teachers, but I'm not the main one organizing them."
It was with some trepidation that Nora made her way to the high school after work. She had unpleasant memories of her high school years, years when she had become more and more acutely aware of the wrongness of her body and almost worked up the courage to tell her friends and family she was really a girl, but finally lost her nerve and continued suffering as an apparent man until the Divergence. But her friends felt her nervousness and sent her their reassurance, and by the time she reached the school, and the classroom she'd been told to use for the lesson, she was feeling a little more confident.
Someone had put up signs for the benefit of the nomads, directing them to the social studies classroom. Nora walked in to find a group of twelve nomads, most of whom she'd seen at the diner, but including several children, the first she'd seen. If she could judge their ages from the cues she'd use for most near-human neospecies, they ranged from seven years up to their mid-teens. The prepubescent children had thin, wispy hair, in pinks and purples so light they were almost white, and all the children sat in the center of the group, with adults surrounding them. Among the adults were Talrasia, Dalvorius, and some older folks Nora hadn't seen.
"Good evening," she said. "I'm Nora Sanders, and I'll be teaching you the basics of lucid dreaming. I've already met some of you -- but could all of you introduce yourselves, please?"
An older woman with dark purple hair down to her waist, whom Nora hadn't seen in the diner, began by saying: "I am Renshulina, and we are clan Pelerin of the Kelowna nomads." The others said only their personal names.
"First, I think, a little history lesson is in order," Nora began. She told of the diaspora from North Platte to the smaller towns and villages of the change-region, and how the influx of new people had affected Carston.
"We'd figured out that we were sharing dreams, and over surprisingly long distances compare to our waking range, but we only remembered them sporadically after we woke. But some of the newcomers had learned lucid dreaming techniques, either back before the Divergence or just afterward, and they taught us -- both in waking lessons like this one, and in our dreams. Talrasia can tell you how I --"
"She's told us," Renshulina said.
"Well. We'll continue to do that, when and as we meet you in the dream. I remember the first time that happened to me, a month after the Divergence, when I met my new friend Regina in a dream, and she pointed out to me that I was dreaming. That helps speed up the process -- once you've dreamed lucidly once or twice, you're more likely to do it again. Regina said that back before the divergence, when she first learned about lucid dreaming, it took her months of daily practice in the techniques I'm going to teach you before she had her first lucid dream, and several weeks more before her second. But for us, once we started teaching and learning in our shared dreams, the process went much faster; and I hope it will be the same for you.
"So within a few months after the Divergence, we had all, except the smallest children, learned to be aware of our dreams, to have some degree of conscious control over them, and to remember them consistently. But they were still quite chaotic. Houses would move around, shuffle their rooms, or grow new rooms spontaneously; whole landscapes would shift, weather would change abruptly. People's dream-selves would change, usually shifting according to their mental image or their memories of how they'd looked and felt when they were younger, or other people's ideas about them, but sometimes transforming more radically as they experimented with dream control; and our clothes rarely remained the same for more than a few minutes of dream-time."
In those early days Nora had been female increasingly often in the dreams, though she still had bad nights when her body would revert to male, either something like her physical body with its sheathed penis and glow-ridges, or the gangly, pimply old-style human male body she remembered having before. It had taken more than a year before she got her body to stop fluctuating, to consistently have three breasts just the right size and shape, the middle one a little smaller and more sensitive than the outer ones, and a delicate middle arm with the baby-size fingers that North Platte males found so attractive. Some old folks still dreamed themselves as old-style humans, though generally much younger than their physical selves.
"First we learned to stabilize our own dream-forms, or to deliberately control our transformations. It was a mutual effort -- we told our friends and neighbors how we wanted to look, what we were aiming for, and they helped imagine us that way. At first we could only hold onto those ideal forms when we were concentrating on them, and we'd revert to some other form when we got distracted by any strong emotion, but over time it became a habit to keep our bodies the way we wanted them -- to keep each other the way we wanted to be.
"Then we started working together on stabilizing the dream landscape, so we could find our way around, and arrange to meet one another at agreed-upon places. Instead of using our lucid dreaming powers to constantly create and rearrange things at a moment's whim, as we'd done at first, we used them to carefully build things up detail by detail and make them stay that way night after night, imagining things together and putting them back every time someone's idle thoughts pushed them out of shape or position. We started downtown, and built beautiful dream-versions of the City Hall, the library, and the churches, and then started working out from there on houses and parks and so forth. We're free to rearrange things inside our own houses when we like, but if we want to change how they look outside, we have to work together with our neighbors.
"I don't expect to be able to teach you how to reshape your dream-self into an ideal form, or build a dream house whose rooms will all stay in place night after night, in just a few days. But I can get you started learning on your own, so you can continue practicing in your travels as you share dreams with each other. And I hope I can teach you enough in a few days that you can stop accidentally changing our dream-town, even if you can't yet start building your own."
She went over basic techniques of lucid dreaming, ways to form habits of routinely checking whether one was awake or dreaming, and methods of testing that, and then suggested exercises to try once they attained lucidity, whether on their own or with the help of a North Platte dreamer. "Start small, with your clothes or the things you carry with you -- concentrate on them and change them. Plan it out now, while you're awake, thinking about what you're going to do when you dream tonight. Think about it again a couple of times in the course of the evening, and again when you're lying down to sleep."
Throughout the lesson, Nora was hearing suggestions from various friends and acquaintances within range about important points to mention or better ways to explain things. It could have been confusing, and it would have been in the first few months after the Divergence, but by now Nora could handle multiple simultaneous conversations as well as anyone, and overall the suggestions were more helpful than distracting; she couldn't have done so well without them. She answered the nomads' questions, and then walked them through doing some of the exercises together.
