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weathered jeans and a look at once furious and bewildered. His own hair stood out in random directions. Annja thought he resembled Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons she’d loved growing up. She fought a semihysterical impulse to giggle.
    â€œSo I wasn’t the only one who had a night visitor,” Dan said. “You look like an avenging angel on a bad-hair day.”
    â€œYou’re a great one to talk, Calvin,” she said.
    He looked confused. “Never mind,” she said. “What did you see?”
    â€œA woman,” he said. “Tall, thin, looked African. Had one of those headdresses on, the ones with the flared tops.” He had extensive experience in sub-Saharan Africa, Annja recalled. “She warned me not to keep seeking the quilombo of dreams.”
    â€œAnd I suppose she vanished without a trace?”
    â€œAbsolutely. I rolled over to turn on the bedside lamp. When I rolled back I was all alone. Creepy.”
    He made a sound deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle, or passed for one. “Something like this tempts a man to believe there might actually be something to the stories about these Promessans possessing mystic powers.”
    It was Annja’s turn to produce an inarticulate noise, this a distinctly unladylike grunt of confirmed skepticism. “It’s some kind of trick. It’s got to be.”
    â€œWas your window open? You find any sign the door had been jimmied?” Dan looked at her intently for a moment. “From your expression I’m taking that as a no on both counts.”
    â€œWell…still. I’m not ready to buy into astral projection or anything,” Annja said.
    He shrugged. “Come to that, if they have some kind of technique of holographic projection, that’d be pretty significant in and of itself, wouldn’t it? Moran seems to think whatever secrets the Promessans have are primarily technological, although he doesn’t say much about the mystic-powers thing one way or another.”
    â€œBut I smelled him. He smelled of soil and plants. Like the rain forest.”
    Dan shrugged. “The Department of Defense was claiming to be able to stimulate various kinds of sensory hallucinations by beaming microwaves directly into people’s skulls in the late 1990s,” he said. “Maybe the Promessans are using a technology that isn’t really that advanced. Just secret.” He uttered a short laugh. “I’m surprised the capitalists haven’t started using it for ads, though. Imagine billboards beamed directly into your brain!”
    â€œI’d rather not, thanks.” Annja compressed her lips. “Still, I had the absolute conviction he was really, physically there. That I could have hit him with my…fist…if I’d only been quick enough.”
    Dan laughed again, in a lighter tone. “Publico said you were a martial-arts expert with more than a little rough-and-tumble experience. I like that in a woman. And yeah, I had the same sense about the woman in my room. Although it didn’t occur to me to hit her. But which impossibility is going to upset your worldview the most? Astral projection, some kind of technological projection, or teleportation?”
    â€œI think I’ll just go back to bed,” she said, “and try not to speculate in the absence of sufficient data.”
    â€œOr an overabundance of uncomfortable data.”
    â€œI thought you were the hardheaded, skeptical type, too,” she said.
    He shrugged. “Maybe I’m more a reflex skeptic. Sometimes being a skeptic means distrusting the official explanation. Especially when you’ve seen official explanations revealed as flat-out lies as often as I have.”
    Standing in the hallway there was a sudden sense of awkwardness between them.
    Dan grinned. “Guess I’ll go back to bed, too,” he said. He tipped his head from side to side, stretching his