by Orson Scott Card
v1.0 (30-Jul-1999)
Some people called it "the time of undoing"; some, wishing to be more positive, spoke of it as "the replanting" or "the restoring" or even "the resurrection" of the Earth. All these names were accurate. Something had been done, and now it was being undone. Much had died or been broken or killed, and now it was coming back to life.
It should have been a happy time, with humanity pressing forward into a future in which the world would be healed, in which a comfortable life could be lived without the shame of knowing that it came at someone else's expense. And for many -- perhaps most -- it was. But many others could not turn their faces from the shadows of the past. Too many creatures were missing, never to be restored. Too many people, too many nations now lay buried in the soil of the past. Once the world had teemed with seven billion human lives. Now a tenth that number tended the gardens of Earth. The survivors could not easily forget the century of war and plague, of drought and flood and famine, of desperate fury leading to despair. Every step of every living man and woman trod on someone's grave, or so it seemed.
They knew, of course, that they could not record it all. There were not enough alive to witness all the actions of the dead. But by sampling here and there, by following this question to its answer, that nation to its end, the men and women of Pastwatch could tell stories to their fellow citizens, true fables that explained why nations rose and fell; why men and women envied, raged, and loved; why children laughed in sunlight and trembled in the dark of night.
Chapter 1 -- The Governor
After so many years of struggle, his three caravels had finally set sail from Palos, only to run into trouble almost at once. After so many priests and gentlemen in the courts of Spain and Portugal had smiled at him and then tried to destroy him behind his back, Columbus found it hard to believe that it wasn't sabotage when the rudder of the Pinta came loose and nearly broke. After all, Quintero, the owner of the Pinta, was so nervous about having his little ship go out on such a voyage that he had signed on as a common seaman, just to keep an eye on his property. And Pinz˘n told him privately that he had seen a group of men gathered at the stern of the Pinta just as they were setting sail. Pinz˘n fixed the rudder himself, at sea, but the next day it broke again. Pinz˘n was furious, but he vowed to Columbus that the Pinta would meet him at Las Palmas within days.
The first consisted of having to listen politely to the petty gentlemen of Beatrice's little court, who kept telling him the most appalling lies about how on certain bright days, from the island of Ferro, westernmost of the Canaries, one could see a faint image of a blue island on the western horizon-- as if plenty of ships had not already sailed that far west! But Columbus had grown skilled at smiling and nodding at the most outrageous stupidity. One did not survive at court without that particular skill, and Columbus had weathered not only the wandering courts of Ferdinand and Isabella, but also the more settled and deeply arrogant court of John of Portugal. And after waiting decades to win the ships and men and supplies and, above all, the permission to make this voyage, he could endure a few more days of conversation with stupid gentlemen. Though he sometimes had to grind his teeth not to point out how utterly useless they must be in the eyes of God and everyone else, if they could find nothing better to do with their lives than wait about in the court of the governor of Gomera when she was not even at home. No doubt they amused Beatrice -- she had shown a keen appreciation of the worthlessness of most men of the knightly class when she conversed with Columbus at the royal court at Santa Fe. No doubt she skewered them constantly with ironic barbs which they did not realize were ironic.
The worst possibilities immediately came to mind. The saboteurs were so grimly determined not to complete the voyage that there had been a mutiny, or they had somehow persuaded Pinz˘n to turn around and sail for Spain. Or they were adrift in the currents of the Atlantic, getting swept to some unnameable destination. Or pirates had taken them -- or the Portuguese, who might have thought they were part of some foolish Spanish effort to poach on their private preserve along the coasts of Africa. Or Pinz˘n, who clearly thought himself better suited to lead the expedition than Columbus himself -- though he would never have been able to win royal sponsorship for such an expedition, having neither the education, the manners, nor the patience that it had required -- might have had the foolish notion of sailing on ahead, reaching the Indies before Columbus.
Was this too bold a thing for him to say to the Lord? Probably. But Columbus had spoken boldly to powerful men before, and so the words spilled easily from his heart to flow from his tongue. God could strike him down for it if he wanted -- Columbus had put himself in God's hands years before, and he was weary.
Having finished this most impious and offensive prayer, Columbus could not sleep until at last, no less angry than before, he flung himself out of bed and knelt again.
The next morning the Pinta limped into port. Columbus took it as the final confirmation that God really was still interested in the success of this voyage. Very well, thought Columbus. You didn't strike me dead for my disrespect, Lord; instead you sent me the Pinta. Therefore I will prove to you that I am still your loyal servant.
And as long as he had the attention of the shipworkers of Las Palmas, he finally bullied Juan Nino, the owner of the Nina, into changing from his triangular sails to the same square rigging as the other caravels, so they'd all be catching the same winds and, God willing, sailing together to the court of the great Khan of China.
And so gracious was God in answering Columbus's impudent prayer that when at last he sailed into Gomera for the final resupply of his ships, the banner of the governor was flying above the battlements of the castle of San Sebastidn.
