Beside him, Leona gasped. She saw color brilliantly. Testing, she tried to smell the air—nothing! So she wasn’t quite focused yet, she thought. Preparing to take a few steps, she rose in the air several tumbling feet. Monarch smiled, and she floated down, apologizing. “I’m sorry. I’m all right now. Can you tell anything?”

They stood quietly, staring. Gradually the contents of the room became clear. There were several people seated at a table. “If we’re right, our aspects should be here. We’d be attracted to them,” Monarch said. And as he uttered those words, his consciousness fluctuated, surged, and pulled him toward a man who was speaking. Monarch stood invisibly beside the man’s chair; and as he did, that individual’s mind opened up to him, almost as if it was his own. It wasn’t, of course, yet the sense of familiarity and strangeness was extremely intoxicating….

“Watch yourself,” Leona cried. “Don’t double in on yourself and him that way, Monarch!”

Monarch heard and didn’t hear. Why, he wondered, did this man and this room seem so familiar, so intimate? As if he’d been here (and not in dreams) before?

Before he could even begin to answer his own question, Monarch almost panicked as some assaulting audio data suddenly blotted out everything else. The thunderous, throbbing rush of sound was followed by squeaking, squealing higher frequencies that hurt Monarch’s dream ears, even while the rhythm of the two kinds of sound seemed to be translated into an unwieldy anxiety. For a moment the sounds seemed everywhere. Then, suddenly, they stopped.

Dazed, Monarch opened his dream eyes again. Leona was staring at him incredulously; she’d obviously heard the noises, too.

There was still some static, but gradually, as they stood invisibly in the room, Monarch and Leona identified the specific sounds of the persons speaking. The earlier barrage had propelled Monarch’s consciousness away from the man who so intrigued him, and now Monarch made cautious attempts to establish some kind of rapport. “I’m Monarch,” he said mentally.

“I’m Monarch,” John Window said, seated in George’s twentieth-century kitchen.

“Again?” George asked, grinning.

“I’ve always been Monarch,” Monarch replied mentally with astonishment. And again, John Window spoke his words.

“There’s some other consciousness here,” Seven said.

“Will you cut that out? You’re as bad as Window. It’s positively spooky,” George said, quickly finishing a beer. “He’s a … split personality—”

Seven turned to Window and said, “If you’re really Monarch, then you must know what the Codicils are.”

Silence.

Monarch was so excited that he didn’t dare speak, not even mentally. Beside him, Leona said, “One of them isn’t really physical! Look, that body doesn’t have a history; it’s flat at this level. Be careful. The room and other people seem real, though.”