Pastwatch Read online

  Tagiri got up from her mat and checked the time. After midnight, and she could not sleep. Pastwatch allowed its workers, wherever they dwelt, to live in the native manner, and the city of Juba had chosen to do so, as much as possible. So she was lying on woven reeds in a loose-walled hut cooled only by the wind. But there was a breeze tonight, and the hut was cool, so it wasn’t heat that kept her awake. It was the prayer of the village of Ankuash.

  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.

  Then the Indies of several tribes began fighting back. This was not the ritual war to bring home victims for sacrifice. Nor was it the raiding war of the Caribs. It was a new kind of war, a punishing war. Or perhaps it was not so new, Tagiri realized. These oft-viewed scenes had been completely translated and it appeared that the natives already had a name for a war of annihilation. They called it “star-at-white-man’s-village war.” The crew awoke one morning to find pieces of their sentries’ bodies scattered through the fort, and five hundred Indie soldiers in feathered splendor inside the stockade. Of course they surrendered.

  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.

  There would be no sacrifice, but there would still be blood and pain. Death, when it came, was a sweet relief. There were those, Tagiri knew, who relished this scene, for it was one of the few victories of the Indies over the Spanish, one of the first victories of a dark people over the arrogant whites. But she hadn’t the stomach to watch it all the way through; she took no joy in torture and slaughter, even when the victims of it were monstrous criminals who had tortured and slaughtered others. Tagiri understood too well that in the minds of the Spaniards, their victims had not been human. It is our nature, she thought, that when we intend to enjoy being cruel, we must transform our victim into either a beast or a god. The Spanish sailors made the Indies into animals in their minds; all that the Indies proved, with their bitter vengeance, was that they were capable of the identical transformation.

  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 Niña, 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 had never seen it and will never see it in his life.

  This is how he turned the eyes of Europe westward, Tagiri realized. By the force of his unshakable belief. If the king and queen of Spain had made their decision solely on the basis of the evidence that Columbus brought back with him, there would have been no follow-up to Columbus’s voyage. Where were the spices? Where was the gold? His first discoveries had not begun to repay even the costs of his own expedition. Who would throw good money after bad?

  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.

  All because Columbus could not be doubted when he spoke of things he had not seen.

  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.

  It was four in the morning when Tagiri came to the door of Hassan’s wind-cooled hut. If she clapped her hands or called to him, it would waken others. So she slipped inside and found that he, too, was still awake.

  “You knew that I would come,” she said.

  “If I had dared,” he answered, “I would have come to you.”

  “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.”

  He said nothing. He waited.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Hassan. We might also make it worse.”

  “Do you think I haven’t been going through this in my mind tonight?” said Hassan. “Over and over. Look at the world around us, Tagiri. Humanity is finally at peace. There are no plagues. No children die hungry or live untaught. The world is healing. That was not inevitable. It might have ended up far worse. What change could we possibly make in the past that would be worth the risk of creating a history without this resurrection of the world?”

  “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.”

  “What, do you imagine that there’s some change we could make that would improve human nature? Undo the rivalry of nations? Teach people that sharing is better than greed?”

  “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.”

  “So you think that we can civilize our ancestors?”

  “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.”

  “If I know you at all, Tagiri,” said Hassan, “you would not have come here tonight if you didn’t know already what the change must be.”

  “Columbus,” she said.

  “One sailor? Caused the destruction of the world?”

  “The
re 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.”

  “You’ve been studying,” he said.

  “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.”

  “One man, then, was responsible for the devastation of our planet?”

  “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?”

  “Of course it would,” said Hassan. “Europeans didn’t invent pillage.”

  “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.”

  “So Columbus is responsible for the age of technology.”

  “Don’t you see, Hassan, I’m not affixing blame?”

  “I know, Tagiri.”

  “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.”

  “So you would kill Columbus?”

  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 would 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.”

  Hassan nodded, slowly. “Let us say this: If we knew that we could turn Columbus away, and if after much research we were sure that stopping him would really stop the terrible course of the world from that time forward, then it might be worth undoing this age of healing on the firm chance of making it unnecessary.”

  “Yes,” said Tagiri.

  “It might be the work of lifetimes, finding the answers to those questions.”

  “It might,” said Tagiri. “But it might not.”

  “And even after we were very sure, we might be wrong, and the world might end up worse off than before.”

  “With one difference,” said Tagiri. “If we stop Columbus, we can be sure of this: Putukam and Baiku would never die under Spanish swords.”

  “I’m with you this far,” said Hassan. “Let’s find out if possible and desirable to do this thing. Let’s find out if the people of our own time agree that it’s worth it, that it’s right to do it. And if they agree that it is, then I’ll be with you when it’s done.”

  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 had just 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?

  Yet she knew even as she doubted herself that she had already made up her mind. The Europeans had had their future, had fulfilled their most potent dreams, and it was their future that now was the dark past of her world, the consequences of their choices that now were being scoured from the Earth.

  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—Cristóbal Colón, 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.

  And by answering that prayer, her own thirst would be slaked. She could never satisfy the hopeless longing in the faces of all slaves in all times. She could never wipe away the sadness in the face of her ancient great-grandmother Diko and her once-joyous little boy, Acho. She could never give their lives and bodies back to the slaves. But she could do this one thing, and by doing it, the burden that had been building up inside her all these years would finally be lifted. She would know that she had done all that was possible to heal the past.

  The next morning 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.

  Tagiri kept the slavery project going, of course, but with Hassan she now launched the new project with a very different team of workers. Hassan led the group that studied history to see if stopping Columbus would have the effect that they desired, and to discover if some other change might be more desirable or more easily practicable. Tagiri divided her working hours between the slavery project and coordinating the work of a dozen physicists and engineers who were trying to find out exactly how it was that temporal backwash might work, and how to alter the time machines in order to enhance the effect enough to allow the alteration of the past.

  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?

  3

  _____

  Ambition

  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.

  One of her earliest memories was of Columbus giving orders for his men to capture several Indies to take back to Spain as slaves. Diko was so young she didn’t realize the significance of what was happening, really. She knew, however, that the people in the holoview weren’t real, so when her mother said, with deep, bitter anger, “I will stop you,” Diko thought that Mother was speaking to her and she burst into tears.

  “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 can’t hear you,” said Diko.

  “He will someday.”

  “Papa says he died a hundred years ago.”

  “Longer than that, my Diko.”

  “Why are you so mad at him? Is he bad?”

  “He lived in a bad time,” said Mother. “He was a great man in a bad time.”

  Diko couldn’t understand the moral subtleties of this. The only lesson she learned from the event was that somehow the people in the holoview were real after all, and the man called variously Cristoforo Colombo and Cristóbal Colón and Christopher Columbus was very, very important to Mother.

  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 Rábida.