Pastwatch

by Orson Scott Card

  “What was your dream?”

  “My dream was madness,” she said. “My dream had no truth in it.”

  “The dreamer does not know,” said Baiku.

  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.”

  Tagiri interrupted. “Stop,” she said.

  He stopped.

  “Was that translation correct?” she demanded.

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

  “Hassan,” she said, “I’m not asking about the etymology. I’m asking about the meaning of what she said.”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Don’t you think that it sounded very much as though she were seeing us?”

  “But that’s absurd,” said Hassan.

  “Forty generations. Isn’t the time about right? A man and a woman, watching.”

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

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

  “It can be disorienting, can’t it?” Hassan grinned at her.

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

  He started the TruSite viewing beyond what they had seen before.

  “I dreamed that they watched me three times,” Putukam was saying, “and the woman seemed to know that I could see her.”

  Hassan slammed his hand onto the Pause button. “There is no God but God,” he muttered in Arabic, “and Muhammad is his prophet.”

  Tagiri knew that sometimes when a Muslim says this, it is because he has too much respect to curse the way a Christian might.

  “Probability of coincidence?” she murmured. “I was just thinking that it seemed as though she could see us.”

  “If I go back and we watch the scene again,” said Hassan, “then it will be four times, not three.”

  “But it had been three times when we first heard her say how many. That will never change.”

  “The TruSite has no effect on the past,” said Hassan. “It can’t possibly be detected there.”

  “And how do we know that?” asked Tagiri.

  “Because it’s impossible.”

  “In theory.”

  “And because it never has.”

  “Till now.”

  “You want to believe that she really saw us in her nicotine dream?”

  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.”

  Hassan slowly, almost timidly, released the TruSite to continue exploring the scene.

  “This is prophecy, then,” Baiku was saying. “Who knows what wonders the gods will bring in forty generations?”

  “I always thought that time moved in great circles, as if all of us had been woven into the same great basket of life, each generation another ring around the rim,” said Putukam. “But when in the great circles of time was there ever such horror as these white monsters from the sea? So the basket is torn, and time is broken, and all the world spills out of the basket into the dirt.”

  “What of the man and woman who watch us?”

  “Nothing,” said Putukam. “They watched us. They were interested.”

  “They see us now?”

  “They saw all the suffering in your dream,” said Putukam. “They were interested in it.”

  “What do you mean, interested?”

  “I think they were sad,” said Putukam.

  “But . . . were they white, then? Did they watch the people suffer and care nothing for it, like the white men?”

  “They were dark. The woman is very black. I have never seen a person of such blackness of skin.”

  “Then why don’t they stop the white men from making us slaves?”

  “Maybe they can’t,” said Putukam.

  “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?”

  “Turn it off,” said Tagiri to Hassan.

  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.”

  “She has to understand,” murmured Tagiri. “I would help her if I could.”

  “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.”

  “The vision of the gods without the power of the gods,” said Tagiri. “What a terrible gift.”

  “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.”

  “It isn’t enough,” said Tagiri.

  “If it’s all that you can do,” said Hassan, “then it is enough.”

  “I’m ready now,” said Tagiri. “You can show the rest of it.”

  “Perhaps we should wait.”

  She reached down and pressed the button to resume the display.

  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.

  Putukam began a chant. “From my body, from the earth, from the spirit water, I . . .”

  The TruSite II paused automatically.

  “It can’t translate the word,” said Hassan. “And neither can I. It’s not in the normally used vocabulary. They do use scraps of older languages in their magicking, and this may be related to a root in the old language that means shaping, like forming something out of mud. So she’s saying, ‘I shape you,’ or something related to that.”

  “Go on,” said Tagiri.

  Putukam’s chant began again. “From my body, from the earth, from the spirit water, I shape you, O children of forty generations who look at me from inside my dream. You see the suffering of us and all the other villages. You see the white monsters who m
ake us slaves and murder us. You see how the gods send plagues to save the blessed ones and leave only the cursed ones to bear this terrible punishment. Speak to the gods, O children of forty generations who look at me from inside my dream! Teach them mercy! Let them send a plague to take us all, and leave the land empty for the white monsters, so they will hunt and hunt for us from shore to shore and find none of us, no people at all, not even the human-eating Caribs! Let the land be empty except for our dead bodies, so that we will die in honor as free people. Speak to the gods for us, O man, O woman!”

  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.

  They were still chanting when the Spanish, led by two shamefaced Indie guides, shambled along the path, their muskets, pikes, and swords at the ready. The people made no resistance. They kept up the chant, even after they had all been seized, even as the old men, including Baiku, were being gutted with swords or spitted on pikes. Even as the young girls were being raped, all who could speak kept up the chanting, the prayer, the conjuration, until finally the Spanish commander, unnerved by it all, walked over to Putukam and drove his sword into the base of her throat, just above where the collarbones come together. With a gurgle, she died, and the chanting ended. For her, as for Baiku, the prayer was answered. She was not a slave before she died.

