Hair Peace

by Piers Anthony

  “Uh-oh,” Gena said. “I think we’re in trouble now.”

  “In our own dream?” Quiti asked. “How can that be?”

  The Worm’s snout dilated. Devastating energy shot out.

  They vacated without thinking, as the space around them fried.

  It was definitely now.

  Chapter 10: Peace

  They woke in the Embassy back on Earth.

  “What just happened,” Quiti asked, “And how did it happen?”

  “We vacated our dream, to save our hides,” Gena replied. “But my question is, how did Wonder Worm get inside our dream? It should have been private.”

  “Worse,” Orchid said. “She knows our home base, here, and will come after us here next.”

  “She must be tracking our mental presence,” Quiti said. “If she wipes out our minds, we’re done for.”

  “So we had better get our minds the hell away from here,” Gena said.

  “And go where?” Quiti asked. “That she can’t track us as fast as we can go?”

  “Maybe not,” Gena said. “Follow me.” She dived back into the dream.

  They followed her, and found themselves at— “The Sorceress’ Castle!” Quiti exclaimed, recognizing the environs. For there was the walled castle with its front portcullis, just as it had been when they played out their fantasy story of three princesses.

  “Take it, Quiti,” Gena said. “She’s your friend.”

  Quiti went to knock on a bar of the portcullis. “May we enter?”

  The hulking werebitch guard peered out at her. “Princess Quiti! What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a long story. I think we need to see the Sorceress.”

  The guard hesitated, because although the Sorceress normally saw nobody, Quiti was a special case. She had taught the denizens and the Sorceress herself how to be vastly more appealing to males. That counted for a lot.

  The Sorceress appeared. “Aren’t you out of context, Quiti? We’re merely on standby here, awaiting our next fantasy adventure. I maintain the castle as a private retreat, as I like it.”

  “My friends and I are on the lam,” Quiti said. “We are trying to hide.” She indicated Gena and Orchid.

  “Seriously?”

  “Deadly. We are in a joint dream state, but our business transcends our present state. We need your help, but must warn you of the danger.”

  “A dream! I thought there was something odd about this setting. I was taking a nap, and found myself here.”

  “This is to normal dreaming what whales are to minnows. It’s a joint effort, a shared dream, making a new reality. We brought you into it, and you are bringing your minions into it with you. Can you help us hide?”

  The Sorceress hardly paused. She was a competent organizer. “It is easier to get lost in a crowd, whether dreaming or waking. I will arrange a distraction.”

  “Thank you.”

  The Sorceress raised her voice. “Girls, we are about to have a blowout party. Signal the Sorcerer to bring his minions on a panty raid, contents included. Rape will be impossible.” Then a message to her own minions: “Uniform of the day is panties, nothing else. You have minutes to organize your roles and make yourselves pretty.”

  Panties with contents? That meant female bodies. Rape impossible? That meant the girls would cooperate fully. A sexual orgy was incipient.

  “That’s some distraction,” Gena murmured appreciatively.

  “The emotional noise will be phenomenal,” Orchid said.

  “It will be impossible to distinguish three specific visitors in such a melee,” Quiti said.

  “Exactly,” the Sorceress agreed. “We will have emotional privacy.”

  The ladies of the castle scrambled to comply. Actresses all across the galaxy roused themselves or put themselves to sleep to fill familiar roles of a roughly humanoid nature, though they themselves were of entirely different species. Some were fish, some insects, some unclassifiable by any Earthly means. In their roles as zombies, vampires and werewolf bitches they got into panties (and nothing else) and disported themselves on beds, where they brushed fur, cleaned skin, arranged tresses, and applied makeup. They were ready for action.

  Quiti had to admit they looked sexy as hell, despite or perhaps because of their fantasy natures. The zombies had heavy makeup, the vampires kept their mouths closed, and the werewolves stayed mostly in their human bitch forms. All were well endowed, as their minimal outfits revealed, and seemed about to burst out of their panties. It was clear that they liked this type of acting, doing things that were forbidden or unknown in their natural states. Indeed, rape was impossible.

