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“Not free of charge, of course.”

  “They hope to be rich, at least by their standards.”

  “As you hope to be rich by yours.”

  “No, my lady. I hope to be rich by your standards.”

  She laughed and touched his arm. “Cristóbal, how good it is to see you again. How glad I am that God chose you to be his champion in this war against the Ocean Sea and the court of Spain.”

  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 Rábida. 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.

  Why had he told her? Perhaps because he knew implicitly that he could trust her with his life. Or perhaps because she looked at him with such piercing intelligence that he knew that no other explanation than the truth would convince her. Even so, he had not told her the half of it, for even she would have thought him mad.

  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 Cristóbal,” she said.

  “My lady,” he answered, unsure if he had heard aright.

  “You lived with a common woman named Beatrice in Córdoba. She had your child. You can’t pretend to be living a monkish life.”

  “I seem doomed to fall under the spell of ladies named Beatrice. And none of them has been, by any stretch of the imagination, a common woman.”

  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.”

  “More grey in the hair than red, I fear.”

  “Hardly any,” she answered.

  “My lady,” he said, “it was your friendship I prayed for when I came to Gomera. I did not dare to dream of more.”

  “Are you beginning a long and gracefully convoluted speech that will, in the end, decline my carnal invitation?”

  “Ah, Lady Beatrice, no decline, but perhaps postpone?”

  She reached out, leaned forward, touched his cheek. “You’re not a very handsome man, you know, Cristóbal.”

  “That has always been my opinion as well,” he answered.

  “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?”

  “My lady, the scandal. If I stayed the night.”

  “Oh, is that all? Then leave before midnight. I’ll let you over the parapet by a silken rope.

  “God has answered my prayers,” he said to her.

  “As well he should, since you were on his mission.”

  “I dare not sin and lose his favor now.”

  “I knew I should have seduced you back in Santa Fé.”

  “And there’s this, my lady. When I return, successful, from this great enterprise, then I’ll not be a commoner, whose only touch of gentility is by his marriage into a not-quite-noble family of Madeira. I’ll be Viceroy. I’ll be Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” He grinned. “You see, I took your advice and got it all in writing in advance.”

  “Well, Viceroy indeed! I doubt you’ll waste a glance on a mere governor of a far-off island.”

  “Ah, no, Lady. I’ll be Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and as I contemplate my realm—”

  “Like Poseidon, ruler over all the shores that are touched by the waves of the sea—”

  “I will find no more treasured crown than this island of Gomera, and no more lovely jewel in that crown than the fair Beatrice.”

  “You’ve been at court too long. You make your compliments sound rehearsed.”

  “Of course I’ve rehearsed it, over and over, the whole week I waited here in torment for your return.”

  “For the Pinta’s return, you mean.”

  “Both were late. Your rudder, however, was undamaged.”

  Her face reddened, and then she laughed.

  “You complained that my compliments were too courtly. I thought you might appreciate a tavern compliment.”

  “Is that what that was? Do strumpets sleep with men for free if they say such pretty things?”

  “Not strumpets, Lady. Such poetry is not for those who can be had for mere money.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Thou art my caravel, with sails full-winded—”

  “Watch your nautical references, my friend.”

  “Sails full-winded, and the bright red banners of thy lips dancing as thou speakest.”

  “You’re very good at this. Or are you not making it up as you go along?”

  “Making it all up. Ah, thy breath is the blessed wind that sailors pray for, and the sight of thy rudder leaves this poor sailor fullmasted—”

  She slapped his face, but it wasn’t meant to hurt.

  “I take it my poetry is a failure.”

  “Kiss me, Cristóbal. I believe in your mission, but if you never return I want at least your kiss to remember you by.”

  So he kissed her, and again. But then he took his leave of her, and returned to the last preparations for his voyage. It was God’s work now; when it was done, then it was time to collect the worldly rewards. Though who was to say that she was not, after all, a reward from heaven? It was God, after all, who had made a widow of her, and perhaps God also who made her, against all probability, love this son of a Genovese weaver.

  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.

  2

  _____

  Slaves

  Though Tagiri did not put her own body back in time, it is still true to say that she was the one who stranded Christopher Columbus on the island of Hispaniola and changed the face of history forever. Though she was born seven centuries after Columbus’s voyage and never left her birth continent of Africa, she found a way to reach back and sabotage the European conquest of America. It was not an act of malice. Some said that it was like correcting a painful hernia in a brain-damaged child: In the end, the child would still be severely limited, but it would not suffer as much along the way. But Tagiri saw it differently.

