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Chapter 20

"But you don't make fruit," Chuck said, following Keir through a doorway. The deafening din of machinery made him cup his hands over his ears until the factory representative handed him a cone made of clear plastic and indicated he should put it over his head. The extraneous noise funneled away. Chuck heard his own voice sounding hollow and distant.

"That's what they make here," Bergold said, wearing his peculiar headgear with aplomb. Each of them had been issued white coats and booties to pull on over their shoes. In the outfit, Bergold looked like a Christmas elf from outer space. "This is a famous business. This is where they put the trees into fruit pits."

"But that's a natural occurrence," Chuck said, looking around him. He inhaled, tasting the delightful aromas of citrus and tree sap. It certainly was a busy place. The ceilings rose sixty feet or more above the concrete floor. The walls were made of cinder block and metal, perfect for echoing the noise back at them. "At least where I come from. Fruit grows on trees, and pits just normally give rise to more trees."

"Is that so?" the Historian asked, curiously. He took out his ever-handy book and made a note in it. "That isn't always the case here, as you see. Perhaps this is some specific sleeper's vision, although I believe of very long standing. We will have to investigate its source. I shall have to bring it up at the next conclave. Goodness me," he chuckled to himself as he jotted it down, "fruit always grows on trees!"

Chuck passed by a man consulting a schedule, and their guide, a lugubrious young man with a long nose, came to a halt beside Chuck.

"Here you see us employing planned obsolescence," the guide said, indicating the clipboard with a limp hand. "It's so's the world doesn't get overrun with too many of any kind of produce."

"All right," the crew boss said, switching a cigar to the other side of his mouth, "that's a thirty percent empty, forty percent immediate failure, twenty percent dropoff in first two years, ten percent fill. Got that?"

"Yes, sir!" Workers sprang to their conveyor belt, along which were tumbling tiny, round shell halves.

"Cherries," said Bergold. "A great favorite of mine."

The machine had an almost baroque appearance, run by clockwork and decorated with bronze medallions and curlicues. Chuck watched in fascination as gloved workers seized minute shells between thumb and forefinger. Using color-coded hoses hanging from the ceiling, the workers sprayed tiny squirts of yellow-green frond into the shells. Somehow they located the matching half of each seed, sealed them up, and dropped them back on the belt. A lot were put together and sent on their way empty. Chuck couldn't keep count, but the supervisor had specified thirty percent had to be that way. He wondered who checked for quality control, and how they did it.

The completed pits tumbled along the belt to the next station, where more white-suited workers blotched with red goo were encasing them swiftly in little rounds of what looked like dark red leather. A third station inserted stems.

"If you'll come this way," said the guide in his sad voice, "you'll see one of our most popular products."

Chuck was intimately familiar with the next kind of seed from years of making homemade guacamole. This group was making avocados. A seventy percent failure rate was specified on the clipboard hanging above the belt, and the white-coated employees referred to it from time to time as they worked. Some of the pits already had toothpicks stuck into the sides. It was much easier to see the trees being stuffed into the smooth-sided pits, since they stood about eight inches tall.

"That's as high as they get, most of them," the young man said, looking as though he felt sorry for the infant trees. "We have no order today for full-sized. But you can see some if you step this way."

Chuck thought at first that he was walking into an indoor orchard, but one that was moving. Trees hung by their topmost branches from a series of hooks depending from a pulley system along the ceiling. By the heavy perfume in the air, this had to be the peach and apricot section, but the fruit itself was almost invisible beneath the crane and pulley assembly that lowered full-sized trees into the flat, oval stones. Chuck watched as a fifty-foot tree disappeared like a magic act in reverse into a pit smaller than the end of his thumb. The apricot into which it had been placed was then sewn together by a deft woman in a hairnet who wielded a narrow, curved needle.

"As you see," their guide said, "the fruit is then finished and is ready to be attached to the parent tree or installed in a grocer's box, as per order."