  Meanwhile, Quiti knew the Sorcerer was similarly marshaling his own humanoids: dwarves, giants, elves, trolls, goblins, ghouls and others. They would soon be marching on the castle with banners (or “whatever”) erect.

  The Sorceress led the three of them into her private chambers. “Now we can talk. I know Quiti and Gena, but not you, Ghobot lady.”

  “She is Orchid, the mother of the lost Ghobot child I told you about,” Quiti explained. “We have formed a Trio. Now we are in trouble.”

  “This should be interesting,” the Sorceress said appreciatively. She liked interesting things; it was one reason she had become a galactic actress.

  “I have a question,” Orchid said. “If everyone else but us are into wild sex, won’t the contrast be obvious? We may only attract attention we don’t want.”

  “Excellent point,” the Sorceress said. “Yet it is difficult to have a serious discussion while engaging wildly, and while I would be happy to make out with the Sorcerer, who is a delicious hunk, and there will be a number of males who would enjoy ravishing your bodies with or without your attention, you three I suspect are not eager to indulge with other than your chosen partners.”

  The three exchanged a look. The Sorceress was exactly on target. They liked being sexy, but only with their loving partners.

  “However, there may be a workaround,” the Sorceress continued after a fraught moment. “Suppose I make the walls transparent, so that the visiting males not otherwise occupied can see us plainly without being able to get inside? We could tease them a little. They might be quite interested, and their emotions would be loud.”

  Quiti laughed. “What a tease! I’m for it.”

  “Teasing is satisfactory,” Gena agreed.

  “We Ghobots make a specialty of it,” Orchid agreed.

  The walls became transparent. The four of them stripped down to their panties and primped, or appeared to; their costumes simply adapted. This, too, promised to be fun.

  The males arrived. Almost immediately a motley collection of humanoids clustered outside the chamber, peering in. Quiti performed her Hair Dance, complete with invisible legs under the skirt. Gena swung her hips and bounced her bosom in a manner Quiti had not seen from her before. The Sorceress did a dance of her own, her legs fully visible and utterly sexy. But Orchid’s dance eclipsed the others. It was immediately apparent that she had not exaggerated when she said it was a specialty. Even Quiti, a completely heterosexual woman, was fascinated by the glimpses she got. Suddenly she was eager to get home and haul her husband Roque into bed, if they even bothered with a bed.

  And the humanoid males simply paused and stared. They might stem from all manner of alien creatures, but their roles attuned them to humanoid sex appeal, and this was the quintessence of that. As teases went, this was the ultimate.

  The Sorcerer appeared, having gotten his troops organized and assigned in record time. The Sorceress blew him a kiss and signaled that he should take another girl or three instead; she would join him later. He seemed glad to oblige, knowing that she would in due course make those others seem like amateurs.

  Then, while the panty raid got into full swing in the rest of the castle, and the raw passions suffused the mental environment, and the watching males stood drippingly transfixed, they talked, updating the Sorceress on what they were doing.

  “Ser
ious business indeed,” the Sorceress agreed as she mooned the ogre who was orienting on her. He practically fell over in a swoon. “I had not known of Wonder Worm before, but I certainly appreciate the danger she represents to you. But we can’t maintain this party indefinitely. WW will track you down the moment the surrounding passions fade, as they soon will. She must already have caught on that you are in here somewhere. You will need to be ready for her.”

  “They soon will fade,” Quiti agreed morosely as she flashed an eager goblin with a high kick. “But we need more time to work this out.”

  “That can be arranged,” Orchid said as she inflated her breasts under the nose of a drooling satyr. He grabbed for her involuntarily, his hands slapping ineffectively into the glassy wall.

  “How?” Gena demanded desperately as she made as if to kiss a troll. His lips smacked the wall, but he hardly seemed to notice.