She listened, rapt, asking intelligent questions and laughing at his tales of the hideous interference the king had visited upon Columbus almost as soon as he had signed the capitulations. "Instead of paying for three caravels, he dredged up some ancient offense that the city of Palos had committed -- smuggling, no doubt--"
"And as their punishment, he required them to pay a fine of exactly two caravels."
"The irony is that seven years ago, the Duke of Sidonia would have bought me three caravels from Palos out of his own treasury, if the crown had not refused him permission."
"Anyway, you can imagine how glad they were to see me in Palos. And then, to make sure both cheeks were well slapped, he issued a proclamation that any man who agreed to join my expedition would win a suspension of any civil and criminal actions pending against him."
"Oh, yes. You can imagine what that did to the real sailors of Palos. They weren't going to sail with a bunch of criminals and debtors -- or run the risk of people thinking that they had needed such a pardon."
"Yes, well, his 'help' nearly killed the expedition from the start."
"None, or at least none that we know of. Thank God for Martin Pinz˘n."
"You know of him?"
"He caught the vision of the thing. But once he noised it about that he was going, we started to get recruits. And it was his friends who ended up risking their caravels on the voyage."
"They hope to be rich, at least by their standards."
"No, my lady. I hope to be rich by your standards."
Her remark was light, but it touched on a matter quite tender: She was the only one who knew that he had undertaken his voyage at the command of God. The priests of Salamanca thought him a fool, but if he had ever breathed a word of his belief in God's having spoken to him, they would have branded him a heretic and that would have brought an end to more than Columbus's plan for an expedition to the Indies. He had not meant to tell her, either; he had not meant to tell anyone, had not even told his brother Bartholomew, nor his wife Felipa before she died, nor even Father Perez at La Rdbida. Yet after only an hour in the company of Lady Beatrice, he had told her. Not all, of course. But that God had chosen him, had commanded him to make this voyage, he told her that much.
And she did not think him mad, or if she did, she must have some special love of madmen. A love that continued even now, to a degree beyond his hopes. "Stay the night with me, my Cristobal," she said.
"You lived with a common woman named Beatrice in Cordoba. She had your child. You can't pretend to be living a monkish life."
Lady Beatrice laughed lightly. "You managed to compliment your old lover and one who would be your new one, both at once. No wonder you were able to win your way past the priests and scholars. I daresay Queen Isabella fell in love with your red hair and the fire in your eyes, just as I did."
"Hardly any," she answered.
"Are you beginning a long and gracefully convoluted speech that will, in the end, decline my carnal invitation?"
She reached out, leaned forward, touched his cheek. "You're not a very handsome man, you know, Cristobal."
"And yet one can't take one's eyes from you. Nor can one purge one's thoughts of you when you're gone. I'm a widow, and you're a widower. God saw fit to remove our spouses from the torments of this world. Must we also be tormented by unfulfilled desires?"
"Oh, is that all? Then leave before midnight. I'll let you over the parapet by a silken rope."
"As well he should, since you were on his mission."
"I knew I should have seduced you back in Santa Fe."
"Well, Viceroy indeed! I doubt you'll waste a glance on a mere governor of a far-off island."
"Like Poseidon, ruler over all the shores that are touched by the waves of the sea--"
"You've been at court too long. You make your compliments sound rehearsed."
"For the Pinta's return, you mean."
Her face reddened, and then she laughed.
"Is that what that was? Do strumpets sleep with men for free if they say such pretty things?"
"Poetry?"
"Watch your nautical references, my friend."
"You're very good at this. Or are you not making it up as you go along?"
She slapped his face, but it wasn't meant to hurt.
"Kiss me, Cristobal. I believe in your mission, but if you never return I want at least your kiss to remember you by."
He saw her, or thought he saw her -- and who else could it have been? -- waving a scarlet handkerchief as if it were a banner from the parapet of the castle as his caravels at last set forth. He raised his hand in a salute to her, and then turned his face westward. He would not look again to the east, to Europe, to home, not until he had achieved what God had sent him to do. The last of the obstacles was past now, surely. Ten days' sailing and he would step ashore in Cathay or India, the Spice Islands or in Cipangu. Nothing could stop him now, for God was with him, as he had been with him since that day on the beach when God appeared to him and told him to forget his dreams of a crusade. "I have a greater work for you," God said then, and now Columbus was near the culmination of that work. It filled him like wine, it filled him like light, it filled him like the wind in the sails over his head.
Chapter 2 -- Slaves
"History is not prelude," she said once. "We don't justify the suffering of people in the past because everything turned out well enough by the time we came along. Their suffering counts just as much as our peace and happiness. We look out of our golden windows and feel pity for the scenes of blood and blades, of plagues and famines that are played out in the surrounding country. When we believed that we could not go back in time and make changes, then we could be excused for shedding a tear for them and then going on about our happy lives. But once we know that it is in our power to help them, then, if we turn away and let their suffering go on, it is no golden age we live in, and we poison our own happiness. Good people do not let others suffer needlessly." What she asked was a hard thing, but some agreed with her. Not all, but in the end, enough.