"All right, now I want everyone to look at your hands. Study their shape, the blood vessels, the lines, the hairs. Ask yourself if you're dreaming. If your hands are as sharply defined as you see them now, you're either awake or you're a very experienced lucid dreamer. When you look at your hands later and ask yourself again if you're dreaming, you might see that they're a little blurry, and that will be a clue that you're dreaming..."
After a bit less than an hour, Nora dismissed the class, and walked home. As she neared home, she came in range of some people who were talking about the nomads and what to do about them:
"I don't see what good teaching them lucid dreaming's going to do," said old Joseph Anderson, the barber. "By the time they learn enough to do any good, they'll have moved on."
"They might stay in our change-region for a while after they leave town," Arnold Roberts countered. "What they learn here will help the folks down the road in Stapleton or North Platte." From the overtones of his thoughts she could tell he was sitting down to supper with Irene and Walter; Nora savored the second-hand taste of Irene's sweet creamed corn.
"They'll do a lot of damage to the dream-town before they leave, even if a few of them start dreaming lucidly by then," warned Keith Leeson. "We ought to tell them to leave now, before the damage gets any worse. A couple of nights ago one of them wandered through my house shuffling rooms and furniture around, and it's going to take me weeks to put it back the way it belongs."
"I'll come round tonight and help out," said Arnold, and several others volunteered to help as well.
"Walter's looking forward to the parade so much," Irene said. "Let's wait until after that before we run them out of town."
That night Nora found herself walking around downtown, near where she'd woken up the previous night. She looked around for any nomads, asking dreamers and dream-people she met if they'd seen them.
"I saw two of them heading into Mythology Park," Marissa Weller said. "A young couple, it looked like."
"Thanks," Nora said. Once she was around the corner, she teleported to the entrance of the park. A couple of years ago some high school students had planted and built Mythology Park as a group project; it was decorated with statues of gods and mythological creatures, and it even had a small petting zoo with cute baby sphinxes, pegasuses, and the like. Nora walked along the paths toward the zoo, past a row of statues of animal-headed gods whose names she couldn't remember, and accelerated to a pace that wouldn't tire her (she never got tired in the dream), but at which she could overtake any non-lucid dreamer who wasn't teleporting. At this speed she could quickly search all the paths in the park, but she found that they weren't quite laid out the way she remembered them; didn't this path twist to the *left* past the petting zoo into the golden-apple orchard?
Indeed, the hedges around her grew higher and denser, and the paths branched and twisted in ways she *definitely* didn't remember. She would have quickly grown lost, but she looked up above the hedges and trees, and saw the observation tower. She teleported to its viewing platform and looked down on the park.
Most of it had become a labyrinth, composed of a mix of dense hedges and stone walls. The petting-zoo was subsumed into it, as were the full-scale copies of the Parthenon, Stonehenge, and Angkor Wat. From here it didn't take her long to spot the nomads -- they were running through the labyrinth, pursued by... oh no.
The minotaur in the petting zoo was an adorable toddler-calf, at least the last time she'd seen him -- not this creature out of nightmares. And at his side, there was something even more terrible, a vast maw full of fangs and slavering tongues with no body attached; it hovered along keeping pace with the minotaur and its prey. "This won't do," Nora said, and teleported into the labyrinth, right between the nomads and their pursuers.
The minotaur and the giant mouth stopped short as they turned the corner and saw Nora standing there with a stern expression on her face, her outer arms crossed, and her middle arm pointing at them.
"What do you think you're doing, boys?"
"Aww, Miz Nora, we didn't mean nothing by it." The minotaur covered his unsheathed member with his hands for a moment before conjuring a loincloth.
"They started it," the maw said in a surprisingly human voice, and began metamorphosing into the usual dream-body of Leroy Paulsen. "We were over in Stonehenge, practicing our transformations, when suddenly these hedges start growing up into a maze. And Tim hovered up in the air to look around and saw that those nomads were making things all crazy, and he said let's give them a scare..."
"You boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves," Nora said. "You may be too young to remember what nightmares were like --"
"No, ma'am," Tim muttered.
"-- but you should know we don't treat guests this way. Tim Stauffer, turn yourself back into a normal boy and -- no, wait. I've got a better idea." A smile spread over her face. "Make yourself look like the minotaur in the petting zoo."
The minotaur's bull-face took on a dismayed expression. "Aww, Miz Nora!"
"Or do you want me to tell your parents?"
He started shrinking and losing his upper-body hair and horns.
"And you, Leroy, make yourself look like the centaur-colt, and we'll go apologize to those poor nomads."
Leroy grumbled, but complied. Moments later two little fabulous creatures were toddling along behind Nora through the maze. Nora leapt into the air and hovered, looking around; she quickly spotted the nomads, still hurrying and looking back over their shoulders. Soon Nora and the boys overtook them. It was the young man whom she, Ursula and Regina had met a couple of nights ago and his wife or girlfriend.
"Good evening," she called to them. "No one's going to hurt you. It's a dream, you know. And these boys have something they want to say to you, don't they?"
"We're sorry," they chorused. They didn't sound very sincere, but Nora didn't feel that berating them further just now was her highest priority. The nomads were looking at one another in confusion.
"Where are we?" the man asked.
"Are those the monsters that were chasing us?" the woman asked.
Nora nodded. "Just a couple of boys playing a prank. They're sorry and they won't do it again, right boys?"
"Yes, Miz Nora."
"And we won't tell their parents, if... they keep wearing those adorable little forms in the dream for the next three nights, let's say?"
"Please, Miz Nora!"
"If anybody asks why, you can tell them you lost a bet. And you'll volunteer as teacher's assistants for one of the lucid dreaming classes tomorrow after school?"
"...Yes, Miz Nora."
"All right. Run along now."
The boys skedaddled and Nora turned back to the nomads.
"We've met but not really been introduced, I think. I'm Nora Sanders."