  “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 g
o 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.

  Nothing in her parentage, her upbringing, or her education gave any hint that one day, by unmaking one world, she would create another. Like most young people who joined Pastwatch, Tagiri’s first use of the Tempoview machine was to trace her own family back, generation before generation. She was vaguely aware that, as a novice, she would be observed during her first year. But hadn’t they told her that as she learned to control and finetune the machine (“it’s an art, not a science”) she could explore anything she wanted? It wouldn’t have bothered her, anyway, to know that her superiors nodded knowingly when it became clear that she was following her matrilineal line back to a Dongotona village on the banks of the Koss River. Though she was as racially mixed as anyone else in the world these days, she had picked the one lineage that mattered most to her, the one from which she derived her identity. Dongotona was the name of her tribe and of the mountainous country where they lived, and the village of Ikoto was her foremothers’ ancient home.

  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 houses—and 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.

  All this took only minutes—and enormous amounts of electricity, but this was the dawn of the twenty-third century, and solar energy was cheap. What ate up Tagiri’s first weeks was sorting through the empty conversations, the meaningless events. Not that they seemed empty or meaningless at first. When she started, Tagiri could listen to any conversation and be enthralled. These were real people, from her own past! Some of them were bound to be ancestors of hers, and sooner or later she’d sort out which ones. In the meantime, she loved it all—the flirtatious girls, the complaining old men, the tired women snapping at the rude children; and oh, those children! Those fungus-covered, hungry, exuberant children, too young to know they were poor and too poor to know that not everyone in the world woke up hungry in the morning and went to bed hungry at night. They were so alive, so alert.

  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.

  Tagiri found her own solution—the minority solution, but those who observed her were not surprised that she was one of those who took this route. Where most pastwatchers began to resort to statistical approaches to their research, keeping counts of different behaviors and then writing papers on cultural patterns, Tagiri took quite the opposite route, beginning to follow one individual from the beginning to the end of life. She wasn’t looking for patterns. She was looking for stories. Ah, said her observers. She will be a biographer; it is lives, not cultures, that she will find for us.

  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.

  Tagiri began doing this with an old woman named Amami, setting up her Tempoview to keep shifting vantage points to track Amami backward in time. It meant that except when she overrode her program, Tagiri was unable to make sense of the woman’s conversations. And instead of cause and effect unfolding in the normal linear pattern, she was constantly seeing the effect first, then discovering the cause. In old age Amami walked with a pronounced limp; only after weeks of following her backward in time did Tagiri find the origin of the limp, as a much younger Amami lay bleeding on her mat, and then seemed to crawl backward away from the mat until she uncrumpled and rose to her feet to face her husband, who seemed to draw his walking stick sharply away from her body again and again.

  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.

  If he ever asked forgiveness, or even implied it, Tagiri had missed it. He had done what he thought a man had to do to maintain his honor in Ikoto. How could he be sorry for that? Amami might limp, but she had an honorable husband whose prestige was undiminished. Never mind that even the week before she died, some of the little children of the village had still been following after her, taunting her with the words they had learned from the previous batch of children a few years older: “Lotuko-whore!”

  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.

  Her superiors noted this with much curiosity, for those few novices who had experimented with backward timeflow in the past usually gave it up quite soon, because it was so disorienting. But Tagiri did not give it up. She went back and back and back in time, taking old women into the womb, and then following their mothers, on and on, finding the cause of everything.

  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 story-seeker 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.

  They were not like Tagiri herself. She would have watched herself in order to discover, not where her peculiar research approach would lead, but rather where it had come from.

  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.

  Only then was Tagiri able to think back to cryptic conversations over breakfast or supper, when her parents had congratulated each other for various accomplishments. Now, no longer naive, Tagiri could remember their words and realize that they had been digging knives into each other’s pride. And so it was that at the cusp of her childhood, she suddenly reexperienced all of her life till then, only in reverse, with the result clear in her mind, thinking backward and backward, discovering the true causes of everything. That was how she had seen life ever since—long before she thought of using her university study in ethnology and ancient languages as an entrée to Pastwatch.

  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.