  “Announce the second round,” Orchid said. “The males having expended their initial rounds will become quiescent. But the females can be challenged to rouse their partners to a second performance. Only when they succeed will the game be considered finished. That is likely to take longer than the first round, but the males should be happy to cooperate, and the emotions will continue to surge.”

  The Sorceress acted immediately. “Attention, girls. When your partner or partners finish, it becomes your challenge to rouse them to a second performance. The last to climax her partner has to wash the pots tonight.” Not that there were dirty pots in a fantasy dream castle, but the threat was in the spirit of the enterprise.

  There was a new stir outside as the girls got on the challenge. Meanwhile the four continued dancing and talking.

  “This Wonder Worm,” the Sorceress said. “How is it I have not heard of her before? A creature as powerful as she is should make galactic waves.”

  “It seems she does not much like publicity,” Orchid said. “She is trying to snuff us out so we won’t expose her machinations.”

  “Has she done this before, elsewhere?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “If someone messed with her before, and she snuffed that person out, shouldn’t there be a record? There are galactic record keepers, such as the Encyclopedia Galactica, or Galactopedia, as well as the Wormpedia. They are quite thorough.”

  “I am familiar with them,” Orchid said. “There is no reference to WW.”

  “Don’t you find that odd? You can hardly be the first she has gone after.”

  “Well, if she eliminated them by unhappening them, as we hope to eliminate the Worm raid on Earth—”

  “There would be no record,” the Sorceress concluded. “There could have been a hundred prior cases, all eliminated before they happened. Just as you will be eliminated if she catches you.”

  The three women stared at each other. Of course that was it!

  “But what can we do about it?” Quiti asked, chagrined.

  “You will have to beat her at her own game. Unhappen her.”

  “But she derives from eons before our time. We saw that.”

  “Because you went there, in your dream,” the Sorceress said. “That's where she saw you. That suggests that you do have the potential. That’s why she is after you. You need to realize that potential, and take her out before she takes you out, literally.”

  Again, the three stared at each other. “We sought ultimate enlightenment,” Gena said. “This is something less than that, but maybe it is what we need.”

  “Needing it is one thing,” Quiti said. “Achieving it is another.”

  “But the alternative may be our own elimination,” Orchid said.

  “So we’d better figure it out,” Gena said. “Our very existence depends on it.”

  Quiti remained bothered by details. “If she can eliminate us by going into the past and unhappening us before we ever get going, and now she knows that’s what it will take rather than a simple blast in our future, why is she chasing us now?”

  “Good question,” Gena said. “She’s doing it the hard way. There must be a reason.”

  “You say she’s not smart,” the Sorceress said. “That might be a key.”

  “Maybe so,” Gena said. “I am thinking of a flower garden with weeds. You want to take out the weeds without hurting the flowers. You don’t mow it all down at the outset; you isolate a weed and carefully pull it out, leaving the neighboring flowers intact. It’s tedious, but it does the job.”

  “We’re weeds?” Quiti asked.

  “In her garden,” Gena agreed. “So she’s out to catch us and remove us without disturbing anything important.”

  “That looks effective from here,” Orchid said. “Is there a smarter way of doing it?”

  “There had better be,” Quiti said. “And we had better find it in a hurry.”

  “In my garden,” Gena said, “I tried to use more general ways to eliminate weeds, because I had to leave the garden unattended for days at a time while I drove my rig on a delivery, and because doing them all by hand gave me a sore back. Prevention, such as layering mulch, sometimes spreading weed deterrent that did not affect my flowers. It seemed impossible to get rid of all the weeds, but I could keep it manageable. It seemed to me that I had to be smarter than a weed.”

  “We’re surely smarter than Wonder Worm,” Orchid said. “But she is far more experienced than we are. If we do something rash, our inexperience might lead to paradox.”

  “Paradox?” Quiti asked. “Like going back in time and killing our own grandmother? I should think that would be impossible.”

