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.”

Nora and the Nomads

Part 4 of 4

by Trismegistus Shandy

My newest novel, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is now available in EPUB format from Smashwords and Kindle format from Amazon. You can read the opening chapter here.

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.

That's all; thanks for reading. I have some vague ideas for more Valentine Divergence stories but no definite plans to write them soon. The Valentine Divergence universe is open and others are welcome to write in it.

I have another finished story, an expansion of one of my 500-word stories which appeared in Hutcho's TG mixed tapes, which I'll probably post in a week or two. After that, I have a sequel to "The Family that Plays Together", a long novella or short novel (I'm not sure how long it will be after the final revisions), which I'll probably post a few weeks later. I'm currently working on the first draft of another Twisted story, a sort of sequel to "Twisted Throwback"; I have no idea when that will be ready to post.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.