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=== Nora and the Nomads === by Trismegistus Shandy This story is in the same setting as my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest" and "A House Divided". It should stand alone tolerably well, but it might help to read one or both of the others first. This story and its setting are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may repost it on other sites, for instance, or write new stories based on it, as long as you give me credit and release your own stories under the same license. ----- 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 continuing 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