"I remember you," the man said. "You and your friends were going to help me find the church, but we got separated...?"
"Wasn't she our waitress in the diner?" the woman said. "Or -- no, sorry, I'm getting you mixed up with someone else."
"That was me," Nora said. "I look different in the dream than in the waking -- lots of people do."
"I'm Guenocaria, and this is my husband Telsurius, but it sounds like you've already met?" She looked at her husband with a curious expression.
"I think that must have been in a dream, too," Telsurius said uncertainly. "I can't remember much about it. And I don't remember seeing you at the diner, either, but Guenocaria has a better memory for faces than I do."
"Yes, it was two nights ago as I think I said -- you didn't seem to be lucid, so it's not surprising you don't remember it clearly. Are you lucid now, by the way? You know you're dreaming, right?"
"Yes," Guenocaria said. "It seems obvious now that you point it out. How do we get out of here?"
"I don't know my way around this maze," Nora said, thinking it impolite to point out just now that they were the ones responsible for its existence, "but I can hover above it and get an idea of how we need to turn to get out. You're welcome to try too, though don't be discouraged if it doesn't work the first time." With that she jumped into the air and hovered ten yards or so above the maze. Telsurius and Guenocaria jumped as well, but not nearly so high, and they fell back down at once; then they tried again, and this time Guenocaria jumped nearly as high as Nora and hovered.
"This is so cool! Telsurius, come on up!"
"Just a minute," he called out, and jumped again, with no immediate success.
"If it were just us maybe we could fly out," Nora whispered to Guenocaria. "But let's go back down and walk out with him."
They descended; Nora said "This way," and led them through the maze toward the petting zoo, which seemed to be nearer the park's main entrance. Now and then she and Guenocaria would leap and hover to verify they were going the right way. They hadn't been walking far when Telsurius suddenly vanished.
"I think he just woke up," Nora said. "Or he suddenly learned to teleport."
"Can we try flying now?"
"Sure."
They leapt and hovered for a few moments, and then Nora began flying toward the petting zoo. Guenocaria followed her, wavering and wobbling erratically; after a few moments she suddenly shot off into the sky, and Nora streaked after her. She found her with her head stuck into a cloud, struggling to free herself from its soft sticky substance; Nora tried hard not to laugh, and barely succeeded.
"Calm down, I'll get you clear of it," she said. Guenocaria seemed to hear her clearly, though her ears were embedded in the cloud; she stopped struggling. Nora concentrated and tried to dispel the cloud, but couldn't, not easily; either someone down below was looking at the cloud and unconsciously maintaining it, or (more likely) Guenocaria's own sensations of being trapped in it were keeping the cloud thick and sticky and keeping her trapped.
"Here, take my hand..." Nora grasped the nomad's hand and tugged gently, saying "Try to concentrate on my hand and the sound of my voice... ignore the cloud as much as you can..."
A few minutes later the cloud dispersed and Guenocaria was free. "Thanks," she said. "What was that?"
"Lick your lips," Nora advised. "You've still got a little here," pointing to a spot above her chin with her middle arm.
Guenocaria licked and said, "It's sweet!"
"Yes -- some of the children decided the clouds were made of cotton candy, and the adults decided, why not? It's not like it can rot their teeth here. But come on, let's go..."
She looked down on the town and parkland. They were no longer near Mythology Park, or downtown; actually, they weren't far from her house. She flew toward it, towing Guenocaria with her, and landed on the cupola moments later. She opened the door and led Guenocaria into her bedroom. "This is my home," she said. "Would you like something to eat or drink?"
Guenocaria's eyes took on a speculative look. "This is a dream, right...? So can I have anything I want?"
"Anything that I know what it tastes like, if you want me to make it. Or you could try making it yourself, using my kitchen if you think that would help, or just imagining hard." As she spoke, she led the way down the spiral staircase to the ground floor and the kitchen.
"Surprise me," the nomad said with a smile.
Nora bustled around in the kitchen, preparing a pot of herbal tea (she poured a cup for Guenocaria to drink while she waited), and then her best imitation of an exquisite coconut cake she'd had at a restaurant in Omaha when she went there with Orson last New Year's Eve. What she was doing wasn't really "cooking" in the strict sense; the dream-town didn't have real chemistry any more than it had real physics. It was a kind of meditation technique, to help Nora concentrate and remember what the coconut cake had looked like, felt like, tasted like... how she and Orson had bitten into their slices simultaneously and shared the taste, sweeter to her taste buds than his; how they'd gone up to their hotel room afterward and slept, and found themselves in a version of the dream-town where they were the only dreamers. They'd made love on the front steps of City Hall and in the stacks of the library and on one of the cotton-candy clouds before finally retiring to Orson's house to lounge around talking lazily until morning.
"Here you go," Nora said, handing Guenocaria a large slice of coconut cake. "It's made of memories and love."
"Mmmm!" Guenocaria exclaimed as she bit into it.
"So," Nora asked when their mouths were no longer full, "tell me more about yourself... Is this the first time you've ever dreamed lucidly? Someone told me you share dreams occasionally, but not every night like us."
"I don't think I've ever had a dream like this before. I used to share dreams with my little sisters pretty often, but I haven't shared dreams with anyone since I married Telsurius and joined clan Pelerin." She sounded a little sad.
Guenocaria explained that the nomads traveled in small clan groups, no more than fifty or a hundred people; about once a year, many clans would meet up somewhere, and then there would be courting and marrying, the brides traveling from then on with their husband's clan. She'd met and married Telsurius after a whirlwind courtship during the big meeting in central Florida last winter, and she loved him and liked most of his family pretty well, but she missed her family, especially her sisters.
