"What of the man and woman who watch us?"

"Nothing," said Putukam. "They watched us. They were interested."

"They see us now?"

"They saw all the suffering in your dream," said Putukam. "They were interested in it."

"What do you mean, interested?"

"I think they were sad," said Putukam.

"But ... were they white, then? Did they watch the people suffer and care nothing for it, like the white men?"

"They were dark. The woman is very black. I have never seen a person of such blackness of skin."

"Then why don't they stop the white men from making us slaves?"

"Maybe they can't," said Putukam.

"If they can't save us," said Baiku, "then why do they look at us, unless they are monsters who enjoy the suffering of others?"

"Turn it off," said Tagiri to Hassan.

He paused the display again and looked at her in surprise. He saw something in her face that made him reach out and touch her arm. "Tagiri," he said gently, "of all people who have ever watched the past, you are the one who has never, even for a moment, forgotten compassion."

"She has to understand," murmured Tagiri. "I would help her if I could."

"How can she understand such a thing?" asked Hassan. "Even if she really saw us, somehow, in a true dream, she can't possibly comprehend the limitations on what we can do. To her, the ability to see into the past like this would be the power of the gods. So of course she will think we can do anything, and simply choose not to. But you know and I know that we can't, and therefore choose not at all."

"The vision of the gods without the power of the gods," said Tagiri. "What a terrible gift."

"A glorious gift," said Hassan. "You know that the stories we've brought out of the slavery project have awakened great interest and compassion in the world around us. You can't change the past, but you've changed the present, and these people are no longer forgotten. They loom larger in the hearts of the people of our time than the old heroes ever did. You have given these people the only help that it was in your power to give. They're no longer forgotten. Their suffering is seen."

"It isn't enough," said Tagiri.

"If it's all that you can do," said Hassan, "then it is enough."

"I'm ready now," said Tagiri. "You can show the rest of it."

"Perhaps we should wait."

She reached down and pressed the button to resume the display.

Putukam and Baiku gathered the dirt where their vomit had formed mud. They threw it into the tobacco water. The fire under it had died, so no steam was rising, yet they put their faces over the water as if to smell the steam of the dirt and the vomit and the tobacco.

Putukam began a chant. "From my body, from the earth, from the spirit water, I ..."

The TruSite II paused automatically.

"It can't translate the word," said Hassan. "And neither can I. It's not in the normally used vocabulary. They do use scraps of older languages in their magicking, and this may be related to a root in the old language that means shaping, like forming something out of mud. So she's saying, 'I shape you,' or something related to that."

"Go on," said Tagiri.

Putukam's chant began again. "From my body, from the earth, from the spirit water, I shape you, O children of forty generations who look at me from inside my dream. You see the suffering of us and all the other villages. You see the white monsters who make us slaves and murder us. You see how the gods send plagues to save the blessed ones and leave only the cursed ones to bear this terrible punishment. Speak to the gods, O children of forty generations who look at me from inside my dream! Teach them mercy! Let them send a plague to take us all, and leave the land empty for the white monsters, so they will hunt and hunt for us from shore to shore and find none of us, no people at all, not even the human-eating Caribs! Let the land be empty except for our dead bodies, so that we will die in honor as free people. Speak to the gods for us, O man, O woman!"

And so it went on like that, Baiku taking over the chant when Putukam wearied. Soon others from the village gathered around them and sporadically joined in the chant, especially when they were intoning the name they were praying to: Children - of - Forty - Generations - Who - Look - at - Us - from - Inside - the - Dream - of - Puthukam.

They were still chanting when the Spanish, led by two shamefaced Indie guides, shambled along the path, their muskets, pikes, and swords at the ready. The people made no resistance. They kept up the chant, even after they had all been seized, even as the old men, including Baiku, were being gutted with swords or spitted on pikes. Even as the young girls were being raped, all who could speak kept up the chanting, the prayer, the conjuration, until finally the Spanish commander, unnerved by it all, walked over to Putukam and drove his sword into the base of her throat, just above where the collarbones come together. With a gurgle, she died, and the chanting ended. For her, as for Baiku, the prayer was answered. She was not a slave before she died.

With all the villagers dead, Tagiri reached down again, but Hassan's hand was there before her, stopping the display.

Tagiri was trembling, but she pretended not to feel strong emotions. "I have seen such terrible things before," said Tagiri. "But this time she saw me. Saw us."

"Or so it seems."

"She saw, Hassan."

"So it seems." Now the words admitted she might be right.

"Something from our time, from right now, was visible to her in her dream. Perhaps we were still visible when she awoke. It seemed to me that she was looking at us. I didn't think of her seeing us until after she awoke from her dream, and yet she saw that I knew she could see us. It's too much to be chance."

"If this is true," said Hassan, "then why haven't other watchers using the TruSite II been seen?"

"Perhaps we're only visible to those who need so desperately to see us."

"It's impossible," said Hassan. "We were taught that from the beginning."

"No," said Tagiri. "Remember the course in the history of Pastwatch? The theorists weren't certain, were they? Only years of observation convinced them that their theory was right -- but in the early days there was much talk of temporal backwash."

"So you paid more attention in class than I did," said Hassan.

"Temporal backwash," she said again. "Don't you see how dangerous this is?"

"If it's true, if they really saw us, then it can't be dangerous because, after all, nothing changed as a result of it."

"Nothing would ever seem to change," she said, "because we would then live in the version of the present created by the new past. Who knows how many changes, small and great, we might have made, and yet never knew it because the change made our present different and we couldn't remember it being any other way?"

"We can't have changed anything at all," said Hassan. "Or history would have changed, and even if Pastwatch itself still existed, certainly the circumstances where we decided to stand here together and watch this village would never have happened in just that way, and therefore the change we made in the past would have unmade our very making of that change, and therefore it couldn't happen. She didn't see us."

"I know the circularity argument as well as you do, Hassan," she said. "But this particular case proves it false. You can't deny that she saw us, Hassan. You can't call it coincidence. Not when she saw I was black."

He grinned. "If the devils of her time are white, then maybe she needed to invent a god as black as you."

"She also saw that there were two of us, that we watched her three times, that I knew she could see us. She even got our era approximately right. She saw and she understood. We changed the past."