But suddenly an idea came to her; a way out, a compromise. “I have to do something tonight,” she said. “Please don’t ask me what it is. I have to do it alone and I don’t want you to follow, even to help. Maybe the Dream Tribunal had something to do with all this. It made me realize how different we are, you and me; how easily you manipulate in ways … I find difficult. I’m still an outsider in your world.”

“But our world is on the Earth. This is the Earth. It’s not something apart,” Sumpter said. “Look—trees, grain, flowers—everything is inside here that’s outside—”

“But maybe I was meant to go through … whatever my people have to go through before they end up with this: your buildings and pyramids and cultivated lands. Maybe I was closer to myself in a crazy way when I was half-starving. I have to do what I have to do, or even staying here wouldn’t work.”

“You can’t go outside alone. You don’t know the way—”

“I know it,” Ma-ah said. He could read her mind easily and see what she’d planned, but she knew that he wouldn’t.

Sumpter looked at her quietly for a moment. “I suppose you want me to leave you alone now.”

She nodded. “I want to think. And I want to sit here and look at the courtyard a while.”

There was nothing for him to do or say. He nodded soberly and walked away.

Ma-ah waited until after sundown. She wanted to be back if possible before midnight, when the Speakers would be up and about in their dream bodies. Now she was frightened but determined. Could she remember the mechanics of out-of-body travel well enough to do what she wanted to? Could she master them without Sumpter around to help? Could she set her destination, reach it safely, and return?

It wouldn’t occur to Sumpter that she’d try to go back out-of-body, because he hadn’t given her instructions yet on going so far from her physical form, or pinpointing destinations. Ma-ah hoped she remembered enough just from hearing him talk about it at various times. She frowned again: physically she didn’t even know how to get outside, but unconsciously she must know. And Sumpter had mentioned once that unconscious knowledge could be used to direct you to otherwise unknown destinations.

Still pondering, she walked back to their private dwelling. When you went “out” spontaneously, things often took care of themselves—she thought—but all kinds of hallucinations could happen, too, if your body was still sleeping. Yet to grab control consciously as she was going to do, and direct the journey, you had to do the things that were automatically done for you in a spontaneous dream projection.