It was hard to learn to use the Tempoview. Even though it had extraordinarily good computer-assisted guidance, so that getting to the exact place and time you wanted was precise within minutes, there was no computer yet that could overcome what the pastwatchers called the "significance problem." Tagiri would pick a vantage point in the village -- near the main path winding among the housesand then set up a time frame, such as a week. The computer would then scan for human passage and record all that took place within range of the vantage point.
Within a few weeks, though, Tagiri had run into the significance problem. After watching a few dozen girls flirting, she knew that all girls of Ikoto flirted in pretty much the same way. After watching a few dozen teasings, tauntings, quarrels, and kindnesses among the children, she realized that she had seen pretty much every variation on teasing, taunting, quarreling, and kindness that she would ever see. No way had yet been found to program the Tempoview computers to recognize unusual, unpredictable human behavior. It had been hard enough to train them to recognize human movement in the first place; in the early days, pastwatchers had had to wade through endless landings and peckings of small birds and scamperings of lizards and mice in order to see a few human interactions.
Then her research took a twist that her superiors had seen only a few times before. Tagiri had already worked her way seven generations deep into her mother's family when she abandoned the biographical approach and, instead of following each person from birth to death, she began to follow individual women backward, from death to birth.
And why had he beaten her? A few more minutes of backtracking brought the answer: Amami had been raped by two powerful men from a nearby village of Lotuko tribesmen when she went for water. But Amami's husband could not accept the idea that it was rape, for that would have meant that he was incapable of protecting his wife; it would have required him to take some kind of vengeance, which would have endangered the fragile peace between Lotuko and Dongotona in the Koss Valley. So for the good of his tribe and to salvage his own ego, he had to interpret his weeping wife's story as a lie, and assume that in fact she had been playing the whore. He was beating her to get her to give him the money she had been paid, even though it was obvious to Tagiri that he knew there was no money, that his beloved wife had not gone whoring, that in fact he was being unjust. His obvious sense of shame at what he was doing did not seem to make him go easier on her. He was more brutal than Tagiri had ever seen any man in the village -- needlessly so, continuing to cane her long after she was screaming and pleading and confessing to all sins ever committed in the world. Since he was doing this beating, not because he believed in the justice of it, but so that he could convince the neighbors that he believed his wife deserved it, he overdid it. Overdid it, and then had to watch Amami limping through the rest of her life.
The more Tagiri began to care about and identify with the people of Ikoto, the more she began to live in the back-to-front timeflow. As she looked at other people's actions, in and out of the Tempoview, instead of waiting to see the results of actions, she waited to see the causes. To her the world was not a potential future awaiting her manipulation; to her, it was an irrevocable set of results, and all that could be found was the irrevocable causes that led to the present moment.
It was because of this that her novice period was allowed to extend long past those uncertain months when she was still gaining skill at handling the Tempoview and finding her own way past the significance problem. Instead of giving her an assignment in one of the ongoing projects, she was allowed to continue exploring her own past. This was a very practical decision, of course, for as a storyseeker instead of a pattern-seeker, she would not fit in with any of the ongoing projects anyway. Story-seekers were usually allowed to follow their own desires. However, Tagiri's continued backward watching made her, not just unusual, but unique. Her superiors were curious to discover where her research would lead her, and what she would write.
If they had asked her, she would have thought for a moment and told them, for she was and always had been extraordinarily self-aware. It was my parents' divorce, Tagiri would have said. They had seemed perfectly happy to her all her life; then, when she was fourteen, she learned that they were divorcing, and suddenly all the idyll of her childhood turned out to be a lie, for her father and mother had been jockeying all those years in a vicious, deadly competition for supremacy in the household. It had been invisible to Tagiri because her parents hid their pernicious competitiveness even from each other, even from themselves, but when Tagiri's father was made head of Sudan Restoration, which would put him two levels higher than Tagiri's mother in the same organization, their hatred for each other's accomplishments finally emerged into the open, naked and brutal.
They did not ask her why her timeflow ran backward, and she did not tell them. Though she was vaguely uneasy that she had not yet been assigned to anything, Tagiri was also glad, for she was playing the greatest game of her life, solving puzzle after puzzle. Hadn't Amami's daughter been late to marry? And hadn't her daughter in turn married too young, and to a man who was far more strong-willed and selfish than her mother's kind but compliant husband? Each generation rejected the choices of the generation before, never understanding the reasons behind the mother's life. Happiness for this generation, misery for the next, but all traceable back to a rape and an unjust beating of an already miserable woman. Tagiri had heard all the reverberations before at last she came upon the ringing bell; she had felt all the waves before she came, at last, to the stone dropping into the pool. Just as it had been in her own childhood.
In the meantime, unknown to her, a monitor would be permanently assigned to her, to track all her work, so that in case (as sometimes happened with these strange ones) she never published, upon her death a report on her life's work would be issued anyway, for whatever value it might then have. Only five other people had silver tags on their files when Tagiri achieved this status. And Tagiri was the strangest of them all.
