Nothing happened. But that was the point. The Worm had forgotten not the moment but the entire process. She never made the key breakthrough of dreaming.
It was that simple, once they knew what to do.
They reverted to the present. There was the Sorceress’s Castle. They entered the central chamber. The Sorceress was not there.
Quiti expanded her telepathy to locate her friend. And found nothing. There were galactic actresses all around, skillfully plying their men, but no Sorceress. Another creature governed them.
“Uh-oh,” Quiti said.
“A side effect,” Gena agreed. “We Earthlings were protected from paradox, and Orchid too, but not the Sorceress. She was too much a creature of the galaxy.”
“Damn damn damn! She was my friend.”
“But the paradox affects us,” Orchid said, “because it was the Sorceress who gave us both time to consider, and the idea of the distilled dream. Without her we would not have found the key, or at least not in time to save our hides.”
“Which means it’s not over,” Gena said. “This is perhaps a trial run, a showing of our error. Like revisions on a computer screen, we must select what works and does not mess us up, before we do the final save.”
“We must go back and revise,” Orchid said. “Get it right before we exit the dream state.”
“Yes!” Quiti exclaimed, gratified by this reprieve.
They went back to the Worm origin. They discovered they were able to take back the Amnesia Bomb by intercepting their own timeline just before it. Then they loosed it again, seconds later. Again there was no apparent effect.
They returned to the present, and to the castle.
There was the Sorceress! Quiti flung herself at her, and hugged her closely.
“I gather you had an interesting experience,” the Sorceress remarked.
“You were gone!” Quiti exclaimed. “We had to go back and do it over to get the right variant, without that side effect. It worked!”
“I am relieved,” the Sorceress said. “I was not aware of the lapse, but find myself a bit nervous in retrospect.”
“So is Wonder Worm really gone?” Gena asked.
The Sorceress was puzzled. “Is what gone?”
Because of course they had no longer discussed the Worm, who had never existed in this frame. This was just a fun visit. They had accomplished their mission.
“However,” Orchid reminded them, “It is not complete until we exit the dream and fix our chosen reality in place. As yet it is still supposition.”
“That’s right,” Gena agreed. “Just as I dreamed my alternative future, then woke and went to seduce and marry my husband for real. The dream was only a guide.”
“That dream,” Orchid said. “But our dream within a dream is a version of reality, as we know by the absence of Wonder Worm. We need to emerge from both levels to fix reality.”
“We have found the version we want,” Quiti said. “Let’s get out now.”
They held hands while the Sorceress watched. “Focus,” Gena said. “Wake!”
“Wake!” Quiti and Orchid echoed, joining the focus.
“However, the Worms have never been more than a nuisance to travelers,” the Sorceress said. “I don’t see why you are concerned about them now.”
The three froze. Had they not emerged?
Then Quiti caught on. “She was speaking when Wonder Worm came, and we dreamed our way out of it.”
“We are down a level,” Gena agreed.
“Did I miss something?” the Sorceress asked. “To what are you referring?”
The three laughed together. “You may find this hard to believe,” Quiti said. “But we just changed reality. Something terrible attacked, and we went into our secondary dream, dealt with it, then returned. No time passed for you.”
“I am not sure I—”
Quiti sent her a telepathic parcel covering their dream within a dream.
“Oh, I see,” the Sorceress said, amazed, for the parcel could not be doubted. “And I actually vanished in the course of that adventure!”
“We’re glad to have you back,” Quiti said. “Now we need to exit this dream level. We do thank you for your participation; you helped us accomplish what was necessary.”
“It seems I did,” the Sorceress said, still amazed.
“I will be in touch later in real life,” Quiti said.
Then the three held hands again and focused. “Wake!” they said together.
This time they woke back in the Embassy on Earth, in their physical bodies. “I’m relieved to have that done,” Quiti said. “Now we have fixed the new reality, and are safe at last from—”
There was a piercing scream from outside. They scrambled out. There was a giant Worm terrorizing passers-by.
“Oh, no!” Quiti breathed, horrified. “We didn’t change it, and now they’re coming for us in the present time!”
“But we did change it,” Gena said. “This has to be an anomaly.”