"We send net messages, sometimes, but it's not the same. It'll probably be years before we're in range for telepathic communication again; we'll be at different meetings this year -- clan Pelerin is going to a meeting near our old home territory, in Alberta, and clan Questing is going to meet up near Guadalajara with some folks who've been traveling in South America for a few years..."
Just then a bell rang, and Nora exclaimed: "Just a moment! I'll be right back." She ran upstairs to the skybridge and met Orson.
"I've got company," she said after they shared a long kiss. "Come on downstairs."
"I've got news," he said, "but I can share it with your guest, whoever...?"
"It's Guenocaria, one of the nomads."
"Oh."
She scarcely had time to introduce Orson and Guenocaria before another distinct bell rang. "It never rains but it pours," Nora said. "Excuse me just a moment." She ran to the front door and opened it to find Dalvorius.
"Oh! Come on in. Have you met my husband Orson? I'm sure you know Guenocaria..."
"Hi, Cari," Dalvorius said. "Where's Telsurius? Have you seen him?"
"He was with us, but we think he woke up," Guenocaria said. "He disappeared anyway."
Dalvorius nodded. "He always was a light sleeper... I just found myself in your neighborhood, Nora, and realized I was dreaming -- I think it was seeing your house that reminded me of you, and the dreaming lessons. Thought I'd ring the bell and say hello."
"Welcome... Would you like some tea or cake?"
"Sure... thanks."
Orson cleared his throat. "I came looking for Nora, to tell her something, but I guess I can tell you too... it concerns you. Nora, I was downtown, and I came on a couple of groups of people talking about the nomads and what they've been doing to the town. Some of them moved the library! At first we thought it was just gone, but then someone found it squeezed in between some dream-people's houses on a side street, though the facing is granite now, not marble. And they turned Mythology Park into a Minoan labyrinth --"
"I know, I was there," Nora said, handing him a slice of cake. "And my guest and her husband are the ones who gave us that labyrinth." Guenocaria cringed, saying:
"Sorry! We didn't mean to, honest!"
"It's okay, we're not blaming you," Nora said, but Orson didn't look quite as sure. He continued:
"So folks are planning a town hall meeting tomorrow night, to decide what to do about them. Some want to continue the lucid dreaming classes, but a lot of people want to ask them to leave, or tell them they have to leave."
"If we are causing harm, perhaps we *should* leave," Dalvorius said. "What is the shortest route out of your change-region...? Perhaps we should go back the way we came, and detour around you on our way to Cheyenne."
"I hope you won't," Nora said. "I mean, you might be the only other telepaths in the world we can talk to. We should learn to get along, not run you off! And you haven't done any real harm -- they haven't hurt anybody, have they?" she asked Orson.
"Not that I've heard. All those buildings and things moving around, though --"
"We can repair them, same as we do when a small child messes with things -- we'll have everything back to normal in a week or two, tops. We might not be able to repair our relationship with the nomads so easily if we tell we don't want them around."
"I can't speak for all of clan Pelerin," Guenocaria said, "but I wouldn't be offended if you ask us to go away after what we did to your park... Not forever, I hope, but until we learn how to dream lucidly, so we won't mess things up next time we visit."
"And we can teach the other clans, when we meet with them," Dalvorius added, "and warn them not to visit this change-region until and unless they have consistent success with those techniques."
"Come to the meeting tomorrow night," Nora urged. "Do you know where City Hall is? I can show you..." She conjured a map and spread it on the dining room table.
"If we're lucid tomorrow night, we'll come," Dalvorius said. "I'll spread the word."
The next day, Nora was still eating breakfast when word began to spread about the town hall meeting. "Tonight in the dream-town, as soon as we fall asleep," Joseph Anderson was announcing to everyone in range. "What will we do about the nomads?"
Nora passed the word to her customers throughout the day, along with her arguments for letting the nomads stay long enough to get more lucid dreaming lessons. Most of the dreamers had already heard from somebody, and all of the nomads had heard from Dalvorius and Talrasia this morning before they left their camp.
Not long before Nora got off work, she felt a welcome presence at the edge of her telepathic range. "Hi, sweetie," she sent. Orson sent back a wave of love that turned the tips of her glow-ridges green.
He walked into the diner and she brought him the cup of coffee he'd asked for. Moments later she clocked out, took off her apron and sat down beside him. In the flesh he wasn't quite as imposing as in the dream; his features were a little more irregular and his glow-ridges not so high and sharp. But he was a very good-looking man nonetheless; she knew she was a very lucky woman. Sometimes, early in their relationship, she'd thought that she didn't deserve him -- but one of her friends would always hear her and cheer her up, and those self-deprecating thoughts eventually went away, or at least got a lot rarer.
They sat quietly sharing thoughts for a few minutes, and then walked out to his truck. He gave her a ride to the high school, and came in with her, sitting at the back of the classroom. The nomads already gathered gave him curious looks; Dalvorius said: "Hello, Orson."
"Don't mind me," he said, "I'm just here to watch your lovely teacher." Nora's glow-ridges turned yellow.
"Behave yourself or I'll send you to the principal's office," she sent, and he sent back an image of what he'd like to do with her in the principal's office. She shushed him and broadcast:
"Leroy, where are you?"
"On my way," the one-time ravening maw sent back. He walked into the classroom a few minutes later, after she'd already started the class. (Tim Stauffer had assisted Anna Gregson with her lucid dreaming class a couple of hours earlier.)
"So," Nora began, "how many of you dreamed lucidly last night?"
Dalvorius raised his hand, of course, as did four others.
"Good, very good," she said. "That's a lot faster than old-style humans would have picked it up. I saw Dalvorius in the dream-town last night, and he told me how he became lucid; what about the rest of you?"