"Look at that," Persemid said. "Those stitches are so small you can hardly see them."

"Visible stitches," the guide pronounced ponderously, "can be seen only in second-quality pieces. In the highest quality, they must be invisible." He offered two peaches, exactly alike except for the seam.

"Oh, yeah, I see," Chuck said, turning over the second-quality fruit. He remembered markings like that on peaches he'd bought in the grocery. "I thought those just happened from the way it grows."

"Nope," said the woman in the hairnet. "Inferior goods. They ought to be cheaper, but we can't control what happens to them when they reach the market. But, everyone's always out for themselves, aren't they?"

* * *

Their young guide offered them samples of the produce to try, and allowed them to tour the factory floor. "Only assuming," he said, with a watery eye fixed on them, "that you stay inside the white lines marking your path."

"You have our word," Hiramus said, with equal gravity. The young man gave a decided nod and faded away.

Chuck wandered among the machines, eating peaches. Bergold ambled beside him with an armful of cherries. They joined Hiramus, strolling along, sniffing the air with a wintry expression of pleasure on his long face. Chuck joined in, smelling happily, and shot Hiramus a companionable glance, two people enjoying the same thing at the same time. Hiramus gave him a sharp nod, which Chuck guessed was as chummy as he got. The smell was heady, and Chuck reveled in it. Peaches always proclaimed to him the special wonder of summer, the perfume of a million flowers, the breath of angels. When he reached the final assembly station, he discovered that the scent was being piped into the seeds with a hose by a man wearing a white suit with a hood and a breather mask. In Chuck's opinion that took some of the charm out of his favorite fruit. At least, he consoled himself, they got the scent exactly right, and the fruit tasted as good as the real thing.

"Seems like an ideal place to live, this Dreamland," Chuck said to Bergold. "You're lucky."

"Oh, we have our problems," said Bergold, tossing a cherry into the air and catching it in his mouth.

"Like what? I mean, here life is but a dream, like it says in the song."

"But dreams end," Bergold said, spitting a pit into a waste box they went by. "For example, there's Changeover."

Morit, too close behind Chuck as usual, seemed to jump nervously when Bergold said the word.

"Oh, I am sorry, Master Morit, Mistress Blanda," Bergold said, contritely. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"Talking about Changeover in public," Morit snarled, recovering himself. He steered his wife over to look at the lemon tree stuffing station.

"Is it that bad?" Chuck asked.

Bergold sent a regretful glance after the Elysian couple. "In fact, it is. Not everyone is so affected by the very sound of the word. Everyone knows it exists. We should accept it, but we can't help being afraid of it."

"What is it?"

"In a way, it is the very essence of the Dreamland, the ultimate change. When a Sleeper who dreams one of the seven provinces is no longer to be a Sleeper, for whatever reason, there's a tremendous upheaval in the Dreamland. We call it Changeover. One at a time, throughout history, the Sleepers have ceased to be, died, retired, awakened—no one knows—and been replaced by another. When one leaves, the vision of the province for which that Sleeper was responsible goes with him or her, leaving a void in existence. Chaos rushes in to fill it. The entire province is consumed in a terrible event."

"Earthquakes? Volcanoes? Tornadoes?" Chuck asked. He and Hiramus listened with rapt attention.

"All of that—and more! A seventh part of the fabric of our world is being torn out! But very quickly the Sleeper is replaced by another, and soon, the province settles into shape, influenced by the mind of its new caretaker. Everything is altered. People disappear or die trying to get to the border. You will notice that most of our population centers are at the edges of the provinces, where they can escape over the bridges to other places when Changeover threatens. But not everyone goes. There is a strong feeling among some that one should take what the Sleepers send. It is our destiny."

"It sounds terrible," Chuck said, impressed.

"It is," Bergold assured him, dusting his hands together. He had finished his cherries. "I have witnessed a few in my life. Of the people trapped within a province undergoing the cataclysm, no one survives unchanged—if they survive at all. Well, with one exception."