Quiti grasped at the straw. She reached out with her mind to touch the limited mind of the Worm.
And discovered that it was as confused as they were. Somehow it had gotten on the wrong trail.
“It’s lost!” Quiti said. “It was chasing us with the pack, when it was Idola, Flower, and me, and didn’t catch the revocation. It’s a young Worm, inexperienced. It landed off the Web, the way Flower did, and doesn’t know how to return. In fact it was also caught by our elimination of Wonder Worm, who it remembers vaguely as in a dream, so is doubly confused.”
“Understandably,” Orchid said. “That dream will soon fade.”
“Then show the Worm the way back,” Gena said. “It should be harmless.”
Quiti was not entirely sure of that, but she approached the Worm physically, reaching out to it telepathically. Its deadly snout oriented on her. Follow me, she thought strongly, with a motherly nuance. Then she walked to the nearest Web intersection that was large enough for a single Worm. It was, of course, the one it had arrived through, that they had overlooked before; possibly the change of reality had changed the connection also.
The Worm followed.
Quiti stood beside it. Dive in, and follow your own scent trail back. You will soon find your companions. No need to tell them you got lost. She was actually mothering a Worm!
The Worm sniffed the crevice. Thank you, Mother, it thought gratefully. It dived in and was gone.
Gena caught Quiti before she fainted from relief, and guided her back inside. “There is one more thing we need to settle.”
Quiti groaned mentally. “I think I’m too unsettled to settle anything for anyone else. Can it wait?”
“No. We must decide before the children return.”
“I think I know,” Orchid said. “It frightens me.”
Something that frightened the Ghobot? Quiti did not like the smell of that. “What, then?”
“It is this: we three have happened upon the most phenomenal power in the universe. We need to decide how to handle it.”
“We do,” Orchid agreed soberly.
Quiti stared at them. “What are you talking about? Didn’t we just get rid of that threat? Wonder Worm is gone.”
“It is the ability to travel in time, as we did before,” Gena said. “With the special dream, but into the past as well as the future. And to knowingly change history, via the dream within a dream. Wonder Worm had it to an extent, and misused it. What of us?”
Quiti realized she was right. They had done that. “But we didn’t misuse it,” she protested.
“Not this time,” Gena agreed grimly. “But power tends to corrupt, as we saw with Wonder Worm. Are we incorruptible?”
“We’re human!” And Quiti realized that that was the answer: humans were highly corruptible. “Uh-oh.”
“But not entirely,” Orchid said. “The three of us together are two parts human, two parts Hair, one part Chip, and one part Ghobot. We seem to need to be together to change history.”
“Oh, damn,” Quiti said. “Do you mean we’ll have to separate forever? I hate that; you’re my friends.” Indeed, their melding had made them most intimate friends. She loved them both.
“I think not,” Gena said. “There could be other time travelers. We need to watch, to be sure they don’t undo what we have done.”
“Just as Wonder Worm watched, for beings like us,” Orchid said.
Quiti shuddered. “We don’t want her back.”
“So I think that means we shall have to stay together,” Gena concluded. “To watch the galaxy, and to guard against any corruption, including our own.”
“That’s one tall order,” Quiti said, awed. “How can we be sure we’re up to it?”
“We can’t ever be sure,” Orchid said.
“We may not even be the best prospects,” Quiti said. “I’d have chosen more qualified folk.”
“We did not choose it,” Gena said. “It was thrust upon us. But now it’s ours, and we simply have to do our best. We have no choice.”
“We have no choice,” Orchid agreed.
“No choice,” Quiti echoed. “I hope we’re up to it.”
“Indeed,” Gena said. “The welfare of the galaxy depends on it.”
But there was one saving grace. “We’ll be together,” Quiti said.
“That prospect does not dismay me unduly,” Orchid said.
Then they laughed, though there was nothing funny about it. That was reassuring in its fashion. They were, after all, laughing together.
“Now let’s relax,” Gena said. “The others will be returning soon.”
“Lotsa luck there,” Quiti said. “I’m hung up on the universe.”
“The universe will surely survive if we take a nap,” Orchid said. “I mean an ordinary nap.”