Two of them had had assistance from a North Platte dreamer who pointed out they were dreaming, but the other two -- including one of the smaller children -- had realized on their own. Nora encouraged them to share their sensations from those dreams with the rest of the class in as much detail as they felt comfortable sharing, and then reviewed the lucid dreaming exercises she'd taught them the previous day. After teaching some more advanced exercises, she broke them into smaller groups, and had Orson and Leroy each lead a third of the class through some of the exercises while Nora led the other third.
Finally, she spoke about the town hall meeting that night. "I don't know how many of you will share dreams with us tonight, or if you'll be lucid when you do," she said, "but I hope all of you who can will come to the meeting. I showed City Hall to Dalvorius and Guenocaria on a map, and they can show you what it looked like I suppose."
"They have shown us, and told us of your invitation," said Renshulina, the matriarch. "But is this your own invitation, or has someone in authority -- the mayor, for instance, or the city council -- asked you to invite us? Is the meeting open to non-citizens?"
"We've been talking about that all day. Some people don't want you to come, but a lot of others want you there, and even some of the people who don't like what you're doing to the dream-town and want you to leave think you have a right to be there and speak in your defense. You can't vote but you should be able to speak."
"Then we will be there -- as many of us as are able to dream lucidly tonight, and find ourselves in your dream-town."
After the lesson, Orson drove Nora home, and came in with her. She made supper for them and they sat talking about the nomads and the meeting that night, and about the inconsequential things that they hadn't had time to speak of in the dream the last few nights, when things had been so hectic -- his work on the farm, her work at the diner, the books Orson had read recently.
Nora's cellphone rang, and she saw that it was her mother. "Hi, Mom," she answered.
"Nora, honey, what's going on there in Carston? I've been hearing third-hand rumors about some foreign telepaths vandalizing your dream-town..."
Nora's parents lived so far outside town that they not only didn't share dreams with people in the Carston city limits like Nora, but didn't share dreams with people like Ursula who were barely in dream-range of downtown. They shared a little dream-village with about a hundred people who lived on the scattered farms within five miles of theirs.
"Yes, Mom, they came to town on Monday, I think it was..." Nora told her about the nomads, the issues with their dreams disrupting the dream-town, the lucid dreaming classes, and their rapid progress in learning lucid dreaming. "So we're going to have a town hall meeting about it tonight. You want to drive into town and sleep here so you can go?"
"I don't want to impose on you," her mom said, which was a relief to Nora because her suite wasn't that big. Probably she didn't want to sleep on Nora's not-very-comfortable sofa, or hear the loud buzz of telepathic conversation in downtown Carston where there might be a hundred or more people in waking telepathic range. "I'll talk to your dad. Maybe we'll call up the Wellers and see if it suits for us to sleep over there tonight. If not, call me in the morning and let me know what was decided."
"All right."
They chatted a little longer, but Nora broke it off as quickly as she gently could. She'd rather visit telepathically with Orson than out loud with her mom. And the food was getting cold while she used her mouth for talking.
After supper, she and Orson curled up in bed; she lay with his arms around her, letting his thoughts and feelings wash over her.
Nora was in her kitchen, busy baking cookies -- a wide variety of snickerdoodles, chocolate chips, ginger snaps, fortune cookies and others. Orson was helping stir the batter. She paused to skim over the pages of an anthology of her favorite jokes, looking for things she could use in the fortune cookies; suddenly Orson said:
"Shouldn't we be getting over to the town hall?"
She realized she was dreaming, and said: "Of course! But let's finish this batch of cookies and take them with us."
They put one last pan of cookies in the oven, and Nora concentrated for a few moments on the way she wanted them to look, feel and taste before pulling them out again. "All ready," she announced after taking a bite of a snickerdoodle. "Let's go."
They put the cookies in a couple of tins, went out the door and down the street. As they got closer to downtown they found themselves amid a stream of people heading for City Hall -- not only dreamers but nomads, more than Nora had ever seen at once, and even dream-people.
"Good evening! Have you noticed you're dreaming?" she greeted Talrasia.
"Yes, several minutes ago. Thanks for asking."
Nora introduced Talrasia and Orson. The bell in the tower of the City Hall began to ring, and got louder as they approached.
"I'm glad you're coming," Edna piped up. The dream-child had fallen into step beside Nora and Orson before they left their neighborhood, but hadn't said anything until now. "They need to hear you."
"Oh," Talrasia said. "I'm sorry, sweetie, I haven't met you in the waking world yet. I'm Talrasia, what's your name?"
"I'm Edna. I don't go to the other place when I fall asleep, like Nora, so you won't see me there."
This was the first time Nora had ever heard one of the dream-people talk about falling asleep. Talrasia looked questioningly at her.
"Don't look at me," she said, "we don't understand it either. But there are more people in the dream-town than in the waking-town, and Edna's one of them."
"It's very nice to meet you," Talrasia said to Edna, but she looked somewhere between puzzled and afraid.
They approached the City Hall, went up the broad marble staircase and through the large open doors. There were a few people standing around in the lobby in small groups, talking; in one corner Dalvorius and several other nomads, including the matriarch Renshulina, were talking with Ursula and her husband Winfield. Someone in the group waved to Talrasia, and she paused a moment before going to join them.
"I'll see you in a bit," Nora said to her. "Go on..."
Nora and Orson went on into the main hall, which was already half full. They put their tins of cookies on one of the tables at the back of the room, and looked around. Nora didn't see her parents anywhere; she didn't really expect them. Regina was over near the podium, apparently arguing vociferously with Mrs. Swenson, whose dream-self looked like Mrs. Swenson had looked when she was twenty -- beautiful by the standards of the time, Nora supposed, but a bit odd with only two breasts and two arms. Another group of nomads were sitting near the back of the room, including Guenocaria.
"I'm going to go say hello to Lonnie Stauffer," Orson said. "Where do you want to sit?"
"Over there," Nora said, pointing to a group of empty seats about two-thirds of the way toward the front. "I've got some people to talk to as well... see you soon."