"Your friend Roan," Chuck guessed.

"That's right. He's been through two at least, the only living being who's been inside one and come out unchanged to tell about it. We believe it is because of his special connection to the Sleepers."

"If he has some kind of connection, can't he tell them what you need them to do? Like warn you about disasters?"

"Direct the Sleepers?" Bergold asked, looking amused and shocked at the same time. "Oh, no, my young friend. I don't think you understand. They are not here to do what we wish. It is exactly the other way around."

"Oh," Chuck said. He tossed a peach pit into a box containing other used seeds. "All right. So the Sleeper who dreams a province vanishes out of it during this Changeover?"

"No," Bergold said. "I've been asked this question before, by your guide, in fact. Their influence is not directly physical. The Sleepers are not precisely in the Dreamland. Their thoughts come over to us. They're in between your world and ours, bridging the gap, or rather, they project a certain amount of their image here, into the Hall of Sleepers. That lies deep under the mountains to the north of where we boarded this train."

"Has anyone ever been in this Hall? Does anyone know what these Sleepers look like?"

"Only a few have ever seen them." Bergold smiled. "As a matter of fact, I am one of them. Oddly enough, if you ever meet my friend, the King's Investigator, you'd know what a Sleeper looks like. He is the living image of one of the Seven. It almost certainly has something to do with the reason he never changes."

A wave of influence peeled back the roof of the factory and made it into an orchard. The trees that had been attached to the conveyor belt along the ceiling were firmly planted in the soil. The workers, without missing a beat, were now plucking fruit from the boughs instead of attaching it. Chuck looked down at himself. He was rid of the silly plastic hat, but now he had on coveralls over a big belly and a pair of boots over feet large enough to water-ski on. He felt like a jerk in the outfit. He kept tripping on the boots, as if his own feet weren't enough trouble.

"Lucky him," Chuck said, sincerely. "If I had my way, I wouldn't keep changing either. It's okay when it's my idea, but I don't like being whipped around all the time."

"It's not a thing to be envied here," the bearded man snapped. He was still in a shirt and tie, but a narrow string tie and a shirt with a Western yoke on it, and his sober coat had turned into a suede vest. "Here changelessness makes one stand out. A freak."

"Did it happen to you when you were here last?" Chuck asked, surprised at the vehemence of the other man's response.

"Harrumph," Hiramus snorted, refusing to answer.

"Oh, come now, my friend, don't be so gloomy." Bergold, looking every inch the dude in full cowboy rig and pointed boots, ambled along the rows of trees. He held out his hands to the sunshine. "It's a beautiful day."

"Tell me more about these Seven Sleepers," Chuck asked as they walked through the apricot section. "Who are they? Is there something special about them?"

"Oh, no. I was surprised. Each one is just like someone you'd meet—you, not us, since they are from your world, except that they are exceptionally clear and strong dreamers," the plump Historian said. "Though the Ministry of History has studied the question for generations, we do not know how one is chosen."

"Do the other Sleepers have images of themselves here?"

"Not like Roan. There has never been another unchanging person reported, in all of recorded history, and we have very full records. But images from other sleepers you see every day."

"Could I distinguish another Sleeper if I meet one?" Chuck asked eagerly, questions all but tumbling out of him. "Would I know other dreamers if I see them? Will I recognize one of my neighbors, for example?" Or, he wondered privately, would one of his neighbors recognize him and give him a hard time when he returned home?

Bergold shook his head. "Even if a sleeper has an active avatar of himself in the Dreamland, someone who's visiting the Dreamland the way you are probably will not be able to recognize him or her, because nobody looks the way they do in the Dreamland the same way they look in the Waking World, with the exception of Roan. People tend to idealize themselves, or make monster pictures of themselves, and they change so frequently depending upon their personality and circumstances that you would be hard pressed to catch that one moment when they resembled their waking selves."