The sadness remained, year before year, back and back into her years as a young wife, until at last it gave way to something else: fear, rage, even weeping. I am close, thought Tagiri. I will find out the pain at the root of her sadness. Was this, too, some act of her husband's? That would be hard to believe, for unlike Amami's husband, Diko's was a mild and kind man, who enjoyed his wife's position of respect in the village while never seeming to seek any honor for himself. Not a proud man, or a brutal one. And they seemed, in their most private moments, to be genuinely in love; whatever caused Diko's sadness, her husband was a comfort to her.
And then, suddenly, the search was unbegun, and for the first time Tagiri could see the Diko that might have been: smiling, laughing, singing, her face fined with perfect delight at the life the gods had given her. For there in Diko's house Tagiri now saw for the first time the one whose loss had brought Diko such deep sadness all her life: an eight-year-old boy, bright and alert and happy. She called him Acho, and she talked to him constantly, for he was her companion in work and play. Tagiri had seen good mothers and bad in her passage through the generations, but never such a delight of a mother in her son, and of a son in his mother. The boy also loved his father, and was learning all the manly things from him as he should, but Diko's husband was not as verbal as his wife and firstborn son, so he watched and listened and enjoyed them together, only occasionally joining in their banter.
There were hippos in the waters of the Koss in those days, though rarely this far upriver, and Tagiri dreaded seeing what the villagers assumed -- poor Acho broken and drowned in the jaws of a surly hippopotamus.
A strange man, who spoke a language unlike any that Acho had heard -- though Tagiri recognized it at once as Arabic. The man's light skin and beard, his robe and turban, all were intriguing to the nearly naked Acho, who had seen only people with dark brown skin, except when a group of blue-black Dinkas came hunting up the river. How was such a creature as this possible? Unlike other children, Acho was not one to turn and flee, and so when the man smiled and talked his incomprehensible babble (Tagiri knew he was saying, "Come here, little boy, I won't hurt you") Acho stood his ground, and even smiled.
A slaver, Tagiri realized at once. She had thought they did not come this far. Usually they bought their slaves from Dinkas down at the White Nile, and the Dinka slavers knew better than to come into the mountains in groups so small. Their method was to raid a village, kill all the men, and take the small children and the pretty women off for sale, leaving only the old women behind to keen for them. Most of the Muslim slavers preferred to trade for slaves rather than to do their own kidnapping. These men had broken with the pattern. In the old marketeering societies that nearly ruined the world, thought Tagiri, these men would have been viewed as vigorous, innovative entrepreneurs, trying to make a bit more profit by cutting out the Dinka middlemen.
What happened at first was that he was almost liberated -- or killed. The slavers were stupid enough to have captured slaves on their way up the river, even though there was no way to return except by passing near the very villages where they had already kidnapped children. At a village farther downstream, some Lotuko men in full warrior dress ambushed them. The other two Arabs were killed, and since their sacks contained the only children the Lotuko villagers cared about -- their own -- they allowed the slaver who carried Acho on his back to escape.
And so the journey down the Nile continued, all the way to the slave market of Khartoum. The slaver would open the bag containing Acho only once a day, to splash some water into the boy's mouth. The rest of the time the boy rode in darkness, his body cramped in fetal position. He was brave, for he never wept, and after the slaver brutally kicked the bag a few times, Acho stopped trying to plead. Instead he endured in silence, his eyes bright with fear. The bag no doubt stank of his urine by now, and since, like most children of Ikoto, Acho's bowels had always been loose from dysentery, the bag was certainly foul with fecal matter, too. But that soon grew old and dry in the desert, and since Acho was fed nothing, this pollution at least was not renewed. Of course the boy could not have been allowed out of the bag to void his bladder and bowel -- he might have run off, and the slaver was determined to realize some profit from a trip that cost the lives of his two partners.
Tagiri followed Acho down the Nile, by boat and by camel, until he was finally sold in Cairo. Better fed now, well-washed, and looking quite exotic in the bustling Arab-African city that was the cultural center of Islam in those days, Acho fetched an excellent price and joined the household of a wealthy trader. Acho quickly learned Arabic, and his master discovered his bright mind and saw to his education. Acho eventually became the factotum of the house, tending to all while the master was off on voyages. When the master died, his eldest son inherited Acho along with everything else, and relied on him even more heavily, until Acho had de facto control of the entire business, which he ran very profitably, expanding into new markets and new trade goods until the family fortune was one of the greatest in Cairo. And when Acho died, the family sincerely mourned him and gave him an honorable funeral, for a slave.
That was when Tagiri left her backward search through her own family's past and took on what she thought would be her lifelong project: slavery. Till now, all the story-seekers in Pastwatch had devoted their careers to recording the stories of great, or at least influential, men and women of the past. But Tagiri would study the slaves, not the owners; she would search throughout history, not to record the choices of the powerful, but to find the stories of those who had lost all choice. To remember the forgotten people, the ones whose dreams were murdered and whose bodies were stolen from themselves, so that they were not even featured players in their own autobiographies. The ones whose faces showed that they never forgot for one instant that they did not belong to themselves, and that there was no lasting joy possible in life because of that.
