The going having gotten much tougher than he had anticipated, he was more glad than ever that he had succeeded in keeping Topaz Atatangle off the airwaves. By this time, Topaz would probably have been inciting the astrals of the city to unite in the quest to seek and find the Dreamer: to waken to consciousness the messiah who, with his or her godlike powers, would reform reality and crush the norms into a state of permanent subordination.
        The fact that no norms believed in the literal existence of the Dreamer (most astrals did not believe in the existence of the Dreamer either, come to that) did not alter the potency of the Dreamer as a bogeyman for the norms. The Dreamer myth, the impossibly crazy idea that some poor mutt was wandering through life unaware of being possessed of world transforming powers, neatly encapsulated the sense which most norms had of the astrals, the Gedahedda, as constituting a threat to them.
        "Do you believe in the Dreamer?" said a caller.
        "No," said Ibrahim. "The Dreamer story is a silly tale for children."
        Heresy, he knew, and there were fanatic astrals who would happily kill him for that heresy. Some of them probably watching him on TV right now. But that could not be helped. To communicate with the norms, Ibrahim had to communicate the message that he bought into normative reality, that he was content to be a member of a feared and despised minority, that he was content to live with that fate for the rest of his life.
        He had to suppress the knowledge that, at a certain level, Topaz spoke for him, too. Topaz, the rabid extremist, the fanatic, had a certain appeal to Ibrahim, the mature citizen of the world of duty.
        "To take the path of terrorism," said Ibrahim, speaking over the latest caller, who had said or had asked something which Ibrahim had totally failed to take in, "to take the path of terrorism is to set the scene for an endless cycle of hate, of killing spawning killing, of death breeding death. Therefore I reject terrorism. Absolutely. Unconditionally. Always. No ifs, buts or maybes."
        Easy to say, and often said in those conventional arguments which Ibrahim had heard many, many times in his life. But, privately, scretly, Ibrahim indulged himself for a moment with the notion that perhaps the Dreamer was real, after all. That there might come a moment when things would be changed. Not by an agonizing series of body bangs, of exploding flesh, of ruptured terror in the streets. But by an act of clestial power which would overthrow the oppressors and give Ibrahim, for the first time in his life, the chance to be truly equal in a world of equals.