Tagiri interrupted. "Stop," she said.

He stopped.

"Was that translation correct?" she demanded.

Hassan spun the TruSite back a little, and ran the seen again, this time with the translator routine suppressed. He listened to the native speech, twice. "The translation is right enough," he said. "The words she used that were rendered as 'man' and 'woman' are from an older language, and I think there may be overtones that might make the words mean hero-man and hero-woman. Less than gods, but more than human. But they often use those words for talking about each other, as opposed to people from other tribes."

"Hassan," she said, "I'm not asking about the etymology. I'm asking about the meaning of what she said."

He looked at her blankly.

"Don't you think that it sounded very much as though she were seeing us?"

"But that's absurd," said Hassan.

"Forty generations. Isn't the time about right? A man and a woman, watching."

"Out of all possible dreams, can't there be dreams of the future?" asked Hassan. "And since Pastwatch scours all eras of history so thoroughly now, isn't it likely that eventually a watcher will witness the telling of a dream that seems to be a dream of the watcher himself?"

"Probability of coincidence," she said. She knew that principle, of course; it had been thoroughly covered in the later stages of training. But there was something else. Yes. As Hassan showed the scene yet a third time, it seemed to Tagiri that when Putukam spoke of her dream, her gaze was steady in the direction from which Hassan and Tagiri were watching, her eyes focused as if she could actually see them, or some glimmer of them.

"It can be disorienting, can't it?" Hassan grinned at her.

"Show the rest," said Tagiri. Of course it was disorienting -- but scarcely less so than Hassan's grin. None of her other subordinates would ever have grinned at her like that, with such a personal comment. Not that Hassan was being impertinent. Rather he was simply ... friendly, yes, that was it.