Tagiri was thirty years old, some eight years into her slavery project, with a dozen of the more traditional pattern-seeking pastwatchers working under her alongside two of the story-seekers, when her career took its fmal turn, leading her at last to Columbus and the unmaking of history. Though she never left Juba, the town where her Pastwatch observatory was located, the Tempoview could range anywhere over the Earth's surface. And when the TruSite II was introduced to replace the now-aging Tempoviews, she began to be able to explore farther afield, for rudimentary translation of ancient languages was now built into the system, and she did not have to learn each language herself in order to get the gist of what was going on in the scenes she saw.
"It's a mountain village," he explained, as soon as he saw that she was watching. "Much more temperate than the villages near the coast -- a different kind of agriculture."
"I'm seeing the lives that were interrupted by the Spanish," he said. "This is only a few weeks before an expedition finally comes up the mountain to take them into slavery. The Spanish are getting desperate for labor down on the coast."
"Not at all," said Hassan. "In fact, they're failing. But the Spanish aren't very good at keeping their Indie slaves alive."
"Most do. The murder-for-sport attitude is here, of course, because the Spanish have absolute power and for some that power has to be tested to the limit. But by and large the priests have got control of things and they're really trying to keep the slaves from dying."
"The people of Ankuash are perfectly aware of what's going on. They've already figured out that they're just about the last Indies left who haven't been enslaved. They've tried to stay out of sight, lighting no fires and making sure the Spanish don't see them, but there are too many Arawaks and Caribs of the lowlands who are saving some bit of their freedom by collaborating with the Spanish. They remember Ankuash. So there'll be an expedition, soon, and they know it. You see?"
"Tobacco water," said Hassan.
Hassan nodded. "I've seen this sort of thing before."
"The TruSite may be enhancing the smoke too much in the holo, so there may be less of it than we're seeing," said Hassan. "But smoke or not, there's no way to boil the tobacco water without fire, and at this point they're near despair. Better to risk their smoke being seen than to go another day without word from the gods."
"They drink and dream," said Hassan.
"They know that most dreams mean nothing. They hope that their nightmares mean nothing -- fear dreams instead of true dreams. They use the tobacco water to make the gods tell them the truth. Farther down the slopes, the Arawaks and Caribs would have offered a human sacrifice, or bled themselves the way the Mayas do. But this village has no tradition of sacrifice and never adopted it from their neighbors. They're a holdout from a different tradition, I think. Similar to some tribes in the upper Amazon. They don't need death or blood to talk to the gods."
"The woman is Putukam -- the name means Mid dog, " said Hassan. "She's a woman noted for her visions, but she hasn't used tobacco water much before."
"On the other hand, Baiku is a healer, so he uses the drugs more. All the time, actually. So he can send his spirit into the body of the sick person and find out what's wrong. Tobacco water is his favorite. Of course, it still makes him vomit. It makes everybody vomit."
"He should live so long," said Hassan.
Hassan shrugged. "Let's zip ahead and see."
"I dreamed," said Putukam.
"Let me hear the healing dream," said Putukam.
"All slaves?"
"And then?"
"This is our healing, then," said Putukam. "To die. Better to have been captured by Caribs. Better to have our hearts torn out and our livers eaten. Then at least we would be an offering to a god."
"My dream was madness," she said. "My dream had no truth in it."
She sighed. "You will think I am a poor dreamer indeed, and the gods hate my soul. I dreamed of a man and woman watching us. They were full grown, and yet I knew in the dream that they are forty generations younger than us."
He stopped.
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."
He looked at her blankly.
"But that's absurd," said Hassan.
"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?"
"It can be disorienting, can't it?" Hassan grinned at her.
He started the TruSite viewing beyond what they had seen before.
Hassan slammed his hand onto the Pause button. "There is no God but God," he muttered in Arabic, "and Muhammad is his prophet."
"Probability of coincidence?" she murmured. "I was just thinking that it seemed as though she could see us."
"But it had been three times when we first heard her say how many. That will never change."
"And how do we know that?" asked Tagiri.
"In theory."
"Until now."
Tagiri shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she didn't feel. "If she saw us, Hassan, then let's go on and see what it means to her."
"This is prophecy, then," Baiku was saying. "Who knows what wonders the gods will bring in forty generations?"
"What of the man and woman who watch us?"
"They see us now?"
"What do you mean, interested?"
"But ... were they white, then? Did they watch the people suffer and care nothing for it, like the white men?"
"Then why don't they stop the white men from making us slaves?"
"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?"
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."
"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."
"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."
"If it's all that you can do," said Hassan, "then it is enough."
"Perhaps we should wait."
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.
The TruSite II paused automatically.
"Go on," said Tagiri.
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.
With all the villagers dead, Tagiri reached down again, but Hassan's hand was there before her, stopping the display.
"Or so it seems."
"So it seems." Now the words admitted she might be right.
"If this is true," said Hassan, "then why haven't other watchers using the TruSite II been seen?"
"It's impossible," said Hassan. "We were taught that from the beginning."
"So you paid more attention in class than I did," said Hassan.
"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."
"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."
He grinned. "If the devils of her time are white, then maybe she needed to invent a god as black as you."