Nora went over to the group of nomads and greeted Guenocaria. "Did you have any trouble finding the place?"
"No, once I realized I was dreaming I remembered your map. But Telsurius woke up just a minute after I told him we were dreaming."
"There are a lot of you here tonight... How many of you realized you were dreaming on your own, and how many had someone point it out to them?"
"Probably two-thirds of us figured it out on our own," Umusalina said. "Over the last couple of days some of us have shared with the rest what it felt like to realize you're dreaming, and I think that helped a lot."
"Great!" Nora enthused. The other group of nomads led by Renshulina came in and sat down near the others; just then Mayor Dalton went to the podium and banged her gavel, and the buzz of conversation died down. Nora went over to where she'd told Orson she would sit, and he joined her a few moments later. Edna and her parents Tom and Gretta were sitting further in on the same row.
"We've met tonight to talk about the issues raised by the visiting group of Kelowna nomads," Mayor Dalton said. "Some people allege that they're responsible for the disruptions we've seen here in the dream-town for the last few nights, and they want to present their evidence and propose a solution. I'm going to call on Joseph Anderson to speak first, and then we'll open the floor to debate."
She stepped back and sat down in one of the chairs behind the podium, while Joseph Anderson climbed the stairs to the podium and spoke. "It's plain enough that the nomads are causing things to move around and change. We haven't had any new babies born lately, and by now little Yolanda and Ricky are dreaming quietly enough along with their parents most of the time. When we don't have soon-to-be-borns or newborns to deal with, we normally only get one disruption every few weeks, when a child has a nightmare we can't dispel or contain quickly enough, or when some mischievous older child messes with things deliberately. Well, nobody's quite sure how many disruptions we've had in the last week, because so many are in private houses or out-of-the-way places, but I've counted thirty-four in public places and sixteen people have told me about disruptions in their houses. In a number of cases we can pin it down and say that a nomad was there when the change happened."
He went on to list several such changes, some of which Nora already knew about, but some she didn't -- the Lutheran church had turned blue, the statue of Maud Nuquist in Orchard Park had turned into a statue of some Canadian pop singer of a shaggy-furred neospecies, and there was a new street of locked, apparently empty houses off Colby Street between McKay and Bryant Streets. "We saw one of the nomads walking along Colby Street, ignoring everything anyone said to him, or answering with some nonsense; then he suddenly turned left and what had been a footpath between Clara Tiedemann's house and mine widened into this new street, and all the houses nearby shifted and squeezed closer together to make room."
After listing all the people who'd found their homes disrupted, he said: "No one's blaming them for all this, any more than we blame a newborn baby -- it's just their nature. But our babies belong here, and we know they'll learn to dream lucidly before they learn to walk. The nomads would be as welcome to visit as any other foreigners if they would come and go in the course of a day, and not stay here overnight; but if they can't sleep here without unconsciously committing large-scale vandalism, we need to ask them to leave."
He sat down, and a lot of other people stood up to be recognized; Mayor Dalton called on Ursula's husband Winfield.
"I'll admit I was skeptical about this crash program to teach our visitors lucid dreaming in the few days they're staying here," he began, "but from what I see here tonight, it's worked surprisingly well. I talked to several of our visitors here just before the meeting, and they're all lucid tonight -- more than two-thirds of their number, apparently. Can anyone point out any damage they've done since becoming lucid? If so, I'd be the first to charge them with vandalism, the same way we'd treat a local adult or teenager who deliberately messed with other people's property -- but for what they did when they weren't lucid, let's let bygones be bygones, and forgive it like we do small children's nightmares."
Several other people spoke then, on either side of the question -- it seemed that Mayor Dalton was calling on anti-nomad and pro-nomad people alternately. Someone asked why the nomads hadn't already been charged with vandalism, and Terry Walsh, the town's lawyer, pointed out that if the nomads appealed, the district or state court would overturn the local court's verdict -- perhaps pausing just long enough to laugh until their horns fell off. They couldn't prove any damage to a Lincoln bison like Judge Perkins.
Nora wasn't called on until eight or nine other people had spoken, and she was starting to think that maybe other people had said everything she had to say, but she decided she'd still speak up anyway, just to show her support for the nomads. When Mayor Dalton called on her, she stood, and felt all the hundreds of eyes concentrated on her; there was a pressure she hadn't felt in a while, that made it hard to maintain her ideal dream-form. She tried to resist it without getting distracted, and began to speak.
"Most of you know I'm one of the ones who volunteered to teach lucid dreaming to the nomads," she said. "I've just taught two classes so far, but I'm really proud of my students' progress; almost all of them are here tonight and fully lucid. They're travelers and they won't settle down anywhere, but in my book they're welcome to stay as long as they like and come back as often as they like; I figure after one or two more lessons --"
And then the pressure of people's attention became too much to resist; she felt herself transforming, and hoped it wouldn't be too bad...
It was. Her hair thinned and three glow-ridges grew from her nearly bald skull. And she thought she was a little taller, too, and stockier... Her glow-ridges burned yellow and she stood there in terror and embarrassment for a few moments before she broke from her place and dashed out of the room, followed by a hubbub of voices.
Orson found her a few moments later, hiding in one of the little meeting rooms on the south side of the building. "Shh, it'll be okay. We'll get you back to yourself soon, like we did last time."
"I've been trying but I can't change back," she wailed, and then: "Don't look at me!"
He closed his eyes. "Is it okay if I sit here with you? Do you want me to rub your shoulders?"
"Okay."
He moved a chair and sat right behind her, rubbing her shoulders. Eventually she was able to relax enough to focus on re-transforming without being distracted by the anxiety and embarrassment that had held her back before. The glow-ridges vanished and her luxuriant curly hair returned; she turned and looked at Orson, and saw she was the right height relative to him now. "Thanks."