Their path took them in between blackberry hedges eight feet high. They surprised Kenner, who was locked in a killer smooch with one of the white-coated fruit technicians, a big-boned girl with long eyelashes. The young woman was the one to break the clinch when she saw visitors approaching. She looked everywhere but at them. Kenner didn't look in the least ashamed of himself.

"Just getting the grand tour," he said with a wink. He took the girl's hand and led her out of the row.

"Speaking of circumstances," Chuck said, glancing around to make sure there were no workers nearby, "can I ask you something personal?" He looked uneasily at Hiramus, hesitating to unburden himself in front of his fellow Visitor.

"I wish to explore by myself," Hiramus said briskly, and walked a few yards apart from them to examine a grove of olive trees at the end of the row.

"A very tactful withdrawal," Bergold said, with a small smile. "So, my friend, what is on your mind?"

"It's not what's on my mind, but on my chest," Chuck said.

Bergold raised his eyebrows. "You have something to get off your chest?"

"I already have," Chuck said, feeling foolish already. "It's not easy to tell anyone, but I don't know what else to do." He pushed the baggy overall bib front to one side and opened the flannel shirt underneath. He ran his fingers around the edge of the hole. As he had feared, it was a little larger than it had been before. Just looking at it made him so depressed he wanted to hide in a dark corner. "What is this?"

"Great Night," Bergold said, then quickly lowered his voice. "That's quite a manifestation, young man."

"I'm afraid I'll die," Chuck said, trying not to let his voice quaver. "I didn't know I had a bad heart when I started doing this meditation. It's getting worse all the time."

Bergold lifted his eyebrows, but he took a close look at the site. "Although it is progressive, I don't believe this is representative of health problems, Master Chuck." He consulted his small book. "I would say it has more to do with fears: loss, inadequacy, helplessness, and the like. It could have one of several causes. Suicidal Tendencies, Broken Heartedness, Mid-life Crisis . . ."

"Mid-life crisis?" Chuck demanded, disbelievingly. "I'm not middle-aged." Bergold pursed plump lips as he gave Chuck a good up-and-down look.

"I would say it's possible. Normally we only see the manifestations of a Mid-life Crisis, not the dreamer himself. You know, the Parade Going By representation, the Left Behind at the Starting Line entrapment, Baldness Ridicule nightmare, Youthspeak nuisances, and of course the Little Red Automobile and Pneumatic Blonde manifestations. Have you shown this problem to your guide?" Chuck shook his head.

"There hasn't been a good moment," Chuck said, apologetically. "I . . . I'm ashamed to."

A motorized berry picker roared into the row on tractor treads and began to strip blackberries into side-mounted baskets with a dozen mechanical arms. Hastily, Chuck shoved his shirt back into place. Bergold tapped him on the chest with a forefinger.

"Nevertheless, you should mention it to Keir. It is he who can help you to find what it is you're missing. It may not be something that can be solved in a single visit. It looks to me as though you have a little time before the worst happens to resolve whatever is troubling you. But remember, this is the Dreamland. All things change, for better or for worse. Keep that in mind."

"Thanks," Chuck said. "I appreciate the advice."

"I wish you the very best of luck. If you can, I hope that you will come back again one day and tell me about it. I'd be very glad to hear about your experiences."

"Like Hiramus does?" Chuck asked, nodding toward the back of the tall man, now gravely chatting with a man operating a pecan tree-shaking machine.

Bergold smiled. "Yes. I am proud to count him as a friend."

Chuck shook his head. It took all kinds. Bergold he had liked from the very beginning, but Hiramus was just too hard to get to know. Bergold guessed what he was thinking. "I realize it might be difficult, but he is a good man. Very much worth your while."

"All right," Chuck said, stoically. "Why not start now? Excuse me," he said to Bergold.

If Bergold considered Hiramus a friend, maybe there was something more to him. After all, no matter what kind of dry stick he seemed to be, he was an experienced traveler in the higher planes, an accomplishment Chuck envied. But the guy was so reserved, like something out of a Victorian novel; it was difficult for a casual person like Chuck to bridge the gap.