Hassan shrugged. "I know, " he said. Then he sat up, alert again, having found an argument. "It doesn't mean that circularity is proved false," he said. "The Spaniards behaved exactly as they would have anyway, so any change that came about because she saw us watching her made no difference in the future because she and all her people were so soon dead. Maybe that's the only time the TruSite II has a backwash effect. When it can't possibly make a difference. So the past is still safe from our meddling. Which means we're also safe."
"She saw me," said Tagiri. "Her desperation made her believe I was a god. And her suffering makes me wish that she were right. To have the power to help these people -- Hassan, if she could sense us, it means that we're sending something back. And if we're sending anything back at all, anything, then perhaps we could do something that would help."
"Dear Hassan," she said, "you tell me now that history is such an inexorable force that we can't alter its onward march. Yet a moment ago you told me that arty change, however small, would alter history by so much that it would undo our own time. Explain to me why this isn't a contradiction."
"Neither of us is a mathematician," said Tagiri. "We're just playing logic games. The fact is that Putukam saw us, you and me. There is some kind of sending from our time to the past. This changes everything, and soon the mathematicians will discover truer explanations for the workings of our time machines, and then we'll see what's possible and what isn't. And if it turns out that we can reach into the past, deliberately and purposefully, then we will do it, you and I."
"Because we're the ones she saw. Because she ... shaped us."
"If we're going to be gods," said Tagiri, "then I think we have a duty to come up with better solutions than the people who pray to us."
"You seem sure of that," she said.
"Not undone," said Tagiri. "Remade."
She glared at him. "You're right," she said. "For one village, it wouldn't be worth it."
***
If that was so, then what of all the suffering that she had seen over all these years? Could there be some way to change it? And if it could be changed, how could she refuse? They had shaped her. It was superstition, it meant nothing, and yet she could not eat that evening, could not sleep that night for thinking of their chanted prayer.
She pulled a robe over her head and went to the laboratory, where others also worked late -- there were no set working hours for people who played so loosely with the flow of time. She told her TruSite to show her Ankuash again, but after only a few seconds she could not bear it and switched to another view. Columbus, landing on the coast of Hispaniola. The wrecking of the Santa Maria. The fort he built to hold the crew that he could not take back home with him. It was a miserable sight to see again -- the way the crew attempted to make slaves of the nearby villagers, who simply ran away; the kidnapping of young girls, the gang rapes until the girls were dead.
The Indie villagers did not, however, adopt their captives preparatory to sacrifice. They had no intention of making these miserable rapists, thieves, and murderers into gods before they died. There was no formula declaration of "He is as my beloved son" when each Spanish sailor was taken into custody.
Besides, there was nothing in this scene to tell her what she wanted to see. Instead she sent the TruSite to Columbus's cabin on the Nina, where he wrote his letter to the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile. He spoke of vast wealth in gold and spices, rare woods, exotic beasts, vast new realms to be converted into Christian subjects, and plenty of slaves. Tagiri had seen this before, of course, if only to marvel at the irony that Columbus saw no contradiction between promising his sovereigns both slaves and Christian subjects out of the same populations. Now, though, Tagiri found something else to marvel at. She knew well enough that Columbus had seen no serious quantities of gold, beyond what might have been found in any Spanish village where the wealthiest household in town might have a few trinkets. He had understood almost nothing of what the Indies had said to him, though he convinced himself that he understood that they were telling him of gold farther inland. Inland? They were pointing west, across the Caribbean, but Columbus had no way of knowing that. He had seen no glimmer of the vast wealth of the Incas or the Mexica -- those were not to be seen by Europeans for more than twenty years, and when the gold at last began to flow, Columbus would be dead. Yet as she watched him writing, then spun back and watched him write again, she thought: He isn't lying. He knows the gold is there. He is so sure of it, even though he has never seen it and will never see it in his life.
Without real evidence, Columbus made these extravagant claims. He had found Cipangu; Cathay and the Spice Islands were close at hand. All false, or Columbus would have had a cargo to show for it. Yet anyone who looked at him, who heard him, who knew him, would recognize that this man was not lying, that he believed in his soul the things he said. On the strength of such a witness as this, new expeditions were financed, new fleets set sail; great civilizations fell, and the gold and silver of a continent flowed eastward while millions of people died of plagues and the survivors watched helplessly as strangers came to rule their land forever.
Tagiri played the recording of the scene in Ankuash, of the moment when Putukam told of her dream. She saw me and Hassan, thought Tagiri. And Columbus saw the gold. Somehow he saw the gold, even though it lay decades in the future. We with our machines can see only into the past. But somehow this Genovese man and this Indie woman saw what none can see, and they were right even though there was no way, no sensible way, no logical way they could be right.
"You knew that I would come," she said.
"It can be done," she said, blurting it out at once. "We can change it. We can stop -- something. Something terrible, we can make it go away. We can reach back and make it better."
"I know what you're thinking, Hassan. We might also make it worse."
"I'll tell you what change would be worth it," she said. "The world would not have needed resurrecting if it had never been killed."