  With all the villagers dead, Tagiri reached down again, but Hassan’s hand was there before her, stopping the display.

  Tagiri was trembling, but she pretended not to feel strong emotions. “I have seen such terrible things before,” said Tagiri. “But this time she saw me. Saw us.”

  “Or so it seems.”

  “She saw, Hassan.”

  “So it seems.” Now the words admitted she might be right.

  “Something from our time, from right now, was visible to her in her dream. Perhaps we were still visible when she awoke. It seemed to me that she was looking at us. I didn’t think of her seeing us until after she awoke from her dream, and yet she saw that I knew she could see us. It’s too much to be chance.”

  “If this is true,” said Hassan, “then why haven’t other watchers using the TruSite II been seen?”

  “Perhaps we’re only visible to those who need so desperately to see us.”

  “It’s impossible,” said Hassan. “We were taught that from the beginning.”

  “No,” said Tagiri. “Remember the course in the history of Pastwatch? The theorists weren’t certain, were they? Only years of observation convinced them that their theory was right—but in the early days there was much talk of temporal backwash.”

  “So you paid more attention in class than I did,” said Hassan.

  “Temporal backwash,” she said again. “Don’t you see how dangerous this is?”

  “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.”

  “Nothing would ever seem to change,” she said, “because we would then live in the version of the present created by the new past. Who knows how many changes, small and great, we might have made, and yet never knew it because the change made our present different and we couldn’t remember it being any other way?”

  “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.”

  “I know the circularity argument as well as you do, Hassan,” she said. “But this particular case proves it false. You can’t deny that she saw us, Hassan. You can’t call it coincidence. Not when she saw I was black.”

  He grinned. “If the devils of her time are white, then maybe she needed to invent a god as black as you.”

  “She also saw that there were two of us, that we watched her three times, that I knew she could see us. She even got our era approximately right. She saw and she understood. We changed the past.”

  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.”

  Tagiri did not bother pointing out that even though the Spaniards had killed or enslaved everyone, it didn’t change the fact that because of what Putukam saw in her vision, the people were chanting a prayer as they were taken. That had to have an effect on the Spaniards. It had to bend their lives, just a little bit, the sheer strangeness of it. No change in the past would fail to have some kind of reverberation. It was the butterfly’s wing, just as they taught in school: Who knew whether or not a storm in the North Atlantic might not have been triggered, far back in the chain of cause-and-effect, by the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in China? But there was no point in arguing this with Hassan. Let him believe in safety while he could. Nothing was safe now; but neither were the watchers powerless, either.

  “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.”

  “How could we save that village?” said Hassan. “Even if it were possible to travel back in time, what would we do? Lead an avenging army to destroy the Spanish who came to take this village? What would that accomplish? More Spanish would come later, or English or some other conquering nation from Europe. And in the meantime, our own time would have been destroyed. Undone by our own intervention. You can’t change great sweeps of history by changing one small event. The forces of history go on anyway.”

  “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 any 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.”

  “It is a contradiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s untrue. History is a chaotic system. The details can shift endlessly, but the overall shape remains constant. Make a small change in the past, and it changes enough details in the present that we would not have come together at exactly this place and time to watch exactly this scene. And yet the great movements of history would be largely unchanged.”

  “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.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because we’re the ones she saw. Because she . . . shaped us.”

  “She prayed for us to send a plague to wipe out all the Indies before the Europeans ever came. Are you really going to take that seriously?”

  “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.”

  “But we’re not going to be gods,” said
Hassan.

  “You seem sure of that,” she said.

  “Because I’m quite sure the people of our time won’t relish the idea of our world being undone in order to ameliorate the suffering of one small group of people so long dead.”

  “Not undone,” said Tagiri. “Remade.”

  “You’re even crazier than a Christian,” said Hassan. “They believe that one man’s death and suffering was worth it because it saved all of humankind. But you, you’re ready to sacrifice half the people who ever lived, just to save one village.”

  She glared at him. “You’re right,” she said. “For one village, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  She walked away.

  It was real, she knew it. The TruSite II reached back into the past, and the watchers were somehow visible to the watched, if they knew how to look, if they were hungry to see. So what should they do? There would be those, she knew, who would want to shut down all of Pastwatch to avoid the risk of contaminating the past with unpredictable and possibly devastating results in the present. And there would be others who would trust complacently in the paradoxes, believing that Pastwatch could be seen by people of the past only under circumstances where it could not possibly affect the future. Fearful overreaction or smug negligence, neither was appropriate. She and Hassan had changed the past, and the change they introduced had in fact changed the present. Perhaps it had not changed all the intervening generations between then and now, but certainly it had changed Hassan and her. Neither of them would think or do or say anything that they would have thought or done or said without having heard the prayer of Putukam. They had changed the past, and the past had changed the future. It could be done. The paradoxes didn’t stop it. The people of this golden time could do more than observe and record and remember.

  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.