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  By all signs, she would have a strange and intriguing career, and her personnel file was given the rare status of a silver tag, which told anyone who had authority to reassign her that she was to be left alone or encouraged to go on with whatever she was doing. 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 of 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.

  Her life might have gone on that way, for nothing outside her was allowed to interfere with the course she naturally followed. But well into her second year of personal research, she came upon an event in the village of Ikoto that turned her away from one path and into another, with consequences that would change the world. She was backtracking through the life of a woman named Diko. More than any other woman she had studied, Diko had won Tagiri’s heart, for there was from the day of her death on back an air of sadness to her that made her seem a figure of tragedy. The others around her sensed it, too—she was treated with great reverence, and often was asked for advice, even by men, though she was not one of the omen-women and performed no more priestly rites than any other Dongotona.

  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.

  Then Diko’s fear and rage gave way to fear alone, and now the whole village was turned out, searching, hunting through the brush and the forest and along the riverbanks for something lost. Someone lost, rather, for there were no possessions among the Dongotona that would be worth searching for so intently, if lost—only human beings had such value, for only they were irreplaceable.

  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 filled 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.

  Perhaps because Tagiri had watched with such suspense through so many weeks searching for the cause of Diko’s sadness, or perhaps because she had come to admire and love Diko so much during her long passage with her, Tagiri could not do as she had done before, and simply continue to move backward, to Acho’s emergence from Diko’s womb, back to Diko’s childhood home and her own birth. Acho’s disappearance had had too many reverberations, not just in his mother’s life but, through her, in the lives of the whole village, for Tagiri to leave the mystery of his disappearance unsolved. Diko never knew what happened to her boy, but Tagiri had the means to find out. And besides, even though it meant changing direction and searching forward in time for a while, tracking, not a woman, but a boy, it was still a part of her backward search. She would find what it was that took Acho and caused Diko’s endless grief.

  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.

  But it was not a hippo. It was a man.

  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.

  Then the man lashed out with his stick and knocked Acho senseless to the ground. For a moment the man seemed concerned that he might have killed the boy, and he was satisfied to find Acho was still breathing. Then the Arab folded the unconscious child into fetal position and jammed his small body into a bag, which he hoisted over his shoulder and carried back down the riverbank, where he joined two other companions, who also had full bags.

  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.

  She meant to resume her backward watching then, returning to the life of Acho’s mother, but Tagiri found that she could not do it. The computer was set to find new vantage points tracking Acho’s movements, and Tagiri did not reach out and give the command that would have returned to the earlier program. Instead she watched and watched, moving forward through time to see, not what caused all this, but where it led. What would happen to this bright and wonderful boy that Diko loved.

  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.

  The slaver eventually found his way to the village where two black slaves of his were keeping the camels. Strapping the bag containing Acho onto the camel, the surviving members of the slaving party got under way at once. To Tagiri’s disgust, the man didn’t so much as open the bag to see if the boy was still alive.

  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.

  In Khartoum, it was no surprise that Acho could not walk for a whole day. Beatings, liberally applied, and a meal of sorghum gruel soon had him on his feet, however, and within a day or two he had been bought by a wholesaler for a price that made Acho’s captor temporarily rich in the economy of Khartoum.

  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.

  Yet what Tagiri could not forget was that through all of this, through every hour of every day of every year of Acho’s slavery, his face never lost that look of unforgotten longing, of grief, of despair. The look that said, I am a stranger here, I hate this place, I hate my life. The look that said to Tagiri that Acho grieved for his mother just as long and just as deeply as she grieved for him.

  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.

  She found this look on faces everywhere. Oh, sometimes there was defiance—but the defiant ones were always singled out for special treatment, and the ones who didn’t die from it were eventually brutalized into wearing the look of despair that the other faces bore. It was the slave look, and what Tagiri discovered was that for an enormous number of human beings in almost every age of history, that was the only face they could ever show to the world.

  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 final 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 father 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.

  Tagiri was often drawn to the TruSite station of one of her story-seekers, a young man named Hassan. She had not bothered to observe his station much when he was using the old Tempoview, because she didn’t understand any of the Antillean languages that he was laboriously reconstructing by analogy with other Carib and Arawak languages. Now, however, he had trained the TruSite to catch the main drift of the dialect of Arawak being spoken by the particular tribe he was observing.

  “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.”

  “And the occasion?” she asked.

  “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.”

  “The plantations are growing?”

  “Not at all,” said Hassan. “In fact, they’re failing. But the Spanish aren’t very good at keeping their Indie slaves alive.”

  “Do they even try?”

  “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.”

  Priests in control, thought Tagiri, and yet slavery is unchallenged. But even though it always tasted freshly bitter in her mouth, she knew that there was no point in reminding Hassan of the irony of it—wasn’t he on the slavery project with her?

  “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?”

  What Tagiri saw was an old man and a middle-aged woman, squatting on opposite sides of a small fire, where a jar of water was giving off steam. She smiled at the new technology—to be able to see steam in the holographic display was amazing; she almost expected to be able to smell it.

  “Tobacco water,” said Hassan.

  “They drink the nicotine solution?”

  Hassan nodded. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before.”

  “Aren’t they being careless? This doesn’t look like a smokeless fire.”

  “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.”

  “So they drink . . .”

  “They drink and dream,” said Hassan.

  “Don’t they give greater trust to dreams that come of themselves?” asked Tagiri.

  “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 man and the woman both tipped pipes into the water and then sucked liquid up into their mouths as if through a drinking straw. The woman gagged; the man was apparently inured to the liquid. The woman began to look very sick, but the man made her drink more.

  “The woman is Putukam—the name means wild dog,” said Hassan. “She’s a woman noted for her visions, but she hasn’t used tobacco water much before.”

  “I can see why not,” said Tagiri. For now the woman named Putukam was puking and retching. For a moment or two the old man tried to steady her, but in moments he too was vomiting; their discharge mingled and flowed into the ashes of the fire.

  “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.”

  “Making him a candidate for stomach cancer.”

  “He should live so long,” said Hassan.

  “Do the gods speak to them?”

  Hassan shrugged. “Let’s zip ahead and see.”

  He rushed the display for a few moments—Putukam and Baiku may have slept for hours, but to the pastwatchers it took only seconds. Whenever they stirred, the TruSite automatically slowed down a little; only when it was clear that the movements were signs of waking, not the normal wriggling of sleep, did Hassan bring the speed back to normal. Now he turned up the sound, and because Tagiri was there, he used the computer translator instead of just listening to the native speechsounds.

  “I dreamed,” said Putukam.

  “And I,” said Baiku.

  “Let me hear the healing dream,” said Putukam.

  “There is no healing in it,” he said, his face looking grave and sad.

  “All slaves?”

  “All except the blessed ones who are murdered or die from plagues.”

  “And then?”

  “All dead.”

  “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.”