"Has human nature changed even now?" asked Tagiri. "I think not. We still have as much greed, as much power-lust, as much pride and anger as we ever had. The only difference now is that we know the consequences and we fear them. We control ourselves. We have become, at long last, civilized."
"I think," said Tagiri, "that if we can find some way to do it, some sure way to stop the world from tearing itself to pieces as it did, then we must do it. To reach into the past and prevent the disease is better than to take the patient at the point of death and slowly, slowly bring her back to health. To create a world in which the destroyers did not triumph."
"Columbus," she said.
"There was nothing inevitable about his westward voyage at the time he sailed. The Portuguese were on the verge of finding a route to the Orient. No one imagined an unknown continent. The wisest ones knew that the world was large, and believed that an ocean twice the width of the Pacific stretched between Spain and China. Not until they had a sailing vessel they believed was capable of crossing such an ocean would they sail west. Even if the Portuguese bumped into the coast of Brasil, there was no profit there. It was dry and sparsely populated, and they would have ignored it just the way they largely ignored Africa and didn't colonize it for four long centuries after exploring its coast."
"I've been thinking, " she said. "I studied all this years ago. It was because Columbus came to America, with his relentless faith that he had found the Orient. Merely stumbling on the landmass meant nothing -- the Norse did it, and where did that lead? Even a chance landing by someone else on Cuba or the eastern tip of Brasil would have meant no more than the meaningless landings on Vinland or the Guinea coast. It was only because of Columbus's reports of boundless wealth that never came true until after he was dead that other sailors followed him. Don't you see? It was not the fact that somebody sailed west that led to the European conquest of America and thus of the world. It was because Columbus did it."
"Of course not," said Tagiri. "I'm not talking about moral responsibility anyway, I'm talking about cause. Europe was already Europe. Columbus didn't make it that way. But it was the pillaging of America that financed the terrible religious and dynastic wars that swept Europe back and forth for generations. If Europe hadn't had possession of America, could it have imposed its culture on the world? Would a world dominated by Islam or ruled by Chinese bureaucracy have ever destroyed itself the way we did in a world where every nation tried to become as European as it could?"
"No, they invented the machines that made their pillaging so madly efficient. The machines that sucked all the oil out of the ground and let us carry war and famine across oceans and continents until nine-tenths of humankind was dead."
"Don't you see, Hassan, I'm not affixing blame?"
"I'm finding the place where the smallest, simplest change would save the world from the most suffering. That would cause the fewest cultures to be lost, the fewest people to be enslaved, the fewest species to fall extinct, the fewest resources to be exhausted. it comes together at the point where Columbus returns to Europe with his tales of gold and slaves and nations to be converted into Christian subjects of the king and queen."
Tagiri shuddered. "No," she said. "Who is to say that we could ever travel physically into the past in such a way that that would even be possible? We don't need to kill him, anyway. We only need to turn him away from his plan of sailing west. We have to find out what's possible before we decide how to do it. And murder -- I could never agree to that. Columbus was no monster. We've all agreed to that, ever since the Tempoview showed the truth of him. His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life. He was a great man. I have no wish to undo the life of a great man."
"Yes," said Tagiri.
"It might," said Tagiri. "But it might not."
"With one difference," said Tagiri. "If we stop Columbus, we can be sure of this: Putukam and Baiku would never die under Spanish swords."
His words were so confident -- yet she felt a dizzying vertigo, as if she stood on the edge of a great chasm, and the ground hadjust shifted a little under her feet. What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?
European dreams led to this, to a deeply wounded world in convalescence, with a thousand years of physicking ahead, with so much irretrievably lost, to be recovered only on the holotapes of Pastwatch. So if it is in my power to undream their dreams, to give the future to another people, who is to say that it's wrong? How could it be worse? Christopher Columbus -- Cristobal Col˘n, as the Spanish called him; Cristoforo Colombo, as he was baptized in Genova -- he would not discover America after all, if she could find a way to stop him. The prayer of the village of Ankuash would be answered.
The next morninva Tagiri and Hassan reported what had happened. For weeks the most important leaders of Pastwatch and many leaders from outside Pastwatch, too, came to them to see the holotape, to discuss what it might mean. They listened to Tagiri and Hassan as they raised their questions and proposed their plans. In the end, they gave consent for a new project to explore what Putukam's vision might mean. They called it the Columbus Project, as much because it seemed the same kind of mad impossible journey that Columbus had embarked on in 1492 as because the project might lead to undoing his great achievement.
Early on in their collaboration, Tagiri and Hassan married and had a daughter and a son. The daughter they named Diko, and Acho was the boy. Both children grew strong and wise, immersed in their parents' love and in the Columbus project from their infancy. Acho grew up to be a pilot, skimming over the surface of the Earth like a bird, fast and free. Diko did not stray so far from home. She learned the languages, the tools, the stories inherent in her parents' work, and spent her days beside them. Tagiri looked at her husband, her children, and more than once she thought, What if some stranger from a faraway place came and stole my son from me and made a slave of him, and I never saw him again? What if a conquering army from a place unheard of came and murdered my husband and raped my daughter? And what if, in some other place, happy people watched us as it happened, and did nothing to help us, for fear it might endanger their own happiness? What would I think of them? What kind of people would they be?