He opened his eyes and smiled at her. They kissed, and he said: "Do you want to go back? Maybe we should just go home now."
"No, I want to be there for the vote."
They returned to the main hall, but sat near the back this time. Nora noticed, as they passed the refreshment tables, that nearly all her cookies had been eaten; that cheered her up a bit. Mrs. Swenson was talking as they entered:
"...dangerous, too! You saw what they did to poor Nora -- I'm not convinced they're fully lucid right now, and if they are, it makes what they did even more heinous. I say we run them out of town first thing in the morning, never mind this parade."
Nora squirmed uneasily to hear herself talked about, used as a blunt instrument to beat the nomads with. She felt she should stand up for them -- it wasn't their fault, they were inexperienced at lucidity and they probably had moments of fading out into unconscious dreaming. And most of them had seen her in the waking, with her odious glow-ridges, more often than they'd seen her dream-self; the conflict between what they saw and what they remembered would put transformation-pressure into their gaze. But she was afraid of it happening again if she drew attention to herself...
It wouldn't do any good to stay sitting down, she realized; people were constantly glancing at her as Mrs. Swenson and then several other speakers referred to her, either commiserating her transformation in the face of the nomads' gaze, or commending her work teaching them lucid dreaming. Nora finally stood up again just as Martha Leeson sat down. Orson leaned over and whispered, "Are you sure about this?" She nodded firmly.
Mayor Dalton called on her right away, though a couple of other people had been looking to be recognized for longer. Nora said:
"I just want to say that I don't blame my friends for what happened -- they know me better by my waking body than my dream-self, and they're lucid but they still have a lot to learn about control. Please don't let's run them out of town on my account!" She quickly sat down, and Orson put reassuring arms around her. There was scattered applause.
Several more people spoke; Terry Walsh warned that they couldn't legally run the nomads out of town. "The most we can do is ask them nicely to leave. And I suppose we could put economic pressure on them, but we need to be careful. If you don't want them to stay, you can refuse to patronize their market and try to persuade others to do the same. But I'd advise business owners not to refuse to serve them -- that could be a violation of various civil rights laws."
Then Renshulina rose and waited to be recognized. Mayor Dalton called on her almost immediately.
"We apologize for the damage we have accidentally done to your beautiful town, and for the harm we apparently caused our friend Nora and perhaps others. We have decided, in any case, to leave soon after the parade and pageant tomorrow, and not to return until and unless we have all learned to dream lucidly. Whether we return then depends on you.
"There are many places where we are welcome, and a few where we are not. Life is short and we have seen only a small fraction of the globe. We will not go where we know we are not wanted; if you collectively decide to ask us to leave and not return, we will leave your town and your change-region without your needing to put special pressure on us, and we will warn other traveling clans of our kind about your decision and the unfortunate way our telepathic abilities interact. If you allow us, however, we may return someday when and if we have learned to safely interact with the incredible dream-world you have built here."
She sat down. Mayor Dalton, before calling on anyone else, asked: "Does anyone have anything really new to add?"
"Wait," said Tom, Edna's father, rising from his seat. "You haven't heard us yet."
And Nora noticed now that there were more dream-people in the hall than there'd been when the meeting started. A few of them sitting near the back, not far from Nora and Orson, conferred among themselves in low voices, then two of them got up and left while the others looked intently toward the podium to see what Mayor Dalton would do.
She looked flummoxed, and no wonder. The dream-people had no official status; not everyone was convinced they were real people in their own right, and not just manifestations of somebody's (or everybody's) subconscious. And there hadn't been many town hall meetings like this in the years since the Divergence -- most of them took place in the waking, at the physical City Hall, for legal reasons. But she'd never known this many dream-people to attend a town hall meeting, or any of them to speak up at one.
"Ah, all right... I recognize, uh, Tom." (The dream-people didn't seem to have surnames, for the most part.)
Tom's glow-ridges were a confident blue as he turned to face the greater part of the people in the hall, and said: "We know the rest of you go somewhere else when you sleep. We've speculated about it, and some of us have asked you about it, but we'll probably never know what it's like. Now here are new people who come from that other place, for the first time in years, and they're really interesting; we'd like to get to know them better. Apparently you're talking about doing something in the other place that will make it so they'll go away, and the question is whether they'll come back or not? Well, we like them and we want them to come back. And before you decide what to do, there are some people we'd like you to meet."
Just then, as if in response to a signal from Tom, the doors at the back of the hall opened and more nomads came in, escorted by the two dream-people who had left a few moments before Tom was recognized. Nora recognized none of them, and in a few moments she realized there were more of them than were already in the hall -- more than she'd thought were in Clan Pelerin, children and young people and old folks all together. And to judge from the excited murmurs among the nomads sitting together near the back of the hall, they were as surprised as anyone.
"These folks showed up not long after the ones you call the nomads," Tom continued, as the group came down the wide middle aisle and all but one older woman found seats. "We think they're probably related to the nomads the way we're related to you -- they don't go somewhere else when they fall asleep, but they look like the nomads. We've just barely started getting to know them, and we're wondering if they're going to disappear when the nomads go away, if they're never coming back unless the nomads do -- they don't know, but we think probably so. They're kind of worried about it, they just got here and now they're afraid they might go away." He gestured toward the newcomers and sat down; the woman he'd pointed out remained standing while the other newcomers sat down. She looked around and said:
"We've just found each other here, in a place where things make sense, in a place where there are a lot of other people. Most of us have met some of the others before, but this is the first time we've all been in the same place. We're not sure how this relates to the things you've been talking about, but our new friends tell us they're connected, and that we're here because they're here?" She gestured uncertainly toward the group of nomads who'd already been there when they entered.
