“There’s so many variables,” Monarch said. “I don’t do my best dream travel under pressure, either, like you do … and there’s not much time before the celebration, either. The technicians must be gathering in the basement and downstairs rooms even now.”

She grinned at him.

He started laughing. “Of course you’re right. And who knows what we’ll find? Maybe we’ll even have more new data for the celebration.”

They took off all of their clothes and lay down in the replica of The George’s bed. They let their thoughts melt: then they let their thoughts melt together, and they felt their bodies dissolving into the bedding—becoming the bedding as far as sensation was concerned, though both of their physical forms lay there, cool and quiet as sleeping stones. Their minds met where their thoughts merged together, and their dream-selves rose up like forms of smoke. The forms faded together into the room’s past—into the pasts of the room—disappearing in numberless autumns and summers, floating through immeasurable winters and springtime … following the beckoning focuses of their individual and joint intents.

Monarch and Leona were naturally gifted dream travelers, their abilities tuned and developed through their university training. They loved working together, and now they maintained their separate critical consciousnesses carefully, clearly, easily, letting them ride atop the deeper, steadier dream consciousnesses that supported them. Their love for each other was a further support, adding to their closeness, so that now the dream consciousness of one of them could intermingle with the other’s. But always their intent steered them in one direction: toward The George’s ancient world.

Now and then, their dream bodies passed through utter darkness. There were bursts of flame and the chattering, it seemed, of a million voices, but both of them knew enough not to become distracted—not to investigate, not to be touched by such dream-atmospheric conditions.

“I love you,” Monarch said mentally. “I love you,” she mentally replied. Then they both felt that sudden exhilaration, that focusing of energy, that surge of triumph as the dream trip zoomed them in precisely on the desired location in time and space; incredibly finding the target from an infinity of probabilities.

Now was a time of special care.

Chapter Seventeen

A Together Dream

The sense of motion ceased. Monarch and Leona tried to hold their consciousnesses as steady as possible, but even then there was a momentary mental blackout. It lasted barely a second. Then there was a jumble of half-formed images as their dreamsight began to operate.

At first Monarch just saw shapes but gradually they gained object status, though everything was gray. All of his other dream senses operated fully, though, so that he stood solidly enough in the corner of “the landing room.”