“I’ll be disappointed if it doesn’t,” Gena said with a smile.
Quiti was recovering in the office when the other Hairs and Chips returned from their galactic engagement. Husband Roque hugged and kissed her. “Did we miss anything?” he asked her. “Hope you weren’t too bored, stuck babysitting Earth.”
“Nothing we couldn’t handle, dear,” she responded. She could catch him and the others up later. Right now he had the bedroom urgently on his mind, and not for sleeping. She could handle that.
After that, life simplified. Quiti invited the Ghobots to come settle in the Hair Embassy, as all of them could fit in a single room. She spelled out firm rules for their interaction with human tourists, limiting the degree of emotion that they could provide. There would be no addiction. As long as they retained that discipline, they would not be rendered unwelcome. The income from the tourist industry would enable them to build their own Embassy building and fund other worthwhile projects. They could, and should, be a beneficial influence on the planet. That was the ideal.
Meanwhile, Quiti, Gena, and Orchid would start quietly training other Hair/Chip/Human/Ghobot trios for dream duty. They would make sure there were no unpleasant surprises emanating from the galaxy. No Worms in the ointment.
And of course the rest of Planet Earth might never know. As far as it was concerned, there was a neat new tourist industry that was highly enjoyable, but not extreme. Plus a few curious but generally harmless aliens.
The Hair Peace was about to commence.
Author’s Note
This is the third novella of the Hair trilogy. The first, Hair Power, started with Quiti as a terminally-ill young woman looking for a convenient place to commit suicide. She helped an alien hairball, who gave her what she facetiously asked for: a decent head of hair to mitigate her baldness from chemotherapy. She got more than that. The second, Hair Suite, saw Quiti and her companions get into the galaxy via the Wormhole Web, and become a successful entertainment troupe. This third one is just an incident in passing, much of which never actually happened, as you have seen. Who would have thought that rescuing a lost child could become so complicated?
I made the first note for Hair Peace on August 9, 2017, and continued making notes on an almost daily basis until I started formal writing on September 6. It moved along okay until the 10th when there was one of those annoying interruptions the mundane world likes to throw at writers. Hurricane Irma, perhaps the most powerful storm ever to originate in the Atlantic Ocean, arrived. Every hurricane orients on us here in Central Florida, but fortunately their eyes aren’t very good so they can’t see us well and they generally miss. But Irma was one determined girl; she cruised the entire length of central Florida searching for us, her center finally passing about twenty five miles from us. We were by no means the hardest-hit victims, but there were four days of power outage that wiped out much of our carefully frozen food, and eight trees down across our three-quarter mile drive. Clearing those gave me some extra exercise, you bet. We live on our little tree farm, you see. It took another four days after the power returned to dig out from under, as it were, and we didn’t get our phone back for two weeks. Finally I resumed typing text on September 18, and continued until end-of-the-month chores and catching up on other backlogged things like reading books and viewing videos caused another nine day interruption. But on October 7, I resumed and continued until the end of the first draft. Then I took a few more days off to let it jell, just in case I had forgotten something important such as a proper conclusion (and I had, but I fixed it, I think), and returned to amend and edit it. So writing even a 33,000 word novella can be an intermittent thing.
Will there be another in the series? I doubt it, as the Hair theme seems somewhat played out, and our Trio is determined to keep the world clear of disaster. It was the first novella done in my new computer system, breaking it in, and breaking me into a new operating system. No, not like the movie Her, which I viewed in the last break, where the man falls in love with the lady operating system. No such luck for me. Now I feel free to move on to other pieces, and to the next Xanth novel.
The title was suggested by my correspondent Sally Allen. I loved it the moment she thought of it. It was proofread and copy-edited to a degree by Scott M Ryan, Anne White, and John Knoderer, three more fans. I expect it to be published by DREAMING BIG, run by Kristi King-Morgan, yet another fan. So you can see I wouldn’t be much of a writer without the active support of my fans. My website is www.hipiers.com/, where I have a monthly personal column, information on my novels, and maintain an ongoing survey of electronic publishers with candid feedback from authors who use them. You are welcome to check it out; the site would be pointless if not visited, and I hope appreciated, by fans like you.
Hair Peace Page 11