Sometimes Diko felt as if she had grown up with Christopher Columbus, that he was her uncle, her grandfather, her older brother. He was always present in her mother's work, scenes from his life playing out again and again in the background.
"No, no," said Mother, rocking her back and forth. "I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to the man in the holoview."
"He will someday."
"Longer than that, my Diko."
"He lived in a bad time," said Mother. "He was a great man in a bad time."
He became important to Diko, too. He was always in the back of her mind. She saw him playing as a child. She saw him arguing endlessly with priests in Spain. She saw him kneel before the King of Aragon and the Queen of Castile. She saw him trying vainly to talk to Indies in Latin, Genovese, Spanish, and Portuguese. She saw him visiting his son at a monastery in La Rabida.
"Who?"
"Because Colombo has no wife."
"So while he's struggling to try to get the king and queen to let him make a voyage west, his son has to stay somewhere safe, where he can get an education."
"Not a wife," said Mother.
"What have you been doing?" asked Mother. "Have you been running the holoview when I wasn't here?"
"That's not an answer, you sly child. What have you been watching?"
"That's because Colombo isn't married to the new baby's mother."
"Diko, you're five years old and I'm very busy. Is it such an emergency that I have to explain all this to you right now?"
Later that afternoon, Diko stood on a stool beside her mother, helping her crush the soft beans for the spicy paste that would be supper. As she stirred the mashed beans as neatly but vigorously as she could manage, another question occurred to her. "If you died, Mama, would Papa send me to a monastery?"
"Why not?"
"But if you did."
"He must have been very lonely," said Diko.
"Cristoforo's boy in the monastery."
"Was Cristoforo lonely, too?" asked Diko. "Without his little boy?"
Diko grinned at that. "Do you miss the two-year-old me?"
"Was I cute?"
"Wasn't that cute?" asked Diko. She was a little disappointed.
"Papa makes bean mash better than you do," said Diko.
"But when you go to work, you're Papa's boss."
"You're head of the project. Everybody says so."
"If you're the head, is Papa the elbow or what?"
Diko started to giggle. "Are you sure Papa isn't the stomach?"
"Well it's a good thing Papa isn't the bottom of the project."
"If it's not cute, what is it?"
"I'm going to be nasty my whole life," said Diko defiantly.
"I'm going to stop Cristoforo," she said.
"You'll be too old," said Diko. "I'm going to grow up and stop him for you."
By the time Diko was ten, she spent all her afternoons in the lab, learning to use the old Tempoview. Technically she wasn't supposed to use it, but the whole installation at Ileret was now devoted to Mother's project, and so it was Mother's attitudes toward the rules that prevailed. This meant that everyone followed scientific procedures rigorously, but the boundary line between work and home wasn't very carefully observed. Children and relatives were often about, and as long as they were quiet, no one worried. It wasn't as if anything secret were going on. Besides, nobody was using the outdated Tempoviews except to replay old recordings, so Diko wasn't interfering with anybody's work. Everyone knew that Diko was careful. So no one even commented on the fact that an unauthorized, half-educated child was browsing through the past unsupervised.
Just before her twelfth birthday, she figured out how to bypass Father's cursory attempt at blocking her from fall access. She wasn't particularly deft about it; Father's computer must have told him what she had done, and he came to see her almost within the hour.
"I don't like the views that other people recorded," she said. "They're never interested in what I'm interested in."
Diko felt suddenly ill. "Don't banish me," she said. "I'll stay with the old views but don't make me leave."
"Isn't that what Pastwatch is all about?" asked Diko.
"I'll be a scientist too," said Diko.
"Me too," said Diko.
"I already have."
"Ugly, Private, and Disturbing. Sounds like a firm of solicitors," said Diko.
"Meaning?"
Diko grinned. "Got it. Ugly and Private I deal with myself, but Disturbing I discuss with the Ancient Ones."
"I'll turn in all the reports you asked for," she said. "But you have to promise to read them."
Diko explored, reported, and began to look forward to her weekly interviews with Father concerning the work she did. Only gradually did she realize how childish and elementary those early reports were, how she skimmed over the surface of issues resolved long before by adult watchers; she marveled that Father never gave her a clue that she wasn't on the cutting edge of science. He always listened with respect, and within a few years Diko was doing things that merited it.
That Cristoforo was one of the great ones could not be doubted, whether Mother and Father approved of him or not. So ... when was the decision made? When did he first set foot on the course that made him one of the most famous men in history?
Cristoforo was eight years old the last time Pietro Fregoso came to visit his father. Cristoforo knew the man's name, but he also knew that in Domenico Colombo's house, Pietro Fregoso was always called by the title that had been wrested from him by the Adorno party: the Doge. Pietro Fregoso had decided to make a serious play for power again, and since Cristoforo's father was one of the most fiery partisans in the Fieschi cause, it was not too surprising that Pietro chose to honor the Colombo house by holding a secret meeting there.
"Nothing," she said. "Come in here."