Maybe he was waiting for Chuck to make the first move. An overture of friendliness from him might break the ice. Since he was resolved to be a better person, he would extend the welcoming hand.

He followed the tall man around the corner of the nut-picking machine, but when he got to the other side, Hiramus was nowhere in sight. Instead, Chuck found himself in a huge, stainless-steel room filled with shelves and shelves of wire crates of fruit.

"Hello?" he called, tentatively, and paused to listen. The orchard was gone. He could accept that, but where was Hiramus? Had he gone the wrong way? Chuck looked back and saw the elongated shadow of a man projected on the wall ahead of him. He started toward it.

A loud rumbling shook the floor. Chuck looked around in alarm. Did they have earthquakes in the Dreamland? He started looking for somewhere to take shelter. He gasped for breath. An odor of citrus in the air, almost chokingly strong, threatened to overwhelm him. Chuck looked up as the rumbling got closer. He had just time to let out a strangled yell before a whole pile of gigantic citrus fruit fell on him.

* * *

Morit stood at the end of the row, arms folded, propped up against the shelf. He didn't so much as flinch when the cascade of fruit began. Huge pumpkelos were still dropping off the high shelf from where they had been pushed by his coconspirators, thudding one at a time onto the pile covering Chuck Meadows's body. Morit used his influence from across the room to pull more of the heavy fruit down so he could watch them fall onto the heap. That ought to have finished off the Visitor. They had managed to engineer an attack that was completely unexpected, both in timing and form. The Visitor had been entirely overwhelmed, throwing his hands up to ward off the missiles that drove him to his knees, then buried him deep in ribbed, orange-skinned globes. An avalanche in the Waking World was supposed to be inevitably fatal, and this one included a change of symbolism, fruit rather than snow or stones. That ought to negate any defense mechanisms the Visitor could throw up against it. Morit waited and listened for a voice, or even breathing. Nothing. He enjoyed the feeling of smug satisfaction that welled up in him at the demise of a Visitor. It wasn't happiness, but it was the closest he ever came. Invader, he thought, as he caused another fruit to plummet down onto the pile. Show-off. Take that.

Blanda appeared out of nowhere beside him, dressed in a red and white gingham dress, with a red barrette holding back the side of her graying brown hair. She was carrying a white box with A PRESENT FROM YORE printed on it in cheerful red letters.

"Good heavens, my dear, look at that mess! What happened?"

"You can see what happened," he snapped. "A lot of fruit fell on the floor. Pumpkelos," he added, with a persnickety pride in details.

"Well, we should tell someone about it! Someone could have been killed!"

With any luck, Morit thought, as his fool of a wife raced off to find the floor supervisor. He didn't have time to wallow thoroughly in the satisfaction of the conspiracy's first triumph before a host of helpers arrived to pick up the fruit and inspect them for damage. When they cleared their way to the bottom of the heap, they found Chuck Meadows, lying very still, his face pale, eyes open and staring at the ceiling. He'd been pounded almost as flat as paper by the weight of the avalanche. Blanda looked from the Visitor to her husband in shock, but she didn't say anything.

The Visitors' guide bounded over the piles of basketball-sized fruit to Chuck's side and started to peel him off the floor. One of the cardboard-flat arms reached up to wave the guide away. To Morit's fury and disbelief, Chuck Meadows sat up.

"I don't believe it," Hiramus said.

Morit could have echoed him in every syllable. Not again! How could the Visitor have survived? He'd been hit by a ton of fruit!

The others helped Chuck Meadows to his feet, which had been squashed until they were too narrow to hold him. He trembled like tissue paper as he threw out his arms to keep his balance.

"Blow into your thumb," Persemid Smith advised him. "It always works in cartoons."

