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.

Nora and the Nomads

Part 1 of 4

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest" and A House Divided, but takes place some years later. Some beta readers who hadn't read those stories found it confusing, and I tried to fix that with a little more exposition in the final draft, but if you still find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first might help.

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.

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.

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