"We've been to a lot of places, but we don't really remember how we got from one place to another. Somehow it never occurred to us to wonder, until now. Now that it has, we really want to know, and we'd like to stay here for a while and see if that helps us figure things out."
She sat down, and the hubbub of voices got louder. Mayor Dalton looked around for a few moments and then called on Frank Benton; the noise of conversations got only a little quieter as he began to speak.
"I don't see why we're bothering to listen to this," he said. "The so-called dream-people aren't people in the strict sense, even if they look like us; they're just animate scenery, like the sphinx in the petting zoo. If the nomads are making new dream-people appear, as well as shifting the landscape around, that's just one more reason to ask them to leave -- maybe these new dream-people will go when they do."
There was an angry uproar from many North Platte dreamers who thought the dream-people were real, including Nora. But she noticed, as Mayor Dalton banged her gavel again and again until the noise died down, that the dream-people themselves didn't look angry; the locals looked amused, and the nomads looked puzzled. Mayor Dalton recognized Regina, who said:
"We may not all agree on what the dream-people are, but surely, even if they aren't independent people in their own right, they're not just scenery? We built the dream-town, we made it the way it is because we wanted it that way -- and the dream-people just showed up. Nobody made them, and nobody's telling them what to do. If they aren't people like us, then they're part of us, our conscience or our subconscious or something. And on rare occasions like this when they speak up, they must be telling us things we know deep down but have forgotten or tried to ignore -- we can't afford to refuse to listen."
Renshulina rose while she was speaking, and Mayor Dalton recognized her next. She said:
"This may change our plans. If you will permit us, we may stay a few days longer than we had planned, in order to learn more about these 'dream-people'. However, if you ask us to leave, then as I said before, we will do so at once."
Several other people spoke then, and Keith Leeson proposed that they table the discussion and have another meeting a few nights later, after they had a chance to learn more about the new dream-people. A few people, mostly those who had suffered worst from the dreaming nomads' unlucid dreams and those who were adamant in asserting that the dream-people weren't real, objected; but the motion soon came to a vote, and Nora voted for it along with well over half of the locals present. The dream-people didn't try to vote.
Just after that, someone moved to adjourn, and that passed almost unanimously. As people got up and started milling around and talking with one another, Orson asked Nora: "You ready to leave now?"
"I'm not sure," she said. She didn't want what had happened earlier to happen again. But she was as curious about the new dream-people nomads as anyone. "Let's talk to a few people... if I start feeling pressure from people's attention, we'll go."
They walked toward where Guenocaria and Telsurius were talking with a couple of the new dream-people, a man and woman with a small child. Guenocaria was saying: "You look really familiar, have we met before?"
"I think so, but I don't remember where," the dream-woman said. Her little boy piped up:
"She was swimming with us in that lake under the waterfall, mommy, and she screamed when the shark ate me, and then the shark chased her around the lake several times until she disappeared."
"Oh, yes, I remember you now," the woman said, nodding complacently, and Nora stared at them in shock for a moment before she realized what had happened. Guenocaria recovered less easily:
"That -- that was a nightmare I had when I was, I don't know, ten or eleven? It wasn't long after the Divergence, anyway... You've been around that long?"
"I'm not sure what you mean, 'that long'?" the woman asked. The man, apparently her husband, said:
"I think she wants to know if we remember her when she was even younger than eleven."
"Um, yes, I suppose so..." said Guenocaria.
"Not very well," the woman said. "But I remember you being a little younger and having different hair. It was more like this color," and she pointed to Nora's dress, which was cloth-of-gold.
"Oh, yeah, I had blond hair before the Divergence."
"What is the Divergence?" the man asked. "We've heard people talk about it from time to time, but no one's ever explained it."
Nora and Guenocaria started trying to explain, and that led to sharing their experiences of the chaotic time right after the Divergence.
"I vaguely remember that people's hair used to be yellow or brown," the male dream-nomad said. "But it's fuzzy. The stuff that's happened since people's hair started being purple and pink is a lot clearer. I don't actually remember the hair changing. Or rather I do, but it seems that it happened several times in different ways."
"That would be the Divergence," Orson said. "I think... maybe what happened was that you already existed as aspects of Guenocaria's subconscious mind, but that after the Divergence you linked up with other nomads' minds, and their subconscious dream-people, and... I don't know, you merged with them? And with more spare processing power, spread out over multiple brains, you got more conscious and self-aware. I think that's what happened here, too, but it's hard to be sure."
"People have a lot of theories," Nora said, "and our own dream-people have as many theories as the ones who spend time in the waking world."
"When they invited us to this meeting," the woman said, "they said we might learn something about where we came from. But none of what you said makes sense. How could we be inside Guenocaria's brain when it's nowhere near big enough?"
Nora and Orson looked at each other helplessly. "I'd like to talk more," Orson said, "but I think I'm about to wake up, and I don't want to be impolite and just disappear in the middle of a sentence. Nora, walk with me a bit?"
She joined him and the left the meeting room, walking out onto the front steps of the town hall.
"What do you think of all this?" he asked, glancing back and forth in the fidgety way he had when he was about to wake.
"I think it's going to be all right," Nora said. "Now that we have this chance to learn more about the dream-people, the nomads will stay longer, and they'll learn to lucid dream a lot better -- they've learned quicker than we did, just after the Divergence -- and then there'll be no reason they can't keep coming back to visit."
"And you did it," Orson said. She opened her mouth to deny it, but he went on: "You're the one who started the lucid dreaming lessons."
"Regina did most of the organizing," she protested, but he said:
"You came up with the idea. That's what she told me, anyway; how you were giving them lucid dreaming advice along with their coffee and oatmeal."
"Well," she said, "we both helped, I guess."
"You certainly did." They embraced and kissed until he woke up, and she found herself holding empty air.
She put her finger to her lips, smiled, and went back inside.
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