The Visitor did that. His limbs expanded to three dimensions with an audible pop! Morit withdrew as far as he could against the wall of the room. His disappointment was almost palpable. How could this have happened? Everyone gathered around the Visitor, talking at once, worrying aloud what had happened.

Chuck could see people surrounding him, but they all looked very odd. They seemed to have been drawn with black outlines filled in with simple colors. Yes, that was it. Persemid was right. Everyone looked like a cartoon. They were all shouting at him. Their voices sounded like random loud noises echoing inside a drinking glass.

"I'm sorry," Chuck said, holding his hand to his ear. "I can't understand you."

"I said," Keir shouted, "what happened?"

Chuck rattled his head. His hearing must have been knocked silly when he was felled. He couldn't understand the guide's speech, since the way Keir's spiky beard was drawn covered his mouth, but he could read the words in the white balloon that hovered over Keir's head. Raising his hands to his shoulders, Chuck gave an exaggerated shrug that nearly threw him off his feet again. His head was spinning, and there were sharp-pointed stars revolving around it. For some reason, that struck him as hilariously funny.

"Ooh, how pretty!" said the balloon over Pipistrella's head, as she moved close enough to touch one. She jerked her hand back, her finger now trailing small stars. "Ow!" was written over her head in a little balloon.

Chuck started laughing, filling the bubble over his own head with "Ha ha ha ha ha hee hee ho ho ho!" in progressively larger letters.

The force of his laughter caused the room to shake visibly, forming vibration lines around everything. One of the huge fruits still on the shelf quivered more violently than the rest, then bounded off the shelf. It bounced, throwing up lines of force on the air, and landed squarely on Morit's toe. Chuck could see Morit's mouth moving. In the balloon issuing above his head was "&%$#@\!" That was funny, too. He quivered with laughter, pointing at Morit. Shake lines appeared in the air around him. Morit frowned at Chuck, and spiky lines shot out from his head. That made Chuck laugh harder, which made Morit madder.

"I'm sorry," Chuck said, giggling helplessly, and his words were duly noted in neatly lettered black print above his head in the white bubble.

A thought balloon, attached to his head by bubbles, said "Idiot!" as Morit stalked out of the steel-lined room. Chuck rolled on the floor, kicking his feet and clutching his stomach.

"Are you all right?" Keir said.

"I'm fine," Chuck said, giggling, and seeing his laughter turn into bubbles and exclamation points. "Did you get the number of the grocery truck that hit me?"

"Pumpkelos," Bergold said. "They're our largest citrus fruit. You can get a gallon of juice out of just one."

"That's my problem," Chuck said solemnly, lying on the floor. "You know that megadoses of vitamin C can be bad for you!" He started laughing at his own witticism. The others shook their heads.

"You were knocked silly," Keir said. He looked relieved. Factory workers in white clustered around, grabbing the fruit and carrying them away. "Come on now, get up."

Chuck picked himself up. His legs felt unsteady. He looked down at them, and they wobbled visibly as though made of rubber. He wiggled his knees so his legs bowed out widely from side to side.

"How marvelous," Bergold said, scribbling away in his little book with an oversized pencil. "You've acquired Animated Features. That's a rare dream."

"Bless my soul," Hiramus said, wiggling his own legs. "I can't get over the rubberiness of you."

"Try it!" Chuck said, encouragingly. "Think two-dimensionally!"

Hiramus concentrated, his long face contorted with the effort. "I can't seem to do it. Perhaps my self-image is too rigid."

"That's too bad," Chuck said, with sympathy, as he tottered up and down the room. "You ought to loosen up! It's fun!" The sensation of having bones made of elastic was a lot like being drunk, without the headache. In fact, nothing hurt. Just walking seemed to tickle his muscles from the inside. It made him want to do more. He grabbed one of the pumpkelos from a surprised factory worker and heaved it into the air. "Okay, missile! Come and get me!"

The huge fruit flew up in the air. At the top of its arc, it turned into a red-tipped rocket, complete with the word ACME printed on the side. Its tail-burner ignited, and it accelerated downward. Grinning, Chuck threw his arms out, tossed his head back, and waited.