  “I hope it is impossible,” Gena said. “But if we tried something that had that effect, it would surely mess us up even if Grandma survived. Wonder Worm may have run afoul of similar, so now she’s more cautious.”

  “But if we’re too cautious,” Orchid said, “We’re doomed. We may just have to gamble on paradox.”

  “Maybe not,” the Sorceress said.

  “Not?” Quiti asked with forlorn hope.

  “Two of you are from Planet Earth, and the third has no home planet. The events of the larger galaxy hardly affect you, as Earth has been socially isolated until very recently. You might do something that entirely disrupted galactic intercourse, and be largely unaffected yourselves. Your isolation becomes a defense against paradox. Wonder Worm, being a longtime creature of the galaxy, has no such protection. You may have a significant advantage.”

  “That’s nice,” Quiti said. “If only we knew what to do.”

  “I am not an expert in time travel,” the Sorceress said. “But I understand that some can do it via specialized dreams, as you did when discovering the Worm invasion of Earth. That is evidently what Wonder Worm does. Now she is chasing you in your special dream, the one that I am sharing with you at the moment. I am thinking that you need more than a dream your enemy shares, to prevail against her.”

  “Oodles more,” Quiti agreed.

  “There is a legend among our people,” Orchid said. “I thought it was mere fantasy, but now I wonder. It indicates that some achieve very special powers via a dream within a dream.”

  Gena laughed. “Some Earth psychology says that we dream about things that are on our minds, that we suppressed while awake, and that a dream within a dream indicates a suppression that even a regular dream can’t handle. Such as a sexual desire for one’s mother. I doubt that sort of thing is relevant here.”

  The Sorceress didn’t laugh. “There are species that do breed with their mothers. It’s not suppressed knowledge. For our purpose here, it could mean a distillation of your present dream that might grant additional power.”

  The three gazed at her. “Another level of dreaming,” Gena said. “If we can travel somewhat in time in this dream, and perform an act, what might we do in that next level of dream?”

  “We might change the Worm’s reality,” Orchid said.

  “And maybe, unhappen her before she unhappens us,” Quiti said. “But still, we don’t want to face her head o
n. She’d pulverize us.”

  “That’s where your intelligence comes in,” the Sorceress said. “She can’t figure out how to eliminate you without first catching you and yanking you out by the roots, or maybe just incinerating you so you can’t do her any harm. But if you study the situation, you may be able to get to her origin in the distant past and take her out of the picture.”

  “Let’s study,” Quiti agreed. “Are there Galactopedia references to the origin of the regular Worms?”

  “There are. However—”

  The watching males scattered in panic as a wall of their chamber crashed down. A six foot wide snout appeared. A curl of fire revved up.

  Wonder Worm had found them.

  The three acted almost instinctively. They grabbed onto each other and zoomed out of the castle, barely avoiding incineration. They might be in a shared dream, but so was their enemy, right there with them.

  The Worm followed them, this time refusing to give them any leeway. They were floating above the castle, and it was apparent that the Worm could wriggle faster than they could float. Her dreadful snout was already reorienting.

  “That dreamed dream!” Quiti gasped. “Into it! Now or never.”

  They clasped hands and focused on sleep. If this didn’t work, they were doomed.

  Wonder Worm expelled a jet of fire right at them.

  It passed through them and went on, leaving them untouched.

  They were in the dream within a dream. It was a different frame. Their perspective was enormously magnified. They saw the Worm reacting with surprise, no longer seeing them, if seeing was what she did.

  “She’ll catch on soon enough,” Gena said tersely. “Follow her timeline to her origin, before she can react.”

  They did, seeing it as a vaporous trail into the Worm’s past. They followed it at the speed of time itself. It led back to Worm World, eons ago, where the variant that was Wonder Worm was first evolving.

  “Make an Amnesia Bomb!” Quiti told Orchid.

  “Here it is.”

  They flew to the moment of the breakthrough, when the special Worm formed. They dropped the Bomb into her gaping maw.