t you'd never even think to question it. If you were a
genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if
you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your
new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a
little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people
who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."

"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going
to tell us how you ended up here."

"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."

"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to
understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you
finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with
increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city,
chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go
and --" I waved my hands, "be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town,
you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay -- you might
think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big
cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all
the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that
information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big
cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.

"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and
territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had
the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around
on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone
knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People
immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of
people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was
religious, but that was just on the surface -- underneath it all was aesthetics.
You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood
prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold
goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course --
jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of f