"No!" yelled Persemid.

The rocket knocked Chuck to the ground and exploded in a cloud of black smoke. When it cleared, Chuck was coated with soot. He got to his feet, shook himself like a puppy, and the covering dissipated in the air.

Persemid looked at him in astonishment. "You're insane!" she exclaimed. "You could have been killed!"

"Oh, c'mon," Chuck said. He didn't believe it. He felt immortal. "You try it!" He pointed his hands at the ceiling like a stage magician. "I'll make a giant boulder, and we can all get flattened."

"Oh, no," Pipistrella said, in alarm. "I wouldn't want to do anything that ugly. It's . . . it's below where my spirit wants to reach."

"Well, then, try something that your spirit would like," Chuck said, encouragingly. He reached out to her. She recoiled, but not before he touched the tip of her finger. She was so lovely. He had thought so since he had first seen her, but he didn't understand her. She seemed so confident in this peculiar reality, as if she was from some kind of higher plane, just loosely held in her physical body. She would make a beautiful cartoon.

Accordingly, when his influence struck her, it was not with the gross blocks of color that Chuck wore. She became a different kind of drawing, an old-master rendering of a nymph in simple, perfect lines, black on white. Birds and butterflies, drawn with lifelike accuracy, flitted around her head. A pillar appeared at her shoulder, and flowering vines snaked down it, still only in black and white, yet looking more real than anything else in the room.

"Oh! That's so sweet of you!" she said, admiring her lines with shining eyes.

Chuck blushed, his cheeks glowing with red light. "You're welcome," he said, the words in timid little letters above his head.

"How did you do that?" Persemid demanded, her hair scattered every which way like a cartoon witch. "I've only been trying to bend the way you did, and in one second flat you've turned the place into an animation studio full of junk!"

Keir immediately turned into a wolf—more like the big, bad sort from an early animated feature than a real lupine—and trotted over to lean its side against Persemid's leg. They communed, but she wasn't appeased.

"Why shouldn't I be able to do anything he can? This is his first time here! Patience . . ." Her face changed, as if she was accepting a scolding. "Oh, all right. I'm sorry." She looked accusingly at Chuck. "He says it's inhibition."

Chuck tried to feel guilty for her sake, but he didn't. He hadn't made this happen. He was just experiencing it. He spun in a circle.

So this was what it felt like to be really free. Flat thinking meant he could wrap himself around any idea, anything at all. He knew he had been afraid of what Dreamlanders went through every day, not knowing what shape they'd be at any time. He had no idea as to the sense of liberation that came with it. Chuck started to see the good side of being able to alter himself. This was a facet of transformation that he had never even dreamed of. It was so deep and yet so simple that he forgot to laugh.

With Persemid still glaring at him, Chuck bent to retrieve his suitcases. They had been smashed flat, too. He slung them on his back, not bothering to reinflate them, seeing another advantage in two-dimensional thinking. Maybe when he got knocked flat it closed up the hole in himself. He'd have to check when he was alone.

A cartoonlike steam whistle opened its mouth and emitted a throaty honk. All around them, the white-coated workers dropped whatever they were doing and started to stream toward the factory door.

"Closing time," said Keir.

"Saved by the whistle," Hiramus said. Without moving from where they stood, they found themselves standing in the street overlooking the river. The factory had automatically put them out. The orange sun hovering just above the western horizon drew a mirror image of itself in the rippling water. Warm yellow light came from the square windows in the tiny houses on the opposite bank, and smoke curled up from the tiny chimneys. It was all so picturesque Chuck expected to see credits crawl up the sky. He could make it happen. White lettering would show up the best. He raised a hand.

Before he could write a single word, Keir came over and knocked his arm down. The words DIRECTED BY appeared on the sidewalk at his feet. Keir twitched a finger in his face. Naughty, naughty, Chuck thought, and subsided.

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